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[OCT. 4, 1902]

much a personality. The date of his birthday is common property, also the day he receives or ought to receive his salary. When he grows up he, too, loses his temper on hot days and shouts numbers to himself when he is looking for books. In his sixteenth year he begins to wear paper collars and cuffs, becomes a dramatic critic, and sends contributions to the local *Express* signed "Hired Opera Glass," or "The Counterfoil of the Unnumbered Gallery." Or if he is talented he becomes an engineer.

Not to visit the library is held to be as bad as not to go to the Baths.* It is pleasant to drift there on summer evenings, taking a stroll on the way after bathing in the river before supper—it is said to have a strengthening effect. Girls go carefully dressed, holding their books with the title well in view. In the winter men drop into the library after their shave, with excellent results they say.

The customers of a provincial library usually divide themselves into two groups: those who read simply "books," and those who read only "intellectual books." Those who read only "intellectual books" wear pince-nez and do not shake hands with the librarian. He does not like them, never gives them a new book, and tries to return them their deposits by instalments—sixpences. It occasionally happens that a reader of mere "books" also dons a pince-nez; this is immediately known all over the town and gossip begins.

Everybody knows everything about everybody else in a small provincial town. They know when the chief engineer reads Boccaccio or "Nana," that he has quarrelled with his wife and is flirting with the actress again. They know that the drawing-master is studying grammar; that Ivanov is reading Dostoievski a third time; that Miss Petrova, madly in love with an officer, reads "Peace and War," and imagines herself to be Natasha. When Miss Anna Vertlianskaya three years ago eloped with an actor, every one was amazed but the librarian and his boy. "I knew it! I foresaw it!" repeats he incessantly, tapping the page at the top of which was written: "Miss Vertlianskaya, deposit paid, two roubles." "Look here: number 468, then at once 2,001, then 1,288, 2,001 again, and then 4,711. Do you know what book that is?" He whispers mysteriously in the ear of his interrogator and then steps back to watch the effect. "Yes; that's how things were. How could I help knowing? The whole history of their love is written down in my books. There is the one who wrote it!" And the boy at whom he points wipes his nose with his sleeve and his sleeve on his blouse, and is well pleased with himself for having been the chronicler of such a remarkable love.

Helen Shumskaya married at the age of fifteen and was besieged by suitors from the age of nine. So all the girls who wish to marry read the books which she read between nine and fifteen. Inquiries are made as to which of the elderly men read Marx, and they are avoided in business connections. "I assure you," it is said, "he will soon be convicted of wilful bankruptcy. Believe me, I know it." It is well known who read Mill, Buckle, and Pesarev, and in their presence people do not speak of the reform of the High Schools, but take care to approve all the measures of the Chief of Police.

Sometimes authors get a name in the provinces for quite unexpected reasons. Thus in the season of 18— Sudermann enjoyed especial popularity because the newly appointed sub-manager of the Imperial Bank had the same beautiful beard as he, and could skate divinely. Nordau attained the reputation of a general consultant when Zebarsky the drunkard took "Degeneration" one day and hanged himself before he had read a page. A certain Petrolev became the rage because he described in one of his novels a case quite similar to that which occurred to the president of the Government Court. Gyp, who had been

* In most provincial Russian towns there are no bath-rooms in private houses.

patronised by the late Governor's wife, is read to annoy the present Governor's wife.

Even the personal appearance of readers of an occult influence on the popularity of an author. Tall youths with long hair, who are to be found everywhere, calling themselves decadents, must read, or at least have inscribed to them, Ibsen, Uman Kaplunovski, and for some unknown reason Mamin Sibirak. Young ladies of an interesting pallor who play the piano and wear æsthetic costumes prefer Balzac and Zola. Brunettes of severe aspect and angry eyes subscribe in two moods. In the evening, after walking, Spencer, Shtzedrin, or even Ruskin; and early in the morning, running down to the library before breakfast without sunshade or gloves, ask for Montepain, Ponson du Terrail, or even 4,711. They are sometimes known to read Gogol, Goncharov, Pushkin—even Shakespeare.

In a library, especially in one possessing a selection of English books (though no one reads them), people have the same confidence as in the Imperial Exchequer or a telegraph pole. They trustfully leave there their bathing things, bicycles, and all kinds of fragile parcels. Ladies whose children are subscribers leave when they are shopping, potatoes, fowls, and spring onions on the library shelves. A fire sometimes occurs at the library—generally in the autumn—the chair, the ladder for fetching the books, and those books which are beginning to be out of fashion usually being the greatest sufferers. The towels and bicycles left to be called for miraculously escape, because, strangely enough, the day before the fire the librarian has removed them to his private house. Every one is quite used to this, and even the insurance companies do not complain, but send the insured value in the works of Maxim Gorki, Vereshev, and Léonide Andreev.

At every well-ordered library there is an Excise officer. He is not there on duty, but for friendship's sake. The supreme supervision of the reading, the choice of authors, the autumn fires, and the correctness of the critical views of the callers are under his jurisdiction. He is partly assistant librarian and attends the readings of new plays. When he laughs the sound is like a cough, and he begins all his discourses not with Adam but with Eve. When a rare stone is found in the town or when the head fireman, for some unknown reason, beats a Jew people go to the Excise officer. He gets excited, tears his beard and cap, and says "Women!" When there is a great festival in the town, the newly-appointed Governor comes, or a drowned body is found, the Excise officer discourses on behalf of the ladies. He explains that life is a mixture of important and unimportant things, that its phenomena are inseparable one from another, that behind the apparent forms are hidden the incomprehensible essence of things, that life is guided by women—and at these words he splutters and coughs.

## COMMENTS OF A COUNTESS

The Highlands

I AM greatly to be pitied. The second week of my stay in this "salubrious health resort"—vide advertisement—finds me still alone with Carlton and the Doomed Empire. Carlton has his liver to amuse him, and the consolation of the Doomed Empire is that it always has been doomed. In these imitative days nothing is original—not even a panic. Certainly this one is recurrent. Outriders each time thunder, roar, or squeak according to the timbre of their vocal powers, and stirred-up officialdom disturbs itself as little as is necessary to hush the noise, and nothing more is done until the next outburst.

My sympathies are all with "P. S.," who is raising such a stir in the *Morning Post*, and whose ink-spilling epithets surpass those even of United Ireland when denouncing landlordism and land-grabbing. To tell the truth in a way which arrests attention provides some excitement to a jaded public; and I confess I open my *Post* in the morning in much the same spirit as I can imagine the languid Jews of old displayed when they strolled to the Wall of Jerusalem in order to hear the latest fulmination of the denunciation Prophet.

There is an adage "When you hear of a new book read an old

OCT. 4, 1920

The Outlook

Furish Litinary effort 267

Kerranou, was not rich, but Garlodik had had enough of marrying for money; he was giving his inclinations their due after thirty-five years' deprivation. She was a splendid great creature with black eyes half hidden under heavy lids, and when he pinched her waist she had a manner of saying "vieux cochon" that was subtly flattering. To-night, her body, covered only by the tight-fitting hiviz that was the costume de rigueur for a threshing, showed lines of a splendid frankness, and Garlodik's future would have been settled there and then but for an accident. Two young men—it is the classic joke for such occasions—came suddenly behind one of the girls that had helped in the threshing. One caught her under the arms and pulled her backwards, the other caught her feet, and between them she was swung to and fro amid the applause of the company. "Merlouche," they cried, "ob, Merlouche." Whether it was the laughing half childish face turned up to the moonlight, whether it was the fair hair escaping from the coiffe, Garlodik's mind was made up. "After all," he thought, "I can have Marie Vraz for my fille de ferme; this child would be no use for that." He would marry Merlouche.

He was sixty-two and Merlouche sixteen, and the countryside talked. "There's a girl that won't eat her bread dry," they said to her father; "you remember how his first wife fared." They recalled how hasty he had been in making an offering to St. Diboan to "deliver her" from her illness when really there was every hope of the old lady getting better. The father was deaf to these representations. "My daughter will be happy at Stankallestrek," he said, "il y a de quoi." So they were married in spite of every one, though the critics threw things into the window of the newly-married couple, though every one prophesied disaster.

Yet for a time all went well. Garlodik was pleased with his wife, who was a good little thing that did anything she was told. Two things were wanting, though, to him. Rannou showed no signs of dying, and Marie was not yet his fille de ferme. All engagements on the farms expire at Christmas, and unless servants are asked to remain it is understood that they are to find fresh employers. For some time before Christmas, then, in view of the "general post" that always ensues, there is much bargaining in the cabarets between employers and employed.

One Sunday just before mass, in December, Marie Vraz was installed in a débit opposite the church of Toulgoat: she had come early to deliver to the beadle a pig vowed in advance to St. Antoine in case the litter turned out all right. One always, of course, chose the weakliest. Jann Perchec, the son of the beadle (who helped his father at the mill at Dibouloune), was a particular friend of Marie's, and they were sitting together frankly criticising the pig when Garlodik entered. He also took a petit verre and started business at once.

"Are you staying on at Kerranou?"

"I have not been asked yet, but probably shall be. Still, if I got a good offer—"

Garlodik named something very modest, and Marie demurred.

"You'll be well treated, though."

"Oh, as if we didn't know how people are fed at Stankallestrek."

Garlodik grinned acquiescence. "But it would be different with you," he said with a nudge.

"Oh, I know," said Marie Vraz, "vieux cochon." It was irresistible, and brought out what was for him a handsome offer, and the thing was settled.

So Marie was duly installed with the new year, and in all the duties of her position was most efficient. But beyond that nothing. Now, when he made any little friendly advances, a push of her magnificent arm sent the little man spinning. To have her always there and not to be able to so much as pinch her arm!

Garlodik grew thinner than ever, and at last asked an explanation. "You are married," she said; "go and talk to Merlouche." She flung it in his face at every turn. At last one day he said "If I hadn't a wife?"

"Oh," she said, "then—"

And then in the spring the world was startled with the news that Merlouche had strangled herself. She had been found in the stable with a rope round her neck. They were at work in the fields. Only an old beggar woman, who walked the country accompanied by a little girl, had been in the place three hours before the body was found, and Merlouche had given her some bread. It was clearly a case of suicide, and the cure was determined that the door of the churchyard should not be opened to such. So Perchelec Koz made a grave in the unconsecrated corner of the churchyard, and the body was thrown over the wall into it.

But a week later Katel, the little girl that walked with You-You on her begging excursions, confided to a woman: "I am sure Merlouche *didn't* kill herself; it was my mother. She told me to stay outside the stable while she helped Merlouche to feed

the beasts, and I heard Merlouche scream." The news spread and the gendarmes appeared in the village. You-You (the owl, as she was called, from her stealing propensities) was arrested, andROCULATED Garlodik.

Garlodik locked his coiffe fort, put the key into his pocket, and took to the woods, and for every one in the vicinity became an object of terror. The little man swelled in the imaginations of all to colossal dimensions by the light of their new knowledge of him. None dared go out after dark for fear of him. They trembled in their houses lest he should knock. The gendarmes ransacked the belt of forest that lies between Toulgoat and the sea, but all in vain.

A fortnight after Garlodik's disappearance the miller Perchec was roused in the middle of the night by a knocking at the door. He opened, and his landlord Garlodik was leaning against the lintel. "I am hungry," he said. Perchelec Koz made him welcome and laid a tremendous meal before him. He bade his wife rise and make crêpes. But he whispered a word to Jann, who slipped out and to the stable. He rode bareback, ventre à terre, to the Chef de Canton for the gendarmes, and when they came they found Garlodik still there, and handcuffed him and took him away.

So Merlouche had Christian burial, and You-You and Garlodik were beheaded. But Marie Vraz was acquitted. She married Jann Perchec and lived happily ever after.

THE RUSSIAN AND HIS BOOK

A correspondent sends us the following translation of an article which appeared recently in the "Bierjevyia Viedomosti" of St. Petersburg. A footnote explains, apparently in irony, that it is "reported from an official chronicle."

WE hear much talk just now of the circulation and influence of books. As inhabitants of the capital we can hardly realise what a book means to the average provincial town, and what a varied and incalculable rôle it plays in the life of a great part of Russia's population.

To begin with, a book is seldom bought outright, except in such extreme cases as the necessity of presenting a gift to a girl on her birthday; and then it will be Gogol, Pushkin, or Nekrasov, always respectably bound. Unbound books or the productions of living authors are not recognised, excepting of course the work of Maxim Gorki.

The librarian is as well known in the town as the doctor or the chief of the volunteer fire brigade. He is welcomed everywhere as a friend, an authority, a teacher. He is a personage, and exercises untold influence in his day and generation. "Take Dickens," says he; "Olga Ivanovna reads him; very interesting." "I don't know if you had better take Lubbock," he hesitates; "Krause and his brother read him and were not at all pleased." Thus he dispenses immortality. It would be a mistake to think that librarians actually read their books. One might as well imagine a pastry-cook eating his pastry or a tailor troubling about his torn elbows. In recommending or condemning a book the librarian is guided by what has been said of it by customers subscribing for not less than five years uninterruptedly. But when he is in a bad temper he ignores any opinions and shouts to his boy climbing along the shelves the first numbers that come into his head—2,460, 158, 12,345, 46, and 47.

In most cases the librarian also figures as reviewer of the productions of local authors. When it happens that somebody in the town evolves a drama or even only produces a novel, and a reading is arranged, the librarian is invariably to be found among the invited intimates. He is asked to assist in solving questions with regard to the insuring of property against fire, or the enlarging of photographs, or the despatch of a big parcel through the post. He exchanges money, occasionally arranges matches, is an expert in tying up travelling baskets, can foretell political events, nominates counsel for Dreyfus and the Humberts, criticises the doings of the Commissioner of Police, and is on intimate terms with one or perhaps even two officers. He has been known to be called in to assist in family crises, but not often.

The librarian's assistant too is, in his way, just as