Little Bits of London
V
BOND STREET
IFIND it very difficult to walk slowly down Bond Street as one ought to do; I always feel so guilty. Most of the people there look scornfully at me as if I belonged to Whitechapel, and the rest look suspiciously at me as if I belonged to Bond Street. My clothes are neither good enough or bad enough. So I hurry through with the tense expression of a man who is merely using Bond Street as a thoroughfare, because it is the way to his dentist—as indeed in my case it is. But recently Ididsaunter in the proper way, and I took a most thrilling inventory of the principal classes of shops, the results of which have now been tabulated by my statistical department.
For instance, do you know how many shops in the street sell things for ladies to wear (not including boots, jewellery or shoes)? No? Well, there are thirty-three. Not many, is it? But thenthere are twenty-one jewellers (including pearl shops) and eight boot and/or shoe shops; so that, with two sort of linen places, which may fairly be reckoned as female, the ladies’ total is sixty-four. I only counted a hundred and fifty shops altogether. Of that total, nine are places where men can buy things to wear, and ten are places where they can buy things to smoke; I have charitably debited all the cigarette-shops to the men, even the ones where the cigarettes are tipped with rose-leaves and violet petals. But even if I do that and give the men the two places where you can buy guns and throw in the one garden-seat shop, we are left with the following result:—
From these figures a firm of Manchester actuaries has drawn the startling conclusion that Bond Street is more used by women than by men. It may be so. But a more interesting question is, how do all these duplicates manage to carry on, considering the very reasonable prices theycharge? At one point there are three jewellers in a row, with another one opposite. Not far off there are three cigarette-shops together, madly defying each other with gold-tips and silver-tips, cork-tips and velvet-tips, rose-tips and lily-tips. There is only one book-shop, of course, but there are about nine picture-places. How do they all exist? It is mysterious.
Especially when you consider how much trouble they take to avoid attracting attention. There are still one or two window-dressers who lower the whole tone of the street by adhering to the gaudy-overcrowded style; but the majority, in a violent reaction from that, seem to have rushed to the wildest extremes of the simple-unobtrusive. They are delightful, I think, those reverent little windows with the chaste curtains and floors of polished walnut, in the middle of which reposes delicately a single toque, a single chocolate, or a single pearl. Some of the picture-places are among the most modest. There is one window which suggests nothing but the obscure branch of a highly decayed bank in the dimmest cathedral town. On the dingy screen which entirely fills the window is written simply in letters which time has almost erased, “John Smith—Pictures.” Nothing could be less enticing. Yet inside, I daresay, fortunes are made daily. I noticed notrace of this method at the Advertisers’ Exhibition; they might give it a trial.
Now no doubt you fondly think that Bond Street is wholly devoted to luxuries; perhaps you have abandoned your dream of actually buying something in Bond Street? You are wrong. To begin with, there are about ten places where you can buy food, and, though there is no pub, now, there is a café (with a license). There are two grocers and a poulterer. There is even a fish-shop—you didn’t know that, did you? I am bound to say it seemed to have only the very largest fish, but they were obviously fish.
Anyone can go shopping in Bond Street. I knew a clergyman once who went in and asked for a back-stud. He was afterwards unfrocked for riotous living, but the stud was produced. You can buy a cauliflower in Bond Street—if you know the ropes. There is a shop which merely looks like a very beautiful florist’s. There are potatoes in the window, it is true, but they are “hot-house” ones; inside there is no trace of a common vegetable. But if you ask facetiously for a cauliflower (as I did) the young lady will disappear below ground and actually return with a real cauliflower (de luxe, of course). I remember few more embarassing episodes.
And if you like to inquire at the magnificentprovision-merchant’s, he too will conjure up from the magic cellars boot-cream and metal-polish and all those vulgar groceries which make life possible. That is the secret of Bond Street. Beneath that glittering display of luxurious trivialities there are vast reserves of solid prosaic necessaries, only waiting to be asked for. A man could live exclusively on Bond Street. I don’t know where you would buy your butcher’s meat, but I have a proud fancy that, if you went in and said something to one of those sleek and sorrowful jewellers, he too would vanish underground and blandly return to you with a jewelled steak or a plush chop.
Many years ago, they tell me, therewasa butcher in Bond Street. Perhaps you dealt there. For my part I was not eating much meat in those days. But I can imagine his window—a perfect little grotto of jasper and onyx, with stalactites of pure gold, and in the middle, resting on a genuine block of Arctic ice, an exquisite beef-sausage. I wish he could come back.
It is difficult to realize that there is anything but shop-windows in Bond Street, but I like to think that, up there in those upper stories which one never sees, there does dwell a self-contained little community for whom Bond Street is merely the village street, down which the housewives passgossiping each morning to the greengrocer’s or the fishmonger’s, and never purchase any pearls at all.
When the butcher comes back I think I shall join them.