Thus Mr Stodham came again and again, to love, honour, and obey the ways of Abercorran House, just as he did the entirely different ways of Mrs Stodham’s house. He, and no other, taught Philip the way to that piece of country which became ours. Harry and Lewis, still under ten, awakened in him a faculty for spinning yarns. What they were nobody but those three knew; for the performance was so special and select that the two boys formed the sole audience. They revealed nothing of what enchanted them. Or was there anything more than at first appeared in Harry’s musing remark on being questioned about Mr Stodham’s stories: “Mr Stodham’s face is like a rat,” a remark which was accompanied by a nibbling grimace which caused smiles of recognition and some laughter? “Yes,” added Lewis, penitent at the laughter he had provoked, “a very good rat!” Perhaps the shy, sandy man’s shrunken face was worked up to an unwonted—and therefore comical—freedom of expression in the excitement of these tales, and this fascinated the boys and made them his firm supporters. He was a tall, thin, sandy-haired, sandy-bearded man with spectacles. As if tobacco smoke had mummified him, his face was of a dried yellow. He stooped slightly and walked rapidly with long strides. Nobody had professed to find anything great or good in him, yet several different kinds of men spoke of him with liking as well as pity. If there was something exceptional about this most ordinary man, it was his youthfulness. It had been said that he was too dull to grow old. But youthful he was, though it is hard to say how, since he truly was dull, and if he had not been indolent must have been a bore—but he was too modest for anyone to allow him to bore. As you walked behind him you had little doubt of his youthfulness. Something in the loose-jointed lightness and irresponsibility of his gait suggested a boy, and if you had been following him with this thought, and he turned round to greet you, the wrinkled, smoky face was a great surprise. There was something in his nature corresponding to this loose-jointed walk. The dogs, I think, knew it: they could do what they liked with him, and for them he carried sugar as a regular cargo.
Thus, Mr Stodham began to be interwoven with that fellowship. I was perhaps too old for his romantic tales, but I have heard him telling Mr Morgan what he considered interesting in his own life. Whatever it was, it revealed his shyness, or his excitability, or his innocence. Once he gave a long explanation of how he came to set an uncommon value on a certain book which he was lending to Mr Morgan. Some winters before, something caused him to wake at midnight and sit up to listen, in spite of the usual powerful inclination to sleep again. At a sharp noise on the pane he threw up the window. All the flints of the road were clear in an unusual light. The white face of a policeman was looking up at him, and he heard the words “Fire!... Come down.” Rapidly half dressing as if executing an order which he did not understand, he was outside on the pavement in a minute. It was next door. The building was losing all resemblance to a barber’s shop; like mad birds the flames flew across it and out at the shuttered windows. The policeman was hammering at the door, to waken those who were in their beds above the fire. Heavily they slept, and some minutes passed before a man came down carrying an umbrella, a woman arranging her hair. The shriek of a cat followed them out of the door, but so also did the flames. Soon the shop was an oblong box containing one great upright body of fire, through which could be seen the twisted skeleton remains of iron bedsteads. Quietly the street had become packed with onlookers—curious neighbours, passers-by, and a few night-wanderers who had souls above merely keeping warm by standing against the walls of bakeries. There were three fire engines. With a low hum the jets of water yielded themselves to the fire and were part of it. Suddenly a fireman noticed that Mr Stodham’s own window was lit from within, thought that the flames had penetrated so far, and was about to direct the hose on it when Mr Stodham shook off the charm of the tumultuous glare to explain that he had left a lamp burning. The man went with him into the house, but could find no fire. Left alone in his room Mr Stodham noticed that it was hot, pleasantly hot for a January midnight. The wall that he leaned against was pleasant until he remembered the fire on the other side. He made haste to save his papers. Instead of sorting them roughly there, he proposed to remove, not the separate drawers, but the whole desk. He forgot that it had only entered the house, in the first place, after having the castors detached, and omitting to do this now, he wedged it firmly between the walls and so barricaded the main passage of the house. He took out all the contents of all the drawers, deposited them with a neighbour whom he had never before seen. Then he returned to his room. He was alone with his books, and had to choose among them, which he should take and save. They numbered several hundred, including a shelf of the very first books he had read to himself. A large proportion consisted of the books of his youth. Having been lived through by the eager, docile Stodham, these poems, romances, essays, autobiographies, had each a genuine personality, however slight the difference of its cover from its neighbour’s. Another class represented aspirations, regrets, oblivions: half cut, dustier than the rest, these wore strange, sullen, ironical, or actually hostile looks. Some had been bought because it was inevitable that a young man should have a copy. Others, chiefly volumes in quarto or folio, played something like the parts of family portraits in a house of one of the new-rich. An unsuspecting ostentation had gone with some affection to their purchase. They gave a hint of “the dark backward and abysm of time” to that small room, dingy but new.... He leaned against the hot wall, receiving their various looks, returning them. Several times he bent forward to clutch this one or that, but saw another which he could not forsake for it, and so left both. He moved up close to the rows: he stood on tip-toe, he knelt. Some books he touched, others he opened. He put each one back. The room was silent with memory. He might have put them all in safety by this time. The most unexpected claims were made. For example, there was a black-letter “Morte d’Arthur” in olive calf. He had paid so much for it that he had to keep its existence secret: brown paper both concealed and protected it. He did, in fact, put this with a few others, chosen from time to time, on a chair. Only a very few were without any claims—histories and the like, of which there are thousands of copies, all the same. The unread and never-to-be-read volumes put in claims unexpectedly. No refusal could be made without a qualm. He looked at the select pile on the chair dissatisfied. Rather than take them only he would go away empty. “You had better look sharp, sir,” said a fireman, vaulting over the desk. Mr Stodham looked at the mute multitude of books and saw all in a flash. Nevertheless not one could he make up his mind to rescue. But on the mantelpiece lay a single book until now unnoticed—a small eighteenth century book in worn contemporary binding, an illustrated book of travels in Africa by a Frenchman—which he had long ago paid twopence for and discontinued his relations with it. He swiftly picked up this book and was, therefore, able to lend it to Mr Morgan for the sake of the plates. But after all he saved all his other books also. The fire did not reach his house, and the one thing damaged was the desk which the firemen had to leap on to and over in passing through to the back of the house.
Mr Stodham, in spite of professing a poor opinion of the subject, was delighted in his quiet way to speak of himself. He was at this time a nearly middle-aged clerk, disappointed in a tranquil style, and beginning to regard it as something to his credit that when he had been four years married he had talked a good deal of going to the colonies. If only he had gone—his imagination was unequal to the task of seeing what might have happened if only he had gone. The regret or pretence of it gave him a sort of shadowy grandeur by suggesting that it was from a great height he had fallen to his present position in a suburban maisonette. Here by some means he had secured to himself the exclusive rights to a little room known as “The Study.” This room was narrower than it was high, and allowed no more than space for his table between the two walls of books, when he sat facing the French window, with the door behind. He looked out on a pink almond-tree, and while this flowered he could see nothing else but the tree and the south-east sky above it; at other seasons the hind parts of many houses like his own were unmistakeable. At night a green blind was let down over the window before the lamp was lit. In this room, and in no other place but Abercorran House, he was at home. Seated at that table, smoking, he felt equal to anything with which his wife or the world could afflict him. He desired no change in the room, beyond a slowly increasing length to accommodate his increasing books. He would have liked to open the windows more often than, being of the French pattern, was deemed safe. The room was completely and unquestionably his own. For his wife it was too shabby and too much out of her influence; she would not take her fingers from the door-handle when she had to enter it. His children were stiff and awed in it, because in earlier days he had been strict in demanding silence in its neighbourhood. Much as he wished that they would forget the old rule they could not; he liked to see them standing at the door looking towards him and the window, but they made haste to be off. As to the servant, she dreaded being caught in the room since the mistress had commanded her to dust it daily, and the master to leave it to him.
Mr Morgan, Mr Torrance, and in later years myself, he admitted to the Study. Acquaintances he received with his wife in their clean and expensive drawing-room. Husband and wife were in harmony when entertaining a few of those whom Mrs Stodham called their friends. On these rare occasions the defensive combination of her slightly defiant pride and his kindly resignation was a model of unconscious tact. If there was a man—which seldom came about—Mr Stodham would ask him into the Study. The gas was slowly lighted, the gas-stove more slowly or not at all. The intruder would remark what a lot of books there were, and how he never had any time for reading. There was only one chair, and he was compelled to sit in it and to light a cigarette. Mr Stodham himself was loth to smoke there in profane company, but dallied with an unaccustomed cigarette, or, if he took a pipe, soon rapped out on the stove with it some variation upon the theme of discontent. In either case his gentle but disturbed presence hung oppressively on the visitor, who very soon took the hint from that helpless but determined face, to propose a return to the drawing-room. There Mrs Stodham frequently made the remark: “What a lot of books John has,” nodding complacently and with the implication partly that she despised them, partly that she saw their worth as a family distinction. At the end of such an evening or after any unpleasantness Mr Stodham would go into the Study, stick an unlit pipe between his teeth, open a book and read very slowly, stretching his legs out, for five minutes, then sigh, stand up and look along the rows of books without seeing them, and go up to bed before he had defined his dissatisfaction.
The Study was the scene of the most extraordinary thing he had to relate. Once when he had been lying for several days in bed, weak and fevered, he had a strong desire to go downstairs to the Study. Darkness and tea-time were near, his wife and children were out, doubtless the servant was reading something by the light of the red-hot kitchen grate. The house was silent. Slowly the invalid went down and laid his fingers on the handle of his door, which was opposite the foot of the stairs. An unusual feeling of quiet expectancy had stolen on him; nothing, he said, could have astonished him at that moment. He had, however, no idea of what he was expecting until he had opened the door to its full extent. Thus was disclosed, between his table and the window, a beautiful female figure, half sitting, half reclining, as if asleep, among a number of books which had remained on the floor during his illness. Though he had not put on his spectacles before coming down he saw perfectly, so clearly, as he said, that she seemed to gleam, as if it was still full day with her. Her beautiful long black hair was confined by a narrow fillet of gold, which made clear the loveliness of her head. He said that only Mr Torrance could describe her properly. No, he affirmed, if people smiled, it did not occur to him that the nude looked awkward near a gas-stove. Nor had she any more need of its warmth than the Elgin Marbles or the Bacchus in Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne.” Yet she was not of marble or paint, but of flesh, though he had seen nothing of the kind in his life. Her shoulders moved with her breathing, and this as well as her attitude proclaimed that she was mourning, some seconds before he heard her sob. He thought that the figure and posture were the same as those in a Greek statue which he had seen long before, in London or Paris. They had the remoteness and austerity of marble along with something delicate, transient, and alive. But if there could have been a doubt whether she was flesh or stone, there was none that she was divine. In what way she was divine he could not tell, but certainly she was, though in no visible way was she different from the women of pictures and statues. He did not feel that she would notice him. He was not shocked, or curious, but calm and still expectant. He drew a deep breath and tried to make his trembling body stand quite still by leaning against the wall to watch. He did not suppose that she had come into his room in the ordinary way. He had, on the other hand, a conviction that she had something to do with his books, that she had emerged from them or one of them. A gap in the bottom shelf, where stood the largest books, caught his eye and thrust itself forward as a cave whence she had come. Yet she was as white as Aphrodite newly risen from the unsailed ocean, and she diffused a sense of open air, of space, of the wild pure air, about her, as if she lay upon a rock at the sea edge or among mountain flowers instead of in this narrow room. He concluded in a reasonable way that she was one of the poets’ nymphs whom he had so often read of with lazy credulity. Actually the words ran into his mind:
“Arethusa arose
From her couch of snows
In the Acroceraunian mountains—
From cloud and from crag,