Looking along the ages from the vantage of a throne in the shoe-blacking parlor, it is a matter of pleased wonder to observe what the mind has found to do with the feet; nor is the late invention of shoe-polish (hardly earlier than the Declaration of Independence) the least surprising item. For the greater part of his journey man has gone about his businesses in unshined footwear, beginning, it would appear, with a pair of foot-bags, or foot-purses, each containing a valuable foot, and tied round the ankle. Thus we see him, far down the vista of time, a tiny figure stopping on his way to tie up his shoe-strings. Captivated with form and color, he exhausted his invention in shapes and materials before ever he thought of polish: he cut his toes square; he cut his toes so long and pointed that he must needs tie them to his knee to keep from falling over them; he wore soles without uppers,—alas! poor devil, how often in all ages has he approximated wearing uppers without soles!—and he went in for top-boots splendidly belegged and coquettishly beautified with what, had he been a lady, he might have described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public view the man who is having his shoes shined.
You know him, as the advertisement says of the live, virile humans who must have the live, virile pipe-smoke; but happily you know him nowadays chiefly by effort of memory. Yet only a little while ago kindly, well-intentioned men thought nothing of having their shoes shined in the full glare of the sun. The man having his shoes shined was a common spectacle. He sat or stood where anybody might see him, almost as immobile as a cigar-store Indian and much less decorative, with a peripatetic shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing attitude was a little like Washington crossing the Delaware; and when he sat down, he was not wholly unlike the picture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch's well-known Age of Fable. He had his shoes shined on the sidewalk, congesting traffic; he had them shined in the park, with the birds singing; wherever he had them shined, he was as lacking in self-consciousness as a baby sucking its thumb. Peripatetic shoeblacks pursued pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman was safe from them merely because he had carefully and well shined his own shoes before he came out. But how rarely nowadays do we see this peripatetic shoeblack! Soon he will be as extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe-blacking parlor is his Buffalo Bill.
In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, all daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical phrase goes, on one another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another, and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre. Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all wondering how we are going to get down when the time comes. One will hop, like a great sparrow; another will turn round and descend backward; another will come down with an absent-minded little wave of the foot, as if he were quite used to having his shoes shined and already thinking of more serious business; another—but this is sheer nervousness and lack of savoir-faire—will step off desperately, as if into an abyss, and come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It is a throne—and perhaps this is true of all thrones—from which no altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it, sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr. Comstock ever had his shoes shined.
And now, behold! the slave-king at my feet has found a long, narrow strip of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but otherwise suggestive of a preparedness course in first aid to the injured. He breathes on my shoes (O unhygienic shoeblack!), dulling them to make them brighter with his strip of linen. It is my notice to abdicate; he turns down the bottoms of my trousers. I do not know how I get down from the throne.
ON MAKING CALLS
I know a boy who dislikes to make calls. Making a call, he says, is 'just sitting on a chair.'
I have had the same feeling, although I had never defined it so nicely. One 'just sits on a chair'—precariously, yet with an odd sense of unhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, as if one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effort to get up and go away would bring the chair up and away with him. He is, so to speak, like a barnacle on a rock in an ocean of conversation. He may exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, cross and uncross his legs, fold and unfold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, incline his tired head this way and that to relieve the strain on his neck, assume (like an actor) expressions of interest, amusement, surprise, pleasure, or what not. He may even speak or laugh. But he remains sitting on his chair. He is more and more certain that he cannot get up.
He is unlike the bottoms of his own trousers. Calmly, quietly, and by imperceptible degrees they get up. Higher and higher they ascend kneeward; they have an ambition to achieve the waist. Every little while he must unostentatiously, and with an easy, careless, indifferent, well-bred, and even blasé gesture, manage to pull them down.