 5 Aubrey walks partway home and rides the rest of the way. It was a cold, clear night as Mr. Aubrey Gilbert left the haunted bookshop that evening and set out to walk homeward. Not making a very conscious choice, he felt instinctively that it would be agreeable to walk back to Manhattan rather than permit the roaring disillusion of the subway to break in upon his meditations. It is to be feared that Aubrey would have badly flunked any quizzing on the chapters of somebody's luggage which the bookseller had read aloud. His mind was swimming rapidly in the agreeable, unfettered fashion of a stream rippling downhill. As O'Henry puts it in one of his most delightful stories, he was outwardly decent and managed to preserve his aquarium, but inside he was impromptu and full of unexpectedness. To say that he was thinking of Miss Chapman would imply too much power of raciocination and abstract scrutiny on his part. He was not thinking, he was being thought. Down the accustomed channels of his intellect he felt his mind ebbing with the irresistible movement of tides drawn by the blandishing moon, and across the shimmering estuaries of impulse his will, a lost and naked athlete, was painfully attempting to swim, but making much leeway and already almost resigned to being carried out to sea. He stopped a moment at Weintraub's drugstore, on the corner of Gissing Street and Wordsworth Avenue, to buy some cigarettes, unfailing solace of an agitated bosom. It was the usual old-fashioned pharmacy of those parts of Brooklyn. Tall, red, green and blue vases of liquid in the windows threw blotches of color light onto the pavement. On the panes was affixed white china lettering H. Weintraub, Deutsche Apotheker. Inside the customary shelves of labeled jars, glass cases holding cigars, nostrums and toilet knick-knacks, and in one corner an ancient revolving bookcase deposited long ago by the Tabard Inn Library. The shop was empty, but as he opened the door a bell buzzed sharply. In a back chamber he could hear voices. As he waited idly for the druggist to appear, Aubrey cast a tolerant eye over the dusty volumes in the twirling case. There were the usual copies of Howard McGrath's The Man on the Box, A Girl of the Limberlost, and The Houseboat on the Sticks. The divine fire, much grime, leaned against Joe Chappell's heart-throbs. Those familiar with the Tabard Inn bookcases, still to be found in outlying drugshops, know that the stock has not been turned for many a year. Aubrey was the more surprised, on spinning the case round, to find wedged in between two other volumes the empty cover of a book that had been torn loose from the pages to which it belonged. He glanced at the lettering on the back. It ran thus, Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell's letters and speeches. Obeying a sudden impulse, he slipped the book cover into his overcoat pocket. Mr. Weintraub entered the shop, a solid, teutonic person with discolored pouches under his eyes, and a face that was a potent argument for prohibition. His manner, however, was that of one anxious to please. Aubrey indicated the brand of cigarettes he wanted. Having himself coined the advertising catch word for them. They're mild, but they satisfy. He felt a certain loyal compulsion always to smoke this kind. The drugist held out the packet, and Aubrey noticed that his fingers were stained a deep saffron color. I see you're a cigarette smoker too," said Aubrey pleasantly, as he opened the packet and lit one of the paper tubes at a little alcohol flame burning in a globe of blue glass on the counter. Me? I never smoke," said Mr. Weintraub, with a smile which somehow did not seem to fit his surly face. I must have steady nerves in my profession. Apothecaries who smoke make up bad prescriptions. Well, how do you get your hands stained that way? Mr. Weintraub removed his hands from the counter. Chemicals, he grunted, prescriptions, all that sort of thing. Well, said Aubrey, smoking's a bad habit. I guess I do too much of it. He could not resist the impression that someone was listening to their talk. The doorway at the back of the shop was veiled by a porcillaire of beads, and thin bamboo sections threaded on strings. He heard them clicking as though they had been momentarily pulled aside. Turning, just as he opened the door to leave, he noticed the bamboo curtain swaying. Well, good night, he said, and stepped out onto the street. As he walked down Wordsworth Avenue under the thunder of the L, past lighted lunchrooms, oyster saloons, and pawn-chops, Miss Chapman resumed her sway, with the delightful velocity of thought his mind whirled in a narrowing spiral round the experience of the evening, the small book-cram sitting-room of the Mifflins, the sparkling fire, the lively chirrup of the bookseller reading aloud, and there in the old easy chair whose horse-hair stuffing was bulging out, that blue-eyed vision of careless girlhood. Happily he had been so seated that he could study her without seeming to do so. The line of her ankle, where the firelight danced upon it, put Cole's Phillips to shame, he averred. Extraordinary how these creatures are made to torment us with their intolerable comeliness. Against the background of dusky bindings her head shone with a soft haze of gold. Her face, that had an air of naive and provoking independence, made him angry with its unnecessary surplus of enchantment. An unaccountable gust of rage drove him rapidly along the frozen street. Damn it, he cried, what right has any girl to be as pretty as that? Why, why I'd like to beat her, he muttered, amazed at himself. What the devil right has a girl got to look so innocently adorable? It would be unseemly to follow poor Arbery in his vacillations of rage and worship, as he thrashed along Wordsworth Avenue, hearing and seeing no more than was necessary for the preservation of his life at street crossings. Half smoked, cigarette stubs glowed in his wake. His burly bosom echoed with incoherent oratory. In the darker stretches a Fulton Street that led up to the Brooklyn Bridge, he fiercely exclaimed, By God, it's not such a bad world! As he ascended the slope of that vast Arry span, a black midget against a froth of stars, he was gravely planning such vehemence of exploit in the advertising profession, as would make it seem less absurd to approach the present of the Dainty Bits Corporation, with a question for which no progenitor of loveliness is ever quite prepared. In the exact center of the bridge something diluted his mood. He halted, leaning against the railing, to consider the splendor of the scene. The hour was late, moving on toward midnight, but in the tall black precipices of Manhattan scattered lights gleamed. In an odd irregular pattern, like the sparse punctures upon the raffle board, take a chance on a milk-fed turkey, the East Indian elevator boy presents to apartment-house tenants about Halloween. A fume of golden light eddied over uptown merriment. He could see the ruby beacon on the metropolitan tower signaled three-quarters. Underneath the arry decking of the bridge a tug went puffing by, her port and starboard lamps trailing red and green threads over the tideway. Some great argacy of the Staten Island fleet swept serenely down to St. George, past liberty in her soft robe of light, carrying theater commuters, dazed with weariness and blinking at the raw fury of the electric bulbs. Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars. Blue sparks crackled stickily along the trolley-wires as the cars groaned over the bridge. Aubrey surveyed all this splendid scene without exact observation. He was of a philosophic turn, and was attempting to console his discomforture in the overwhelming luster of Miss Titania by the thought that she was, after all, the creature and offspring of the science he worshipped, that of advertising. Was not the fragrance of her presence, the soft compulsion of her gaze, even the delicious frill of muslin at her wrist, to be set down to the credit of his chosen art, had he not, pondering obscurely upon attention-compelling copy, and layout and typeface in a corner of the gray matter office, contributed to the triumphant prosperity and grace of this unconscious beneficiary? Indeed she seemed to him, fiercely tormenting himself with her loveliness, a symbol of the mysterious and subtle power of publicity. It was advertising that had done this, that had enabled Mr. Tapman, a shy and droll little person, to surround this girl with all the fructifying glories of civilization, to foster and cherish her until she had shone upon the earth like a morning star. Advertising had clothed her, advertising had fed her, schooled, roofed, and sheltered her. In a sense she was the crowning advertisement of her father's career, and her innocent perfection taunted him, just as much as the bright sky sign he knew was flashing the words, Chapman Prunes, over the teeming pavements of Times Square. He groaned to think that he himself, by his conscientious labors, had helped to put this girl in such a position that he could barely dare approach her. 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. Out of 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 gotten 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. Do you want me to go and ring up an ambulance? 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 in thirty-second. Maybe I can flag a jidney for you. Here, he cried, as another citizen approached a foot. Give this fellow a hand. Somebody 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 around Long Island at night, said the motorist, genuinely. Two fellows tried to hold me up, coming in from Rockville Center 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 latchkey in the lock, climbed four creaking flights, and stumbled into his room. Groping his way to the wash-basin, he bathed his strobing head, tied a towel round it, and fell into bed. End of Chapter 5 Chapter 6 of the Haunted Bookshop This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Haunted Bookshop By Christopher Morley Chapter 6 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 a bed 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 said about buffeting dust and tobacco smoke, Roger would take the milk and rolls back to the kitchen and give Bach a morning greeting. Bach 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 backyard 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 jogging down the alley. In bedroom bay windows, sheets and pillows were already set to sun and air. Brooklyn, admirable borough of homes and hearty breakfast, attacked the morning hours in cheery, smiling spirit. Bach sniffed and rooted about the small backyard, as though the earth, every cubic inch of which he already knew by road, held some new and trancing flavor. Roger watched him with the amused and tender condescension one always feels towards 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 drafts in the range, set up a kettle 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-sellers, she ran down Gissing Street to a little florist 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? Payday doesn't come until next Friday. Just one blowout, she said cheerfully. I thought it would be fun to brighten the place up a bit. Think how pleased your floor-walker will be when he comes in. Dear me, said Roger, I hope you don't really think we have floor-walkers in the second-hand book business. After breakfast he said 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 bookshops lure as the difference between Philo Gubb and Philip Gibbs, Mrs. Whistlin 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 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. Hayes 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 20th 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 tasted furs, said Roger. This is just the color 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 summertime. The first thing every morning, continued Roger, I set out the ten-cent stuff on 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 50 or 60 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 its 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 secondhand trade, said Roger, but it might make them look better. Titania ran inside, borrowed a duster from Helen, and began house-cleaning the grimy boxes, while Roger chatted away in high spirits. Bach already noticing the new order of things, squatted on the doorstep with an air of being a party to the conversation, mourning 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 Dear Mabel. Roger chuckled, I hope you don't mind, I'm a mirror eyebrow, 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 unintentionally flavored with vanilla. Confectionary soon discussed the palette, whether you find it in Marcus Aurelius or Dr. 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 Mabel book coming, she said. It's called That's Me, All Over Mabel. And the new stand clerk at the Otigan 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 them. I'm afraid I haven't read Dear Mabel. 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 Dear 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 theater at a Saturday matinee when the house goes dark and the footlights set the bottom of the curtains in a glow and the latecomers tank over your feet climbing into their seats. Isn't that 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, expended 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 the theaters 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 worthwhile. 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 remold the world nearer to our heart's desire. Look here, here's something I found the other day in John Macefield's preface to one of his plays. The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not likely 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 the 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 housed the hopes and gentleness and dreams of men and women and wondered if they were all wrong, discredited and defeated, wondered if the world were still merely a jungle of fury. I think I'd have gone balmy if it were not 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. I, a deadly path indeed. The German military men weren't idlers, but they were glutton's 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 Brown 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 dare say most of the apostles were boobs or maybe they called themselves 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 III called Brent Franklin a Bolshevik, retorted Roger. The trouble is, truth and falsehood don't come laid out in black and white. Truth and hunt truth, 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 anyone 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 Latsko's Men in War, which was so damn true that the government suppressed it? Putting truth on rations. He knocked out his pipe against his heel and his blue eyes shown 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 are all rejoicing in our new happiness. I tell you, the real peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up the fibers 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 smurches 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 dip their pens along 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 813, but he used to call it the 773. He said it made him feel more virtuous. There was a pause, while Roger watched some belated urchins hurrying towards 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 breath of mine 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 man 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. Well, we're up against some terribly complicated problems. My only consolation is that I think the bookseller can play as useful a part at any man in rebuilding the world's sanity. When I was fretting over what I could do to help things along, I came across two lines in my favorite poet that encourages me. Good old George Herbert says, a grain of glory mixed with humbleness cures both a fever and less arduousness. Certainly running the secondhand bookshop is a pretty humble calling, but I've mixed a grain of glory with it in my own imagination at any rate. You see, books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes and strivings, and all their immortal parts. It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worthwhile life is. I never realized the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man's mind until I read Milton's Areopagitica to read that great outburst of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton. Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worthwhile cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile mines, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man? The bookseller is the real Mr. Valiant for truth. Here is my war, Alcove. He went on, I've stacked up here most of the really good books the war has brought out. If humanity has sense enough to take these books too hard, it will never get itself into this mess again. Printers Inc. has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Inc. is handicapped in a way because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second while it may take 20 years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. There's Hardy's Dynas, for example. When you read that book, you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated. Oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one's brain. It hurts. There's enough TNT in that book to blast war from the face of the globe, but there's a slow fuse attached to it. It hasn't really exploded yet. Maybe it won't for another 50 years. In regard to the war, think what books have accomplished. What was the first thing all the government started to do? Publish books, blue books, yellow books, white books, red books, everything but black books, which would have been appropriate in Berlin. They knew that guns and troops were helpless unless they could get the books on their side too. Books did as much as anything else to bring Americans into the war. Some German books helped to wipe the Kaiser off his throne. I accuse, and Dr. Merlin's magnificent outburst, the Vandal of Europe, and Liknowsky's private memorandum that shook Germany to her foundations, simply because he told the truth. Here's that book, Men in War, written, I believe, by a Hungarian officer with its noble dedication to friend and foe. Here are some of the French books, books in which the clear, passionate intellect of that race, with its savage irony, burns like a flame. Romain Roland's Au Deuces de la Mêlée, written in exile in Switzerland, Barbouce's Terrible Le Fue, du Hamil's bitter civilization. Borgé's strangely fascinating novel, The Meaning of Death, and the noble books that have come out of England, A Student in Arms, The Tree of Heaven, Why Men Fight, by Bertrand Russell. I'm hoping he'll write one on why men are imprisoned. You know, he was locked up for his sentiments. And here's one of the most moving of all, the letters of Arthur Heath, a gentle, sensitive young Oxford tutor who was killed on the Western front. You ought to read that book. It shows the entire lack of hatred on the part of the English. Heath and his friends, the night before they enlisted, sat up singing the German music they had loved as a kind of farewell to the old, friendly, joyous life. Yes, that's the kind of thing war does, wipes out spirits like Arthur Heath. Please read it. Then you'll have to read Philip Gibbs and Loes Dickinson and all the young poets. Of course you've read wells already. Everybody has. How about the Americans, said Titania. Haven't they written anything about the war that's worthwhile? Here's one that I found a lot of meat in, straked with philosophical gristle, said Roger, relighting his pipe. He pulled out a copy of Professor Latimer's Progress. There was one passage that I remember barking. Let's see now, what was it? Yes, here. It is true that if you make a poll of newspaper editors, you might find a great many who think that war is evil. But if you were to take a census among pastors of fashionable metropolitan churches, that's a bullseye hit. The church has done for itself with most thinking men. There's another good passage in Professor Latimer, where he points out the philosophical value of dishwashing. Some of Latimer's talk is so much in common with my ideas that I've been rather hoping he'd drop in here someday. I'd like to meet him. As for American poets, get wise to Edwin Robinson. There is no knowing how long the bookseller's monologue might have continued. But at this moment, Helen appeared from the kitchen. Good gracious, Roger, she exclaimed. I've heard your voice piping away for I don't know how long. What are you doing, giving the poor child a Chateauqua lecture? You must want to frighten her out of the book business. Roger looked a little sheepish. My dear, he said, I was only laying down a few of the principles underlying the art of bookselling. It was very interesting. Honestly, it was, said Titania brightly. Mrs. Mifflin in a blue checked apron and with plump arms flowery to the elbow gave her a wink, or as near a wink as a woman ever achieves, asked the man who owns one. Whenever Mr. Mifflin feels very low in his mind about the business, she said, he falls back on those highly idealized sentiments. He knows that next to being a person, he's gotten to the worst line there is, and he tries bravely to conceal it from himself. I think it's too bad to give me away before Ms. Titania, said Roger, smiling. So Titania saw this was merely a family joke. Really, truly, she protested, I'm having a lovely time. I've been learning all about Professor Lattermer, who wrote the Handel of Europe and all sorts of things. I've been afraid every minute that some customer would come in and interrupt us. No fear of that, said Helen. They're scarce in the early morning. She went back up to her kitchen. Well, Ms. Titania, resumed Roger. You see what I'm driving at. I want to give people an entirely new idea about bookshops. The grain of glory that I hope will cure both my fever and my lethargicness is my conception of the bookstore as a powerhouse, a radiating place for truth and beauty. I insist, books are not absolutely dead things. They are as lively as those fabulous dragon's teeth. And being sewn up and down may chance to spring up armed men. How about Bernhardie? Some of my corncob friends tell me books are just merchandise. Pasha, I haven't read much of Bernard Shaw, said Titania. Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out? They follow you like the hound in Frances Thompson's poem. They know their quarry. Look at that book, The Education of Henry Adams. Just watch the way it's hounding out thinking people this winter. And the Four Horsemen. You can see it racing in the veins of the reading people. It's one of the uncannyest things I know to watch a real book on its career. It follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and makes you read it. There's a queer old book that's been chasing me for years. The Life and Opinions of John Bunkle Esquire, it's called. I've tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It'll get me someday and I'll be compelled to read it. 10,000 a year trailed me the same way until I surrendered. Words can't describe the cunning of some books. You'll think you've shaken them off your trail and then one day some innocent looking customer will pop in and begin to talk. And you'll know he's an unconscious agent of book destiny. There's an old sea captain who drops in here now and then. He's simply the novels of Captain Marriott put into flesh. He has me under a kind of spell. I know I shall have to read Peter Simple before I die just because the old fellow loves it so. That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop, haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor, uneasy spirits. They walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book and that is to read it. I know what you mean, said Titania. I haven't read much Bernard Shaw, but I feel I shall have to. He meets me at every turn, bullying me. And I know lots of people who are simply terrorized by H.G. Wells. Every time one of his books comes out, and that's pretty often, they're in a perfect panic until they've read it. Roger chuckled. Some have even been stampeded into subscribing to the New Republic for that very purpose. But speaking of the Haunted Bookshop, what's your special interest in that Oliver Cromwell book? Oh, I'm glad you mentioned it, said Roger. I must put it back in its place on the shelf. He ran back to the den to get it. And just then the bell clanged at the door. A customer came in and the one-sided gossip was over for the time being. End of chapter six. Chapter seven of the Haunted Bookshop. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley. Chapter seven, Aubrey Takes Lodgings. I am sensible that Mr. Aubrey Gilbert is by no means ideal as the leading juvenile of our peace. The Times still demands some explanation why the leading juvenile wears no gold chevrons on his left sleeve. As a matter of fact, our young servant of the Gray Matter Agency had been declined by a recruiting station and a draft board on account of flat feet. Although I must protest that their flatness detracts not at all from his outward bearing nor from his physical capacity in the ordinary concerns of amiable youth. When the army turned him down flat, as he put it, he had entered the service of the Committee on Public Information and had carried on mysterious activities on their behalf for over a year, up to the time when the armistice was signed by the United Press. Owing to the small error of judgment on his part, now completely forgotten, but due to the regrettable delay of the German envoys to synchronize with over exuberant press correspondence, the last three days of the war had been carried on without his active assistance. After the natural recuperation necessary on the 12th of November, he had been reabsorbed by the Gray Matter Advertising Agency, with whom he had been connected for several years and where his sound and vivacious qualities were highly esteemed. It was in the course of drumming up post-war business that he had swung so far out of his ordinary orbit as to call on Roger Mifflin. Perhaps these explanations should have been made earlier. At any rate, Aubrey woke that Saturday morning about the time Titania began to dust the payment boxes in no very world-conquering humor, as it was a half-holiday he felt no compunction in staying away from the office. The landlady, a motherly soul, sent him up some coffee and scrambled eggs and insisted on having a doctor in to look at his damage. Several stitches were taken, after which he had a nap. He woke up at noon, feeling better, though his head still ached abominably. Putting on a dressing gown, he sat down in his modest chamber, which was furnished chiefly with a pipe rack, ashtrays, and a set of ohenry, and picked up one of his favorite volumes for a bit of solace. We have hinted that Mr. Gilbert was not what is called literary. His reading was mostly of the newsstand sort and printer's ink, that naive journal of the publicity professions. His favorite diversion was luncheon at the advertising club, where he would pour fascinated over displays of advertising booklets, posters, and pamphlets, with such titles as Tell Your Story in Bold Face. He was accustomed to remark that the fellow who writes the Packard ads has Ralph Waldo Emerson skinned three ways from the Jack. Yet much must be forgiven this young man for his love of ohenry. He knew what many happy souls have found, that ohenry is one of those rare and gifted tellers of tales who can be read at all times. No matter how weary, how depressed, how shaken and morale, one can always find enjoyment in that master romancer of the Caberabian Knights. Don't talk to me of Dickens' Christmas stories, Aubrey said to himself, recalling his adventure in Brooklyn, Albedo Henry's Gift of the Magi beats anything Dick ever laid pen to. What a shame he died without finishing that Christmas story in Rolling Stones. I wish some boss writer like Irvin Cobber and Neferber would take a hand at finishing it. If I were an editor, I'd hire somebody to wind up that yarn. It's a crime to have a good story like that lying around half-written. He was sitting in a soft wreath of cigarette smoke when his landlady came in with the morning paper. Thought you might like to see the times, Mr. Gilbert, she said, I knew you'd been too sick to go out and buy one. I see the president's going to sail on Wednesday. Aubrey threaded his way through the news with the practice eye of one who knows what interests him. Then by force of habit, he carefully scanned the advertising pages. A notice in the Help Wanted columns leaped out at him. Wanted for temporary employment at Hotel Octagon, three chefs, five experienced cooks, 20 waiters. Apply chef's office 11 p.m. Tuesday. Hum, he thought. I suppose to take the place of those fellows who are going to sail on the George Washington to cook for Mr. Wilson. That's a grand ad for the octagon, having their kitchen staff chosen for the president's trip. Gee, I wonder why they don't play that up in some real space. Maybe I can play some copy for them along that line. An idea suddenly occurred to him and he went over to the chair where he had thrown his overcoat the night before. From the pocket, he took out the cover of Carlisle's Cromwell and looked at it carefully. I wonder what the jinx is on this book, he thought. It's a queer thing the way that fellow tailed me last night, then my finding this in the drugstore and getting that crack on the bean. I wonder if that neighborhood is a safe place for a girl to work in. He paced up and down the room, forgetting the pain in his head. Maybe I ought to tip the police off about this business, he thought. It looks wrong to me, but I have a hankering to work the thing out on my own. I'd have a wonderful stand-in with old man Chapman if I saved that girl from anything. I've heard of gangs of kidnappers. No, I don't like the looks of things a little bit. I think that bookseller is half-cracked anyway. He doesn't believe in advertising. The idea of Chapman trusting his daughter in a place like that. The thought of playing knight errant to something more personal and romantic than an advertising account was irresistible. I'll slip over to Brooklyn as soon as it gets dark this evening, he said to himself. I ought to be able to get a room somewhere along that street where I can watch that bookshop without being seen and find out what's haunting it. I've got that old 22-pop gun of mine that I used to use up at camp. I'll take it along. I'd like to know more about Weintraub's drugstore too. I didn't fancy the map of Hare Weintraub not at all. To tell the truth, I had no idea old man Carlisle would get mixed up in anything as interesting as this. He found a romantic exhilaration in packing a handbag, pajamas, hairbrushes, toothbrush, toothpaste. What an ad it would be for the Chinese paste people, he thought. If they knew, I was taking a tube of their stuff on this adventure. His 22 revolver, a small green box of cartridges of the size commonly used for squirrel shooting, a volume of O'Henry, a safety razor and adjuncts, a pad of writing paper, at least six nationally advertised articles he said to himself, enumerating his kit. He locked his bag, dressed, and went downstairs for lunch. After lunch, he lay down for a rest as his head was still very painful, but he was not able to sleep. The thought of Titania Chapman's blue eyes and gallant little figure came between him and Slumber. He could not shake off the conviction that some peril was hanging over her. Again and again he looked at his watch, rebuking the lagging dusk. At half-past four he set off for the subway. Halfway down 33rd Street, a thought struck him. He returned to his room, got out a pair of opera glasses from his trunk, and put them in his bag. It was a blue twilight when he reached Gissing Street. The block between Wordsworth Avenue and Hazlett Street is peculiar in that on one side, the side where the haunted bookshop stands, the old brownstone dwellings have been mostly replaced by small shops of a bright, lively character. At the Wordsworth Avenue corner, where the L swings round in a lofty, roaring curve, stands Wintrop's drugstore. Below it, on the western side, a succession of shining windows beacon through the evening. Delicatessen shops with their appetizing medley of cooked and pickled meats, dried fruits, cheeses, and bright-colored jars of preserves. Small moudise with generously contoured wax bus of coffeered ladies. Lunchrooms with the day's menu typed and pasted on the outer pane. A French rotisserie where chickens turn hissing on the spits before a tall oven of rosy coals, florist, tobacconists, fruit dealers, and a Greek candy shop with a long soda fountain, shining with onyx marble and colored glass lamps and nickel tanks of hot chocolate. A stationery shop now stuffed for the holiday trade with Christmas cards, toys, calendars, and those queer little, suede-bound volumes of Kipling, service, Oscar Wilde, and Omar Kayam that appear every year toward Christmas time. Such modest and cheerful merchandising makes the western pavement of Gissing Street a jolly place when the lights are lit. All the shops were decorated for the Christmas trade. The Christmas issues of the magazines were just out and brightened the newsstands with their glowing covers. This section of Brooklyn has a tone and atmosphere, peculiarly French in some parts. One can quite imagine oneself in some smaller Parisian boulevard frequented by the petite bourgeois. Midway in this engaging and animated block stands the haunted bookshop. Aubrey could see its windows lit and the shelled masses of books within. He felt a severe temptation to enter, but a certain bashfulness added itself to his desire to act in secret. There was a privy exhilaration in his plan of putting the bookshop under an unsuspected surveillance, and he had the emotion of one walking on the frontiers of adventure. So he kept on the opposite side of the street, which still maintains an unbroken row of quiet brown fronts, save for the movie theater at the upper corner opposite wine trubs. Some of the basements on this side are occupied now by small tailors, laundries, and lace curtain cleaners. Lace curtains are still a fetish in Brooklyn, but most of the houses are still merely dwellings. Carrying his bag, Aubrey passed the bright halo of the movie theater. Posters announcing the return of Tarzan showed a kind of third chapter of Genesis scene with an eve in a sports suit. Added attraction, Mr. and Mrs. Sidney drew, he read. A little way down the block, he saw a sign vacancies in a parlor window. The house was nearly opposite the bookshop and he had once mounted the tall steps to the front door and rang. A fawn-tinted colored girl of the kind generally called Addie arrived presently. Can I get a room here? he asked. I don't know, you better see Miss Schiller, she said without rancor. Adopting the customary compromise of untrained domestics, she did not invite him inside, but departed, leaving the door open to show that there was no ill will. Aubrey stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. In an immense mirror, the pale cheese-colored flutter of a gas jet was remotely reflected. He noticed the lancere engraving hung against wallpaper designed in a facsimile of large rectangles of gray stone and the usual telephone memorandum for the usual Mrs. J. F. Smith, who abides in all lodging houses, tucked into the frame of the mirror. Will Mrs. Smith please call Stockton 6771, it said. A carpeted stare with a fine old mahogany balustrade rose into the dimness. Aubrey, who was thoroughly familiar with lodgings, knew instinctively that the fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps would be creakers. A soft musk sweetened the warm, torpored air. He divined that someone was toasting marshmallows over a gas jet. He knew perfectly well that somewhere in the house would be a placard over a bathtub with a legend. Please leave this tub as you would wish to find it. Roger Mifflin would have said, after studying the hall, that someone in the house was sure to be reading the poems of Rabbi Tagore, but Aubrey was not so caustic. Mrs. Schiller came up the basement stairs, followed by a small pug dog. She was warm and stout, with a tendency to burst just under the armpits. She was friendly. The pug made merry over Aubrey's ankles. Stop it, treasure! said Mrs. Schiller. Can I get a room here? asked Aubrey, with great politeness. Third-floor front's the only thing I've got, she said. You don't smoke in bed, do you? The last man I had burned holes in three of my sheets. Aubrey reassured her. I don't give meals. That's all right! said Aubrey, suits me. Five dollars a week, she said. May I see it? Mrs. Schiller brightened the gas and led the way upstairs. Treasures skipped up the treads beside her. The sight of the six feet ascending together amused Aubrey. The fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps creaked, as he had guessed they would. On the landing of the second story, a transom gushed orange light. Mrs. Schiller was secretly pleased at not having to augment the gas on that landing. Under the transom and behind a door, Aubrey could hear someone having a bath, with a great sloshing of water. He wondered irreverently whether it was Mrs. J. F. Smith. At any rate, he felt sure, it was some experienced habituate of lodgings, who knew that about five-thirty in the afternoon is the best time for a bath, before cooking supper and the homecoming ablutions of other tenants have exhausted the hot water boiler. They climbed one more flight. The room was small, occupying half the third-floor frontage. A large window opened onto the street, giving a plain view of the bookshop and the other houses across the way. A wash-stand stood modestly inside a large cupboard. Over the manto was the familiar picture, usually, however, reserved for the fourth floor back, of a young lady having her shoes shined by a rivaled small boy. Aubrey was delighted. "'This is fine,' he said, "'here's a week in advance.'" Mrs. Schiller was almost disconcerted by the rapidity of the transaction. She preferred to solemnize the reception of a new lodger by a little more talk, remarks about the weather, the difficulty of getting help, the young women-guests who empty tea-leaves down wash-basin pipes, and so on. All this sort of gossip, apparently aimless, has a very real purpose. It enables the defenseless landlady to size up the stranger who comes to pray upon her. She had hardly had a good look at this gentleman, nor even knew his name, and here he had paid a week's rent and was already installed. He defined the cause of her hesitation, and gave her his business card. "'All right, Mr. Gilbert,' she said, "'I'll send up the girl with some clean towels and a latch-key.'" Aubrey sat down in a rocking chair by the window, tucked the Muslim curtain to one side, and looked out upon the bright channel of Gissing Street. He was full of the exhilaration that springs from any change of abode, but his romantic satisfaction in being so close to the adorable Titania was somewhat marred by a sense of absurdity, which is feared by young men more than wounds and death. He could see the lighted windows of the haunted bookshop quite plainly, but he could not think of any adequate excuse for going over there. And already he realized that to be near Miss Chapman was not at all the consolation he had expected it would be. He had a powerful desire to see her. He turned off the gas, lit his pipe, opened the window, and focused the opera-glasses on the door of the bookshop. It brought the place tantalizingly near. He could see the table at the front of the shop, Roger's bulletin board under the electric light, and one or two nondescript customers gleaning along the shelves. Then something bounded violently under the third button of his shirt. There she was, in the bright, prismatic little circle of the lenses he could see Titania, heavenly creature in her white venect blouse and brown skirt. There she was, looking at a book. He saw her put out one arm and caught the twinkle of her wristwatch. In the startling familiarity of the magnifying glass he could see her bright, unconscious face, the merry profile of her cheek and chin. The idea of that girl working in a second-hand bookstore, he exclaimed. It's positive sacrilege. Old man Chapman must be crazy. He took out his pajamas and threw them on the bed, put his toothbrush and razor on the wash basin, laid hairbrushes and o'henry on the bureau. Feeling rather serio-comic, he loaded his small revolver and hipped it. It was six o'clock and he wound his watch. He was a little uncertain what to do, whether to keep a vigil at the window with the opera glasses or go down in the street where he could watch the bookshop more nearly. In the excitement of the adventure he had forgotten all about the cut on his scalp and felt quite chipper. In leaving Madison Avenue he had attempted to excuse the preposterousness of his excursion by thinking that a quiet weekend in Brooklyn would give him an opportunity to jot down some tentative ideas for Dainty Bitt's advertising copy which he planned to submit to his chief on Monday. But now that he was here he felt the impossibility of attacking any such humdrum task. How could he sit down in cold blood to devise any attention-compelling layouts for Dainty Bitt's tapioca and Chapman's cherished Saratoga chips when the daintyest bit of all was only a few yards away? For the first time was made plain to him the amazing power of young women to interfere with the legitimate commerce of the world. He did get so far as to take out his pad of writing paper and jot down Chapman's cherished chips. These delicate wafers crisped by a secret process cherished in their unique tang and flavor all the life-giving nutriment that has made the potato the king of vegetables. But the face of Miss Titania kept coming between his hand and brain. Of what avail to flood the world with Chapman's chips if the girl herself should come to any harm? Was this the face that launched a thousand chips? he murmured, and for an instant wished he had brought the Oxford Book of English verse instead of O'Henry. A tap sounded at his door and Mrs. Shiller appeared. Telephone for you, Mr. Gilbert, she said. For me, said Aubrey in amazement, how could it be for him, he thought. For no one knew he was there. The party on the wire asked to speak to the gentleman who arrived about half an hour ago, and I guess you must be the one he means. Did he say who he is? asked Aubrey. No, sir. For a moment Aubrey thought of refusing to answer the call. Then it occurred to him that this would arouse Mrs. Shiller's suspicions. He ran down to the telephone, which stood under the stairs in the front hall. Hello? he said. Is this the new guest? Said a voice? A deep, gargling kind of voice. Yes, said Aubrey. Is this the gentleman that arrived half an hour ago with the handbag? Yes, who are you? I'm a friend, said the voice. I wish you well. How do you do, friend, and well-wisher? said Aubrey, genially. I just want to warn you that Gissing Street is not healthy for you, said the voice. Is that so? said Aubrey sharply. Who are you? I'm a friend, buzzed the receiver. There was a harsh bass note in the voice that made the diaphragm at Aubrey's ear vibrate tinnily. Aubrey grew angry. Well-here, friend, he said, if you're the well-wisher I met on the bridge last night, watch your step. I've got your number. There was a pause. Then the other repeated ponderously, I am a friend. Gissing Street is not healthy for you. There was a click, and he had rung off. Aubrey was a good deal perplexed. He returned to his room, and sat in the dark by the window, smoking a pipe and thinking, with his eyes on the bookshop. There was no longer any doubt in his mind that something sinister was afoot. He reviewed in memory the events of the past few days. It was on Monday that a book-loving friend had first told him of the existence of the shop on Gissing Street. On Tuesday evening he had gone round to visit the place, and had stayed to supper with Mr. Mifflin. On Wednesday and Thursday he had been busy at the office, and the idea of an intensive dainty-bit campaign in Brooklyn had occurred to him. On Friday he had dined with Mr. Chapman, and had run into a curious string of coincidences. He tabulated them. 1. The Lost Add in the Times on Friday morning. 2. The Chef and the Elevator carrying the book that was supposed to be lost. He being the same man Aubrey had seen in the bookshop on Tuesday evening. 3. Seeing the Chef again on Gissing Street. 4. The Return of the Book to the Bookshop. 5. Mifflin had said that the book had been stolen from him. Then why should it be either advertised or returned? 6. The Rebinding of the Book. 7. Finding the original cover of the book in Wine Trubs Drugstore. 8. The Affair on the Bridge. 9. The Telephone Message from A Friend. A friend with an obviously teutonic voice. He remembered the face of anger and fear displayed by the Octokon Chef when he had spoken to him in the Elevator. Until this oddly menacing telephone message he could have explained the attack on the bridge as merely a haphazard footpad enterprise. But now he was forced to conclude that it was in some way connected with his visits to the bookshop. He felt too that in some unknown way Wine Trubs Drugstore had something to do with it. Would he have been attacked if he had not taken the book cover from the drugstore? He got the cover out of his bag and looked at it again. It was a plain blue cloth with the title stamped in gold on the back and at the bottom the lettering London Chapman and Hall. From the width of the back strap it was evident that the book had been a fat one. Inside the front cover the figure sixty was written in red pencil. As he took the B. Roger Mifflin's price mark. Inside the back cover he found the following notations. Volume 3, 166, 174, 210, 329, 349, dot dot dot, 329, FF, CF, WW. These references were written in black ink in a small neat hand. Below them in quite a different script and in pale violet ink was written 153, 3, 1, 2. I suppose these are page numbers, Aubrey thought. I think I'd better have a look at that book. He put the cover in his pocket and went out for a bite of supper. It's a puzzle with three sides to it, he thought, as he descended the crepitant stairs. The bookshop, the octagon, and Wine Trubs. But that book seems to be the clue to the whole business. End of Chapter 7 A few doors from the bookshop was a small lunchroom named after the great city of Milwaukee. One of those pleasant refectories where the diner buys his food at the counter and eats it sitting in a flat-arm chair. Aubrey got a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, beef stew, and bran muffins, and took them to an empty seat by the window. He ate with one eye on the street. From his place in the corner he could command the strip of payment in front of Mifflin's shop. Halfway through the stew he saw Roger come out onto the pavement and begin to remove the books from the boxes. After finishing his supper he lit one of his mild but they satisfy cigarettes, and sat in the comfortable warmth of a nearby radiator. A large black cat lay sprawled on the next chair. Up at the service counter there was a pleasant clank of stout crockery as occasional customers came in and ordered their victuals. Aubrey began to feel a relaxation swim through his veins. Gissing Street was very bright and orderly in its Saturday evening bustle. Certainly it was grotesque to imagine melodrama hanging about a secondhand bookshop in Brooklyn. The revolver felt absurdly lumpy and uncomfortable in his hip pocket. What a different aspect a little hot supper gives to affairs. The most resolute idealist or assassin had better write his poems or plan his atrocities before the evening meal. After the narcosis of that repasse the spirit falls into a softer mood, eager only to be amused. Even Milton would hardly have had the inhuman fortitude to sit down to the manuscript of Paradise Lost right after supper. Aubrey began to wonder if his unpleasant suspicions had not been overdrawn. He thought how delightful it would be to stop in at the bookshop and ask Titania to go to the movies with him. Curious magic of thought. The idea was still sparkling in his mind when he saw Titania and Mrs. Mifflin emerge from the bookshop and pass briskly in front of the lunchroom. They were talking and laughing merrily. Titania's face shining with young vitality seemed to him more attention compelling than any ten point castlin type arrangement he had ever seen. He admired the layout of her face from the standpoint of his cherished technique. Just enough white space, he thought, to set off her eyes as the center of interest. Her features aren't this modern boldface stuff, set solid, he said to himself, thinking typographically, they're rather French old-style italic, slightly leaded, set on twenty-two point body, I guess. Old man Chapman's a pretty good type founder. You have to hand it to him. He smiled at this conceit, seized hat and coat, and dashed out of the lunchroom. Mrs. Mifflin and Titania had halted a few yards of the street, and were looking at some pert little bonnets in a window. Aubrey hurried across the street, ran up to the next corner, recrossed, and walked down the eastern pavement. In this way he would meet them as though he were coming from the subway. He felt rather more excited than King Albert re-entering Brussels. He saw them coming, chattering together in the delightful fashion of women out on a spree. Helen seemed much younger in the company of her companion. A lining of pussy with a taffeta and an embroidered slip-on, she was saying. Aubrey steered into them with an admirable gesture of surprise. Well, I never, said Mrs. Mifflin, here's Mr. Gilbert. Were you coming to see Roger? She added, rather enjoying the young man's predicament. Titania shook hands cordially. Aubrey, searching the old-style italics with the desperate intensity of a proofreader, saw no evidence of chagrin at seeing him again so soon. Why, he said rather lamely, I was coming to see you all. I wondered how you were getting along. Mrs. Mifflin had pity on him. We've left Mr. Mifflin to look after the shop, she said. He's busy with some of his old crony customers. Why don't you come with us to the movies? Yes, do, said Titania. It's Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew. You know how adorable they are. No one needs to be told how quickly Aubrey assented. Pleasure coincided with duty in that the outer wing of the party placed him next to Titania. Well, how do you like bookselling? He asked. Oh, it's the greatest fun! She cried. But it'll take me ever and ever so long to learn about all the books. People ask such questions. A woman came in this afternoon, looking for a copy of Blasey Tales. How was I to know she wanted the blaze trail? You'll get used to that, said Mrs. Mifflin. Just a minute, people. I want to stop in at the drugstore. They went into Weintraub's pharmacy, and tranced as he was by the proximity of Miss Chapman, Aubrey noticed that the drugst eyed him rather queerly. And being of a noticing habit, he also observed that when Weintraub had occasion to write out a label for a box of powdered alum Mrs. Mifflin was buying, he did so with a pale violet ink. At the glass sentry box in front of the theater, Aubrey insisted on buying the tickets. We came out right after supper, said Titania as they entered, so as to get in before the crowd. It is not so easy, however, to get ahead of Brooklyn movie fans. They had to stand for several minutes in a packed lobby, while a stern young man held the waiting crowd in check with a velvet rope. Aubrey sustained delightful spasms of the protective instinct in trying to shelter Titania from buffets and pushings. According to her, his arm extended behind her like an iron rod to absorb the onward impulses of the eager throng. A rustling groan ran through these enthusiasts as they saw the preliminary footage of the great Tarzan flash onto the screen and realized they were missing something. At last, however, the trio got through the barrier and found three seats while in front at one side. From this angle the flying pictures were strangely distorted, but Aubrey did not mind. Isn't it lucky I got here when I did?" whispered Titania. Mr. Mifflin has just had a telephone call from Philadelphia, asking him to go over on Monday to make an estimate on the library that's going to be sold, so I'll be able to look after the shop for him while he's gone. Is that so? said Aubrey. Well now, I've got to be in Brooklyn on Monday on business. Maybe Mrs. Mifflin would let me come in and buy some books from you. Customers are always welcome, said Mrs. Mifflin. I've taken a fancy to that Cromwell book, said Aubrey. What do you suppose Mr. Mifflin would sell it for? I think that book must be valuable, said Titania. Somebody came in this afternoon and wanted to buy it, but Mr. Mifflin wouldn't part with it. He says it's one of his favorites. Gracious! What a weird film this is! The fantastic absurdities of Tarzan proceeded on the screen, tearing celluloid passions to tatters, but Aubrey found the strongman of the jungle coming almost too close to his own imperious instincts. Was not he too, he thought naively, a poor Tarzan of the advertising jungle, lost among the elephants and alligators of commerce, and sighing for this dainty and unattainable vision of girlhood that had burst upon his burning gaze? He stole a perilous side glance at her profile, and saw the racing flicker of the screen reflected in tiny spangles of light that danced in her eyes. He was even so unknowing as to imagine that she was not aware of his contemplation. And then the lights went up. What nonsense, wasn't it? said Titania. I'm so glad it's over. I was quite afraid one of those elephants would walk off the screen and tread on us. I never can understand, said Helen, why they don't film some of the really good books. Think of Frank Stockton's stuff. How delightful that would be. Can't you imagine Mr. and Mrs. Drew playing in rudder grange? Thank goodness! said Titania. Since I entered the book business, that's the first time anybody's mentioned a book that I've read. Yes, do you remember when Pomona and Jonas visited an insane asylum on their honeymoon? Do you know? You and Mr. Mifflin remind me a little of Mr. and Mrs. Drew. Helen and Aubrey trekkled at this innocent correlation of ideas. Then the organ began to play, oh, how I hate to get up in the morning, and the ever-delightful Mr. and Mrs. Drew appeared on the screen in one of their domestic comedies. Lovers of the movies may well date a new screen error from the day those whimsical pantomimers set their wholesome and humane talent at the service of the arc light and the lens. Aubrey felt a serene and intimate pleasure in watching them from a seat beside Titania. He knew that the breakfast-table scene shadowed before them was only a makeshift section of laugh propped up in some barn-like motion-picture studio, yet his rocketing fancy imagined it as some Arcadian suburb where he and Titania, by a jugglery of benign fate, were bungalowed together. Young men have a pioneering imagination. It is doubtful whether any young Orlando ever found himself side-by-side with Rosalind without dreaming himself wedded to her. If men die a thousand deaths before this mortal coil is shuffled, even so surely do youths contract a thousand marriages before they go to the city hall for a license. Aubrey remembered the upper glasses, which were still in his pocket, and brought them out. The trio amused themselves by watching Sidney Drew's face through the magnifying lenses. They were disappointed in the result, however, as the pictures, when so enlarged, revealed all the cobweb of fine cracks on the film. Mr. Drew's nose, the most amusing feature known to the movies, lost its quaintness when so augmented. Why? cried Titania. It makes his lovely nose look like the map of Florida. How on earth did you happen to have these in your pocket? asked Mrs. Mifflin, returning the glasses. Aubrey was hard-pressed for a prompt and reasonable fib, but advertising men are resourceful. Oh! he said. I sometimes carry them with me at night to study the advertising sky signs. I'm a little short-sighted. You see, it's part of my business to study the technique of the electric signs. After some current event pictures, the program prepared to repeat itself, and they went out. Will you come in and have some cocoa with us? said Helen as they reached the door of the bookshop. Aubrey was eager enough to accept, but fear to overplay his hand. I'm sorry, he said, but I think I'd better not. I've got some work to do tonight. Perhaps I can drop in on Monday when Mr. Mifflin's away and put coal on the furnace for you. Or something of that sort? Mrs. Mifflin laughed. Surely, she said, you welcome any time. The door closed behind them, and Aubrey fell into a profound melancholy, deprived of the heavenly retoric of her eye, kissing streets seem flat and dull. It was still early, not quite ten o'clock, and it occurred to Aubrey that if he was going to patrol the neighborhood, he had better fix its details in his head. Hazlett, the next street below the bookshop, proved to be a quiet little byway, cheerfully lit with modest dwellings. A few paces down Hazlett Street, a narrow cobbled alley ran through to Wordsworth Avenue, passing between the backyards of Gissing Street and Whittier Street. The alley was totally dark, but by counting off the correct number of houses, Aubrey identified the rear entrance of the bookshop. He tried the yard gate cautiously and found it unlocked. Glancing in, he could see a light in the kitchen window and assumed that the cocoa was being brewed. Then a window glowed upstairs, and he was thrilled to see Titania shining in the lamp light. She moved to the window and pulled down the blind. For a moment he saw her head and shoulders silhouetted against the curtain. Then the light went out. Aubrey stood briefly in sentimental thought. If he only had a couple of blankets he mused, he could camp out here in Roger's backyard all night. Surely no harm could come to the girl while he kept watch beneath her casement. The idea was just fantastic enough to appeal to him. Then as he stood in the open gateway he heard distinct footfalls coming down the alley and a grumble of voices, perhaps two policemen on their rounds, he thought. It would be awkward to be surprised skulking about back doors at this time of night. He slipped inside the gate and closed it gently behind him, taking the precaution to slip the bolt. The footsteps came nearer, stumbling down the uneven cobbles in the darkness. He stood still against the back fence. To his amazement the men halted outside Mifflin's gate and he heard the latch quietly lifted. It's no use, said a voice. The gate is locked. We must find another way, my friend. Aubrey tingled to hear the rolling throaty R in the last word. There was no mistaking. This was the voice of his friend and well-wisher over the telephone. The other said something in German in a hoarse whisper. Having studied that language in college, Aubrey caught only two words, sir and schluschel, which he knew meant door and key. Very well, said the first voice. That will be all right, but we must act to-night. The damn thing must be finished to-morrow. Your idiotic stupidity! Again followed some gargling in German in a rapid undertone too fluent for Aubrey's grasp. The latch of the alligate clicked once more and his hand was on his revolver, but in a moment the two had passed on down the alley. The young advertising agent stood against the fence in silent horror, his heart bumping heavily. His hands were clammy, his feet seemed to have grown larger and taken root. What dandable complot was this? A sultry wave of anger passed over him. This bland, slick, talkative bookseller. Was he arranging some blackmailing scheme to kidnap the girl and ring blood money out of her father? And in league with Germans too, the scoundrel. What an acidine thing for old Chapman to send an unprotected girl over here into the wilds of Brooklyn, and in the meantime what was he to do? Patrol the backyard all night? No, the friend and well-wisher had said we must find some other way. Besides, Aubrey remembered something having been said about the old terrier sleeping in the kitchen. He felt sure Bach would not let any German in at night without raising the roof. Probably the best way would be to watch the front of the shop. In miserable perplexity he waited several minutes until the two Germans would be well out of earshot. Then he unbolted the gate and stole up the alley on tiptoe, in the opposite direction. It led into Wordsworth Avenue, just behind Weintraub's drugstore, over the rear of which hung the great girders and trestles of the L station, a kind of Swiss chalet, straddling the street on stilts. He thought it prudent to make a detour, so he turned east on Wordsworth Avenue until he reached Whittier Street, then slauntered easily down Whittier for a block, spying sharply for evidences of pursuit. Brooklyn was putting out its lights for the night, and all was quiet. He turned into Haslett Street and so back into Gissing, noticing now that the haunted bookshop lights were off. It was nearly eleven o'clock. The last audience was filing out of the movie theater, where two workmen were already perched on ladders, taking down the Tarzan electric light sign to substitute the illuminated lettering for the next feature. After some debate he decided that the best thing to do was to return to his room at Mrs. Schiller's, from which he could keep a sharp watch on the front door of the bookshop. By good fortune there was a lamppost almost directly in front of Mifflin's house, which cast plenty of light on the little sunken area before the door. With his opera glasses he could see from his bedroom whatever went on. As he crossed the street he cast his eyes upward at the façade of Mrs. Schiller's house. Two windows in the fourth story were lit, and the gas burned minutely in the downstairs hall, elsewhere all was dark. And then as he glanced at the window of his own chamber, where the curtain was still tucked back behind the pane, he noticed a curious thing, a small point of rosy light glowed, faded, and glowed again by the window. Someone was smoking a cigar in his room. Aubrey continued walking in even stride, as though he had seen nothing. Returning down the street on the opposite side he verified his first glance. The light was still there, and he judged himself not far out and assuming the smoker to be the friend and well-wisher or one of his gang. He had suspected the other man in the alley of being wine-trob, but he could not be sure. A cautious glance through the window of the drugstore revealed wine-trob at his prescription counter. Aubrey determined to get even with the guttural gentleman who was waiting for him, certainly with no affectionate intent. He thanked the good fortune that had led him to stick the book cover in his overcoat pocket when leaving Mrs. Schiller's. Suddenly, for reasons unknown, someone was very anxious to get hold of it. An idea occurred to him as he passed a little florist shop which was just closing. He entered and bought a dozen white carnations, and then, as if by an afterthought, asked, Have you any wire? The florist produced a spool of the slender, tough wire that is sometimes used to nip the buds of expensive roses to prevent them from blossoming too quickly. Let me have about eight feet, said Aubrey. I need some tonight, and I guess the hardware stores are all closed. With this he returned to Mrs. Schiller's, picking his way carefully and close to the houses so as to be out of sight from the upstairs windows. He climbed the steps and unlatched the door with baited breath. It was half past eleven, and he wondered how long he would have to wait for the well-wisher to descend. He could not help chuckling as he made his preparations, remembering an occasion at college somewhat similar in setting, though far less serious in purpose. First he took off his shoes, laying them carefully to one side where he could find them again in a hurry. Then choosing a banister about six feet from the bottom of the stairs, he attached one end of the wire tightly to its base and spread the slack in a large loop over two of the stair treads. The remaining end of the wire he passed out through the banisters, twisting it into a small loop so that he could pull it easily. Then he turned out the whole gas and sat down in the dark to wait events. He sat for a long time in some nervousness, lest the pug-dog might come prowling and find him. He was startled by a lady in a dressing-gown, perhaps Mrs. J. F. Smith, who emerged from a ground floor room, pass very close to him in the dark, and muttered upstairs. He twitched his noose out of the way just in time. Presently, however, his patience was rewarded. He heard a door squeak above, and then the groaning of the staircase as someone descended slowly. He relayed his trap and waited, smiling to himself. A clock somewhere in the house was chiming twelve, as the man came groping down the last flight, feeling his way in the dark. Aubrey heard him swearing under his breath. At the precise moment, when both his victim's feet were within the loop, Aubrey gave the wire a gigantic tug. The man fell like a safe, crashing against the banisters and landing in a sprawl on the floor. It was a terrific fall, and shook the house. He lay there, groaning and cursing. Barely retaining his laughter, Aubrey struck a match, and held it over the sprawling figure. The man lay with his face twisted against one outspread arm, but the beard was unmistakable. It was the assistant chef again, and he seemed partly unconscious. "'Burnt hair is a great restorative,' said Aubrey to himself, and applied the match to the bush of beard. He singed off a couple of inches of it with intense delight, and laid his carnations on the head of the stricken one. Then hearing stirrings in the basement, he gathered up his wire and shoes and fled upstairs. He gained his room, roaring with inward mirth, but entered cautiously, fearing some trap. Save for the strong tincture of cigar smoke, everything seemed correct. Listening at his door, he heard Mrs. Schiller exclaiming shrilly in the hall, assisted by yappings from the pug. Doors upstairs were opened, and questions were called out. He heard guttural groans from the bearded one, mingled with ose and some angry remark about having fallen downstairs. The pug, frenzied with excitement, yelled insanely. A female voice, possibly Mrs. J. F. Smith, cried out, "'What's that smell of burning?' Someone else said. There are burning feathers under his nose to bring him to. Yes, Hun's feathers,' chuckled Aubrey to himself. He locked his door, and sat down by the window with his opera-glasses. CHAPTER IX Roger had spent a quiet evening in the bookshop, sitting at his desk under a fog of tobacco. He had honestly intended to do some writing on the twelfth chapter of his great work on bookselling. This chapter was to be an, alas, entirely conjectural, a dress delivered by a bookseller on being conferred the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by a leading university, and it presented so many alluring possibilities that Roger's mind always wandered from the paper into the entranced visions of his imagined scene. He loved to build up in fancy the flattering details of that fine ceremony when bookselling would at last be properly recognized as one of the learned professions. He could see the great auditorium, filled with cultivated people, men with Emersonian profiles, ladies whispering behind their fluttering programs. He could see the academic beetle, proctor, dean, or whatever he is. Roger was a little doubtful, pronouncing the august words of presentation. A man, who in season and out of season, forgetting private gain for public will, has labored with Promethean and sacrificial ardor to instill the love of reasonable letters into countless thousands, to whom and to whose colleagues, amid the perishable caducity of human affairs, is largely due the pullillation of literary taste, in honoring whom we seek to honor the noble and self-effacing profession of which he is so representative a member. Then he could see the modest bookseller, somewhat clammy in his extremities, and lost within his academic robe and hood, nervously fidgeting his mortarboard, hailed forward by ushers, tottering rubescent before the chancellor, provost, president, or whoever it might be, who hands out the diploma. Then in Roger's vision, he could see the garland bibliopol turning to the expectant audience, giving his trailing gown a deft rearward kick, as the ladies do on the stage, and uttering, without hesitation or embarrassment, with due interpolation of graceful pleasantry, that learned and unlabored discourse on the delights of bookishness that he had so often dreamed of. Then he could see the ensuing reception, the distinguished savants crowding round, the plates of macaroons, the cups of untasted tea, the ladies twittering, now there's something I want to ask you. Why are there so many statues to generals, admirals, parsons, doctors, statesmen, scientists, artists, and authors, but no statues to booksellers? One of this glittering scene always lured Roger into fantastic dreams. Ever since he had traveled country roads some years before, selling books from a van drawn by a fat white horse, he had nourished a secret hope of someday founding a Parnassus on Wheels corporation, which would own a fleet of these vans, and send them out into the rural byways where bookstores are unknown. He loved to imagine a great map of New York State, with the daily location of each traveling Parnassus, marked by a colored pin. He dreamed of himself, sitting in some vast central warehouse of secondhand books, pouring over his map like a military chief of staff, and forwarding cases of literary ammunition to various bases where his vans would restock. His idea was that his traveling salesmen could be recruited largely from college professors, parsons, and newspaper men, who were weary of their thankless tasks, and would welcome an opportunity to get out on the road. One of his hopes was that he might interest Mr. Chapman in this superb scheme, and he had a vision of the day when the shares of the Parnassus on Wheels corporation would pay a handsome dividend and be much sought after by serious investors. These thoughts turned his mind toward his brother-in-law, Andrew McGill, the author of several engaging books on the joys of country living, who dwells at the Sabine farm in the green elbow of a Connecticut valley. The original Parnassus, a quaint old blue wagon in which Roger had lived and journeyed and sold books over several thousand miles of country roads in the days before his marriage, was now housed in Andrew's barn, peg his fat white horse had lodging there also. It occurred to Roger that he owed Andrew a letter, and putting aside his notes for the bookseller's collegiate oration he began to write. The Haunted Bookshop, 163 Kissing Street, Brooklyn, November 30, 1918. My dear Andrew, it is scandalous not to have thanked you sooner for the annual cask of cider, which has given us even more than the customary pleasure. This has been an autumn when I have been hard put to keep up with my own thoughts, and I've written no letters at all. Like everyone else I am thinking constantly of this new piece that has marvelously come upon us. I trust we may have statesmen who will be able to turn it to the benefit of humanity. I wish there could be an international peace conference of bookseller's. For, you will smile at this, my own conviction is that the future happiness of the world depends on no small measure on them and on the librarians. I wonder what a German bookseller is like. I've been reading the education of Henry Adams, and wish he might have lived long enough to give us his thoughts on the war. I fear it would have bolt him over. He thought that this is not a world that sensitive and timid natures can regard without a shutter. What would he have said of the four-year shambles we have watched with sickened hearts? You remember my favorite poem, Old George Herbert's Church Porch, where he says, By all means use sometimes to be alone, salute thyself, see what thy soul doth wear, Dare to look in thy chest for its thine own, And tumble up and down what thou findst there. Well, I've been tumbling my thoughts up and down a good deal. Melancholy, I suppose, is the curse of the thinking classes, but I confess my soul wears a great uneasiness these days. And a sudden and amazing turnover in human affairs, dramatic beyond anything in history, already seems to be taken as a matter of course. My great fear is that humanity will forget the atrocious suffering of the war, which will have never been told. I am hoping and praying that men like Philip Gibbs may tell us what they really saw. You will not agree with me on what I am about to say, for I know you as a stubborn Republican, but I thank fortune that Wilson is going to the peace conference. I've been mulling over one of my favorite books. It lies beside me, as I write, Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, edited by Carlisle, with what Carlisle amusingly calls elucidations. Carlisle is not very good at elucidating anything. I have heard somewhere or other that this is one of Wilson's favorite books, and indeed there is much of the Cromwell in him. With what a grim, covenanting zeal he took up the sword when at last it was forced into his hand. I have been thinking that what he will say to the peace conference will smack strongly of what old Oliver used to say to parliament in 1657 and 1658. If we will have peace without a worm in it, lay we foundations of justice and righteousness. What makes Wilson so irritating to the unthoughtful is that he operates exclusively upon reason, not upon passion. He contradicts Kipling's famous lines which apply to most men. Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact to its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act. In this instance, I think, reason is going to win. I feel the whole current of the world setting in that direction. It's quaint to think of Old Woodrow, a kind of Cromwell Wordsworth, going over to do his bit among the diplomatic shell craters. What I'm waiting for is the day when he'll get back into private life and write a book about it. There's a job, if you like, for a man who might reasonably be supposed to be pretty tired in body and soul. When that book comes out I'll spend the rest of my life in selling it. I ask nothing better. Speaking of Wordsworth, I've often wondered whether Woodrow hasn't got some poems concealed somewhere among his papers. I've always imagined that he may have written poems on the sly. And by the way, you needed to make fun of me for being so devoted to George Herbert. Do you realize that two of the most familiar quotations in our language come from his pen, namely, wouldstile both eat thy cake and have it, and, dare to be true, nothing can need a lie, a fault which needs it most grows to thereby. Forgive this tedious sermon. My mind has been so tumbled up and down this autumn that I am in a queer state of mingled melancholy and exultation. You know how much I live in in four books. Well I have a curious feeling, a kind of premonition, that there are great books coming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps a book in which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it never has before. The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment. It has never done for humanity what it should have done. I wonder why. Walt Whitman is going to do a great deal, but he is not quite what I mean. There is something coming. I don't know just what. I thank God I am a bookseller, trafficking in the dreams and beauties and curiosities of humanity rather than some mere huckster of merchandise. But how helpless we all are when we try to tell what goes on within us. I found this in one of Lafcadio Hearn's letters the other day. I marked the passage for you. Baudelaire has a touching poem about an albatross which you would like, describing the poet's soul superb in its own free azure but helpless, insulted, ugly, clumsy when striving to walk on common earth, or rather on a deck where sailors torment it with tobacco pipes, et cetera. You can imagine what evenings I have here among my shelves. Now the long dark nights are come. Of course, until 10 o'clock when I shut up shop, I am constantly interrupted, as I have been during this letter, once to sell a copy of Helen's babies, and once to sell the ballad of Reading Jail. So you can see how varied are my client's tastes. But later on, after we have had our evening cocoa and Helen has gone to bed, I prowl about the place, dipping into this and that, fuddling myself with speculation, how clear and bright the stream of mind flows in those late hours. After all the sediment and floating trash of the day has drained off. Sometimes I seem to coast the very shore of beauty or truth, and hear the surf breaking on those shining sands. Then some offshore wind of weariness or prejudice bears me away again. Have you ever come across Andreyev's confessions of a little man during great days? One of the honest books about the war. The little man ends his confession thus. My anger has left me, my sadness returned, and once more the tears flow. Whom can I curse? Whom can I judge? When we are all alike unfortunate. Suffering is universal. Hands are outstretched to each other, and when they touch, the great solution will come. My heart is aglow, and I stretch out my hand and cry. Come, let us join hands. I love you, I love you. And of course, as soon as one puts oneself in that frame of mind, someone comes along and picks your pocket. I suppose we must teach ourselves to be too proud to mind having our pockets picked. Did it ever occur to you that the world is really governed by books? The course of this country in the war, for instance, has been largely determined by the books Wilson has read, since he first began to think. If we could have a list of the principal books he has read since the war began, how interesting it would be. Here's something I'm just copying out to put up on my bulletin board for my customers to ponder. It was written by Charles Sorley, a young Englishman who was killed in France in 1915. He was only twenty years old. To Germany you are blind like us. You hurt no man designed, and no man claimed the conquest of your land, but gropers both through fields of thought confined. We stumble and we do not understand. You only saw your future bigly planned, and we, the tapering paths of our own mind, and in each other's dearest ways we stand, and hiss and hate, and the blind fight the blind. When it is peace, then we may view again with new one eyes each other's truer form, and wonder, grown more loving, kind and warm, will grasp firm hands, and laugh at the old pain, when it is peace, but until peace the storm, the darkness and the thunder and the rain. Isn't that noble? You see what I am dumbly groping for, some way of thinking about the war that will make it seem, to future ages, a purification for humanity, rather than a mere blackness of stinking cinders and tortured flesh and men shot to ribbons in marshes of blood and sewage. Out of such unspeakable desolation men must rise to some new conception of national neighborhood. I hear so much apprehension that Germany won't be punished sufficiently for her crime, but how can any punishment be devised or imposed for such a huge panorama of sorrow? I think she has already punished herself horribly, and will continue to do so. My prayer is that what we have gone through will startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of life. All life, animal as well as human, don't you find that a visit to a zoo can humble and astound you, with all the amazing and grotesque variety of living energy? What is it that we find in every form of life? Desire of some sort, some unexplained mode of power that impels even the smallest insect on its queer travels. You must have watched some infinitesimal red spider on a fence rail, bustling along, why and wither, who knows? And when you come to man, what a chaos of hungers and impulses keep thrusting him through his cycle of quaint tasks, and in every human heart you find some sorrow, some frustration, some lurking pang. I often think of Lafcadio Hearn's story of his Japanese cook. Hearn was talking of the Japanese habit of not showing their emotions on their faces. His cook was a smiling, healthy, agreeable-looking young fellow whose face was always cheerful. Then one day, by chance, Hearn happened to look through a hole in the wall and saw his cook alone. His face was not the same face. It was thin and drawn and showed strange lines worn by old hardships or sufferings. Hearn thought to himself, he will look just like that when he is dead. He went into the kitchen to see him, and instantly the cook was all changed, young and happy again. Never again did Hearn see that face of trouble, but he knew the man wore it when he was alone. Don't you think there is a kind of parable there for the race as a whole? Have you ever met a man without wondering what shining sorrows he hides from the world? What contrasts between vision and accomplishment torments him? Behind every smiling mask is there not some cryptic grimace of pain? Henry Adams puts it tersely. He says the human mind appears suddenly and inexplicably out of some unknown and unimaginable void. It passes half its known life in the mental chaos of sleep. Even when awake, it is a victim of its own ill adjustment, of disease, of age, of external suggestion, of nature's compulsions. It doubts its own sensations, and trusts only in instruments and averages. After sixty years or so of growing astonishment, the mind wakes to find itself looking blankly into the void of death. And as Adams says, that it should profess itself pleased by this performance is all that the highest rules of good-breeding can ask, that the mind should actually be satisfied would prove that it exists only as idiocy. I hope that you were right to tell me along what curves your mind is moving. For my own part I feel that we are on the verge of amazing things. Long ago I fell back on books as the only permanent consolers. They are the one, stainless, and unimpeachable achievement of the human race. It saddens me to think that I shall have to die, with thousands of books unread, that would have given me noble and unblemished happiness. I will tell you a secret. I have never read King Lear, and have purposely refrained from doing so. If I were ever very ill, I would only need to say to myself, you can't die yet, you haven't read Lear. That would bring me round. I know it would. You see, books are the answer to all our perplexities. Henry Adams grinds his teeth at his inability to understand the universe. The best he can do is to suggest a law of acceleration, which seems to mean that nature is hustling man along at an ever-increasing rate, so that he will either solve all her problems or else die of fever in the effort. But Adams' candid portrait of a mind grappling helplessly with its riddles is so triumphantly delightful that one forgets the futility of the struggle in the accuracy of the picture. Man is unconquerable because he can make even his helplessness so entertaining. His motto seems to be, even though he slay me, yet will I make fun of him. Yes, books are man's supreme triumph, for they gather up and transmit all other triumphs. As Walter de La Mer writes, how uncomprehending must an angel from heaven smile on a poor human sitting engrossed in a romance, angled upon his hams, motionless in his chair, spectacles on nose, his two feet as close together as the flukes of a merman's tail, only his strange eyes stirring in his time-worn face. Well, I've been scribbling away all this time and haven't given you any news whatever. Helen came back the other day from a visit to Boston where she enjoyed herself greatly. Tonight she has gone out to the movies with a young protege of ours, Miss Titania Chapman, an engaging damsel whom we have taken in as an apprentice bookseller. It's a quaint idea, done at the request of her father, Mr. Chapman, the proprietor of Chapman's Dainty Bits, which you see advertised everywhere. He is a great book lover and is very eager to have the zeal transmitted to his daughter. So you can imagine my glee to have a neophyte of my own to preach books at. Also it will enable me to get away from the shop a little more. I had a telephone call from Philadelphia this afternoon, asking me to go over there on Monday evening to make an estimate of the value of a private collection that is to be sold. I was rather flattered, because I can't imagine how they got hold of my name. Forgive this long, incoherent scrawl. How did you like Irrawan? It's pretty near closing time, and I must say grace over the day's accounts. Yours ever, Roger Mifflin. CHAPTER X Roger had just put Carlisle's Cromwell back in its proper place in the history alcove when Helen and Titania returned from the movies. Bach, who had been dozing under his master's chair, rose politely and wagged a deferential tail. I do think Bach has the darlingest manners, said Titania. Yes, said Helen. It's really a marvel that his wagging muscles aren't all worn out. He has abused them so. Will, said Roger, did you have a good time? An adorable time, cried Titania, with a face and voice so sparkling that two musty habituaries of the shop popped their heads out of the alcoves, marked essays and theology, and peered in amazement. One of these even went so far as to purchase the copy of Leigh Hunt's Wishing Cap papers he had been munching through in order to have an excuse to approach the group and satisfy his bewilder eyes. When Miss Chapman took the book and wrapped it up for him, his astonishment was made complete. Unconscious that she was actually creating business, Titania resumed. We met your friend Mr. Gilbert on the street, she said, and he went to the movies with us. He says he's coming in on Monday to fix the furnace while you're away. Well, said Roger, these advertising agencies are certainly enterprising, aren't they? Think of sending a man over to attend to my furnace, just on the slim chance of getting my advertising account. Did you have a quiet evening? said Helen. I spent most of the time writing to Andrew, said Roger. What amusing thing happened, though. I actually saw that copy of Philip Drew. No, cried Helen. A fact, said Roger. A man was looking at it, and I told him it was supposed to be written by Colonel House. He insisted on buying it. But what a sell when he tries to read it. Did Colonel House really write it? Asked Titania. I don't know, said Roger. I hope not, because I find in myself a secret tendency to believe that Mr. House is an able man. If he did write it, I definitely hope none of the foreign statesmen in Paris will learn of that fact. While Helen and Titania took off their wraps, Roger was busy closing up the shop. He went down to the corner with Bach to mail his letter, and when he returned to the den, Helen had prepared a large jug of cocoa. They sat down by the fire to enjoy it. Chesterton has written a very savage poem against cocoa, said Roger, which you will find in the flying inn. But for my part, I find it the ideal evening drink. Which lets the mind down gently and paves the way for slumber. I have often noticed that the most terrific philosophical agonies can be allayed by three cups of Mrs. Mifflin's cocoa. A man can safely read Schopenhauer all evening, if he has a tablespoon of cocoa and a tin of condensed milk available. Of course it should be made with condensed milk, which is the only way. I had no idea anything could be so good, said Titania. Of course Daddy makes condensed milk in one of his factories, but I never dreamed of trying it. I thought it was only used by explorers, people at the North Pole, you know. How stupid of me, exclaimed Roger, I quite forgot to tell you. Your father called up just after you had gone out this evening, and wanted to know how you were getting on. Oh, dear, said Titania. He must have been delighted to hear I was at the movies on the second day of my first job. He probably said it was just like me. I explained that I had insisted on you going with Mrs. Mifflin, because I felt she needed the change. I do hope, said Titania. You wouldn't let Daddy poison your mind about me. He thinks I'm dreadfully frivolous, just because I look frivolous, but I'm so keen to make good at this job. I've been practicing doing up parcels all afternoon, so as to learn how to tie this string nicely, and not cut it until after the knots tied. I found that when you cut it beforehand, either you get it too short and it won't go round, or else too long and you waste some. Also, I've learned how to make wrapping paper cuffs to keep my sleeves clean. Well, I haven't finished yet, continued Roger. Your father wants us all to spend tomorrow out at your home. He wants to show us some books he has just bought. And besides, he thinks maybe you're feeling homesick. What, with all these lovely books to read? Nonsense. I don't want to go home for six months. He wouldn't take no for an answer. He's going to send Edwards round with the car the first thing tomorrow morning. What fun, said Helen, it'll be delightful. Goodness, said Titania, imagine leaving this adorable bookshop to spend Sunday in Largemont. Well, I'll be able to get that Georgeette Blouse I forgot. What time will the car be here? asked Helen. Mr. Chapman said about nine o'clock. He begs us to get out there as early as possible as he wants to spend the day showing us his books. As I sat round the fading bed of coals, Roger began hunting along his private shells. Have you ever read any gissing? He said. Titania made a pathetic gesture to Mrs. Mifflin. It's awfully embarrassing to be asked these things. No, I never heard of him. Well, as the street we live on is named after him, I think you ought to, he said. He pulled down his copy of the House of Cobwebs. I'm going to read you one of the most delightful short stories I know. It's called A Charming Family. No, Roger, said Mrs. Mifflin firmly. Not tonight. It's eleven o'clock, and I can see Titania's tired. Even Bach has left us and gone into his kennel. He's got more sense than you have. All right, the bookseller said amably, Miss Chapman, you take the book up with you and read it in bed if you want to. Are you a liberal cubicularist? Titania looked a little scandalized. It's all right, my dear, said Helen. He only means are you fond of reading in bed. I've been waiting to hear him work that word into the conversation. He made it up, and he's immensely proud of it. Reading in bed, said Titania, what a quaint idea. Does anyone do it? It never occurred to me. I'm sure when I go to bed I'm far too sleepy to think of such a thing. Run along, then, both of you, said Roger. Get your beauty sleep. I shan't be very late. He meant it when he said it. But returning to his desk at the back of the shop his eye fell upon his private shelf of books, which he kept there to rectify perturbations, as Burton puts it. On this shelf there stood Pilgrim's Progress, Shakespeare, The Anatomy of Melancholy, The Home Book of Verse, George Herbert's Poems, The Notebooks of Samuel Butler, and Leaves of Grass. He took down the Anatomy of Melancholy, that most delightful of all books for midnight browsing. Turning to one of his favorite passages, a consolatory digression containing the remedies of all manner of discontents, he was happily lost to all ticking of the clock, retaining only such bodily consciousness as was needful to dump, fill, and relight his pipe from time to time. Solitude is a dear jewel for men whose days are spent in the tedious this and that of trade. Roger was a glutton for his midnight musings. To such tried companions as Robert Burton and George Herbert, he was want to exonerate his spirit. It used to amuse him to think of Burton, the lonely Oxford scholar, writing that vast book to rectify his own melancholy. By and by, turning over the musty old pages, he came to the following on sleep. The fittest time is two or three hours after supper, whereas the meat is now at the bottom of the stomach, and it is good to lie on the right side first, because at that site, the liver doth rest under the stomach, not molesting anyway, but heating him as a fire doth a kettle that is put to it. After the first sleep, it is not amiss to lie on the left side, that the meat made the better descend, and sometimes again on the belly, but never on the back. One or eight hours is a competent time for a melancholy man to rest. In that case, thought Roger, it's time for me to be turning in. He looked at his watch and found it was half past twelve. He switched off his light and went back to the kitchen quarters to tend the furnace. I hesitate to touch upon a topic of domestic bitterness, but candor compels me to say that Roger's evening vigils invariably ended at the icebox. There are two theories as to this subject of icebox plundering, one of the husband and the other of the wife. Husbands are prone to think, in their simplicity, that if they take a little of everything palatable they find in the refrigerator, but thus distributing their forage over the viands, the general effect of the depredation will be almost unnoticeable. Whereas wives say, and Mrs. Mifflin had often explained to Roger, that it is by far better to take all of any one dish than a little of each, for the latter course is likely to diminish each item below the bulk at which it is still useful as a leftover. Roger, however, had the obstinate viciousness of all good husbands, and he knew the delights of cold provinder by heart. Many astute prune, many a mess of string beans, or naked cold-boiled potato, many a chicken leg, half-apple pie, or sector of rice pudding, had perished in these midnight festivals. He made it a point of honour never to eat quite all of the dish in question, but would pass with unabated zest from one to another. This habit he had sternly repressed during the war, but Mrs. Mifflin had noticed that since the armistice he had resumed it with hearty violence. This is a custom which causes the housewife to be confronted the next morning with a tragical vista of pathetic scraps, two slices of beet in a little earthenware cup, a sliver of apple pie one inch wide, three prunes lowly nesting in a mere trickle of their own syrup, and a tablespoon of stewed rhubarb where had been one of those yellow basins nearly full. What can the most resourceful kitchenier do with these odmints? This atrocious practice cannot be too bitterly condemned. But we are what we are, and Roger was even more so. The anatomy of melancholy always made him hungry, and he dipped discreetly into various vessels of refreshment, sharing a few scraps with Bach, whose pleading brown eye at these secret seppers always showed a comical realisation of their shameful and furtive nature. Bach knew very well that Roger had no business at the icebox, for the larger outlines of social law upon which every home depends are clearly understood by dogs. But Bach's face always showed his tremulous eagerness to participate in the sin, and rather than have him stand by as a silent and damning critic, Roger used to give him most of the cold potato. The censure of a dog is something no man can stand. But I rove, as Burton would say. After the icebox, the cellar. Like all true householders, Roger was fond of his cellar. It was something moldy of smell, but it harboured a well-stocked little bin of flickers, and the floored glow of the furnace-mouth upon the concrete floor was a great pleasure to the bookseller. He loved to peer at the dancing flicker of small blue flames that played above the ruddy mound of coals in the firebox, tenuous airy little flames that were as blue as violets and hovered up and down in the ascending gases. Before blackening the fire with a stoking of coal, he pulled up a wooden bushmill's box, turned off the electric bulb overhead, and sat there for a final pipe, watching the rosy shine of the great. The tobacco smoke, drawn inward by the hot, inhaling fire, seemed dry and gray in the golden brightness. Bach, who had patted down the steps after him, nosed and snooped about the cellar. Roger was thinking of Burton's words on the immortal weed. Tobacco, divine, rare, super-excellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the penaceas, potable gold and philosopher's stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases, a virtuous herb, if it be well-qualified, opportunely taken, and medicinally used. But as it is commonly abused by most men, which take it as tinkers do ale, tis a plague, a mischief, a violent purger of goods, lands, health, hellish, devilish, and damned tobacco, the ruin and overthrow of body and soul. Bach was standing on his hind legs, looking up at the front wall of the cellar, in which two small iron-graded windows opened unto the sunken area by the front door of the shop. He gave a low growl and seemed uneasy. What is it Bach? said Roger placidly, finishing his pipe. Bach gave a short, sharp bark, with a curious note of protest in it, but Roger's mind was still with Burton. Rats, he said, I very likely. This is rat-a-spawn, old man, but don't bark about it. Incident of the French camp, smiling, the rat fell dead. Bach paid no heed to this persiflage, but prowled the front end of the cellar, looking upward in curious agitation. He growled again, softly. Shhh, said Roger gently. Never mind the rats, Bach. Come on, we'll stoke up the fire and go to bed. Lord, it's one o'clock. End of Chapter Ten.