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

blackened corncob pipes and a canister of tobacco. Above was a startling canvas in emphatic oils, representing a large blue wagon drawn by a stout white animal⁠—evidently a horse. A background of lush scenery enhanced the forceful technique of the limner. The walls were stuffed with books. Two shabby, comfortable chairs were drawn up to the iron fender, and a mustard-coloured terrier was lying so close to the glow that a smell of singed hair was sensible.

“There,” said the host; “this is my cabinet, my chapel of ease. Take off your coat and sit down.”

“Really,” began Gilbert, “I’m afraid this is⁠—”

“Nonsense! Now you sit down and commend your soul to Providence and the kitchen stove. I’ll bustle round and get supper.” Gilbert pulled out his pipe, and with a sense of elation prepared to enjoy an unusual evening. He was a young man of agreeable parts, amiable and sensitive. He knew his disadvantages in literary conversation, for he had gone to an excellent college where glee clubs and theatricals had left him little time for reading. But still he was a lover of good books, though he knew them chiefly by hearsay. He was twenty-five years old, employed as a copywriter by the Grey-Matter Advertising Agency.

The little room in which he found himself was plainly the bookseller’s sanctum, and contained his own private library. Gilbert browsed along the shelves curiously. The volumes were mostly shabby and bruised; they had evidently been picked up one by one in the humble mangers of the secondhand vendor. They all showed marks of use and meditation.

Mr. Gilbert had the earnest mania for self-improvement which has blighted the lives of so many young men⁠—a passion which, however, is commendable in those who feel themselves handicapped by a college career and a jewelled fraternity emblem. It suddenly struck him that it would be valuable to make a list of some of the titles in Mifflin’s collection, as a suggestion for his own reading. He took out a memorandum book and began jotting down the books that intrigued him:

The Works of Francis Thompson (3 vols.)

Social History of Smoking: Apperson

The Path to Rome: Hilaire Belloc

The Book of Tea: Kakuzo

Happy Thoughts: F. C. Burnand

Dr. Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations

Margaret Ogilvy: J. M. Barrie

Confessions of a Thug: Taylor

General Catalogue of the Oxford University Press

The Morning’s War: C. E. Montague

The Spirit of Man: edited by Robert Bridges

The Romany Rye: Borrow

Poems: Emily Dickinson

Poems: George Herbert

The House of Cobwebs: George Gissing

So far had he got, and was beginning to say to himself that in the interests of advertising (who is a jealous mistress) he had best call a halt, when his host entered the room, his small face eager, his eyes blue points of light.

“Come, Mr. Aubrey Gilbert!” he cried. “The meal is set. You want to wash your hands? Make haste then, this way: the eggs are hot and waiting.”

The dining room into which the guest was conducted betrayed a feminine touch not visible in the smoke-dimmed quarters of shop and cabinet. At the windows were curtains of laughing chintz and pots of pink geranium. The table, under a drop-light in a flame-coloured silk screen, was brightly set with silver and blue china. In a cut-glass decanter sparkled a ruddy brown wine. The edged tool of advertising felt his spirits undergo an unmistakable upward pressure.

“Sit down, sir,” said Mifflin, lifting the roof of a platter. “These are eggs Samuel Butler, an invention of my own, the apotheosis of hen fruit.”

Gilbert greeted the invention with applause. An Egg Samuel Butler, for the notebook of housewives, may be summarized as a pyramid, based upon toast, whereof the chief masonries are a flake of bacon, an egg poached to firmness, a wreath of mushrooms, a cap-sheaf of red peppers; the whole dribbled with a warm pink sauce of which the inventor retains the secret. To this the bookseller chef added fried potatoes from another dish, and poured for his guest a glass of wine.

“This is California Catawba,” said Mifflin, “in which the grape and the sunshine very pleasantly (and cheaply) fulfil their allotted destiny. I pledge you prosperity to the black art of advertising!”

The psychology of the art and mystery of advertising rests upon tact, an instinctive perception of the tone and accent which will be en rapport with the mood of the hearer. Mr. Gilbert was aware of this, and felt that quite possibly his host was prouder of his whimsical avocation as gourmet than of his sacred profession as a bookman.

“Is it possible, sir,” he began, in lucid Johnsonian, “that you can concoct so delicious an entrée in so few minutes? You are not hoaxing me? There is no secret passage between Gissing Street and the laboratories of the Ritz?”

“Ah, you should taste Mrs. Mifflin’s cooking!” said the bookseller. “I am only an amateur, who dabbles in the craft during her absence. She is on a visit to her cousin in Boston. She becomes, quite justifiably, weary of the tobacco of this establishment, and once or twice a year it does her good to breathe the pure serene of Beacon Hill. During her absence it is my privilege to inquire into the ritual of housekeeping. I find it very sedative after the incessant excitement and speculation of the shop.”

“I should have thought,” said Gilbert, “that life in a bookshop would be delightfully tranquil.”

“Far from it. Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world⁠—the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking. Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade⁠—would you wonder at his getting excited? What would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip? She would go