I
viz.
I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our town that old Mr. M——, our librarian—a gentle, furtive, silent man—a man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books—had been caught dancing one day with his wife.
“Which only goes to show,” broke in The M. P., “what a man of fixed literary habits—mere book-habits—if he keeps on, is reduced to.”
But as I was about to remark, for a good many weeks afterward—after the rumour was started—one kept seeing people (I was one of them) as they came into the library, looking shyly at Mr. M——, as if they were looking at him all over again. They looked at him as if they had really never quite noticed him before. He sat at his desk, quiet and busy, and bent over, with his fine-pointed pen and his labels, as usual, and his big leather-bound catalogue of the universe.
A few of us had had reason to suspect—at least we had had hopes—that the pedantry in Mr. M—— was somewhat superimposed, that he had possibilities, human and otherwise, but none of us, it must be confessed, had been able to surmise quite accurately just where they would break out. We were filled with a gentle spreading joy with the very thought of it, a sense of having acquired a secret possession in a librarian. The community at large, however, as it walked into its library, looked at its Acre of Books, and then looked at its librarian; felt cheated. It was shocked. The community had always been proud of its books, proud of its Book Worm. It had always paid a big salary to it. And the Worm had turned.
I have only been back to the old town twice since the day I left it, as a boy—about this time. The first time I went he was there. I came across him in his big, splendid new library, his face like some live, but wrinkled old parchment, twinkling and human though—looking out from its Dust Heap. “It seems to me,” I thought, as I stood in the doorway,—saw him edging around an alcove in The Syriac Department,—“that if one must have a great dreary heaped-up pile of books in a town—anyway—the spectacle of a man like this, flitting around in it, doting on them, is what one ought to have to go with it.” He always seemed to me a kind of responsive every-way-at-once little man, book-alive all through. One never missed it with him. He had the literary nerves of ten dead nations tingling in him.
The next time I was in town they said he had resigned. They said he lived in the little grey house around the corner from the great new glaring stone library. No one ever saw him except in one of his long, hesitating walks, or sometimes, perhaps, by the little study window, pouring himself over into a book there. It was there that I saw him myself that last morning—older and closer to the light turning leaves—the same still, swift eagerness about him.
I stepped into the library next door and saw the new librarian—an efficient person. He seemed to know what time it was while we stood and chatted together. That is the main impression one had of him—that he would always know what time it was. Put him anywhere. One felt it.
II
cf.
Our new librarian troubles me a good deal. I have not quite made out why. Perhaps it is because he has a kind of chipper air with the books. I am always coming across him in the shelves, but I do not seem to get used to him. Of course I pull myself together, bow and say things, make it a point to assume he is literary, go through the form of not letting him know what I think as well as may be, but we do not get on.