The Haunted Bookshop, Christopher Morley [best romance ebooks TXT] 📗

“Oh, I’m sure of it!” cried Titania. “I mean, I’m sure I shall be happy! You mustn’t believe a word of what Dad says about me. I’m crazy about books. I don’t see how you can bear to sell them. I brought these violets for you, Mrs. Mifflin.”

“How perfectly sweet of you,” said Helen, captivated already. “Come along, we’ll put them right in water. I’ll show you your room.”

Roger heard them moving about overhead. It suddenly occurred to him that the shop was rather a dingy place for a young girl. “I wish I had thought to get in a cash register,” he mused. “She’ll think I’m terribly unbusiness-like.”

“Now,” said Mrs. Mifflin, as she and Titania came downstairs again, “I’m making some pastry, so I’m going to turn you over to your employer. He can show you round the shop and tell you where all the books are.”

“Before we begin,” said Titania, “just let me give Bock his present.” She showed a large package of tissue paper and, unwinding innumerable layers, finally disclosed a stalwart bone. “I was lunching at Sherry’s, and I made the head waiter give me this. He was awfully amused.”

“Come along into the kitchen and give it to him,” said Helen. “He’ll be your friend for life.”

“What an adorable kennel!” cried Titania, when she saw the remodelled packing-case that served Bock as a retreat. The bookseller’s ingenious carpentry had built it into the similitude of a Carnegie library, with the sign “Reading Room” over the door; and he had painted imitation bookshelves along the interior.

“You’ll get used to Mr. Mifflin after a while,” said Helen amusedly. “He spent all one winter getting that kennel fixed to his liking. You might have thought he was going to live in it instead of Bock. All the titles that he painted in there are books that have dogs in them, and a lot of them he made up.”

Titania insisted on getting down to peer inside. Bock was much flattered at this attention from the new planet that had swum into his kennel.

“Gracious!” she said, “here’s ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Canine.’ I do think that’s clever!”

“Oh, there are a lot more,” said Helen. “The works of Bonar Law, and Bohn’s ‘Classics,’ and ‘Catechisms on Dogma’ and goodness knows what. If Roger paid half as much attention to business as he does to jokes of that sort, we’d be rich. Now, you run along and have a look at the shop.”

Titania found the bookseller at his desk. “Here I am, Mr. Mifflin,” she said. “See, I brought a nice sharp pencil along with me to make out sales slips. I’ve been practicing sticking it in my hair. I can do it quite nicely now. I hope you have some of those big red books with all the carbon paper in them and everything. I’ve been watching the girls up at Lord and Taylor’s make them out, and I think they’re fascinating. And you must teach me to run the elevator. I’m awfully keen about elevators.”

“Bless me,” said Roger, “You’ll find this very different from Lord and Taylor’s! We haven’t any elevators, or any sales slips, or even a cash register. We don’t wait on customers unless they ask us to. They come in and browse round, and if they find anything they want they come back here to my desk and ask about it. The price is marked in every book in red pencil. The cashbox is here on this shelf. This is the key hanging on this little hook. I enter each sale in this ledger. When you sell a book you must write it down here, and the price paid for it.”

“But suppose it’s charged?” said Titania.

“No charge accounts. Everything is cash. If someone comes in to sell books, you must refer him to me. You mustn’t be surprised to see people drop in here and spend several hours reading. Lots of them look on this as a kind of club. I hope you don’t mind the smell of tobacco, for almost all the men that come here smoke in the shop. You see, I put ash trays around for them.”

“I love tobacco smell,” said Titania. “Daddy’s library at home smells something like this, but not quite so strong. And I want to see the worms, bookworms you know. Daddy said you had lots of them.”

“You’ll see them, all right,” said Roger, chuckling. “They come in and out. Tomorrow I’ll show you how my stock is arranged. It’ll take you quite a while to get familiar with it. Until then I just want you to poke around and see what there is, until you know the shelves so well you could put your hand on any given book in the dark. That’s a game my wife and I used to play. We would turn off all the lights at night, and I would call out the title of a book and see how near she could come to finding it. Then I would take a turn. When we came more than six inches away from it we would have to pay a forfeit. It’s great fun.”

“What larks we’ll have,” cried Titania. “I do think this is a cunning place!”

“This is the bulletin board, where I put up notices about books that interest me. Here’s a card I’ve just been writing.”

Roger drew from his pocket a square of cardboard and affixed it to the board with a thumbtack. Titania read:

The Book That Should Have Prevented the War

Now that the fighting is over is a good time to read Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts. I don’t want to sell it, because it is one of the greatest treasures I own. But if anyone will guarantee to read all three volumes, and let them sink into his mind, I’m willing to lend them.

If enough thoughtful Germans had read The Dynasts before July, 1914, there would have been no war.

If every delegate to the Peace Conference could be made to