“I want you to buy my books, Daunchey.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll send a man round, sir.”
“Right away, please.”
“Certainly, sir. And if I might suggest it, sir, your name in them would increase their value. We might even issue a special catalogue.…”
But the thought gave Gaveston pause. He rather shuddered. And he glanced at the long lines of second- and even third-hand books, ranged there in penitential rows, drilled into anonymity, like lost dogs or waifs and strays … each once the darling purchase of some eager Oxonian, each.… Before his eyes rose the phantasms and sosias of generation upon dead generation of his predecessors, buyers at first and sellers at last of books, thronging the air with their insistent presences, pleading with poor withered fingers for their possessions. A charnel house of books, a morgue of literature! No! Impossible!
“Perhaps, Daunchey, you’d better not send just yet,” he said quickly. And partly to assuage the aged bookseller’s disappointment, partly to ward off that too often told anecdote of how the P … of W … had entered once to ask for the copy of the (current) Sporting Times, Gaveston ordered two copies of La Dame aux Camelias, in its most unexpurgated form.
“One to myself, Daunchey. And one to Mr. Paunceford, at my address. And bind them both in that eau-de-nil calf I had before.”
Side by side, he planned, David and he would read them while dawn broke upon their last dear day as clerks of Oxenford.…