The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [95]
We sat on old, unmatched, brightly painted kitchen chairs, on a long glassed-in veranda. We were the only people there. It was a bit late for lunch. We ate roast chicken.
“It’s Sunday dinner, really,” I said. “It’s Sunday dinner after church.”
“It’s a lovely place,” said Julie. She asked Douglas how he knew it existed.
Douglas said he got to know where everything was, he spent so much time travelling around the province. He is in charge of collecting, buying up for the Provincial Archives, all sorts of old diaries, letters, records, that would otherwise perish, or be sold to collectors outside the province or the country. He pursues various clues and hunches, and when he finds a treasure it is not always his immediately. He often has to persuade reticent or suspicious or greedy owners, and to outwit private dealers.
“He’s a sort of pirate, really,” I said to Julie.
He was talking about the private dealers, telling stories about his rivals. Sometimes they would get hold of valuable material, and then impudently try to sell it back to him. Or they would try to sell it out of the country to the highest bidders, a disaster he has sworn to prevent.
Douglas is tall, and most people would think of him as lean, disregarding the little bulge over his belt which can be seen as a recent, unsuitable, perhaps temporary, development. His hair is gray, and cut short, perhaps to reassure elderly and conservative diary-owners.
To me he is a boyish-looking man. I don’t mean to suggest by that a man who is open-faced and ruddy and shy. I am thinking of the hard youthfulness, the jaunty grim looks you often see in photographs of servicemen in the Second World War. Douglas was one of those, and is preserved, not ripened. Oh, the modesty and satisfaction of those faces, clamped down on their secrets! With such men the descent into love is swift and private and amazing—so is their recovery. I watched him as he told Julie about the people who deal in old books and papers, how they are not fusty and shadowy, as in popular imagination, not mysterious old magpies, but bold rogues with the instincts of gamblers and confidence men. In this, as in any other enterprise where there is the promise of money, intrigues and lies and hoodwinking and bullying abound.
“People have that idea about anything to do with books,” Julie said. “They have it about librarians. Think of the times you hear people say that somebody is not a typical librarian. Haven’t you wanted to say it about yourself?”
Julie was excited, drinking her wine. I thought it was because she had flourished, at the conference. She has a talent for conferences, and no objection to making herself useful. She can speak up in general meetings without her mouth going dry and her knees shaking. She knows what a point of order is. She says she has to admit to rather liking meetings, and committees, and newsletters. She has worked for the P.T.A. and the N.D.P. and the Unitarian Church, and for Tenants’ Associations, and Great Books Clubs; she has given a lot of her life to organizations. Maybe it’s an addiction, she says, but she looks around her at meetings and she can’t help thinking that meetings are good for people. They make people feel everything isn’t such a muddle.
Now, at this conference, Julie said, who, who, were the typical librarians? Where could you find them? Indeed, she said, you might think there had been a too-strenuous effort to knock that image on the head.
“But it isn’t a calculated knocking-on-the-head,” she said. “It really is one of those refuge-professions.” Which didn’t mean, she said, that all the people in it were scared and