t.i.tania 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 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 ap.r.o.n. 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.
t.i.tania 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? Pay-day doesn"t come until next Friday!"
"Just one blow-out," 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 second-hand 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 t.i.tle 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. "t.i.tania, 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, t.i.tania"s blue eyes were sparkling above her soft tippet.
"I applaud your taste in furs," said Roger. "That is just the colour 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 t.i.tania.
"What an adorable little place," said t.i.tania, looking round at the bookshop"s s.p.a.ce of private pavement, which was sunk below the street level. "You could put tables out here and serve tea in summer time."
"The first thing every morning," continued Roger, "I set out the ten-cent stuff in 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 fifty or sixty 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 it"s tripe, but it serves its purpose."
"Aren"t they rather dirty?" said t.i.tania doubtfully, looking at some little blue Rollo books, on which the siftings of generations had acc.u.mulated. "Would you mind if I dusted them off a bit?"
"It"s almost unheard of in the second-hand trade," said Roger; "but it might make them look better."
t.i.tania ran inside, borrowed a duster from Helen, and began housecleaning the grimy boxes, while Roger chatted away in high spirits. Bock already noticing the new order of things, squatted on the doorstep with an air of being a party to the conversation. Morning pedestrians on Gissing Street pa.s.sed by, wondering who the bookseller"s engaging a.s.sistant 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 t.i.tania 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."
t.i.tania 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 Dere Mable."
Roger chuckled. "I hope you don"t think I"m a mere highbrow," 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 intentionally flavoured with vanilla.
Confectionery soon disgusts the palate, whether you find it in Marcus Aurelius or Doctor 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?"
t.i.tania, 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 gra.s.shopper; the masculine plods as the ant.
"I see there"s a new Mable book coming," she said. "It"s called That"s Me All Over Mable, and the newsstand clerk at the Octagon 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 "em. I"m afraid I haven"t read Dere Mable. 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 Dere 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 theatre at a Sat.u.r.day matinee, when the house goes dark and the footlights set the bottom of the curtain in a glow, and the latecomers tank over your feet climbing into their seats----"
"Isn"t it an adorable moment!" cried t.i.tania.
"Yes, it is," said Roger; "but it makes me sad to see what tosh is handed out to that eager, expectant 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 subst.i.tutes for joy and sorrow are put over on them! Day after day I see people streaming into theatres 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 appet.i.te left for the real grain."
t.i.tania 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 amus.e.m.e.nt is! Laughter and prayer are the two n.o.blest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.
To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap G.o.ds. To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit."
t.i.tania 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 G.o.d 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 worth while. 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 remould the world nearer to our heart"s desire. Look here, here"s something I found the other day in John Masefield"s preface to one of his plays: "The truth and rapture of man are holy things, not lightly 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 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 house the hopes and gentlenesses and dreams of men and women, and wondered if they were all wrong, discredited, defeated. Wondered if the world were still merely a jungle of fury. I think I"d have gone balmy if it weren"t 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... . Aye, a deadly path indeed. The German military men weren"t idlers, but they were gluttons 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 t.i.tania, 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 Browne 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 n.o.ble 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 b.o.o.b, they called him. Well, I say bravo for b.o.o.bs! I daresay most of the apostles were b.o.o.bs--or maybe they called them bolsheviks."
t.i.tania 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 the Third called Ben Franklin a bolshevik,"