In every large London restaurant, and in many small ones, there is
a spacious hall (or several) curtained away from the public, in which
every night strange secret things go on. Few suspect, and still fewer
realise, the strangeness of these secret things.
[Illustration: 0175]
In the richly decorated interior (sometimes marked with mystic signs),
at a table which in space reaches from everlasting to everlasting, and
has the form of a grill or a currycomb or the end of a rake--at such
a table sit fifty or five hundred males. They are all dressed exactly
alike, in black and white; but occasionally they display a coloured
flower, and each man bears exactly the same species and tint and size
of flower, so that you think of regiments of flowers trained throughout
their lives in barracks to the end of shining for a night in unison on
the black and white bosoms of these males. Although there is not even a
buffet in the great room, and no sign of the apparatus of a restaurant,
all these males are eating a dinner, and it is the same dinner. They do
not wish to choose; they accept, reading the menu like a decree of fate.
They do not inquire upon the machinery; a slave, unglanced at, places a
certain quantity of a dish in front of them--and lo! the same quantity
of the same dish is in front of all of them; they do not ask whence nor
how it came; they eat, with industry, knowing that at a given moment,
whether they have finished or not, a hand will steal round from behind
them, and the plate will vanish into limbo. Thus the repast continues,
ruthlessly, under the aquiline gaze of a slave who is also a
commander-in-chief, manoeuvring his men silently, manoeuvring them with
naught but a glance. With one glance he causes to disappear five hundred
salad-plates, and with another he conjures from behind a screen five
hundred ices, each duly below zero, and each calculated to impede the
digesting of a salad. The service of the dinner is a miracle, but the
diners, absorbed in the expectancy of rites to come, reck not; they
assume the service as they assume the rising of the sun. Only a few
remember the old, old days, in the ’eighties (before a cabal of
international Jews had put their heads together and inaugurated a
new age of miracles), when these solemn repasts were a scramble and a
guerilla, after which one half of the combatants went home starving, and
the other half went home glutted and drenched. Nowadays these repasts
are the most perfectly democratic in England; and anybody who has ever
assisted at one knows by a morsel of experience what life would be if
the imaginative Tory’s nightmare of Socialism were to become a reality.
But each person has enough, and has it promptly.
*****
The ceremonial begins with a meal, because it would be impossible on an
empty stomach. Its object is ostensibly either to celebrate the memory
of some deed or some dead man, or to signalise the triumph of some
living contemporary. Clubs and societies exist throughout London in
hundreds expressly for the execution of these purposes, and each! of
them is a remunerative client of a large restaurant. Societies even
exist solely in order to watch for the triumphs of contemporaries, and
to gather in the triumphant to a repast and inform them positively that
they are great. So much so that it is difficult to accomplish anything
unusual, such as the discovery of one pole or another, or the successful
defence of a libel action, without submitting to the ordeal of these
societies one after the other in a chain, and emerging therefrom
with modesty ruined and the brazen conceit of a star actor. But the
ostensible object is merely a cover for the real object, the unadmitted
and often unsuspected object: which is, to indulge in a debauch of
universal mutual admiration. When the physical appetite is assuaged,
then the appetite for praise and sentimentality is whetted, and the
design of the mighty institution of the banquet is to minister, in a
manner majestic and unexceptionable, to this base appetite, whose one
excuse is its _naïveté_.
A pleasurable and even voluptuous thrill of anticipation runs through
the assemblage when the chairman rises to open the orgy. Everybody
screws himself up, as a fiddler screwing the pegs of a fiddle, to what
he deems the correct pitch of appreciativeness; and almost the breath
is held. And the chairman says: “Whatever differences may divide us
upon other subjects, I am absolutely convinced, and I do not hesitate
to state my conviction in the clearest possible way, that we are
enthusiastically and completely agreed upon one point,” the point being
that such and such a person or such and such a work is the greatest
person or the greatest work of the kind in the whole history of the
human race. And although the point is one utterly inadmissible upon an
empty stomach, although it is indeed a glaring falsity, everybody at
once feverishly endorses it, either with shrill articulate cries, or
with deep inarticulate booming, or with noises produced by the shock
of flesh on flesh, or ivory on wood, or steel on crystal. The uproar is
enormous. The chairman grows into a sacramental priest, or a philosopher
of amazing insight and courage. And everybody says to himself: “I had
not screwed myself up quite high enough,” and proceeds to a further
screwing. And in every heart is the thought: “This is grand! This is
worth living for! This alone is the true reward of endeavour!” And the
corporate soul muses ecstatically: “This work, or this man, is ours, by
reason of our appreciation and our enthusiasm. And he, or it, is ours
exclusively.” And, since the soul and the body are locked together in
the closest sympathetic intimacy, all those cautious dyspeptic ones who
have hitherto shirked danger, immediately put on courage like a splendid
garment, and order the strongest drinks and the longest cigars that the
establishment can offer. The real world fades into unreality; the morrow
is lost in eternity; the moment and the illusion alone are real.
*****
The key of the mood is to be sought less in the speeches as they succeed
each other than in the applause. For the applauders are not influenced
by a sense of responsibility, or made self-conscious by publicity.
They can be natural, and they are. What fear can prevent them from
translating instantly their emotions into sound? By the applause, if
you are a slave and non-participator, you may correct your too kindly
estimate of men in the mass. Note how the most outrageous exaggeration,
the grossest flattery, the most banal platitude, the most fatuous
optimism, gain the loudest approval. Note how any reservation produces
a fall of temperature. Note how the smallest jokes are seized on
ravenously, as a worm by a young bird. And note always the girlish
sentimentality, ever gushing forth, of these strong, hard-headed males
whose habit is to proverbialise the sentimentality of women.
[Illustration: 0179]
The emotional crisis arrives. Feeling transcends the vehicle of speech,
and escapes in song. And one guest, honoured either; for some special
deed of his own or because his name has been “coupled” with some
historic deed or movement, remains sitting, in the most exquisite
self-consciousness that human ingenuity ever brought about, while all
the rest fling hoarsely at him the fifteen sacred words of a refrain
which in its incredible vulgarity surpasses even the National Anthem.
The reaction is now not far off. But owing to several reasons it is
postponed yet awhile. The honoured guest’s response is one of the
chief attractions of the night. Very many diners have been drawn to the
banquet by the desire to inspect the honoured guest at their leisure, to
see his antics, to divine his human weaknesses and his ridiculous side.
And, moreover, the honoured guest must give praise for praise, and lie
for lie. He is bound by the strictest conventions of social intercourse
to say in so many words: “Gentlemen, you are the most enlightened body
of men that I ever had the good fortune to meet; and your hospitality
is the greatest compliment that I have ever had, or ever shall have, or
could conceive. Each of you is a prince of the earth. And I am a worm.”
And then there are the minor speeches, finishing off in detail the vast
embroidery of laudation which was begun by the Chairman. Everybody is
more or less enfolded in that immense mantle. And everybody is satisfied
and sated, save those who have sat through the night awaiting the sweet
mention of their own names, and who have been disappointed. At every
banquet there are such. And it is they who, by their impatience,
definitely cause the reaction at last. The speakers who terminate the
affair fight against the reaction in vain. The applause at the close is
perfunctory--how different from the fever of the commencement and the
hysteria of the middle! The illusion is over. The emotional debauch
is finished. The adult and bearded boys have played the delicious
make-believe of being truly great, and the game is at an end; and each
boy, looking within, perceives without too much surprise that he is
after all only himself. A cohort “of the best,” foregathered in the
cloakroom, say to each other, “Delightful evening! Splendid! Ripping!”
And then one says, ironically leering, in a low voice, and a tone heavy
with realistic disesteem: “Well, what do you think of--?” Naming the
lion of the night.