It was not only the appeal of varying shape and colour or even of the many perfumes each with its power of evoking images: the heavy voluptuous scents suggesting brunette adventuresses, Turkish cigarettes and luxurious idleness; the elusive, delicate, that could bring springtime into a winter bedroom darkened by snow-clouds. The secret of its power was in the way it pervaded one’s best realisations of everyday life. No wonder Beethoven worked at his themes washing and re-washing his hands. And even in merely washing with an empty mind there is a charm; though it is an empty charm, the illusion of beginning, as soon as you have finished, all over again as a different person. But all great days had soap, impressing its qualities upon you, during your most intense moments of anticipation, as a prelude. And the realisation of a good day past, coming with the early morning hour, is accompanied by soap. Soap is with you when you are in that state of feeling life at first hand that makes even the best things that can happen important not so much in themselves as in the way they make you conscious of life, and of yourself living. Every day, even those that are called ordinary days, with its miracle of return from sleep, is heralded by soap, summoning its retinue of companion days.
To buy a new cake of soap is to buy a fresh stretch of days. Its little weight, treasure, minutely heavy in the hand, is life, past present and future compactly welded.
Post-office offering universal hospitality more vitally than the little church. A beggar could perhaps find help in a church more easily than in a post-office. Yet the mere atmosphere of a post-office offered something a church could never give. Even to enter it and come away without transactions was to have been in the midst of life. And to handle stamps, and especially foreign stamps, was to be aware of just those very distances the post had abolished.
The priced goods in the windows were discouragingly high. One window behind whose thick plate glass were set forth just a few things very tastefully arranged, showed no prices at all and had the ominous note of a west-end shop. Next door was a windowful that might have been transplanted from Holborn so much steel was there, such an array of rectangular labels and announcements. Skates and skates and skates. Then a chemist’s and an inspiration, though the window showed nothing but a perforated screen and the usual coloured bottles bulging on a shelf above.
The counter was stacked with wares from Wigmore Street. Even the toothbrushes were those of the new shape devised in Cavendish Square. The chemist was a bald preoccupied man speaking English abruptly. She came away with a jar of Smith’s cream, her shopping done and the face of the clock sticking out above the watchmaker’s telling her it was nearly noon. The little clock on the church said a quarter past eleven and glancing back at the watchmaker’s, now in the rear, she saw the reverse dial of the outstanding clock marking half past eleven. And Switzerland was the land of watchmakers. … Her own watch said one o’clock, English time. Then it was noon. But this far world was not three minutes distance from the Alpenstock. There was still half-an-hour.
The post-office was a sumptuous hall. Little tables stood about invitingly set with pens and ink. No railed counter; a wooden partition extending to the ceiling; a row of arched pigeonholes, all closed. Like a railway booking-office on Sunday, between trains—blankly indifferent to the announcement of the presence of a customer made by the clumping of her boots upon the wooden floor. And when presently—having gone the round of the posters, brilliant against the whitewashed walls, all so much brighter and so much less bright than reality, all resounding with a single deep charm, bringing assurance of possessing, in one journey and one locality, the being of the whole—she tapped at a little shutter, it flew up impatiently, revealing an affronted young man in a blue cotton overall, glaring reproachfully through spectacles. The stamps handed over, the little door shot back into place with a bang, as if cursing an intruder.
The open spaces called for a first view before the sense of its being no longer morning should have robbed them of intensity. But where the street joined the roadway there was a little shop, full sunlight falling on its window, whose contents were a clustered delight and each separate thing more charming than its neighbour.
Two women approaching along the road preceded by English voices distracted her, for a moment, with the strangeness of their headdress—a sort of cowl. In a moment they passed with dangling clinking skates, and her intention of getting a good view from behind was diverted back to the shop window, by “tourist-trap” interpolated in a tone meant to be inaudible, in the dissertation of the one holding forth in a voice not unlike Mrs. Harcourt’s, about a hotel “packed like a beehive and swarming with influenza.”
It was true. The shop was full of Swiss brummagem. She fastened on it the more eagerly. Little expensive cheap
