Part 21 (2/2)
”It's such stupid stuff,” she explained. ”I can understand people buying daffodils or tulips or violets, because they're pretty or sweet, but not this dried-up stuff with the little kittens.”
The remark set me wondering to what extent dealers in other articles are perplexed by their customers' preferences. (Some milliners, I hope.) For the most part we are encouraged by the shopkeeper to follow our own inclinations. His taste may be utterly different, but he doesn't impose it on us; he ventures to suggest only when there are varying prices and we seem unduly inclined to the lowest. But this old lady was prepared, long before the bargaining stage had set in, to knock off fifty per cent. and traduce the goods as well. Surely a character.
”And that's not all,” she added. ”What do you think a lady--calls herself a lady--said to me just now when she bought threepenny worth?
She said it lasted a year. Fancy telling a poor flower-woman that!”
We went on to talk of her calling. I found her an ”agreeable blend” (as the tobacconists say) of humour and resignation; and very practical.
”Why are your flowers,” I asked her, ”so much better than the flowers of the man the other side of the road?”
”Because he takes his home at night,” she said. ”You should never do that. If I've got any unsold I leave them at the fire-station and then they're fresh in the morning. But I don't often have any left over.”
This was, I should say, a day of acute discomfort: it had been bitterly raining since early morning, and yet there was no bitterness in the flower-woman. She was merely resigned. Very damp, but cheerfully apathetic. ”When it's cold and wet like this,” I asked, ”is life worth living?”
”Of course,” was her splendid answer; ”aren't there the nights?”
Rather fine that--even if as a commentary on the wakeful hours a little acid. And for those who can sleep, how true! ”Aren't there the nights?”
I must remember the solace when next the cynic or the misanthrope girds at sunless noons.
Of her philosophy she then gave me another taste, for, observing a great ma.s.s of loose coins, many of them silver, lying in the basket, I asked if she were not afraid of a thief s.n.a.t.c.hing at it. ”Oh, no,” she said.
”But I don't always have it there. It's because it's so wet to-day.
Counting helps.”
My guess would have been that although the life of flower-women calls for philosophy, for philosophy to respond is by no means the rule; and her consolation and cheerfulness made me very happy. Yet what a penance much of their lives must be! First of all, there is the weather. Wet or fine, hot or cold, they must be out in it, and stationary at that. What to place second and third I do not know, but there is the perishable character of the stock-in-trade to be considered, and, when fogs and frosts interfere, the chance of being unable to collect any stock-in-trade at all. But exposure must be the crucial strain.
The whole question of this motionless, receptive att.i.tude to the elements is interesting to me, who catch cold several times a day. How these people can stand it is a constant mystery. That blind man, for instance, at the little door of the Temple just below the Ess.e.x Street archway--ever since I can remember London he has been there, with his matches, always placid, no matter what new buffetings Heaven has for him.
The blind in particular seem to become indifferent to climatic extremes; and there must be in every one's cognizance two or three immovable sightless mendicants defying rain and chill. Every town in the country has such landmarks, and all seem to retain their health. But I recollect that the blind man who used to sit in front of the Grand Hotel at Brighton forty years ago spelling out Holy Writ, while the dog at his feet collected coppers in a little box, always in winter wore mittens and a cap with ear-flaps, and had fingers red and swollen. Still, he endured. Whether with those red and swollen fingers he really deciphered the Evangel or merely repeated from memory, we never knew, but I can still hear the droning voice, ”And Jesus said----”
This insensitiveness to January blasts and February drenchings may be one of the compensations that the blind enjoy. Whatever else happens to them they never, perhaps, catch cold. And that is more than something.
But how odd that these stolid, shabby, and often rather battered old florists should be the middle-men and middle-women between the country and the city, but for whose indifference to pitiless skies so many town-dwellers would never see a blossom at all! There is nothing of the country about them, nothing of the garden--almost no Londoner less suggests the riot of a herbaceous border--and yet it is they who form the link between flower-bed and street.
”Well,” I said, grasping the bunch of palm that the old flower-woman had sold me at such a sacrifice, ”good-bye; I hope you'll empty your basket.”
”And I hope you'll empty yours,” she replied.
”Mine?” I said, ”I haven't got one.”
”Oh, yes, you have,” said Flora; ”every one's got a basket, only they don't always know where to take it.”
THE END
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