The opening of a large new centre for West End shopping, particularly
feminine shopping, suggests the reflection, Do women ever really shop?
Of course, it is a well-attested fact that they go forth shopping as
assiduously as a bee goes flower-visiting, but do they shop in the
practical sense of the word? Granted the money, time, and energy, a
resolute course of shopping transactions would naturally result in having
one's ordinary domestic needs unfailingly supplied, whereas it is
notorious that women servants (and housewives of all classes) make it
almost a point of honour not to be supplied with everyday necessities.
"We shall be out of starch by Thursday," they say with fatalistic
foreboding, and by Thursday they are out of starch. They have predicted
almost to a minute the moment when their supply would give out and if
Thursday happens to be early closing day their triumph is complete. A
shop where starch is stored for retail purposes possibly stands at their
very door, but the feminine mind has rejected such an obvious source for
replenishing a dwindling stock. "We don't deal there" places it at once
beyond the pale of human resort. And it is noteworthy that, just as a
sheep-worrying dog seldom molests the flocks in his near neighbourhood,
so a woman rarely deals with shops in her immediate vicinity. The more
remote the source of supply the more fixed seems to be the resolve to run
short of the commodity. The Ark had probably not quitted its last
moorings five minutes before some feminine voice gloatingly recorded a
shortage of bird-seed. A few days ago two lady acquaintances of mine
were confessing to some mental uneasiness because a friend had called
just before lunch-time, and they had been unable to ask her to stop and
share their meal, as (with a touch of legitimate pride) "there was
nothing in the house." I pointed out that they lived in a street that
bristled with provision shops and that it would have been easy to
mobilise a very passable luncheon in less than five minutes. "That,"
they said with quiet dignity, "would not have occurred to us," and I felt
that I had suggested something bordering on the indecent.
But it is in catering for her literary wants that a woman's shopping
capacity breaks down most completely. If you have perchance produced a
book which has met with some little measure of success, you are certain
to get a letter from some lady whom you scarcely known to bow to, asking
you "how it can be got." She knows the name of the book, its author, and
who published it, but how to get into actual contact with it is still an
unsolved problem to her. You write back pointing out that to have
recourse to an ironmonger or a corn-dealer will only entail delay and
disappointment, and suggest an application to a bookseller as the most
hopeful thing you can think of. In a day or two she writes again: "It is
all right; I have borrowed it from your aunt." Here, of course, we have
an example of the Beyond-Shopper, one who has learned the Better Way, but
the helplessness exists even when such bypaths of relief are closed. A
lady who lives in the West End was expressing to me the other day her
interest in West Highland terriers, and her desire to know more about the
breed, so when, a few days later, I came across an exhaustive article on
that subject in the current number of one of our best known outdoor-life
weeklies, I mentioned that circumstance in a letter, giving the date of
that number. "I cannot get the paper," was her telephoned response. And
she couldn't. She lived in a city where newsagents are numbered, I
suppose, by the thousand, and she must have passed dozens of such shops
in her daily shopping excursions, but as far as she was concerned that
article on West Highland terriers might as well have been written in a
missal stored away in some Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.
The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a certain
combative derision in the feminine onlooker. A cat that spreads one
shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long summer afternoon, and then
possibly loses him, doubtless feels the same contempt for the terrier who
compresses his rat into ten seconds of the strenuous life. I was
finishing off a short list of purchases a few afternoons ago when I was
discovered by a lady of my acquaintance whom, swerving aside from the
lead given us by her godparents thirty years ago, we will call Agatha.
"You're surely not buying blotting-paper _here_?" she exclaimed in an
agitated whisper, and she seemed so genuinely concerned that I stayed my
hand.
"Let me take you to Winks and Pinks," she said as soon as we were out of
the building: "they've got such lovely shades of blotting-paper--pearl
and heliotrope and _momie_ and crushed--"
"But I want ordinary white blotting-paper," I said.
"Never mind. They know me at Winks and Pinks," she replied
inconsequently. Agatha apparently has an idea that blotting-paper is
only sold in small quantities to persons of known reputation, who may be
trusted not to put it to dangerous or improper uses. After walking some
two hundred yards she began to feel that her tea was of more immediate
importance than my blotting-paper.
"What do you want blotting-paper for?" she asked suddenly. I explained
patiently.
"I use it to dry up the ink of wet manuscript without smudging the
writing. Probably a Chinese invention of the second century before
Christ, but I'm not sure. The only other use for it that I can think of
is to roll it into a ball for a kitten to play with."
"But you haven't got a kitten," said Agatha, with a feminine desire for
stating the entire truth on most occasions.
"A stray one might come in at any moment," I replied.
Anyway, I didn't get the blotting-paper.
THE BLOOD-FEUD OF TOAD-WATER
A WEST-COUNTRY EPIC
The Cricks lived at Toad-Water; and in the same lonely upland spot Fate
had pitched the home of the Saunderses, and for miles around these two
dwellings there was never a neighbour or a chimney or even a
burying-ground to bring a sense of cheerful communion or social
intercourse. Nothing but fields and spinneys and barns, lanes and
waste-lands. Such was Toad-Water; and, even so, Toad-Water had its
history.
Thrust away in the benighted hinterland of a scattered market district,
it might have been supposed that these two detached items of the Great
Human Family would have leaned towards one another in a fellowship
begotten of kindred circumstances and a common isolation from the outer
world. And perhaps it had been so once, but the way of things had
brought it otherwise. Indeed, otherwise. Fate, which had linked the two
families in such unavoidable association of habitat, had ordained that
the Crick household should nourish and maintain among its earthly
possessions sundry head of domestic fowls, while to the Saunderses was
given a disposition towards the cultivation of garden crops. Herein lay
the material, ready to hand, for the coming of feud and ill-blood. For
the grudge between the man of herbs and the man of live stock is no new
thing; you will find traces of it in the fourth chapter of Genesis. And
one sunny afternoon in late spring-time the feud came--came, as such
things mostly do come, with seeming aimlessness and triviality. One of
the Crick hens, in obedience to the nomadic instincts of her kind,
wearied of her legitimate scratching-ground, and flew over the low wall
that divided the holdings of the neighbours. And there, on the yonder
side, with a hurried consciousness that her time and opportunities might
be limited, the misguided bird scratched and scraped and beaked and
delved in the soft yielding bed that had been prepared for the solace and
well-being of a colony of seedling onions. Little showers of earth-mould
and root-fibres went spraying before the hen and behind her, and every
minute the area of her operations widened. The onions suffered
considerably. Mrs. Saunders, sauntering at this luckless moment down the
garden path, in order to fill her soul with reproaches at the iniquity of
the weeds, which grew faster than she or her good man cared to remove
them, stopped in mute discomfiture before the presence of a more
magnificent grievance. And then, in the hour of her calamity, she turned
instinctively to the Great Mother, and gathered in her capacious hands
large clods of the hard brown soil that lay at her feet. With a terrible
sincerity of purpose, though with a contemptible inadequacy of aim, she
rained her earth bolts at the marauder, and the bursting pellets called
forth a flood of cackling protest and panic from the hastily departing
fowl. Calmness under misfortune is not an attribute of either hen-folk
or womenkind, and while Mrs. Saunders declaimed over her onion bed such
portions of the slang dictionary as are permitted by the Nonconformist
conscience to be said or sung, the Vasco da Gama fowl was waking the
echoes of Toad-Water with crescendo bursts of throat music which
compelled attention to her griefs. Mrs. Crick had a long family, and was
therefore licensed, in the eyes of her world, to have a short temper, and
when some of her ubiquitous offspring had informed her, with the
authority of eye-witnesses, that her neighbour had so far forgotten
herself as to heave stones at her hen--her best hen, the best layer in
the countryside--her thoughts clothed themselves in language "unbecoming
to a Christian woman"--so at least said Mrs. Saunders, to whom most of
the language was applied. Nor was she, on her part, surprised at Mrs.
Crick's conduct in letting her hens stray into other body's gardens, and
then abusing of them, seeing as how she remembered things against Mrs.
Crick--and the latter simultaneously had recollections of lurking
episodes in the past of Susan Saunders that were nothing to her credit.
"Fond memory, when all things fade we fly to thee," and in the paling
light of an April afternoon the two women confronted each other from
their respective sides of the party wall, recalling with shuddering
breath the blots and blemishes of their neighbour's family record. There
was that aunt of Mrs. Crick's who had died a pauper in Exeter
workhouse--every one knew that Mrs. Saunders' uncle on her mother's side
drank himself to death--then there was that Bristol cousin of Mrs.
Crick's! From the shrill triumph with which his name was dragged in, his
crime must have been pilfering from a cathedral at least, but as both
remembrancers were speaking at once it was difficult to distinguish his
infamy from the scandal which beclouded the memory of Mrs. Saunders'
brother's wife's mother--who may have been a regicide, and was certainly
not a nice person as Mrs. Crick painted her. And then, with an air of
accumulating and irresistible conviction, each belligerent informed the
other that she was no lady--after which they withdrew in a great silence,
feeling that nothing further remained to be said. The chaffinches
clinked in the apple trees and the bees droned round the berberis bushes,
and the waning sunlight slanted pleasantly across the garden plots, but
between the neighbour households had sprung up a barrier of hate,
permeating and permanent.
The male heads of the families were necessarily drawn into the quarrel,
and the children on either side were forbidden to have anything to do
with the unhallowed offspring of the other party. As they had to travel
a good three miles along the same road to school every day, this was
awkward, but such things have to be. Thus all communication between the
households was sundered. Except the cats. Much as Mrs. Saunders might
deplore it, rumour persistently pointed to the Crick he-cat as the
presumable father of sundry kittens of which the Saunders she-cat was
indisputably the mother. Mrs. Saunders drowned the kittens, but the
disgrace remained.
Summer succeeded spring, and winter summer, but the feud outlasted the
waning seasons. Once, indeed, it seemed as though the healing influences
of religion might restore to Toad-Water its erstwhile peace; the hostile
families found themselves side by side in the soul-kindling atmosphere of
a Revival Tea, where hymns were blended with a beverage that came of
tea-leaves and hot water and took after the latter parent, and where
ghostly counsel was tempered by garnishings of solidly fashioned
buns--and here, wrought up by the environment of festive piety, Mrs.
Saunders so far unbent as to remark guardedly to Mrs. Crick that the
evening had been a fine one. Mrs. Crick, under the influence of her
ninth cup of tea and her fourth hymn, ventured on the hope that it might
continue fine, but a maladroit allusion on the part of the Saunders good
man to the backwardness of garden crops brought the Feud stalking forth
from its corner with all its old bitterness. Mrs. Saunders joined
heartily in the singing of the final hymn, which told of peace and joy
and archangels and golden glories; but her thoughts were dwelling on the
pauper aunt of Exeter.
Years have rolled away, and some of the actors in this wayside drama have
passed into the Unknown; other onions have arisen, have flourished, have
gone their way, and the offending hen has long since expiated her
misdeeds and lain with trussed feet and a look of ineffable peace under
the arched roof of Barnstaple market.
But the Blood-feud of Toad-Water survives to this day.
A YOUNG TURKISH CATASTROPHE
IN TWO SCENES
The Minister for Fine Arts (to whose Department had been lately added the
new sub-section of Electoral Engineering) paid a business visit to the
Grand Vizier. According to Eastern etiquette they discoursed for a while
on indifferent subjects. The minister only checked himself in time from
making a passing reference to the Marathon Race, remembering that the
Vizier had a Persian grandmother and might consider any allusion to
Marathon as somewhat tactless. Presently the Minister broached the
subject of his interview.
"Under the new Constitution are women to have votes?" he asked suddenly.
"To have votes? Women?" exclaimed the Vizier in some astonishment. "My
dear Pasha, the New Departure has a flavour of the absurd as it is; don't
let's try and make it altogether ridiculous. Women have no souls and no
intelligence; why on earth should they have votes?"
"I know it sounds absurd," said the Minister, "but they are seriously
considering the idea in the West."
"Then they must have a larger equipment of seriousness than I gave them
credit for. After a lifetime of specialised effort in maintaining my
gravity I can scarcely restrain an inclination to smile at the
suggestion. Why, our womenfolk in most cases don't know how to read or
write. How could they perform the operation of voting?"
"They could be shown the names of the candidates and where to make their
cross."
"I beg your pardon?" interrupted the Vizier.
"Their crescent, I mean," corrected the Minister. "It would be to the
liking of the Young Turkish Party," he added.
"Oh, well," said the Vizier, "if we are to do the thing at all we may as
well go the whole h---" he pulled up just as he was uttering the name of
an unclean animal, and continued, "the complete camel. I will issue
instructions that womenfolk are to have votes."
* * * * *
The poll was drawing to a close in the Lakoumistan division. The
candidate of the Young Turkish Party was known to be three or four
hundred votes ahead, and he was already drafting his address, returning
thanks to the electors. His victory had been almost a foregone
conclusion, for he had set in motion all the approved electioneering
machinery of the West. He had even employed motorcars. Few of his
supporters had gone to the poll in these vehicles, but, thanks to the
intelligent driving of his chauffeurs, many of his opponents had gone to
their graves or to the local hospitals, or otherwise abstained from
voting. And then something unlooked-for happened. The rival candidate,
Ali the Blest, arrived on the scene with his wives and womenfolk, who
numbered, roughly, six hundred. Ali had wasted little effort on election
literature, but had been heard to remark that every vote given to his
opponent meant another sack thrown into the Bosphorus. The Young Turkish
candidate, who had conformed to the Western custom of one wife and hardly
any mistresses, stood by helplessly while his adversary's poll swelled to
a triumphant majority.
"Cristabel Columbus!" he exclaimed, invoking in some confusion the name
of a distinguished pioneer; "who would have thought it?"
"Strange," mused Ali, "that one who harangued so clamorously about the
Secret Ballot should have overlooked the Veiled Vote."
And, walking homeward with his constituents, he murmured in his beard an
improvisation on the heretic poet of Persia:
"One, rich in metaphors, his Cause contrives
To urge with edged words, like Kabul knives;
And I, who worst him in this sorry game,
Was never rich in anything but--wives."