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He picked up another treasure, last year's first eleven. Smashed glass again. Faces cut about with knife as before. His collection of snapshots was torn into a thousand fragments, though, as Mr Jerome said of the papier-mache trout, there may only have been nine hundred. He did not count them. His bookshelf was empty. The books had gone to swell the contents of the floor.
He was not ashamed of them; he let them flow in the darkness. 'Pavel was right, he thought, 'I feel it; this evening will not come again. At last he got up, lighted a candle, put on his dressing-gown, took down from the bookshelf the second volume of Raumer's History of the Hohenstaufen, and sighing twice, he set to work diligently to read it.
There is time to read, and books are today so easily accessible that living in the country is no bar to the bookshelf. Better than time to read is time to think. The farmer has always been a man who pondered things in his heart. He has had a chance to meditate. No culture is sound except it has been bought by much thinking; all else is veneer. Farm life gives in good measure this time to think.
Silently she obeyed, and as she handed the little pasteboard across the table which separated them she looked past him to the bookshelf behind his head, and particularly to a new volume which bore the name of Stanford Beale. "Thanks," said van Heerden, pocketing the ticket, "it is of no use to me now, for I cannot wait.
Then the portrait was again brought forth, and hung next to that of Count Caprivi which had supplanted it. On his top bookshelf, triumphant over a dreary jungle of theological literature, might have been found the works of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Freiligrath, and in a secret receptacle behind his little drug cabinet reposed a complete edition of Heine.
He had no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with emotion
It was, he imagined, the calm before the storm; the tempest would be raging round him soon in all its fury; and moving the empty horn cups aside the relics of the night's carousal he reached down a volume from the thinly-populated bookshelf, hoping to calm his excited feelings by arousing an interest which might for a time distract his attention from the forthcoming trial.
Hitherto it had seemed hopelessly chained to the bookshelf, like something in a dead language, "dead, and shut up in reliquaries of books," or like those relics "one may only see through a little pane of glass," as one of its recent "liberators" had said.
He sought in the faces of the others the admiration which he himself felt: he would amble round her like an old photographic camera which had the power of setting itself up. But from the day when she took down from his bookshelf a French work on mechanics, a subject with which she was evidently acquainted and for which she declared that she had a natural aptitude, it was all over with him.
But, believe me, it is wisest to wait a short time longer before we are publicly engaged. You must take my word for it, and not made me unhappy by imagining such cruel things. Come, let us look for this list of yours. What were you doing searching among the books?" "Yes," said she, rising, as he went towards a bookshelf, and following him.
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