_Restaurants, and the Magic Door_
I
What scenes in fiction cling more persistently in the memory
than those that deal with the satisfying of man's appetite?
Who ever heard of a dyspeptic hero? Are not your favourites
beyond the Magic Door all good trenchermen?
--ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE.
It was O. Henry, I believe, who spoke of restaurants as "literary
landmarks." They are really much more than that--they are signposts,
psychical rather than physical, which show the trend of the times--or
of the neighbourhood. I suppose nothing in Greenwich Village could be
more significantly illuminating than its eating places. There are, of
course, many sorts. The Village is neither so unique nor so uniform as
to have only one sort of popular board. But in all the typical
Greenwich restaurants you will find the same elusive something, the
spirit of the picturesque, the untrammelled, the quaint and
charming--in short, the _different_!
The Village is not only a locality, you understand, it is a point of
view. It reaches out imperiously and fastens on what it will. The
Brevoort basement--after ten o'clock at night--is the Village. So is
the Lafayette on occasion. During the day they are delightful French
hostelries catering to all the world who like heavenly things to eat
and the right atmosphere in which to eat them. But as the magic hour
strikes, presto!--they suffer a sea change and become the quintessence
of the Spirit of the Village!
It is 10.20 P.M. at the Brevoort in the restaurant upstairs.
All the world and his wife--or his sweetheart--are fully represented.
Most of the uptowners--the regulation clientele--are going away,
having finished gorging themselves on delectable things; some few of
them are lingering, lazily curious; a certain small number are still
coming in, moved by that restless Manhattanic spirit that hates to go
home in the dark.
Among these is a discontented, well-dressed couple, seen half an hour
before completing their dinner a block away at the Lafayette. The head
waiter at that restaurant explained them nonchalantly, not to say
casually:
"It is the gentleman who married his manicurist. Regard, then--one
perceives they are not happy--eh? It is understood that she beats
him."
Yonder is a moving-picture star, quite alone, eating a great deal, and
looking blissfully content. There is a man who has won a fortune in
war-brides--the one at the next table did it with carpets. There is a
great lady--a very great lady indeed--who, at this season, _should_ be
out of town.
Swiftly moving, deft-handed waiters, the faint perfume of delicate
food, the sparkle of light upon rare wine, the complex murmur of a
well-filled dining-room. It is so far not strikingly different, in the
impression it gives, from uptown restaurants.
But the hands of the clock are pointing to the half-hour after ten.
Hasten, then, to the downstairs cafe,--the two rooms, sunk below the
level of Fifth Avenue, yet cool and airy. If you hurry you will be
just in time to see the Village come in. For this is their really
favourite haunt--their Mecca when their pockets will stand it--the
Village Restaurant de Luxe!
Upstairs are exquisite frocks and impeccable evening clothes; good
jewels and, incidentally, a good many tired faces--from uptown. Down
here it is different. The crowd is younger, poorer, more strikingly
bizarre--immeasurably more interesting. Everyone here does something,
or thinks he does--which is just as good;--or pretends to--which is
next best. There is a startling number of girls. Girls in smocks of
"artistic" shades--bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending violet;
girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, is usually either arranged
in a wildly natural bird's-nest mass, or boldly clubbed after the
fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; girls with tense little
faces, slender arms and an astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And
men who, for the most part, are too busy with their ideals to cut
their hair; men whose collars may be low and rolling, or high and
bound with black silk stocks after the style of another day; men who
are, variously, affectedly natural or naturally affected, but who are
nearly all of them picturesque, and, in spite of their poses, quite in
earnest, after their queer fashion. They are all prophets and seers
down here; they wear their bizarre hair-cuts and unusual clothes with
a certain innocently flaunting air which rather disarms you. Their
poses are not merely poses; they are their almost childlike way of
showing the prosaic outer world how different they are!
Here they all flock--whenever they have the price. That may be a bit
beyond them sometimes, but usually there is someone in the crowd who
is "flush," and that means who will pay. For the Villagers are not
parsimonious; they stand in no danger of ever making themselves rich
and thus acquiring place in the accursed class called the Philistines!
It is beyond question that the French have a genius for hospitality.
It must be rooted in their beautiful, national tact, that gracious
impulse combining chivalry to women, friendliness to men and courtesy
to all which is so characteristic of "the world's sweetheart" France.
I have never seen a French restaurant where the most casual visitor
was not made personally and charmingly welcome, and I have never seen
such typically French restaurants as the Lafayette and the Brevoort.
And the Villagers feel it too. From the shabbiest socialist to the
most flagrantly painted little artist's model, they drift in
thankfully to that atmosphere of gaiety and sympathy and thoughtful
kindliness which is, after all, just--the air of France.
Next let us take a restaurant of quite another type, not far from the
Brevoort--all the Village eating places are close together--walk
across the square, a block further, and you are there.
It is not many years since Bohemia ate chiefly in the side streets,
at restaurants such as Enrico's, Baroni's--there are a dozen such
places. They still exist, but the Village is dropping away from them.
They are very good and very cheap, and the tourist--that is, the
uptowner--thinks he is seeing Bohemia when he eats in them, but not
many of them remain at all characteristic. Bertolotti's is something
of an exception. It is a restaurant of the old style, a survival of
the days when all Bohemian restaurants were Italian. La Signora says
they have been there, just there on Third Street, for twenty years. If
you are a newcomer you will probably eat in the upstairs room, in cool
and rather remote grandeur, and the pretty daughter with the wondrous
black eyes will serve you the more elaborate of the most
extraordinarily named dishes on the menu. But if, by long experience,
you know what is pleasant and comfortable you will take a place in the
basement cafe. At the clean, bare table, in the shadow of the big,
bright, many-bottled bar, you will eat your _Risotta alla Milanese_,
your _coteletti di Vitelle_, your _asparagi_--it's probably the only
place in the city where they serve asparagus with grated
cheese--finally your _zambaione_,--a heavenly sort of hot "flip," very
foamy and seductive and strongly flavoured with Marsarla wine.
If you stand well with the house you may have the honour to be
escorted by the Signora herself--handsome, dignified, genial, with a
veritable coronal of splendid grey hair--to watch the eternal bowling
in the alley back of the restaurant. I have watched them fascinated
for long periods and I have never learned what it is they are trying
to do with those big "bowling balls." They have no ninepins, so they
are not trying to make a ten-strike. Apparently, it is a game however,
for now and then a shout of triumph proclaims that someone has won. He
orders the drinks and they go at it again.
"But, what _is_ it?" I asked the Signora.
"Eh--oh--just a _Giocho di Bocca_," she returned vaguely, "a game of
bowls--how should I know?"
Beyond the bowling alley is a long, narrow yard with bushes. It would
make quite a charming summer garden with little tables for
after-dinner coffee. But the Signora says that the _Chiesa_, there at
the back of it, objects. The _Chiesa_, I think, is the Judson Memorial
Church on Washington Square. Just why they don't want the Signora to
have tables in her own back yard is not clear. She, being a Latin,
shrugs her shoulders and makes no comment. Standing in the darkness,
there is a real freshness in the air; there is also a delicious,
gurgling sound, the music of summer streams.
"How lovely!" you whisper. "What a delightful, rippling sound."
"Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel," says La Signora sweetly.
There is, at Bertolotti's one of the queerest little old figures in
all that part of the world, the bent and aged Italian known
universally as _Castagna_ (Chestnuts), because of the interminable
anecdotes he tells over and over again. No one knows his real name,
not even the Signor or the Signora. Yet he has worked for them for
years. He wants no wages--only a living and a home. In the
aforementioned back yard he has built himself a little house about the
size of a dog kennel. It is a real house, and like nothing so much as
the historic residence of the Three Bears. It has a window, eaves,
weather-strips and a clothesline, for he does his own washing. He
trots off there very happily when his light work is done, and, when
his door is closed, opens it for no one. That scrap of a building is
_Castagna's_ castle. One evening I went to call on him, but he had put
out his light. In the gleam that came from the bowling alley behind
me, something showed softly red and green and white against the wooden
door. I put out my hand and touched that world-famous cross. It was
about six inches long, and only of paper, but it was the flag of
Italy, and it kept watch outside the _Casa Castagna_. I am certain
that he would not sleep well without it.
Probably the most famous Bohemian restaurant in the quarter is the
Black Cat. It is not really more typical than the others,--indeed it
is rather less so,--but it is extremely striking, and most
conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking
suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too
obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is
Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised. Just the same, it
is fascinating. From the moment you pass the outer, polite portals and
intermediate anterooms and enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room
at the back, you are enormously interested, excellently entertained.
The noise is the thing that impresses you first. In most Village
resorts you find quiet the order of the day--or rather night. Even
"Polly's," crowded as it is, is not noisy. In the Brevoort there is a
steady, low rumble of talk, but not actual noise. At the Black Cat it
is one continual and all-pervading roar--a joyous roar, too; these
people are having a simply gorgeous time and don't care who knows it.
It is a wonder that the high-set rafters do not fall--that the lofty,
whitewashed walls of brick do not tremble, and that the little black
cats set in a rigid conventional design around the whole room do not
come to life in horror, and fly spitting up the short stairway and out
of the door!
When you go to the Black Cat you would better check what prejudices
you have as to what is formal and fitting, and leave them with your
coat at the entrance. Not that it is disreputable--Luigi would pale
with the shock of such a thought! It is just--Bohemian! Everyone does
exactly what he wishes to do. Sometimes, one person's wishes conflict
with someone else's, and then there is a fight, and the police are
called, and the rest of the patrons have a beautiful time watching a
perfectly good and unexpected free show! As a rule, however, this
determination on the part of each one to do what he wants to has no
violent results. An incident will show something of the entire liberty
allowed in the Black Cat. A man came in with two girls, and, seeing a
jolly stag party at another table, decided to join them. He promptly
did so, with, as far as could be seen, no word of excuse to his
feminine companions. In a moment two young men strolled up to their
table and sat down.
"Your friend asked us to come over here and take his place,"
explained one nonchalantly. "You don't object, ladies?"
The girls received them amiably. Apparently no one thought of such a
formality as names or introductions. The original host stayed away for
the rest of the evening, but the four new acquaintances seemed to get
along quite satisfactorily without him.
A young married woman from uptown came in with her husband and two
other men. A good-looking lad, much flushed and a little unsteady,
stopped by her chair.
"Say, k-kid," he exclaimed, with a disarming chuckle, "you're the
prettiest girl here--and you come here with three p-protectors! Say,
it's a shame!"
He lurched cheerfully upon his way and even the slightly conservative
husband found a grudging smile wrung out of him.
There is a pianist at the Black Cat--a real pianist, not just a person
who plays the piano. She is a striking figure in a quaint, tunic-like
dress, greying hair and a keen face, and a personal friend of half the
frequenters. She has an uncanny instinct for the psychology of the
moment. She knows just when "Columbia" will be the proper thing to
play, and when the crowd demands the newest rag-time. She will feel an
atmospheric change as unswervingly as any barometer, and switch in a
moment from "Good-bye Girls, Good-bye" to the love duet from Faust.
She can play Chopin just as well as she can play Sousa, and she will
tactfully strike up "It's Always Fair Weather" when she sees a crowd
of young fellows sit down at a table; "There'll Be a Hot Time in the
Old Town Tonight" to welcome a lad in khaki; and the very latest fox
trot for the party of girls and young men from uptown, who look as
though they were dying to dance. She plays the "Marseillaise" for
Frenchmen, and "Dixie" for visiting Southerners, and "Mississippi" for
the frequenters of Manhattan vaudeville shows. And, then, at the right
moment, her skilled fingers will drift suddenly into something
different, some exquisite, inspired melody--the soul-child of some
high immortal--and under the spell the noisy crowd grows still for a
moment. For even at the Black Cat they have not forgotten how to
dream.
Probably the Black Cat inspired many other Village restaurants--the
Purple Pup for instance.
The Purple Pup is a queer little place. It is in a most exclusive and
aristocratic part of the Square--in the basement of one of the really
handsome houses, in fact. It is, so far as is visible to the naked
eye, quite well conducted, yet there is something mysterious about it.
Doubtless this is deliberately stage-managed and capitalised, but it
is effectively done. It is an unexpected sort of place. One evening
you go there and find it in full blast; the piano tinkling, many
cramped couples dancing in the two tiny rooms, and every table covered
with tea cups or lemonade glasses. Another night you may arrive at
exactly the same time and there will be only candlelight and a few
groups, talking in low tones.
Here, as in all parts of the Village, the man in the rolling collar,
and the girl in the smock, will be markedly in evidence. Yes; they
really do look like that. Lots of the girls have their hair cut short
too.
And "Polly's"!
In many minds, "Polly's" and the Village mean one and the same thing.
Certainly no one could intelligently write about the one without due
and logical tribute to the other. Polly Holliday's restaurant (The
Greenwich Village Inn is its formal name in the telephone book) is not
incidental, but institutional. It is fixed, representative and sacred,
like Police Headquarters, Trinity Church and the Stock Exchange. It is
indispensable and independent. The Village could not get along
without it, but the Village no longer talks about it nor advertises
it. It is, in fact, so obviously a vital part of Greenwich that often
enough a Greenwicher, asked to point out hostelries of peculiar
interest, will forget to mention it.
"How about 'Polly's'?" you remind him.
"Oh--but 'Polly's'!" he protests wonderingly. "Why, it wouldn't be the
Village at all without 'Polly's.' It--why, of course, I never thought
anyone had to be told about _'Polly's_'!"
His attitude will be as disconcerted as though you asked him whether
he was in the habit of using air to breathe,--or was accustomed to
going to bed to sleep.
Polly Holliday used to have her restaurant under the Liberal
Club--where the Dutch Oven is now,--but now she has her own good-sized
place on Fourth Street, and it remains, through fluctuations and fads,
the most thoroughly and consistently popular Village eating place
extant. It is, outwardly, not original nor superlatively striking in
any way. It is a clean, bare place with paper napkins and such waits
between courses as are unquestionably conducive to the encouragement
of philosophic, idealistic, anarchistic and aesthetic debates. But the
food is excellent, when you get it, and the atmosphere both friendly
and--let us admit frankly--inspiring. The people are interesting; they
discuss interesting things. You are comfortable, and you are
exhilarated. You see, quickly enough, why the Village could not
possibly get along without its inn; why "Polly's" is so essential a
part of its life that half the time it overlooks it. Outsiders always
know about "Polly's." But the Villager?
"'Polly's'? But _of course_ 'Polly's.'"
There it is. _Of course_ "Polly's." "Polly's" is Greenwich Village in
little; it is, in a fashion, cosmic and symbolic.
Under the Liberal Club, where "Polly's" used to be located, the "Dutch
Oven," with its capacious fireplace and wholesome meals, now holds
sway. The prices are reasonable, the food substantial and the
atmosphere comfortable, so it is a real haven of good cheer to
improvident Villagers.
The Village Kitchen on Greenwich Avenue is another place of the same
sort. And Gallup's--almost the first of these "breakfast and lunch"
shops--is another. They are not unlike a Childs restaurant, but with
the rarefied Village air added. You eat real food in clean
surroundings, as you do in Childs', but you do it to an accompaniment
that is better than music--a sort of life-song, rather stirring and
quite touching in its way--the Song of the Village. How can people be
both reckless and deeply earnest? But the Villagers are both.
One of the oddest sights on earth is a typical "Breakfast" at
"Polly's," the "Kitchen" or the "Dutch Oven," after one of the masked
balls for which the Village has recently acquired such a passion.
After you have been up all night in some of these mad masquerades--of
which more anon--you may not, by Village convention, go home to bed.
You must go to breakfast with the rest of the Villagers. And you must
be prepared to face the cold, grey dawn of "the morning after" while
still in your war paint and draggled finery. It is an awful ordeal.
But "it's being done in the Village"!
Quite recently a new sort of eating place has sprung up in Greenwich
Village--of so original and novel a character that we must investigate
it in at least a few of its manifestations. Speaking for myself, I had
never believed that such places could exist within sound of the "L"
and a stone's throw from drug stores and offices.
But see what you think of them.
[Illustration: THE DUTCH OVEN. One of the favorite eating places of the
Village. Some of the famous breakfasts are given here.]
II
"I can't believe _that_!" said Alice.
"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again:
draw a long breath and shut your eyes."
Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One
_can't_ believe impossible things."
"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen.
"When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a
day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible
things before breakfast."--"Through the Looking Glass."
"But it can't be this!" I said. "You've made a mistake in the number!"
"It is this," declared my guide and companion. "This is where Nanni
Bailey has her tea shop."
"But this is--is--isn't anything!"
Indeed the number to which my friend pointed seemed to indicate the
entrance to a sort of warehouse, if it indicated anything at all. On
peering through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared instead to be
a particularly desolate-looking cellar. There were old barrels and
boxes about, an expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy
distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading upwards to a faint
light.
"It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come true!" I exclaimed.
"It looks as though it might be a burglars' den or somebody's back
yard, but anyway, it isn't a restaurant!"
"It is too!" came back at me triumphantly. "Look at that sign!"
By the faint rays of a street light on nearby Sixth Avenue, I saw the
shabby little wooden sign, "The Samovar." This extraordinary place was
a restaurant after all!
We entered warily, having a vague expectation of pickpockets or rats,
and climbed that ladder--I mean staircase--to what was purely and
simply a loft.
But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious, simple, picturesque
apotheosis of a loft! A loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and the
heavy rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables and a bare
floor and an only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette where the
hungry could descry piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups. And
there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar itself, a really
splendid affair, and one actually not for decorative purposes only,
but for use. I had always thought samovars were for the ornamentation
either of houses or foreign-atmosphere novels. But you could use this
thing. I saw people go and get glasses-full of tea out of it.
Under the smoke-dimmed lights were curious, eager, interesting faces:
a pale little person with red hair I recognised instantly as an
actress whom I had just seen at the Provincetown Players--a Village
Theatrical Company--in a tense and terribly tragic role. Beyond her
was a white-haired man with keen eyes--a distinguished writer and
socialist. A shabby poet announced to the sympathetic that he had sold
something after two years of work. Immediately they set about making a
real fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss Bailey, a small, round,
efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among
her guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The best cheese sandwiches
in New York went round. A girl in a vampire costume of grey--hooded
and with long trailing sleeves--got up from her solitary place in the
corner. She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a
kimono and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply drifted in for
sandwiches before going to bed. She vanished down the ladder.
An hour later, we, too, climbed down the ladderish stairs, my
companion and I, and as we came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth
Street at midnight, I had a really odd sensation. I felt as though I
had been reading a fascinating and unusual book, and had--suddenly
closed it for the night.
This was one of the first of the real Village eating places which I
ever knew. Perhaps that is why it comes first to my memory as I write.
I do not know that it is more representative or more interesting than
others. But it was worth going back to.
Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor yet the unusual
surroundings, that bring you back to these places. It's the--well, one
has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally
inappropriate word "atmosphere." Like "temperament" and
"individuality" and the rest of the writer-folk's old reliables,
"atmosphere" is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing
something you won't take the trouble to define more expressively. Dick
says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful
artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a
picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt
to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion.
But this is a fact just the same. Nearly all the Greenwich Village
places really have atmosphere. You can be cynical about it, or frown
at it, or do anything you like about it, but it's there, and it's the
real thing. It's an absolute essence and ether which you feel
intensely and breathe necessarily, but which no one can put quite
definitely into the concrete form of words. I have heard of liquid or
solidified air, but that's a scientific experiment, and who wants to
try scientific experiments on the Village which we all love?
"But such an amount of play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain,
referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation. "They pretend
to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of
thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality."
Yes, to a certain extent that is true--true of a portion of the
Village, at any rate, and a certain percentage of the Villagers. But
even if it is true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of
understanding to make us tender and tolerant instead of scornful and
hard. My dear lady, you who complained of the "play-acting," and you
other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies and pretenses in Our
Village only a spectacle of cheap affectation and artifice, have you
lived so long and yet do not know that the play-acting instinct is one
of the most universal of all instincts--the very first developed, and
the very last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies? From the
moment when we try to play ball with sunbeams through those
intermediate years wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth
that we are not, down to those last days of all, when we live, all
furtive and unsuspected, a secret life of the spirit--either a life
of remembrance or a life of imagination visualising what we have
wanted and have missed,--what do we do but pretend,--make
believe,--pose, if you will? When we are little we pretend to be
knights and ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and Red
Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and explorers. We people the
window boxes with elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red
Indians and bears. The commonplace world about us is not truly
commonplace, since our fancy, still fresh from eternity, can transform
three dusty shrubs into an enchanted forest, and an automobile into
the most deliciously formidable of the Dragon Family. A bit later, our
pretending is done more cautiously. We do not confess our shy flights
of imagination: we take a prosaic outward pose, and try not to
advertise the fact that our geese wear (to our eyes) swans' plumage,
and that our individual roles are (to our own view) always those of
heroes and heroines. No one of us but mentally sees himself or herself
doing something which is as impracticable as cloud-riding. No one of
us but dreams of the impossible and in a shamefaced, almost
clandestine, fashion pictures it and lingers over it. All
make-believe, you see, only we hate to admit it! The different thing
about Greenwich is that there they do admit it, quite a number of
them. They accept the pretending, play-acting spirit as a perfectly
natural--no, as an inevitable--part of life, and, with a certain
whimsical seriousness, not unlike that of real children, they provide
for it. You know children can make believe, _know_ that it is make
believe, yet enjoy it all the more for that. So can the Villagers.
Hence, places like--let us say, as an example--"The Pirate's Den."
It is a very real pirate's den, lighted only by candles. A coffin
casts a shadow, and there is a regulation "Jolly Roger," a black flag
ornamented with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but even a
healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games once in
a while.
There is a Dead Man's Chest too,--and if you open it you will find a
ladder leading down into mysterious depths unknown. If you are very
adventurous you will climb down and bump your head against the cellar
ceiling and inspect what is going to be a subterranean grotto as soon
as it can be fitted up. You climb up again and sit in the dim, smoky
little room and look about you. It is the most perfect pirate's den
you can imagine. On the walls hang huge casks and kegs and wine
bottles in their straw covers,--all the signs manual of past and
future orgies. Yet the "Pirate's Den" is "dry"--straw-dry, brick-dry
--as dry as the Sahara. If you want a "drink" the well-mannered
"cut-throat" who serves you will give you a mighty mug of ginger ale
or sarsaparilla. And if you are a real Villager and can still play at
being a real pirate, you drink it without a smile, and solemnly
consider it real red wine filched at the edge of the cutlass from
captured merchantmen on the high seas. On the big, dark centre table
is carefully drawn the map of "Treasure Island."
The pirate who serves you (incidentally he writes poetry and helps to
edit a magazine among other things) apologises for the lack of a
Stevensonian parrot.
"A chap we know is going to bring one back from the South Sea
Islands," he declares seriously. "And we are going to teach it to say,
'Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!'"
If, while you are at the "Pirate's Den" you care to climb a rickety, but
enchanted staircase outside the old building (it's pre-Revolutionary, you
know) you will come to the "Aladdin Shop"--where coffee and Oriental
sweets are specialties. It is a riot of strange and beautiful
colour--vivid and Eastern and utterly intoxicating. A very talented and
picturesque Villager has painted every inch of it himself, including the
mysterious-looking Arabian gentleman in brilliantly hued wood, who sits
cross-legged luring you into the little place of magic. The wrought iron
brackets on the wall are patches of vivid tints; the curtains at the
windows are colour-dissonances, fascinating and bizarre. As usual there
is candlelight. And, as usual, there is the same delicious spirit of
seriously and whole-heartedly playing the game. While you are there you
are in the East. If it isn't the East to you, you can go away--back to
Philistia.
And speaking of candlelight. I went into the poets' favourite "Will o'
the Wisp" tea shop once and found the gas-jet lighted! The young girl
in charge jumped up, much embarrassed, and turned it out.
"I'm so sorry!" she apologised. "But I wanted to _see_ just a moment,
and lighted it!"
I peered at her face in the ghostly candlelight. It was entirely and
unmistakably earnest.
Just the same, Mrs. Browning's warning that "colours seen by
candlelight do not look the same by day" is not truly applicable to
these Village shrines. Even under the searching beams of a slanting,
summer afternoon sun, they are adorable. Go and see if you don't
believe this.
Then take the "Mad Hatter's." The entrance alone is a monument to the
make-believe capabilities of the Village. Scrawled on the stone wall
beside the steps that lead down to the little basement tea room, is an
inscription in chalk. It looks like anything but English. But if you
held a looking-glass up to it you would find that it is "Down the
Rabbit Hole" written backward! Now, if you know your "Alice" as well
as you should, you will recall delightedly her dash after the White
Rabbit which brought her to Wonderland, and, incidentally, to the Mad
Tea Party.
You go in to the little room where Villagers are drinking tea, and the
proprietress approaches to take your order. She is a good-looking
young woman dressed in a bizarre red and blue effect, not unlike one
of the Queens, but she prefers to be known as the "Dormouse"--not,
however, that she shows the slightest tendency to fall asleep.
On the wall is scribbled, "'There's plenty of room,' said Alice."
The people around you seem only pleasantly mad, not dangerously so.
There is a girl with an enchanting scrap of a monkey; there is a youth
with a manuscript and a pile of cigarette butts. The great thing here
once more is that they are taking their little play and their little
stage with a heavenly seriousness, all of them. You expect somebody to
produce a set of flamingos at any moment and start a game of croquet
among the tiny tables.
Not all of the Greenwich restaurants have definite individual
characters to maintain consistently. Sometimes it is just a general
spirit of picturesqueness, of adventure, that they are trying to keep
up. The "Mouse Trap," except for the trap hanging outside and a mouse
scrawled in chalk on the wall of the entry, carries out no particular
suggestion either of traps or mice. But take a look at the
proprietress (Rita they call her), with her gorgeous Titian hair and
delft-blue apron; at her son Sidney, fair, limp, slim, English-voiced,
with a deft way of pouring after-dinner coffee, and hair the colour of
corn. They are obviously play-acting and enjoying it.
Ask Rita her nationality. She will fix you with eyes utterly devoid of
a twinkle and answer: "I? I am part Scotch terrier, and part Spanish
mongrel, but _mostly_ mermaid!"
Rita goes to the sideboard to cut someone a slice of good-looking pie.
She overhears a reference to the "Candlestick," a little eating place
chiefly remarkable for its vegetables and poetesses.
"If they eat nothing but vegetables no wonder they take to poetry," is
her comment. But still she does not smile. If you giggle, as every
child knows, you spoil the game. They laugh heartily enough and often
enough down in the Village, but they never laugh at the Village
itself,--not because they take it so reverentially, but because they
know how to make believe altogether too well.
Let me whisper here that the most fascinating hour in the "Mouse Trap" is
in the late afternoon, when no one is there, and the ebony hand-maiden in
the big back kitchen is taking the fat, delicious-smelling cakes from the
oven. Drop in some afternoon and sniff the fragrance that suggests your
childhood and "sponge-cake day." You will feel that it is a trap no sane
mouse would ever think of leaving! On a table beside you is a slate with,
obviously, the day's specials:
"Spice cakes.
Chocolate cake.
Strawberry tarts with whipped cream."
And still as you peep through the door at the back you see more and
still more goodies coming hot and fresh and enticing from the oven.
White cakes, golden cakes, delicately browned pies,--if you are
dieting by any chance you flee temptation and leave the "Mouse Trap"
behind you.
It would be impossible to give even an approximately complete
inventory of the representative places of the Village. I have had to
content myself with some dozen or so examples,--recorded almost
haphazard, for the most part, but as I believe, more or less typical,
take them all in all, of the Village eating place in its varied and
rather curious manifestations.
Then there is a charming shop presided over by a pretty girl with the
inevitable smock and braided hair, where tea is served in order to
entice you to buy carved and painted trifles.
And then there is, or was, the place kept by Polly's brother, which
was heartlessly raided by the police, and much maligned, not to say
libelled, by the newspapers.
And then there was and is the "Hell Hole." Its ancient distinction
used to be that it was one of the first cheap Bohemian places where
women could smoke, and that it was always open. When all the other
resorts closed for the night you repaired to the "Hell Hole." As to
the smoking, it has taken a good while for New York to allow its
Bohemian women this privilege, though society leaders have enjoyed it
for ages. We all know that though most fashionable hotels permitted
their feminine guests to smoke, the Haymarket of dubious memory always
tabooed the custom to the bitter end!
The "Hell Hole" has always stoutly approved of cigarettes, so all
honour to it! And many a happy small-hours party has brought up there
to top off the night in peace without having to keep an eye on the
clock.
There is a little story told about one of these restaurants of which I
have been writing--never mind which. A visiting Englishman on his way
from his boat to his hotel dropped in at a certain place for a drink.
He found the company congenial and drifted into a little game which
further interested him. It was a perfectly straight game, and he was a
perfectly good sport. He stayed there two weeks. No: I shall _not_
state what the place was. But I think the story is true.
Personally, I don't blame the Englishman. Even shorn of the charm of a
game of chance, there is many a place in Greenwich Village which might
easily capture a susceptible temperament--not merely for weeks, but
for years!
The last of the tea shops is the "Wigwam," in which, take note, it is
the Indian game that is played. Its avowed aim is "Tea and Dancing,"
and it is exceedingly proud of its floor. It lives in the second story
of what, for over fifty years, has been the old Sheridan Square
Tavern, and its proprietors are the Mosses,--poet, editor and
incidental "pirate" on one side of the house; and designer of
enchanting "art clothes" on the other. Lew Kirby Parrish, no less, has
made the decorations, and he told me that the walls were grey with
Indian decorations, and the ceiling a "live colour." I discovered that
that meant a vivid, happy orange.
The spirit of the play is always kept in the Village. Let us take the
opening night of the "Wigwam" as a case in point.
The Indian note is supreme. It is not only the splendid line drawings
of Indian chiefs, forming the panels of the room--those mysterious and
impressive shades created by the imagination of Lew Parrish--it is the
general mood. Only candles are burning,--big, fat candles, giving, in
the aggregate, a magical radiance.
The victrola at the end of the room begins to play a curious Indian
air with an uneven, fascinating, syncopated rhythm. A graceful girl in
Indian dress glides in and places a single candle on the floor,
squatting before it in a circle of dim, yellow light.
She lifts her dark head with its heavy band about the brows and shades
her eyes with her hand. You see remote places, far, pale horizons,
desert regions of sand. There are empty skies overhead, instead of the
"live-colour" ceiling. With an agile movement, she rises and begins to
dance about the candle, and you know that to her it is a little
campfire; it is that to you, too, for the moment. Something like the
west wind blows her fringed dress; there is a dream as old as life in
her eyes.
Faster and faster she dances about the candle, until at last she sinks
beside it and with a strange sure gesture--puts it out.
Silence and the dark. The prairie fades.... The little dark-wood
tables with their flowers and candles begin to glow again; the next
musical number is a popular one step!...