There was some dramatic nerve in Gissing's nature that responded
eloquently to the floorwalking job. Never, in the history of Beagle and
Company, had there been a floorwalker who threw so much passion and zeal
into his task. The very hang of his coattails, even the erect carriage
of his back, the rubbery way in which his feet trod the aisles, showed
his sense of dignity and glamour. There seemed to be a great tradition
which enriched and upheld him. Mr. Beagle senior used to stand on
the little balcony at the rear of the main floor, transfixed with the
pleasure of seeing Gissing move among the crowded passages.
Alert, watchful, urbane, with just the ideal blend of courtesy and
condescension, he raised floorwalking to a social art. Female customers
asked him the way to departments they knew perfectly well, for the
pleasure of hearing him direct them. Business began to improve before he
had been there a week.
And how he enjoyed himself! The perfection of his bearing on the
floor was no careful pose: it was due to the brimming overplus of his
happiness. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only
the unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was young, remember; and
this was his first job. His precocious experience as a paterfamilias had
added to his mien just that suggestion of unconscious gravity which is
so appealing to ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had been
touched--but Oh so lightly!--by poetic sorrow or strange experience: to
ask him the way to the notion counter was as much of an adventure as
to meet a reigning actor at a tea. The faint cloud of melancholy that
shadowed his brow may have been only due to the fact that his new boots
were pinching painfully; but they did not know that.
So, quite unconsciously, he began to “establish” himself in his role,
just as an actor does. At first he felt his way tentatively and with
tact. Every store has its own tone and atmosphere: in a day or so he
divined the characteristic cachet of the Beagle establishment. He saw
what kind of customers were typical, and what sort of conduct they
expected. And the secret of conquest being always to give people
a little more than they expect, he pursued that course. Since they
expected in a floorwalker the mechanical and servile gentility of a
hired puppet, he exhibited the easy, offhand simplicity of a fellow
club-member. With perfect naturalness he went out of his way to assist
in their shopping concerns: gave advice in the selection of dress
materials, acted as arbiter in the matching of frocks and stockings. His
taste being faultless, it often happened that the things he recommended
were not the most expensive: this again endeared him to customers.
When sales slips were brought to him by ladies who wished to make an
exchange, he affixed his O. K. with a magnificent flourish, and with
such evident pleasure, that patrons felt genuine elation, and plunged
into the tumult with new enthusiasm. It was not long before there were
always people waiting for his counsel; and husbands would appear at
the store to convey (a little irritably) some such message as: “Mrs.
Sealyham says, please choose her a scarf that will go nicely with that
brown moire dress of hers. She says you will remember the dress.”--This
popularity became even a bit perplexing, as for instance when old Mrs.
Dachshund, the store's biggest Charge Account, insisted on his leaving
his beat at a very busy time, to go up to the tenth floor to tell her
which piano he thought had the richer tone.
Of course all this was very entertaining, and an admirable opportunity
for studying his fellow-creatures; but it did not go very deep into
his mind. He lived for some time in a confused glamour and glitter;
surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but drifting
merely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns of
artificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity,
glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silks
and slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, for
he soon learned to estimate these things at their proper value; which is
low, for they have little to do with life itself. His work was tiring in
the extreme--merely having to remain upright on his hind legs for
such long hours WAS an ordeal--but it did not penetrate to the secret
observant self of which he was always aware. This was advantageous. If
you have no intellect, or only just enough to get along with, it does
not much matter what you do. But if you really have a mind--by which
is meant that rare and curious power of reason, of imagination, and
of emotion; very different from a mere fertility of conversation and
intelligent curiosity--it is better not to weary and wear it out over
trifles.
So, when he left the store in the evening, no matter how his legs ached,
his head was clear and untarnished. He did not hurry away at closing
time. Places where people work are particularly fascinating after
the bustle is over. He loved to linger in the long aisles, to see the
tumbled counters being swiftly brought to order, to hear the pungent
cynicisms of the weary shopgirls. To these, by the way, he was a bit of
a mystery. The punctilio of his manner, the extreme courtliness of his
remarks, embarrassed them a little. Behind his back they spoke of him as
“The Duke” and admired him hugely; little Miss Whippet, at the stocking
counter, said that he was an English noble of long pedigree, who had
been unjustly deprived of his estates.
Down in the basement of this palatial store was a little dressing
room and lavatory for the floorwalkers, where they doffed their formal
raiment and resumed street attire. His colleagues grumbled and hastened
to depart, but Gissing made himself entirely comfortable. In his locker
he kept a baby's bathtub, which he leisurely filled with hot water at
one of the basins. Then he sat serenely and bathed his feet; although it
was against the rules he often managed to smoke a pipe while doing so.
Then he hung up his store clothes neatly, and went off refreshed into
the summer evening.
A warm rosy light floods the city at that hour. At the foot of every
crosstown street is a bonfire of sunset. What a mood of secret smiling
beset him as he viewed the great territory of his enjoyment. “The
freedom of the city”--a phrase he had somewhere heard--echoed in his
mind. The freedom of the city! A magnificent saying, Electric signs,
first burning wanly in the pink air, then brightened and grew strong.
“Not light, but rather darkness visible,” in that magic hour that just
holds the balance between paling day and the spendthrift jewellery
of evening. Or, if it rained, to sit blithely on the roof of a bus,
revelling in the gust and whipping of the shower. Why had no one told
him of the glory of the city? She was pride, she was exultation, she
was madness. She was what he had obscurely craved. In every line of
her gallant profile he saw conquest, triumph, victory! Empty conquest,
futile triumph, doomed victory--but that was the essence of the drama.
In thunderclaps of dumb ecstasy he saw her whole gigantic fabric,
leaning and clamouring upward with terrible yearning. Burnt with
pitiless sunlight, drenched with purple explosions of summer storm, he
saw her cleansed and pure. Where were her recreant poets that they had
never made these things plain?
And then, after the senseless day, after its happy but meaningless
triviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures,
his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind!
He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: but
sometimes he suspected that he loved them as God does--at a judicious
distance. From his rather haphazard religious training, strange words
came back to him. “For God so loved the world...” So loved the world
that--that what? That He sent someone else... Some day he must think
this out. But you can't think things out. They think themselves,
suddenly, amazingly. The city itself is God, he cried. Was not God's
ultimate promise something about a city--The City of God? Well, but that
was only symbolic language. The city--of course that was only a symbol
for the race--for all his kind. The entire species, the whole aspiration
and passion and struggle, that was God.
On the ferries, at night, after supper, was his favourite place for
meditation. Some undeniable instinct drew him ever and again out of
the deep and shut ravines of stone, to places where he could feed on
distance. That is one of the subtleties of this straight and narrow
city, that though her ways are cliffed in, they are a long thoroughfare
for the eye: there is always a far perspective. But best of all to go
down to her environing water, where spaces are wide: the openness that
keeps her sound and free. Ships had words for him: they had crossed many
horizons: fragments of that broken blue still shone on their cutting
bows. Ferries, the most poetical things in the city, were nearly empty
at night: he stood by the rail, saw the black outline of the town slide
by, saw the lower sky gilded with her merriment, and was busy thinking.
Now about a God (he said to himself)--instinct tells me that there is
one, for when I think about Him I find that I unconsciously wag my tail
a little. But I must not reason on that basis, which is too puppyish. I
like to think that there is, somewhere in this universe, an inscrutable
Being of infinite wisdom, harmony, and charity, by Whom all my desires
and needs would be understood; in association with Whom I would find
peace, satisfaction, a lightness of heart that exceed my present
understanding. Such a Being is to me quite inconceivable; yet I feel
that if I met Him, I would instantly understand. I do not mean that I
would understand Him: but I would understand my relationship to Him,
which would be perfect. Nor do I mean that it would be always
happy; merely that it would transcend anything in the way of social
significance that I now experience. But I must not conclude that there
is such a God, merely because it would be so pleasant if there were.
Then (he continued) is it necessary to conceive that this deity is
super-canine in essence? What I am getting at is this: in everyone
I have ever known--Fuji, Mr. Poodle, Mrs. Spaniel, those maddening
delightful puppies, Mrs. Purp, Mr. Beagle, even Mrs. Chow and Mrs.
Sealyham and little Miss Whippet--I have always been aware that there
was some mysterious point of union at which our minds could converge and
entirely understand one another. No matter what our difference of breed,
of training, of experience and education, provided we could meet and
exchange ideas honestly there would be some satisfying point of mental
fusion where we would feel our solidarity in the common mystery of life.
People complain that wars are caused by and fought over trivial things.
Why, of course! For it is only in trivial matters that people differ:
in the deep realities they must necessarily be at one. Now I have a
suspicion that in this secret sense of unity God may lurk. Is that what
we mean by God, the sum total of all these instinctive understandings?
But what is the origin of this sense of kinship? Is it not the
realization of our common subjection to laws and forces greater than
ourselves? Then, since nothing can be greater than God, He must BE these
superior mysteries. Yet He cannot be greater than our minds, for our
minds have imagined Him.
My mathematics is very rusty, he said to himself, but I seem to remember
something about a locus, which was a curve or a surface every point
on which satisfied some particular equation of relation among the
coordinates. It begins to look to me as though life might be a kind of
locus, whose commanding equation we call God. The points on that locus
cannot conceive of the equation, yet they are subject to it. They cannot
conceive of that equation, because of course it has no existence save
as a law of their being. It exists only for them; they, only by it. But
there it is--a perfect, potent, divine abstraction.
This carried him into a realm of disembodied thinking which his mind was
not sufficiently disciplined to summarize. It is quite plain, he said to
himself, that I must rub up my vanished mathematics. For certainly the
mathematician comes closer to God than any other, since his mind is
trained to conceive and formulate the magnificent phantoms of legality.
He smiled to think that any one should presume to become a parson
without having at least mastered analytical geometry.
The ferry had crossed and recrossed the river several times, but Gissing
had found no conclusion for these thoughts. As the boat drew toward
her slip, she passed astern of a great liner. Gissing saw the four tall
funnels loom up above the shed of the pier where she lay berthed.
What was it that made his heart so stir? The perfect rake of the
funnels--just that satisfying angle of slant--that, absurdly enough, was
the nobility of the sight. Why, then? Let's get at the heart of this, he
said. Just that little trick of the architect, useless in itself--what
was it but the touch of swagger, of bravado, of defiance--going out
into the vast, meaningless, unpitying sea with that dainty arrogance
of build; taking the trouble to mock the senseless elements, hurricane,
ice, and fog, with a 15-degree slope of masts and funnels: damn, what
was the analogy?
It was pride, it was pride! It was the same lusty impudence that he saw
in his perfect city, the city that cried out to the hearts of youth,
jutted her mocking pinnacles toward sky, her clumsy turrets verticalled
on gold! And God, the God of gales and gravity, loved His children to
dare and contradict Him, to rally Him with equations of their own.
“God, I defy you!” he cried.