Stranded

“No,” I thought, “I won’t take any books with me. I want a rest. I shall swim. I shall catch fish. There is sure to be a billiard-room in that pub., and pretty certain to be a few people who play bridge. The overtaxed brain must be allowed relaxation. So good-bye, Plato; good-bye, Spinoza; good-bye, Samuel Rawson Gardiner; good-bye, Freud. I won’t take any of you.”

I had been in the place twenty-four hours, and had plumbed the depths of my neighbours’ incapacity to play any games of skill or chance (except possibly—I did not ask this—loo and vingt-et-un), when, sauntering down the main, and indeed the only, street, I caught sight of the words, “Grocer, Chemist, Tobacconist, Draper, and Circulating Library.” It would be ungracious, I felt, to let such versatility go unrecognized. Besides, one might as well take a novel or two out with one in the boat. It might make the intervals between the bites seem a little shorter. So in I went.

A young girl with a pigtail escorted me past the Quaker Oats and the Gold Flakes, under a little low doorway and into a back room. “A shilling deposit, and twopence on each book,” she said; and left me to the shelves. There were books there all right: about two thousand of them, reaching from floor to ceiling on both sides. There was no sort of order, alphabetical or otherwise, so it was no good expecting to find a particular author right off. The only thing for it was beginning somewhere and going steadily along the rows.

B. M. Croker: yes, I think I read a great many of hers in my youth. They were about penniless young ladies going to India and getting married. It is no good tackling this one. The Gateless Barrier, by Lucas Malet; that was about spiritualism, and pretty average tosh it was; I shall probably come to Sir Richard Calmady presently, but I shall give him a miss too. The Iron Pirate: I liked that rather, but it would be a pity not to like it so much now. I feel the same about Saracinesca, The Witch of Prague, and In the Palace of the King, which are all in a lump together where some late devotee has replaced them. Marion Crawford, upon whose every word my childhood hung, I dare not attempt you again; even A Cigarette Maker’s Romance and the chronicle of Mr. Isaacs (who enjoyed Kant and deluded me, for a time, into the belief that I should like him too) will be more dear to the memory if they are not restored to sight. Count Hannibal: that was the man who either massacred somebody or escaped massacre on St. Bartholomew’s Day. He had a great square jaw and eyes that made you jump; and women cowered and obeyed when he emitted a short, sharp oath or looked like emitting one. William Black I never liked at any time, so nothing by him need detain me. Flames? No. Dodo? Oh dear, no. Ships that pass in the Night? No. There was edelweiss in it, and an old man who was otherworldly and read nothing but Gibbon. Queen Victoria thought highly of it, but I don’t want to read it again. Nor Red Pottage either. The husband and the other man (I think) had a duel. They drew straws, and the man with the shortest straw had to kill himself. What the lady thought about it I don’t remember. But one of them was a Lord, New Zealand came in somewhere, and at suitable places in the conversation a moth would flutter or a kingfisher flash by. It is by touches like these that one can distinguish really imaginative literature, but I am not tempted.

It is not reasonable to expect a man at this date to return to A Yellow Aster, or Moths by Ouida. As for The Silence of Dean Maitland, the predicament of that respected ecclesiastic with the undisclosed sin on his conscience is still fresh in my mind, and I still remember how my elders, when it first came out, debated whether such a book ought to be written, and whether Maxwell Gray was a man or a woman. Of The Sorrows of Satan I recall little of the plot, except that the Devil was a gentleman. I think that the first sentences were: “Do you know what it is to be poor? Not with that—poverty that—on ten thousand a year, but with that grinding poverty that,” etc. How many years ago is it since that immortal paragraph, reproduced in facsimile from the author’s own script, appeared in the Strand Magazine, with pictures of the great novelist in divers postures? It would be Ethel M. Dell now, I suppose; but they don’t seem to keep Miss Dell’s works in this Circulating Library, of which the circulation seems to have stopped many, many, many years since. They keep instead Frankfort Moore and G. B. Burgin.

Anthony Hope now. Here is The Intrusions of Peggy. There was a grizzled inventor who lived in the Temple, and he had a daughter (?) who shone like a sunbeam amidst the dusty shades of the law. Anthony Hope, who was very nearly a first-rate writer, must have put it better than that; but I’m sure that that is what it was about. Seton Merriman now. This is better. But will or will not a reperusal of The Vultures and Roden’s Corner diminish the respect that still survives in me for him? He gave me immense pleasure at one time; can I risk it? I don’t know.

With meditations like the above I roamed up and down before the frayed and wrinkled backs of these veterans, fascinated by so systematic a recovery of the familiar. Then I remembered that the sun was shining in a blue sky, only slightly fleeced with cloud; that the salt wind blowing shoreward was driving broken sunlight over the waves; that there were as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it; and that I must really take care of my health. Catching sight of She and Many Cargoes, which I have read at least ten times apiece, but am always good for again, I detached them from their faded companions and took them into the front shop, meditating upon the astonishing sluggishness of this shop, where even Mrs. Barclay had not yet penetrated and Garvice was a cloudy speculation in the far future.

I paid my one-and-fourpence and stepped out on to the cobblestones. As I passed into the sun, it occurred to me that it was not surprising that even the minor works in the library were like old friends. For—and things like these do strangely remain known, yet for a time, unrelated—I spent a summer in this village fifteen years ago.