Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 9/Make-believe places of business
MAKE-BELIEVE PLACES OF BUSINESS.
You meet with these in all our large towns, but in London they form a most striking feature. The number of spectral shops, phantom wharves, and ghostly warehouses to be met with in the metropolis is startling. Every such place has the peculiarity that, with all the usual preparation for business, it still successfully avoids the slightest transaction of trade of any kind. In some cases, to judge from the situation of the premises, this must be a task of great difficulty; but, some way, these apparitional tradesmen and illusive tradeswomen manage to achieve it. Only an archway, the sharp corner of another building, or ten yards, say, of street, separate them from the roaring tides of buyers and sellers, yet no customer ever throws an impertinent shadow over their counter or upon their desk. The Thames, for instance, is said to be a busy river, and still I know wharves on its banks which have long since rotted on their piles, but where no barge has unladen cargo for seven years past. Myriads of craft pass up and down the turbid stream, and as far as those spots go they always do pass, for not a cockle-boat by any accident ever anchors there. There are undertakers’ shops, which I know, where the last and only business transaction was the sale by the new-comer of a coffin-plate for the use of the previous proprietor. Brokers’ stores may be counted in many neighbourhoods by the half-dozen, at which not so much as change for a sixpence was ever given in the memory of the most aged errand-lad. For there are shopmen, store-keepers, and errand-boys, who unbar and fasten doors, take down and put up shutters, and sit behind counters and desks, with just as much regularity as though the premises were district branches of the Bank of England, set up in out-of-the-way places for the convenience of stray populations. It is suggested by their manner and appearance, that they always labour under the delusion that business is to commence on the day following: and they are simply there for twelve, fifteen, or twenty years, getting things into shape to begin fairly the next morning.
For the most part, the people who play at business in this solemn manner, are a melancholy, faded tribe. There is a damp air of decay about them, and you get the impression that if you looked closely you would see the cobwebs hanging from their coat-elbows, or forming a fringe from their daggling dress. Here and there, it is true, you stumble upon awfully cheerful people in such places, but these are impostors; they will lock up the place for a week and go down into the country, or, at other times, go wandering off into the parks at mid-day. They, consequently, would be unable to swear that a customer had not disgraced the premises by a visit in their absence! Many of the genuine class are old men who have broken down in large concerns; some of them, it is even whispered, have been many years ago on ’Change: and they now, in these nooks and corners, make-believe with the wrecks of their fortunes that they are all they ever were, only, just for convenience sake, they trade upon a smaller footing. Some again—and these may be of either sex—are people who have gained a hard-earned competency elsewhere, and have once retired, but who, finding themselves dying in dull, foolish houses without shops to them, creep back into sham places of business to pass the time in the old routine. As a rule, indeed, it may be stated that after persons have kept a shop for twenty-five or thirty years, they pass into the bust stage. They are, practically, no longer full-length figures, although they may appear to be so: but are busts, cut off at the height of the counter, higher or lower, just as it happens. In some cases, where a man has only held intercourse with his kind for that space from behind a tall desk, he is not even a bust, but extends no lower than his shoulders—a sort of antiquated commercial cherub. For those people to be pushed out, or for them voluntarily of themselves to wander forth into society, unsheltered and exposed from head to foot, is a species of indecency; and it is no matter of surprise that after roaming about in the world unsteadily for a short time, they generally lose their balance, and fall flat into their coffins. But this is a metaphysical digression. A goodly proportion of the owners of these pantomimical places of business are widows, whose husbands, possibly, did a real trade through that very same doorway; but who appeared, when they departed this life, to take it with them, and who, consequently, may be carrying on a prosperous commerce elsewhere. Others of the same sex are ladies who perchance would have made an excellent affair of it, if they had ever succeeded in achieving that initial stroke of business with which the widows commenced; but who, as the unwedded successors of parents or aunts and uncles, instead of husbands, never quite settle down to their position until very late in life.
These no-places of business, it is unnecessary to observe, are not located all in one quarter;—there is not a special colony of these monks of commerce, these nuns of trade, where the stricken harts of the vending world go weep in herds. You happen upon them everywhere—now in a dim alley, and again in a busy thoroughfare. There are several spectral shops of this kind in the Strand, and one or two even in Fleet Street, where the entrance of a real buyer or seller would be felt, by the ghostly attendant, to be an unwarrantable intrusion. If a customer ever intended to come, he ought to have made up his mind, and presented himself years ago: ere the stock had spoiled, the scales rusted, the drawers grown fastened in their holes, the ink in the stand dried up, and the pen become green with mould. A romance worth a fortune to a modern novelist attaches to many of these places and persons, if the particulars were only hunted up. Some day, the present writer, as the discoverer of these places, intends rolling himself in wealth in that way.
Something of the sort we have been describing holds good, too, of the professions as well as the businesses and the trades. I once knew a superannuated minister (yes, Reverend Sir, he was a Dissenter), who actually “touted” for the preaching of charity sermons and anniversary discourses of any kind; of course, I don’t mean as a matter of profit: oh! no, he was only too glad to pay his own expenses, and put something upon the plate besides. The poor old man had occupied pulpits for such a length of time, that he felt out of place in chapel or church anywhere else, and could not reconcile himself to “sitting under” any one. I have also heard, from a medical student friend of mine, of an antiquated surgeon, who used to go loitering into the hospital dissecting-room, and would even bribe the younger lads to let him hold a limb of the “subject” during the operation. There are barristers, too, who go regularly to their chambers long after everybody has done confiding in their “opinions,” and years and years after the last brief made its appearance. Venerable attorneys, I have often seen at assize courts, pushing and bustling, with their white heads bobbing about in the crowd, just as though the life of a prisoner, indicted upon a capital charge, depended upon their instantly having a word or two with a leading counsel they were instructing for the defence: it being a well-known fact, that, for half a life-time, they had ceased actively to practise. Men having once formed habits, no matter of what kind, preaching or housebreaking, are loth to give them up, and in every department of human occupation these innocent impositions are going on. Even authorship, we magnanimously admit, is not exempt. It would not, by any means, be difficult to mention authors who go on writing long after the public has ceased to read. Yes, there are apparitional writers, who go on addressing phantom publics, and perhaps that is the most ghostly sham of all.
W. C.