Women, more readily than men, respond to the stratifications of restaurants, because they are more adaptable. Their very clothes show it; women are like cats, they have no bones, and easily suit themselves to bell-mouthed skirt or hobble. The female form is infinitely squashable and extensible; any fashion can transform it, and if a woman has the wit to shun the becoming, she can always be in the fashion if she dares. If she fails, it is because she does not dare to underline her deficiency. If I were a woman and extraordinarily tall, I should dress myself in vertical stripes; if I were very short and very stout, I should insert the hoops of barrels under my skirt; I should be hideous, but I should be It, for the essence of true fashion is extremism. I said fashion, not elegance; that is quite another story, but then, to be elegant you must be born as the greyhound, and if you strive to elegance you are more likely to resemble the mouse. Fashion is much easier.
SHOPPING
Not only in her clothes, but in herself, does the metropolitan girl define her city. She is always the creature of the day, who heavily overlays the creature of all time. In soups and stews she has little part, for a woman is a poor partner at the table. She eats and drinks, as a rule, without much science or much intentness; she eats too little, she bolts; she does not realise that she is doing something important and artistic. Oh, it is not that she is lifted high above material desires, for, indeed, certain articles of food, such as chocolates, certain drinks, such as liqueurs, make her accept the society of the dullest and the most dreary, but such trifles are merely the preludes and the coronals of the true soup and the true stew. Still, she is the decoration and the charm of the table; when Mr Lauzerte said that where there are no women there is no true elegance, he was speaking the truth. In matters of food they care very little what it is and very much what it looks. Also, because few of them neglect an advantage and prove the old adage that what woman most desires is mastery over man, they never ignore what they look upon as a gross means of seduction. It was a woman, I think, who told another to ‘feed the brute.’ What an illusion! If you have to deal with a brute, indeed, you can keep him quiet by feeding him, just as you mollify Cerberus with a sop, but to keep a man quiet ... how unnecessary in the early days of marriage! and how disastrous after! It is unconsciously, I think, that women strive to please the palate of men, that is they are unconscious of the effects of such a course. Unless they are very unhappy they do not want to soothe the sullen creature; they wish to produce in him a light and airy grace, a not very promising ambition. For some men, who are in possession of all their senses, will feel true gratitude, which is akin to love, to the one who knows how so to flatter them. One of them said to me not long ago: ‘It makes the day easier to feel that I shall go back to-night to a perfectly cooked meal, and a perfectly dressed wife.’ I am not quite sure whether he said that, or whether it was ‘a perfectly dressed wife, and a perfectly cooked meal,’ but anyhow, it does not matter, for in that man’s mind the two delights had grown mixed. That is what every woman knows, and perhaps she is wise as well as humble in hoping to mingle with the potage velouté some of the old philtres of love.
VI
IN SEARCH OF VICE
CHAPTER VI
IN SEARCH OF VICE
When I first came to London I was twenty years old; I came from Paris, and, being twenty, felt sure that there remained no sensations for me to experience, no realms of passion to explore. I felt that I had lived—well, lived; that I came from Babylon city, and was now entering a Puritanic world, a place of dignities and parliaments, of clergymen with white bibs, of ladies with prominent teeth and elastic-sided boots who said ‘shocking’; I also felt that I was entering the country of le sport, le flirt; I had also been told that the English were a strange people, adepts in every depravity, of which the secret drinking of methylated spirits was a minor example. I admired them thoroughly, as I admired Westminster Abbey. Briefly, a land of virtue. This state of mind was fairly well kept up for the first year, because it rained nearly all the time, and there is nothing like a rainy summer to raise the moral tone of the streets. I was interested by the life I saw round me, bored by the life I led on thirty-eight shillings a week; I could afford little in the way of theatres; whisky made me sick; so did Irish stew and suet pudding; I did not see as much of my fellows as I wanted, because, in those days, I often had to choose between a clean shirt in the evening, and a cut from the joint at lunch. Also, my landlady washed the collie in the bath, which annoyed me.
It is not surprising, then, that I did not at once enter London’s ‘gilded haunts of vice.’ It took me a little time to discover them, and, to be truthful, I am still looking for them. Indeed, I can say that I have employed a considerable portion of the last eighteen years in search of vice, and it may be that I must blame a Parisian education for my disappointment. I thought I had found vice the first time I saw a couple publicly embrace, opposite Marble Arch, never having seen anything so indecent in a Continental city; but this was an illusion, just like another illusion when, for the first time, I heard a speaker in the Park state his true opinion of the Royal Family: I thought this was the beginning of the revolution, and could not understand why the police looked so bored. I do now, for I suppose that meetings have been going on for several generations. But when it came to vice, when I explained to my new and fast English friends that I was looking for vice, when they took me to the old Empire Promenade, when they bade me be shocked at the condition of Regent Street, between Vigo Street and Piccadilly Circus, when they took me to Earl’s Court to ogle and to drink milk-coffee, when they drew my attention to the chorus girls performing what they called orgies in the punts near Maidenhead, a certain melancholy crept over me. English vice was overrated. Indeed, to this day, I am sure that there is very little vice in England, that the Londoner, particularly, is a flighty creature, who kills virtue with his mouth, who tells unpleasant stories about the deeds of other people, and paints the town red with the assistance of his fancy socks. They are cowards, really, and most of them, when they slip at all, seem to slip ignobly into the rare satisfaction of a purely animal instinct; also, to do this, they need drink. Nero would not have understood them at all.
Since those days much time has passed, and now and then, here and there, I have come a little closer to those strange and secret depravities of which, according to the Continent, London holds the monopoly. The newspapers are helpful; for they have occasional fits of virtue and begin to expose something, thus, at last, giving it an advertisement; or the police intervene and shut up a restaurant, thus focusing all eyes upon its proprietor and making him so famous that when he opens another restaurant next door he is assured of custom. And so I have known dreadful places, manicure shops where hands were held longer than filing demands, tea shops where the depraved waitresses call you ‘old dear,’ and demonstrate that in a chair when there is room for one there is room for two. It is perfectly appalling. I have been to the old Continental and to the old Globe Restaurant to spend considerable sums on not very satisfactory meals, to see a number of ladies manifest a little more clearly than is the custom the liberalism of their mind. I don’t know why it strikes the Puritan faction as so terrible that the women whom they call lost should congregate in a particular place; it cannot be because thus they can be found, for the Puritans must know that there is no street in central London, no tube, no omnibus, which does not hold as much temptation and as much opportunity as a small room in a quiet restaurant. I suppose it is the openness of the thing shocks them, the fact that they cannot cover it up and, therefore, pretend it is not there. But if that is vice, if that is ‘the smirch on our fair escutcheon,’ then, indeed, must English prudery be easily offended. It must be a sensitive prudery, for it cried out against night-clubs, against the Cave of the Golden Calf, where a few people did drink too much, against the excessive dancing at poor Ciro’s, which for a time fell among Y.M.C.A.’s.