Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  “Well, I’ve been feeling rather peakéd, until lately, keeping awake to read and read after the volunteer readers.”

  “You mean you’ve lost sleep?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Well, you mustn’t. How many books do you start with?”

  “About twenty-five.”

  “Good ones? It’s a lot, isn’t it? I didn’t suppose there were so many.”

  “Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of each.”

  “You’ll never sell them in the world! You’ll be ruined.”

  “Oh no; the publishers will take them back.”

  “How nice of them! But that’s only what painters have to do when the dealers can’t sell their pictures.”

  A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped put them about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling; but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.

  The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old customers of the old codger’s came in upon one fictitious errand and another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he mean by “critical”?

  The first bona fide buyer appeared in a little girl who could just get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire and the morning paper open before his face.

  “Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called The Egg-beater?”

  “The Egg-beater?” he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.

  “No, no!” the little girl shouted, angrily. “It ain’t a book. It’s a thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it.”

  “Well, she’s sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go to a hardware-store,” the young lady argued.

  “Ain’t this No. 1232?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, this is the right place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess she knows. She’s an old customer.”

  “The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!” the blithe young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had begun elsewhere. “The Egg-beater? What a splendid title for a story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That’s one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. The Egg-beater! Doesn’t it suggest desert islands and penguins’ nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they’ve got sick of plain eggs, and can’t for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one — makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn’t let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study fireplace always.”

  This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort’s fire from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch for the old codger’s old customers coming to buy hardware. There might be copy in it.

  But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort feared. Instead there came bona fide book-buyers, who asked some for a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what they wanted in Erlcort’s selection.

  “Why don’t you stock it?” they demanded.

  “Because I don’t think it’s worth reading.”

  “Oh, indeed!” The sarcastic customers were commonly ladies. “I thought you let the public judge of that!”

  “There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I sell only the books that I think worth reading. If you had noticed my sign—”

  “Oh!” the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without buying.

  There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment, but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book, and he had to say, “Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I didn’t think it quite—”

  “But here is The Green Bay Tree, and The Biggest Toad in the Puddle, and—”

  “I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking.”

  Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.

  “I’m just through the customs, and I’ve motored up here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I recommended. It’s dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn’t sell that dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the ship’s library and came on that frightful episode. You know! Where — How could you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so? It’s utterly immoral!”

  “I don’t agree with you,” Erlcort answered, dryly. “I consider that passage one of the finest in modern fiction — one of the most ennobling and illumining—”

  “Ennobling!” The lady made a gesture of horror. “Very well! If that is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I’ve got to say is—”

  But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the assistant and said, gently, “I believe I should like this book, please,” and paid for it and went out.

  It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his assistant: “I’ll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn’t stay any longer.”

  “All right, sir,” the girl said, and went into the little closet at the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?

  When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pec
uniarily. In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority the president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having so many old books. “My idea was that it would be a place where one could come for the best of the new books. But here! Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!” She chided him merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say he should not do anything in holiday books. “I had expected to get all my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort,” she crowed, but for the present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude, almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect with her: that book of the dreadful episode.

  He wished Margaret Green had been there; but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, “What if it should be she now?” But when he went to peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without asking her; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.

  His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort’s door in it to argue the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled him to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn’t Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.

  They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.

  There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger, and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.

  He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered vaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.

  He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given him, he was aware of having enjoyed it — perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it. But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in, and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends to look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches in their several cities.

  They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits, too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he had no right to.

  His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had been getting at the artist’s-materials store near by. “Don’t bother about them,” she said, “but take me to the fire as fast as you can,” and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, “Where have you been all the time?”

  “Waiting here for you,” he answered.

  “Well, you needn’t. I wasn’t going to come — or at least not till you sent for me, or s
aid you wanted my advice.”

  “I don’t want your advice now.”

  “I didn’t come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn’t I should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with your ridiculous critical bookstore?”

  “Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say to the authors when they don’t want to publish their books.”

  “Yes, I know that saying. Why didn’t you go in for the holiday books?”

  “How did you know I didn’t?”

  “Lots of people told me.”

  “Well, then, I’ll tell you why. I would have had to read them first, and no human being could do that — not even a volunteer link in an endless chain.”

  “I see. But since Christmas?”

  “You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead.”

  “Yes, so I’ve been told.” She had flung her wet veil back over her shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put her in mind of them, and she said, “Those immoral mirrors are shameful.”

  “They’ve sold more of the best books than anything else.”

  “No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down.”

  “Very well. I didn’t put them up.” He laid a log of hickory on the fire. “I’m not doing it to dry you quicker.”

  “Oh, I know. I’ll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines, or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience, and you could sell them without reading; they’re always good.”

  “There’s an idea in that. I believe I’ll try it.”

  Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a good many of his best books, and she said: “Well! I don’t see why you should be discouraged.”