Different Seasons(168)
He was waiting for me at the foot of the steps that evening, and Stevens held the door for us. The wine was as excellent as Waterhouse had promised. He made no attempt whatsoever to “introduce me around”—I took that for snobbery but later recanted the idea—but two or three of them introduced themselves to me. One of those who did so was Emlyn McCarron, even then in his late sixties. He held out his hand and I clasped it briefly. His skin was dry, leathery, tough; almost turtlelike. He asked me if I played bridge. I said I did not.
“Goddamned good thing,” he said. “That goddamned game has done more in this century to kill intelligent after-dinner conversation than anything else I can think of.” And with that pronouncement he walked away into the murk of the library, where shelves of books went up apparently to infinity.
I looked around for Waterhouse, but he had disappeared. Feeling a little uncomfortable and a lot out of place, I wandered over to the fireplace. It was, as I believe I have already mentioned, a huge thing—it seemed particularly huge in New York, where apartment-dwellers such as myself have trouble imagining such a benevolence big enough to do anything more than pop corn or toast bread. The fireplace at 249B East Thirty-fifth was big enough to broil an ox whole. There was no mantel; instead a brawny stone arch curved over it. This arch was broken in the center by a keystone which jutted out slightly. It was just on the level of my eyes, and although the light was dim, I could read the legend engraved on that stone with no trouble: IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
“Here you go, David,” Waterhouse said from my elbow, and I jumped. He hadn’t deserted me after all; had only trudged off into some uncharted locale to bring back drinks. “Scotch and soda’s yours, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Thank you. Mr. Waterhouse—”
“George,” he said. “Here it’s just George.”
“George, then,” I said, although it seemed slightly mad to be using his first name. “What is all of—”
“Cheers,” he said.
We drank.
“Stevens tends the bar. He makes fine drinks. He likes to say it’s a small but vital skill.”
The scotch took the edge off my feelings of disorientation and awkwardness (the edge, but the feelings themselves remained—I had spent nearly half an hour gazing into my closet and wondering what to wear; I had finally settled on dark brown slacks and a rough tweed jacket that almost matched them, hoping I would not be wandering into a group of men either turned out in tuxedos or wearing bluejeans and L. L. Bean’s lumberjack shirts... it seemed that I hadn’t gone too far wrong on the matter of dress, anyway). A new place and a new situation make one crucially aware of every social act, no matter how small, and at that moment, drink in hand and the obligatory small toast made, I wanted very much to be sure that I hadn’t overlooked any of the amenities.
“Is there a guest book I ought to sign?” I asked. “Something like that?”
He looked mildly surprised. “We don’t have anything like that,” he said. “At least, I don’t think we do.” He glanced around the dim, quiet room. Johanssen rattled his Wall Street Journal. I saw Stevens pass in a doorway at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white messjacket. George put his drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire. Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.
“What does that mean?” I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. “Any idea?”
Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
“I suppose I have an idea,” he said. “You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David.”
He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the Second Avenue intersection up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite suddenly I felt the queerest—and yet very welcome—sense of peace come to me. It did not flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes great sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace.
All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It made me think for the first time in years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse where I grew up: lying in bed in a drafty upstairs room and marking the contrast between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts.
There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of Dismemberment and Their Outcomes Under British Law is one title I remember. Pet Cases was another. I opened that one and, sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome dealing with the law’s treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some important respect upon pets—everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman..
There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was also a set of novels—eleven of them—by a man named Edward Gray Seville. They were bound in handsome green leather, and the name of the firm gold-stamped on the spine was Stedham & Son. I had never heard of Seville or of his publishers. The copyright date of the first Seville—These Were Our Brothers-was 1911. The date of the last, Breakers, was 1935.