The Man Who Lived in a Shoe

by Henry James Forman

That slender income and the old Scotchwoman, Griselda Dow, with her Biblical austerity and North British economy, surround my existence with the comfort of a cushion. Because two sparrows sold for one farthing, was to Griselda a reason and an incentive for miracles of thrift. To change all this in three weeks—and I have not yet informed Griselda! In a welter of agitation I began to pace the room.

Perhaps I am a fool to harbor such emotions, but I confess that the sight of my pleasant study, covered to the ceiling with the books that I love, and so many of which I have gathered, fills me with a poignant melancholy. To uproot all this or to change it violently seems like a sin I cannot bring myself to commit. How had I come to think of committing it?

Gertrude is, of course, a splendid girl. With all her energy, she can yet sympathize with the mild successes of a poor bookworm and listen with patience to the tales of his triumphs as though he had captured an army corps. My first edition of the "Religio Medici" can mean nothing to her, who has never read it, but she seemed gladdened by my victory when I acquired it under the very nose of a wily bookseller.

When was it that I had first asked Gertrude to marry me? It is odd that I cannot remember, for our friendship could have continued on the same pleasant basis for the rest of our lives.

I was dining alone with her one evening at her apartment in Gramercy Park, I remember, and there was sparkling Moselle. I am not one of your experienced topers, and that sparkling Moselle entered my blood like a Caxton in a Zaehnsdorf binding or a First Folio of Shakespeare. A golden haze had seemed to emanate from every object in the region of that Moselle. Then, I recollect, Gertrude and I were on a new plane of being. We were speaking of marriage. Without being "engaged", we were, in Gertrude's phrase, talking of "marrying each other." It was on that evening I must have asked her, though, oddly enough, I have no recollection of the fact. And now, it seems, three pleasant years have passed and the time has come.

Again it occurred to me abruptly that I had not yet informed Griselda.

What if Gertrude should insist upon my removing myself to her apartment; would she accept Griselda? And how would my precious books be domiciled? How human they are, those books, even though silent! Always I have found them waiting whenever I returned from journeys, from summer visits, from the country, from anywhere. Their backs and bindings seem to shimmer and flash forth a stately greeting, to exhale that subtle fragrance of leather, ink, and paper that none but book-lovers know. They have developed a sense in me to perceive these things as no one else can perceive them. How delightful it has been to find them in their peaceful legions, arrayed and changeless, retaining the very marks and slips I have left in them, faithful servitors and friends!

I take down the "Antigone" in the Cambridge Sophocles that faces me as I stand and open at random to the chorus: "Love, invincible love! who makest havoc of wealth, who keepest vigil on the soft cheek of the maiden;—no immortal can escape thee, nor any among men whose life is for a day; and he to whom thou hast come is mad." It is clear that Sophocles was no modern.

Ah, me! I must tell Griselda at once, lest her Scotch probity should charge me with disingenuousness or evasion. I pressed a bell. I could not face Griselda in the kitchen which is her stronghold. I must summon her to mine.

Griselda, with a heather-blue cap awry on her coarse gray hair, appeared at the door.