Seldom before had I heard such a friendly and comforting inquiry.
The crowd melted away. In the quietude that followed, one young waiter who remained explained to me that my published article on the Italian quarter had caused great offense, as my reference to the ice-cream factories had been taken as an insult. I had used the phrase “dirty places” and the Italian colony desired my death. They did not get it that Sunday morning. But I was sorry to have hurt their feelings, as I had an affectionate regard for those people.
I was abominably near a nasty accident, owing to a misplaced sense of humor, when the Mohammedans in London celebrated the Feast of Ramadan, as they do each year at the Holborn Restaurant. That is one of the most unlikely places in which to meet Romance. On all the other days of the year it is given over to public banquets of Odd Fellows and Good Fellows, Masons, and Rotarians, and the business man of London when he puts on a hard white shirt, and expands his manly bosom under the influence of comradeship, and the sense of holding an honorable place among his fellow men of the same social grade as himself. Yet, in the Holborn Restaurant there is the mystery and the romance of the East, an astonishing, and almost incredible, assembly of Oriental types, on that day of Mohammedan rejoicing.
The first time I went, there were several Indian princes in richly colored turbans and gold-embroidered coats, some Persians in white robes, Turks wearing the scarlet fez, a number of Arabs, some full-blooded African negroes, and a group of Indian students. White tablecloths, used as a rule by business men at their banquets, were spread on the floor, and these were used as kneeling mats by the Mohammedans, who bowed to the East with their foreheads touching the ground and joined in a chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale, with strange wailings, as one among them read extracts from the Koran, and between whiles seemed to carry on a musical and melancholy conversation with the Faithful.
My trouble was that I wanted to laugh. There was nothing to laugh at, and much to admire in the intense faith of these Mohammedan worshipers, but there are times, probably due to nervousness, when some little demon tickles one into a desperate desire to relieve one’s emotion by mirth. It is what schoolgirls call “the giggles.” I caught the eye of an enormous negro, staring at me ferociously, and I failed to hide a fatuous smile. It was the queer nasal lamentations of those kneeling men, and this scene in the Holborn Restaurant, where I had dined the very night before with business men in boiled shirts, which stirred my sense of the ridiculous, against all my spirit of reverence and decency. I was alarmed at myself, and hurriedly left the room.
Outside the door I leaned against the wall and laughed with my handkerchief to my mouth, because of this Arabian Nights’ dream in the ridiculous commonplace of the Holborn Restaurant. As I did so, the tall negro who had been eying me appeared suddenly before me in the darkness of the passage. His eyes seemed to blaze with rage, and all the wrath of Islam was in him, and he crouched a little as though to make a spring at me. My misplaced sense of humor left me immediately! I was out of the Holborn Restaurant and on top of a ’bus bound for Oxford Circus, with astonishing rapidity.
It was not only among the foreigners of London that I found strange scenes and odd characters. The life of a journalist brings him into touch with the eccentricities of human nature, and trains him to keep his eyes open for rare birds, philosophers in back streets, odd volumes in the bookshelf.
It was by accident that I discovered a very queer fellow who revealed to me a romantic profession. I was calling on a Member of Parliament in the old Queen Anne house behind Westminster Abbey, when I saw a smart gig standing by the pavement, a well-dressed young man with a clean-shaven face, long nose, and green eyes, and, up against the wall, a sack. It was the sack which astonished me. Filled with some bulky-looking material, it was not like an ordinary sack, but was heaving in a most peculiar way. I ventured to address the young man with the gig.
“What on earth’s the matter with that sack?”