It turned out to be a confectioner's. The name was over the door. It was the third name on our list. The shop was still open.
“We'll have some tea here,” said my wife.
It seemed a good idea. They gave us very good tea with some quite delicious cream buns. We stayed there half-an-hour.
“Do we leave cards, or pay the bill?” I asked my wife.
“Well, if the former,” explained my wife, “we shall have to ask them to dinner.”
There is a vein of snobbery in most of us. I decided to pay the bill.
The late King Leopold was the most unpopular man in Brussels when we were there. It was the time when the Congo horrors were coming to light. One hopes, for the credit of the Belgians, this may have had something to do with it. The people would rush to the windows, when his carriage came in sight, and hastily draw down the blinds. In the streets, he was generally followed by a hooting crowd. His brother, the Vicomte de Flandres, was much liked. A quaint old gentleman. He would promenade the Avenue Louise, and talk to anyone he met: for preference anyone English. Waterloo is a pleasant bicycle ride from Brussels; through the Forêt de Soignes, where little old Thomas à Kempis once walked and thought. It was always good fun to take an Englishman there, and get a Belgian guide I knew, an old Sergeant, to come with us and explain to us the battle. We would be shown the Belgian Lion, on a pyramid, proudly overlooking the field; and would learn how on the 18th of June, 1815, the French were there defeated by the Belgian army, assisted by the Germans, and some English.
We tried to winter once in Lausanne. But Swiss town life holds few attractions. We had a villa at the top of the hill. The view was magnificent. But of an evening one yearns rather for the café and the little theatre. Oswald Crawford and his wife were staying at the Beau Rivage. It was there that he invented Auction Bridge. I used to go down and play with him. He was tired of the old game, and was working out this new idea with the help of some French officers. I took a dislike to invalids that winter. The Beau Rivage was given over to them. There were men and women who would take seven different medicines with their dinner, and then sit nipping all the evening. Young girls would lure you into a corner, and tell you all their kidney troubles; and in the middle of a game your partner would break off to give an imitation of the sort of spasms that had happened to him in the night. It was difficult at times to remember what were trumps.
It gave me a good conceit of myself, living abroad. I found I was everywhere well known and—to use the language of the early Victorian novel—esteemed and respected. I cocked my head and forgot the abuse still, at that time, being poured out upon me by the English literary journals. If it be true that the opinion of the foreigner is the verdict of posterity, said I to myself, I may come to be quite a swell dead author.
Speaking of my then contemporaries, Phillpotts I found also well read, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Zangwill was known everywhere in literary circles. Barrie, to my surprise, was almost unknown. I was speaking of him once at a party in Russia. “Do you mean Mr. Pain?” asked one of the guests. Shaw had not yet got there. Wells was popular in France, and Oscar Wilde was famous. Kipling was known, but was discussed rather as a politician than a poet. Stevenson was read and Rider Haggard. But of the really great—according to Fleet Street—one never heard.