Not for Women
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!