BOOTS
In the very small hall G.J. gazed at himself in the mirror that was
nearly as large as the bathroom door, to which it was attached, and
which it ingeniously masked.
Although Mrs. Braiding was present, holding his ebony stick, he
carefully examined his face and appearance without the slightest
self-consciousness. Nor did Mrs. Braiding's demeanour indicate that in
her opinion G.J. was behaving in a manner eccentric or incorrect. He
was dressed in mourning. Honestly he did not believe that he looked
anywhere near fifty. His face was worn by the friction of the world,
especially under the eyes, but his eyes were youthful, and his hair
and moustache and short, fine beard scarcely tinged with grey. His
features showed benevolence, with a certain firmness, and they had the
refinement which comes of half a century's instinctive avoidance of
excess. Still, he was beginning to feel his age. He moved more slowly;
he sat down, instead of standing up, at the dressing-table. And he was
beginning also to take a pride in mentioning these changes and in the
fact that he would be fifty on his next birthday. And when talking to
men under thirty, or even under forty, he would say in a tone mingling
condescension and envy: "But, of course, you're young."
He departed, remarking that he should not be in for lunch and might
not be in for dinner, and he walked down the covered way to the
Albany Courtyard, and was approved by the Albany porters as a resident
handsomely conforming to the traditional high standard set by the
Albany for its residents. He crossed Piccadilly, and as he did so he
saw a couple of jolly fine girls, handsome, stylish, independent of
carriage, swinging freely along and intimately talking with that mien
of experience and broad-mindedness which some girls manage to wear in
the streets. One of them in particular appealed to him. He thought how
different they were from Christine. He had dreamt of just such girls
as they were, and yet now Christine filled the whole of his mind.
"You can't foresee," he thought.
He dipped down into the extraordinary rectangle of St. James's, where
he was utterly at home. A strange architecture, parsimoniously plain
on the outside, indeed carrying the Oriental scorn for merely external
effect to a point only reachable by a race at once hypocritical and
madly proud. The shabby plainness of Wren's church well typified all
the parochial parsimony. The despairing architect had been so pinched
by his employers in the matter of ornament that on the whole of the
northern facade there was only one of his favourite cherub's heads!
What a parish!
It was a parish of flat brick walls and brass door-knobs and brass
plates. And the first commandment was to polish every brass door-knob
and every brass plate every morning. What happened in the way of
disfigurement by polishing paste to the surrounding brick or wood had
no importance. The conventions of the parish had no eye save for brass
door-knobs and brass plates, which were maintained daily in effulgence
by a vast early-rising population. Recruiting offices, casualty lists,
the rumour of peril and of glory, could do nothing to diminish the
high urgency of the polishing of those brass door-knobs and those
brass plates.
The shops and offices seemed to show that the wants of customers were
few and simple. Grouse moors, fisheries, yachts, valuations, hosiery,
neckties, motor-cars, insurance, assurance, antique china, antique
pictures, boots, riding-whips, and, above all, Eastern cigarettes!
The master-passion was evidently Eastern cigarettes. The few provision
shops were marmoreal and majestic, catering as they did chiefly for
the multifarious palatial male clubs which dominated the parish and
protected and justified the innumerable "bachelor" suites that hung
forth signs in every street. The parish, in effect, was first an
immense monastery, where the monks, determined to do themselves
extremely well in dignified peace, had made a prodigious and not
entirely unsuccessful effort to keep out the excitable sex. And,
second, it was an excusable conspiracy on the part of intensely
respectable tradesmen and stewards to force the non-bargaining sex to
pay the highest possible price for the privilege of doing the correct
thing.
G.J. passed through the cardiac region of St. James's, the Square
itself, where knights, baronets, barons, brewers, viscounts,
marquesses, hereditary marshals and chief butlers, dukes, bishops,
banks, librarians and Government departments gaze throughout the four
seasons at the statue of a Dutchman; and then he found himself at his
bootmaker's.
Now, his bootmaker was one of the three first bootmakers in the West
End, bearing a name famous from Peru to Hong Kong. An untidy interior,
full of old boots and the hides of various animals! A dirty girl was
writing in a dirty tome, and a young man was knotting together two
pieces of string in order to tie up a parcel. Such was the "note" of
the "house". The girl smiled, the young man bowed. In an instant the
manager appeared, and G.J. was invested with the attributes of God. He
informed the manager with pain, and the manager heard with deep
pain, that the left boot of the new pair he then wore was not quite
comfortable in the toes. The manager simply could not understand it,
just as he simply could not have understood a failure in the working
of the law of gravity. And if God had not told him he would not have
believed it. He knelt and felt. He would send for the boots. He would
make the boots comfortable or he would make a new pair. Expense was
nothing. Trouble was nothing. Incidentally he remarked with a sigh
that the enormous demand for military boots was rendering it more and
more difficult for him to give to old patrons that prompt and plenary
attention which he would desire to give. However, God in any case
should not suffer. He noticed that the boots were not quite well
polished, and he ventured to charge God with hints for God's personal
attendant. Then he went swiftly across to a speaking-tube and snapped:
"Polisher!"
A trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid,
weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of St. James's, and knelt
before God far more submissively than even the manager had knelt. He
had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed
alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand
what he had done with his brush. He never looked up, never spoke. When
he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements
and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back
into the earth of St. James's. And because the trap-door had not
shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man
definitely into the darkness underneath. And then G.J. was wafted out
of the shop with smiles and bows.