Ivan Doig - Work Song

“No, no, you misconstrue. The meaning in this instance is the stringed instrument that accompanied the words of bards. When Homer smote his lyre, he heard men sing by land and sea, remember?” I drew a breath. “To launch this group, I have been asked to be the guest speaker for a series of sessions.”

“You’re the main attraction? They must be hard up. What are you going to yatter to them about?”

“Versification,” I said, honest enough as far as it went.

“Aren’t there enough bad poets in the world already?”

“You never know where the next bard will derive from, Sandy.”

“If you want to spend your nights making up nursery rhymes, I guess I can’t bring you to your senses.” He looked around at me as though I had lately lost more than my mustache. “If you ask me, you’re going about things all wrong. Why don’t you spend your nights sparking Miss Rellis like a red-blooded human being, instead of preaching verse to some bunch of sissies?”

“Actually, she will be on hand at these meetings.”

“Oho. Maybe there’s hope for you yet, Morgan. Make the most of your Homeric opportunity.” Chortling into his beard, he turned back to fondling his latest bound-and-engraved prize.

Rab was lingering near the office doorway when I came out. “Is he going to let you?”

“We have his blessing,” I said moodily.

“I knew you’d make things click. Jared will get word to the others and we’re in business, presto!”

“I can hardly wait,” I said, my mood not at all improved.

“AHA! THERE YOU ARE.”

Dora Sandison made it sound as if I had been hiding from her, when in point of fact she was the one lurking like a lioness at a watering hole as I emerged from the lavatory later that morning.

“Everyone is somewhere, nature’s way of housekeeping,” I responded, skipping back a bit from her overpowering height. “I expect you’re in search of your husband, and I believe I just saw him disappear into the mezzanine stacks. May I escort you to-”

“Not at all,” she crushed that with a smile. “My evening group has a wee problem that is beneath Sandy’s notice.”

“I see. How wee would that be, Mrs. Sandison?”

“Simply a book we are in desperate need of,” she said airily. Her enunciation of the title lacked only a drum roll: The Gilbert and Sullivan Musical Treasury, Complete and Illustrated.

“You’re in luck!” I exulted, really meaning that I was. “If I am not mistaken, such a volume already exists at the reference desk.”

“That is precisely the point,” she said, that sly note coming into her voice. “The book can’t leave the Reading Room. But our meetings are held not there but in the auditorium.” She fixed me with the look I had come to dread. “A downstairs copy of our own is absolutely essential when major questions arise, such as what costumes the three little girls from school wore in the original Shaftesbury production of The Mikado.” Confident that even I could see the justice of that argument, she added, generously: “Storing it would be no problem whatsoever for you. It could fit with the music stands, could it not?”

My mind was whirring with the cost of a fat reference book of that sort, the kind of duplicate expenditure that would send Sandison through the roof. Fortunately, though, there were a lot of Gilberts in the world, and if I slipped merely the author’s last name and a reference like costumery in foreign lands into the general book budget, chances were our mutual bugaboo wouldn’t pay any attention to it.

“Mrs. Sandison, I think I can accommodate you.”

“Good. You haven’t disappointed me yet.” She pursed the smile of one weaned on a pickle, and turned to go.

“Now I have a favor to ask of you,” I halted her.

A pause. “And what would that be?”

“A dual favor, actually. I need to squeeze a new group into the meetings calendar. So, I would like your group to change its meeting night for the next several weeks, and to amalgamate with another group during that period.”

Dora Sandison looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

“Preposterous,” she snorted when she had regained enough breath for it. “We could not possibly-”

“The other group,” I sped on, “is the Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s Literary and Social Circle. Your husband rather scoffs at them as junior aesthetes, but just between us, Mrs. Sandison, they would make ideal new adherents to Gilbert and Sullivan. Think of it: maidens and swains, already listening hard for the music that makes a heart go pit-a-pat. You’d be doing them a favor, really.”

The sniff of conspiracy had its effect on her. I swear, her nostrils widened a tiny bit with anticipation as she eyed me. “This might work to everyone’s benefit, am I to understand? Yours included?”

“Your understanding is pitch-perfect.”

She gave me the queen of smiles, as lofty as it was crafty. “You still have not disappointed me.” With that, she swept out of the library.

When I got back to the inventorying, Rabrab looked at me curiously and asked where I had been.

“Reinventing the calendar,” I said, mopping my brow.

“GOOD EVENING, FELLOW LYRISTS.”

Among the upturned faces as I took center stage in the auditorium only a faithful few showed any appreciation of my greeting. Rab sent back a warm conniving smile, and Jared grinned gamely. In the front row Hoop and Griff looked eager for whatever mischief the night might bring; Quinlan’s expression was similarly keen, but with a sardonic edge. Most of the others, union stalwarts coaxed by Jared and his council to represent their neighborhoods, showed curiosity at best, and at worst a variety of misgivings. These hardened miners had sifted into the library basement one by one or in pairs; several had brought their wives, weathered women in dark-dyed dresses usually worn to weddings, wakes, and funerals. Life on the Hill was written in the creased faces staring up at me in my blue serge, and I needed to tap into whatever inspiration I could find, without delay.

“Why the lyre, you may be wondering, as a fitting symbol for our musical quest?” I whirled to the blackboard I had rigged up on Miss Runyon’s story-hour tripod and sketched the flowing curves of the instrument, then chalked in the strings. “Poets and singers of ancient Greece took up the lyre to accompany their recitations, wisely enough. It is a civilized instrument that honors a song’s words without drowning the intonations out.”

“You draw a pretty picture,” Quinlan called out, “but come right down to it, Morgan my man, the thing is only a midget harp. How’s that going to compete with anything in the Little Red Songbook”-in back of him Jared pained up at those words-“where all you have to do is oil your tonsils a little and bawl out the verse?”

“Just the question I was hoping for, Quin. What the lyre gives us is the word we must strive toward.”

There was a waiting silence, which I could tell would not last beyond one more fidget from the audience.

“Lyrical,” I pronounced, and drove the matter home. “The lyrics of the work song for the union cause must sing to the heart as well as the mind.”

A miner with a bristling mustache objected. “What’d be wrong with a song that just out and out gives Anaconda hell?”

“I believe that already exists.” I warbled the first few lines of “The Old Copper Collar” in illustration. “As apt as that may be, it seems to have had no measurable effect on the top floor of the Hennessy Building, do we agree?” Griff looked hurt.

The audience absorbed my performance uncertainly until the Cornish miner from the Muckaroo called out. “Thee speak a good spoke. But what’s the first bite of the bun to get this done?”