II

Ambrose Meyrick's adventure was certainly of the fantastic order. His

fame had long been established on a sure footing with his uncle and

with everybody else, and Mr. Horbury had congratulated him with genuine

enthusiasm on his work in the examinations--the Summer term was drawing

to a close. Mr. Horbury was Ambrose's trustee, and he made no difficulty

about signing a really handsome cheque for his nephew's holiday expenses

and outfit. "There," he said "you ought to be able to do pretty well on

that. Where do you think of going?"

Ambrose said that he had thought of North Devon, of tramping over

Exmoor, visiting the Doone country, and perhaps of working down to

Dartmoor.

"You couldn't do better. You ought to try your hand at fishing:

wonderful sport in some of those streams. It mightn't come off at first,

but with your eye and sense of distance you'll soon make a fine angler.

If you _do_ have a turn at the trout, get hold of some local man and

make him give you a wrinkle or two. It's no good getting your flies from

town. Now, when I was fishing in Hampshire----"

Mr. Horbury went on; but the devil of gaiety had already dictated a

wonderful scheme to Ambrose, and that night he informed Nelly Foran that

she must alter her plans; she was to come with him to France instead of

spending a fortnight at Blackpool. He carried out this mad device with

an ingenuity that poor Mr. Palmer would certainly have called

"diabolical." In the first place, there was to be a week in London--for

Nelly must have some clothes; and this week began as an experience of

high delight. It was not devoid of terror, for masters might be abroad,

and Ambrose did not wish to leave Lupton for some time. However, they

neither saw nor were seen. Arriving at St. Pancras, the luggage was left

in the station, and Ambrose, who had studied the map of London, stood

for a while on the pavement outside Scott's great masterpiece of

architecture and considered the situation with grave yet humorous

deliberation. Nelly proved herself admirably worthy of the adventure;

its monstrous audacity appealed to her, and she was in a state of

perpetual subdued laughter for some days after their arrival. Meyrick

looked about him and found that the Euston Road, being squalid and

noisy, offered few attractions; and with sudden resolution he took the

girl by the arm and steered into the heart of Bloomsbury. In this

charmingly central and yet retired quarter they found rooms in a quiet

byway which, oddly enough, looked on a green field; and under the

pleasant style of Mr. and Mr. Lupton they partook of tea while the

luggage was fetched by somebody--probably a husband--who came with a

shock of red, untidy hair from the dark bowels of the basement. They

screamed with mirth over the meal. Mr. Horbury had faults, but he kept

a good table for himself, his boys and his servants; and the exotic,

quaint flavour of the "bread" and "butter" seemed to these two young

idiots exquisitely funny. And the queer, faint, close smell, too, of the

whole house--it rushed out at one when the hall door was opened: it was

heavy, and worth its weight in gold.

"I never know," Ambrose used to say afterwards, "whether to laugh or cry

when I have been away for some time from town, and come back and smell

that wonderful old London aroma. I don't believe it's so strong or so

rare as it used to be; I have been disappointed once or twice in houses

in quite shabby streets. It was _there_, of course, but--well, if it

were a vintage wine I should say it was a second growth of a very poor

year--Margaux, no doubt, but a Margaux of one of those very indifferent

years in the early 'seventies. Or it may be like the smell of

grease-paints; one doesn't notice it after a month or two. But I don't

think it is.

"Still," he would go on, "I value what I can smell of it. It brings back

to me that afternoon, that hot, choking afternoon of ever so many years

ago. It was really tremendously hot--ninety-two degrees, I think I saw

in the paper the next day--and when we got out at St. Pancras the wind

came at one like a furnace blast. There was no sun visible; the sky was

bleary--a sort of sickly, smoky yellow, and the burning wind came in

gusts, and the dust hissed and rattled on the pavement. Do you know what

a low public-house smells like in London on a hot afternoon? Do you know

what London bitter tastes like on such a day--the publican being

evidently careful of his clients' health, and aware of the folly of

drinking cold beverages during a period of extreme heat? I do. Nelly,

poor dear, had warm lemonade, and I had warm beer--warm chemicals, I

mean. But the odour! Why doesn't some scientific man stop wasting his

time over a lot of useless rubbish and discover a way of bottling the

odour of the past?

"Ah! but if he did so, in a phial of rare crystal with a stopper as

secure as the seal of Solimaun ben Daoud would I preserve one most

precious scent, inscribing on the seal, within a perfect pentagram, the

mystic legend 'No. 15, Little Russell Row.'"

The cat had come in with the tea-tray. He was a black cat, not very

large, with a decent roundness of feature, and yet with a suggestion of

sinewy skinniness about him--the Skinniness of the wastrel, not of the

poor starveling. His bright green eyes had, as Ambrose observed, the

wisdom of Egypt; on his tomb should be inscribed "The Justified in

Sekht." He walked solemnly in front of the landlady, his body

describing strange curves, his tail waving in the air, and his ears put

back with an expression of intense cunning. He seemed delighted at "the

let," and when Nelly stroked his back he gave a loud shriek of joy and

made known his willingness to take a little refreshment.

They laughed so heartily over their tea that when the landlady came in

to clear the things away they were still bubbling over with aimless

merriment.

"I likes to see young people 'appy," she said pleasantly, and readily

provided a latchkey in case they cared to come in rather late. She told

them a good deal of her life: she had kept lodgings in Judd Street, near

King's Cross--a nasty, noisy street, she called it--and she seemed to

think the inhabitants a low lot. She had to do with all sorts, some good

some bad, and the business wasn't what it had been in her mother's day.

They sat a little while on the sofa, hand in hand still consumed with

the jest of their being there at all, and imagining grotesque entrances

of Mr. Horbury or Dr. Chesson. Then they went out to wander about the

streets, to see London easily, merrily, without bothering the Monument,

or the British Museum, or Madame Tussaud's--finally, to get something to

eat, they didn't know when or where or how, and they didn't in the

least care! There was one "sight" they were not successful in avoiding:

they had not journeyed far before the great portal of the British Museum

confronted them, grandiose and gloomy. So, by the sober way of Great

Russell Street, they made their way into Tottenham Court Road and,

finally, into Oxford Street. The shops were bright and splendid, the

pavement was crowded with a hurrying multitude, as it seemed to the

country folk, though it was the dullest season of the year. It was a

great impression--decidedly London was a wonderful place. Already

Ambrose felt a curious sense of being at home in it; it was not

beautiful, but it was on the immense scale; it did something more than

vomit stinks into the air, poison into the water and rows of workmen's

houses on the land. They wandered on, and then they had the fancy that

they would like to explore the regions to the south; it was so

impossible, as Ambrose said, to know where they would find themselves

eventually. He carefully lost himself within a few minutes of Oxford

Street. A few turnings to right and then to left; the navigation of

strange alleys soon left them in the most satisfactory condition of

bewilderment; the distinctions of the mariner's compass, its pedantry of

east and west, north and south, were annihilated and had ceased to be;

it was an adventure in a trackless desert, in the Australian bush, but

on safer ground and in an infinitely more entertaining scene. At first

they had passed through dark streets, Georgian and Augustan ways, gloomy

enough, and half deserted; there were grave houses, with many stories of

windows, now reduced to printing offices, to pickle warehouses, to odd

crafts such as those of the metal assayer, the crucible maker, the

engraver of seals, the fabricator of Boule. But how wonderful it was to

see the actual place where those things were done! Ambrose had read of

such arts, but had always thought of them as existing in a vague

void--if some of them even existed at all in those days: but there in

the windows were actual crucibles, strange-looking curvilinear pots of

grey-yellowish ware, the veritable instruments of the Magnum Opus,

inventions of Arabia. He was no longer astonished when a little farther

he saw a harpsichord, which had only been a name to him, a beautiful

looking thing, richly inlaid, with its date--1780--inscribed on a card

above it. It was now utterly wonderland: he could very likely buy armour

round the corner; and he had scarcely formed the thought when a very

fine sixteenth-century suit, richly damascened, rose up before him,

handsomely displayed between two black jacks. These were the

comparatively silent streets; but they turned a corner, and what a

change! All the roadway, not the pavement only, seemed full of a

strolling, chatting, laughing mob of people: the women were bareheaded,

and one heard nothing but the roll of the French "r," torrents of

sonorous sound trolled out with the music of happy song. The papers in

the shops were all French, ensigns on every side proclaimed "Vins Fins,"

"Beaune Superieur": the tobacconists kept their tobacco in square blue,

yellow and brown packets; "Charcuterie" made a brave and appetising

show. And here was a "Cafe Restaurant: au chateau de Chinon." The name

was enough; they could not dine elsewhere, and Ambrose felt that he was

honouring the memory of the great Rabelais.

It was probably not a very good dinner. It was infinitely better than

the Soho dinner of these days, for the Quarter had hardly begun to yield

to the attack of Art, Intellect and the Suburbs which, between them,

have since destroyed the character and unction of many a good cook-shop.

Ambrose only remembered two dishes; the _pieds de porc grilles_ and the

salad. The former he thought both amusing and delicious, and the latter

was strangely and artfully compounded of many herbs, of little vinegar,

of abundant Provencal oil, with the _chapon_, or crust rubbed with

garlic, reposing at the bottom of the bowl after Madame had "tormented"

the ingredients--the salad was a dish from Fairyland. There be no such

salads now in all the land of Soho.

"Let me celebrate, above all, the little red wine," says Ambrose in a

brief dithyrambic note. "Not in any mortal vineyard did its father grape

ripen; it was not nourished by the warmth of the visible sun, nor were

the rains that made it swell common waters from the skies above us. Not

even in the Chinonnais, sacred earth though that be, was the press made

that caused its juices to be poured into the _cuve_, nor was the humming

of its fermentation heard in any of the good cellars of the lower

Touraine. But in that region which Keats celebrates when he sings the

'Mermaid Tavern' was this juice engendered--the vineyard lay low down in

the south, among the starry plains where is the _Terra Turonensis

Celestis_, that unimaginable country which Rabelais beheld in his vision

where mighty Gargantua drinks from inexhaustible vats eternally, where

Pantagruel is athirst for evermore, though he be satisfied continually.

There, in the land of the Crowned Immortal Tosspots was that wine of

ours vintaged, red with the rays of the Dog-star, made magical by the

influence of Venus, fertilised by the happy aspect of Mercury. O rare,

superabundant and most excellent juice, fruit of all fortunate stars, by

thee were we translated, exalted into the fellowship of that Tavern of

which the old poet writes: _Mihi est propositum in Taberna mori!_"

There were few English people in the Chateau de Chinon--indeed, it is

doubtful whether there was more than one--the menage Lupton excepted.

This one compatriot happened to be a rather remarkable man--it was

Carrol. He was not in the vanguard of anything; he knew no journalists

and belonged to no clubs; he was not even acquainted in the most distant

manner with a single person who could be called really influential or

successful. He was an obscure literary worker, who published an odd

volume every five or six years: now and then he got notices, when there

was no press of important stuff in the offices, and sometimes a kindly

reviewer predicted that he would come out all right in time, though he

had still much to learn. About a year before he died, an intelligent

reading public was told that one or two things of his were rather good;

then, on his death, it was definitely discovered that the five volumes

of verse occupied absolutely unique ground, that a supreme poet had been

taken from us, a poet who had raised the English language into a fourth

dimension of melody and magic. The intelligent reading public read him

no more than they ever did, but they buy him in edition after edition,

from large quarto to post octavo; they buy him put up into little

decorated boxes; they buy him on Japanese vellum; they buy him

illustrated by six different artists; they discuss no end of articles

about him; they write their names in the Carrol Birthday Book; they set

up the Carrol Calendar in their boudoirs; they have quotations from him

in Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral; they sing him in the

famous Carrol Cycle of Song; and, last and best of all, a brilliant

American playwright is talking even now of dramatising him. The Carrol

Club, of course, is ancient history. Its membership is confined to the

ranks of intellect and art; it invites to its dinners foreign princes,

bankers, major-generals and other persons of distinction--all of whom,

of course, are intensely interested in the master's book; and the record

and praise of the Club are in all the papers. It is a pity that Carrol

is dead. He would not have sworn: he would have grinned.

Even then, though he was not glorious, he was observant, and he left a

brief note, a sort of thumb-nail sketch, of his impressions that night

at the Chateau de Chinon.

"I was sitting in my old corner," he says, "wondering why the devil I

wrote so badly on the whole, and what the devil I was going to do with

the subject that I had tackled. The dinner was not so bad at the old

Chateau in those days, though now they say the plate-glass is the best

dish in the establishment. I liked the old place; it was dingy and low

down and rather disreputable, I fancy, and the company was miscellaneous

French with a dash of Italian. Nearly all of us knew each other, and

there were regulars who sat in the same seat night after night. I liked

it all. I liked the coarse tablecloths and the black-handled knives and

the lead spoons and the damp, adhesive salt, and the coarse, strong,

black pepper that one helped with a fork handle. Then there was Madame

sitting on high, and I never saw an uglier woman nor a more

good-natured. I was getting through my roast fowl and salad that

evening, when two wonderful people came in, obviously from fairyland! I

saw they had never been in such a place in all their lives before--I

don't believe either of them had set foot in London until that day, and

their wonder and delight and enjoyment of it all were so enormous that I

had another helping of food and an extra half-bottle of wine. I enjoyed

them, too, in their way, but I could see that _their_ fowl and _their_

wine were not a bit the same as mine. _I_ once knew the restaurant they

were really dining at--Grand Cafe de Paradis--some such name as that. He

was an extraordinary looking chap, quite young, I should fancy, black

hair, dark skin, and such burning eyes! I don't know why, but I felt he

was a bit out of his setting, and I kept thinking how I should like to

see him in a monk's robe. Madame was different. She was a lovely girl

with amazing copper hair; dressed rather badly--of the people, I should

imagine. But what a gaiety she had! I couldn't hear what they were

saying, but one had to smile with sheer joy at the sight of her face--it

positively danced with mirth, and a good musician could have set it to

music, I am sure. There was something a little queer--too pronounced,

perhaps--about the lower part of her face. Perhaps it would have been an

odd tune, but I know I should have liked to hear it!"

Ambrose lit a black Caporal cigarette--he had bought a packet on his

way. He saw an enticing bottle, of rotund form, paying its visits to

some neighbouring tables, and the happy fools made the acquaintance of

Benedictine.

"Oh, yes, it is all very well," Ambrose has been heard to say on being

offered this agreeable and aromatic liqueur, "it's nice enough, I

daresay. But you should have tasted the _real_ stuff. I got it at a

little cafe in Soho some years ago--the Chateau de Chinon. No, it's no

good going there now, it's quite different. All the walls are

plate-glass and gold; the head waiter is called Maitre d'hotel, and I am

told it's quite the thing, both in southern and northern suburbs, to

make up dinner parties at the Chateau--everything most correct, evening

dress, fans, opera cloaks, 'Hide-seek' champagne, and stalls afterwards.

One gets a glimpse of Bohemian life that way, and everybody says it's

been such a queer evening, but quite amusing, too. But you can't get the

real Benedictine there now.

"Where can you get it? Ah! I wish I knew. _I_ never come across it. The

bottle looks just the same, but it's quite a different flavour. The

phylloxera may be responsible, of course, but I don't think it is.

Perhaps the bottle that went round the table that night was like the

powder in _Jekyll and Hyde_--its properties were the result of some

strange accident. At all events, they were quite magical."

The two adventurers went forth into the maze of streets and lost

themselves again. Heaven knows where they went, by what ways they

wandered, as with wide-gleaming eyes, arm locked in arm, they gazed on

an enchanted scene which they knew must be London and nothing else--what

else could it be? Indeed, now and again, Ambrose thought he recognized

certain features and monuments and public places of which he had read;

but still! That wine of the Chateau was, by all mundane reckonings, of

the smallest, and one little glass of Benedictine with coffee could not

disturb the weakest head: yet was it London, after all?

What they saw was, doubtless, the common world of the streets and

squares, the gay ways and the dull, the broad, ringing, lighted roads

and the dark, echoing passages; yet they saw it all as one sees a

mystery play, through a veil. But the veil before their eyes was a

transmuting vision, and its substance was shot as if it were samite,

with wonderful and admirable golden ornaments. In the Eastern Tales,

people find themselves thus suddenly transported into an unknown magical

territory, with cities that are altogether things of marvel and

enchantment, whose walls are pure gold, lighted by the shining of

incomparable jewels; and Ambrose declared later that never till that

evening had he realized the extraordinary and absolute truth to nature

of the _Arabian Nights_. Those who were present on a certain occasion

will not soon forget his rejoinder to "a gentleman in the company" who

said that for truth to nature he went to George Eliot.

"I was speaking of men and women, Sir," was the answer, "not of lice."

The gentleman in question, who was quite an influential man--some

whisper that he was an editor--was naturally very much annoyed.

Still, Ambrose maintained his position. He would even affirm that for

crude realism the Eastern Tales were absolutely unique.

"Of course," he said, "I take realism to mean absolute and essential

truthfulness of description, as opposed to merely conventional

treatment. Zola is a realist, not--as the imbeciles suppose--because he

described--well, rather minutely--many unpleasant sights and sounds and

smells and emotions, but because he was a poet, a seer; because, in

spite of his pseudo-philosophies, his cheap materialisms, he saw the

true heart, the reality of things. Take _La Terre_; do you think it is

'realistic' because it describes minutely, and probably faithfully, the

event of a cow calving? Not in the least; the local vet. who was called

in could probably do all that as well, or better. It is 'realist'

because it goes behind all the brutalities, all the piggeries and

inhumanities, of those frightful people, and shows us the strange, mad,

transcendent passion that lay behind all those things--the wild desire

for the land--a longing that burned, that devoured, that inflamed, that

drove men to hell and death as would a passion for a goddess who might

never be attained. Remember how 'La Beauce' is personified, how the

earth swells and quickens before one, how every clod and morsel of the

soil cries for its service and its sacrifice and its victims--I call

_that_ realism.

"The _Arabian Nights_ is also profoundly realistic, though both the

subject-matter and the method of treatment--the technique--are very

different from the subject-matter and the technique of Zola. Of course,

there may be people who think that if you describe a pigsty well you are

a 'realist,' and if you describe an altar well you are 'romantic.' ... I

do not know that the mental processes of Cretins form a very interesting

subject for discussion."

One may surmise, if one will, that the sudden violence of the change was

a sufficient cause of exaltation. That detestable Lupton left behind; no

town, but a collection of stink and poison factories and slave quarters;

that more detestable school, more ridiculous than the Academy of Lagado;

that most detestable routine, games, lessons and the Doctor's

sermons--the transition was tremendous to the freedom of fabled London,

of the unknown streets and unending multitudes.

Ambrose said he hesitated to talk of that walk, lest he should be

thought an aimless liar. They strolled for hours seeing the most

wonderful things, the most wonderful people; but he declared that the

case was similar to that of the Benedictine--he could never discover

again the regions that he had perambulated. Somewhere, he said, close to

the Chateau de Chinon there must be a passage which had since been

blocked up. By it was the entrance to Fairyland.

When at last they found Little Russell Row, the black cat was awaiting

them with an expression which was pleased and pious, too; he had

devoured the greater portion of that quarter-pound of dubious butter.

Ambrose smoked black cigarettes in bed till the packet was finished.