Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant
restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts
sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and
sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one
for a lunatic--a servant of the moon.
Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the
word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the
busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around,
like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned
façade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its
shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake
gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms
than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the
festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous
orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes,
the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For
me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon
which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor
and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery,
fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread,
and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces
or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in
Père-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead
than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a
shudder that once so familiar threshold.
It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a
ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the
old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so
often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had
flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on
our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling
the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective
continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and
watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through
the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could
see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many
a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected
that considerable identification would be necessary for that once
light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy
by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and
when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the
gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and
cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light
up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a
nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in
the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart.
Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding
paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable
accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for
my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at
that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the
waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the
"secret memoirs" of that historic table.
In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far
deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was
living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken
acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a
dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and
unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of
desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet
it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding
dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and
memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So
much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching
distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people,
making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was
evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a
neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a
moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes.
How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's
place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately
cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the
radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and
water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly
with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west
wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the
feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting
presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her
eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means
parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of
all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset
as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves,
but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming
I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as
we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer
fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked
for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--.
"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to
each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our
glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful
dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break
one's heart."
"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly.
"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender
elegance, as in the old days.
As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was
more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours
was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and
women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the
ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what
one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness
and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was
nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry
each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on
both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I
am sure neither of us regretted.
Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young
hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better
than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted
intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a
passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden
surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious
adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet
aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a
roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and
fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever,
nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those
lovers on the Grecian Urn:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter
has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound
meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious."
"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?"
"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a
woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows
how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with
some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it
up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your
presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all
the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!"
"Was I like that?" said I.
"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a
touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en
prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as
poor--"
"As we often were," I added.
And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise
from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so
reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy
flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he
did so!
"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging
kiss but for the street.'"
Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some
little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under
the ancient London roofs.
But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left
alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would
prefer.
With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to
deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I
savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure
in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of
innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all
around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I
had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent,
irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman
had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too
often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those
tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate
loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic
pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me
there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat
together over the wine and talked of the only matters then--and perhaps
even yet--worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can
still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying
brightness--
Where the oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey,
And the lyre's strings are ever strung.
Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen
from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying
petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow
with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than
the city lamps--passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on
such quests no more--"another race hath been and other palms are won."
No, not always women--but naturally women nearly always, for it was the
time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might--
Through the many to the one--
O so many!
Kissing all and missing none,
Loving any.
Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own
private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid
up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may
be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to
remember, granted to some--the years when one has reluctantly to
accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to
watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us,
unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what
is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side,
may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those
other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed
up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to
the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's
calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor
saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer
retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints,
were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness
of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most
jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course,
desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than
permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which
Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray
consecrated to certain loves of the long ago--
Gillian's dead, God rest her bier,
How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian's married, but I sit here,
Alone and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.
So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of
several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private
Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes
at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read
Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names
are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in
the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered
butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives,
each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing
personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of
smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little
originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held
differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize
that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of
contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the
same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one
of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian
red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways,
was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on
the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager
responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendré_, and _fausse
maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the
starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of
these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and
fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget
the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved
again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted
comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful
joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and
songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take
possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into
existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such
divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society
play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of
consequence."
"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself
in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year."
But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat
musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had
come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years
that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the
world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat
at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with
breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice
again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts,
renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion
of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain
sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing
its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still
under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the
beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced
of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of
her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the
sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that,
after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we
had both died--but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily
to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not,
though I sat long awaiting her--sat on till the tables began to be
deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper
had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come
to me: we must both wait till I could go to her.
And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave,
but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by
a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls
without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all
those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling
me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity,
was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he
will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition.
The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor
was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim
Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And,
I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her
face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together."
Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days.
"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster
and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people
in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend
of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago."
So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the
piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection,
a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the
radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding
thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity.