AN EXPENSE OF SPIRIT
sure I could foresee, was unable to begin anything new. My routine
does not provide for such intervals; ideally, I suppose, I should un–
dertake some unbroken series of works as long as my expected life,
but I am, alas, not equal to even so modest an ideal as I have pro–
posed.
I remember standing before the Library that day with a dim
sense of profanation, checking my watch, the leaflet in my hand to be
sure of the date, the time (somewhere the public reassurance of a
steeple clock boomed twice the hour), and then committing myself
to the door, trembling, I must confess, just a little.
An
attendant I
did not recognize, seeing my hesitation just inside the entrance,
asked almost inaudibly, "Great Books?" and at my nod, indicated a
small door off the central corridor into which I had seen only libra–
rians pass before. Retreat was impossible after my nod of affirma–
tion and under that hostile stare, so I pushed forward toward
inevitable disappointment. No room could, I fear, have been adequate
to my hope; but the strange face at the entry, the query scarcely
heard, and the door I had never used justified surely more than the
dim
barren room I entered, inhabited by a score of chairs, a library
table, like the dusty flora of a not quite desert.
There were already too many people present for the chairs,
and the attendant thrusting ineptly into the room behind me with
extra seats, nearly knocked me over on to my face. When I had
recovered from the assault of his clumsiness (I have a certain native
aplomb, unlooked for perhaps in one who ventures so seldom into
public ) , I found myself seated, or more precisely, wedged in beside
a large darkish man who overflowed relentlessly on to my seat.
Though the room was not warm, he had taken off his coat, reveal–
ing great damp patches of sweat on his back and under his arms;
he smelled of maleness as an animal does, an acrid hut not wholly
unpleasant odor.
It would be a shade melodramatic to say that he frightened
me, but
his
very existence seemed a threat to my status; I was, at
least, uneasy. Even before the proceedings started (someone indistinct
through the tobacco smoke wrestled with a pile of papers on the
table before us, as if they must be subdued before a beginning was
possible), he jerked about in exaggerated spasms of impatience,
endangering my precarious seathold.
II
