You have a certain complacency in entering it, because it is one of the
twenty monster restaurants of London. The name glitters in the public
mind. “Where shall we dine?” The name suggests itself; by the immense
force of its notoriety it comes unsought into the conversation like
a thing alive. “All right! Meet you in the Lounge at 7.45.” You
feel--whatever your superficial airs--that you are in the whirl of
correctness as you hurry (of course late) out of a taxi into the Lounge.
There is something about the word “Lounge”. . .! Space and freedom
in the Lounge, and a foretaste of luxury; and it is inhabited by the
haughty of the earth! You are not yet a prisoner, in the Lounge. Then an
official, with the metallic insignia of authority, takes you apart.
[Illustration: 0133]
He is very deferential--but with the intimidating deference of a limited
company that pays forty per cent. You can go upstairs--though he doubts
if there is immediately a table--or you can go downstairs. (Strange, how
in the West-End, when once you quit the street, you must always go up or
down; the planet’s surface is forbidden to you; you lose touch with it;
the ground-landlord has taken it and hidden it-) You go downstairs; you
are hypnotised into going downstairs; and you go down, and down, one of
a procession, until a man, entrenched in a recess furnished to look like
a ready-made tailor’s, accepts half your clothing and adds it to
his stock. He does not ask for it; he need not; you are hypnotised.
Stripped, you go further down and down. You are now part of the
tremendous organism; you have left behind not merely your clothing, but
your volition; your number is in your hand.
Suddenly, as you pass through a doorway, great irregular vistas of a
subterranean chamber discover themselves to you, limitless. You perceive
that this wondrous restaurant ramifies under all London, and that a
table on one verge is beneath St. Paul’s Cathedral, and a table on
the other verge beneath the Albert Memorial. All the tables--all the
thousands of tables--are occupied. An official comes to you, and,
putting his mouth to your ear (for the din is terrific), tells you that
he will have a table for you in three minutes. You wait, forlorn. It
reminds you of waiting at the barber’s for a shave, except that the
barber gives you an easy-chair and a newspaper. Here you must stand; and
you must gather your skirts about you and stand firm to resist the shock
of blind waiters. Others are in your case; others have been waiting
longer than you, and at every moment more arrive. You wait. The diners
see you waiting, and you wonder whether they are eating slowly on
purpose.... At length you are led away--far, far from the pit’s mouth
into a remote working of the mine. You watch a man whisk away foul
plates and glasses, and cover offence with a pure white cloth. You
sit. You are saved! And human nature is such that you feel positively
grateful to the limited company.. . .
*****
You begin to wait again, having been deserted by your saviours. And then
your wandering attention notices behind you, under all the other sounds,
a steady sound of sizzling. And there fat, greasy men, clothed and
capped in white, are throwing small fragments of animal carcases on to
a huge, red fire, and pulling them off in the nick of time, and flinging
them on to plates which are continually being snatched away by flying
hands. The grill, as advertised! And you wait, helpless, through a
period so long that if a live cow and a live sheep had been led into the
restaurant to satisfy the British passion for realism in eating, there
would have been time for both animals to be murdered, dismembered, and
fried before the gaze of a delighted audience. But fear not. The deity
of the organism, though unseen, is watching over you. You have not been
omitted from the divine plan. Presently a man approaches with a gigantic
menu, upon which are printed the names of hundreds of marvellous dishes,
and you can have any of them--and at most reasonable prices. Only,
you must choose at once. You must say instantly to the respectful but
inexorable official exactly what you will have. You are lost in the menu
as in a labyrinth, as in a jungle at nightfall.... Quick! For, as you
have waited, so are others waiting! Out with it! You drop the menu.
“Roast beef and Yorkshire pudding--Guinness.” The magic phrase releases
you. In the tenth of a second the official has vanished. A railway
truck laden with the gifts of Cuba and Sumatra and the monks of the
Chartreuse, sweeps majestically by, blotting out the horizon; and lo!
no sooner has it glided past than you see men hastening towards you with
plates and bottles. With an astounding celerity the beef and the stout
have, arrived--out of the unknown and the unknowable, out of some secret
place in the centre of the earth, where rows and rows of slices of beef
and bottles of stout wait enchanted for your word.
All the thousands of tables scintillate with linen and glass and silver,
and steel and ivory, and are bright with flowers; ten thousand blossoms
have been wrenched from their beds and marshalled here in captive
regiments to brighten the beef and stout on which your existence
depends. The carpet is a hot crimson bed of flowers. The whole of the
ceiling is carved and painted and gilded; not a square inch of repose
in the entire busy expanse of it; and from it thousands of blinding
electric bulbs hang down like stalactites. The walls are covered with
enormous mirrors, perversely studded with gold nails, and framed in gold
sculpture. And these mirrors fling everything remorselessly back at
you. So that the immensity and glow of the restaurant are multiplied
to infinity. The band is fighting for its life. An agonised violinist,
swaying and contorting in front of the band, squeezes the last drop
of juice out of his fiddle. The “selection” is “_Carmen_” But “Carmen”
raised to the second power, with every _piano, forte, allegro, and
adagio_ exaggerated to the last limit; “_Carmen_” composed by Souza and
executed by super-Sicilians; a “_Carmen_” deafening and excruciating!
And amid all this light and sound, amid the music and the sizzling, and
the clatter of plates and glass, and the reverberation of the mirrors,
and the whirring of the ventilators, and the sheen of gold, and the
harsh glitter of white, and the dull hum of hundreds of strenuous
conversations, and the hoarse cries of the pale demons at the fire,
and the haste, and the crowdedness, and the people waiting for your
table--you eat. You practise the fine art of dining.
[Illustration: 0141]
In a paroxysm the music expires. The effect is as disconcerting as
though the mills of God had stopped. Applause, hearty and prolonged,
resounds in the bowels of the earth.. . . You learn that the organism
exists because people really like it.
*****
This is a fearful and a romantic place. Those artists who do not tingle
to the romance of it are dead and have forgotten to be buried. The
romance of it rises grandiosely storey beyond storey. For you must
know that while you are dining in the depths, the courtesans, and their
possessors are dining in the skies. And the most romantic and impressive
thing about it all is the invisible secret thoughts, beneath the
specious bravery, of the uncountable multitude gathered together under
the spell of the brains that invented the organism. Can you not look
through the transparent faces of the young men with fine waistcoats and
neglected boots, and of the young women with concocted hats and insecure
gay blouses, and of the waiters whose memories are full of Swiss
mountains and Italian lakes and German beer gardens, and of the
violinist who was proclaimed a Kubelik at the Conservatoire and who now
is carelessly pronounced “jolly good” by eaters of beefsteaks? Can you
not look through and see the wonderful secret pre-occupations? If so,
you can also pierce walls and floors, and see clearly into the souls of
the cooks and the sub-cooks, and the cellar-men, and the commissionaires
in the rain, and the washers-up. They are all there, including the human
beings with loves and ambitions who never do anything for ever, and ever
but wash up. These are wistful, but they are not more wistful than the
seraphim and cherubim of the upper floors. The place is grandiose and
imposing; it has the dazzle of extreme success; but when you have stared
it down it is wistful enough to make you cry.
[Illustration: 0137]
Accidentally your eye rests on the gorgeous frieze in front of you, and
after a few moments, among the complex scrollwork and interlaced Cupids,
you discern a monogram, not large, not glaring, not leaping out at you,
but concealed in fact rather modestly! You decipher the monogram. It
contains the initials of the limited company paying forty per cent, and
also of the very men whose brains invented the organism. They are men.
They may be great men: they probably are; but they are men.