"We all need money," he pursued with new energy. "It's a thing to despise if you can—a thing for sentimentalists to drivel about. But so long as our present social and economic system continues, only a fool would decry money. It's no good to you when your heart is breaking, but neither is food nor water, nor shelter nor leisure. But when you want food and shelter and leisure, that is as long as you're above ground, you want money. I have prospered—done well. Will you come with me, Randolph Byrd?"
"My dear good Andrews," I paced the room agitated, exultant, terrified by this stroke of good fortune. "But how can I take advantage of your unheard-of generosity? What can I offer? Will you take my books as a contribution to capital?"
"No," he shook his head, with twinkling eyes and a queer crinkling of the crow's-feet about them. "I don't think we need them. Books are always—books," he concluded oracularly, with a ring in his voice of the true bibliophile's reverence.
"Say you will come."
My heart was suddenly flooded by a rich inundation of hope. This was permanence that Andrews was holding out—this was an anchorage. It was neither Salmon and Byrd, nor Visconti's. This was my own peculiar realm, and only a snob or a fool could reject it. Ça me connait. All the turmoil and troubles of the past seemed to be melting rapidly away like the shapes in dreams or unsubstantial clouds. My life would be secure, the children nourished and educated. Alicia should have her chance unchallenged—should be prepared against the advent of that dream-hero of hers,—when he comes—when he comes! What else was I now living for? I felt as might have felt the old woman of the nursery rhyme, who lived in a shoe, had any one suddenly offered her a vine-clad well-stocked cottage of many chambers, with a future reasonably safe for her progeny. I saw on a sudden the clamorous city that had more than once droned forth my doom, now rich in prospects and gayly reciting the flattering tale of hope in my ears—the hope of becoming a bookseller in face of my dreams of scholarship, eminence—fame, possibly! But this was no dream. With a flitting smile I recognized the wayward cynicism and irony of it. And in deep gratitude I gripped the hand of Andrews to seal the bargain.
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER XXII
In returning to this all but neglected record of the things that made up my life I realize with incredulity the passage of time. I realize, too, that when you live the most fully, you write, reflect and record the least. It was after his years of slavery that Cervantes wrote Don Quixote and inside a prison house that Bunyan and Sir Walter Raleigh composed their best-known works.
I shall never compose "works", I am certain now, for my lot is business to the end. Three times during the past two years I have been in England and in France, attending sales, buying books, manuscripts and libraries, and very narrowly I escaped sailing on the Lusitania, which would probably have been the end of these memoirs and of me. Would it have mattered? To the children, possibly. Not to me, certainly—except in so far as they would have suffered by my exit. For though the business of books is to me the one nearest akin to pleasure, it is nevertheless a chaffering and a haggling in the market-place—the reverse of all my tastes and aptitudes.
It is odd that externally I bear few of the marks of the indolent lotus-eating soul that possesses me. People viewing me superficially might think, with Andrews, that I am fitted for stratagems, spoils and—business.