“I know it,” was his reply, “by the caressing way you took up that book!”
Your real bookworm loves all books. Like the modern genius, he is amoral. But unlike the genius, his amorality, simple soul, is confined within the four walls of a library. He could never, I am sure, bring himself to agree with André Theuriet, who in “La Chanoinesse” depicts
“les Bijoux indiscrets auprès des œuvres de Duclos; Candide, Jacques la Fataliste et le Sophia voisinant de Restif de la Brétonne à deux pas de l’Emile, et les Aventures du Chevalier de Faublas—une nouveauté—non loin de l’Histoire philosophique des Indes,”
all of which books, by a kind of moral exercise of his imagination we cannot sufficiently deplore, he found exhaling “une odeur de volupté perverse, quelque chose comme le parfum aphrodisiac des seringes et des tubereuses dans une chambre close.”
Every dwelling-house has its own peculiar atmosphere, sometimes agreeable, sometimes not. But, whatever its quality, so characteristic and persistent are some of them that I am sure a blind man would always be able to tell them by the smell alone. Few of us may be gifted with the analytical nose of a Charles Dickens to detect the ingredients that make up a complex domiciliary atmosphere, but everybody must have noticed that basement houses smell differently from bungalows, the former greeting you with a harmonious blend of earthiness, soapsuds, and sinks.
Nay! The house you live in has a separate odour for each room: the drawing-room with its chintzes; the snuggery with its stale tobacco, and, perhaps, like an insinuating nudge, with a whiff of the stronger alcohols; the bedrooms, if your housekeeper knows her business, with the freshness of well-aired linen.
The very days of the week have each its own particular olfactory mark, dating from our childhood: Sundays (in Scotland), peppermint followed by roast beef and richness; Mondays, pickles and soapsuds; Tuesday, the damp airs from the washing hung up to dry; Wednesdays, warmth and beeswax from the laundry, with ever and anon the thump of the flat iron; Thursdays, bread new from the baker and the washing of floors with soft soap—“Mind yer feet, now!”—Fridays, jam-boiling and the never-to-be-forgotten aroma of oat-cakes on the girdle; Saturdays—but Saturday is a day of wind and banging doors, of tops and dust; all its smells are out of doors.
Shops, too! What of the coffee-shop?—Who does not pause a moment at that door when the beans are roasting? One of the richest of all odours that; curious how you lose it in the beverage! Then there is the ironmonger’s, where the sharp smell of steel strikes, by some strange reflex, the upper incisor teeth and gums; the oil and colour shop, with its putty, turpentine, and general clamminess; and, last and best of all, the druggist’s!
What about the fried fish-shop? Faugh! I once for a reason connected with my calling had cause to spend a whole night in a room above a fish-shop—once only. The next time (there never will be a next time, she swears, but there always is)—the next time I happened, curiously enough, to arrive late!
But although houses and rooms and, as we hinted, streets also, all smell differently, each town and city has its own peculiar fundamental odour. There is a town in Yorkshire that smells of “mungo.” I know another that smells of mineral oil, and many that exhale the dank smell of the coal-mine.