He stopped a moment at Weintraub's drug store, on the corner of Gissing Street and Wordsworth Avenue, to buy some cigarettes, unfailing solace of an agitated bosom.
It was the usual old-fashioned pharmacy of those parts of Brooklyn: tall red, green, and blue vases of liquid in the windows threw blotches of coloured light onto the pavement; on the panes was affixed white china lettering: H. WE TRAUB, DEUT CHE APOTHEKER. Inside, the customary shelves of labelled jars, glass cases holding cigars, nostrums and toilet knick-knacks, and in one corner an ancient revolving bookcase deposited long ago by the Tabard Inn Library. The shop was empty, but as he opened the door a bell buzzed sharply. In a back chamber he could hear voices. As he waited idly for the druggist to appear, Aubrey cast a tolerant eye over the dusty volumes in the twirling case. There were the usual copies of Harold MacGrath's The Man on the Box, A Girl of the Limberlost, and The Houseboat on the Styx. The Divine Fire, much grimed, leaned against Joe Chapple's Heart Throbs. Those familiar with the Tabard Inn bookcases still to be found in outlying drug-shops know that the stock has not been "turned" for many a year. Aubrey was the more surprised, on spinning the the case round, to find wedged in between two other volumes the empty cover of a book that had been torn loose from the pages to which it belonged. He glanced at the lettering on the back. It ran thus:
CARLYLE
——
OLIVER CROMWELL'S
LETTERS
AND
SPEECHES
Obeying a sudden impulse, he slipped the book cover in his overcoat pocket.
Mr. Weintraub entered the shop, a solid Teutonic person with discoloured pouches under his eyes and a face that was a potent argument for prohibition. His manner, however, was that of one anxious to please. Aubrey indicated the brand of cigarettes he wanted. Having himself coined the advertising catchword for them—They're mild—but they satisfy—he felt a certain loyal compulsion always to smoke this kind. The druggist held out the packet, and Aubrey noticed that his fingers were stained a deep saffron colour.
"I see you're a cigarette smoker, too," said Aubrey pleasantly, as he opened the packet and lit one of the paper tubes at a little alcohol flame burning in a globe of blue glass on the counter.
"Me? I never smoke," said Mr. Weintraub, with a smile which somehow did not seem to fit his surly face. "I must have steady nerves in my profession. Apothecaries who smoke make up bad prescriptions."
"Well, how do you get your hands stained that way?"
Mr. Weintraub removed his hands from the counter.
"Chemicals," he grunted. "Prescriptions—all that sort of thing."