"John Norman - Gor 22 - Dancer of Gor " - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

giddy and faint. Then I looked up once more after him. The aisle
was empty. I wondered if he would come back for me. Then I felt
suddenly frightened, and ill, and hurried to the ladiesтАЩ room.



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 CHAPTER 3
THE LIBRARY




I put the bells about my ankle.
It was dark now in the library, and it was past ten thirty. We had
closed more than an hour ago.
The incident in the reference section, that in connection with
HarperтАЩs Dictionary of Classical Literature and Antiquities, that in
which I had been so frightened, had occurred more than three
months ago. In that incident it seemed that I had found myself at the
feet of a man. To be sure, it was merely that I was kneeling to draw
forth a book. I was a librarian. I was only being helpful, surely. Too,
it had seemed that I had, before him, aloud, confessed that I was a
slave. But that was an absurd interpretation, surely, of what had
occurred. I was only reading the paper I had found in the book. That
was all. I had taken the paper home. The next day, after a troubled,
restless night, and after hours of anxiety, misery and hesitation, I
had suddenly, feverishly, burned it. Thus I had hoped to put it from
me, but I knew the thing had happened, that the words had been
said, and had had their meaning, that which they had had at the time,
and not necessarily that which I might now fervently desire to
ascribe to them, and to such a man. That the paper might be burned
could not undo what was now transcribed in the reality of the world.
The incident, as you might well imagine, had much disturbed me.
For days it dominated my consciousness, obsessing me. Then, later,
mercifully, when I gradually began to understand how foolish my
fears were, I was able to return my attention to the important
routines of my life, my duties in the library, my reading, my
shopping, and so on. Once in a while, of course, the terrors and
alarms of that incident, suddenly, unexpectedly, would rise up,
flooding back upon me, but on the whole, I had, it seemed, forgotten
about it. I rationally dismissed it, which was the healthy thing to do.
The whole thing had been silly. Sometime I wondered if it had even
happened. I would recall sometimes the eyes of the man. The thing
that had perhaps most impressed me about him, aside from his size,
his seeming vigor


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and formidableness, was his eyes. They had not seemed like the