Verschoyle swept aside her reluctance to accept gifts from him, and she
allowed him to furnish her rooms for her upon condition that he never
came there without her permission. He said,--
'Why shouldn't I have the pleasure of indulging my desire to give you
everything in the world? People will talk! ... People talk anyhow in
London. If we were seen walking together down Piccadilly, there would
be talk. They will say I am going to marry you, but we know
different.... Your way of living is exactly my ideal, absolute
independence, peace, and privacy. We're rather alike in that. It
seems so odd that we should be living with these people whose whole aim
in life is publicity.'
They had many happy hours together reading and discussing the books
which he bought for her by the armful at a shop in Charing Cross Road,
where, open to the street, were piles of books almost blatantly
subversive of society--Nietsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist
tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every
sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured
upon a special order.... It was a very fierce shop. Its woodwork was
painted scarlet, and above the shelves in gilt letters were such names
as Morris, Marx, Bakounin, Kropotkin, Lassalle, and mottoes such as
'The workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains.'
It was Clara who discovered the shop in her wanderings through the West
End, which she desired to know even to its remotest crannies, and its
oddity seized her imagination when she discovered that for all its
fierceness it was kept by a gentle little old Scotsman, who most
ferociously desired the destruction of society, but most gently helped
all who needed help and most wholly sympathised with all, and they were
many, who turned to him for sympathy.... The frequenters of his shop
were poor, mostly long-haired eaters of nuts, and drinkers of ideas.
There were young men who hovered in the background of his shop arguing,
chatting, filling in the time they had to spend away from their
lodgings in the frequent intervals between their attempts to do work
for which their convictions made them unfitted. They believed, as he
did, in the nobility of work, but could find none that was not ignoble.
It was his boast that he had no book in his shop in which he did not
believe.
The beautiful and elegant young lady who walked into his shop one day
astonished and delighted him with her radiance. She was the kind of
accident that does not often happen to a humble Anarchist bookseller.
When she came again and again, he warmed to her, and recommended books,
and gave her Prince Kropotkin's _Memoirs_ as a present, at least he
gave her the second volume, for he could not find the first.... He
always hotly denied that books were stolen from his open shop, but
admitted that they were sometimes 'borrowed' by his young friends.
The story of Kropotkin's escape from the fortress moved Clara deeply,
and she read it to Verschoyle in her rooms.
'And that man is still alive,' she said, 'here in England, where we go
round and round hunting fame and money.... He was like you,
Verschoyle, in just such a position as you, but he found it intolerable
and went to prison.'
'Ah! but that was in Russia, where it is easy to go to prison. If I
tried and tried they wouldn't send me. I'm too rich. They wouldn't do
it. If I became an Anarchist, they would just laugh because they don't
believe that society can ever be upset.'
'I'm quite sure I didn't go into that shop for nothing. Something is
going to happen to me,' said Clara.
'I think quite enough has happened to you. Don't you? ... What a
restless little creature you are! Here you are with everything at your
feet, the greatest artist, the richest bachelor in London at your
disposal, and you want something to happen to you.'
'I don't want it. I say that I feel it must come.
'You're before your time, my dear. That's what is the matter with you.
Women aren't independent yet. They are still clinging to men. That is
what I cannot stand about them. I should hate to have a woman clinging
to my money. Still more should I hate to have one clinging to myself.'
'But you ought to marry. You would be happier.'