‘Shell-shock case. He’s improving, but I find he’s running after this girl Elsie. Quite OK, of course. Most respectable. Only it’s putting him off his work, and I just thought as I happened to be in here you wouldn’t mind me asking you about her. Is she a good girl? I’d like him to marry – if it’s the right sort. Might do him a lot of good.’

‘She’s right enough,’ answered the bookseller calmly and indifferently. ‘I’ve nothing against her.’

‘Had her long?’

‘Oh, some time.’

The bookseller said no more. Beneath his impassive and courteous exterior he hid a sudden spasm of profound agitation. The next minute Dr Raste departed, but immediately returned.

‘Afraid your books outside are getting a bit wet,’ he cried from the doorway.

‘Thank you. Thank you,’ said the bookseller mildly and unperturbed, thinking: ‘He must be a managing and interfering kind of man. Can’t I run my own business?’

Some booksellers kept waterproof covers for their outside display, but this one did not. He had found in practice that a few drops of rain did no harm to low-priced volumes.

3

The Bookseller at Home

At the back of the rather spacious and sombre shop (which by reason of the bays of bookshelves seemed larger than it really was) came a small room, with a doorway, but no door, into the shop. This was the proprietor’s den. Seated at his desk therein he could see through a sort of irregular lane of books to the bright oblong of the main entrance, which was seldom closed. There were more books to the cubic foot in the private room even than in the shop. They rose in tiers to the ceiling and they lay in mounds on the floor; they also covered most of the flat desk and all the window-sill; some were perched on the silent grandfather’s clock, the sole piece of furniture except the desk, a safe, and two chairs, and a step-ladder for reaching the higher shelves.

The bookseller retired to this room, as to a retreat, upon the departure of Dr Raste, and looked about, fingering one thing or another in a mild, amicable manner, and disclosing not the least annoyance, ill-humour, worry, or pressure of work. He sat down to a cumbrous old typewriter on the desk, and after looking at some correspondence, inserted a sheet of cheap letter-paper into the machine. The printed letter-head on the sheet was ‘T. T. Riceyman’, but in fulfilment of the new law the name of the actual proprietor ‘Henry Earlforward’, had been added (in violet, with an indiarubber stamp, and crookedly).

Mr Earlforward began to tap, placidly and very deliberately, as one who had the whole of eternity before him for the accomplishment of his task. A little bell rang; the machine dated from the age when typewriters had this contrivance for informing the operator that the end of a line would be reached in two or three more taps. Then a great clatter occurred at the window, and the room became dark. The blue-black blind had slipped down, discharging thick clouds of dust.

‘Dear, dear!’ murmured Mr Earlforward, groping towards the window. He failed to raise the blind again; the cord was broken. As he coughed gently in the dust, he could not recall that the blind had been once drawn since the end of the war.

‘I must have that seen to,’ he murmured, and turned on the electric light over the desk.

The porcelain shade of the lamp wore a heavy layer of dust, which, however, had not arrived from the direction of the blind, being the product of slow, secular accumulation. Mr Earlforward regretted to be compelled to use electric current – and rightly, considering the price! – but the occasion was quite special. He could not see to tap by a candle. Many a time on winter evenings he had gently told an unimportant customer in that room that a fuse had gone – and lighted a candle.

He was a solitary man, and content in his solitude; at any rate, he had been content until the sight of the newly come lady across the way began to disturb the calm deep of his mind. He was a man of routine, and happy in routine. Dr Raste’s remarks about his charwoman were seriously upsetting him. He foresaw the possibility, if the charwoman should respond to the alleged passion of her suitor, of a complete derangement of his existence. But he was not a man to go out to meet trouble. He had faith in time, which for him was endless and inexhaustible, and even in this grave matter of his domesticity he could calmly reflect that if the lady across the way (whom he had not yet spoken to) should favour him, he might be in a position to ignore the vagaries of all charwomen.