Work Song - Ivan Doig [20]
In their midst, however, loomed Sandison, and bringing up the rear was unmistakably the Reading Room matron, looking sour. The group proved to be the entire library staff, all the way to janitor. Sandison was counting heads before letting anyone through the arched doorway—the same mode of management, I was to learn, he had used on his cowboys each morning at the horse corral.
He took notice of my presence with a vague gesture. “This is Morgan, everybody. He’ll be puttering around the place from now on.”
I filed in with the rest of the staff, happily conscious of the palatial grandeur, the Tuscan red wainscoting, the dark oaken beams set against the ceiling panels of white and gold, the all-seeing portrait of Shakespeare above the Reading Room doorway. And beyond, the regal reds and greens and gilts of those books of Sandison’s collection, the best of their kind anywhere.
But no sooner were we in the building than he cut me out of the herd, and, just as adroitly, the matron of the Reading Room. “Miss Runyon will show you the ropes,” Sandison provided with another of those gestures that might mean anything. “Come on up when she’s had her fill of you,” he dismissed us and mounted the stairs to his office.
Miss Runyon and I considered each other.
“What foolishness has he put you in charge of?” she demanded, as though she had caught me trespassing.
“That seems yet to be determined.”
“That man.” Her voice had a startling deep timbre, as if the words resounded in her second chin. “He runs this place to suit himself. The trustees would never have named him librarian but for those precious books of his.” Clapping her chained eyeglasses onto her formidable nose, she directed: “Come along, you had better know the catalogue system.”
Miss Runyon kept me in tow as we circumnavigated the Reading Room, her realm and her orb, her temple and her fortress, she let me know in every manner possible. I took note of the goodly assortment of dictionaries and cyclopedias, and the respectable selection of magazines and the newspapers racked on spine sticks, all of it recited to me as if I were a blind man in a museum. One oddity, though, she paid no attention to; conspicuously paid it no heed, if I was not mistaken. It was a display case, glassed over, taking up one corner of the room. My mild inquiry about it brought:
“Pfft, that. The boys’ dollhouse.”
Naturally that increased my curiosity and I went over to it, Miss Runyon clopping after me. Encased there, with plentiful nose smudges and handprints on the glass testifying to the popularity of its viewing, sat an entire miniature mine. It looked so amazingly complete, I half expected it to bring up teaspoonfuls of earth from under the library. Headframe, machine house, elevator shafts, tunnels, tiny tracks and ore cars, the entirety was a Lilliputian working model. With disdain Miss Runyon told me the diorama had been built for a court case over a mining claim and afterward donated to the library. “He”—her eyes swept upward toward Sandison’s office—“insists it sit here in the way. It’s a nuisance to keep clean.”
“Wonders often are,” I murmured, still taken with the remarkable model of the workings of the Hill.
“Now, then,” Miss Runyon said haughtily, “is that enough of an initiation into librarianship for you?”
“The most thorough, Miss Runyon, since my introduction to the Reading Room of the British Museum.”
I seemed to have invoked the Vatican to a Mother Superior. “You, you have actually been—?”
“Under that great domed ceiling, with its delicate blue and accents of gold, with every word ever written in English at one’s beck and call,” I dreamily sketched aloud, “yes, I confess I have. And would you believe, Miss Runyon, the very day I walked in, my reader’s ticket in my hand, the seat of destiny was vacant.”
“The seat of—?”
“Seat number three, right there in the first great semicircle of desks.” I leaned confidingly close to her. “Where Karl Marx sat, those years when he was writing Das Kapital. I will tell you, Miss Runyon, sitting in that seat,