Dress 33 Dress 9
Jewellers 21 Tobacco 10
Boots and Shoes 8 Motors 9
Sort of Linen Places 2 Guns 2
Dog Bureau 1 Garden Seats 1
-- --
65 31
From these figures a firm of Manchester actuaries has drawn the
startling conclusion that Bond Street is more used by women than by
men. It may be so. But a more interesting question is, how do all
these duplicates manage to carry on, considering the very reasonable
prices they charge? At one point there are three jewellers in a row,
with another one opposite. Not far off there are three cigarette-shops
together, madly defying each other with gold-tips and silver-tips,
cork-tips and velvet-tips, rose-tips and lily-tips. There is only one
book-shop, of course, but there are about nine picture-places. How do
they all exist? It is mysterious.
Especially when you consider how much trouble they take to avoid
attracting attention. There are still one or two window-dressers who
lower the whole tone of the street by adhering to the gaudy-overcrowded
style; but the majority, in a violent reaction from that, seem to have
rushed to the wildest extremes of the simple-unobtrusive. They are
delightful, I think, those reverent little windows with the chaste
curtains and floors of polished walnut, in the middle of which reposes
delicately a single toque, a single chocolate, or a single pearl. Some
of the picture-places are among the most modest. There is one window
which suggests nothing but the obscure branch of a highly decayed bank
in the dimmest cathedral town. On the dingy screen which entirely fills
the window is written simply in letters which time has almost erased,
“JOHN SMITH--Pictures.” Nothing could be less enticing. Yet inside, I
daresay, fortunes are made daily. I noticed no trace of this method at
the Advertisers’ Exhibition; they might give it a trial.
Now no doubt you fondly think that Bond Street is wholly devoted to
luxuries; perhaps you have abandoned your dream of actually buying
something in Bond Street? You are wrong. To begin with, there are
about ten places where you can buy food, and, though there is no pub,
now, there is a café (with a license). There are two grocers and a
poulterer. There is even a fish-shop--you didn’t know that, did you? I
am bound to say it seemed to have only the very largest fish, but they
were obviously fish.
Anyone can go shopping in Bond Street. I knew a clergyman once who went
in and asked for a back-stud. He was afterwards unfrocked for riotous
living, but the stud was produced. You can buy a cauliflower in Bond
Street--if you know the ropes. There is a shop which merely looks like
a very beautiful florist’s. There are potatoes in the window, it is
true, but they are “hot-house” ones; inside there is no trace of a
common vegetable. But if you ask facetiously for a cauliflower (as I
did) the young lady will disappear below ground and actually return
with a real cauliflower (_de luxe_, of course). I remember few more
embarassing episodes.
And if you like to inquire at the magnificent provision-merchant’s, he
too will conjure up from the magic cellars boot-cream and metal-polish
and all those vulgar groceries which make life possible. That is the
secret of Bond Street. Beneath that glittering display of luxurious
trivialities there are vast reserves of solid prosaic necessaries, only
waiting to be asked for. A man could live exclusively on Bond Street. I
don’t know where you would buy your butcher’s meat, but I have a proud
fancy that, if you went in and said something to one of those sleek and
sorrowful jewellers, he too would vanish underground and blandly return
to you with a jewelled steak or a plush chop.
Many years ago, they tell me, there _was_ a butcher in Bond Street.
Perhaps you dealt there. For my part I was not eating much meat in
those days. But I can imagine his window--a perfect little grotto of
jasper and onyx, with stalactites of pure gold, and in the middle,
resting on a genuine block of Arctic ice, an exquisite beef-sausage. I
wish he could come back.
It is difficult to realize that there is anything but shop-windows
in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper
stories which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little
community for whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which
the housewives pass gossiping each morning to the greengrocer’s or the
fishmonger’s, and never purchase any pearls at all.
When the butcher comes back I think I shall join them.