The Haunted Restaurant

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Title:     The Haunted Restaurant
Author: Richard Le Gallienne [More Titles by Le Gallienne]

Were one to tell the proprietors of the very prosperous and flamboyant restaurant of which I am thinking that it is haunted--yea, that ghosts sit at its well appointed tables, and lost voices laugh and wail and sing low to themselves through its halls--they would probably take one for a lunatic--a servant of the moon.

Certainly, to all appearance, few places would seem less to suggest the word "haunted" than that restaurant, as one comes upon it, in one of the busiest of London thoroughfares, spreading as it does for blocks around, like a conflagration, the festive glare of its electrically emblazoned facade. Yet no ruined mansion, with the moon shining in through its shattered roof, the owl nesting in its banqueting hall, and the snake gliding through its bed chambers, was ever more peopled with phantoms than this radiant palace of prandial gaiety, apparently filled with the festive murmur of happy diners, the jocund strains of its vigorous orchestra, the subdued clash of knives and forks and delicate dishes, the rustle of women's gowns and the fairy music of women's voices. For me its portico, flaming like a vortex of dizzy engulfing light, upon which, as upon a swift current, gay men and women, alighting from motor and hansom, are swept inward to glittering tables of snow-white napery, fair with flowers--for me the mouth of the grave is not less dread, and the walls of a sepulchre are not so painted with dead faces or so inscribed with elegiac memories. I could spend a night in Pere-la-Chaise, and still be less aware of the presence of the dead than I was a short time ago, when, greatly daring, I crossed with a shudder that once so familiar threshold.

It was twelve years since I had been in London, so I felt no little of a ghost myself, and I knew too well that it would be vain to look for the old faces. Yes, gone was the huge good-natured commissionaire, who so often in the past, on my arrival in company with some human flower, had flung open the apron of our cab with such reverential alacrity, and on our departure had so gently tucked in the petals of her skirts, smiling the while a respectfully knowing benediction on the prospective continuance of our evening's adventure. Another stood in his place, and watched my lonely arrival with careless indifference. Glancing through the window of the treasurer's office to the right of the hall, I could see that an unfamiliar figure sat at the desk, where in the past so many a cheque had been cashed for me with eager _bonhomie_. Now I reflected that considerable identification would be necessary for that once light-hearted transaction. It is true that I was welcomed with courtesy by a bowing majordomo, but alas, my welcome was that of a stranger; and when I mounted the ornate, marble-walled staircase leading to the gallery where I had always preferred to sit, I realized that my hat and cane must pass into alien keeping, and that no waiter's face would light up as he saw me threading my way to the sacred table, withdrawn in a nook of the balcony, where one could see and hear all, participate in the general human stir and atmosphere, and yet remain apart.

Ah! no; for the friendly Cockney that once greeted me with an enfolding paternal kindness was substituted broken English of a less companionable accent. A polite young Greek it was who stood waiting respectfully for my order, knowing nothing of all it meant for me--_me_--to be seated at that table again--whereas, had he been one of half a dozen of the waiters of yester-year, he would have known almost as much as I of the "secret memoirs" of that historic table.

In ordering my meal I made no attempt at sentiment, for my mood went far deeper than sentiment. Indeed, though, every second of the time, I was living so vividly, so cruelly, in the past, I made one heartbroken acknowledgment of the present by beginning with the anachronism of a dry Martini cocktail, which, twelve years previous, was unknown and unattainable in that haunted gallery. That cocktail was a sort of desperate epitaph. It meant that I was alone--alone with my ghosts. Yet it had a certain resurrecting influence, and as I sat there proceeding dreamily with my meal, one face and another would flash before me, and memory after memory re-enact itself in the theatre of my fancy. So much in my actual surroundings brought back the past with an aching distinctness--particularly the entrance of two charming young people, making rainbows all about them, as, ushered by a smiling waiter, who was evidently no stranger to their felicity, they seated themselves at a neighbouring table with a happy sigh, and neglected the menu for a moment or two while they gazed, rapt and lost, into each other's eyes. How well I knew it all; how easily I could have taken the young man's place, and played the part for which this evening he was so fortunately cast! As I looked at them, I instinctively summoned to my side the radiant shade of Aurea, for indeed she had seemed made of gold--gold and water lilies. And, as of old, when I had called to her, she came swiftly with a luxurious rustle of fragrant skirts, like the sound of the west wind among the summer trees, or the swish and sway of the foam about the feet of Aphrodite. There she sat facing me once more, "a feasting presence made of light"--her hair like a golden wheat sheaf, her eyes like blue flowers amid the wheat, and her bosom, by no means parsimoniously concealed, literally suggesting that the loveliness of all the water lilies in the world was amassed there within her corset as in some precious casket. Ours was not one of the great tragic loves, but I know I shall think of Aurea's bosom on my death-bed. At her coming I had ordered champagne--we always drank champagne together, because, as we said, it matched so well with her hair--champagne of a no longer fashionable brand. The waiter seemed a little surprised to hear it asked for, but it had been the only _chic_ brand in 19--.

"Look at those two yonder," I said presently, after we had drunk to each other, smiling long into each other's eyes over the brims of our glasses. "You and I were once as they. It is their first wonderful dinner together. Watch them--the poor darlings; it is enough to break one's heart."

"Do you remember ours?" asked Aurea quite needlessly.

"I wonder what else I was thinking of--dear idiot!" said I, with tender elegance, as in the old days.

As I said before, Aurea and I had not been tragic in our love. It was more a matter of life--than death; warm, pagan, light-hearted life. Ours was perhaps that most satisfactory of relationships between men and women, which contrives to enjoy the happiness, the fun, even the ecstasy, of loving, while evading its heartache. It was, I suppose, what one would call a healthy physical enchantment, with lots of tenderness and kindness in it, but no possibility of hurt to each other. There was nothing Aurea would not have done for me, or I for Aurea, except--marry each other; and, as a matter of fact, there were certain difficulties on both sides in the way of our doing that, difficulties, however, which I am sure neither of us regretted.

Yes, Aurea and I understood thoroughly what was going on in those young hearts, as we watched them, our eyes starry with remembrance. Who better than we should know that hush and wonder, that sense of enchanted intimacy, which belongs of all moments perhaps in the progress of a passion to that moment when two standing tiptoe on the brink of golden surrender, sit down to their first ambrosial meal together--delicious adventure!--with all the world to watch them, if it choose, and yet aloof in a magic loneliness, as of youthful divinities wrapped in a roseate cloud! Hours of divine expectancy, at once promise and fulfilment. Happy were it for you, lovers, could you thus sit forever, nor pass beyond this moment, touched by some immortalizing wand as those lovers on the Grecian Urn:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

"See," said Aurea presently, "they are getting ready to go. The waiter has brought the bill, and is looking away, suddenly lost in profound meditation. Let us see how he pays the bill. I am sure she is anxious."

"Your old test!" said I. "Do you remember?"

"Yes! And it's one that never fails," said Aurea with decision. "When a woman goes out to dinner with a man for the first time, he little knows how much is going to depend on his way of paying the bill. If, as with some men one meets, he studies it through a microscope and adds it up with anxious brow--meanwhile quite evidently forgetting your presence--how your heart sinks, sinks and hardens--but you are glad all the same, and next day you congratulate yourself on your narrow escape!"

"Was I like that?" said I.

"Did we escape?" asked Aurea. Then she added, touching my arm as with a touch of honeyed fire: "O I'm so glad! He did it delightfully--quite _en prince_. Just the right nonchalance--and perhaps, poor dear, he's as poor--"

"As we often were," I added.

And then through the corners of our eyes we saw the young lovers rise from the table, and the man enfold his treasure in her opera cloak, O so reverently, O so tenderly, as though he were wrapping up some holy flower. And O those deep eyes she gave him, half turning her head as he did so!

"That look," whispered Aurea, quoting Tennyson, "'had been a clinging kiss but for the street.'"

Then suddenly they were gone, caught up like Enoch, into heaven--some little heaven, maybe, like one that Aurea and I remember, high up under the ancient London roofs.

But, with their going, alas, Aurea had vanished too, and I was left alone with my Greek waiter, who was asking me what cheese I would prefer.

With the coming of coffee and cognac, I lit my cigar and settled down to deliberate reverie, as an opium smoker gives himself up to his dream. I savoured the bitter-sweetness of my memories; I took a strange pleasure in stimulating the ache of my heart with vividly recalled pictures of innumerable dead hours. I systematically passed from table to table all around that spacious peristyle. There was scarcely one at which I had not sat with some vanished companion in those years of ardent, irresponsible living which could never come again. Not always a woman had been the companion whose form I thus conjured out of the past, too often out of the grave; for the noble friendship of youth haunted those tables as well, with its generous starry-eyed enthusiasms and passionate loyalties. Poets of whom but their songs remain, themselves by tragic pathways descended into the hollow land, had read their verses to me there, still glittering with the dawn dew of their creation, as we sat together over the wine and talked of the only matters then--and perhaps even yet--worth talking of: love and literature. Of these but one can still be met in London streets, but all now wear crowns of varying brightness--

Where the oldest bard is as the young,
And the pipe is ever dropping honey,
And the lyre's strings are ever strung.

Dear boon fellows of life as well as literature, how often have we risen from those tables, to pursue together the not too swiftly flying petticoat, through the terrestrial firmament of shining streets, aglow with the midnight sun of pleasure, a-dazzle with eyes brighter far than the city lamps--passionate pilgrims of the morning star! Ah! we go on such quests no more--"another race hath been and other palms are won."

No, not always women--but naturally women nearly always, for it was the time of rosebuds, and we were wisely gathering them while we might--

Through the many to the one--
O so many!
Kissing all and missing none,
Loving any.

Every man who has lived a life worthy the name of living has his own private dream of fair women, the memory of whom is as a provision laid up against the lean years that must come at last, however long they may be postponed by some special grace of the gods, which is, it is good to remember, granted to some--the years when one has reluctantly to accept that the lovely game is almost, if not quite at an end, and to watch the bloom and abundance of fragrant young creatures pass us, unregarding, by. And, indeed, it may happen that a man who has won what is for him the fairest of all fair faces, and has it still by his side, may enter sometimes, without disloyalty, that secret gallery of those other fair faces that were his before hers, in whom they are all summed up and surpassed, had dawned upon his life. We shall hardly be loyal to the present if we are coldly disloyal to the past. In the lover's calendar, while there is but one Madonna, there must still be minor saints, to whom it is meet, at certain times and seasons, to offer retrospective candles--saints that, after the manner of many saints, were once such charming sinners for our sakes, that utter forgetfulness of them were an impious boorishness surely unacceptable to the most jealous of Madonnas. Public worship of them is not, of course, desirable, but occasional private celebrations are surely more than permissible--such celebrations as that "night of memory and tears" which Landor consecrated to Rose Aylmer, or that song which Thackeray consecrated to certain loves of the long ago--

Gillian's dead, God rest her bier,
How I loved her twenty years syne!
Marian's married, but I sit here,
Alone and merry at forty year,
Dipping my nose in the Gascon wine.

So I, seated in my haunted restaurant, brought the burnt offerings of several cigars, and poured out various libations to my own private Gillians and Marians, and in fancy sat and looked into Angelica's eyes at this table, and caressed Myrtle's opaled hand at that, and read Sylvia a poem I had just written for her at still another. "Whose names are five sweet symphonies," wrote Rossetti. Yes, symphonies, indeed, in the ears of memory are the names of the lightest loves that flittered butterfly-like across our path in the golden summer of our lives, each name calling up its human counterpart, with her own endearing personality distinguishing her from all other girls, her way of smiling, her way of talking, her way of being serious, all the little originalities on which she prided herself, her so solemnly held differentia of tastes and manners--all, in a word, that made you realize that you were dining with Corinna and not with Chloe. What a service of contrast each--all unwittingly, need one say--did the other, just in the same fashion as contrasting colours accentuate the special quality one of the other. To have dined last night with Amaryllis, with her Titian red hair and green eyes, her tropic languor and honey-drowsy ways, was to feel all the keener zest in the presence of Callithoe on the following evening, with her delicate soul-lit face, and eager responsiveness of look and gesture--_blonde cendre_, and _fausse maigre_--a being one of the hot noon, the other a creature of the starlight. But I disclaim the sultanesque savour of thus writing of these dear bearers of symphonic names. To talk of them as flowers and fruit, as colour and perfume, as ivory and velvet, is to seem to forget the best of them, and the best part of loving them and being loved again; for that consisted in their comradeship, their enchanted comradeship, the sense of shared adventure, the snatching of a fearful joy together. For a little while we had escaped from the drab and songless world, and, cost what it might, we were determined to take possession, for a while at least, of that paradise which sprang into existence at the moment when "male and female created He them." Such divine foolishness, let discretion warn, or morality frown, or society play the censorious hypocrite, "were wisdom in the scorn of consequence."

"Ah, then," says every man to himself of such hours, as I said to myself in my haunted restaurant--"ah, then came in the sweet o' the year."

But lovely and pleasant as were the memories over which I thus sat musing, there was one face immeasurably beyond all others that I had come there hoping and yet fearing to meet again, hers of whom for years that seem past counting all the awe and wonder and loveliness of the world have seemed but the metaphor. Endless years ago she and I had sat at this table where I was now sitting and had risen from it with breaking hearts, never to see each other's face, hear each other's voice again. Voluntarily, for another's sake, we were breaking our hearts, renouncing each other, putting from us all the rapture and religion of our loving, dying then and there that another might live--vain sacrifice! Once and again, long silences apart, a word or two would wing its way across lands and seas and tell us both that we were still under the same sky and were still what nature had made us from the beginning--each other's. But long since that veil of darkness unpierced of my star has fallen between us, and no longer do I hear the rustle of her gown in the autumn woods, nor do the spring winds carry me the sweetness of her faithful thoughts any more. So I dreamed maybe that, after the manner of phantoms, we might meet again on the spot where we had both died--but alas, though the wraiths of lighter loving came gaily to my call, she of the starlit silence and the tragic eyes came not, though I sat long awaiting her--sat on till the tables began to be deserted, and the interregnum between dinner and after-theatre supper had arrived. No, I began to understand that she could no longer come to me: we must both wait till I could go to her.

And with this thought in my mind, I set about preparing to take my leave, but at that moment I was startled--almost superstitiously--startled by a touch on my shoulder. I was not to leave those once familiar halls without one recognition, after all. It was our old waiter of all those years ago, who, with an almost paternal gladness, was telling me how good it was to see me again, and, with consolatory mendacity, was assuring me that I had hardly changed a bit. God bless him--he will never know what good it did me to have his honest recognition. The whole world was not yet quite dead and buried, after all, nor was I quite such an unremembered ghost as I had seemed. Dear old Jim Lewis! So some of the old guard were still on deck, after all! And, I was thinking as I looked at him: "He, too, has looked upon her face. He it was who poured out our wine, that last time together." Then I had a whim. My waiter had been used to them in the old days.

"Jim," I said, "I want you to give this half-sovereign to the bandmaster and ask him to play Chopin's _Funeral March_. There are not many people in the place, so perhaps he won't mind. Tell him it's for an old friend of yours, and in memory of all the happy dinners he had here long ago."

So to the strains of that death music, which so strangely blends the piercing pathos of lost things with a springlike sense of resurrection, a spheral melody of immortal promise, I passed once more through the radiant portals of my necropolitan restaurant into the resounding thoroughfares of still living and still loving humanity.

[The end]
Richard Le Gallienne's essay: Haunted Restaurant

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