Different Seasons - Stephen King [230]
'Yes. Thank you. Mr Waterhouse -'
'George,' he said. 'Here it's just George.'
'George, then,' I said, although it seemed slightly mad to be using his first name. 'What is all of-'
'Cheers,' he said.
We drank. The martini was perfect. I said so instead of finishing my question. 'Stevens tends the bar. He makes fine drinks. He likes to say it's a small but vital skill. ' The martini took the edge off my feelings of disorientation and awkwardness (the edge, but the feelings themselves remained- I had spent nearly half an hour gazing into my closet and wondering what to wear; I had finally settled on dark brown slacks and a rough tweed jacket that almost matched them, hoping I would not be wandering into a group of men either turned out in tuxedos or wearing bluejeans and L. L. Bean's lumberjack shirts it seemed that I hadn't gone too far wrong on the matter of dress, anyway). A new place and a new situation makes one crucially aware of every social act, no matter how small, and at that moment, drink in hand and the obligatory small toast made, I wanted very much to be sure that I hadn't overlooked any of the amenities. 'Is there a guest book I ought to sign?' I asked. 'Something like that?' He looked mildly surprised. 'We don't have anything like that,' he said. 'At least, I don't think we do.' He glanced around the dim, quiet room. Johanssen rattled his Wall Street Journal, I saw Stevens pass in a doorway at the far end of the room, ghostly in his white messjacket. George put his drink on an endtable and tossed a fresh log onto the fire. Sparks corkscrewed up the black throat of the chimney.
'What does that mean?' I asked, pointing to the inscription on the keystone. 'Any idea?' Waterhouse read it carefully, as if for the first time. IT IS THE TALE, NOT HE WHO TELLS IT.
'I suppose I have an idea,' he said. 'You may, too, if you should come back. Yes, I should say you may have an idea or two. In time. Enjoy yourself, David.' He walked away. And, although it may seem odd, having been left to sink or swim in such an unfamiliar situation, I did enjoy myself. For one thing, I have always loved books, and there was a trove of interesting ones to examine here. I walked slowly along the shelves, examining the spines as best I could in the faint light, pulling one out now and then, and pausing once to look out a narrow window at the 2nd Avenue intersection up the street. I stood there and watched through the frost-rimmed glass as the traffic light at the intersection cycled from red to green to amber and back to red again, and quite suddenly I felt the queerest-and yet very welcome -sense of peace come to me. It did not flood in; instead it seemed to almost steal in. Oh yes, I can hear you saying, that makes great sense; watching a stop-and-go light gives everyone a sense of peace. All right; it made no sense. I grant you that. But the feeling was there, just the same. It made me think for the first time in years of the winter nights in the Wisconsin farmhouse where I grew up: lying in bed in a draughty upstairs room and marking the contrast between the whistle of the January wind outside, drifting snow as dry as sand along miles of snow-fence, and the warmth my body created under the two quilts. There were some law books, but they were pretty damn strange: Twenty Cases of Dismemberment and Their Outcomes under British Law is one title I remember. Pet Cases was another. I opened that one and sure enough, it was a scholarly legal tome dealing with the law's treatment (American law, this time) of cases which bore in some important respect upon pets-everything from housecats that had inherited great sums of money to an ocelot that had broken its chain and seriously injured a postman. There was a set of Dickens, a set of Defoe, a nearly endless set of Trollope; and there was also a set of novels-eleven