The Haunted Bookshop

"Well, my dear," said Roger after supper that evening, "I think perhaps we had better introduce Miss Titania to our custom of reading aloud."

"Perhaps it would bore her?" said Helen. "You know it isn't everybody that likes being read to."

"Oh, I should love it!" exclaimed Titania. "I don't think anybody ever read to me, that is not since I was a child."

"Suppose we leave you to look after the shop," said Helen to Roger, in a teasing mood, "and I'll take Titania out to the movies. I think Tarzan is still running."

Whatever private impulses Miss Chapman may have felt, she saw by the bookseller's downcast face that a visit to Tarzan would break his heart, and she was prompt to disclaim any taste for the screen classic.

"Dear me," she said; "Tarzan—that's all that nature stuff by John Burroughs; isn't it? Oh, Mrs. Mifflin, I think it would be very tedious. Let's have Mr. Mifflin read to us. I'll get down my knitting bag."

"You mustn't mind being interrupted," said Helen. "When anybody rings the bell Roger has to run out and tend the shop."

"You must let me do it," said Titania. "I want to earn my wages, you know."

"All right," said Mrs. Mifflin; "Roger, you settle Miss Chapman in the den and give her something to look at while we do the dishes."

But Roger was all on fire to begin the reading. "Why don't we postpone the dishes," he said, "just to celebrate?"

"Let me help," insisted Titania. "I should think washing up would be great fun."

"No, no, not on your first evening," said Helen. "Mr. Mifflin and I will finish them in a jiffy."

So Roger poked up the coal fire in the den, disposed the chairs, and gave Titania a copy of Sartor Resartus to look at. He then vanished into the kitchen with his wife, whence Titania heard the cheerful clank of crockery in a dishpan and the splashing of hot water. "The best thing about washing up," she heard Roger say, "is that it makes one's hands so clean, a novel sensation for a second-hand bookseller."

She gave Sartor Resartus what is graphically described as a "once over," and then seeing the morning Times lying on the table, picked it up, as she had not read it. Her eye fell upon the column headed

LOST AND FOUND Fifty cents an agate line

and as she had recently lost a little pearl brooch, she ran hastily through it. She chuckled a little over

LOST—Hotel Imperial lavatory, set of teeth. Call or communicate Steel, 134 East 43 St. Reward, no questions asked.

Then she saw this:

LOST—Copy of Thomas Carlyle's "Oliver Cromwell," between Gissing Street, Brooklyn, and the Octagon Hotel. If found before midnight, Tuesday, Dec. 3, return to assistant chef, Octagon Hotel.

"Why" she exclaimed, "Gissing Street—that's here! And what a funny kind of book for an assistant chef to read. No wonder their lunches have been so bad lately!"

When Roger and Helen rejoined her in the den a few minutes later she showed the bookseller the advertisement. He was very much excited.

"That's a funny thing," he said. "There's something queer about that book. Did I tell you about it? Last Tuesday—I know it was then because it was the evening young Gilbert was here—a man with a beard came in asking for it, and it wasn't on the shelf. Then the next night, Wednesday, I was up very late writing, and fell asleep at my desk. I must have left the front door ajar, because I was waked up by the draught, and when I went to close the door I saw the book sticking out a little beyond the others, in its usual place. And last night, when the Corn Cobs were here, I went out to look up a quotation in it, and it was gone again."

"Perhaps the assistant chef stole it?" said Titania.

"But if so, why the deuce would he advertise having done so?" asked Roger.

"Well, if he did steal it," said Helen, "I wish him joy of it. I tried to read it once, you talked so much about it, and I found it dreadfully dull."

"If he did steal it," cried the bookseller, "I'm perfectly delighted. It shows that my contention is right: people DO really care for good books. If an assistant chef is so fond of good books that he has to steal them, the world is safe for democracy. Usually the only books any one wants to steal are sheer piffle, like Making Life Worth While by Douglas Fairbanks or Mother Shipton's Book of Oracles. I don't mind a man stealing books if he steals good ones!"

"You see the remarkable principles that govern this business," said Helen to Titania. They sat down by the fire and took up their knitting while the bookseller ran out to see if the volume had by any chance returned to his shelves.

"Is it there?" said Helen, when he came back.

"No," said Roger, and picked up the advertisement again. "I wonder why he wants it returned before midnight on Tuesday?"

"So he can read it in bed, I guess," said Helen. "Perhaps he suffers from insomnia."

"It's a darn shame he lost it before he had a chance to read it. I'd like to have known what he thought of it. I've got a great mind to go up and call on him."

"Charge it off to profit and loss and forget about it," said Helen. "How about that reading aloud?"

Roger ran his eye along his private shelves, and pulled down a well-worn volume.

"Now that Thanksgiving is past," he said, "my mind always turns to Christmas, and Christmas means Charles Dickens. My dear, would it bore you if we had a go at the old Christmas Stories?"

Mrs. Mifflin held up her hands in mock dismay. "He reads them to me every year at this time," she said to Titania. "Still, they're worth it. I know good old Mrs. Lirriper better than I do most of my friends."

"What is it, the Christmas Carol?" said Titania. "We had to read that in school."

"No," said Roger; "the other stories, infinitely better. Everybody gets the Carol dinned into them until they're weary of it, but no one nowadays seems to read the others. I tell you, Christmas wouldn't be Christmas to me if I didn't read these tales over again every year. How homesick they make one for the good old days of real inns and real beefsteak and real ale drawn in pewter. My dears, sometimes when I am reading Dickens I get a vision of rare sirloin with floury boiled potatoes and plenty of horse-radish, set on a shining cloth not far from a blaze of English coal——"

"He's an incorrigible visionary," said Mrs. Mifflin. "To hear him talk you might think no one had had a square meal since Dickens died. You might think that all landladies died with Mrs. Lirriper."

"Very ungrateful of him," said Titania. "I'm sure I couldn't ask for better potatoes, or a nicer hostess, than I've found in Brooklyn."

"Well, well," said Roger. "You are right, of course. And yet something went out of the world when Victorian England vanished, something that will never come again. Take the stagecoach drivers, for instance. What a racy, human type they were! And what have we now to compare with them? Subway guards? Taxicab drivers? I have hung around many an all-night lunchroom to hear the chauffeurs talk. But they are too much on the move, you can't get the picture of them the way Dickens could of his types. You can't catch that sort of thing in a snapshot, you know: you have to have a time exposure. I'll grant you, though, that lunchroom food is mighty good. The best place to eat is always a counter where the chauffeurs congregate. They get awfully hungry, you see, driving round in the cold, and when they want food they want it hot and tasty. There's a little hash-alley called Frank's, up on Broadway near 77th, where I guess the ham and eggs and French fried is as good as any Mr. Pickwick ever ate."

"I must get Edwards to take me there," said Titania. "Edwards is our chauffeur. I've been to the Ansonia for tea, that's near there."

"Better keep away," said Helen. "When Roger comes home from those places he smells so strong of onions it brings tears to my eyes."

"We've just been talking about an assistant chef," said Roger; "that suggests that I read you Somebody's Luggage, which is all about a head waiter. I have often wished I could get a job as a waiter or a bus boy, just to learn if there really are any such head waiters nowadays. You know there are all sorts of jobs I'd like to have, just to fructify my knowledge of human nature and find out whether life is really as good as literature. I'd love to be a waiter, a barber, a floorwalker——"

"Roger, my dear," said Helen, "why don't you get on with the reading?"

Roger knocked out his pipe, turned Bock out of his chair, and sat down with infinite relish to read the memorable character sketch of Christopher, the head waiter, which is dear to every lover of taverns. "The writer of these humble lines being a Waiter," he began. The knitting needles flashed with diligence, and the dog by the fender stretched himself out in the luxuriant vacancy of mind only known to dogs surrounded by a happy group of their friends. And Roger, enjoying himself enormously, and particularly pleased by the chuckles of his audience, was approaching the ever-delightful items of the coffee-room bill which is to be found about ten pages on in the first chapter—how sad it is that hotel bills are not so rendered in these times—when the bell in the shop clanged. Picking up his pipe and matchbox, and grumbling "It's always the way," he hurried out of the room.

He was agreeably surprised to find that his caller was the young advertising man, Aubrey Gilbert.

"Hullo!" he said. "I've been saving something for you. It's a quotation from Joseph Conrad about advertising."

"Good enough," said Aubrey. "And I've got something for you. You were so nice to me the other evening I took the liberty of bringing you round some tobacco. Here's a tin of Blue-Eyed Mixture, it's my favourite. I hope you'll like it."

"Bully for you. Perhaps I ought to let you off the Conrad quotation since you're so kind."