Women must, I am glad to say, have fur coats. It has been so since
we men set out after the ermine with clubs instead of cheque books,
and splendidly have they always repaid us with a glimpse of eyes over
soft fur and chins buried in the cosy rightness of it.
The result is that, all over the world, wherever hairy things creep,
crawl, or climb, men are ready with guns and traps. Three times a
year the pelts of the world pour into London to be distributed.
Whenever this happens a large auction-room in Queen Street will
provide you with the strangest sight in the City of London. You walk
in through a courtyard past a man in white overalls. As I passed him
recently he said: "Hudson Bay Company selling now, sir!" and, do you
know, I felt young all over! I thrilled. Hudson Bay Company!
Shades of Fenimore Cooper! In one swift, pregnant moment I saw the
white lands I used to know so well when I was at school, the driving
sheets of snow, the tugging sleigh dogs, and the big, square-bearded
men, with matted hair frozen under round fur hats, bending forward
against the storm, urging on their teams, taking their piled sleighs
to the trading post.
I crossed the courtyard and entered the auction-room. What a scene!
Men who buy furs in every country in the world were present. They
sat tier on tier, a good five hundred of them, looking like a full
session of the Parliament of the United States of Europe. No common
auction this: it was a fur parliament, a senate of seal and musquash.
Russians, Poles, Germans, Dutch, French, every kind of Jew, and a
good balance of English and American. If Sir Arthur Keith had been
with me he would have gone crazy over the marvellous skulls and cheek
bones. It was, anthropologically, a splendid sight.
They retained their hats as they sat in the wide half-moon of the fur
theatre. What hats! Here and there I picked out a round astrakhan
cap, and, of course, there were fur coats. One man unbuttoned his
coat. Somebody had been killing leopards!
Seven men sat high up above the assembly, facing it, and in the
centre of the seven was the auctioneer:
"Any advance on three hundred?"
Instead of the nods and lifted eyebrows of any ordinary saleroom
there was a violent agitation. To make a bid in this room a man had
to create a scene. In two minutes the place looked like a crisis in
the French Senate. Men desiring mink rose and shot up their arms.
The three hundred pounds advanced to five hundred, hesitated, and
spurted on to seven hundred. Then a man with a Central European
beard rose (exposing a fine nutria lining) and carried the day. The
hammer fell! At least twenty more women would have fur coats next
winter!
* * *
So it went on. Millions of potential fur coats were bought and--not
one of them in sight! They were all lying in warehouses somewhere in
London; they had all been carefully examined before the sale.
As it proceeded it occurred to me how true it is that certain
professions take hold of a man and brand him. There are grooms who
look like horses, dog fanciers who resemble dogs, and if certain of
these fur men had emerged from thick undergrowth nine sportsmen out
of ten would have taken a pot shot at them. I fancied I could detect
the little rodent-like beaver merchants, the fat, swarthy seal fans,
the sharp, pale-white fox-fanciers, and a few aristocratic grey men
with whom I associated chinchilla.
* * *
The story behind it all! That was the thing that thrilled me.
Behind this roomful of strange, intent men in a London auction-room I
seemed to see other men, the wild, uncouth men of youthful romance,
out in the savage places of the earth and in the great loneliness of
forests and ice. Hunters, trappers! Though we grow old and hard and
inaccessible to all soft thoughts we will never lose our love for
these. It is in our blood. We have all longed to be trappers, we
have all longed to blaze the trail through the Canadian wilderness,
to crack the ice on Great Whale River before we could catch our
breakfast, to win home at last in a flurry of snow to the log
cabin....
"Any advance on three hundred and fifty pounds?"
The baying of dogs in a white-sheeted world, the pine trees in
shrouds; and then--silence...
"Four hundred. Any advance?"
The green glitter of ice and the drama of a man fighting the
elements, fighting solitude, primitive, uncouth, his mind following
the minds of beasts as a fox-hunter anticipates the mind of a fox.
"Five hundred! Any advance?"
Blood over the snow and a limp body, the cracking of whips, the dog
team with its laden sledge, and--all in order that you, my dear, may
wrap your tall, elegant self in a lovely fur coat!
"Going, going, gone!"
Crack!