When normal London folk have gone home to bed the coffee-stalls come
trundling out of the mysterious dark to stay at street corners and
bridge-heads till the dawn. Ask your friends if they have ever
sought refreshment at a coffee-stall. I wager that perhaps only the
Bad Boy of the Family or Dance Club Jane have experienced the
happiness of sausages at 3 A.M. in this temple of romance.
The coffee-stall at the street corner is the only thing left in our
modern world that approximates to the mediæval inn or guest-house.
Hotels are graded and standardized, and you know exactly the kind of
people you will find in them. Good hotels are so much alike that
patrons often have to ask the hall porter whether they are in London
or Rome.
But the little coffee-stall, set netwise at street corners to catch
queer fish, is dramatic. If ever I write a play the first act will
take place round a coffee-stall; but I am told that this has been
done; and no wonder. Here it is that you, like some traveller in the
old days before the last dragon died, will meet varlets and squires,
knights on some bright errantry, damsels in distress, and many a
wandering fool: all the old characters of Romance like moths round a
flame, dropping in out of the night to snatch a sausage and then off,
mysterious, elusive, into the night.
There was a mist round the coffee-stall when I found it: one of those
strange, fugitive fogs that drift like ghosts at night in the
hollows. In the mist the stall was a glow-worm, yellow and furry,
warm and desirable, a home to wanderers and fly-by-nights, comforting
with its smell of hot coffee and its pungent, inviting sizzle.
Six or seven people, black against the yellowness and the banked
Woodbines and the tiers of depressing cakes, gazed round suspiciously
as I came in out of the incalculable dark, for after a certain time
of morning every plain man may have the mark of the devil on him.
Round this stall were the following people:
A young man with a silk hat on the back of his head and a white
evening scarf hanging over a white shirt front.
A young girl with yellow, shingled hair and a pair of silver
dance-shoes peeping out from under a moleskin cloak.
A very arch young woman, who was making hopeless eyes at the young
man in the silk hat out of sheer enthusiasm, as she ground cigarette
stump after cigarette stump into her saucer.
Three or four workmen from neighbouring road repairs.
Two men holding little black bags, who may have been telephone
officials, burglars, printers, disguised peers, or returning prodigal
sons, but mostly they looked like uncles from Balham.
From the young man in the silk hat I eavesdropped that everything was
"topping" and that Millie was "awfully struck" on Arthur, and from
his pretty partner I gathered that coffee and buns at 3 A.M. were
awfully good fun, and that she had sprung a ladder in her stocking.
"By why," she asked, "are coffee-stalls licensed to sell stamps?"
The arch young woman looked up swiftly, and said all in one breath:
"So that men can write home and tell their wives why they were kept
late at the office. Who's going to stand me a coffee?"
No one laughed; then, surprisingly, one of the solemn Balham uncles
put down the money and as solemnly went on talking to his companion
about horses. The arch lady turned her back on them, drank her
coffee, borrowed a broken mirror, rouged her lips, said, "Well,
cheerio, all!" and vanished, archly.
A taxicab driver arrived with a clatter, excavated threepence from
that deep remoteness where all taxicab drivers keep their money, and
departed with the young man and the young woman. The Balham uncles
went off with a non-committal air, which made me wonder whether they
were off to break into a house or off home to sleep beneath a
scriptural text.
"All sorts, sir, I gets here," said the coffee-stall man as he
sloshed about among the dirty plates. "You remember that cat
burglar, him what broke into Grosvenor Gardens the other night? I've
had him 'ere. 'Safact! Talkin' to a reel lord, he was, too! Yes; I
get a lord now and again, but they ain't no different from ordinary
people. They eats their sausages like everybody else and leaves the
gristle like everybody else and only puts tuppence under the saucer.
Why, you might be a lord for all I know----"
He paused, then in case I might get proud and haughty he added:
"Or a cat burglar.... Well, as I was sayin', up comes this 'ere cat
burglar, smart as you like, puts a little black bag where your
leanin' now--full of jools it was, but I didn't know--and he asks for
a cup of coffee and a barth bun. He chips into the conversation and
talks to 'is lordship quite the gentleman. 'Nice chap that,' says
'is nibs after he'd gone. 'What is he?' 'I dunno.' I tell him; and
at that moment up run a couple of coppers, all hot and bothered.
''Ave you seen a dark young man wearin' a blue double-breasted suit,
height five foot ten and a narf and of a pale complexion?'
'Thousands,' I says, going on wiping up; I could see something was up
and I wasn't splitting. Then they told me about 'im, and I told them
about 'im, and off they ran like a couple of ferrets. Catch him?
Not likely.... Good morning, sir!"
Suddenly into the circle of light stepped a man carrying a cat that
had been born white. A thin, melancholy cat and a thin, melancholy
man, middle-aged, rain-coated, and grim. He placed the thin cat on
the oilcloth counter, and the man behind at once poured out a saucer
of milk.
The cat slunk to it guiltily. The man watched it as if he had never
seen a cat before, and stroked its back. Then he buttoned it inside
his raincoat and went away.
"Collects cats, he does," said the coffee-stall man, as he banged
about among his unwashed china. "Says they follow him. Most nights
he comes along with a stray cat, buys it milk, takes it home and
looks after it. Regular walkin' cats' home, he is.... Good morning,
sir..."
Round the bend of the road swung the first gold tramcar of a new day.