The curious part of these gatherings was that I had nothing to offer these guests, no refreshment, either wet or dry. I was far too poor for that. Not that any of them ever seemed to expect anything but a precarious seat on the edge of a box, or even standing room. They brought their own tobacco and talked and smoked while I worked, and when at last the job was finished and I had to say, "Now, you fellows must clear out, I've got to take this job home," they would go reluctantly—except occasionally that some of them would insist upon lending me a hand with my load to the door of the house that I was bound to. Ah, it was a strenuous time and full of worries, but I know now that it had its own peculiar charm and value, also a certain zest which I shall never know again.
Noble sportsmen spend huge sums and risk life and limb hunting game, I was gambling with my health and strength for an elusive stake, and, generally speaking, the odds were against me. And what made the venture of more intense interest was of course the helpless dependents. These made it impossible for me to halt even if, as often happened, I lost heart. It must be a good thing to be compelled to go on, it often makes a hero out of quite an ordinary person, raising him to heights of effort of which he never dreamed himself capable. All the more honour therefore to those, who, without these incentives, press forward to their goal in defiance of every hindrance.
I now began to realise in full measure the minor trials of the shop-keeper. The mere buying and selling, the commercial side of the business had in it a good deal of pleasure, but there was little in the more sordid details of keeping the stock dusted, the shop clean, the windows bright. Oh, those windows! they had a fascination for the children of the neighbourhood, whose chief delight appeared to be to get a lump of horse-dung or mud or filth of any sort and smear on them immediately after I had spent an hour's hard work in getting them clean. And I did begrudge the time for doing this, yet I couldn't afford to pay for having it done, that would indeed have been taking the exiguous gilt off the all too scanty gingerbread. And there was yet another prime difficulty. I dared not let a customer go who wanted anything that I had not in stock at the time, but would promise to get it whatever it was. And so I had to make continual rushes to the city after office hours, the travelling expenses almost invariably eating up double the profits, rather than have a customer go elsewhere and say that he or she could not get what they wanted from me.
This is the main difficulty of a suburban shop like mine was, started with insufficient capital, for it is impossible to keep a stock on hand sufficient to meet the needs of all customers, so vastly varied are the details of nearly every business now. But in this matter the wholesale dealers are kindness and courtesy itself. They might very well neglect the small, hardly beset trader, or refuse to supply him unless he gave a substantial order, but in my experience they are just as courteous and ready to meet the wants of the smallest of their customers as they are of the huge retailers who spend scores of thousands of pounds per annum with them. I always think of this when I read diatribes in the press about the laxity of British trade methods abroad, and wonder how much truth there can be in them.
This, however, is trenching upon the ground of high commercial politics, very far removed indeed from my feeble shopkeeping, and so I must needs return humbly to the principal difficulty encountered on the left hand side of my shop, or let us say grandiloquently, "The Fancy and Art Needlework Department." When customers began to come in we soon found that they almost invariably wanted something we had not got in stock, often something which we had never heard of, and when we hinted that the demand was infrequent or unusual, lifted shoulders and half-closed eyes proclaimed most eloquently profound disbelief in our statements, or an equally profound belief in our unfitness for the particular business in which we were engaged. I was often tempted to believe that ladies upon whose hands time hung heavy did of malice aforethought study our poor windows, and finding that something in the art needlework line which they knew of was not there (alas that was not difficult), would enter boldly and ask for it. If by some happy but unusual chance we had it, and displayed it triumphantly, nothing was easier than to decry its quality or tint or something, and retiring say that they would think about it. Doubtless in this employment there was great sport to be found, seeing the number of women who practised it, but it needed the exercise of much patience and amiability to take it politely when once we had begun to realise that it was a game to these folks, and nothing more.
Still I make no doubt but that this trial did us good, in that no one can exercise patience and politeness without becoming more patient and polite. Only when the making of a sale was almost imperative by reason of present need for money there was often a sick feeling at the heart upon realising that the comfortably dressed, bejewelled woman upon whom we were attending so assiduously had not the remotest idea of making a purchase, but was only passing the time away in what was to her a pleasant fashion. Such behaviour, so common among women of leisure, is hard enough upon paid employees of a shop, but it is very much harder upon such people as depend upon the scanty earnings of the shop itself. Ah well, it was only another of the lessons I was learning that, as a sardonic shopkeeper friend of mine said one day, a small trader in London must be a transgressor, in that his way was certainly hard.