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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 ofRome, 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 the tactful 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 wondered if he had read that somewhere, or had thought it up himself.
    “And I suppose there are no ways of protecting people?” the Librarian said. “But you must know all about that.”
    She left him then. Somebody had come in.
    The accident was followed by a rush of warm weather. The length of the evenings and the heat of the balmy days seemed sudden and surprising, as if this were not the way winter finally ended in that part