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

satisfaction in lying abed in the morning. Those who approach the term of the fifth decade are sensitively aware of the fluency of life, and have no taste to squander it among the blankets.

The bookseller’s morning routine was brisk and habitual. He was generally awakened about half-past seven by the jangling bell that balanced on a coiled spring at the foot of the stairs. This ringing announced the arrival of Becky, the old scrubwoman who came each morning to sweep out the shop and clean the floors for the day’s traffic. Roger, in his old dressing gown of vermilion flannel, would scuffle down to let her in, picking up the milk bottles and the paper bag of baker’s rolls at the same time. As Becky propped the front door wide, opened window transoms, and set about buffeting dust and tobacco smoke, Roger would take the milk and rolls back to the kitchen and give Bock a morning greeting. Bock would emerge from his literary kennel, and thrust out his forelegs in a genial obeisance. This was partly politeness, and partly to straighten out his spine after its all-night curvature. Then Roger would let him out into the back yard for a run, himself standing on the kitchen steps to inhale the bright freshness of the morning air.

This Saturday morning was clear and crisp. The plain backs of the homes along Whittier Street, irregular in profile as the margins of a free verse poem, offered Roger an agreeable human panorama. Thin strands of smoke were rising from chimneys; a belated baker’s wagon was joggling down the alley; in bedroom bay-windows sheets and pillows were already set to sun and air. Brooklyn, admirable borough of homes and hearty breakfasts, attacks the morning hours in cheery, smiling spirit. Bock sniffed and rooted about the small back yard as though the earth (every cubic inch of which he already knew by rote) held some new entrancing flavour. Roger watched him with the amused and tender condescension one always feels toward a happy dog⁠—perhaps the same mood of tolerant paternalism that Gott is said to have felt in watching his boisterous Hohenzollerns.

The nipping air began to infiltrate his dressing gown, and Roger returned to the kitchen, his small, lively face alight with zest. He opened the draughts in the range, set a kettle on to boil, and went down to resuscitate the furnace. As he came upstairs for his bath, Mrs. Mifflin was descending, fresh and hearty in a starchy morning apron. Roger hummed a tune as he picked up the hairpins on the bedroom floor, and wondered to himself why women are always supposed to be more tidy than men.

Titania was awake early. She smiled at the enigmatic portrait of Samuel Butler, glanced at the row of books over her bed, and dressed rapidly. She ran downstairs, eager to begin her experience as a bookseller. The first impression the Haunted Bookshop had made on her was one of superfluous dinginess, and as Mrs. Mifflin refused to let her help get breakfast⁠—except set out the salt cellars⁠—she ran down Gissing Street to a little florist’s shop she had noticed the previous afternoon. Here she spent at least a week’s salary in buying chrysanthemums and a large pot of white heather. She was distributing these about the shop when Roger found her.

“Bless my soul!” he said. “How are you going to live on your wages if you do that sort of thing? 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 floorwalker will be when he comes in!”

“Dear me,” said Roger. “I hope you don’t really think we have floorwalkers in the secondhand book business.”

After breakfast he set about initiating his new employee into the routine of the shop. As he moved about, explaining the arrangement of his shelves, he kept up a running commentary.

“Of course all the miscellaneous information that a bookseller has to have will only come to you gradually,” he said. “Such tags of bookshop lore as the difference between Philo Gubb and Philip Gibbs, Mrs. Wilson Woodrow and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and all that sort of thing. Don’t be frightened by all the ads you see for a book called Bell and Wing, because no one was ever heard to ask for a copy. That’s one of the reasons why I tell Mr. Gilbert I don’t believe in advertising. Someone may ask you who wrote The Winning of the Best, and you’ll have to know it wasn’t Colonel Roosevelt but Mr. Ralph Waldo Trine. The beauty of being a bookseller is that you don’t have to be a literary critic: all you have to do to books is enjoy them. A literary critic is the kind of fellow who will tell you that Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’ is a poem of 85 lines composed entirely of two sentences, one of 26 lines and one of 59. What does it matter if Wordsworth wrote sentences almost as long as those of Walt Whitman or Mr. Will H. Hays, if only he wrote a great poem? Literary critics are queer birds. There’s Professor Phelps of Yale, for instance. He publishes a book in 1918 and calls it The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century. To my way of thinking a book of that title oughtn’t to be published until 2018. Then somebody will come along and ask you for a book of poems about a typewriter, and by and by you’ll learn that what they want is Stevenson’s Underwoods. Yes, it’s a complicated life. Never argue with customers. Just give them the book they ought to have even if they don’t know they want it.”

They went outside the front door, and Roger lit his pipe. In the little area in front of the shop windows stood large empty boxes supported on trestles. “The first thing I always do⁠—,” he said.

“The first thing you’ll both do is