The Widening Stain Read online

  “If Mr. Belknap gets run over, my fellow nuns and I will be glad to take care of him.”

  “I’ll be run over first. Will you bring me my breakfast in bed?”

  “Mr. Parry!”

  “Just an idea that came to me.”

  “Mr. Belknap is after all a very eminent scholar. And I rather admire his devotion to learning. So wholehearted. Look what he’s just given us—a first edition of the Malleus Maleficarum!”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Hammer of Witches. He paid somewhere around three hundred dollars for it. I remember the item in the Thorp catalogue.”

  “Hammer of Witches! Not a bad job for Belknap! I’ll bet you that a lot of those old inquisitors were taking it out on the witches just because they were shy and awkward themselves.”

  “Kind of tough on the witches. I must say most of my sympathy goes to them. Maybe they were shy too. Probably most of them were just middle-aged spinsters going a little sour. Mr. Parry!”

  “Yes?”

  “What is a spinster?”

  “Haven’t you got a dictionary in this Library?”

  “I mean, when does one become a spinster?”

  “Well, offhand I should say when you get your first set of false teeth. Why?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  “Wondering about when you are going to become a spinster? Oh, my dear Miss Gorham! Never!”

  “Well, after all, time is passing.”

  A slow smile spread over Professor Parry’s face. “Did you ever hear the one about the morbid young miss of Westminster?”

  “No, and I don’t want to—”

  “A morbid young miss of Westminster

  Was in terror of being a spinster;

  But they say that you can’t

  Make a spinster enceinte,

  And that is what really convinced her.”

  “Mr. Parry!”

  “How lovely you are when you turn that sort of tearose color! You aren’t the spinster type!”

  “You know, I could listen to you all day, Mr. Parry, but the Librarian has a theory that I work here, and I suppose I ought to humor him.”

  “No doubt. In fact, here he comes now. Probably trying to find out what has happened to his theory.”

  Dr. Sandys approached, carrying in his left hand, according to his custom, a sheaf of letters and documents, ready for instant reference. He seldom had any occasion to reveal what these apparently urgent papers were; it was the opinion of the catalogue room that he carried them only as a symbol of the busy man, and as a hint to all others to be busy too.

  “Hello, Sandys!” called Professor Parry genially. “Come over here and sit down! We were just telling each other some snappy limericks!”

  “Hello, Parry. I’m afraid I’m pretty busy this morning. Quite a rush of work in the Library.” His look at Miss Gorham was charged with meaning.

  “Miss Gorham was telling me some beauties. Did she ever tell you the one about the rapid young lady of Erie?”

  “Mr. Parry!” cried Gilda. “Dr. Sandys! Mr. Parry! I never—”

  “To a rapid young lady of Erie

  Her mother is stuffy and dreary,

  Saying: ‘Young ingenues

  Should never confuse

  “To date” and “to fecundate,” deary.’

  That’s right, isn’t it, Miss Gorham?”

  Miss Gorham and Dr. Sandys uttered noises compounded of a giggle and a snort, but in unequal proportions. In Miss Gorham’s case the giggle predominated over the snort, while Dr. Sandys’s response was considerably more snort than giggle. Both blushed to a uniform pink. The girls at the great round catalogue desk suspended all their work to watch and to strain their ears.

  “Dr. Sandys!” said Miss Gorham. “You certainly won’t believe that I told any such limerick?”

  “Oh no. I know Mr. Parry’s reputation. In fact, I know Mr. Parry. He is the mysterious figure that the world has been hunting for for years—the man who makes up the limericks.”

  “Oh, not all of them, my dear fellow.”

  “Maybe not all of them. There was one I heard in California—I’ll tell you some time.”

  “Not now?”

  “Certainly not now. We all have our work to do.”

  “I haven’t any work to do. But don’t worry, I’ll go away in a minute. I only have a little more business to discuss with Miss Gorham.”

  “Oh, well, I’m afraid I must be going.”

  Dr. Sandys looked earnestly at the papers in his left hand and went his way.

  “Curiously enough, I do have some business to discuss with you, Miss Gorham. Two items. One, Casti asked me to use my influence with you, which he regards as compelling, to permit him to consult that medieval manuscript in his laboratory. I said: ‘Why, of course, my dear fellow; anything to oblige.’ I therefore exert my compelling influence upon you, in behalf of Professor Casti.”

  Professor Parry made a horrible Svengali face at Miss Gorham.

  “Nonsense. He knows it’s against all the rules.”

  “Something seems to have gone wrong with my influence. But you are quite right. Don’t let that manuscript get away from you, and don’t break any rules, especially with Assistant Professor Casti. Now I’m going to try my influence again, and for myself this time. Are you going to the President’s reception tonight?”

  “Why, what day is this?”

  “Monday, September 29. Formal reception for the opening of the term. President Temple and Mrs. Temple invite the staff to have ice cream and cookies in the Presidential Mansion.”

  “Why, I think I ought to go. Part of my job, I suppose.”

  “And you will go with me?”

  “Well—”

  “Save a taxi fare, anyhow. I’ll stop for you at eight thirty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Fine. Well, I must be up and away, so that the Librarian and the rest of the Library can get back to work. Good-by, Gilda.”

  “Good-by, Francis.”

  Professor Parry strolled out, pausing for a word with the cataloguing girls, in their fairy ring. He waved a benevolent farewell to the group. Gilda returned to her work.

  “Oh, Miss Gorham!” It was Dr. Sandys.

  “Miss Gorham, are you going to the President’s reception this evening?”

  “Why, yes, I suppose so.”

  “I might—ah—stop and get you, perhaps?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! Mr. Parry just offered to pick me up, and I told him I’d go with him.”

  “Oh yes, of course, yes. I just thought I might save you the bother. But of course, yes.”

  Dr. Sandys seemed quite annoyed.

  Chapter II

  THE UNIVERSITY Library was first erected in the fifties of the last century, as a replica of the Baptistry of Pisa. In the seventies a considerable addition was built, in half-hearted imitation of King’s College Chapel at Cambridge. In the nineties, as the University and the Library continued to grow, the building was enlarged and revised in the Boston Romanesque manner. In the twenties, when the need for space again became acute, two new wings were added, rectangular solids of steel and concrete. Sensitive visitors staggered drunkenly at their first glimpse of the structure. Professor Halsey, of the College of Architecture, referred to it in his lectures as “our architectural emetic.” But there were some who found a naive and endearing charm in its pathetic effort at ostentation, in its record of the architectural ideals of successive generations. For a really inexcusable monster, they said, go to New Haven.

  It was not well adapted to library purposes, certainly. The arrangement was inconvenient, the lighting bad, the shelving of the books capricious. All these disadvantages were compensated, however, in the eyes of some, by the magnificence of the stone-work, the richness of the wood-carving, and the endless novelties that greeted the explorer. The men’s washroom had been the Librarian’s office in the original Baptistry of Pisa Library. It contained a fireplace with a monumental mant
el, reproduced from the Château of Blois. Since in the Library any flame was banned as from a straw-filled barn, no one had ever thought of lighting a fire in the fireplace. This was a good thing, as it had no chimney.

  The books were housed in endless book-stacks, thrusting out in every direction, climbing to the tower and burrowing to the crypt. The books dwelt in darkness; messengers and researchers were trained to snap on lights to guide them to their goal, and to snap them off on returning. These interminable shelves of books, waiting pitifully in the dark for a reader to come, worked strongly on some imaginations and filled them with eerie fancies.

  The wanderer in the stacks kept meeting delightful, or annoying, surprises. Broad purposeful corridors ended suddenly in solid walls. A glassed sentry-box, or bartizan, thrust out from a bastion over a dry moat. A graduate student’s desk was established here; the student was alternately blistered by the sun and frozen by icy drafts. To get from Volume XLI of the Edinburgh Review to Volume XLII one had to climb two spiral stairways, cross a musicians’ gallery above the periodical room, and descend two more spiral stairways. Here and there, in areas of waste space, study cubicles had been constructed. Looking in, one would perceive a graduate student, asleep.

  A constant, distant rumble sounded in the solitudes, from the great fan of the ventilating system. Installed, with much pride, in the rebuilding of the nineties, the ventilation system penetrated the Library as the lymphatic system does the human body. Modern engineers looked on the ventilation apparatus with scorn. It neither cooled nor humidified the air, but only annoyed it, blowing forth lifeless blasts from concealed vents, and causing a great deal of coughing.

  The catalogue room was situated on the ground floor, between the main reading-room and the wing containing the Wilmerding Library. The catalogue room was the brain of the Library’s sluggish body. It was also a small library in itself, for in its alcoves were shelved the catalogues of the world’s great libraries, the files of Book Prices Current, and all the aids, in many languages, to which the bibliographer must refer. It was also the room in which Miss Gilda Gorham had spent half her waking hours since her graduation from the University, summa cum laude.

  On this September morning Miss Gorham kept glancing at a vacant chair at the enormous circular desk in the middle of the room. When her visitors left her a moment’s respite she strolled to the desk.

  “Where’s Miss Loring?” she inquired of a girl next to the vacant chair.

  “Why, she went up to the Architectural Collection to check on the description of a book. She should be back by this time.”

  “She’s been gone half an hour.”

  “Here she comes now, Miss Gorham.”

  “I’ll speak to her at my desk.”

  Miss Loring, with bright blue eyes, bright golden hair, and bright pink cheeks, reported at Miss Gorham’s desk. Her cheeks were even pinker than usual, and she was panting.

  “What’s the matter?” said Miss Gorham. “Have you been running?”

  “Yes, Miss Gorham. I—I got scared.”

  “Who scared you?”

  “Nobody. Just the Library.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Well, it did! I went up to the Architectural Collection in the tower, and I took along the key to the reserved section and let myself in and left the key in the door. I found the book all right. But there was a gargoyle there, right over the shelf where I was working. And it was all sort of queer and lonesome. It made me nervous. So I kind of rushed for the door, and it has a sort of snap lock on it you have to press underneath in a certain place. I couldn’t find the place, and I got scared. I was locked in! And I screamed, and finally that janitor came and let me out—you know, Cameron. And I started to run back here and I got lost, and I went on running in and out and up and down for miles and miles, and not a soul around anywhere. My! I thought I could be murdered there and nobody would find me for weeks! All those great big books and all so dark! And finally I landed somehow in Anthropology and I knew where I was. I don’t think people ought to go into those stacks alone.”

  “Nonsense! There’s nothing on earth to be scared of. You go back to your work.”

  “Yes, Miss Gorham.”

  Miss Loring turned and started for the catalogue desk.

  “Miss Loring! Come back here a moment.”

  “Yes, Miss Gorham?”

  “Don’t wiggle so when you walk. There’s no sense in wiggling so when you walk.”

  “Why, Miss Gorham, I just walk. That’s the way I always walk.”

  “It isn’t the way you walked last week. I suppose you’ve seen somebody in the movies. Somebody with a fascinating undulating walk. Well, don’t undulate around here.”

  “No, Miss Gorham.”

  “Maybe you expect to be sent to Atlantic City as Miss University Library?”

  “Oh, no, Miss Gorham.”

  Miss Loring undulated to her desk and whispered gleefully to the girls at her left and right.

  “Miss Gorham, please?”

  “Yes, Miss Cornwell?”

  “Professor Zabel has just brought in two hundred more off-prints of his article on the Effects of Malnutrition on the Grasping Power of the Octopus. We already have a hundred of them. What do I do about these? Return them?”

  “Heavens, no! Never refuse anything. Put them down in the crypt with the stereopticon slides and the Wilmerding Collection of Railroad Time-tables. You never can tell; maybe he’ll come around some day and want them back. And have Miss Worcester write a gift letter for Dr. Sandys to sign.”

  “Yes, Miss Gorham. And another thing. I have a thesis called ‘Retroactive Inhibition as Function of the Length of the Interpolated Lists.’ I’ve been trying to read it, but it doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. I don’t know where in the world to classify it.”

  “Put it under Education and you can’t go wrong.” Miss Gorham smiled to herself. That was the sort of little joke she enjoyed. The best little jokes are plain statements of fact.

  “My!” said Miss Cornwell. “This is our busy day! Here’s Old Harmless! Going into the sale-catalogue alcove.”

  “You don’t mean Professor Hyett? Why is he Old Harmless?”

  “Don’t you know? The girls in the dorms have a kind of faculty blacklist. Useful if they are called in for conferences or if they are advisees. I believe there are two of the profs who are marked DANGER, in red. The girls are cautioned to leave the door open when they go in. Probably all tommyrot, of course. The girls love to imagine things. Well, Hyett isn’t dangerous, but he’s a friendly patter. All very kindly and fatherly, of course, but some of the girls get mad. He doesn’t seem quite like their own fathers. And there is said to be some relation between the friendly pats and the marks in course. You know how the girls talk; I’m just telling you what they say. But anyhow, they call him Harmless Hyett, or just Old Harmless.”

  “That makes me think of Mr. Parry’s limerick which he says he dedicated to Mr. Hyett.”

  “Oh, what’s that?”

  “Said a nasty old man of Freehold:

  ‘The young of today, I am told,

  Are so used to the nude

  That it doesn’t seem lewd—

  Oh gee, but it’s great to be old!’ ”

  The two ladies snickered together.

  “He’s heading our way!” said Miss Cornwell. “Good morning, old—er—Professor Hyett.”

  Professor Hyett made a curious double impression on one who saw him for the first time. His face was that of an old Roman, firm, handsome, cleanly modeled. But floating wisps of white hair, misting the ample baldness of his skull, confused the effect of manly force. His body was an evident misfit to his face. Gangling and loose-jointed, he minced as he walked. His voice, deep and resonant, was likely to break into a boyish falsetto. He was perhaps sixty.

  “Good morning, Miss Cornwell. And how are you this beautiful morning? I hope you are as well as you look. And, my dear Miss Gorham, how are you? Blooming, assuredly?”
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  “I’m all right, thank you.”

  “One glance should have told me that. But I come on business. It never seems right to talk business to you, my dear Miss Gorham. One doesn’t talk business to a rose.”

  “One doesn’t talk roses to a business woman, my dear Mr. Hyett.”

  “Oh, doesn’t one? I’ll send you a dozen American Beauties tomorrow. Remind me if I should happen to forget, will you?”

  “Certainly not.”

  Professor Hyett laughed. “And quite right too, my dear. I find that it is the promise that gives pleasure, not the fulfillment. However, that is by the way. Has Casti been in about that manuscript?”

  “No, but Mr. Belknap and Mr. Parry both asked to let him take it over to his laboratory.”

  “If you really want my opinion, don’t let him take it out. Leave it in the safe, where it belongs. He can do anything he is likely to do with the microfilm. Just between us three, or I should say among us three, he is no classicist. He’s excellent on phonetics, no doubt, but he’s never had any proper cultural background.”

  Professor Hyett glanced around and lowered his voice.

  “You know who Casti is, don’t you? His father is an Italian barber in Detroit! And he worked his way through college by barbering in the College Shop!”

  “Well, after all,” said Miss Gorham, “barbering is an ancient and respectable trade.”

  “Assuredly. But the barber-shop background is hardly ideal for the future interpreter of civilizations and cultures. Casti is one of these bright young Italian-Americans—I don’t deny he is bright—who pick up languages quickly and think that linguistic facility qualifies them to be professors of literature. The Romance Language Department is full of them. An amusing young rascal in one of my classes alleges that he went into the Romance instructors’ room and said loudly: ‘Haircut?’ And every instructor sprang to his feet and stood beside his chair!”