"An Elzevir 'Horace'!" I exclaimed. "Where did you get it?" All the
rest of the world and all my cares thinned to insignificance before this
treasure.
"A plutocratic book collector living in a mausoleum on Fifth Avenue has
just given it to me," he replied. "It's a duplicate. He has another and
a better one of the same date. D'you value it any at all?"
"Value it!" I cried, as my fingers caressed it. "Why, certainly I value
it. It is a perfectly genuine Elzevir--the great Louis himself printed
this at Leyden. It is not what you would call a tall copy, and binders
have sacrilegiously spoiled an originally fine broad margin. It's not
perfect. But it's a splendid specimen of early printing, with title
page and colophon intact. It's a beauty!"
"You beat the devil," murmured Dibdin in his beard. "You can be
enthusiastic about some things, that's clear. Anyway, the book is
yours," he concluded. "I have no use for it."
"You don't mean it!" I exulted incredulously. "I am simply delighted,
Dibdin, tickled pink, as you would say! I have long wanted the Elzevir
'Horace.' I haven't a single Elzevir to compare with this. Think of
this coming out of the blue!" And in my foolish way I fell to gloating
over the thin, musty little volume, examining the worm drills, holding
it up to the light for watermarks in the gray paper and, in general, I
suppose, behaving like an imbecile.
"Illustrates my point," muttered Dibdin, fumbling with a malodorous corn
cob and a tobacco pouch.
"Point? What point?" I looked up at him abstractedly.
"Out of the blue--this book you say you yearned for--anything may
happen."
"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the
chair. "Things like this happen--yes. But in the serious business of
life you're ground between the millstones of the gods--a victim of
events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free
spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so
that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other
a victim of property,--took a wife that disgusted him. (I have
beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look
at.) But each of them was a victim."
"A victim if you're victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I
cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play
with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a
bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my
boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I
was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with
humiliation if I had turned out a 'hobo' on their hands. So I took to
ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking
I'm an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart's
content."
That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to
me.
"Why," I finally asked, "didn't I do that?"
"Because you're not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin.
"Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be,
since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity."
"You with all this comfort--a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this
room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I
know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about.
Time will tell."
I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems
to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best
arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the
happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the
ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts.
"Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did
you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college
when you were teaching me?"
"Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You've never been a
teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your
so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a
snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies,
or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes
the teacher's golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You'll admit
you haven't set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet."
"All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the
devil of a fix and you are talking like Job's comforters."
"Yes," he agreed, "I suppose I am. But in the end it was not the
comforters but events that pulled Job up. Await events with resignation
and expectancy, Randolph, my lad, and play the game. Stake your coin
and wait until the wheel stops and see what happens."
"A fine teacher you are!" I laughed at him, albeit mirthlessly.
"No good at all," he assented cheerfully, knocking his pipe against the
ash tray and pocketing the noisome thing. "And didn't I chuck teaching
the minute events made it possible? Events, my boy; they are the
teacher and the deities to tie to. Set up a little altar to the great
god Event--right here in your perfumed little temple. That's what I
should do," he concluded, muttering into his beard.
"Incidentally," he added, "I'm getting extraordinarily hungry."
"Oh, sorry," I murmured. "Glad you're here to eat with me, anyway. It
enables me to put off breaking the news of my coming marriage to
Griselda."
"What--you haven't told her yet?" shouted Dibdin, sitting up in his
chair. "That fine, upright Highland lassie? Then you're no disciple of
mine! Face things with courage and face 'em fairly, Randolph. Go and
tell her now! I'll wait here with my highly moral support."
"I--I can't," I blurted miserably.
"Yes, you can," he insisted with obstinacy. "Go and do it now."
With a gesture of desperation I pressed the bell.
"If I am going to tell her anything," I mumbled between my teeth, "I'll
say it right here." Dibdin laughed ghoulishly.
"This cowardice--this shrinking from life," he philosophized
detestably--"that's what our kind of education brings about."
Griselda appeared at the door.
"You rang, Mr. Randolph."
"Yes--er--yes, Griselda," and I felt myself idiotically hot and flushed.
"I wanted to say--" and beads of perspiration prickled my forehead.
Then in desperation, I stammered out,
"Mr. Dibdin, Griselda--he is dining here to-night--that's all,
Griselda!"
Dibdin's laugh rattled throatily in the room. How I hated him at that
moment! Griselda swept us with an impenetrable glance.
"There is a place laid for him," she uttered in the tone of one whose
patience is a sternly acquired virtue. And she left us.
"Better strip, my lad," chuckled Dibdin, "and put on your wrestling
trunks."
"What d'you mean?" I demanded sulkily.
"The tussle that life is going to give you will be a caution."
"A lot you know about life!"
"Not much, that's a fact," Dibdin observed more soberly. "But I've had
to face some things, Randolph. I've had to grin at a lot of greasy Arabs
in the desert who thought they would hold me for ransom. I've had to
laugh out of their dull ambition a pack of villainous Chinese thugs in
Gobi, who felt it would profit them to cut my throat. I've had to make
my way alone through a jungle in Central America for days when the
beastly natives absconded with the supplies and left me in the middle of
a job of excavation. I've had other little episodes. But never, son, I
may say truthfully, have I shown such blue funk as you did just then
before the patient Griselda."
"Rot!" was my only answer. "Let's go in to dinner."
It is after ten. Old Dibdin is gone and I have been putting down these
foolish notes.
It must be by some odd law of balance or compensation, I suppose, that
those whose lives are least important keep the fullest record of them.
It is a weakness of mine to wish to read in the future the things I
failed to do in the past. It is really for you, O Randolph Byrd, aged
seventy, that I am writing these notes.
If only Gertrude had made up her masterful mind to three months hence,
instead of three weeks, I should have taken my last fling and gone by
the next boat to Italy.
Biagi, that courteous scholar and humanist, writes me from the
Laurentian at Florence that he has discovered some new material
concerning Brunetto Latini--the teacher of Dante. Among the few
ambitions that I dally with there has always been the one to write a
life of Brunetto, who taught Dante how a man may become immortal. I
have a fine copy of Ser Brunetto's works, the "Tesoro" and the
"Tesoretto", and it seems a shabby enough little encyclopedia in verse
of knowledge now somewhat out of date. There must have been, therefore,
something in the man himself that enabled Dante to attribute his own
greatness to the teacher.
But I cannot go to Florence and return in three weeks.
Gertrude, I know, will tell me I can do it after we're married. But she
will expect me to "clean up the job" in two weeks.
There is nothing about Gertrude that terrifies me so much as her
efficiency. I shall never dare to mention the subject to her, and so I
shall never attempt it and never know the mystery of Dante's
immortality. It is all one, however; what have I to do with greatness?
No more than with marriage.
Bur-r-r! The room is cold. _Sparge ligna super foco_, as cheerful old
Horace advises. I have just complied and put another log on the fire.
My nerves must be a shade off color to-night. I could have sworn a
moment ago, as the room grew chilly, that my sister Laura was standing
before me. It is my guilty conscience, I suppose. Too late to call her
now. Besides, the telephone is no doubt still "out of order." Poor
Laura! I saw her, white as death, with tears running down her drawn
cheeks. What things are human nerves when a bit unstrung! I shall go
and see Laura to-morrow.