The talk was incessant, and perforce loud, for everyone joined in any topic which interested them, no matter how far down the long table it might have originated. If the young Frenchman on your right was discussing grape-growing in Champagne with the little wrinkled Spaniard, with waxed moustaches, on your left, of whom such stories were told—mon Dieu, bombs, and what not!—and their talk became wearying, what so natural as that you should join in with the fierce argument on the Fiscal Question that a member of the Upper House might be holding with the little Socialist, whose blood-thirsty policy, as exemplified by his scarlet tie, was for ever warring against his warm Irish heart; “The little Doctor,” as he is fondly called by all the habitués of the place, for he is decidedly a better, or at least a safer, physician of the body than the mind, while it was declared that the all-adored Bambina owed life itself to his care and skill.
A young Greek talked of Athens, all aglow with fervour, to an art-student, one of those completely self-sufficient girls who are so typical of Melbourne. “But why?” I heard her ask, with the curiously drawled accent—also typical, both question and accent; for the Australian likes all his or her information to be precise—with the reason thereof plainly showed, and “but why?” is their crushing response to most of our enthusiastic eulogiums on the old order of things.
They were an interesting couple from their very contrast; but soon, one’s wandering attention would float away on a new stream, piloted most likely by one of the best talkers of the place, a man who was so completely soaked in the spirit and literature, the eternal glow and romance, of the Renaissance, that it seemed always as if Providence must have merely amused itself, in some freakish fit, by reincarnating him here in Melbourne. An atom of imagination was enough, and one was away with him, wandering through the sun-soaked street of old Florence. Gone the babel of talk and laughter, the queer, eager faces, the shabby coats, the bright eyes, and erratic locks; the kerosene-lamps and long table, with its vases of artificial flowers, all quite gone, as one paced demurely by his side, between the stately palaces and high, huddled houses. Peeped through the interstices of the iron gates into the great courtyards at the orange-trees in their stone vases, where such or such a great Prince lived, or such a lady—of a beauty, ah yes! But as to morals—well, a shrug of the shoulders told all there was to be told with propriety. Stopped at this corner, or that, where such and such a party-broil took place, or stood agaze at so-and-so, who wrote those sonnets, or so-and-so who painted so divinely. Then pressed back into a deep doorway while Lorenzo himself—Lorenzo the Magnificent—swept past, with all his gay and courtly suite, to see how the new frescoes came on, which were to make that young Michael and his great master famous throughout the entire world, or so said Lorenzo, bracketing himself and the artist urbanely together. Such a whiff of perfume, such a rustle of stiff brocaded silks, and flow of silver laughter as they passed; then, with a sudden rasping sound, which brought one back with a jerk to the world of reality, the chairs were pushed back over the boarded floors; there was a crash of notes at the piano, and someone would begin to sing. Perhaps the heart-rending words and melody of “A wearing o’ the green,” perhaps the “Marseillaise,” or just as likely “Little Mary.” The coffee was brought, the table cleared. Delicately burning his spoonful of eau-de-vie over his coffee, the Frenchman on my right would throw out some words on Arragon that set my other neighbour aflame, and a hot argument would ensue, each man speaking his own language with a wealth of expletives and abandonment of gesture. Feeling the fiery breath flame on either cheek, and catching the eye of our old hostess who, the night’s work done, had joined her guests, knitting in hand, I would nod my response. For those eyes, so human, tolerant, and wise, said as plainly as any words could, “What children those men are! what ‘blaguers!’” then draw back my chair, and place it near to hers; when we would talk, sober women’s talk—reasonable and profitable—of the cost of food under the new tariff, and how the spaghetti had been cooked in that fresh fashion at dinner. And if I asked the man to the right of that big man—the German there—for a little tarragon for the vinegar, he would surely give it, for he had a large garden, and then the Signora would present me with a bottle. And of the Bambina, what gave it that little cough—cigarette smoke! But he had breathed little else since he was born!
Someone would perhaps bang a fist down on the table, and fling the single word “separation” like a lighted torch among tinder, or the big German make bragging assertions as to the superiority of Goethe over Shakespeare. One caught the choicest morsels from that week’s Bulletin with which the art-students regaled each other, for the Bulletin is the bible of the Australian Bohemian. Or the murmur of the perennial discussion on the Armenian question, in which the big Turk ensnared all newcomers; less effective than it might have been owing to the fact that in moments of excitement he forgot all the little English that he ever had, and reverted to his mother-tongue, which no one else at table could understand. But all this was mere sound and fury, leaving our little oasis of quietude quite untouched. Then an immense man, who looked like a Portuguese, but was in reality a half-caste Chinaman, would most likely draw his chair up to mine, and join in our talk of the Bambina, with some strange lore regarding the souls of children, and that little moment when they remember all of the life they have lived before, while the old woman dropped her knitting on her knee and listened open-eyed, till he drifted off to other subjects—art and literature for the most part. He had never been out of Australasia, and yet there seemed to be no historical spot in Europe which he did not know intimately, not a half-forgotten verse that he could not finish for me, not a writer whose works he had not only read, but whose place in literature and whose influence he clearly realized. And then sometimes he would quote Chinese poetry, accompanying it with a running translation which was a delight to the ear.
One evening I remember some insolent, loud-voiced remarks on a “White Australia” were flipped down the table in his direction, but he only shrugged his great shoulders. “We shall see,” he said; “after all it is the best who win.”
It always seemed strange—I write in the past, for, though the little cosmopolitan restaurant is still in being, the old people have relinquished their share of it, and it has changed its quarters, thereby losing some of its indefinable charm; it seemed strange, I say, to come out of such an atmosphere into the wide, dreary drabness of Lonsdale Street, so nearly repellent, indeed, in its entire lack of expression or soul, that often enough we would turn aside toward Little Burke Street, to soak ourselves afresh in that “something different” towards which we are all for ever striving.
Long ago I wrote for a Melbourne paper an article on “Lilly Bulke Street”—which, with the cosmopolitan café, was the only possible hunting-ground for “something different” in the whole city—that was translated and republished in a Chinese paper, giving me a sort of fame among its denizens; so that: “You the lady that like Lilly Bulke Street?” they would often say to me, with their slow smile of sympathy; and of appreciation, too, for a little thought, a little understanding.
Lately, since the opium laws have become so stringent, the people are shy of Europeans in their shops and “fan-tan” rooms; but only a little while before I could go anywhere I liked, and did so. Into the upper rooms of the few Chinese who were married to women of their own race, to talk, and sip tea, and play with the solemn-eyed children; even into the opium dens, where men reposed sleeping off the effects of the drug with a seraphic expression; or sat puffing, fiercely and wildly anxious for the coming of the rainbow-tinted dreams, which would, for a while, shut away from them all the hard and sordid realities of life.
After dark Little Burke is bordered, save for a few Chinese chemists’ shops and eating-houses, by jealously closed doors, through which not one single crack of light penetrates.
Some have a name above the lintel or a sentence in Chinese; and though one may not remember the name or understand the sentence, one soon knows what places are worth entering, and, pushing open the door, pass in, secure in the knowledge that though one may be met with the cold inquiring stare of many narrow inscrutable eyes—and a dead silence where there has before been a babel of voices—one will encounter no incivility, no insolent look or gesture.