Читать книгу The Call of the Town: A Tale of Literary Life - Sir John Alexander Hammerton - Страница 9

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It was a perfect day in "the sweet o' the year" when the carrier's waggon creaked along the highway to Stratford with Henry Charles perched beside the red-faced driver.

There is, perhaps, no county in all England so full of charm in spring-time and the early summer as leafy Ardenshire. The road on which the hope of Hampton travelled is typical of many in that fair countryside. Gleaming white in the morning sunshine, it lies snug between high banks of prodigal growth, bramble and trailing arbutus, backed by green bushes, among which the massy white clots of elder-blossom look like snowy souvenirs of the winter that has fled, with here and there a strong note of colour struck by swaying foxgloves. The lanes that steal away from the highway are often as beautiful as those of glorious Devon, and all bear promise that if the wanderer will but come with them he will surely find the veritable

"Bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlip and the nodding violet grows;

Quite over-canopy'd with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine."

But it was not of the wild beauties by the way that Henry thought as onward creaked the waggon. Nor was it for long that the picture of his mother's face and the light of violet eyes occupied his mind. His thoughts ran forward swifter than ever the train would go which in later years was to bring Hampton Bagot within half-an-hour's journey of Stratford.

Twice before had he travelled this same way, and both times to the same place. But now all was changed. The carrier would crack his whip on his homeward way that evening and sing his snatches of song, but not for Henry.

For the first time in his life the youth would stretch himself upon an unfamiliar bed, and hear voices that had never spoken to him before. He would tread the streets where once the steps of the immortal bard had been as common as his own comings and goings at the Hampton Post Office. Till now he had dreamed what life might be in a town larger than his native hamlet, and this night he would begin to know, to live it.

The wayside wild flowers, so recently part and parcel of his daily life, paled before his eyes when he thought of the temple of books toward which his course was bent. The smell of the new bindings, and the mouldy suggestions of old volumes, were sweeter to him for the moment than the scented hedgerows. Already he had built up for himself the figure of his Mr. Ephraim Griggs.

A man of medium height, somewhat bent in the back, high forehead, intelligent face, eyes aided with spectacles in their constant task of examining the treasures stacked around.

His hair? Grey—yes, of course, it must be grey; thin to baldness on the top, but abundant at the back of the head. Clothes? Old-fashioned, no doubt; negligent, certainly; yet not altogether slovenly.

He saw the figure, vivid as life, moving about the shop, talking with innocent display of erudition to some wealthy customer, or half reluctantly selling a costly volume from his shelves.

This dream-companion kept him company all the way, and it was only in a listless fashion that he chatted with the carrier, to whom books were no better than common lumber.

Stratford was reached early in the afternoon, and as the waggon rumbled over the Clopton Bridge, Henry thought that the scene presented here by the soft flowing Avon, with the spire of Shakespeare's Church softly etched on the sky, and the strange masonry of the world-famed Memorial Theatre in the middle distance, was the fairest man could see.

The thoughtfulness of his father had arranged for Henry a lodging near to Rother Street, and thither the carrier undertook to drive him before stopping at the market-hall to distribute his goods. On the way up the broad and pleasant High Street Henry was excited, for there, to his joy, he beheld the name of Ephraim Griggs upon a window well stocked with books—smaller, perhaps, and dustier than he had pictured it in his own mind.

Mrs. Filbert, the landlady with whom Edward John had arranged for Henry's board and lodging, was a widow of more than middle age, who had brought up a considerable family, most of whom were now "doing for themselves." In summertime she often let her best rooms to visitors, but nothing rejoiced her more than the prospect of a permanent lodger. She was fortunate already in having one who came under that description, and whose acquaintance we may make in due time.

Mrs. Filbert was a motherly soul, and set Henry at his ease at once when she took him to the little bedroom he was to share with one of her sons, a lad about his own age. Nor would she allow him to fare forth into the town until he had disposed of some dinner she had kept for him, suspecting that his means did not run to the luxury of a meal at one of the country inns on the way from Hampton.

When Henry had freed himself from the motherly attentions of Mrs. Filbert, and again found himself in the High Street, it was late afternoon. With a beating heart he walked direct to the shop of Mr. Griggs, but as his engagement commenced the next morning, he did not intend to present himself to his future employer that afternoon.

His purpose was merely a preliminary inspection of the place, for on his two previous visits to Stratford the establishment which had suddenly become his centre of interest had not been noticed by him.

The window was dustier than he had supposed from his sight of it while passing with the carrier, and many of the books that were offered for sale were disappointingly commonplace. As for the collection in the window-box, labelled in crude blue letters, "All in this row 2d. each," he was amazed that Mr. Griggs should exhibit them. For the most part they were old school-books, and he remembered, with a sudden sense of wealth unreckoned, that he had quite a number at home as good as these. He was not aware that only a summer ago a sharp visitor had picked up from this bundle a volume which he sold in London for £9.

Timidly did Henry peep in at the doorway, which was narrower than he had expected, and a trifle shabby so far as painting was concerned.

So much as he could see of the shop inside accorded but little better with his mental picture of the place. Books were there in abundance, many of them presenting some degree of order, and as many more seemingly in hopeless confusion.

He got a glimpse of a counter, at which he supposed the business of the place was transacted, but the inadequate back view of the figure of a young man bending at a desk in a gloomy corner was the only thing suggesting life.

His first peep assuredly was not what he had looked forward to, but who knew to what hidden chambers of interest the door at the far side of the front shop gave access?

Afraid to further pursue his inspection, Henry moved away somewhat hurriedly when the young man at the desk showed signs of moving towards the door, having probably scented a customer.

He wandered next to Shakespeare's Church, lingering on the way at the Memorial, then fresh from the hands of the builders, and loudly out of harmony with everything else in Stratford. Anon he was peeping in at the old Grammar School and the Guild Hall, and tea-time found him loitering around the Birthplace, with half a desire to set out then and there to Anne Hathaway's Cottage.

The business of dealing in Shakespeare's memory had not yet developed into Stratford's staple industry, nor had local boyhood begun to earn precarious pennies by waylaying visitors and rehearsing to them in parrot fashion the leading dates in the life of the poet. But the principal show-place of the town had long been attracting pilgrims from the ends of the earth, and for the first time in his life Henry heard the English language produced with strong nasal accompaniment by a group of brisk-looking young men and women issuing from the shrine in Market Street.

There was little sleep for him that night, nor was the unusual circumstances of his sharing a bed with another youth the cause of it. He wondered at his ability to peep in at Mr. Griggs's door without entering precipitately and avowing himself the new assistant. But his father's instructions on this point had been explicit. He had to present himself at the proper hour of the morning; neither early nor late, but at the hour precisely. It would have been unbusiness-like to stroll in the previous afternoon, and if business-like habits were not acquired now they never would be.

But Henry had read so recently the wonderful story of "Monte Cristo," and was so impressed by the hero's habit of keeping his appointments to the second, that he required no advice on this point.

"Suppose I go down in the morning and enter the shop when the market-clock is striking the fifth note of nine. That would be a good start to make!"

Thus he thought, and thus he did. But alas! the new Monte Cristo found no appreciative audience awaiting him.

For a moment he stood at the counter in the middle of the shop, with half a mind to run away. His entry had been unheralded, unobserved. No one was visible. But hesitating whether to knock on the counter, as customers at Hampton Post Office were wont to do, or take down a book until someone appeared, he became aware of certain sounds issuing from behind a wooden partition which enclosed a corner of the shop.

Henry shuffled his feet noisily, and plucked up courage to rap on the counter, for the market-clock had ceased its striking by quite a minute, and no one had witnessed his romantic punctuality.

In answer to the knocking there appeared from behind the partition a youngster of some twelve years, who seemed to have been disturbed in some pleasant but undutiful occupation. On seeing that the person at the counter was merely a youth, just old enough to make a boy wish to be his age, but not old enough to inspire him with respect, the youngster, without a word of inquiry or apology, stooped down and lifted on to the counter a little bull pup, which he stroked with all the pride of a fancier, challenging Henry with his eyes to produce its equal.

Loftily indifferent to the behaviour of the boy, and secretly wondering if Monte Cristo had ever been so absurdly received on any of the occasions when he opened a door as the clock struck the appointed hour of meeting, Henry said, with a touch of indignation in his voice:

"I am the new assistant, and I wish to see Mr. Griggs."

The boy gave a whistle of surprise, and eyed Henry boldly. Hastily stowing away the pup in some secret receptacle under the counter, he proceeded to the side-door, taking a backward glance at the new assistant, and disclosing under his snub nose a very wide and smiling mouth.

"Shop!" bawled the lad, as he opened the door.

Without another word, and leaving the door ajar, he went and perched himself on a stool, from which position he brazenly surveyed the new assistant.

Henry waited, quailing somewhat under the searching gaze of this juvenile servitor in the temple of literature. He surveyed at leisure the walls so thickly stacked with dusty volumes, and wondered why the youngster was not cleaning them or arranging the bundles on the floor, instead of sitting on the stool swaying his legs idly.

How different it all was from what he had expected! The books were there and in abundance, yet they were heaped about more like potatoes in a greengrocer's than things worthy of respect. It was difficult to connect this youthful dog-fancier with literary pursuits, and Henry could only hope that Mr. Griggs in his person would make up for what his establishment had lost in contrast with his ideal picture of it.

It was some little time before the shuffle of slip-shod feet was heard behind the back-door. The new assistant grew expectant. The shuffle suggested the approach of the venerable book-lover himself. There was a pause, during which Henry's heart thumped against his bosom, and then a large and tousled head was thrust inquiringly beyond the door, in a way that suggested a desire to conceal the absence of a collar and tie.

The head belonged to Mr. Ephraim Griggs, dealer in second-hand books and prints.

"Oh, it's young Charles, is it?" said Mr. Griggs, displaying a little more of his person, and showing that he was in the act of drying his hands. "Just come in here, will you?" he went on, jerking his head back towards the passage. "I want your advice."

Wondering on what subject he might be capable of advising the veteran, he went through to the passage, where Mr. Griggs, having finished with the towel, offered him a cold and flabby hand.

Henry felt tempted to laugh, and probably a little inclined to cry, when he stood before his employer, and found that his mental portrait of the man tallied in no particular with the person facing him.

There was little of the book-worm about Mr. Griggs. He did not even wear spectacles; an offence which Henry found hardest to forgive. Not so tall as Edward John, nor yet so stout, he was a long-bearded fellow, with a nasty habit of breathing heavily through his nose, as if that organ were clogged with dust from his books. As he stood before Henry he was in his shirt-sleeves, and, judging by the latter, the garment as a whole was ready for the wash. His waistcoat was glossy with droppings of snuff; his trousers, Henry noticed, were very baggy at the knees and appeared to be a size too large for him; while his feet were encased in ragged carpet slippers.

Evidently Mr. Griggs was in some trouble, and while Henry was speculating as to what the cause of his anxiety might be, the learned bookseller said, somewhat anxiously, and in a thin, wheezy voice:

"Tell me, do you know anythink about poultry?"

"Poultry!" gasped Henry.

"Yes," replied Mr. Griggs, with a solemnity which struck the new assistant as absurdly pathetic. "Hens," he explained further; "my best one is down with croup or somethink o' the kind. Your father has taken a many prizes with his birds, and I thought you might know all about 'em. I've never had great success with 'em myself. Come outside and tell me what you think."

Without waiting for a reply, the bookseller shuffled through the passage into a back-yard, and the youth followed as one in a dream.

The yard was almost entirely devoted to poultry, and if Mr. Griggs was an amateur at the pursuit, he had at least prepared for it in no mean way, three sides of the place being taken up with wired hen-runs and a wooden house for his stock. In a compartment by itself, gasping and choking, lay the object of the old man's solicitude.

"The finest layer I ever had," he declared despondingly. "An egg a day as reg'lar as clockwork. I'd rather lose two of the others."

His sorrow deepened when Henry said that he had never seen a hen in that state before, and did not know what was wrong with it.

"Then I'll be forced to ask old John Shakespeare, the grocer, what to do; although I 'ate the man, and don't want to be beholden to him for anythink. But he's our champion breeder, and what must be, must be."

Shakespeare, grocer, hens! Henry doubted seriously if his ears were doing their duty, but there was no mistaking the anxiety of Mr. Ephraim Griggs. He could not have been more perturbed if his wife had been dangerously ill. His wife? That reminded Henry that he had heard his father say Mrs. Griggs had been dead these many years. Perhaps that was why the bookseller was so untidy.

"You had better go back to the shop, my lad," said he, in a voice which meant he was now resigned to the worst, "and take a look round. I'll be in there directly."

When Henry returned to the shop he found that Mr. Pemble, the senior assistant, had arrived; but for the moment that young gentleman was so engrossed with the study of his features in a broken looking-glass that he did not notice Henry's entrance. Mr. Pemble's anxiety seemed to be centred around the tardy growth of an incipient moustache, which, when an illuminating ray of sunshine fell upon his upper lip, was readily visible to the naked eye.

A somewhat prim and characterless person, with more teeth than his mouth seemed able to accommodate, Mr. Pemble was the bête noir of Jenks, the dog-loving shop-boy, who, with a sly wink to Henry and an expressive grimace, indicated unmistakably his opinion of the senior assistant.

This was a sign to the new-comer that if he cared to make common cause against Mr. Pemble, Jenks was with him to the death; but Henry, either in his rustic simplicity or his lofty indifference to the youngster, did not respond, and waited for Mr. Pemble to languidly acknowledge his presence.

"Ah, you're the new assistant Mr. Griggs was speaking of," he said at length.

"Yes, sir," replied Henry, and at the delicious sound of the flattering "sir" Mr. Pemble endeavoured to tug his laggard moustache. "Mr. Griggs says I'm to have a look round until he is ready," Henry went on, casting a dubious glance at the walls and the thickly-strewn floor.

"Oh, that's all right," drawled Mr. Pemble, who now turned his attention to some small parcels that had arrived by the morning's post.

In a little while Mr. Griggs appeared, fully clothed, by the addition of a faded black morning coat and a creased white collar. He beckoned Henry into the back-parlour, which served as a sort of office and a general lumber-room.

"Sit you down, my lad, and let's see what we have here," he said, pointing to a crazy arm-chair beside an old Pembroke table, on which a broken ink-bottle and some rusty pens lay, together with a muddle of notepaper.

The bookseller then turned to a large case of old volumes recently acquired at the sale of a country house, and picking up several of these he flapped the dust from them, puffing and blowing like a walrus. Glancing briefly at the title-pages of the first two, he threw them in a corner with a brief but emphatic "Rubbish!" The next fished forth satisfied him better, and taking up one of his latest catalogues, he showed Henry how to write down the title and description of the book.

So he proceeded for a time, initiating the youth in the art of cataloguing, which with Mr. Griggs did not take a particularly exalted form. He eschewed such aids to ready references as alphabetical entry, and was content so long as the principal items of his stock appeared on his printed list, quite irrespective of order or value. These lists, villainously printed, were a source of unfailing amusement to the educated book-buyers into whose hands they fell, for every page contained the most hilarious blunders, whereby the best-known classics assumed new and surprising disguises.

Henry took to the simple work eagerly, and displayed far greater interest than his employer did in the books that came to light as the case was gradually emptying. Now and again during the forenoon Mr. Griggs would suddenly disappear from the parlour, as his thoughts reverted to his suffering Dorking, only to return from his visit to the poultry with a gloomy shake of the head.

When dinner-time arrived, Henry and Jenks were left in charge of the shop while Mr. Pemble went home to dine, and the old bookseller shambled upstairs to some of the unknown domestic rooms. Jenks, unabashed by Henry's obvious determination not to familiarise with him, boldly asked if he knew how to play that great and universal game of boyhood called "knifey." When Henry said that he didn't, and hadn't time to think of it, Jenks was filled with disgust, for he found it a delightful pastime when the hours hung heavy on his hands, and he had been at the trouble to import a specially soft piece of wood for the purpose of playing "knifey" whenever an opportunity occurred. Failing Henry's assistance, he brazenly proceeded to engage in the pastime by himself.

The task of cataloguing occupied but little of the afternoon, and for the remainder of the day there was nothing to do but idling. Indeed, Henry found himself wondering by what means Mr. Griggs contrived to exist, as nothing seemed to matter beyond his devotion to the poultry and Mr. Pemble's frequent inspections of his upper lip.

On the whole, the impression left by his first day at business was by no means bright, as he could not suppose there would be books to catalogue every day, and he had not seen more than half-a-dozen customers in the shop.