He was about to fly at me again, but, controlling himself once more, he merely looked at me and said: “Screw-drivers? cork-screws?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I dreamed I had a wife—horrible to relate. I laughed at her for reading papers without cutting the leaves, and for putting up for years with a drawer that would not go. Thereupon she gave me a sermon on patience, and required me to exercise myself in that virtue by wearing screws and screw-drivers on my coat instead of buttons and button-holes, suggesting that they might be quite ornamental if made out of oxidised metal; or she said I might have corks, which I would be obliged to remove by means of a cork-screw every time I wished to unbutton my coat. Ah, pshaw! a woman is quite capable of putting a cover upon a dressing-case in such a manner that it will catch every time the upper drawer is opened and shut. Sir, a woman has time for the struggle with the villain called matter; she lives in this struggle, it is her element; a man has no business to have time for this, he needs his patience for things that are worthy of patience. It is an imposition to expect him to waste either for what is worthless, an imposition against which he may, can, and must rage! You must know that. You must know that these unworthy objects, these hooks and crooks of matter, never get entangled with your destiny except when you are in most desperate haste to complete something which is necessary and reasonable! Miserable gimcrack, worthless button or ball of twine, or string to my eye-glasses that gets twisted about one of the buttons of my vest just at the very moment when it is necessary to look over a time-table in small type at the railway station, I have no time, no time for ye! And if I were to set a thousand leeches on eternity, they would not draw out a single moment of time for ye!”
“But what is the use of all this bluster?”
“Oh, insipid! Was it of no use to Luther—if you are going to talk about use—to rail at the devil? Don’t you know what it is to disburden your poor soul? Have you never heard of the precious balm that lies in a good round oath?”
“I TOOK THE EXASPERATED MAN AND POINTED SILENTLY TO THE SPOT.”
The evil spirit took possession of him anew; he rushed about the room in another paroxysm of rage pouring out a volley of abuse upon his poor innocent spectacles. Meanwhile I looked about the floor; I picked up a couple of shirts that were clean, but terribly messed, and my eyes fell upon a mouse-hole in the boards. It seemed to me I saw something glitter there; I looked closer, and the discovery was made. I took the exasperated man by his arm and pointed silently to the spot. He gazed at it, recognised his missing glasses, and remarked: “Look at them well! Do you notice the sneer, the demoniac triumph in that evil glassy leer? Out with the entrapped monster!”
It was not easy to pull the spectacles out of the hole; the trouble was really out of proportion to the value of the object. At last we succeeded; he held them out at arm’s-length, dropped them from there, cried in a solemn voice, “Sentence of death! Supplicium!” raised his foot, and crushed them with his heel, shivering them to bits.
“That’s all very well,” I said, after a pause of astonishment; “but now you have no spectacles.”