A swift journey of a thousand yards in this enchanted vehicle along slushy and dangerous pavements into the West End, that magic region and golden home of the marvelous, saw the bewildered young man and his companion, a veritable prince who had stepped out of some fairy romance, deposited before the portals of a palace raised by a wizard in the centre of the streets of London. A master-stroke of malice had placed this temple of choice and rarity in the midst of acres of disease, penury, and polluted air. The faces of the ghostly denizens of these regions broke through the shadows with dumb malevolence as the solicitor and the advocate leaped to the portico. Hardly had they reached it when they were assailed by light and color, glittering liveries, gorgeous women. A stealthy and perfumed warmth had even invaded the outer atmosphere. The starving man opened his lips and nostrils, and flung wide all the doors of the senses in order to drink the sheen and scents, the hues and odors. Like a poet of the Latin races he sought to feed upon animal sensations. Here in these bright saloons was the reverse of the medal, of which in his garret that evening he had dreamed. By no more than the wave of a wand he had been transported into the plaisances of success.
As he entered this domain he was enchanted with everything,—the tread of the carpets, the hang of the curtains, the clothes of the people, the sounds of the music, the mien of the waiters. Ali Baba did not illicitly enter the Cave of the Forty Robbers with a more profound bewilderment, a sharper curiosity.
Northcote followed his companion into one of the smaller and quieter but not the less gilded and luxurious rooms. Mr. Whitcomb, who even in his own person did not disdain the panoply of fashion, had the unconquerable nonchalance of bearing which is the first credential to the public respect.
“I want Jools,” he said to the first waiter he met.
The waiter bowed low and said ingratiatingly, “Yes, sare.” He darted away in quest of that personage without an attempt to maintain the few rags of dignity that attend his calling. There was, indeed, a strain of the magician in this wonderful Mr. Whitcomb. It would not have occurred to Northcote to use the formula “I want Jools,” any more than it did to Ali Baba to cry “Open Sesame!” at the portals of the cave of the Forty Robbers.
Jools was the head waiter, a man of the first distinction, with a small imperial, the envy and the proud despair of all the compatriots who shared his exile in an alien country. It had the choice perfection which art is sometimes able to superimpose upon nature. Jools was of slight, even mean, physique, but he had the ease of bearing which comes of having been somebody for several generations. He held the key to the finest cellar in London, as his father before him had held the key to the finest cellar of Paris, and his grandfather of that of Vienna. Jools was an aristocrat of aristocrats, and one versed in the ways of his order would almost have divined it from the amiable humility with which he came forward to receive one of other clay.
“How do, Jools?” said Northcote’s companion, with his inimitable gift of manner. “Nasty night. Let us have a quart of your Château Margaux. What was that you gave me before?”
Jools screwed up his furtive brown eyes in deep contemplation. “Et would be a seventy-one, sare,” he said, rubbing softly a forefinger along his chin.
“I don’t know what it was,” said Mr. Whitcomb, royally, “and I don’t care, so long as it is the best you have in the place.”
An air of magnificence which prosperity had conferred upon the solicitor touched a chord in the proud soul of Jools.
“I haf a seventy-three, sare,” said this aristocrat, with a not too ductile absence of condescension, which he reserved for the society of his equals.
“That sounds all right,” said the solicitor. “We still number you among the few eminent Christians we have in London at the present time.”
Jools bowed and smiled softly, but an expression of sorrow was seen to overspread his mat complexion.
“Ef I had known before, sare, I would haf had it decanted.”
“We must all abase ourselves before the despotism of necessity,” said the solicitor’s hollow-eyed companion, who was already under the stimulus of an intense anticipation. “She has reverence for nothing. Even your Château Margaux ’73, which no doubt is divine, must forego the rights and trappings of its royalty.”
“You must forgive him, Jools,” said the solicitor, enjoying the effect upon the waiter of these deep tones. “He is talking prose, although, unlike your immortal compatriot, I am afraid he knows it.”
Jools summoned one of another mould to receive the baser order of a thick soup and a cut from the saddle, while he himself, beaming with pleasure and shrugging his shoulders furiously, went forth accompanied by an awe-stricken satellite personally to select one of those royal wines, which lent a touch of romantic grace to the exile of this artist in a foreign country.
Seated on cushions in the cosiest of all imaginable corners, with spotless lawn and bright silver before him, the starving man enveloped his nostrils in the delicious fumes that arose from his plate. These aromatic vapors seemed to pervade his being like some intoxicating hashish, or a pungent but subtle Arabian tobacco. He toyed with the pepper and salt, and crumbled his bread with a devouring eagerness, which he kept in check sufficiently to refuse at first to swallow a spoonful of the magic food, in order that he might obtain this sense of inebriation to the full. His companion, whose perfectly normal and healthy hunger permitted no such refinements as these, had already tasted and enjoyed.
“Excellent soup,” he said. “It’s got quite a bouquet to it. I’m almost glad I missed my dinner. One of these days I shall do it again.”
The satisfaction which in these circumstances consumes the average sensual person grew so acute, that by the time he had swallowed half of his plateful, he cried out to the nearest waiter: “Hi! you, Alphonse—have the goodness to tell the chef to step this way, will you?”
Northcote placed the first spoonful on his tongue, and indescribable pangs seemed to mount to his brain. A fierce desire overpowered him. He devoured another spoonful, and then another. Suddenly he was overcome by a strange fury of greed. His plate was empty, and his palate had lost its original fineness, before he was able to impose a check upon his passion.
Great, however, as his expedition had been in its later stages, it had scarcely surpassed that of Mr. Whitcomb, who from the first had been devouring steadily. No sooner had that gentleman eaten his final mouthful than he ordered both plates to be replenished.
At this moment, by one of those significant coöperations of events which form the basis of the drama, a large, fat, frock-coated, and pomatumed gentleman appeared, a little sheath of quiet smiles twinkling all over his person, as though the playful god of love was in hiding behind his ample shirt-front and slyly tickling his bosom with feathers.
“Hommage, monsieur le chef, hommage!” cried Mr. Whitcomb. “Cette consommé est délicieuse. Vous êtes un vrai ruban bleu.”
The chef emitted a loud purr of satisfaction like an unusually large Persian cat. And then by a still more exquisite coöperation of events than that which had already preceded this incident, who should appear but Jools, behind whom his attendant satellite was mincing with a warmed decanter of wine.
“Two more glasses, Jools, if you please,” said the solicitor. “Monsieur le chef and your worthy self will honor us, I hope. The first product of your country will not prove unworthy of two of its most distinguished sons.”
A look of rapture sprang to the proud eyes of Jools, and he measured four glasses of wine with an agitation that was more dignified than perfect composure.
“To l’Entente Cordiale, messieurs,” said Mr. Whitcomb, raising his glass.
“L’Entente Cordiale!” chimed the others.
“It is part of my religion,” said Mr. Whitcomb, “never to encounter the artistic temperament without rendering my homage. If we had only a trace of it in this country to fuse and rarefy our other manifold gifts and blessings, I believe we should become the most perfect nation upon the earth.”
“Is it not, sir, the absence of it that makes you English so perfect?” said the chef, who had all the alert intelligence of his race.
“That is not a thrust, monsieur?”
“Ah, no. As a citizen of the world I make it my duty never to wound the English. I respect your country; there are seasons when I adore it.”
“Ees it not the land of justice, order, and liberty?” said Jools.
“Justice we have for those who can afford to pay for it,” said the solicitor; “that is to say, the poor man is quite unable to purchase it, and even the rich finds it costs a great deal of money. Order we have; it is the birthright of us all—an adumbration of our exaggerated reverence for mud, and stones, and bricks, and mortar. Liberty, Jools, I regret to say, we have not. We are all base slaves—”
“Of the External,” said Northcote, with a lustre in his eyes that the wine had kindled. “There is no slave like a Saxon. In his scheme of sense the eye takes precedence. Even his religion is Money.”
“Ah, no,” said the chef, with much amiability, “you English have no avarice like we have in my native Normandy.”
“An Englishman’s avarice is not of the heart, but of the spirit,” said Northcote, with the melancholy calmness of one who knows everything.
“You haf your Shakespeare, your Milton,” said Jools.
“I think sometimes we could afford to exchange them both for your Honoré Balzac,” said Northcote.
“You would be unwise to do so,” said the chef. “Your Shakespeare is among the first order of mankind. He is greater than Molière; my faith! he is as great as Napoleon.”
“Perhaps you are right, but your Honoré Balzac showed the bourgeoisie its every form and feature.”
“Truly,” said the chef, with a sly laugh; “but you have ceased to be bourgeois in your England nowadays.”
“Since when, sir?” said the young advocate, with a flame in his eyes. “Since we have learned the trick of calling our mean ambitions by high-sounding names?”
The solicitor filled up the glasses of Northcote and the chef.
“You speak well, my friends,” he said, with his richest chuckle; “although myself being a middle-class Englishman, I am sorry to say your discourse is over my head. But if it is to be my privilege to maintain the talk upon this extremely high level, it will cost me, Jools—”
“It will cost him, Jools,” interrupted Northcote, with a truculent glance at the waiter.
“It will cost me, Jools,” said the solicitor, with an imperturbable smile, “an extra quart at least of your Château Margaux.”
At the moment this order fell on deaf ears, for the lips of Jools were trembling with speech like those of Socrates.
“We will give you our Honoré de Balzac, sare,” he said, with a heavy sigh, “ef you will part wiz your Shikspeare.”
“Also our Voltaire,” said the chef, with a leer at his melancholy compatriot, “if they will part with their Shakespeare.”
“Your Honoré Balzac is only just coming into his own,” said Northcote, with immense solemnity.
“That is to say, sir,” said the chef, “a reputation must be established at least a hundred years in the arts before the world can be decorated with the radiance that proceeds from the enormous fire it holds in its bowels.”
“True, monsieur,” said Northcote. “It is like a new-born planet. It has to be allowed to cool a little before it can assume a shape, and the wonderful vegetation begins to appear upon it. It cannot be approached at first; it is a mere ball of fire in the heavens, without form and without meaning to the human eyes.”
“Or it ees like a young wine, sare; it must be allowed time to mature,” said Jools.
“It is the worst feature, Jools,” said the solicitor, “of this claret of yours, that it always unlocks the door for these pleasantries. And this British skull of mine is so packed with business, that with our shopkeeping instinct of transacting a little of it whenever and wherever we can, before we fall upon the latest theories in regard to the composition of matter, with every reluctance, I shall ask you and your distinguished compatriot to withdraw for the space of one hour.”
“Personally,” said Northcote, “I believe the universe is not made up of matter at all.”
“In other words, sir,” said the chef, “matter is—”
“I ask your pardon, my friends,” said the solicitor; “but with true Britannic effrontery, this business of mine even seeks to take precedence of the mystery of the universe.”
“There is no such thing as the universe,” said Northcote, draining his glass with great decision. “The whole of it is contained within ourselves.”
“Peace, peace!” said the solicitor. “We will resume our speculations, with the permission of our good friends, in the space of one hour.”
Filled with every fraternal and complacent feeling, Jools and his distinguished compatriot bowed smilingly, and with a profound regard for the solicitor and the advocate, retired, in opposite directions, to those spheres of activity in which there was none to dispute their supremacy.