"The entire set," he said, "weighs over ten pounds. There are 1,162 pages, enough paper if laid down flat, end to end, to reach half a mile."
I cannot quote his exact language: there was too much of it, but he made an impressive showing of the amount of literature that could be had at a very low price per pound. Mr. Dixon was a hypnotist. He fixed me with his glittering eye, and he talked so fast, and his ideas upon the subject were so original that he held me spellbound. At first I was inclined to be provoked: one does not like to be forcibly hypnotised, but gradually the situation began to amuse me, the more so when Harriet came in.
"Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?" asked the agent, holding his book admiringly at arm"s length. "This up here," he said, pointing to the illuminated cover, "is the Muse of Poetry She is scattering flowers--poems, you know. Fine idea, ain"t it? Colouring fine, too."
He jumped up quickly and laid the book on my table, to the evident distress of Harriet.
"Trims up the room, don"t it?" he exclaimed, turning his head a little to one side and observing the effect with an expression of affectionate admiration.
"How much," I asked, "will you sell the covers for without the insides?"
"Without the insides?"
"Yes," I said, "the binding will trim up my table just as well without the insides."
I thought he looked at me a little suspiciously, but he was evidently satisfied by my expression of countenance, for he answered promptly:
"Oh, but you want the insides. That"s what the books are for. The bindings are never sold alone."
He then went on to tell me the prices and terms of payment, until it really seemed that it would be cheaper to buy the books than to let him carry them away again. Harriet stood in the doorway behind him frowning and evidently trying to catch my eye. But I kept my face turned aside so that I could not see her signal of distress and my eyes fixed on the young man Dixon. It was as good as a play. Harriet there, serious-minded, thinking I was being befooled, and the agent thinking he was befooling me, and I, thinking I was befooling both of them--and all of us wrong. It was very like life wherever you find it.
Finally, I took the book which he had been urging upon me, at which Harriet coughed meaningly to attract my attention. She knew the danger when I really got my hands on a book. But I made up as innocent as a child. I opened the book almost at random--and it was as though, walking down a strange road, I had come upon an old tried friend not seen before in years. For there on the page before me I read:
"The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not."
And as I read it came back to me--a scene like a picture--the place, the time, the very feel of the hour when I first saw those lines. Who shall say that the past does not live! An odour will sometimes set the blood coursing in an old emotion, and a line of poetry is the resurrection and the life. For a moment I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot myself, I even forgot the book on my knee--everything but that hour in the past--a view of shimmering hot housetops, the heat and dust and noise of an August evening in the city, the dumb weariness of it all, the loneliness, the longing for green fields; and then these great lines of Wordsworth, read for the first time, flooding in upon me:
"Great G.o.d! I"d rather be A pagan suckled in a creed outworn: So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."
When I had finished I found myself standing in my own room with one arm raised, and, I suspect, a trace of tears in my eyes--there before the agent and Harriet. I saw Harriet lift one hand and drop it hopelessly.
She thought I was captured at last. I was past saving. And as I looked at the agent I saw "grim conquest glowing in his eye!" So I sat down not a little embarra.s.sed by my exhibition--when I had intended to be self-poised.
"You like it, don"t you?" said Mr. Dixon unctuously.
"I don"t see," I said earnestly, "how you can afford to sell such things as this so cheap."
"They _are_ cheap," he admitted regretfully. I suppose he wished he had tried me with the half-morocco.
"They are priceless," I said, "absolutely priceless. If you were the only man in the world who had that poem, I think I would deed you my farm for it."
Mr. Dixon proceeded, as though it were all settled, to get out his black order book and open it briskly for business. He drew his fountain pen, capped it, and looked up at me expectantly. My feet actually seemed slipping into some irresistible whirlpool. How well he understood practical psychology! I struggled within myself, fearing engulfment: I was all but lost.
"Shall I deliver the set at once," he said, "or can you wait until the first of February?"
At that critical moment a floating spar of an idea swept my way and I seized upon it as the last hope of the lost.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Did you ever see a more beautiful binding?"]
"I don"t understand," I said, as though I had not heard his last question, "how you dare go about with all this treasure upon you. Are you not afraid of being stopped in the road and robbed? Why, I"ve seen the time when, if I had known you carried such things as these, such cures for sick hearts, I think I should have stopped you myself!"
"Say, you _are_ an odd one," said Mr. Dixon.
"Why do you sell such priceless things as these?" I asked, looking at him sharply.
"Why do I sell them?" and he looked still more perplexed. "To make money, of course; same reason you raise corn."
"But here is wealth," I said, pursuing my advantage. "If you have these you have something more valuable than money."
Mr. Dixon politely said nothing. Like a wise angler, having failed to land me at the first rush, he let me have line. Then I thought of Ruskin"s words, "Nor can any n.o.ble thing be wealth except to a n.o.ble person." And that prompted me to say to Mr. Dixon:
"These things are not yours; they are mine. You never owned them; but I will sell them to you."
He looked at me in amazement, and then glanced around--evidently to discover if there were a convenient way of escape.
"You"re all straight, are you?" he asked tapping his forehead; "didn"t anybody ever try to take you up?"
"The covers are yours," I continued as though I had not heard him, "the insides are mine and have been for a long time: that is why I proposed buying the covers separately."
I opened his book again. I thought I would see what had been chosen for its pages. And I found there many fine and great things.
"Let me read you this," I said to Mr. Dixon; "it has been mine for a long time. I will not sell it to you. I will give it to you outright.
The best things are always given."
Having some gift in imitating the Scotch dialect, I read:
"November chill blaws loud wi" angry sugh; The shortening winter day is near a close; The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh; The black"ning trains o" craws to their repose: The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, This night his weekly moil is at an end, Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes, Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, And weary, o"er the moor, his course does hameward bend."
So I read "The Cotter"s Sat.u.r.day Night." I love the poem very much myself, sometimes reading it aloud, not so much for the tenderness of its message, though I prize that, too, as for the wonder of its music:
"Compared with these, Italian trills are tame; The tickl"d ear no heart-felt raptures raise."
I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice. As I glanced up from time to time I saw the agent"s face change, and his look deepen and the lips, usually so energetically tense, loosen with emotion. Surely no poem in all the language conveys so perfectly the simple love of the home, the quiet joys, hopes, pathos of those who live close to the soil.
When I had finished--I stopped with the stanza beginning:
"Then homeward all take off their sev"ral way";
the agent turned away his head trying to brave out his emotion. Most of us, Anglo-Saxons, tremble before a tear when we might fearlessly beard a tiger.
I moved up nearer to the agent and put my hand on his knee; then I read two or three of the other things I found in his wonderful book. And once I had him laughing and once again I had the tears in his eyes. Oh, a simple young man, a little crusty without, but soft inside--like the rest of us.
Well, it was amazing once we began talking not of books but of life, how really eloquent and human he became. From being a distant and uncomfortable person, he became at once like a near neighbour and friend. It was strange to me--as I have thought since--how he conveyed to us in few words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the clear simple voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his baby girl and his home.
The very incongruity of detail--he told us how he grew onions in his back yard--added somehow to the homely glamour of the vision which he gave us. The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottage organ, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in Seventeenth Street--were all, curiously, fabrics of his emotion.
It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phosph.o.r.escent in the heat of true feeling. How little we may come to know Romance by the cloak she wears and how humble must be he who would surprise the heart of her!
It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill that I heard him add the details, one by one--the mortgage on his place, now rapidly being paid off, the brother who was a plumber, the mother-in-law who was not a mother-in-law of the comic papers. And finally he showed us the picture of the wife and baby that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat baby with its head resting on its mother"s shoulder.