|
Arnold Bennett - Your United States
menials who despise it, menials who slang one another openly in the patois of Geneva, Luxembourg, or
Naples. A singular survival, this restaurant!... Moreover, the man was justified in his triumphant air. Not
only had he most intelligently brought me a fresh ice, but he had brought the particular kind of rusk for
which I had asked. There were over thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I had wanted
something that was not on it: a peculiar rusk, a rusk recondite and unheard of by my fellow-diners. The
man had hopefully said that he "would see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I felicitated him,
as an equal. And then, having consumed the ice and the fruits of the hot-house, I arose and followed in
the path of the lion-breasted woman, and arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of sixteen
who did nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight (so he said) but ascend and descend in that elevator. By
the discipline of this inspiring and jocund task he was being prepared for manhood and the greater
world!... And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys, and even men. Civilization is not so
simple as it may seem to the passionate reformer and lover of humanity.
Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I formed one of a group of men, most of whom had
acquired fame, and had the slight agreeable self-consciousness that fame gives; and I listened, against a
background of the ever-insistent music, to one of those endless and multifarious reminiscent
conversations that are heard only in such places. The companion on my right would tell how he had
inhabited a house in Siam, next to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too poor to be
burned were laid out, after surgical preliminaries, to be devoured by vultures, and how the vultures, when
gorged, would flap to the roof of his house and sit there in contemplation. And the companion on my left
would tell how, when he was unfamous and on his beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack
of influenza, and on the day when a chance offered itself would get up and don his only suit - a glorious
one - and, fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him look older, would go forth to confront the
chance. And then the talk might be interrupted in order to consult the morning paper, and so settle a
dispute about the exact price of Union Pacifics. And then an Italian engineer would tell about sport in the
woods of Maine, a perfect menagerie of wild animals where it was advisable to use a revolver lest the
excessive noise of a fowling-piece should disturb the entire forest, and how once he had shot seven times
at an imperturbable partridge showing its head over a tree, and missed seven times, and how the partridge
had at last flown off, with a flicker of plumage that almost said aloud, "Well, I really can't wait any
longer!" And then might follow a simply tremendous discussion about the digestibility of
buckwheat-cakes.
And then the conversation of every group in the lounge would be stopped by the entry of a page bearing
a telegram and calling out in the voice of destiny the name of him to whom the telegram was addressed.
And then another companion would relate in intricate detail a recent excursion into Yucatan, speaking
negligently - as though it were a trifle - of the extraordinary beauty of the women of Yucatan, and in the
end making quite plain his conviction that no other women were as beautiful as the women of Yucatan.
And then the inevitable Mona Lisa would get onto the carpet, and one heard, apropos, of the theft of
Adam mantelpieces from Russell Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting with damp in
neglected Venetian churches, and so on and so on, until one had the melancholy illusion that the whole
art world was going or gone to destruction. But this subject did not really hold us, for the reason that,
beneath a blase exterior, we were all secretly preoccupied by the beauty of the women of Yucatan and
wondering whether we should ever get to Yucatan.... And then, looking by accident away, I saw the dim,
provocative faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen caps peering from without through the dark double
windows of the lounge. And I was glad when somebody suggested that it was time to take a turn. And
outside, in the strong wind, abaft the four funnels of the Lusitania, a star seemed to be dancing
|
