The Volume of Cajetan

Gale turned the luxurious pages of the tiny treatise with a sense of thrilled satisfaction. It was good to possess at last so capital a work as Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia, competently, exhaustively edited, printed in the best Italian tradition on paper of fine texture. He did not at once begin to read but enjoyed the sense of possession and of authority. So slight in size the corner piece of a now authoritative library. As he rose to find a place for the book on his shelves, a place that must be at once adequate and inevitable, he saw that the light had gone out of the summer evening. He forgot his shelves, leaving the book on the arm of a chair.The rain came suddenly with a crash of thunder and a simultaneous flicker of lightning. The wonder of storms. From the window he could barely see the railings of the park, so fierce the fall of the rain. Immediate the stride of the storm. Here thundering at the door with its guns of water, and as suddenly would be gone and the world changed in a moment's bombardment. Somewhere at the back of his mind an uneasiness Cajetan would not solve. Sustained violence, an unthinkable thing. Natural causes, his mind told him, workaday, but powerful, tremendous.The crash and assault of the rain beat the evergreens before his window, tore petals from the few flowers. Window panes aswim with switchback scenery. An early light wept lucidly, pools of yellow in the window frames. A man was standing, coat caught up to the chin, in the inadequate shelter of the grandiose pillared porch, gusts of rain sweeping his legs like impetuous brooms. Gale watched him slantwise through the blear panes. Trousers sodden: would run water soon. He thought of the bell; Thompson his servant; unfriendly? No, he would go to the door himself.