CHAPTER III

IN WHICH NARCISSUS OPENS HIS ‘GLADSTONE’

Though it was so long since we had met—­is not three years indeed ’so long’ in youth?—­we had hardly to wait for our second glass to be again en rapport.  Few men grow so rapidly as Narcissus did in those young days, but fewer still can look back on old enthusiasms and superannuated ideals with a tenderness so delicately considerate.  Most men hasten to witness their present altitude by kicking away the old ladders on the first opportunity; like vulgar lovers, they seek to flatter to-day at the expense of yesterday.  But Narcissus was of another fibre; he could as soon have insulted the memory of his first love.

So, before long, we had passed together into a sweet necropolis of dreams, whither, if the Reader care, I will soon take him by the hand.  But just now I would have him concern himself with the afternoon of which I write, in that sad tense, the past present.  Indeed, we did not ourselves tarry long among the shades, for we were young, and youth has little use for the preterite; its verbs are wont to have but two tenses.  We soon came up to the surface in one, with eyes turned instinctively on the other.

Narcissus’ bag seemed, somehow, a symbol; and I had caught sight of a binding or two as it lay open in Tithefields that made me curious to see it open again.  He was only beginning to collect when we had parted at school, if ‘collect’ is not too sacred a word:  beginning to buy more truly expresses that first glutting of the bookish hunger, which, like the natural appetite, never passes in some beyond the primary utilitarian stage of ‘eating to live,’ otherwise ‘buying to read.’  Three years, however, works miracles of refinement in any hunger that is at all capable of culture; and it was evident, when Narcissus did open his ‘Gladstone,’ that it had taken him by no means so long to attain that sublimation of taste which may be expressed as ‘reading to buy.’  Each volume had that air—­of breeding, one might almost say—­by which one can always know a genuine bouquin at a glance; an alluvial richness of bloom, coming upon one like an aromatic fragrance in so many old things, in old lawns, in old flowers, old wines, and many another delicious simile.  One could not but feel that each had turned its golden brown, just as an apple reddens—­as, indeed, it had.

I do not propose to solemnly enumerate and laboriously describe these good things, because I hardly think they would serve to distinguish Narcissus, except in respect of luck, from other bookmen in the first furor of bookish enthusiasm.  They were such volumes as Mr. Pendennis ran up accounts for at Oxford.  Narcissus had many other points in common with that gentleman.  Such volumes as, morning after morning, sadden one’s breakfast-table in that Tantalus menu, the catalogue.  Black letter, early printed, first editions Elizabethan and Victorian, every poor fly ambered in large paper, etc. etc.; in short, he ran through the gamut of that craze which takes its turn in due time with marbles, peg-tops, beetles, and foreign stamps—­with probably the two exceptions of Bewick, for whom he could never batter up an enthusiasm, and ‘facetiae.’  These latter needed too much camphor, he used to say.