The Haunted Bookshop Part 12

retorted Roger. "The trouble is, truth and falsehood don't come laid out in black and white--Truth and Huntruth, as the wartime joke had it.

Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth," he cried bitterly. "Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments.

I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers. I saw the world clawing itself to shreds in blind rage. I saw hardly any one brave enough to face the brutalizing absurdity as it really was, and describe it. I saw the glutton, the idler, and the fool applauding, while brave and simple men walked in the horrors of h.e.l.l. The stay-at-home poets turned it to pretty lyrics of glory and sacrifice.

Perhaps half a dozen of them have told the truth. Have you read Sa.s.soon? Or Latzko's Men in War, which was so d.a.m.ned true that the government suppressed it? Humph! Putting Truth on rations!"

He knocked out his pipe against his heel, and his blue eyes shone with a kind of desperate earnestness.

"But I tell you, the world is going to have the truth about War. We're going to put an end to this madness. It's not going to be easy. Just now, in the intoxication of the German collapse, we're all rejoicing in our new happiness. I tell you, the real Peace will be a long time coming. When you tear up all the fibres of civilization it's a slow job to knit things together again. You see those children going down the street to school? Peace lies in their hands. When they are taught in school that war is the most loathsome scourge humanity is subject to, that it smirches and fouls every lovely occupation of the mortal spirit, then there may be some hope for the future. But I'd like to bet they are having it drilled into them that war is a glorious and n.o.ble sacrifice.

"The people who write poems about the divine frenzy of going over the top are usually those who dipped their pens a long, long way from the slimy duckboards of the trenches. It's funny how we hate to face realities. I knew a commuter once who rode in town every day on the 8.13. But he used to call it the 7.73. He said it made him feel more virtuous."

There was a pause, while Roger watched some belated urchins hurrying toward school.

"I think any man would be a traitor to humanity who didn't pledge every effort of his waking life to an attempt to make war impossible in future."

"Surely no one would deny that," said t.i.tania. "But I do think the war was very glorious as well as very terrible. I've known lots of men who went over, knowing well what they were to face, and yet went gladly and humbly in the thought they were going for a true cause."

"A cause which is so true shouldn't need the sacrifice of millions of fine lives," said Roger gravely. "Don't imagine I don't see the dreadful n.o.bility of it. But poor humanity shouldn't be asked to be n.o.ble at such a cost. That's the most pitiful tragedy of it all.

Don't you suppose the Germans thought they too were marching off for a n.o.ble cause when they began it and forced this misery on the world?

They had been educated to believe so, for a generation. That's the terrible hypnotism of war, the brute ma.s.s-impulse, the pride and national spirit, the instinctive simplicity of men that makes them worship what is their own above everything else. I've thrilled and shouted with patriotic pride, like everyone. Music and flags and men marching in step have bewitched me, as they do all of us. And then I've gone home and sworn to root this evil instinct out of my soul.

G.o.d help us--let's love the world, love humanity--not just our own country! That's why I'm so keen about the part we're going to play at the Peace Conference. Our motto over there will be America Last!

Hurrah for us, I say, for we shall be the only nation over there with absolutely no axe to grind. Nothing but a pax to grind!"

It argued well for t.i.tania's breadth of mind that she was not dismayed nor alarmed at the poor bookseller's anguished harangue. She surmised sagely that he was cleansing his bosom of much perilous stuff. In some mysterious way she had learned the greatest and rarest of the spirit's gifts--toleration.

"You can't help loving your country," she said.

"Let's go indoors," he answered. "You'll catch cold out here. I want to show you my alcove of books on the war."

"Of course one can't help loving one's country," he added. "I love mine so much that I want to see her take the lead in making a new era possible. She has sacrificed least for war, she should be ready to sacrifice most for peace. As for me," he said, smiling, "I'd be willing to sacrifice the whole Republican party!"

"I don't see why you call the war an absurdity," said t.i.tania. "We HAD to beat Germany, or where would civilization have been?"

"We had to beat Germany, yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that we had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you'll find, when the Peace Conference gets to work, will be that we shall have to help Germany onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so that she can pay her indemnities--we shall have to police her cities to prevent revolution from burning her up--and the upshot of it all will be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back to health. If that isn't an absurdity, what is? That's what happens when a great nation like Germany goes insane.

"Well, we're up against some terribly complicated problems. My only consolation is that I think the bookseller can play as useful a part as any man in rebuilding the world's sanity. When I was fretting over what I could do to help things along, I came across two lines in my favourite poet that encouraged me. Good old George Herbert says:

A grain of glory mixed with humblenesse Cures both a fever and lethargicknesse.

"Certainly running a second-hand bookstore is a pretty humble calling, but I've mixed a grain of glory with it, in my own imagination at any rate. You see, books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their hopes and strivings and all their immortal parts. It's in books that most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. I never realized the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man's mind, until I read Milton's Areopagitica. To read that great outburst of splendid anger enn.o.bles the meanest of us simply because we belong to the same species of animal as Milton. Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man? The bookseller is the real Mr. Valiant-For-Truth.

"Here's my War-alcove," he went on. "I've stacked up here most of the really good books the War has brought out. If humanity has sense enough to take these books to heart, it will never get itself into this mess again. Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. There's Hardy's Dynasts for example. When you read that book you can feel it blowing up your mind. It leaves you gasping, ill, nauseated--oh, it's not pleasant to feel some really pure intellect filtered into one's brain! It hurts! There's enough T. N. T. in that book to blast war from the face of the globe. But there's a slow fuse attached to it. It hasn't really exploded yet. Maybe it won't for another fifty years.

"In regard to the War, think what books have accomplished. What was the first thing all the governments started to do--publish books! Blue Books, Yellow Books, White Books, Red Books--everything but Black Books, which would have been appropriate in Berlin. They knew that guns and troops were helpless unless they could get the books on their side, too. Books did as much as anything else to bring America into the war. Some German books helped to wipe the Kaiser off his throne--I Accuse, and Dr. Muehlon's magnificent outburst The Vandal of Europe, and Lichnowsky's private memorandum, that shook Germany to her foundations, simply because he told the truth. Here's that book Men in War, written I believe by a Hungarian officer, with its n.o.ble dedication "To Friend and Foe." Here are some of the French books--books in which the clear, pa.s.sionate intellect of that race, with its savage irony, burns like a flame. Romain Rolland's Au-Dessus de la Melee, written in exile in Switzerland; Barbusse's terrible Le Feu; Duhamel's bitter Civilization; Bourget's strangely fascinating novel The Meaning of Death. And the n.o.ble books that have come out of England: A Student in Arms; The Tree of Heaven; Why Men Fight, by Bertrand Russell--I'm hoping he'll write one on Why Men Are Imprisoned: you know he was locked up for his sentiments! And here's one of the most moving of all--The Letters of Arthur Heath, a gentle, sensitive young Oxford tutor who was killed on the Western front. You ought to read that book. It shows the entire lack of hatred on the part of the English. Heath and his friends, the night before they enlisted, sat up singing the German music they had loved, as a kind of farewell to the old, friendly joyous life. Yes, that's the kind of thing War does--wipes out spirits like Arthur Heath. Please read it. Then you'll have to read Philip Gibbs, and Lowes d.i.c.kinson and all the young poets. Of course you've read Wells already. Everybody has."

"How about the Americans?" said t.i.tania. "Haven't they written anything about the war that's worth while?"

"Here's one that I found a lot of meat in, streaked with philosophical gristle," said Roger, relighting his pipe. He pulled out a copy of Professor Latimer's Progress. "There was one pa.s.sage that I remember marking--let's see now, what was it?--Yes, here!

"It is true that, if you made a poll of newspaper editors, you might find a great many who think that war is evil. But if you were to take a census among pastors of fashionable metropolitan churches--"

"That's a bullseye hit! The church has done for itself with most thinking men... . There's another good pa.s.sage in Professor Latimer, where he points out the philosophical value of dishwashing. Some of Latimer's talk is so much in common with my ideas that I've been rather hoping he'd drop in here some day. I'd like to meet him. As for American poets, get wise to Edwin Robinson----"

There is no knowing how long the bookseller's monologue might have continued, but at this moment Helen appeared from the kitchen.

"Good gracious, Roger!" she exclaimed, "I've heard your voice piping away for I don't know how long. What are you doing, giving the poor child a Chautauqua lecture? You must want to frighten her out of the book business."

Roger looked a little sheepish. "My dear," he said, "I was only laying down a few of the principles underlying the art of bookselling----"

"It was very interesting, honestly it was," said t.i.tania brightly.

Mrs. Mifflin, in a blue check ap.r.o.n and with plump arms floury to the elbow, gave her a wink--or as near a wink as a woman ever achieves (ask the man who owns one).

"Whenever Mr. Mifflin feels very low in his mind about the business,"

she said, "he falls back on those highly idealized sentiments. He knows that next to being a parson, he's got into the worst line there is, and he tries bravely to conceal it from himself."

"I think it's too bad to give me away before Miss t.i.tania," said Roger, smiling, so t.i.tania saw this was merely a family joke.

"Really truly," she protested, "I'm having a lovely time. I've been learning all about Professor Latimer who wrote The Handle of Europe, and all sorts of things. I've been afraid every minute that some customer would come in and interrupt us."

"No fear of that," said Helen. "They're scarce in the early morning."

She went back to her kitchen.

"Well, Miss t.i.tania," resumed Roger. "You see what I'm driving at. I want to give people an entirely new idea about bookshops. The grain of glory that I hope will cure both my fever and my lethargicness is my conception of the bookstore as a power-house, a radiating place for truth and beauty. I insist books are not absolutely dead things: they are as lively as those fabulous dragons' teeth, and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. How about Bernhardi? Some of my Corn Cob friends tell me books are just merchandise. Pshaw!"

"I haven't read much of Bernard Shaw" said t.i.tania.

"Did you ever notice how books track you down and hunt you out? They follow you like the hound in Francis Thompson's poem. They know their quarry! Look at that book The Education of Henry Adams! Just watch the way it's hounding out thinking people this winter. And The Four Hors.e.m.e.n--you can see it racing in the veins of the reading people.

It's one of the uncanniest things I know to watch a real book on its career--it follows you and follows you and drives you into a corner and MAKES you read it. There's a queer old book that's been chasing me for years: The Life and Opinions of John Buncle, Esq., it's called. I've tried to escape it, but every now and then it sticks up its head somewhere. It'll get me some day, and I'll be compelled to read it.

Ten Thousand a Year trailed me the same way until I surrendered. Words can't describe the cunning of some books. You'll think you've shaken them off your trail, and then one day some innocent-looking customer will pop in and begin to talk, and you'll know he's an unconscious agent of book-destiny. There's an old sea-captain who drops in here now and then. He's simply the novels of Captain Marryat put into flesh. He has me under a kind of spell; I know I shall have to read Peter Simple before I die, just because the old fellow loves it so.

That's why I call this place the Haunted Bookshop. Haunted by the ghosts of the books I haven't read. Poor uneasy spirits, they walk and walk around me. There's only one way to lay the ghost of a book, and that is to read it."

"I know what you mean," said t.i.tania. "I haven't read much Bernard Shaw, but I feel I shall have to. He meets me at every turn, bullying me. And I know lots of people who are simply terrorized by H. G.

Wells. Every time one of his books comes out, and that's pretty often, they're in a perfect panic until they've read it."

Roger chuckled. "Some have even been stampeded into subscribing to the New Republic for that very purpose."

"But speaking of the Haunted Bookshop, what's your special interest in that Oliver Cromwell book?"

"Oh, I'm glad you mentioned it," said Roger. "I must put it back in its place on the shelf." He ran back to the den to get it, and just then the bell clanged at the door. A customer came in, and the one-sided gossip was over for the time being.

Chapter VII

Aubrey Takes Lodgings