The Book 1

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The Book

I pray Thee, Lord, for some great work to do, Full worth the years I wait beneath the sky Horace Holley1

Important events, world-shaking events are seldom announced with the beating of drums, blasts of trumpets or exploding fireworks. More likely, they are quiet, trivial, everyday happenings that go unnoticed even by the participants until their true worth is revealed days, years, or centuries later.

One such incident took place over the North Atlantic in May 1909 as the SS Merion, an American Line passenger ship, made a routine crossing from Liverpool, England to her home port of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. No one recorded where it happened. Did it occur in the upper-class dining room? In a lounge with tufted seating? While strolling on a deck? Why bother noting for posterity such a minor detail of an insignificant transaction? Over time, however, the event would prove not only life-changing but world-altering. It was the loan of a book.

The owner of the book was an American beauty, Bertha Herbert – an extraordinarily accomplished woman of the world. The recipient was a twenty-two-year-old college student from Connecticut, eight years her junior, Horace Holley. Horace was not looking for such a book. In fact, he was not originally scheduled to be on that ship, but the Wheel of Fate, the unseen forces of the universe, had decreed otherwise.

In the retelling of the loan, one detail is usually missing; Horace was not travelling alone. He and his favourite brother, Irving Holley, three years older than Horace, were returning home to Torrington, Connecticut, following a two-month vacation in their ancestral homeland, the British Isles. Horace had never travelled beyond the borders

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