shameless chronicle would be disloyalty. At the Astor Club one evening I
met her. I realised then what that intimating smile had meant when, the
week before, she had met me on the stairs. I thereupon forgot Leonard,
and visited the night debaucheries of London in the company of the
grey-eyed, auburn-haired Elsie. I have every reason to believe that ere
I sailed back to America I had sounded the depths of London's
iniquities. By stealth and copious bribing, plus the influence of my
fair companion, I found that, though it was difficult it was
nevertheless possible to eat and drink and dance in London till dawn.
Yet at no place to which we went could I find anything unlike any other
city in the world--the only difference being that in London one must act
surreptitiously, while other cities permit all of the London indulgences
openly. Surely the night life of London is innocent enough! Why
membership in expensive clubs is necessary in order for one to enjoy it
is a question to which only British logic is applicable. The searcher
for thrills or the touring shock absorber will find nothing in London to
rattle his psychic slats. Even the professional moralist, skilled in the
subtle technicalities of sin, can find nothing in England's capital to
make him shudder and flee. The chief criticism against London night life
is that it is hypocritical, that it is sordid, because it is denied and
indulged in subterraneanly. The hypocrisy of it all is doubly
accentuated by the curious fact that the British public permits
trafficking in the promenades of its theatres, such as even New York has
balked at these many years. I refer to such theatres--called "music
halls," that they may be distinguished from the smaller houses in which
the serious drama is produced--as the "Alhambra," in Leicester Square;
the "Empire Theatre of Varieties," also in Leicester Square; the "Palace
Theatre of Varieties" on Cambridge Circus in Shaftesbury Avenue; the
"London Pavilion" in Piccadilly; and the "Hippodrome" at the corner of
Cranbourn Street and Charing Cross Road. Let us inspect their vaudeville
offerings. Let us snoop into their wares. At these theatres, equipped
with numerous and eminently available cafés, women, frail and fair, sit
and walk about on the promenades and generously waive introductions when
the young gentlemen evince a desire to speak to them. But there is no
romance here. These promenades are even without illusion. Here, among
the theatres, is where London tries to be Paris. Just as she tries to be
New York in Regent Street. Here is where the most moral town in
Christendom discovers her native hoggishness. Here is the great slave
market of the English.
But we are out for vaudeville and not for slaves, and so we pursue our
virtuous way up the stream of amiable fair until we reach the Palace
Music Hall, where a poster advertising a Russian dancer inspires us to
part with half a dozen shillings. Luxurious seats of red velvet, wide
enough for a pair of German contraltos, invite to slumber, and the
juggler on the stage does the rest. Twenty times he heaves a cannon ball
into the air, and twenty times he catches it safely on his neck. The
Russian dancer, we find, is booked for ten-thirty, and it is now but
eight-fifty. "Why wait?" says the fair Elsie. "It will never kill him."
So we try another hall--and find a lady with a face like a tomato
singing a song about the derby, to an American tune that was stale in
1907. Yet another, and we are in the midst of a tedious ballet founded
upon "Carmen," with the music reduced to jigtime and a flute playing out
of tune. A fourth--and we suffer a pair of comedians who impersonate
Americans by saying "Naow" and "Amurican." When they break into "My
Cousin Carus'" we depart by the fire escape. We have now spent eight
dollars on divertisement and have failed to be diverted. We take one
more chance, and pick a prize--Little Tich, to wit, a harlequin no more
than four feet in his shoes, but as full of humour as a fraternal order
funeral.
Before these few lines find you well, Little Tich, I dare say, will be
on Broadway, drawing his four thousand stage dollars a week and longing
for a decent cut of mutton. But we saw him on his native heath,
uncontaminated by press agents, unboomed by a vociferous press,
undefiled by contact with acquitted murderers, eminent divorcées,
"perfect" women, returned explorers who never got where they went, and
suchlike prodigies and nuisances of the Broadway 'alls. Tich, as I have
said, is but four feet from sole to crown, but there is little of the
dwarf's distortion about him. He is simply a man in miniature: in
aspect, much like any other man. His specialty is impersonation. First
he appears as a drill sergeant, then as a headwaiter, then as a gas
collector, then as some other familiar fellow. But what keen insight and
penetrating humour in every detail of the picture! How mirth bubbles
out! Here we have burlesque, of course, and there is even some horseplay
in it, but at bottom how deft it is, and how close to life, and how
wholly and irresistibly comical! You must see him do the
headwaiter--hear him blarney and flabbergast the complaining guest,
observe him reckon up his criminal bill, see the subtle condescension of
his tip grabbing. This Tich, I assure you, is no common mountebank, but
a first-rate comic actor. Given legs eighteen inches longer and an
equator befitting the rôle, he would make the best Falstaff of our
generation. Even as he stands, he would do wonders with Bob Acres--and
I'd give four dollars any day to see him play Marguerite Gautier.
But enough of theatres! There are two night restaurants in London
which should be mentioned here. Let what little fame they may attain
from being set down in these pages be theirs. They more nearly
approximate to youthful whole-heartedness than any institutions in the
city. Perhaps this is because they are so distinctly Continental,
because they are almost stripped of anything (save the language spoken)
which savours of London and the British temperament. They are the Villa
Villa, at 37 Gerrard Street (once the residence of Edmund Burke), and
Maxim's, at 30 Wardour Street. Their reputations are far from spotless,
and English society gives them a wide berth. Because of this they have
become the meeting place of clandestine lovers. Here is the genuine
laughter and the wayward noise of youth. Nine out of every ten of their
patrons are young, and four out of every five of the girls are pretty.
Music is continuous and lively, and they possess an intimacy found only
in Parisian cafés. Do I imply that they are free from sordidness and
commercialism? They are not. Far from it. There is no night life in
London entirely free from these two disintegrating factors. But their
simulacrum of gaiety is far from obvious. When the fifteen-minute
warning for evacuation is given a good-natured cheer goes up, and a peal
of laughter which shakes the chandeliers and drowns out the musicians.
The crowd at least sees the humour of the closing law, and, being unable
to repeal it, laughs at it. In the Villa Villa and Maxim's, hands meet
lingeringly over the table; faces are near together; and a public stolen
kiss is not a rarity. When the doors of these restaurants are locked on
a deserted room the exiles do not go decorously and dolorously home. In
another hour you will see many of these same couples dancing at the
supper clubs.
Here we are again in Signor Bolis's establishment--which means that we
have made the round.... Elsie is yawning. I, too, am tired of the dance
and sick of the taste of champagne. I motion the waiter and pay the
bill. I draw Elsie's long coat about her, and we pass out into the clear
London night. We walk home circuitously--down Cranbourn Street and into
Charing Cross Road where it turns past the National Gallery into St.
Martin's place. Through Duncannon Street, we enter the Strand, now
almost deserted save for a few stray figures and a hurrying taxicab. We
then turn into Villiers Street, and in a few minutes we are on York
Terrace, overlooking the Thames embankment. The elm trees and the
beeches stand about like green ghosts in the pale night. At the edge of
the water Cleopatra's Needle is a black silhouette. We should like to
walk through the Gardens in the starlight, but the formidable iron gates
are locked against us. So we turn up Robert Street into Adelphi Terrace.
We lean for a moment against the railing.
There below us, a crinkling tapestry of gilts, silvers and coppery
pinks, is ancient Father Thames, the emperor and archbishop of all
earthly streams. There are the harsh waters (but now so soft!) that the
Romans braved, watching furtively for blue savages along the banks, and
the Danes after the Romans, and the Normans after the Danes, and
innumerable companies of hardy seafarers in the long years following. At
this lovely turning, where the river flouts the geography books by
flowing almost due northward for a mile, bloody battles must have been
fought in those old, forgotten, far-off times--and battles, I venture,
not always ending with Roman cheers. One pictures some young naval
lieutenant, just out of the Tiber Annapolis, and brash and nosey like
his kind--one sees some such youngster pushing thus far in his light
craft, and perhaps going around on the mud of the south bank, and there
fighting to the death with Britons of the fog-wrapped marshes, "hairy,
horrible, human." And one sees, too, his return to the fleet so snug at
Gravesend, an imperfect carcass lashed to a log, the pioneer and prophet
of all that multitude of dead men who have since bobbed down this dirty
tide. Dead men, and men alive--men full of divine courage and high
hopes, the great dreamers and experimenters of the race. Out of this
sluggish sewer the Anglo-Saxon, that fabulous creature, has gone forth
to his blundering conquest of the earth. And conquering, he has brought
back his loot to the place of his beginning. The great liners flashing
along their policed and humdrum lanes, have long since abandoned London,
but every turn of the tide brings up her fleet of cargo ships,
straggling, weather-worn and grey, trudging in from ports far-flung and
incredible--Surinam, Punta Arenas, Antofagasta, Port Banana, Tang-chow,
Noumea, Sarawak. If you think that commerce, yielding to steel and
steam, has lost all romance, just give an idle day or two to London
docks. The very names upon the street signs are as exotic as a breath of
frankincense. Mango Wharf, Kamchatka Wharf, Havannah Street, the Borneo
Stores, Greenland Dock, Sealers' Yard--on all sides are these
suggestions of adventure beyond the sky-rim, of soft, tropical moons and
cold, arctic stars, of strange peoples, strange tongues and strange
lands. In one Limehouse barroom you will find sailors from Behring
Straits and the China Sea, the Baltic and the River Plate, the Congo and
Labrador, all calling London home, all paying an orang-outang's
devotions to the selfsame London barmaid, all drenched and paralysed by
London beer....
The _kaiserstadt_ of the world, this grim and grey old London! And the
river of rivers, this oily, sluggish, immemorial Thames! At its widest,
I suppose, it might be doubled upon itself and squeezed into the lower
Potomac, and no doubt the Mississippi, even at St. Louis, could swallow
it without rising a foot--but it leads from London Bridge to every coast
and headland of the world! Of all the pathways used by man this is the
longest and the greatest. And not only the greatest, but the loveliest.
Grant the Rhine its castles, the Hudson its hills, the Amazon its
stupendous reaches. Not one of these can match the wonder and splendour
of frail St. Stephen's, wrapped in the mists of a summer night, or the
cool dignity of St. Paul's, crowning its historic mount, or the iron
beauty of the bridges, or the magic of the ancient docks, or the
twinkling lights o' London, sweeping upward to the stars....
PARIS
[Illustration: PARIS]
PARIS
For the American professional seeker after the night romance of Paris,
the French have a phrase which, be it soever inelegant, retains still a
brilliant verity. The phrase is "_une belle poire_." And its Yankee
equivalent is "sucker."
The French, as the world knows, are a kindly, forgiving people; and
though they cast the epithet, they do so in manner tolerant and with
light arpeggio--of Yankee sneer and bitterness containing not a trace.
They cast it as one casts a coin into the hand of some maundering
beggar, with commingled oh-wells and philosophical pity. For in the
Frenchman of the Paris of to-day, though there run not the blood of
Lafayette, and though he detest Americans as he detests the Germans, he
yet, detesting, sorrows for them, sees them as mere misled yokels,
uncosmopolite, obstreperous, of comical posturing in ostensible un-Latin
lech, vainglorious and spying--children into whose hands has fallen
Zola, children adream, somnambulistic, groping rashly for those things
out of life that, groped for, are lost--that may come only as life
comes, naturally, calmly, inevitably.
But the Frenchman, he never laughs at us; that would his culture
forbid. And, if he smile, his mouth goes placid before the siege. His
attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Comstock come to the hill of
Hörselberg in Thuringia, there to sniff and snicker in Venus's crimson
court. His attitude is the attitude of one beholding a Tristan _en
voyage_ for a garden of love and roses he can never reach. His attitude,
the attitude of an old and understanding professor, shaking his head
musingly as his tender pupils, unmellowed yet in the autumnal fragrances
of life, giggle covertly over the pages of Balzac and Flaubert, over the
nudes of Manet, over even the innocent yearnings of the bachelor Chopin.
The American, loosed in the streets of Paris by night, however sees in
himself another and a worldlier image. Into the crevices of his flat
house in his now far-away New York have penetrated from time to time
vague whisperings of the laxative deviltries, the bold saucinesses of
the city by the Seine. And hither has he come, as comes a jack tar to
West Street after protracted cruise upon the celibate seas, to smell
out, as a very devil of a fellow, quotation-marked life and its
attributes. What is romance to such a soul--even were romance, the
romance of this Paris, uncurtained to him? Which, forsooth, the romance
seldom is; for though it may go athwart his path, he sees it not, he
feels it not, he knows it not, can know it not, for what it is.
Romance to him means only an elaborate and circumspect winking at some
perfectly obvious and duly checked little baggage; it means to him only
a scarlet-cushioned seat along the mirrored wall of the Café Américain,
a thousand incandescents, a string quartette sighing through "Un Peu
d'Amour," a quart of "wine." Romance to him is a dinner jacket prowling
by night into the comic opera (American libretto) purlieus of modern
Montmartre, with its spurious extravaganzas of rouge and roister, with
its spider webs of joy. For him, there is romance in the pleasure girls
who sit at the tables touching St. Michel before the Café d'Harcourt,
making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "_Eh,
bébé_" assails their tympani with its suggested tintinnabulation of
needed francs: for him--"models." And the Bullier, ghost now of the old
Bullier where once little Luzanne, the inspiration of a hundred
palettes, tripped the polka, the new Bullier with its coloured
electricity and ragtime band and professional treaders of the Avenue de
l'Observatoire, is eke romance to his nostril. And so, too, he finds it
atop the Rue Lepic in the now sham Mill of Galette, a capon of its
former self, where Germaine and Florie and Mireille, veteran battle-axes
of the Rue Victor Massé, pose as modest little workgirls of the
Batignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, the
Café de Paris--and in the Moulin Rouge, which died forever from the
earth a dozen years ago when the architect Niermans seduced the place
with the "art nouveau"--and amid the squalid hussies of the fake
Tabarin--and in the Rue Royale, at Maxim's, with its Tzigane orchestra
composed of German gipsies and its toy balloons made by the Elite
Novelty Co. of Jersey City, U.S.A.
The American notion of Paris under the guardianship of the French
stars, of Paris caressed by the night wind come down from Longchamps and
filtered through the chestnut branches of Boulogne, is usually achieved
from the Sons of Moses who, in spats and sticks, adorn the entrance of
the Olympia and the sidewalks of the Café de la Paix and interrogatively
guide-sir the passing foreign mob. This Paris consists chiefly of a view
of the exotic bathtub of the good King Edward of Britain, quondam Prince
of Wales, in the celebrated house of the crystal staircase in the Rue
Chabanais, of one of the two "mysterious" midinette speak-easys in the
dark Rue de Berlin (where the midinettes range from the tender age of
forty-five to fifty), of the cellar of the tavern near the Panthéon with
its tawdry wenches and beer and butt-soaked floors--of tawdry resorts
and tawdrier peoples.
Do I treat of but a single class of Americans? Well, maybe so. But the
other class--and the class after that--think you _these_ are so
different? So different, goes my meaning, in the matter of appropriating
to themselves something of the deep and very true romance that sings
still in the shadowed corners of this one-time Flavia of capitals, that
sounds still, as sounds some far-off steamboat whistle wail in the
death-quiet of night, pleading and pathetic, that calls still to the
dreamers of all the world from out the tomb of faded triumphs and
forgotten memories?
True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory--gone that
Paris that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul.
True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd of
other days--Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them--is no
more. Gone, as well, and gone forever is the cabaret of Bruant, him of
the line of François Villon--now become a place for the vulgar oglings
of Cook's tourists taxicabbing along the Boulevard Rochechouart. Gone
the wild loves, the bravuras, the _camaraderie_ of warm night skies in
the old Boulevard de Clichy, supplanted now with a strident
concatenation of Coney Island sideshows: the "Cabaret de l'Enfer," with
its ballyhoo made up as Satan, the "Cabaret du Ciel," with its "grotto"
smelling of Sherwin-Williams' light blue paint, the "Cabaret du Néant,"
with its Atlantic City plate glass trick of metamorphosing the visiting
doodle into a skeleton, the "Lune Rousse," with its mean Marie Lloyd
species of lyrical concupiscence, the "Quat'-z-Arts," with its charge of
two francs the glass of beer and its concourse of loafers dressed up
like Harry B. Smith "poets," in black velvet, corduroy _grimpants_ and
wiggy hirsutal cascades to impress "atmosphere" on the minds of the
attendant citizenry of Louisville. And gone, too, with the song of
Clichy, is the song from the heart of St. Michel, the song from the
heart of St. Germain. "Tea rooms," operated by American old maids, have
poked their noses into these once genuine boulevards ... and, as if
giving a further fillip to the scenery, clothing shops with windows
haughtily revealing the nobby art of Kuppenheimer, postcard shops laden
to the sill's edge with lithographs disclosing erstwhile _Saturday
Evening Post_ cover heroines, and case upon case displaying in lordly
enthusiasm the choicest cranial confections of the house of Stetson....
What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, has
not yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart in
the days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouder
people. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it,
lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highways
of the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then still
somewhere. But where, ask you, is this somewhere? And I shall tell you.
This somewhere is in the eyes of the Parisian girl; this somewhere is in
the heart of the Parisian man. There, romance has not died--one must
believe, will never die.
And, having told you, I seem to hear you laugh. "We thought," I would
seem to hear you say, "that he was going to tell us of concrete places,
of concrete byways, where this so gorgeous romance yet tarries." And you
are aggrieved and disappointed. But I bid you patience. I am still too
young to be sentimental: so have you no fear. And yet, bereft of all of
sentimentality, I _re_-issue you my challenge: this somewhere is in the
eyes of the Parisian girl, this somewhere is in the heart of the
Parisian man.
By Parisian girl I mean not the order of Austrian wenches who twist
their tummies in elaborate tango epilepsies in the Place Pigalle, nor
the order of female curios who expectorate with all the gusto of
American drummers in La Hanneton, nor yet the Forty-niners who
foregather in the private entrance of 16 Rue Frochot. I do not mean the
dead-eyed joy jades of the café concerts in the Champs Elysées. I do not
mean the crow-souled scows who steam by night in the channels off the
Place de la Madeleine. The girl I mean is that girl you notice leaning
against the onyx balustrade at the Opéra--that one with lips of Burgundy
and cheeks the colour of roses in olive oil. The girl I mean is that
phantom girl you see, from your table before the Rotonde across the way,
slipping past the iron grilling of the Luxembourg Gardens--that girl
with faded blouse but with eyes, you feel, a-colour with the lightning
of the world's jewels. The girl I mean is that girl you catch sight
of--but what matters it where? Or what she leans against or what she
wears or what her lips and eyes? If you know Paris, you know her.
Whether in the Allée des Acacias or in the boulevard Montparnasse, she
is the same: the real French girl of still abiding Parisian romance; the
real French girl in whose baby daughter, some day, will be perpetuated
the laughter of the soul of a city that will not fade. And in whose baby
girl in turn, some day long after that, it will be born anew.
Ah, me, the cynic in you! Do you protest that the girl of the
balustrade, the girl of the Luxembourg, are very probably American girls
here for visit? Well, well! _Tu te paye ma tête._ Who has heard of
romance in an American girl? I grant you, and I make grant quickly, that
the American girl is, in the mass, more ocularly massaging, more nimble
with the niblick, more more in several ways than her sister of France;
but in her eyes, however otherwise lovely, is glint of steel where
should be dreaming pansies, in her heart reverie of banknotes where
should be _billets doux_.
And so by Parisian man I mean, not the chorus men of Des Italiens,
betalcumed and odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those weird birds
who are guarded by the casual Yankee as typical and symbolic of the
nation. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver-faced denizens of the region
down from the Opéra, those spaniel-eyed creatures who live in the tracks
of petite Sapphos, who spend the days in cigarette smoke, the nights in
scheming ambuscade. Nor yet the Austrian cross-breeds who are to be
beheld behind the _gulasch_ in the Rue d'Hauteville, nor the
semi-Milanese who sibilate the _minestrone_ at Aldegani's in the Passage
des Panoramas, nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobble
the _guisillo madrileño_ at Don José's in the Rue Helder, nor the
half-French Cossacks amid the _potrokha_ in the Restaurant Cubat, nor
the Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may be
observed at moontide dawdling over their _café à la Turque_ at Madame
Louna Sonnak's. These are the Frenchmen of Paris no more than the
habitués of Back Bay are the Americans of Boston, no more than the
Americans of Boston are--Americans.
* * * * *