Read Ebook: The Man Who Lived in a Shoe by Forman Henry James

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Ebook has 2418 lines and 98159 words, and 49 pages

"No, thanks, Ranny," she smiled, somewhat enigmatically, I thought. "We shall often dine together--afterwards."

"Of course," I agreed flippantly. "We may even meet at the races."

"I promised," said Gertrude, "to dine at the Club with Stella Blackwelder--to settle some committee matters before I go away. Shall you be alone, poor thing?"

"Yes--but that doesn't matter. I am often alone. I prop up a book against a glass candlestick and the dinner is gone before I am aware of it."

"It might as well be sawdust, for all you know," laughed Gertrude.

"So it might," I told her, "except that Griselda can do better than sawdust. I might, of course," I added, "call up Dibdin and have him feast with me."

"Your trampy friend," commented Gertrude. "Yes, better do it. I don't like to think of you so much alone."

"Now, that is very sweet of you, my dear. I'll do exactly that."

Her cool lips touched mine for an instant and she was gone.

To my shame I must record that, once I was alone, the appalling fact of marriage overwhelmed me like a landslide. With a sense of suffocation and wild struggle I longed to do in earnest what I had threatened to do in jest, to run away, blindly, madly, anywhere, to freedom, as far as ever I could go.

When I should have been rejoicing, I desired, in a manner, to sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings. I thought upon Lincoln, a brave man if ever one there was, who had paled before the thought of marriage and wrote consoling letters to another in similar case. When I ought to have been feeling at my most virile, I felt unmanned.

Yet, was I a boy to be a prey to these emotions? At twenty-nine surely a man should know his own mind and be in possession of himself. Never before had I doubted my way in life. In a world where every one who has no money proceeds with energy to make it, and every one who has a little tirelessly labors to acquire more, I had wittingly and of full purpose turned my life away from the market place and toward a studious devotion to books. On my compact income of less than two hundred and fifty dollars monthly left me by generous parents, I was able to maintain my modest apartment in Twelfth Street and to live a life, purposeless in the eyes of some, no doubt, but which to me is priceless.

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.

"You called?" she demanded.

"Yes, Griselda, I called. Come in; I wish to speak to you."

Griselda has known me since I was seven and all my gravity counts for ever so little with her. So redolent is she of rich encrusted personality that she gives to my poor small apartment the air of an establishment.

"You always call me, Mr. Randolph," she somewhat testily informed me, "just when I have my hands in the dough pan or when the pot is boiling over."

"Which is it now?" I asked her, laughing somewhat ruefully.

"Both," was her laconic answer.

"Hurry back then," I told her. "What I wanted to say will keep."

"Just like a man," muttered Griselda and left me without ceremony.

The relief I felt was shameful. To face Griselda with news of a possible derangement of our lives required a courage, a girding up of one's resolution to which at the moment I felt myself woefully unequal.

There was Dibdin and his blessed archeological expedition. He had told me that there might be a berth for me as a sort of keeper of records and archives. If only he had started last week. In a mist of vision well known to daydreamers, I suddenly saw the trim shipshape steamer with holystoned decks, the glinting metal work, the opulent South-Pacific sun pouring down on lightly clad passengers lounging in deck chairs; girls in white lazily flirting with indolent men. What oceans of joy and ease were to be found in the world for those who knew how to take them!

Ah, well! Gertrude would make no opposition to my going, since absolute individual liberty is the very keystone in the arch of our coming marriage.

I decided to ring up Dibdin.

"Our line is out of order," the switchboard below informed me. "They'll have a man up here as soon as possible."

Frustration! I did not wish the colored door boy below to hear what I said. He has a notion of my dignity.

With a restless agitation new to me I again fell to pacing the room, a room not contrived for exercise. It occurred to me that I must go to see my sister, my only near relative. She was sure to be at home, for she, poor girl, is always at home,--what with her three children and her broken health.

If it were not that the damnable telephone is out of order, I would ring her up immediately. What with her three young children and an income the exact equivalent of my own, she has little diversion unless I take her to the theater or the opera. How does the poor girl manage, I wonder? I dread to ask her and she never complains. I ought to see her oftener; if only she lived nearer than the depths of Brooklyn.

There is the result of romantic marriage for you! Poor Laura committed the error of falling in love with a man on a steamer when she was barely nineteen and marrying him secretly; after seven years and three babies, the scoundrel Pendleton, with his smooth ways and unsteady eye, deserted her, disappeared into the blue. The poor girl's health has never been good since then.

It is irritating to think that I might have done more than an occasional gift for Laura and the children. But I am so wretchedly poor myself.

I still cannot comprehend how Laura could have been so inconceivably foolish as to marry that ruffian Pendleton before she had known him three months--and then to acquire three babies!

Gertrude, at all events, could not be guilty of anything so perverse.

Marriage--children--chains--slavery--how sordid it all is and how disturbing! Good enough perhaps for the hopeless middle class, semi-animal types, who have nothing else to expect of life, or to absorb them. But for folk with ambitions and ideals!

What are my ambitions and ideals, I cannot at times help wondering? Useless to analyze. Freedom to have them is the first of all.

How eager I used to be to discuss them with Laura during those long summers at our cottage in Westchester when life seemed endless and the future infinite. Between sets at tennis I poured out to her the things I was going to do in the world. Laura is only two years older than I, but how well she had understood and how sympathetic she was! It was the motherhood within her, I suppose, that drove her to the marriage and the kiddies.

The scent of those summers comes to my nostrils now, the fragrance of lilac and honeysuckle, that brought ideas to one's head, dreams of achievement, of perfection and happiness. Who has that cottage now, I wonder? Poor Laura's dreams have been distorted into a very dismal sort of reality. And what of my own? But here is Griselda and she is announcing Dibdin.

That grizzled priest of what he is pleased to call science growled in a way he meant to be pleasant as he shouldered into my comfortable study and sank sprawling into my best chair. He never seems quite at home in a civilized room.

"Couldn't get you on the telephone," he remarked. "Thought I'd drop over and see what iniquities you're up to."

"As you see," I told him, "I'm deep in crime."

"Will you feed me?" he demanded with a gruffness that is part of his charm.

"Certainly. What else can I do when you come at this hour?"

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