A marrying man

by G. B. Stern

Gareth went once to have a look at the Booke-Shoppe, stealing a twilight half-hour from the day's drudgery with Leslie Campbell. Thus the quest held a guilty pang of disloyalty not altogether unpleasant. He also knew that he would again be late for dinner; likewise that the gazing upon the outer walls of a publisher's sanctum was the sheerest folly, with the book lying scarcely more than half completed in his desk at home. Guilt and folly and a secret quest were good companions for a mellow September evening; the sunset powdering all the roofs of London with gold; Bloomsbury Church lifting a dazzling spire into the tender fading blue of the sky-strip that tented Holborn; and a blind man's fiddle scattering its melody, now plaintive, now a mere scraping jig, among the rapid swell of footsteps on the pavement. The Booke-Shoppe revealed itself in a tiny by-street, where the houses leant a little towards one another, as though in gossiping indignation at the incongruous glaring picture-palace, newly erected at the corner. And here was the Booke-Shoppe's dangling sign, that jutted over the wrought-iron lantern in the porch; latticed windows bulging oddly into the street; behind them a sense of dimness ... this was indeed the Perfect Publisher, from whose shrine one could imagine, without any shrinkings of distaste, the issue of all one's cherished favourites. Gareth fancied himself summoned to the octagonal chamber he was sure lingered behind those squares of thick glass; a chamber at once fragrant and frowsy with cobwebs and the aroma of lingering hopes; everywhere books; books piled and tumbled and tottering on floor and shelf; folios and quartos and duodecimos; classics and lyric poets and Elizabethan drama; rare gems of modern verse and prose. At a table likewise heaped, a wizened figure sitting in a round circle of lamplight; a little smoky old man, with spectacles pushed high up among a bush of untidy white hair, and kindly short-sighted brown eyes that mused absently on who might be the stranger at the door. Then Gareth would declare his name, and be greeted by a flood of gentle enthusiasm, and an exquisite comprehension of all he had put into "The Round Adventure."

"A somewhat fantastic title, Mr. Temple, but we'll keep it, oh, we'll keep it. My dear lad—you must permit me to call you so—I can't be too proud that you brought your delightful wares to the Booke-Shoppe!"... Discussion of contract, terms, advertisement?—perhaps! It was manifestly absurd for Gareth, sixteen years a reader, to hover and hope and dream impossible dreams of publishers; dream as he did in front of that iron swinging sign, on a mellow September evening; dream as might have done the veriest novice in the realm of letters. Gareth should have known better. Besides which, it made him late for dinner.

As it happened, Kathleen was later even than he. But in the parlour of Pacific Villa he found Trixie Worley awaiting him. The apparition was less of a shock than it might have been, had not her spiritual presence already formed a habit of straying into his realm of imagination; he knew just exactly what she was going to say, and how she would say it....

"Mr. Temple. A word with you. Privately."

"Certainly, Mrs. Worley. Won't you sit down?" She was mauver even than he remembered her. Much mauver....

She shut her eyes, gasped two or three times—then suddenly raised her eyebrows till they shot out of sight; and proceeded to issue a series of disjointed galvanic shocks.

"Mr. Temple. I'm a moral woman."

She stopped dead. And he hastened to assure her that he believed this to be the case ... and wondered what he could have said to lead to the question being raised. "Won't you sit down?"... Surely this had not been interpreted in any wrong sense? Her next contribution to the interview seemed to hint the contrary:

"And I believe in the sanctity of the marriage law."

"Oh, quite; yes, indeed...." A horrible suspicion flashed through him, that her visit might be the result of a guilty attachment formed for himself; and that these references to holy wedlock were merely preliminary.