CHAPTER I
1
On the northern fringe of Soho there lies a not ill-favoured little street, about which play many grubby children and barrel-organs, and on whose pathways not even the most distinguished foreigner can look anything but a mere alien; while the veritable alien looks there, in the light of day, even more undesirable than in the shadows of the “night-club” into which, at about midnight, your passing attention might be beckoned. But you and I, in passing up that street in the failing light of evening, would be concerned with none of its alien banalities—except, of course, in so far as a hint of such may lie behind the wide and well-lit windows of the Hotel and Restaurant Mont Agel, at the far end of the street.
On the left of these spacious windows, at the head of a few steps, is the door of the restaurant, pleasantly inviting your pressure, if indeed it is not widely open to show the elegant interior; and on the right is the door of the hotel, a door of a very different air to the other, a sealed and reticent looking door, with a tiny navel through which a worldly eye may judge of your business: a door, in fact, with the secret air of having very important business of its own as a door, which indeed it has. But you and I, concerned only with our dinner—to which, say, I have invited you, being intimate with the excellence of the place—plunge up the steps to the restaurant; reading, as we go in, the small white lettering on the large windows that tell us that therein we may have Lunch, Tea, and Dinner, and, more importantly, that we can have them à toute heure; which, to our pedantic eye, may seem a rather optimistic boast to make in face of the law that—even on this 1st of May, 1921—requires all hotels, cafés, inns, restaurants and eating-houses, to be closed somewhere about ten-thirty o’clock. But I shouldn’t wonder if the fact that the boast is written in French allows us to take it more as one of those beaux gestes that are so frequent in the language of the race that has most need of them, than as a braggart defiance.
Within the restaurant you will find all quiet, orderly and clean. In extent it is only a rather spacious room of uncertain shape (though there are, of course, possibilities upstairs), but it has not the air of being confined to that one room. These four walls, it says to you, might be placed at vastly different and more elegant angles if it wished, but it does not wish. The room wears, in fact, an air of perfect satisfaction with itself, and not insolently, but wisely: not as a young man who thinks he knows everything, but as an old man who knows that it is not worth while to know any more. It is bounded on the north side, as our schoolbooks say, by the wide front windows, which are pleasantly half-curtained with vermilion gauze; on the south side, where the room tapers to its end, by a much smaller window, which is always heavily curtained and may or may not look upon the mysteries of the Mont Agel backyard; on the west by a wall decorated with mirrors, stags’ antlers, and heads of furry beasts, and broken by a small door which leads into the hotel, the famous cellars, and the usual offices; and on the east side by a handsome counter which runs along half the length of the wall, and across which the young and elegant Madame Stutz, with befitting seriousness, hands to her husband’s waiters those concoctions, collations, and confections which have won for the Mont Agel Restaurant its reputation for conservative excellence.
Wines, too, Madame Stutz there uncorks, very deftly and tenderly; during which process her husband, the polite and amiable M. Stutz, while trusting her in this as in all else, cannot resist watching her with a certain anxiety; for the wines of his cellar are the treasures of his heart, and now and then, though all too rarely, if it is a special vintage and a favoured customer, himself will uncork the wine, seeming with the gesture to broach a secret emotion. ‘Ah, you can hear the angels singing!’ sighs M. Stutz, hovering about the table. Mellow and full-blooded wines of Burgundy there are here, to stiffen a man’s heart against the shyness that defeats desire: glistening Château Yquem, too sweet and luxurious for any but the sweetest occasions, and many another: wines, let us say, for beginnings, wines for consummations, wines for tired endings—sweet, bitter-sweet, and bitter! M. Stutz lacks not one, neither Liebfraumilch nor Tokay, nor any liqueur that ever monkery devised with which to tantalise its own asceticism.
This restaurant is no place for a poor man, you understand; unless, of course, he happen to be with a rich one, as must now and then happen in even the most luckless life. The very tables are arranged with a rich sparseness; for they are placed only around the walls, each with its red-shaded lamp. The centre of the room is thus left unchallenged to a large brass contrivance from which flow ferns, palm leaves, and all manner of secondary flowers; on one side of this is a rack for papers; on its other side is a small table weighted with various and unseasonable delicacies, artichokes and asparagus, oysters and strawberries, plovers’ eggs and grouse, caviare and cantaloup. A table of miracles, indeed! About which the most miraculous thing is that there are always those who can afford to look over it and choose from it, fastidious and unperturbed.
Whether the Mont Agel was created for its patrons, or whether patrons were created for the Mont Agel, will now never be known. Let it suffice that they become each other very well, even if not quite so well as the polite and amiable M. Stutz becomes them both. As every civilisation must produce a M. Stutz, so every M. Stutz must produce a civilisation; and the atmosphere he has created in this bye-street of Soho is essentially an atmosphere of civilisation. Not, you understand, that brazen modernity which Mr. Stephen Mackenna’s almost too social eye cannot desist from discerning in glittering heaps and serial form all the way from Berkeley Street to Sloane Square (that happy and horrible land where all young men have Clubs and all young women Lovers), but an air of just sensible civilisation. Here, at the Mont Agel, you will find not the sense of property, about which so much has been written, but that much finer sense of independence, which has written so much. But you would have to know the place pretty well before you found in its customers any sense of anything whatsoever, for this Mont Agel has a singular dignity of its own, which subtly caresses its patrons and is as a mystic cloud between them and an alien eye. Stout yeomen from Wimbledon and honest burghers from Kensington Gore, gallants from Holland Park and beaux from Golders Green—one and all have some time or other been lured hither by some wanton friend; and what have they seen? Rich wines and rare food, delicious to the Battersea palate, made up the sum of that unexpected for which these worthy adventurers did timidly search; they have seen nothing for their money, nothing at all! Or was it, as an afterthought, nothing to have sat and watched the bearded and significant figure of M. Stutz’s most considerable patron—an epic figure, that!—and to have wondered whether that silent detachment betokened a great artist or a great vagabond? And was it nothing to have been made suddenly aware of the strange things men once did and suffered for women, of the quests that were followed and the lances that were broken in the days when there were neither suburbs nor men to live in them—was it nothing to be reminded of all this, by the vivid entrance of those tawny-haired women of almost barbaric fairness, whose faces the men of Putney recognised from the illustrated papers with a thrill of disapproval? Those young women of patrician and careless intelligence, whom it is the pet mistake of bishops, diarists, press-photographers, and Americans, to take as representing the “state” of modern society (whereas, God knows, they represent nothing but themselves, and that too rarely), and who, by some law of sympathy, have found refuge at this Mont Agel from their tedious parentage or tiresome duties roundabout, say, Grosvenor Square. One especially of these the men of Notting Hill will often call to mind, she will arise before their eyes as a rebuke to their passionless lives, as the phantom of the desire that has never become tangible, as the symbol of the life that has never been lived—one, alas, who now knows the Mont Agel no more! And they will be faintly shocked yet strangely stirred, after the manner of honest men, by the cruel indifference of this lady’s look and the casual arrogance of her poise, murmuring among themselves that the Lady Lois—for it was she—is a bit above herself, and insinuating against her thus and thus, after the manner of honest but common men.... And on many nights will come the toughs and roughs and bravoes of the town, to press their ill-favoured noses against the windows of the Mont Agel and watch the leading beauties toying with their food and their poets.
And through and about this atmosphere of his creation moves always the polite and amiable M. Stutz: thoughtful here, smiling there, always and implacably encouraging. No fool ever said a wise thing but that M. Stutz did not quickly commend it, no wise man ever said a foolish thing but that M. Stutz did not gently condone it. He is always about your table, not, you understand, as the servant of his restaurant, but as the director of its amenities. His interests are wide, his dignity not stiff, his formality pleasing, his familiarity appropriate; so that when, with a gesture, he tells you that he is “only a little restaurateur” you will take leave to disbelieve him, vowing that never was a restaurateur so imperially conceived, nor a gentleman so politely informed.... Thus, knowing and appreciating him, it were an offence in you to be surprised at those very rare occasions when M. Stutz, having been prevailed upon to accept a guest’s hospitality a little too freely, has betrayed ever so little of that human dross which his patrons have so often displayed before him.