It is one of the consolations of being unemployed that one has time
to look in the shop windows. When I was among the employed I never
looked in shop windows. I was shot like a shuttle in a loom from
home to office and from engagement to engagement, and had no time to
saunter along and "stand and stare." It was not merely that I had no
time for shop windows: I thought I had no taste for shop windows. If
I walked down Regent Street with Jane I was sensible of a certain
impatience when she made a sudden left-wheel and stood transfixed
before some brilliant idea of the window-dresser. I declined to
wheel to the left. I stood implacably in the middle of the pavement,
looking severely ahead or around or above. I wanted to be getting on
with the war. I was a serious person, with a soul above the
frivolities of shop windows. No doubt there was something of a pose
in this behaviour. There is usually something of a pose in us when
we feel superior.
But with the inheritance of leisure I have become more humble-minded.
I not only wheel to the left when Jane wheels, but I wheel to the
left on my own account. I am becoming a student of shop windows. I
find them as interesting as a hedgerow in the country. I can tell
you the price of things. I can discuss with you the relative merits
of Marshall and Snelgrove and Peter Robinson, and the name of Mr.
Selfridge falls trippingly from my tongue. There is not a tailor's
shop between the Law Courts and Marble Arch that I have not peered
into, and if you want to know where a good line in boots is to be had
or where motor-cars are cheap to-day or precious stones should be
sought I am worth consulting. No longer does Jane regard a walk down
Regent Street with me as an affliction. I am a companion after her
own heart--if not an expert, at least an intelligent amateur. A
touch on my arm, and I wheel to the left with military precision and
line up in front of the window and discuss the contents in no
unenlightened spirit. My opinion is regarded. I am asked questions.
I am listened to with respect. My taste in hats is becoming a
proverb, and it is allowed that I have a good eye for colour.
In this new-found diversion I am catholic in my tastes. You may see
me lost in thought before a furniture shop or a fruit shop, or
examining trombones or Kodaks, or looking at old colour prints or old
books, or studying old china, or simply standing amused among a crowd
of other idlers watching the kittens at play in the naturalist's shop
window. There is no covetousness in all this. I am conscious of no
yearnings for unattainable things. On the contrary, I am astonished
at the number of things I can do without.
Nor am I tempted to go inside the shops.
May day seldom looks
Up in the country as it does in books.
And I know that shop windows are no more like the inside of shops
than a company prospectus is like the company's balance-sheet. You
see, let us say, a pair of shoes in the window at twenty-five
shillings. It would be a crime to let that pair of shoes go, you
say. It is what you have been looking for--something "good-cheap,"
as the old English phrase went. You go inside and allude falteringly
to that cheap line in the window. The salesman observes the falter.
He speaks coldly of that attractive-looking bait. You feebly insist,
and he tries it on, making you sensible the while that a person like
you would be dishonoured by such footwear, that he is surprised you
should think that a person of your obvious quality can appear abroad
in such inferior leathers. Moreover, aren't they a leetle tight
across the instep? And unfortunately he hasn't the next size in
stock.... Now here is a perfect shoe, best box-calf, soft as kid,
durable as brass, last a lifetime.... The price? The fellow looks
inside as though the question of price had not occurred to him, as
though it had no relation to the subject.... Fifty-five shillings.
And as you leave the shop worsted, wearing the shoes, you fancy you
hear a slight chuckle of derision from the victor.
There are, of course, people who love shopping and whose life is
irradiated by victories at the counter. They are chiefly women, but
I have known men who had gifts in this line of no mean order. They
could march into a shop as boldly as any woman and have the place
turned upside down and go away without spending a copper, carrying
their heads as high and haughtily as you please. But men of this
heroic mould are rare. Men are usually much too mean-spirited, too
humble, too timid to be fit to go into a shop to buy anything.
Perhaps I ought to say they are too proud. They would slink out, if
they could do so unobserved. They would decline to buy what they
don't want to buy if their vanity would permit them. But they cannot
face the ordeal. They cannot leave the impression that they are not
rolling in riches and are not able to buy anything in the shop,
whether they want it or not. And it is only fair to us to say that
sometimes we fall from compassion. We buy because the lady has been
so attentive--or has such an agreeable presence--that we have not the
courage to disappoint her or, less creditably, to lose her favourable
opinion.
Now women, of course, are afflicted with none of these handicaps.
The trouble with men as shoppers is that they are incurable amateurs
and sentimentalists. They not only do not know the ropes; they do
not know that there are any ropes to know. They are just babes and
sucklings at the business. You can see the Delilah behind the
counter smiling pityingly and even contemptuously to herself as they
approach with their mouths wide open to receive the hook. She
chooses her bait under the poor simpletons' noses, and lands them
without a struggle. She knows that they will take any old thing at
any old price. But a woman marches to the attack as the soldier
marches to battle. She is for the rigour of the game. The shop is
her battlefield, and she surveys it with the eye of the professional
warrior. And Delilah prepares to receive her as an enemy worthy of
her steel. All her faculties are aroused, all her suspicions are
awakened. She expects no quarter, and she will give none.
Here is Pamela, for example, accompanied by Roderick, halting rather
shamefacedly in the rear. Roderick has never seen Pamela on the
warpath before, and it is a terrifying revelation. He had thought
she was so kind-hearted and genial that everybody must love her, but
he grows crimson as he sees the progress of the duel. This is not
the Pamela he knew: this is a very Amazon of a woman, armed to the
teeth, clothed in an icy disapproval of everything, riding down her
foe with Prussian frightfulness. And all over a matter of a handbag.
The counter is piled with handbags, and Pamela examines each with
relentless thoroughness and increasing dissatisfaction. She must
have more handbags. And Delilah with darkening brows ransacks the
store for the last handbag. She understands the game, but she is
helpless, and when at the end of the battle Pamela coldly remarks
that they are not what she wants, and that she will just take one of
those tops, Delilah knows that she has been defeated. "I only wanted
a top, you see," says Pamela to Roderick sweetly as they leave the
shop, "but I wanted to see how the bags were fitted to them."
Or to understand the gulf that separates men and women in the art and
science of shopping, see my Lady Bareacres at the mantlemaker's,
accompanied by a lady companion. All the riches of the establishment
are displayed before her, and she parades in front of the mirror in
an endless succession of flowing robes. She gives the impression of
inexhaustible good intentions, but she finds that there is nothing
that suits her, and she goes away to repeat the performance
elsewhere. And as she goes Delilah looks daggers at the companion
who has come with her ladyship to get hints for the garment that she
is to make for her. The man has not been born who could play so high
a hand as that. Whether his inferiority in the great art of shopping
is to be accounted to him as a virtue or a shame may be left to the
moralists to discuss; but the fact is indisputable enough. He knows
his weakness, and rarely goes into a shop except in the last
extremity or under the competent guardianship of a woman. He can
look in shop windows if he have firmness of mind and can say,
"Danton, no weakness!" with the assurance that Danton will not bolt
inside. But there is one sort of shop window before which the least
of us are safe. And it transcends all shop windows in interest. It
is the window through which you look into the far places of the
earth. Canada and Queensland, British Columbia and New Zealand. The
Strand is lit up with glimpses of these distant horizons--landscapes
waving with corn, landscapes flowing with milk and honey, bales of
fleecy wool, sugar-canes like scaffold poles, peaches that make the
mouth water, pumpkins as large as the full moon, prodigious trout
that would make the angler's heart sing, snow mountains and
climbing-boots, a thousand invitations to come out into the wide
spaces of the earth, where plenty and freedom and the sunshine await
you. I daresay it is an illusion. I daresay the wide spaces of the
earth are very unlike these wonderful windows. But I love to look in
them and to feel that they are true. They almost make me wish that I
were young again--young enough to set out
For to admire and for to see.
For to behold the world so wide.