“It does not do,” said a friend of mine, “to think about boots.” For my own part, I have always been particularly inclined to look at boots, and think about them. I have an odd idea that most general questions can be expressed in terms of foot-wear—which is perhaps why cobblers are often such philosophical men. Accident it may be, gave me this persuasion. A very considerable part of my childhood was spent in an underground kitchen; the window opened upon a bricked-in space, surmounted by a grating before my father’s shop window. So that, when I looked out of the window, instead of seeing—as children of a higher upbringing would do—the heads and bodies of people, I saw their under side. I got acquainted indeed with all sorts of social types as boots simply, indeed, as the soles of boots; and only subsequently, and with care, have I fitted heads, bodies, and legs to these pediments.
There would come boots and shoes (no doubt holding people) to stare at the shop, finicking, neat little women’s boots, good sorts and bad sorts, fresh and new, worn crooked in the tread, patched or needing patching; men’s boots, clumsy and fine, rubber shoes, tennis shoes, goloshes. Brown shoes I never beheld—it was before that time; but I have seen pattens. Boots used to come and commune at the window, duets that marked their emotional development by a restlessness or a kick.... But anyhow, that explains my preoccupation with boots.
But my friend did not think it did, to think about boots.
My friend was a realistic novelist, and a man from whom hope had departed. I cannot tell you how hope had gone out of his life; some subtle disease of the soul had robbed him at last of any enterprise, or belief in coming things; and he was trying to live the few declining years that lay before him in a sort of bookish comfort, among surroundings that seemed peaceful and beautiful, by not thinking of things that were painful and cruel. And we met a tramp who limped along the lane.
“Chafed heel,” I said, when we had parted from him again; “and on these pebbly byways no man goes barefooted.” My friend winced; and a little silence came between us. We were both recalling things; and then for a time, when we began to talk again, until he would have no more of it, we rehearsed the miseries of boots.
We agreed that to a very great majority of people in this country boots are constantly a source of distress, giving pain and discomfort, causing trouble, causing anxiety. We tried to present the thing in a concrete form to our own minds by hazardous statistical inventions. “At the present moment,” said I, “one person in ten in these islands is in discomfort through boots.”
My friend thought it was nearer one in five.
“In the life of a poor man or a poor man’s wife, and still more in the lives of their children, this misery of the boot occurs and recurs—every year so many days.”
We made a sort of classification of these troubles.
There is the TROUBLE OF THE NEW BOOT.
(i) They are made of some bad, unventilated material; and “draw the feet,” as people say.