Читать книгу The Idiot at Home - Bangs John Kendrick - Страница 3

The Bibliomaniac had come off into the country to spend Sunday with the Idiot, and, as fortune would have it, Mr. and Mrs. Pedagog also appeared on the scene. After the mid-day dinner the little party withdrew to the library, where the Bibliomaniac began to discourse somewhat learnedly upon his hobby.

"I am glad to see, my dear Idiot," he observed, as he glanced about the room at the well-filled shelves, "that as you grow older you are cultivating a love of good literature."

"I heartily echo the sentiment," said Mr. Pedagog, as he noted the titles of some of the volumes. "I may add that I am pleasurably surprised at some of your selections. I never knew, for instance, that you cared for Dryden, and yet I see here on the top shelf a voluminous edition of that poet."

"Yes," said the Idiot. "I have found Dryden very useful indeed. Particularly in that binding and in so many volumes. The color goes very well with the hangings, and the space the books occupy, eked out by a dozen others of the same color, gives to that top shelf all the esthetic effect of an attractive and tasteful frieze. Then, too, it is always well," he added, with a sly wink at Mrs. Idiot, "to have a lot of books for a top shelf that is difficult to reach that nothing under the canopy could induce you to read. It is not healthful to be stretching upward, and with Dryden upon the top shelf my wife and I are never tempted to undermine our constitutions by taking him down."

The Bibliomaniac laughed.

"Your view is at least characteristic," said he, "and to tell you the absolute truth, I do not know that your judgment of the literary value of Dryden is at variance with my own. Somebody called him the Greatest Poet of a Little Age. Perhaps if the age had been bigger he'd not have shone so brilliantly."

"Lowell," observed Mr. Pedagog, "was responsible for that remark, if I remember rightly, and I have no doubt it is a just one, and yet I do not hold it up against Dryden. Man does not make the age. The age makes the man. Had there been any inspiring influences at work to give him a motive, an incentive, Dryden might have been a greater poet. To excel his fellows was all that could rightly be expected of him, and that he did."

"Assuredly," said the Idiot. "That has always been my view, and to-day we benefit by it. If he had gone directly to oblivion, Mrs. Idiot and I should have been utterly at a loss to know what to put on that top shelf."

The Idiot offered his visitors a cigar.

"Thank you," said the Bibliomaniac, taking his and sniffing at it with all the airs and graces of a connoisseur.

"I don't know but that I will join you," said Mr. Pedagog. "I did not smoke until I was fifty, and I suppose I ought not to have taken it up then, but I did, and I have taken a great deal of comfort out of it. My allowance is fifty-two cigars a year, one for each Sunday afternoon," he added, with a kindly smile.

"Well, you want to look out you don't get smoker's heart," said the Idiot. "When a man plunges into a bad habit as rashly as that, he wants to pull up before it is too late."

"I have felt no ill effects since the first one," rejoined Mr. Pedagog. "But you, my dear Idiot, how about your allowance? Is it still as great as ever? As I remember you in the old days you were something of a cigarette fiend."

"I smoke just as much, but with this difference: I do not smoke for pleasure any more, Mr. Pedagog," the Idiot replied. "As a householder I smoke from a sense of duty. It keeps moths out of the house, and insects from the plants."

The Bibliomaniac meanwhile had been investigating the contents of the lower shelves.

"You've got a few rare things here, I see," he observed, taking up a volume of short sketches illustrated by Leech, in color. "This small tome is worth its weight in gold. Where did you pick it up?"

"Auction," said the Idiot. "I didn't buy it by weight, either. I bought it by mistake. The colored pictures fascinated me, and when it was put up I bawled out 'fifteen.' Another fellow said 'sixteen.' I wasn't going to split nickels so I bid 'twenty.' So we kept at it until it was run up to 'thirty-six.' Then I thought I'd break the other fellow's heart by bidding fifty, and it was knocked down to me."

"That's a stiff price, but on the whole it's worth it," said the Bibliomaniac, stroking the back of the book caressingly.

"But," said Mr. Pedagog, "if you bid on it consciously where did the mistake come in?"

The Idiot sighed. "I meant cents," he said, "but the other chap and the auctioneer meant dollars. I went up and planked down a half-dollar and was immediately made aware of my error."

"But you could have explained," said Mr. Pedagog.

"Oh, yes," said the Idiot, "I could, but after all I preferred to pay the extra $49.50 rather than make a public confession of such infernal innocence before some sixty or seventy habitues of a book-auction room."

"And you were perfectly right!" said the Bibliomaniac. "You never would have dared set your foot in that place again if you had explained. They would have made life a burden to you. Furthermore, you have not paid too dearly for the experience. The book is worth forty dollars; and to learn better than to despise the man who makes his bid cautiously, and who advances by small bids rather than by antelopian jumps, is worth many times ten dollars to the man who collects rare books seriously. In the early days I scorned to break a five-dollar bill when I was bidding, just as you refused, as you put it, to split nickels, and many a time I have paid as high as twenty-five dollars for books that could have been had for twenty-one, because of that foolish sentiment."

"I have often wondered," Mr. Pedagog put in at this point, holding his cigar in a gingerly and awed fashion, taking a puff at it between words, by which symptoms the man who seldom smokes may always be identified, "I have often wondered what was the mission of a private library, anyhow. And now that I find you two gentlemen interested in a phase of book-collecting with which I have had little sympathy myself, possibly I may, without being offensive, ask a question. Do you, for instance, Mr. Idiot, collect books because you wish to have something nobody else has got, or do you buy your books to read?"

"That is a deep question," said the Idiot, "and I do not know that I can answer it off-hand. I have already confessed that I bought Dryden for his decorative quality. I purchased my Thackeray to read. I bought my Pepys Diary because I find it better reading than a Sunday newspaper, quite as gossipy, and with weather reports that are fully as reliable. But that particular Leech I bought because of my youthful love for colored pictures."

"But you admit that it is valuable because of its rarity, and that compared to fifty dollars' worth of books that are not rare it is not to be compared with them from a literary point of view?" said Mr. Pedagog.

"I presume," said the Idiot, "that the fifty dollars I expended on that book would have provided me with a complete Shakespeare in one volume; all of Byron in green cloth and gold top; all of Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer, and Austen in six volumes, with a margin of forty-five dollars left with which for nine years I could have paid for a subscription to the Mercantile Library, containing all the good reading of the present day and all the standard works of the past. But I rather like to have the books, and to feel that they are my own, even if it is only for the pleasure of lending them."

"Still, if a man collects books merely for their contents – " persisted Mr. Pedagog.

"He is a wild, extravagant person," said the Idiot. "He might save himself hundreds of dollars, not to say thousands. The library on that plan need not occupy an honored place among the rooms of the house. A mere pigeon-hole with a subscriber's card to a circulating library filed away in it will do as well, or if the city or town in which he lives maintains a public library he may spare himself even that expense."

"Good for you!" exclaimed the Bibliomaniac. "That's the best answer to the critics of book-collectors I have heard yet."

"I agree with you," said Mr. Pedagog. "It is a very comprehensive reply. As for you, my dear Bibliomaniac, why do you collect books?"

"Because I love 'em as books," replied the Bibliomaniac. "Because of their associations, and because when I get a treasure I have the bliss of knowing I have something that others haven't."

"Then it is selfishness?" asked Mr. Pedagog.

"Just as everything else is," returned the Bibliomaniac. "You, sir, if I may be personal without wishing to be offensive, are wedded to Mrs. Pedagog. You take pleasure in knowing that she belongs to you and not to any one else. The Idiot here is proud of his children, and is glad they are his children and nobody else's. I am wedded to my rare books, and it rejoices my soul to pick up a volume that is unique, and to know that it belongs to me and to no one else. If that is selfishness, then all possession is selfish."

"That's about it," said the Idiot. "You collect books just as Mormons and Solomon used to collect wives. You are called a Bibliomaniac. I suppose Brigham Young and Solomon would have been known as Gamyomaniacs – though I don't suppose that age in women as in books is a requisite of value to marrying men – and they are both of them supposed to be rather canny persons."

Mr. Pedagog puffed away in silence. It was evident that the argumentum ad hominem did not please him.

"Well," he said, after awhile, "possibly you are right. If a man wants a library to be a small British Museum – "

"He will take better care of his rarities than the Idiot does," said the Bibliomaniac, putting the rare Leech back into its place. "If that were mine I'd put it out of the reach of my children."

"I didn't know you had any," said the Idiot, eagerly.

"Oh, you know what I mean," retorted the Bibliomaniac. "You place Dryden on the top shelf where Tommy and Mollie cannot get at him. But this book, which is worth ten larger paper editions of Dryden, you keep below, where the children can easily reach it. It's a wonder to me you've been able to keep it in its present superb condition."

"The mind of a child," said Mr. Pedagog, sententiously, "is above values, above all conceits. It is the mind of sincerity, and a rare book has no greater attraction to the boy or girl than one not so favored."

"That is not my reason," said the Idiot. "I know children pretty well, and I have observed that they are ambitious, and in a sense rebellious. They want to do what they cannot do. That is why, when mothers place jam on the top shelf of the pantry, the children always climb up to get it. If they would leave it on the dining-room table, within easy reach, the children would soon cease to regard it as a thing to be sought for. Make jam a required article of diet and the little ones will soon cease to want it. So with that book. If I should put that out of Tommy's reach, Tommy would lie awake nights to plan his campaign to get it. Leaving it where it is he doesn't think about it, doesn't want it, is not forbidden to have it, and so it escapes his notice."

"You have the right idea, the human idea," said Mr. Pedagog, and even the Bibliomaniac was inclined to agree. But just then Tommy happened in, with Mollie close after. The boy walked straight to the bookcase, and Mollie gathered up the large shears from the Idiot's table, and together they approached their father.

"Pa," said Mollie, holding up the scissors, "can I borrow these?"

"What for?" asked the Idiot.

"We want to cut the pictures out o' this," said Tommy, holding up the fifty-dollar Leech.

After all, it is difficult to lay down a cast-iron rule as to how a private library should be constructed or arranged, particularly when one's loyalty is divided between one's children and one's merely bookish treasures.