“Famina? Woman?” he cried, scandalised.
“Yes, my friend,” said I. “All things sublunar can be translated into terms of woman. St. Fliscus wrote because he hadn’t a wife; Simon Magniagus stopped printing because he got married and devoted his existence to reproducing himself instead of St. Fliscus.”
“Ach, that is very interesting,” said he. “Could you tell me the date of Magniagus’s marriage?”
“I never heard of him till this moment, my dear Herr Doctor. But depend upon it, he was either married or was going to be married, and she ran away from him and left him without the heart to print for posterity, and when he took his seat among the saints she said she was so glad; he was a stupid old ink-sodden fellow!”
He departed sorrowingly from the deck, clasping the precious volume to his heart. Allusive or discursive speech scared him like indecency; and I had used his gem but as a peg whereon flauntingly to hang it. It took me three days to tame him and to induce him to show me another of his treasures, recently acquired in Athens. Ioannes Georgius Godelmann’s Tractate de Lamiis, printed by Nicholas Bassaeus of Frankfurt. I read him Keats’s poem about the young lady of Corinth, of which he had never heard. His mental attitude towards it was the indulgent one of an old diplomatist towards a child’s woolly lamb. For him literature had never existed and printing ended in the year 1600. But I was sorry when he left me at Constantinople, where he counted on striking the track of a Bohemian herbal, printed at Prague, and never more to be read by any of the sons of man. In the summer he was going book-hunting in Iceland. By chance I have learned since that he died there. Peace to his ashes! For aught I could see he dwelt in a mild stupor of happiness, absorbed in the intoxication of a tremulous pursuit. I wondered whether his soul contained that antidote—the odor di femina. Perhaps he met it at Reykjavic and he died of dismay.
I thought that my landing at Alexandretta was alone responsible for the continuance of my dotage, and hoped that fresh scenes would banish Carlotta’s distracting image. But no, it was one of the many vain reflections on which I based a false philosophy. Whether in Beyrout, or the land of the “sweet singer of Persephone,” or Alexandria, or on the Cannebiere of Marseilles, or in the queer half-Orient of Algiers whither a restless pursuit of the Identical led me, or in Lisbon, or in the mountainous republic of Andorre, where I hoped to find primitive wisdom and to shape a theory from first principles, and whence I was ironically driven by fleas—whether on land or sea, in cities or in solitudes, the vanished hand harped on my heartstrings and the voice that was still (as far as I was concerned) cooed its dove-notes into my ears.
I remember overhearing myself described on a steamboat by a pretty American girl of sixteen, as “a quaint gentle old guy who talks awful rot which no one can understand, and is all the time thinking about something else.” My sudden emergence from the companion-way, where I was lighting a cigarette, brought red confusion into the young person’s cheeks.
“How old do you think I am?” I asked.
“Oh, about sixty,” quoth the damsel.
“I’m glad I’m quaint and gentle, even though I do talk rot,” said I.