one the wiser.'
'Well, maybe.'
The first thing Homer did when they got back to the station was to send Sergeant Shrubsole out to Monument Street to look in the hollow tree. 'Do I have to have a search warrant?' said Bernard wittily. 'I mean if someone lives there now...'
'Oh, hurry up. I can just see that fowling piece standing up inside. I suppose it would be too good to be true.'
It was too good. There was nothing in the hollow tree but an extremely huffy English sparrow sitting on a nest of spotted eggs. She made a frightful fuss about the whole thing, lecturing Shrubsole roundly from a nearby bush, as he groped around inside her house. Gallantly, in spite of the superfluousness of any more English sparrows at all in the world, he put her nest back where it belonged, eggs and all. 'Small thanks I got,' he said.
*27*
Miss Herpitude was no ordinary librarian. She did not regard it as her sacred task to protect her precious volumes from the clutches of the villainous defacing mob. Instead it was her faith that the proper destiny for any book in her car was to lie open upon the lap of a reader, whether he were taking notes soberly in school or simply holding his place with a buttery finger while he ate lunch at his own table.
Mary looked at Miss Herpitude with awe and wonder. That admirable woman was using a razor blade to cut a map out of a history book so that a boy doing his homework could hold it up to the window and trace it. When he was through with it Mary knew that Miss Herpitude would spend half an hour pasting the map back in. Her maxim was, and Mary subscribed to it with all her heart, that the books were there to be used and the librarians were there to be useful.
Be useful. Here came someone who was obviously in need of help. A stranger was goggling around at the pale watchers on the balcony, Ephraim Bull and Judge Hoar and Bronson Alcott and Louisa May. Then he goggled at Mary and came right over. When he opened his mouth his speech was one of the cruder forms of British English, with an absurd affected accent thrown in for good measure. Poor wretch. His posture was miserable, his chest was caved in, his legs were bowed like a cockney cowboy's. His eyes stared and stared at her, fixed and unblinking.
'Can I help you?' said Mary.
'Oi hev something to show yew,' he said. His eyebrows and his hair, thick wiry stuff combed forward over his forehead, were a dull black like lampblack. He wore glasses with round celluloid frames. If he had stood up straight he might have been about as tall as she was, but his posture was dreadful, and his long neck thrust forward so that his Adam's apple hung down over his collar. His collar was dirty, with a black line around the edge. But all of these details were as nothing beside the awful facts of his complexion. The poor fellow had a ghastly case of acne, and its prominences were superimposed on the shallow depressions and pits of old smallpox scars like the mountains and craters of the Moon. Mary had to stare very hard at his googly eyes in order not to be caught making a clinical examination of his pimples. As an unnecessary final flourish, his jaw suffered from malocclusion and two yellow buck teeth rested on his lower lip. Mary felt some anguish for him. But then her sympathy vanished as it became more and more apparent that he considered himself as sexually appealing as Tarzan the Ape-man.
There was a sheaf of grubby typed pages in his hand. All his own work. He laid it on the desk and ran his finger along the lines, reading aloud.
What a charlatan. Mary nodded as though she believed it, and then Roland Granville-Galsworthy asked for the complete works of Emmanuel Kant. In German. 'I'm afraid we have it only in English,' said Mary.
'Thet's quoite all roight. Thet will dew,' said Granville-Galsworthy. What a show-off. Mary bet he couldn't read German anyway, the way he had pronounced Kant. She found him a watered-down version of the
'But it's cribbed straight from that book by Claridge,' said Miss Herpitude. 'What an incredible man.'
Mary started to laugh. 'When I was in the sixth grade we had a health play, and I was supposed to be 'Malnutrition, First Cousin to Death.' I tried to make myself look just like that, with that same droopy posture and big lipstick pimples. I was a smash hit, too. I suppose I shouldn't be so hard on the poor fellow. He probably can't help being a wretch, a dolt and a fool.'
'But surely,' said Miss Herpitude, 'he should have medical advice. I feel truly sorry for the poor man.'
*28*
Poor Mary. The sham graduate of Oxford, having once set his googly eyes on her, would not take them off. He showed up everywhere. He came every day to the library, asked for some ponderous work and read picture magazines instead, like a boy with a comic book folded in his speller. When Mary didn't appear at the library on Thursday, he asked Miss Herpitude where she was and followed her to the Police Station, bobbing his Adam's apple up and down like a yo-yo. Mary couldn't understand him at all. His repellent skin was part of a hide so thick that he was sensitive to no hints and boggled at no excuses. Mary loathed the sight of him. When he began waiting for her at lunchtime, Jimmy Flower started to kid her about her boyfriend. Mary took to ducking out the back door, but Granville-Galsworthy caught on to that trick, too, and she had no peace. Homer Kelly, shaking his head, would lift the corner of the shade and watch the two of them go off together, Mary marching firmly in advance, Roland Granville-Galsworthy skulking in the rear.
Even when one was trapped, one had to be polite. Mary, wedged into a corner behind a small restaurant table, would rack her brain for something to talk about. It was no good talking about Emerson. Roland knew nothing at all about Emerson. She had tried reminiscing about the colleges at Oxford, where she and Gwen had once spent a summer. Oh yes, he knew so-and-so, and he had met so-and-so. Mary made up a few preposterous people, and he was old friends with them, too. The ass. Why did he bother? What on earth was the man doing in Concord anyway? How was he supporting himself? He paid only for his own lunch, always, and ate an unvarying diet of Coke, potato chips and fried clams. Over the weeks his pimples roved from one part of his physiognomy to another, changing the lunar topography. The Apennines receded, Eratosthenes rose up in splendor.
And then one Sunday he showed up in church. He had seen Mary striding across the grass with her black choir robe billowing behind her, and he followed her in. She didn't see him, because she was looking up at the giant elm trees that stood on the lawn like old grandees, putting on new leaves like airs. Her transcendental jukebox was grinding...
Wasn't this church a copy of the one that had burned down? So it must have looked much the same to Waldo Emerson. He had retreated from Unitarianism, of course, or vaulted over it, one or the other, but he had been a gracious friend of the First Parish, as a good neighbor and fellow townsman. And, old hedonist of sight that he was, how he must have relished the domed spire and the heavy Doric columns, part of his daily horizon down the road. Mary climbed the steps to the balcony and sat down with the choir. The bell began to ring, and she cranked up Emily—
How still the Bells in Steeples stand
Till swollen with the Sky
