Where the Blue Begins

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  There was some dramatic nerve in Gissing's nature that respondedeloquently to the floorwalking job. Never, in the history of Beagle andCompany, had there been a floorwalker who threw so much passion and zealinto his task. The very hang of his coattails, even the erect carriageof his back, the rubbery way in which his feet trod the aisles, showedhis sense of dignity and glamour. There seemed to be a great traditionwhich enriched and upheld him. Mr. Beagle senior used to stand onthe little balcony at the rear of the main floor, transfixed with thepleasure of seeing Gissing move among the crowded passages.Alert, watchful, urbane, with just the ideal blend of courtesy andcondescension, he raised floorwalking to a social art. Female customersasked him the way to departments they knew perfectly well, for thepleasure of hearing him direct them. Business began to improve before hehad been there a week.

  And how he enjoyed himself! The perfection of his bearing on thefloor was no careful pose: it was due to the brimming overplus of hishappiness. Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: onlythe unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was young, remember; andthis was his first job. His precocious experience as a paterfamilias hadadded to his mien just that suggestion of unconscious gravity which isso appealing to ladies. He looked (they thought) as though he had beentouched--but Oh so lightly!--by poetic sorrow or strange experience: toask him the way to the notion counter was as much of an adventure asto meet a reigning actor at a tea. The faint cloud of melancholy thatshadowed his brow may have been only due to the fact that his new bootswere pinching painfully; but they did not know that.

  So, quite unconsciously, he began to "establish" himself in his role,just as an actor does. At first he felt his way tentatively and withtact. Every store has its own tone and atmosphere: in a day or so hedivined the characteristic cachet of the Beagle establishment. He sawwhat kind of customers were typical, and what sort of conduct theyexpected. And the secret of conquest being always to give peoplea little more than they expect, he pursued that course. Since theyexpected in a floorwalker the mechanical and servile gentility of ahired puppet, he exhibited the easy, offhand simplicity of a fellowclub-member. With perfect naturalness he went out of his way to assistin their shopping concerns: gave advice in the selection of dressmaterials, acted as arbiter in the matching of frocks and stockings. Histaste being faultless, it often happened that the things he recommendedwere not the most expensive: this again endeared him to customers.When sales slips were brought to him by ladies who wished to make anexchange, he affixed his O. K. with a magnificent flourish, and withsuch evident pleasure, that patrons felt genuine elation, and plungedinto the tumult with new enthusiasm. It was not long before there werealways people waiting for his counsel; and husbands would appear atthe store to convey (a little irritably) some such message as: "Mrs.Sealyham says, please choose her a scarf that will go nicely with thatbrown moire dress of hers. She says you will remember the dress."--Thispopularity became even a bit perplexing, as for instance when old Mrs.Dachshund, the store's biggest Charge Account, insisted on his leavinghis beat at a very busy time, to go up to the tenth floor to tell herwhich piano he thought had the richer tone.

  Of course all this was very entertaining, and an admirable opportunityfor studying his fellow-creatures; but it did not go very deep intohis mind. He lived for some time in a confused glamour and glitter;surrounded by the fascinating specious life of the store, but driftingmerely superficially upon it. The great place, with its columns ofartificial marble and white censers of upward-shining electricity,glimmered like a birch forest by moonlight. Silver and jewels and silksand slippers flashed all about him. It was a marvellous education, forhe soon learned to estimate these things at their proper value; which islow, for they have little to do with life itself. His work was tiring inthe extreme--merely having to remain upright on his hind legs forsuch long hours WAS an ordeal--but it did not penetrate to the secretobservant self of which he was always aware. This was advantageous. Ifyou have no intellect, or only just enough to get along with, it doesnot much matter what you do. But if you really have a mind--by whichis meant that rare and curious power of reason, of imagination, andof emotion; very different from a mere fertility of conversation andintelligent curiosity--it is better not to weary and wear it out overtrifles.

  So, when he left the store in the evening, no matter how his legs ached,his head was clear and untarnished. He did not hurry away at closingtime. Places where people work are particularly fascinating afterthe bustle is over. He loved to linger in the long aisles, to see thetumbled counters being swiftly brought to order, to hear the pungentcynicisms of the weary shopgirls. To these, by the way, he was a bit ofa mystery. The punctilio of his manner, the extreme courtliness of hisremarks, embarrassed them a little. Behind his back they spoke of him as"The Duke" and admired him hugely; little Miss Whippet, at the stockingcounter, said that he was an English noble of long pedigree, who hadbeen unjustly deprived of his estates.

  Down in the basement of this palatial store was a little dressingroom and lavatory for the floorwalkers, where they doffed their formalraiment and resumed street attire. His colleagues grumbled and hastenedto depart, but Gissing made himself entirely comfortable. In his lockerhe kept a baby's bathtub, which he leisurely filled with hot water atone of the basins. Then he sat serenely and bathed his feet; although itwas against the rules he often managed to smoke a pipe while doing so.Then he hung up his store clothes neatly, and went off refreshed intothe summer evening.

  A warm rosy light floods the city at that hour. At the foot of everycrosstown street is a bonfire of sunset. What a mood of secret smilingbeset him as he viewed the great territory of his enjoyment. "Thefreedom of the city"--a phrase he had somewhere heard--echoed in hismind. The freedom of the city! A magnificent saying, Electric signs,first burning wanly in the pink air, then brightened and grew strong."Not light, but rather darkness visible," in that magic hour that justholds the balance between paling day and the spendthrift jewelleryof evening. Or, if it rained, to sit blithely on the roof of a bus,revelling in the gust and whipping of the shower. Why had no one toldhim of the glory of the city? She was pride, she was exultation, shewas madness. She was what he had obscurely craved. In every line ofher gallant profile he saw conquest, triumph, victory! Empty conquest,futile triumph, doomed victory--but that was the essence of the drama.In thunderclaps of dumb ecstasy he saw her whole gigantic fabric,leaning and clamouring upward with terrible yearning. Burnt withpitiless sunlight, drenched with purple explosions of summer storm, hesaw her cleansed and pure. Where were her recreant poets that they hadnever made these things plain?

  And then, after the senseless day, after its happy but meaninglesstriviality, the throng and mixed perfumery and silly courteous gestures,his blessed solitude! Oh solitude, that noble peace of the mind!He loved the throng and multitude of the day: he loved people: butsometimes he suspected that he loved them as God does--at a judiciousdistance. From his rather haphazard religious training, strange wordscame back to him. "For God so loved the world..." So loved the worldthat--that what? That He sent someone else... Some day he must thinkthis out. But you can't think things out. They think themselves,suddenly, amazingly. The city itself is God, he cried. Was not God'sultimate promise something about a city--The City of God? Well, but thatwas only symbolic language. The city--of course that was only a symbolfor the race--for all his kind. The entire species, the whole aspirationand passion and struggle, that was God.

  On the ferries, at night, after supper, was his favourite place formeditation. Some undeniable instinct drew him ever and again out ofthe deep and shut ravines of stone, to places where he could feed ondistance. That is one of the subtleties of this straight and narrowcity, that though her ways are cliffed in, they are a long thoroughfarefor the eye: there is always a far perspective. But best of all to godown to her environing water, where spaces are wide: the openness thatkeeps her sound and free. Ships had words for him: they had crossed manyhorizons: fragments of that broke
n blue still shone on their cuttingbows. Ferries, the most poetical things in the city, were nearly emptyat night: he stood by the rail, saw the black outline of the town slideby, saw the lower sky gilded with her merriment, and was busy thinking.

  Now about a God (he said to himself)--instinct tells me that there isone, for when I think about Him I find that I unconsciously wag my taila little. But I must not reason on that basis, which is too puppyish. Ilike to think that there is, somewhere in this universe, an inscrutableBeing of infinite wisdom, harmony, and charity, by Whom all my desiresand needs would be understood; in association with Whom I would findpeace, satisfaction, a lightness of heart that exceed my presentunderstanding. Such a Being is to me quite inconceivable; yet I feelthat if I met Him, I would instantly understand. I do not mean that Iwould understand Him: but I would understand my relationship to Him,which would be perfect. Nor do I mean that it would be alwayshappy; merely that it would transcend anything in the way of socialsignificance that I now experience. But I must not conclude that thereis such a God, merely because it would be so pleasant if there were.

  Then (he continued) is it necessary to conceive that this deity issuper-canine in essence? What I am getting at is this: in everyoneI have ever known--Fuji, Mr. Poodle, Mrs. Spaniel, those maddeningdelightful puppies, Mrs. Purp, Mr. Beagle, even Mrs. Chow and Mrs.Sealyham and little Miss Whippet--I have always been aware that therewas some mysterious point of union at which our minds could converge andentirely understand one another. No matter what our difference of breed,of training, of experience and education, provided we could meet andexchange ideas honestly there would be some satisfying point of mentalfusion where we would feel our solidarity in the common mystery of life.People complain that wars are caused by and fought over trivial things.Why, of course! For it is only in trivial matters that people differ:in the deep realities they must necessarily be at one. Now I have asuspicion that in this secret sense of unity God may lurk. Is that whatwe mean by God, the sum total of all these instinctive understandings?But what is the origin of this sense of kinship? Is it not therealization of our common subjection to laws and forces greater thanourselves? Then, since nothing can be greater than God, He must BE thesesuperior mysteries. Yet He cannot be greater than our minds, for ourminds have imagined Him.

  My mathematics is very rusty, he said to himself, but I seem to remembersomething about a locus, which was a curve or a surface every pointon which satisfied some particular equation of relation among thecoordinates. It begins to look to me as though life might be a kind oflocus, whose commanding equation we call God. The points on that locuscannot conceive of the equation, yet they are subject to it. They cannotconceive of that equation, because of course it has no existence saveas a law of their being. It exists only for them; they, only by it. Butthere it is--a perfect, potent, divine abstraction.

  This carried him into a realm of disembodied thinking which his mind wasnot sufficiently disciplined to summarize. It is quite plain, he said tohimself, that I must rub up my vanished mathematics. For certainly themathematician comes closer to God than any other, since his mind istrained to conceive and formulate the magnificent phantoms of legality.He smiled to think that any one should presume to become a parsonwithout having at least mastered analytical geometry.

  The ferry had crossed and recrossed the river several times, but Gissinghad found no conclusion for these thoughts. As the boat drew towardher slip, she passed astern of a great liner. Gissing saw the four tallfunnels loom up above the shed of the pier where she lay berthed.What was it that made his heart so stir? The perfect rake of thefunnels--just that satisfying angle of slant--that, absurdly enough, wasthe nobility of the sight. Why, then? Let's get at the heart of this, hesaid. Just that little trick of the architect, useless in itself--whatwas it but the touch of swagger, of bravado, of defiance--going outinto the vast, meaningless, unpitying sea with that dainty arroganceof build; taking the trouble to mock the senseless elements, hurricane,ice, and fog, with a 15-degree slope of masts and funnels: damn, whatwas the analogy?

  It was pride, it was pride! It was the same lusty impudence that he sawin his perfect city, the city that cried out to the hearts of youth,jutted her mocking pinnacles toward sky, her clumsy turrets verticalledon gold! And God, the God of gales and gravity, loved His children todare and contradict Him, to rally Him with equations of their own.

  "God, I defy you!" he cried.