A Sale at Christie's.
CHAPTER XIII
LONDON SHOPS AND MARKETS
"The busy Mart of London."
"Gay shops, stately palaces, bustle and breeze,
The whirring of wheels, and the murmur of trees;
By night or by day, whether noisy or stilly,
Whatever my mood is, I love Piccadilly."—
Locker-Lampson, London Lyrics.
I am confident that if a million of women of all classes could by any possibility be placed in a Palace of Truth, and interrogated straitly as to what they liked best in all London, the vast majority of them would answer, "The Shops." Indeed, you may easily, and without any undue inquisitiveness, find this out for yourself by simply taking (in May for choice) a morning or afternoon walk down Oxford Street or Regent Street. Every shop of note will have its quota of would-be buyers, trembling on the brink of irrevocable purchase: its treble, nay, quadruple row of admiring females, who appear to find this by far the most attractive mode of getting through the day. I would go further, and say that as regards the more persevering among them, it is difficult to imagine that they ever have any other occupation at all.
The shops of London have wonderfully improved in quite recent years; not perhaps, so much in actual quality, as in arrangement and taste. Labels with "dropsical figures" of shillings and perfectly invisible pence have, as in Dickens's time, still their charm for us; but other things have changed. Everything could, to those who "knew," always be bought best in London; but everything was not always displayed to the best advantage. To dress a shop-front well was in old days hardly considered a British trait. But "nous avons changé tout cela." Now, even the Paris boulevard, that Paradise of good Americans, has, except perhaps in the matter of trees and wide streets, little to teach us. "The wealth of Ormus and of Ind" that the shops of Regent Street and Bond Street display, their gold embroideries and wonderfully woven silks, tending to make a kleptomaniac out of the very elect,—these it would be hard indeed to beat. Not Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.
Even the critical American cousin is now beginning to forsake Paris, and to find out the real superiority of London shops. See how he—she, I mean—helps, in her numbers, to swell the shop-gazing crowds in Oxford Circus. Tramping from Bloomsbury boarding-houses,—or, more aristocratic, from Northumberland Avenue hotels,—the Americans have discovered, and are in a fair way to dominate, London; the London, that is, of July and August.
"The English," said a celebrated Frenchman once unkindly, "are a nation of shopkeepers." However that may be, it is certain that we are nothing if not business-like. Evidently, the love of bargaining is inherent in the soul of the average British female who comes up from the suburbs for a day's shopping. She has a long, neatly-written list of her wants and necessities, generally pinned to some part of her person, a list with startling variations of subject, thus: "Baby's food-warmer, Tom's cricket-bat, lay-figure for Sylvia, beetle-trap for the kitchen, Effie's long Suède gloves, registry office for new cook, dentist, evening wrap, chiffon boa, something neat in the blouse line for Mamie, Aunt Maria's birthday." Poor woman! That "something neat in the blouse line" takes her nearly forty minutes in the finding; and "Aunt Maria's birthday" walks sadly into the hour for lunch, already attenuated. Several shops, alas! have been ransacked vainly, and the horrid "Sign 'ere, Miss!" that so cruelly stigmatizes, in certain cheap shops, the recalcitrant buyer, has more than once mortified the poor lady's sensitive ears. "Mamie," who is assisting at the martyrdom, gets quite cross over Aunt Maria; she succeeds, however, in detaching herself from her inconvenient parent, and appears, for her part, to be preferring the claims of a protégé of her own, a personage who is very particular, apparently, about his special brand of ties. Finally, Aunt Maria's natal day is checked off by the purchase of an aggressive china pug, large as life, with staring eyes, which, for some occult reason, is supposed to be "the very thing" for that lady.
What are the special qualities that constitute "a good shopper"? They would appear to be as follows: endurance, patience, strength, coolness, self-control, amiability, mental arithmetic, and, lastly, an eye to a bargain. All these cardinal virtues are, for the average shopper, considered as generally necessary to salvation: but yet there are other qualifications. For instance, the intense delight that most women (and a few men) feel in obtaining an article at 1s. 11-3/4d., that has once been marked with the magic 3s. 6-1/2d., is of distinct value in this connection. How many women have delightedly bought a thing that is not of the slightest value to themselves or to any one else, simply because it is thus reduced in price! Hence the supreme advantage of sales—but that is another story.