A FRENCH NIGHT
OLD COMPTON STREET
Step aside from the jostle and clamour of Oxford Street into Soho Square, and you are back in the eighteenth century and as lonely as a good man in Chicago. Cross the Square, cut through Greek Street or Dean Street, and you are in—Paris, amid the clang, the gesture, and the alert nonchalance of metropolitan France.
Soho—magic syllables! For when the respectable Londoner wants to feel devilish he goes to Soho, where every street is a song. He walks through Old Compton Street, and, instinctively, he swaggers; he is abroad; he is a dog. He comes up from Surbiton or Norwood or Golder's Green, and he dines cheaply at one of the hundred little restaurants, and returns home with the air and the sensation of one who has travelled, and has peeped into places that are not ... Quite ... you know.
Soho exists only to feed the drab suburban population of London on the spree. That artificial atmosphere of Montmartre, those little touches of a false Bohemia are all cunningly spread from the brains of the restaurateurs as a net to catch the young bank clerk and the young Fabian girl. Indeed, one establishment has overplayed the game to the extent of renaming itself "The Bohemia." The result is that one dare not go there for fear of dining amid the minor clergy and the Fabians and the girl-typists. It is a little pitiable to make a tour of the cafés and watch the Londoner trying to be Bohemian. There has been, of course, for the last few years, a growing disregard, among all classes, for the heavier conventionalities; but this determined Bohemianism is a mistake. The Englishman can no more be trifling and light-hearted in the Gallic manner than a Polar bear can dance the maxixe brésilienne in the jungle. If you have ever visited those melancholy places, the night clubs and cabarets, which had a boom a year or two ago, you will appreciate the immense effort that devilry demands from him. Those places were the last word in dullness. I have been at Hampstead tea-parties which gave you a little more of the joy of living. I have watched the nuts and the girls, and what have I seen? Boredom. Heavy eyes, nodding heads, a worn-out face, saying with determination, "I WILL be gay!" Perhaps you have seen the pictures of those luxuriously upholstered and appointed establishments: music, gaiety, sparkle, fine dresses, costume songs, tangos, smart conversation and faces, and all the rest of it. But the real thing.... Imagine a lot of dishevelled girls pouring into a stuffy room after the theatre, looking already fatigued, but bracing themselves to dance and eat and drink and talk until—as I have seen them—they fall asleep over the tables, and hate the boy who brought them there.
Practically the sole purpose of the place was to fill some one's pockets, for, as the patrons were playing at being frightful dogs, the management knew that they could do as they liked with the tariff. The boys wouldn't go to night-clubs if they were not spendthrifts. Result: whisky-and-soda, seven-and-sixpence; cup of coffee, half a crown. And nobody ever had the pluck to ask for change out of a sovereign.
Now, I love my Cockneys, heart and soul. And, just because I love them so much, I do wish to goodness they wouldn't be Bohemian; I do wish to goodness they would keep out of Soho cafés. They only come in quest of a Bohemianism which isn't there. They can get much better food at home, or they can afford to get a really good meal at an English hotel. I wish they would leave Soho alone for the people like myself who feed there because it is cheap, and because the waiters will give us credit.
"Garcong," cried the diner whose food was underdone, "these sausages ne sont pas fait!"