While gazing full at the spectacle of King’s Cross Road the man on the steps peered downwards on his right at the confectioner’s shop, which held the woman who had begun to inflame him. He failed to descry her, but his thoughts pleasantly held her image, and she held his thoughts. He dreamed that one day he would share with her sympathetic soul his own vision of this wonderful Clerkenwell in which he lived and she now lived. He would explain to her eager ear that once Clerkenwell was a murmuring green land of medicinal springs, wells, streams with mills on their banks, nunneries, aristocrats, and holy clerks who presented mystery-plays. Yes, he would tell her about the drama of Adam and Eve being performed in the costume of Adam and Eve to a simple and unshocked people. (Why not? She was a widow and no longer young.) And he would point out to her how the brown backs of the houses which fronted on King’s Cross Road resembled the buttressed walls of a mighty fortress, and how the grim, ochreish, unwindowed backs of the houses of Riceyman Square (behind him) looked just like lofty, medieval keeps. And he would relate to her the story of the palace of Nell Gwynn, contemporary of Louise de la Vallière, and dividing with Louise the honour of being the first and most ingenuous of modern vampires. Never before had he had the idea of unfolding his mind on these enthralling subjects to a woman.
Rain began to fall. It fell on the bargain-books exposed in a stand outside the bookseller’s shop. The man did not move. Then a swift gentlemanly person stepped suddenly out of King’s Cross Road into the approach to the steps, and after a moment’s hesitation entered the shop. The man on the steps quietly limped down and followed the potential customer into the shop, which was his own.
II
The Customer
The shop had one window in King’s Cross Road, but the entrance, with another window, was in Riceyman Steps. The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular modern novels, such as those of Ethel M. Dell, Charles Garvice, Zane Grey, Florence Barclay, Nat Gould, and Gene Stratton Porter. The side window was set out with old books, first editions, illustrated editions, and complete library editions in calf or morocco of renowned and serious writers, whose works, indispensable to the collections of self-respecting book-gentlemen (as distinguished from bookmen), have passed through decades of criticism into the impregnable paradise of eternal esteem. The side window was bound to attract the attention of collectors and bibliomaniacs. It seemed strangely, even fatally, out of place in that dingy and sordid neighbourhood where existence was a dangerous and difficult adventure in almost frantic quest of food, drink and shelter, where the familiar and beloved landmarks were public-houses, and where the immense majority of the population read nothing but sporting prognostications and results, and, on Sunday mornings, accounts of bloody crimes and juicy sexual irregularities.
Nevertheless, the shop was, in fact, well placed in Riceyman Steps. It had a picturesque air, and Riceyman Steps also had a picturesque air, with all its outworn shabbiness, grime and decay. The steps leading up to Riceyman Square, the glimpse of the Square at the top, with its church bearing a massive cross on the west front, the curious perpendicular effects of the tall, blind, ochreish houses—all these touched the imagination of every man who had in his composition any unusually strong admixture of the universal human passion—love of the past. The shop reinforced the appeal of its environment. The shop was in its right appropriate place. To the secret race of collectors always ravenously desiring to get something for much less than its real value, the window in Riceyman Steps was irresistible. And all manner of people, including book-collectors, passed along King’s Cross Road in the course of a day. And all the collectors upon catching sight of the shop exclaimed in their hearts: “What a queer spot for a bookshop! Bargains! …” Moreover, the business was of old date and therefore had firmly established connections quite extra-local. Scores of knowing persons knew about it, and were proud of their knowledge. “What!” they would say with affected surprise to acquaintances of their own tastes. “You don’t know Riceyman Steps, King’s Cross Road? Best hunting-ground in London!” The name “Riceyman” on a signboard, whose paint had been flaking off for twenty years, also enhanced the prestige of the shop, for it proved ancient local associations. Riceyman must be of the true ancient blood of Clerkenwell.
The customer, with his hands behind him and his legs somewhat apart, was staring at a case of calf-bindings. A short, carefully dressed man, dapper and alert, he had the air neither of a bookman nor of a member of the upper-middle class.
“Sorry to keep you waiting. I just had to slip out, and I’ve nobody else here,” said the bookseller quietly and courteously, but with no trace of obsequiousness.
“Not at all!” replied the customer. “I was very interested in the books here.”
The bookseller, like many shopkeepers a fairly sure judge of people, perceived instantly that the customer must have acquired deportment from somewhere after adolescence, together with the art of dressing. There was abruptness in his voice, and the fact was that he had learnt manners above his original station in a strange place—Palestine, under Allenby.
“I suppose you haven’t got such a thing as a Shakespeare in stock; I mean a pretty good one?”
“What sort of a Shakespeare? I’ve got a number of Shakespeares.”
“Well, I don’t quite know. … I’ve been thinking for a long time I ought to have a Shakespeare.”
“Illustrated?” asked the bookseller,
