The Pretty Lady - Arnold Bennett

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were few and simple. Grouse moors, fisheries, yachts, valuations, hosiery, neckties, motor-cars, insurance, assurance, antique china, antique pictures, boots, riding-whips, and, above all, Eastern cigarettes! The master-passion was evidently Eastern cigarettes. The few provision shops were marmoreal and majestic, catering as they did chiefly for the multifarious palatial male clubs which dominated the parish and protected and justified the innumerable "bachelor" suites that hung forth signs in every street. The parish, in effect, was first an immense monastery, where the monks, determined to do themselves extremely well in dignified peace, had made a prodigious and not entirely unsuccessful effort to keep out the excitable sex. And, second, it was an excusable conspiracy on the part of intensely respectable tradesmen and stewards to force the non-bargaining sex to pay the highest possible price for the privilege of doing the correct thing.

      G.J. passed through the cardiac region of St. James's, the Square itself, where knights, [45] baronets, barons, brewers, viscounts, marquesses, hereditary marshals and chief butlers, dukes, bishops, banks, librarians and Government departments gaze throughout the four seasons at the statue of a Dutchman; and then he found himself at his bootmaker's.

      Now, his bootmaker was one of the three first bootmakers in the West End, bearing a name famous from Peru to Hong Kong. An untidy interior, full of old boots and the hides of various animals! A dirty girl was writing in a dirty tome, and a young man was knotting together two pieces of string in order to tie up a parcel. Such was the "note" of the "house". The girl smiled, the young man bowed. In an instant the manager appeared, and G.J. was invested with the attributes of God. He informed the manager with pain, and the manager heard with deep pain, that the left boot of the new pair he then wore was not quite comfortable in the toes. The manager simply could not understand it, just as he simply could not have understood a failure in the working of the law of gravity. And if God had not told him he would not have believed it. He knelt and felt. He would send for the boots. He would make the boots comfortable or he would make a new pair. Expense was nothing. Trouble was nothing. Incidentally he remarked with a sigh that the enormous demand for military boots was rendering it more and more difficult for him to give to old patrons that prompt and plenary attention which he would desire to give. However, God in any case should not suffer. He noticed that the boots were not quite well polished, [46] and he ventured to charge God with hints for God's personal attendant. Then he went swiftly across to a speaking-tube and snapped:

      "Polisher!"

      A trap-door opened in the floor of the shop and a horrible, pallid, weak, cringing man came up out of the earth of St. James's, and knelt before God far more submissively than even the manager had knelt. He had brushes and blacking, and he blacked and he brushed and breathed alternately, undoing continually with his breath or his filthy hand what he had done with his brush. He never looked up, never spoke. When he had made the boots like mirrors he gathered together his implements and vanished, silent and dutifully bent, through the trap-door back into the earth of St. James's. And because the trap-door had not shut properly the manager stamped on it and stamped down the pale man definitely into the darkness underneath. And then G.J. was wafted out of the shop with smiles and bows.

      [47]

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