My imagination kept asking: Up to what?
“DO ME A FAVOR, please, Rab,” I felt compelled to ask, when I was sure we would not be overheard in the book stacks as we tackled Tennyson, Thoreau, and Tolstoy. “Just as a hypothetical exercise, mind you, find out from Jared how much granite it takes to withstand dynamite.”
“Mr. Morgan, since when are you such a scaredy-cat?” she scolded. She clucked as if I were one of her more dismaying schoolboys. “Besides, I already checked. The walls of the basement auditorium are three feet thick.”
“RHYTHM.” I turned to the next session of miners and wives sitting immobile as birds on a wire while I paced the stage. “The ebb and rise of sounds, the heartbeat that gives life to the alphabet.”
I paused, which never hurts in building up drama.
“In other words, the vital pattern within each line of a verse. Art imitates nature in this, for we live amid natural rhythms, don’t we? For instance, the pit-pat, pit-pat of rain,” I clapped gently in time with that.
Climatology evidently did not stir this audience. Not even Hoop and Griff in the front row responded with more than stifled yawns.
“Or,” I resorted to, “let us take the example of oceanic sound, the anticipatory swish of the tide coming in”-I illustrated with my elbows out and my hands sweeping grandly to my chest-“and the conclusive hiss of it going out,” my arms spreading wide to imaginary watery horizons.
High tide did not seem to register in Butte. Clearing my throat as though the problem of communication might be there in the windpipe, I tried once more:
“In strictly musical terms, a song can attain a distinctive rhythm with repetition of certain syllables or sets of sounds. An example, please, anyone?”
I had not encountered that many mute faces since trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem in the Marias Coulee schoolroom.
Walking a circle on the stage as if surrounding the problem, I thought out loud for the benefit of the passive gathering:
“I assume many of you have children at home? A show of hands, please.”
A good proportion of the audience admitted to parenthood.
“And all of us here are former children, am I correct?”
An unsettled chuckle went around the room.
“Therefore, let us approach this matter from that younger time. We are fortunate to have with us someone who, I happen to know, excelled in schoolyard serenade. Miss Rellis? Would you come up, please, and demonstrate?”
Rab colored prettily. Beside her, Jared tried to look as though he was not present during this. “You’re too kind, Mr. Morgan,” she made a show of demurring, “I’m badly out of practice.”
“One never forgets one’s specialty. Recess was never complete without it, I have reason to believe.”
“Ooh, that. Do you really want me to?”
“Desperately.”
“You asked for it, then.”
Rab sprang from her seat and paraded up onto the stage. As I had counted on, she showed the admirable zeal of a schoolgirl, but of more interest to this mostly male audience, also the chest and legs of a Ziegfeld chorine. She proceeded to deliver the playground song in a voice as pretty as she was, her hands instinctively hoisting the hem of her dress a trifle at just the right words:
Two little lovebirds sitting in a tree,
K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
First comes love!
Then comes marriage!
Then comes a baby in a baby carriage!
That’s not all! That’s not it!
Now there’s another before they quit!
That’s not it! That’s not all!
Now comes twins, Peter and Paul!
I had no more trouble explaining the vital nature of rhythm.
HECTIC NIGHTS OR NOT, the library went about its daytime business at its own whirligig pace. Rab and I were kept hopping to finish the inventory before she went back to teaching in a few weeks, and on top of that was my never-ending round of chores devised by Sandison. Reaching the end of a typically crammed week, I was somewhat behind in tabulating the most popular books of the past seven days and typing up the list for the Daily Post, and still was slaving away at the checkout slips when I heard footsteps approaching the office at a near trot. Why, just once in his life, couldn’t the courier be less than prompt? Glancing up to say something of the sort, I discovered the speed demon coming in the door was not Skinner, but an even skinnier messenger.
“He’s busy running bets on some fight,” Russian Famine explained nonchalantly. “Said it don’t take any brains to do this kind of thing.”
“Nice to see you, Famine. Make yourself comfortable,” I pointed him to a chair, “I’ll be a little while yet at this.”
Making himself comfortable was the opposite of sitting still, as I should have known. After a bit of trying to put up with his fidgets, I suggested he work off that energy on the back staircase and I’d meet him there. Bouncing up to go, he spun into the doorway and collided with Sandison’s belly. The boy gawked up the slope of body, gasped out a strangled “ ’Scuse me,” and darted into the hallway.
Sandison stared after him. “What the hell now, do you have us taking in orphans?”
“You have just met our current messenger to the Daily Post, Sandy. Butte’s version of winged Mercury.”
“If he was any scrawnier, he’d be transparent. Where’s he off to?”
“Oh, just out among the books. Fam-Wladislaw is interested in higher learning.”
Only barely assuaged, Sandison steamed on into the room, took charge of his chair, and wheeled it around to face me. Lately he seemed even more testy than usual. “Something’s not quite right around here, and for once I don’t just mean the library. You’ve got ears like a donkey when it comes to what’s going on in this town. Catch me up.”
I hesitated. Saying anything about the rising resolve of the miners’ union might brush too close to the fact of the sessions in the basement. I chose to concentrate on the Wobblies and recited the gossip about the arrival of phantom operatives to poach membership from the miners’ union.
“Outsiders,” Sandison pronounced flatly. “They’re always trouble.” With that, he heaved himself out of the chair and marched over to the stained-glass window to broodily peer out as if watching for trouble to come.
RUSSIAN FAMINE WAS FLYING UP the top steps when I went to the back staircase with the book list for him to deliver to the newspaper office. For a minute I stood watching, not daring to interrupt the dizzying ballet on the stairs. As before, the scissor-thin legs flashed up the steps three and almost four at a time, then straddled the banister and rode gravity zip-zip-zip to the bottom. Reluctantly I called to him after one of these precipitous rides, and, shaking his thatch of hair as if coming awake, he trotted over to me.
“Has anyone ever told you, my young friend, you give new meaning to the word restless?”
“Huh-uh. You’re the only one who talks that way.”
I thought it best to walk him out of the building, lest he run into Sandison again. While we made our way through the standing ranks of books Rab and I had tallied, the turn of season was on my mind, with her impending departure back to the classroom, and, as adults always foolishly do, I asked Famine if he was ready for school to start.