Books: The Haunted Bookshop
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Christopher Morley >> The Haunted Bookshop
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He would never have approached her again, on any pretext,
if the intensity of his thoughts had not caused him, unconsciously,
to grip the railing of the bridge with strong and angry hands.
For at that moment a sack was thrown over his head from behind
and he was violently seized by the legs, with the obvious
intent of hoisting him over the parapet. His unexpected grip
on the railing delayed this attempt just long enough to save him.
Swept off his feet by the fury of the assault, he fell sideways against
the barrier and had the good fortune to seize his enemy by the leg.
Muffled in the sacking, it was vain to cry out; but he held furiously
to the limb he had grasped and he and his attacker rolled together
on the footway. Aubrey was a powerful man, and even despite
the surprise could probably have got the better of the situation;
but as he wrestled desperately and tried to rid himself of his hood,
a crashing blow fell upon his head, half stunning him. He lay
sprawled out, momentarily incapable of struggle, yet conscious enough
to expect, rather curiously, the dizzying sensation of a drop through
insupportable air into the icy water of the East River. Hands seized him--
and then, passively, he heard a shout, the sound of footsteps running
on the planks, and other footsteps hurrying away at top speed.
In a moment the sacking was torn from his head and a friendly
pedestrian was kneeling beside him.
"Say, are you all right?" said the latter anxiously.
"Gee, those guys nearly got you."
Aubrey was too faint and dizzy to speak for a moment.
His head was numb and he felt certain that several inches of it
had been caved in. Putting up his hand, feebly, he was surprised
to find the contours of his skull much the same as usual.
The stranger propped him against his knee and wiped away a trickle
of blood with his handkerchief.
"Say, old man, I thought you was a goner," he said sympathetically.
"I seen those fellows jump you. Too bad they got away. Dirty work,
I'll say so."
Aubrey gulped the night air, and sat up. The bridge rocked under him;
against the star-speckled sky he could see the Woolworth
Building bending and jazzing like a poplar tree in a gale.
He felt very sick.
"Ever so much obliged to you," he stammered. "I'll be all right
in a minute."
"D'you want me to go and ring up a nambulance?" said his assistant.
"No, no," said Aubrey; "I'll be all right." He staggered to his feet
and clung to the rail of the bridge, trying to collect his wits.
One phrase ran over and over in his mind with damnable iteration--"Mild,
but they satisfy!"
"Where were you going?" said the other, supporting him.
"Madison Avenue and Thirty-Second----"
"Maybe I can flag a jitney for you. Here," he cried,
as another citizen approached afoot, "Give this fellow a hand.
Someone beat him over the bean with a club. I'm going to get him
a lift."
The newcomer readily undertook the friendly task, and tied
Aubrey's handkerchief round his head, which was bleeding freely.
After a few moments the first Samaritan succeeded in stopping a touring
car which was speeding over from Brooklyn. The driver willingly
agreed to take Aubrey home, and the other two helped him in.
Barring a nasty gash on his scalp he was none the worse.
"A fellow needs a tin hat if he's going to wander round Long
Island at night," said the motorist genially. "Two fellows tried
to hold me up coming in from Rockville Centre the other evening.
Maybe they were the same two that picked on you. Did you get a look
at them?"
"No," said Aubrey. "That piece of sacking might have helped me
trace them, but I forgot it."
"Want to run back for it?"
"Never mind," said Aubrey. "I've got a hunch about this."
"Think you know who it is? Maybe you're in politics, hey?"
The car ran swiftly up the dark channel of the Bowery, into Fourth Avenue,
and turned off at Thirty-Second Street to deposit Aubrey in front
of his boarding house. He thanked his convoy heartily, and refused
further assistance. After several false shots he got his latch key
in the lock, climbed four creaking flights, and stumbled into his room.
Groping his way to the wash-basin, he bathed his throbbing head,
tied a towel round it, and fell into bed.
Chapter VI
Titania Learns the Business
Although he kept late hours, Roger Mifflin was a prompt riser.
It is only the very young who find satisfaction in lying abed
in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade
are sensitively aware of the fluency of life, and have no taste to
squander it among the blankets.
The bookseller's morning routine was brisk and habitual.
He was generally awakened about half-past seven by the jangling
bell that balanced on a coiled spring at the foot of the stairs.
This ringing announced the arrival of Becky, the old scrubwoman
who came each morning to sweep out the shop and clean the floors
for the day's traffic. Roger, in his old dressing gown of
vermilion flannel, would scuffle down to let her in, picking up
the milk bottles and the paper bag of baker's rolls at the same time.
As Becky propped the front door wide, opened window transoms, and set
about buffeting dust and tobacco smoke, Roger would take the milk
and rolls back to the kitchen and give Bock a morning greeting.
Bock would emerge from his literary kennel, and thrust out his
forelegs in a genial obeisance. This was partly politeness,
and partly to straighten out his spine after its all-night curvature.
Then Roger would let him out into the back yard for a run, himself
standing on the kitchen steps to inhale the bright freshness of the
morning air.
This Saturday morning was clear and crisp. The plain backs of
the homes along Whittier Street, irregular in profile as the margins
of a free verse poem, offered Roger an agreeable human panorama.
Thin strands of smoke were rising from chimneys; a belated baker's
wagon was joggling down the alley; in bedroom bay-windows sheets and
pillows were already set to sun and air. Brooklyn, admirable borough
of homes and hearty breakfasts, attacks the morning hours in cheery,
smiling spirit. Bock sniffed and rooted about the small back yard
as though the earth (every cubic inch of which he already knew by rote)
held some new entrancing flavour. Roger watched him with the amused
and tender condescension one always feels toward a happy dog--
perhaps the same mood of tolerant paternalism that Gott is said to have
felt in watching his boisterous Hohenzollerns.
The nipping air began to infiltrate his dressing gown, and Roger
returned to the kitchen, his small, lively face alight with zest.
He opened the draughts in the range, set a kettle on to boil, and went
down to resuscitate the furnace. As he came upstairs for his bath,
Mrs. Mifflin was descending, fresh and hearty in a starchy morning apron.
Roger hummed a tune as he picked up the hairpins on the bedroom floor,
and wondered to himself why women are always supposed to be more tidy
than men.
Titania was awake early. She smiled at the enigmatic portrait
of Samuel Butler, glanced at the row of books over her bed,
and dressed rapidly. She ran downstairs, eager to begin her experience
as a bookseller. The first impression the Haunted Bookshop had made
on her was one of superfluous dinginess, and as Mrs. Mifflin refused
to let her help get breakfast--except set out the salt cellars--
she ran down Gissing Street to a little florist's shop she had
noticed the previous afternoon. Here she spent at least a week's
salary in buying chrysanthemums and a large pot of white heather.
She was distributing these about the shop when Roger found her.
"Bless my soul!" he said. "How are you going to live on your wages
if you do that sort of thing? Pay-day doesn't come until next Friday!"
"Just one blow-out," she said cheerfully. "I thought it would
be fun to brighten the place up a bit. Think how pleased your
floorwalker will be when he comes in!"
"Dear me," said Roger. "I hope you don't really think we have
floorwalkers in the second-hand book business."
After breakfast he set about initiating his new employee
into the routine of the shop. As he moved about, explaining
the arrangement of his shelves, he kept up a running commentary.
"Of course all the miscellaneous information that a bookseller has
to have will only come to you gradually," he said. "Such tags of
bookshop lore as the difference between Philo Gubb and Philip Gibbs,
Mrs. Wilson Woodrow and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and all that sort of thing.
Don't be frightened by all the ads you see for a book called "Bell
and Wing," because no one was ever heard to ask for a copy. That's one
of the reasons why I tell Mr. Gilbert I don't believe in advertising.
Someone may ask you who wrote The Winning of the Best, and you'll
have to know it wasn't Colonel Roosevelt but Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine.
The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don't have to be
a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them.
A literary critic is the kind of fellow who will tell you that
Wordsworth's Happy Warrior is a poem of 85 lines composed entirely
of two sentences, one of 26 lines and one of 59. What does it
matter if Wordsworth wrote sentences almost as long as those of Walt
Whitman or Mr. Will H. Hays, if only he wrote a great poem?
Literary critics are queer birds. There's Professor Phelps of Yale,
for instance. He publishes a book in 1918 and calls it The Advance
of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. To my way of thinking
a book of that title oughtn't to be published until 2018.
Then somebody will come along and ask you for a book of poems
about a typewriter, and by and by you'll learn that what they
want is Stevenson's Underwoods. Yes, it's a complicated life.
Never argue with customers. Just give them the book they
ought to have even if they don't know they want it."
They went outside the front door, and Roger lit his pipe.
In the little area in front of the shop windows stood large empty
boxes supported on trestles. "The first thing I always do----,"
he said.
"The first thing you'll both do is catch your death of cold,"
said Helen over his shoulder. "Titania, you run and get your fur.
Roger, go and find your cap. With your bald head, you ought to
know better!"
When they returned to the front door, Titania's blue eyes were
sparkling above her soft tippet.
"I applaud your taste in furs," said Roger. "That is just the colour
of tobacco smoke." He blew a whiff against it to prove the likeness.
He felt very talkative, as most older men do when a young girl looks
as delightfully listenable as Titania.
"What an adorable little place," said Titania, looking round
at the bookshop's space of private pavement, which was sunk below
the street level. "You could put tables out here and serve tea
in summer time."
"The first thing every morning," continued Roger, "I set
out the ten-cent stuff in these boxes. I take it in at night
and stow it in these bins. When it rains, I shove out an awning,
which is mighty good business. Someone is sure to take shelter,
and spend the time in looking over the books. A really heavy
shower is often worth fifty or sixty cents. Once a week I change
my pavement stock. This week I've got mostly fiction out here.
That's the sort of thing that comes in in unlimited numbers.
A good deal of it's tripe, but it serves its purpose."
"Aren't they rather dirty?" said Titania doubtfully, looking at
some little blue Rollo books, on which the siftings of generations
had accumulated. "Would you mind if I dusted them off a bit?"
"It's almost unheard of in the second-hand trade," said Roger;
"but it might make them look better."
Titania ran inside, borrowed a duster from Helen, and began housecleaning
the grimy boxes, while Roger chatted away in high spirits.
Bock already noticing the new order of things, squatted on the doorstep
with an air of being a party to the conversation. Morning pedestrians
on Gissing Street passed by, wondering who the bookseller's engaging
assistant might be. "I wish _I_ could find a maid like that,"
thought a prosperous Brooklyn housewife on her way to market.
"I must ring her up some day and find out how much she gets."
Roger brought out armfuls of books while Titania dusted.
"One of the reasons I'm awfully glad you've come here to help me,"
he said, "is that I'll be able to get out more. I've been
so tied down by the shop, I haven't had a chance to scout round,
buy up libraries, make bids on collections that are being sold,
and all that sort of thing. My stock is running a bit low.
If you just wait for what comes in, you don't get much of the really
good stuff."
Titania was polishing a copy of The Late Mrs. Null.
"It must be wonderful to have read so many books," she said.
"I'm afraid I'm not a very deep reader, but at any rate Dad has taught
me a respect for good books. He gets so mad because when my friends
come to the house, and he asks them what they've been reading,
the only thing they seem to know about is Dere Mable."
Roger chuckled. "I hope you don't think I'm a mere highbrow,"
he said. "As a customer said to me once, without meaning to
be funny, 'I like both the Iliad and the Argosy.' The only thing
I can't stand is literature that is unfairly and intentionally
flavoured with vanilla. Confectionery soon disgusts the palate,
whether you find it in Marcus Aurelius or Doctor Crane.
There's an odd aspect of the matter that sometimes strikes me:
Doc Crane's remarks are just as true as Lord Bacon's, so how is it
that the Doctor puts me to sleep in a paragraph, while my Lord's essays
keep me awake all night?"
Titania, being unacquainted with these philosophers,
pursued the characteristic feminine course of clinging to
the subject on which she was informed. The undiscerning have
called this habit of mind irrelevant, but wrongly. The feminine
intellect leaps like a grasshopper; the masculine plods as the ant.
"I see there's a new Mable book coming," she said. "It's called
That's Me All Over Mable, and the newsstand clerk at the Octagon
says he expects to sell a thousand copies."
"Well, there's a meaning in that," said Roger. "People have a craving
to be amused, and I'm sure I don't blame 'em. I'm afraid I haven't
read Dere Mable. If it's really amusing, I'm glad they read it.
I suspect it isn't a very great book, because a Philadelphia schoolgirl
has written a reply to it called Dere Bill, which is said to be
as good as the original. Now you can hardly imagine a Philadelphia
flapper writing an effective companion to Bacon's Essays.
But never mind, if the stuff's amusing, it has its place.
The human yearning for innocent pastime is a pathetic thing,
come to think about it. It shows what a desperately grim thing
life has become. One of the most significant things I know is
that breathless, expectant, adoring hush that falls over a theatre
at a Saturday matinee, when the house goes dark and the footlights
set the bottom of the curtain in a glow, and the latecomers tank over
your feet climbing into their seats----"
"Isn't it an adorable moment!" cried Titania.
"Yes, it is," said Roger; "but it makes me sad to see what tosh
is handed out to that eager, expectant audience, most of the time.
There they all are, ready to be thrilled, eager to be worked upon,
deliberately putting themselves into that glorious, rare,
receptive mood when they are clay in the artist's hand--and Lord!
what miserable substitutes for joy and sorrow are put over on them!
Day after day I see people streaming into theatres and movies,
and I know that more than half the time they are on a blind quest,
thinking they are satisfied when in truth they are fed on paltry husks.
And the sad part about it is that if you let yourself think you
are satisfied with husks, you'll have no appetite left for the
real grain."
Titania wondered, a little panic-stricken, whether she had been
permitting herself to be satisfied with husks. She remembered how
greatly she had enjoyed a Dorothy Gish film a few evenings before.
"But," she ventured, "you said people want to be amused.
And if they laugh and look happy, surely they're amused?"
"They only think they are!" cried Mifflin. "They think they're amused
because they don't know what real amusement is! Laughter and prayer
are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.
To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods.
To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit."
Titania thought she was getting in rather deep, but she
had the tenacious logic of every healthy girl. She said:
"But a joke that seems cheap to you doesn't seem cheap to the person
who laughs at it, or he wouldn't laugh."
Her face brightened as a fresh idea flooded her mind:
"The wooden image a savage prays to may seem cheap to you, but it's
the best god he knows, and it's all right for him to pray to it."
"Bully for you," said Roger. "Perfectly true. But I've got away
from the point I had in mind. Humanity is yearning now as it never did
before for truth, for beauty, for the things that comfort and console
and make life seem worth while. I feel this all round me, every day.
We've been through a frightful ordeal, and every decent spirit is
asking itself what we can do to pick up the fragments and remould
the world nearer to our heart's desire. Look here, here's something I
found the other day in John Masefield's preface to one of his plays:
'The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly to be scorned.
A carelessness of life and beauty marks the glutton, the idler,
and the fool in their deadly path across history.' I tell you,
I've done some pretty sober thinking as I've sat here in my bookshop
during the past horrible years. Walt Whitman wrote a little poem
during the Civil War--Year that trembled and reeled beneath me,
said Walt, Must I learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled,
and sullen hymns of defeat?--I've sat here in my shop at night,
and looked round at my shelves, looked at all the brave books
that house the hopes and gentlenesses and dreams of men and women,
and wondered if they were all wrong, discredited, defeated.
Wondered if the world were still merely a jungle of fury.
I think I'd have gone balmy if it weren't for Walt Whitman.
Talk about Mr. Britling--Walt was the man who 'saw it through.'
"The glutton, the idler, and the fool in their deadly path across history.
. . . Aye, a deadly path indeed. The German military men
weren't idlers, but they were gluttons and fools to the nth power.
Look at their deadly path! And look at other deadly paths, too.
Look at our slums, jails, insane asylums. . . .
"I used to wonder what I could do to justify my comfortable existence
here during such a time of horror. What right had I to shirk in a
quiet bookshop when so many men were suffering and dying through
no fault of their own? I tried to get into an ambulance unit,
but I've had no medical training and they said they didn't want
men of my age unless they were experienced doctors."
"I know how you felt," said Titania, with a surprising look
of comprehension. "Don't you suppose that a great many girls,
who couldn't do anything real to help, got tired of wearing neat
little uniforms with Sam Browne belts?"
"Well," said Roger, "it was a bad time. The war contradicted
and denied everything I had ever lived for. Oh, I can't tell
you how I felt about it. I can't even express it to myself.
Sometimes I used to feel as I think that truly noble simpleton
Henry Ford may have felt when he organized his peace voyage--
that I would do anything, however stupid, to stop it all.
In a world where everyone was so wise and cynical and cruel,
it was admirable to find a man so utterly simple and hopeful
as Henry. A boob, they called him. Well, I say bravo for boobs!
I daresay most of the apostles were boobs--or maybe they called
them bolsheviks."
Titania had only the vaguest notion about bolsheviks, but she
had seen a good many newspaper cartoons.
"I guess Judas was a bolshevik," she said innocently.
"Yes, and probably George the Third called Ben Franklin a bolshevik,"
retorted Roger. "The trouble is, truth and falsehood don't come laid
out in black and white--Truth and Huntruth, as the wartime joke had it.
Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth," he cried bitterly.
"Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments.
I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers.
I saw the world clawing itself to shreds in blind rage.
I saw hardly any one brave enough to face the brutalizing absurdity
as it really was, and describe it. I saw the glutton, the idler,
and the fool applauding, while brave and simple men walked in the horrors
of hell. The stay-at-home poets turned it to pretty lyrics of glory
and sacrifice. Perhaps half a dozen of them have told the truth.
Have you read Sassoon? Or Latzko's Men in War, which was so damned
true that the government suppressed it? Humph! Putting Truth
on rations!"
He knocked out his pipe against his heel, and his blue eyes shone
with a kind of desperate earnestness.
"But I tell you, the world is going to have the truth about War.
We're going to put an end to this madness. It's not going to
be easy. Just now, in the intoxication of the German collapse,
we're all rejoicing in our new happiness. I tell you, the real
Peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up all the fibres
of civilization it's a slow job to knit things together again.
You see those children going down the street to school?
Peace lies in their hands. When they are taught in school that war
is the most loathsome scourge humanity is subject to, that it
smirches and fouls every lovely occupation of the mortal spirit,
then there may be some hope for the future. But I'd like to bet
they are having it drilled into them that war is a glorious and
noble sacrifice.
"The people who write poems about the divine frenzy of going
over the top are usually those who dipped their pens a long,
long way from the slimy duckboards of the trenches. It's funny
how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode
in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73.
He said it made him feel more virtuous."
There was a pause, while Roger watched some belated urchins hurrying
toward school.
"I think any man would be a traitor to humanity who didn't pledge
every effort of his waking life to an attempt to make war impossible
in future."
"Surely no one would deny that," said Titania. "But I do think
the war was very glorious as well as very terrible. I've known
lots of men who went over, knowing well what they were to face,
and yet went gladly and humbly in the thought they were going
for a true cause."
"A cause which is so true shouldn't need the sacrifice of millions
of fine lives," said Roger gravely. "Don't imagine I don't see
the dreadful nobility of it. But poor humanity shouldn't be asked
to be noble at such a cost. That's the most pitiful tragedy of it all.
Don't you suppose the Germans thought they too were marching off
for a noble cause when they began it and forced this misery on
the world? They had been educated to believe so, for a generation.
That's the terrible hypnotism of war, the brute mass-impulse,
the pride and national spirit, the instinctive simplicity of men
that makes them worship what is their own above everything else.
I've thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone.
Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me,
as they do all of us. And then I've gone home and sworn
to root this evil instinct out of my soul. God help us--
let's love the world, love humanity--not just our own country!
That's why I'm so keen about the part we're going to play at
the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last!
Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over
there with absolutely no axe to grind. Nothing but a pax
to grind!"
It argued well for Titania's breadth of mind that she was not dismayed
nor alarmed at the poor bookseller's anguished harangue. She surmised
sagely that he was cleansing his bosom of much perilous stuff.
In some mysterious way she had learned the greatest and rarest of
the spirit's gifts--toleration.
"You can't help loving your country," she said.
"Let's go indoors," he answered. "You'll catch cold out here.
I want to show you my alcove of books on the war."
"Of course one can't help loving one's country," he added.
"I love mine so much that I want to see her take the lead
in making a new era possible. She has sacrificed least for war,
she should be ready to sacrifice most for peace. As for me,"
he said, smiling, "I'd be willing to sacrifice the whole
Republican party!"
"I don't see why you call the war an absurdity," said Titania.
"We HAD to beat Germany, or where would civilization have been?"
"We had to beat Germany, yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that we
had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you'll find,
when the Peace Conference gets to work, will be that we shall have
to help Germany onto her feet again so that she can be punished in
an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce
so that she can pay her indemnities--we shall have to police her
cities to prevent revolution from burning her up--and the upshot
of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war
in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing
their enemy back to health. If that isn't an absurdity, what is?
That's what happens when a great nation like Germany goes insane.
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