The place is generally blue with smoke and it smells strongly of
grilled chops.
It is full of men: men eating and talking. Some do not remove their
overcoats or hats, although the rooms are uncomfortably warm. This
spot is remarkable only for the fact that it is one of the last
eating-houses in London which does not cater for or encourage women.
Sometimes a woman finds her way in, and all the men look up
curiously, as early Victorians might have done to see a lone woman in
a chop-house. They blink at her. They watch her covertly as she
eats, not impudently, but with a slight pity, for she is, poor thing,
unwittingly transgressing an unwritten law. She has no right to be
there! Generations of males have marked this place out as a
feeding-place, and the funny thing is that no matter how you admire
women generally, and adore some individually, you feel unhappy when
you see one there. You want to put a screen round her and forget
her. She is all wrong there. It is like going to your tailors and
finding a pretty girl being measured for a costume. It surprises and
unsettles your conception of the fitness of things!
Through the smoke and the stimulating smell--which I believe is a
kind of barrage put up against the feminine--move women and girls of
a type quite different from the usual waitress. They resemble more
the handmaids of inns in, say, the time of Sterne. They have a
sharp, ready way with them, and they regard the zoo of hungry men
dependent on them with the faint superiority of the ministering
female. They treat elderly barristers who inquire testily for an
overdue sausage rather like a school matron reproving a greedy boy.
How efficient they are! They blow down a tube and order all at once
a sole, two grilled sausages, liver and bacon, a chop and apple tart,
and never do they make a mistake in their destinations.
At first sight you might think that everybody comes here because it
is cheap. A second glance shows you a curious assortment. There are
celebrated barristers--the Lord Chief Justice often used to go there
when he was Attorney-General--solicitors, journalists, at least one
solemn editor of a literary monthly, and a floating population of
publishers' readers, poets, authors, and others with business in the
Street of Misadventure.
On your left two barristers discuss a case, on your right two
newspaper men whisper all the things not yet printed in a murder or
conspiracy trial, and in the corner two or three men who have not
lost their undergraduate voices argue about an unpublished novel.
"Of course, the residuary legatee is in exactly the same position as
that in Rex _v._ Tolbooth, and I therefore think you will agree...."
This from the left. From the right:
"The police know perfectly well who did it, but they daren't say
so--yet. Of course, you've heard..." And from the corner:
"You can't do it with your tongue in your cheek! You must be
sincere! You must believe in it, no matter how bad it is. Have you
read--"
Then, slowly, peevishly, comes the inevitable Dickensian, the old man
whose collars and neckties seem deathless, whose clothes have a queer
cut, whose hat, while it does not actually challenge modernity, does
not conform to any current mode. He is angry. Some young upstart is
sitting at his table, the table at which he has probably eaten about
fifteen thousand chops. Ancient kings must have looked like this
when they caught a virile baron trying on the crown! Insolence
and--worse! Much worse. An awful reminder to a man of habit! Some
day ... ah, well, that day has not come, and till it does he will sit
at that particular table and eat his chop with his particular knife
and fork. So he stands about glowering and fidgeting, the bland
young man calmly eating, an innocent usurper.
But the clash between man and man is as nothing compared with the
drama of a woman's entrance. Most women reach the door and
instinctively realize that they have blundered into man's last
stronghold and beat a tactful retreat, coughing slightly. Now and
again some insensitive or ignorant man actually brings a poor woman
there. Sex consciousness is a queer thing. Go into a telephone
exchange where you are the only man and see how you like it. These
women who suddenly dawn like a crime in the unwritten convention of
this place must feel it too; but women are so accustomed to scrutiny.
Is it fancy or does an uneasy silence pass like a cloud over the
babel of law, newspaper, and book talk? I wonder.
Anyhow, it is remarkable to find any place in London in which woman
is an anachronism, and no doubt the day is coming when they will
storm even this barricade and--then we may have more comfortable
chairs and nicer tables and a change in wall-paper!