The Sex that Doesn’t
Shop by Saki
The opening of a large new centre for West End shopping,
particularly feminine shopping, suggests the reflection, Do women
ever really shop? Of course, it is a well-attested fact
that they go forth shopping as assiduously as a bee goes
flower-visiting, but do they shop in the practical sense of the
word? Granted the money, time, and energy, a resolute
course of shopping transactions would naturally result in having
one’s ordinary domestic needs unfailingly supplied, whereas
it is notorious that women servants (and housewives of all
classes) make it almost a point of honour not to be supplied with
everyday necessities. “We shall be out of starch by
Thursday,” they say with fatalistic foreboding, and by
Thursday they are out of starch. They have predicted almost
to a minute the moment when their supply would give out and
if Thursday happens to be early closing day their triumph is
complete. A shop where starch is stored for retail purposes
possibly stands at their very door, but the feminine mind has
rejected such an obvious source for replenishing a dwindling
stock. “We don’t deal there” places it at
once beyond the pale of human resort. And it is noteworthy
that, just as a sheep-worrying dog seldom molests the flocks in
his near neighbourhood, so a woman rarely deals with shops in her
immediate vicinity. The more remote the source of supply
the more fixed seems to be the resolve to run short of the
commodity. The Ark had probably not quitted its last
moorings five minutes before some feminine voice gloatingly
recorded a shortage of bird-seed. A few days ago two lady
acquaintances of mine were confessing to some mental uneasiness
because a friend had called just before lunch-time, and they had
been unable to ask her to stop and share their meal, as (with a
touch of legitimate pride) “there was nothing in the
house.” I pointed out that they lived in a street
that bristled with provision shops and that it would have been
easy to mobilise a very passable luncheon in less than five
minutes. “That,” they said with quiet dignity,
“would not have occurred to us,” and I felt that I
had suggested something bordering on the indecent.
But it is in catering for her literary wants that a
woman’s shopping capacity breaks down most
completely. If you have perchance produced a book which has
met with some little measure of success, you are certain to get a
letter from some lady whom you scarcely known to bow to, asking
you “how it can be got.” She knows the name of
the book, its author, and who published it, but how to get into
actual contact with it is still an unsolved problem to her.
You write back pointing out that to have recourse to an
ironmonger or a corn-dealer will only entail delay and
disappointment, and suggest an application to a bookseller as the
most hopeful thing you can think of. In a day or two she
writes again: “It is all right; I have borrowed it from
your aunt.” Here, of course, we have an example of
the Beyond-Shopper, one who has learned the Better Way, but the
helplessness exists even when such bypaths of relief are
closed. A lady who lives in the West End was expressing
to me the other day her interest in West Highland
terriers, and her desire to know more about the breed, so when, a
few days later, I came across an exhaustive article on that
subject in the current number of one of our best known
outdoor-life weeklies, I mentioned that circumstance in a letter,
giving the date of that number. “I cannot get the
paper,” was her telephoned response. And she
couldn’t. She lived in a city where newsagents are
numbered, I suppose, by the thousand, and she must have passed
dozens of such shops in her daily shopping excursions, but as far
as she was concerned that article on West Highland terriers might
as well have been written in a missal stored away in some
Buddhist monastery in Eastern Thibet.
The brutal directness of the masculine shopper arouses a
certain combative derision in the feminine onlooker. A cat
that spreads one shrew-mouse over the greater part of a long
summer afternoon, and then possibly loses him, doubtless feels
the same contempt for the terrier who compresses his rat into ten
seconds of the strenuous life. I was finishing off a short
list of purchases a few afternoons ago when I was discovered by a
lady of my acquaintance whom, swerving aside from the
lead given us by her godparents thirty years ago, we will call
Agatha.
“You’re surely not buying blotting-paper
here?” she exclaimed in an agitated whisper, and she
seemed so genuinely concerned that I stayed my hand.
“Let me take you to Winks and Pinks,” she said as
soon as we were out of the building: “they’ve got
such lovely shades of blotting-paper—pearl and heliotrope
and momie and crushed—”
“But I want ordinary white blotting-paper,” I
said.
“Never mind. They know me at Winks and
Pinks,” she replied inconsequently. Agatha apparently
has an idea that blotting-paper is only sold in small quantities
to persons of known reputation, who may be trusted not to put it
to dangerous or improper uses. After walking some two
hundred yards she began to feel that her tea was of more
immediate importance than my blotting-paper.
“What do you want blotting-paper for?” she asked
suddenly. I explained patiently.
“I use it to dry up the ink of wet manuscript without
smudging the writing. Probably a
Chinese invention of the second century before Christ, but
I’m not sure. The only other use for it that I can
think of is to roll it into a ball for a kitten to play
with.”
“But you haven’t got a kitten,” said Agatha,
with a feminine desire for stating the entire truth on most
occasions.
“A stray one might come in at any moment,” I
replied.
Anyway, I didn’t get the blotting-paper.
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