Borrower of the Night - Elizabeth Peters [4]
He gave me a beaming smile and let me take off my own coat. I threw it, soggy wet as it was, onto the couch. That was wasted effort; I should have thrown it at his notes. He was as neat as a cat about his academic work, and a complete slob otherwise. He pushed the coat off onto the floor and sat calmly down in the damp patch it had left. He started typing.
‘I’ve got two more books to do after this one,’ he said, pecking away. ‘Take a load off.’
I poured a drink since he hadn’t offered me one, and sat down on the floor near the fire. Books were scattered all over the place, where he had presumably flung them after looking them over.
The fire and the bourbon gradually restored my equanimity, and I felt a faint stir of affectionate amusement as I watched poor, unsubtle Tony pecking away at his antique typewriter. He typed with four fingers – two on each hand – and the effort made his tongue stick out between his teeth. His hair was standing on end, there was a black smudge across one cheek, and beads of perspiration bedewed his upper lip. He looked about eighteen, and damned attractive; if I had had the slightest maternal instinct, I’d have gone all soft and marsh-mallowy inside. I seem, however, to be totally lacking in maternal instincts. It’s one of the reasons why I fight marriage. I watched Tony sweat with the kindliest feelings, and with certain hormonal stirrings, but I didn’t have the slightest urge to rush over and offer to do his typing for him. I type sixty words a minute. Tony knows that.
‘We’re supposed to be there in half an hour,’ I said.
‘If you’ll keep quiet, we’ll make it easily.’
‘You plan to read two books and type out a review of each in twenty-five minutes?’
‘Read?’ Tony stopped typing long enough to give me a look of honest indignation. ‘Nobody reads these things. Don’t be silly.’
He started typing again.
I picked up the nearest book and glanced at it.
‘I see what you mean,’ I admitted.
All the books were inches thick; I don’t know why scholars judge accomplishment by weight instead of content. This one was the heaviest of the lot, and its title, in German, was also ponderous.
‘The Peasants’ Revolt: A Discussion of the Events of 1525 in Franconia, and the Effects of the Reformation,’ I translated. ‘Is it any good?’
‘How would I know? I haven’t seen that one yet.’
Tony went on typing. Casually I began leafing through the book. Scholarly prose is generally poor, and scholarly German prose is worse. But the author had gotten hold of some new material – contemporary letters and diaries. Also, the subject interested me.
In recent years, students have done a lot of complaining about ‘relevance.’ No one can quarrel with the basic idea: that education should have something to do with real life and its problems. The trouble comes when you try to define the word. What is relevant? Not history, according to the more radical critics. Who cares what happened in ancient Babylon or medieval England? It’s now that counts.
They couldn’t be more wrong. Everything has happened before – not once, but over and over again. We may not be able to solve our problems through what are pompously called ‘the lessons of history,’ but at least we should be able to recognize the issues and perhaps avoid some of the solutions that have failed in the past. And we can take heart in our own dilemma by realizing that other people in other times have survived worse.
Social upheaval and revolution are old issues, as old as society itself. The Peasants’ Revolt, in the southern and western provinces of Germany, is not one of the better-known