Read Online Is That What People Do? by Robert Sheckley - Free Book Online Page A

know,” Smith said, not very helpfully. “A little knowledge is not as dangerous as a lot of ignorance, eh? Never mind, my blank-faced young friend. I like the look of your village. I like the wooden frame buildings and the stately elms. I like—”
    “The stately what?” I asked him.
    “Elms,” he said, gesturing at the tall trees that lined Main Street. “Didn’t you know their name?”
    “It was forgotten,” I said, embarrassed.
    “No matter. Many things have been lost, and some have been hidden. Still, there’s no harm in the name of a tree. Or is there?”
    “No harm at all,” I said. “Elm trees.”
    “Keep that to yourself,” he said, winking. “It’s only a morsel, but there’s no telling when it might prove useful. I shall stay for a time in this village.”
    “You are most welcome,” I said. “Especially now, at harvest-time.”
    Smith looked at me sharply. “I have nothing to do with that. Did you take me for an itinerant apple-picker?”
    “I didn’t think about it one way or another. What will you do here?”
    “I repair furniture,” Smith said.
    “Not much call for that in a village this size,” I told him.
    “Then maybe I’ll find something else to turn my hand to.” He grinned at me suddenly. “For the moment, however, I require lodgings.”
    I took him to the Widow Marsini’s house, and there he rented her large back bedroom with porch and separate entrance. He arranged to take all of his meals there, too.
    His arrival let loose a flood of gossip and speculation. Mrs. Marsini felt that Smith’s questions about the police went to show that he himself was a policeman. “They work like that,” she said. “Or they used to. Back fifty years ago, every third person you met was some kind of a policeman. Sometimes even your own children were policemen, and they’d be as quick to arrest you as they would a stranger. Quicker!”
    But others pointed out that all of that had happened long ago, that life was quiet now, that policemen were rarely seen, even though they were still believed to exist.
    But why had Smith come? Some felt that he was here to take something from us. “What other reason is there for a stranger to come to a village like this?” And others felt that he had come to give us something, citing the same argument.
    But we didn’t know. We simply had to wait until Smith chose to reveal himself.
    He moved among us as other men do. He had knowledge of the outside world; he seemed to us a far-traveling man. And slowly, he began to give us clues as to his identity.
    One day I took him to a rise which looks out over our valley. This was at midautumn, a pretty time. Smith looked out and declared it a fine sight. “It puts me in mind of that famous tag from William James,” he said. “How does it go? ‘Scenery seems to wear in one’s consciousness better than any other element in life.’ Eh? Apt, don’t you think?”
    “Who is or was this William James?” I asked.
    Smith winked at me. “Did I mention that name? Slip of the tongue, my lad.”
    But that was not the last “slip of the tongue.” A few days later I pointed out an ugly hillside covered with second-growth pine, low coarse shrubbery, and weeds. “This burned five years ago,” I told him. “Now it serves no purpose at all.”
    “Yes, I see,” Smith said. “And yet—as Montaigne tells us—there is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself.”
    And still later, walking through the village, he paused to admire Mrs. Vogel’s late-blooming peonies. He said, “Flowers do indeed have the glances of children and the mouths of old men...Just as Chazal pointed out.”
    Toward the end of the week, a few of us got together in the back of Edmonds’s store and began to discuss Mr. Edgar Smith. I mentioned the things he had said to me. Bill Edmonds remembered that Smith had cited a man named Emerson, to the effect that solitude was impractical, and society fatal. Billy Foreclough told us that