Part 11

One evening during the month, so runs the forecast, will be devoted to John Davidson (I missed that evening); one to Modern Fairy Tales (I somehow missed that evening also); another to Fabian de Castro and "Old Gipsy Folk Lore and Dance" (Alas, alas, that I should have missed that evening, too!). But this loss of culture, so far as I personally was concerned (and other, too, I opine), was not accompanied by any physical loss; that is to say, the statement on the manifest that during the performance there would be available "suppers and every kind of refreshment" is eminently correct, and veracious almost to the point of fault. Even when the performance was not given--as seemed always to be the case--there was no cessation in the kitchen activities. Suppers there were and, what is more to the point, every kind of refreshment.

The most important item on this manifest I have saved until the last. There is in it something of the epic, of the beyond, of the trans and the super. I print it in capitals that it may the better penetrate:

NO FIXED CLOSING HOURS

Such is the unlucky star under which I was born that I have escaped at these clubs all of the artistic and cultural performances. When I have attended them no light has been thrown on the Drama, Opera, Pantomime, Vocal Music, or "such delicate Art of the past as adapts itself to the frame of an intimate stage, and more especially all such new art as in the strength of its sincerity allows simplicity." Nor has it been my luck to be present during the production of "Lysistrata," by Aristophanes, or "Bastien et Bastienne," by W. A. Mozart, or "Orpheus," by Monteverde, or "Maestro di Capella," by Pergolese, or "Timon of Athens," by Purcell. Nor have I been present when an eminent technician has rendered Florent Schmitt's "Palais Hante," or Arnold Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." All of which are booked for production or rendition. And yet I cannot feel that my money has been entirely wasted. It has bought me "every kind of refreshment," and catering by Frenchmen, and the company of lovely ladies--ladies, who, I fear, are more familiar with the works of Victoria Cross than the works of Aristophanes, and whose ears are attuned to the melodies of Theodore Moses-Tobani rather than to the diabolical intricacies of Schoenberg's piano pieces.

Let us indulge ourselves for a moment in what is known to ritualists as a responsive service, thus:

Q.--What is a Supper Club?

A.--A Supper Club is a legal technicality--a system whereby the English law is misconstrued, misapplied, controverted, disguised and outdone. Specifically, it is a combination restaurant, cafe, and dance hall, the activities in which begin at about one A.M. and continue so long as there are patrons whose expenditures warrant the orchestra being retained and the electric lights being left on. A Supper Club is usually downstairs, decorated in the cheap imitation of a grape arbour, furnished with small tables, comfortable wicker chairs, suave and sophisticated waiters, an orchestra of from six to ten pieces and a small polished floor for purposes of dancing. Supper Clubs are run to meet every size of pocketbook. There are those whose patrons do not know the titillating effects of champagne; and there are those where the management serves no other form of febrifuge. Club members naturally need no introduction to one another, with the result that such formalities are here entirely dispensed with. In the better grade Supper Clubs the ladies are not admitted unless in evening dress, while at other establishments even such sartorial formalities are not insisted upon. The object of a Supper Club is to furnish relaxation to the tired business man, profits to the management, usufructs to the police and incomes to the lady patrons. The principal activities of a Supper Club are (1) drinking; (2) dancing; (3) wooing.

There you have it. In the Astor Club (or is it the Palm Club? Or has the name been changed since spring?) one finds the higher type of nocturnal rounder. Evening clothes are obligatory for all. Champagne and expensive wines constitute the only beverages served. The orchestra is composed of very creditable musicians; and the lady patrons, chosen by the management by standards of pulchritude rather than of social standing, are attestations to the good taste of the corpulent and amiable Signor Bolis, owner and director. The men whose money pours into the Signor's coffers are obviously drawn from the better class of English society--clean-cut, clean-shaven youths; slick and pompous army officers; prosperous-looking middle-aged men who, even at a supper club, drop but little of their genteel dignity. On my numerous visits to this club I failed to find one member who did not have about him in a marked degree an atmosphere of deportmental distinction. Even during those final mellow hours, when the dawn was sifting through the cracks of the window above the stairs, there was little or none of that loud-mouthed boisterousness which follows on the heels of alcoholic imbibitions in America. Surfacely the Astor Club is an orderly and decorous institution, and so fastidious were the casual "good evenings" between the men and women that only the initiated would have guessed that ere that meeting they had been strangers. Even under the protection of membership and the police, the Englishman does not know how to laugh. He is decorous and stilted during the basest of intriguing.

I had become a member of the Astor Club after as much red tape, investigation and scrutiny as would have been exerted by a board of the most exclusive social club. I had signed my full name, my address and business, beneath which had been appended the names of two of my sponsors. I had had a blue seal pinned beneath my coat lapel and an engraved card sewn in my chemise. After which precautions and rigmarole I was admitted each evening by the gorgeous St. Peter in red zouave breeches and drum major's jacket who guarded the outer portal.

Have I given the impression that, once inside, I assumed virtues which ill became me; that I sat apart and watched with critical eyes the merriment around me? Then let the impression be forever blasted. I am not a virtuous man according to theological standards. I have been a hardened sinner since birth. I gamble. Beer is my favourite drink. It has been flatteringly whispered into my ear that I dance beautifully. I read Cellini and Rabelais and Boccaccio with unfeigned delight. I am enchanted by the music of Charpentier and Wolf-Ferrari. I smoke strong cigars. And I do not flee at the sight of beautiful women. In short, I am a man of sin. Born in iniquity (according to the moral fathers) I have never been regenerated. Therefore let me admit that the spirit of the vice crusader was not mine as a member of the Astor Club. I spent many a delightful half-hour chatting with Heloise Dessault, formerly at Fouquet's in Champs Elysees; with Mizzi Schwarz, one-time frequenter of the Cafe de l'Europe, in Vienna; with Hedwig Zinkeisen, of Berlin's Palais de Danse....

Here is a characteristic thing about the London supper club: the majority of the girls and--to London's shame let it be noted--the more attractive girls are all from the Continent. Without these feminine importations I doubt if the supper clubs could be maintained. At the musical galleries--a third-rate supper place run by the Musical and Theatrical Club at 30 Whitfield Street, near Tottenham Court Road, W.--I was approached and greeted by a little French girl, whose knowledge of English was almost as limited as is my knowledge of Russian.

But I was forgetting Elsie Winwood, and to forget Elsie in this 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 cafes, 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 divorcees, "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 role, 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 cafes. 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

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 Hoerselberg 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 Cafe Americain, 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 Cafe d'Harcourt, making patient pretence of sipping their Byrrh until a passing "Eh, bebe" 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 Masse, pose as modest little workgirls of the Batignolles. And so, too, in that loud, crass annex of Broadway, the Cafe 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 Cafe 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 Pantheon 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 Francois 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 Neant," 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....