376
PARTISAN REVIEW
her name with those old-fashioned script esses. Why, thought
Hartford, I bet-in his thoughts he allowed himself the vernacu–
lar-E. Moss was born around the Revolutionary War!
"Little boy, I asked you a question! " The librarian peered
down over Hartford's shoulder, expecting to see
Nick Carter, De–
tective
or at the very best,
The Prince and the Pauper.
But when
she saw
Hallam's Middle Ages
open at page 463, she took a step
back and, removing her glasses for better long-distance vision,
stared at Hartford as if he were a rare phenomenon of nature: a
two-headed calf or a crocus coming up in November. Then her
gaze softened. A
boy
who really
liked
to
read!
She sighed sharply, gave the braided buns over her ears a
quick pat to tuck in loose hairpins, and walked back to her file
cards, making metallic, no-nonsense noises with her heels so
that the boy would be sure not to draw in the book or let his
hand wander too close to the buttons on his fly.
Meanwhile, Hartford was reading the note at the bottom of
page 463.
The most singular effect of this crusading spirit was wit–
nessed in
1211,
when a multitude, amounting, as some say, to
90,000, chiefly composed of children, and commanded by a
child, set out for the purpose of recovering the Holy Land. They
came for the most part from Germany, and reached Genoa with–
out harm. But finding there an obstacle which their imperfect
knowledge of geography had not anticipated, they soon dispersed
in various directions. Thirty thousand arrived at Marseilles,
where part were murdered, part probably starved, and the rest
sold to the Saracens.
When he had stopped holding his breath he could have
answered the librarian well enough, for his voice had come back;
indeed, it had come back better than ever because, as if out of
nowhere, it had come back
to
him full of declensions and conju–
gations, but it was hard to find information on the Children 's
Crusade, and he didn't want to risk saying something that would
persuade the librarian to call the truant officer. For a few weeks
now he had been reading Sir Walter Scott and Turgenev and
Charlotte Bronte, but walking past a shelf and catching sight of
the golden-brown binding, he had plucked down this book and
turned
to
the index in the hope that it might contain a reference
to that pitiful campaign which fascinated him far more than the
