"Maybe I ought to tip the police off about this business," he thought. "It looks wrong to me. But I have a hankering to work the thing out on my own. I'd have a wonderful stand-in with old man Chapman if I saved that girl from anything.… I've heard of gangs of kidnappers.… No, I don't like the looks of things a little bit. I think that bookseller is half cracked, anyway. He doesn't believe in advertising! The idea of Chapman trusting his daughter in a place like that——"
The thought of playing knight errant to something more personal and romantic than an advertising account was irresistible. "I'll slip over to Brooklyn as soon as it gets dark this evening," he said to himself. "I ought to be able to get a room somewhere along that street, where I can watch that bookshop without being seen, and find out what's haunting it. I've got that old .22 popgun of mine that I used to use up at camp. I'll take it along. I'd like to know more about Weintraub's drug store, too. I didn't fancy the map of Herr Weintraub, not at all. To tell the truth, I had no idea old man Carlyle would get mixed up in anything as interesting as this."
He found a romantic exhilaration in packing a handbag. Pyjamas, hairbrushes, toothbrush, toothpaste—("What an ad it would be for the Chinese Paste people," he thought, "if they knew I was taking a tube of their stuff on this adventure!")—his .22 revolver, a small green box of cartridges of the size commonly used for squirrel-shooting, a volume of O. Henry, a safety razor and adjuncts, a pad of writing paper.… At least six nationally advertised articles, he said to himself, enumerating his kit. He locked his bag, dressed, and went downstairs for lunch. After lunch he lay down for a rest, as his head was still very painful. But he was not able to sleep. The thought of Titania Chapman's blue eyes and gallant little figure came between him and slumber. He could not shake off the conviction that some peril was hanging over her. Again and again he looked at his watch, rebuking the lagging dusk. At half-past four he set off for the subway. Half-way down Thirty-third Street a thought struck him. He returned to his room, got out a pair of opera glasses from his trunk, and put them in his bag.
It was blue twilight when he reached Gissing Street. The block between Wordsworth Avenue and Hazlitt Street is peculiar in that on one side—the side where the Haunted Bookshop stands—the old brownstone dwellings have mostly been replaced by small shops of a bright, lively character. At the Wordsworth Avenue corner, where the L swings round in a lofty roaring curve, stands Weintraub's drug store; below it, on the western side, a succession of shining windows beacon through the evening. Delicatessen shops with their appetizing medley of cooked and pickled meats, dried fruits, cheeses, and bright coloured jars of preserves; small modistes with generously contoured wax busts of coiffured ladies; lunch rooms with the day's menu typed and pasted on the outer pane; a French rotisserie where chickens turn hissing on the spits before a tall oven of rosy coals; florists, tobacconists, fruit-dealers, and a Greek candy-shop with a long soda fountain shining with onyx marble and coloured glass lamps and nickel tanks of hot chocolate; a stationery shop, now stuffed for the holiday trade with Christmas cards, toys, calendars, and those queer little suede-bound volumes of Kipling, Service, Oscar Wilde, and Omar Khayyam that appear every year toward Christmas time—such modest and cheerful merchandising makes the western pavement of Gissing Street a jolly place when the lights are lit. All the shops were decorated for the Christmas trade; the Christmas issues of the magazines were just out and brightened the newsstands with their glowing covers. This section of Brooklyn has a tone and atmosphere peculiarly French in some parts: one can quite imagine oneself in some smaller Parisian boulevard frequented by the petit bourgeois. Midway in this engaging and animated block stands the Haunted Bookshop. Aubrey could see its windows lit, and the shelved masses of books within. He felt a severe temptation to enter, but a certain bashfulness added itself to his desire to act in secret. There was a privy exhilaration in his plan of putting the bookshop under an unsuspected surveillance, and he had the emotion of one walking on the frontiers of adventure.
So he kept on the opposite side of the street, which still maintains an unbroken row of quiet brown fronts, save for the movie theatre at the upper corner, opposite Weintraub's. Some of the basements on this side are occupied now by small tailors, laundries, and lace-curtain cleaners (lace curtains are still a fetish in Brooklyn), but most of the houses are still merely dwellings. Carrying his bag, Aubrey passed the bright halo of the movie theatre. Posters announcing THE RETURN OF TARZAN showed a kind of third chapter of Genesis scene with an Eve in a sports suit. ADDED ATTRACTION, Mr. AND Mrs. SIDNEY DREW, he read.
A little way down the block he saw a sign VACANCIES in a parlour window. The house was nearly opposite the bookshop, and he at once mounted the tall steps to the front door and rang.
A fawn-tinted coloured girl, of the kind generally called "Addie," arrived presently. "Can I get a room here?" he asked. "I don't know, you'd better see Miz' Schiller," she said, without rancour. Adopting the customary compromise of untrained domestics, she did not invite him inside, but departed, leaving the door open to show that there was no ill will.
Aubrey stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him. In an immense mirror the pale cheese-coloured flutter of a gas jet was remotely reflected. He noticed the Landseer engraving hung against wallpaper designed in facsimile of large rectangles of gray stone, and the usual telephone memorandum for the usual Mrs. J. F. Smith (who abides in all lodging houses) tucked into the frame of the mirror. Will Mrs. Smith please call Stockton 6771, it said. A carpeted stair with a fine old mahogany balustrade rose into the dimness. Aubrey, who was thoroughly familiar with lodgings, knew instinctively that the fourth, ninth, tenth, and fourteenth steps would be creakers. A soft musk sweetened the warm, torpid air: he divined that someone was toasting marshmallows over a gas jet. He knew perfectly well that somewhere in the house would be a placard over a bathtub with the legend: Please leave this tub as you would wish to find it. Roger Mifflin would have said, after studying the hall, that someone in the house was sure to be reading the poems of Rabbi Tagore; but Aubrey was not so caustic.
Mrs. Schiller came up the basement stairs, followed by a small pug dog. She was warm and stout, with a tendency to burst just under the armpits. She was friendly. The pug made merry over Aubrey's ankles.
"Stop it, Treasure!" said Mrs. Schiller.