Alice Munros Best

pages. The bottom part of her face was working in an unsightly way, as if she was chewing at the inside of her cheeks.
    “I guess he just took them home as he felt like it,” Arthur said.
    “I’m sorry?” she said in a minute. “What did you say? I’m sorry.”
    It was the accident, he thought. The idea that the man who had died in such a way had been the last person to open these books, turn thesepages. The thought that he might have left a bit of his life in them, a scrap of paper or a pipe cleaner as a marker, or even a few shreds of tobacco. That unhinged her.
    “No matter,” he said. “I just dropped by to bring them back.”
    He turned away from her desk but did not immediately leave the Library. He had not been in it for years. There was his father’s picture between the two front windows, where it would always be.
    A.V. Doud, founder of the Doud Organ Factory and
Patron of this Library. A Believer in Progress, Culture,
and Education. A True Friend of the Town of
Carstairs and of the Working Man.
    The Librarian’s desk was in the archway between the front and back rooms. The books were on shelves set in rows in the back room. Green-shaded lamps, with long pull cords, dangled down in the aisles between. Arthur remembered years ago some matter brought up at the Council Meeting about buying sixty-watt bulbs instead of forty. This Librarian was the one who had requested that, and they had done it.
    In the front room, there were newspapers and magazines on wooden racks, and some round heavy tables, with chairs, so that people could sit and read, and rows of thick dark books behind glass. Dictionaries, probably, and atlases and encyclopedias. Two handsome high windows looking out on the main street, with Arthur’s father hanging between them. Other pictures around the room hung too high, and were too dim and crowded with figures for the person down below to interpret them easily. (Later, when Arthur had spent many hours in the Library and had discussed these pictures with the Librarian, he knew that one of them represented the Battle of Flodden Field, with the King of Scotland charging down the hill into a pall of smoke, one the funeral of the Boy King of Rome, and one the Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.)
    He sat down at one of the reading tables, where he could look out the window. He picked up an old copy of the
National Geographic
which was lying there. He had his back to the Librarian. He thought this thetactful thing to do, since she seemed somewhat wrought-up. Other people came in, and he heard her speak to them. Her voice sounded normal enough now. He kept thinking he would leave, but did not.
    He liked the high bare window full of the light of the spring evening, and he liked the dignity and order of these rooms. He was pleasantly mystified by the thought of grown people coming and going here, steadily reading books. Week after week, one book after another, a whole life long. He himself read a book once in a while, when somebody recommended it, and usually he enjoyed it, and then he read magazines, to keep up with things, and never thought about reading a book until another one came along, in this almost accidental way.
    There would be little spells when nobody was in the Library but himself and the Librarian.
    During one of these, she came over and stood near him, replacing some newspapers on the rack. When she finished this, she spoke to him, with a controlled urgency.
    “The account of the accident that was printed in the paper – I take it that was more or less accurate?”
    Arthur said that it was possibly too accurate.
    “Why? Why do you say that?”
    He mentioned the public’s endless appetite for horrific details. Ought the paper to pander to that?
    “Oh, I think it’s natural,” the Librarian said. “I think it’s natural to want to know the worst. People do want to picture it. I do myself. I am very ignorant of machinery. It’s hard for me to imagine what happened. Even with the paper’s help. Did the machine do something unexpected?”
    “No,” Arthur said. “It wasn’t the machine grabbing him and pulling him in, like an animal. He made a wrong move or at any rate a careless move. Then he was done for.”
    She said nothing, but did not move away.
    “You have to keep your wits about you,” Arthur said. “Never let up for a second. A machine is your servant and it is an excellent servant, but it makes an imbecile master.”
    He