THE REAL AND THE IDEAL
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 2_d._
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 L9.
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 _bete 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.