VIII
SOLITUDE
Verschoyle swept aside her reluctance to accept gifts from him, and she allowed him to furnish her rooms for her upon condition that he never came there without her permission. He said,—
'Why shouldn't I have the pleasure of indulging my desire to give you everything in the world? People will talk! ... People talk anyhow in London. If we were seen walking together down Piccadilly, there would be talk. They will say I am going to marry you, but we know different.... Your way of living is exactly my ideal, absolute independence, peace, and privacy. We're rather alike in that. It seems so odd that we should be living with these people whose whole aim in life is publicity.'
They had many happy hours together reading and discussing the books which he bought for her by the armful at a shop in Charing Cross Road, where, open to the street, were piles of books almost blatantly subversive of society—Nietsche, Havelock Ellis, Shaw, Ibsen, Anarchist tracts, Socialist and Labour journals, R.P.A. cheap reprints, every sort and kind of book that in an ordinary shop would only be procured upon a special order.... It was a very fierce shop. Its woodwork was painted scarlet, and above the shelves in gilt letters were such names as Morris, Marx, Bakounin, Kropotkin, Lassalle, and mottoes such as 'The workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains.'
It was Clara who discovered the shop in her wanderings through the West End, which she desired to know even to its remotest crannies, and its oddity seized her imagination when she discovered that for all its fierceness it was kept by a gentle little old Scotsman, who most ferociously desired the destruction of society, but most gently helped all who needed help and most wholly sympathised with all, and they were many, who turned to him for sympathy.... The frequenters of his shop were poor, mostly long-haired eaters of nuts, and drinkers of ideas. There were young men who hovered in the background of his shop arguing, chatting, filling in the time they had to spend away from their lodgings in the frequent intervals between their attempts to do work for which their convictions made them unfitted. They believed, as he did, in the nobility of work, but could find none that was not ignoble. It was his boast that he had no book in his shop in which he did not believe.
The beautiful and elegant young lady who walked into his shop one day astonished and delighted him with her radiance. She was the kind of accident that does not often happen to a humble Anarchist bookseller.
When she came again and again, he warmed to her, and recommended books, and gave her Prince Kropotkin's Memoirs as a present, at least he gave her the second volume, for he could not find the first.... He always hotly denied that books were stolen from his open shop, but admitted that they were sometimes 'borrowed' by his young friends.
The story of Kropotkin's escape from the fortress moved Clara deeply, and she read it to Verschoyle in her rooms.
'And that man is still alive,' she said, 'here in England, where we go round and round hunting fame and money.... He was like you, Verschoyle, in just such a position as you, but he found it intolerable and went to prison.'