Part 15 (1/2)

It is a very real pirate's den, lighted only by candles. A coffin casts a shadow, and there is a regulation ”Jolly Roger,” a black flag ornamented with skull and crossbones. Grim? Surely, but even a healthy-minded child will play at gruesome and ghoulish games once in a while.

There is a Dead Man's Chest too,--and if you open it you will find a ladder leading down into mysterious depths unknown. If you are very adventurous you will climb down and b.u.mp your head against the cellar ceiling and inspect what is going to be a subterranean grotto as soon as it can be fitted up. You climb up again and sit in the dim, smoky little room and look about you. It is the most perfect pirate's den you can imagine. On the walls hang huge casks and kegs and wine bottles in their straw covers,--all the signs manual of past and future orgies. Yet the ”Pirate's Den” is ”dry”--straw-dry, brick-dry --as dry as the Sahara. If you want a ”drink” the well-mannered ”cut-throat” who serves you will give you a mighty mug of ginger ale or sarsaparilla. And if you are a real Villager and can still play at being a real pirate, you drink it without a smile, and solemnly consider it real red wine filched at the edge of the cutla.s.s from captured merchantmen on the high seas. On the big, dark centre table is carefully drawn the map of ”Treasure Island.”

The pirate who serves you (incidentally he writes poetry and helps to edit a magazine among other things) apologises for the lack of a Stevensonian parrot.

”A chap we know is going to bring one back from the South Sea Islands,” he declares seriously. ”And we are going to teach it to say, 'Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!'”

If, while you are at the ”Pirate's Den” you care to climb a rickety, but enchanted staircase outside the old building (it's pre-Revolutionary, you know) you will come to the ”Aladdin Shop”--where coffee and Oriental sweets are specialties. It is a riot of strange and beautiful colour--vivid and Eastern and utterly intoxicating. A very talented and picturesque Villager has painted every inch of it himself, including the mysterious-looking Arabian gentleman in brilliantly hued wood, who sits cross-legged luring you into the little place of magic. The wrought iron brackets on the wall are patches of vivid tints; the curtains at the windows are colour-dissonances, fascinating and bizarre. As usual there is candlelight. And, as usual, there is the same delicious spirit of seriously and whole-heartedly playing the game. While you are there you are in the East. If it isn't the East to you, you can go away--back to Philistia.

And speaking of candlelight. I went into the poets' favourite ”Will o'

the Wisp” tea shop once and found the gas-jet lighted! The young girl in charge jumped up, much embarra.s.sed, and turned it out.

”I'm so sorry!” she apologised. ”But I wanted to _see_ just a moment, and lighted it!”

I peered at her face in the ghostly candlelight. It was entirely and unmistakably earnest.

Just the same, Mrs. Browning's warning that ”colours seen by candlelight do not look the same by day” is not truly applicable to these Village shrines. Even under the searching beams of a slanting, summer afternoon sun, they are adorable. Go and see if you don't believe this.

Then take the ”Mad Hatter's.” The entrance alone is a monument to the make-believe capabilities of the Village. Scrawled on the stone wall beside the steps that lead down to the little bas.e.m.e.nt tea room, is an inscription in chalk. It looks like anything but English. But if you held a looking-gla.s.s up to it you would find that it is ”Down the Rabbit Hole” written backward! Now, if you know your ”Alice” as well as you should, you will recall delightedly her dash after the White Rabbit which brought her to Wonderland, and, incidentally, to the Mad Tea Party.

You go in to the little room where Villagers are drinking tea, and the proprietress approaches to take your order. She is a good-looking young woman dressed in a bizarre red and blue effect, not unlike one of the Queens, but she prefers to be known as the ”Dormouse”--not, however, that she shows the slightest tendency to fall asleep.

On the wall is scribbled, ”'There's plenty of room,' said Alice.”

The people around you seem only pleasantly mad, not dangerously so.

There is a girl with an enchanting sc.r.a.p of a monkey; there is a youth with a ma.n.u.script and a pile of cigarette b.u.t.ts. The great thing here once more is that they are taking their little play and their little stage with a heavenly seriousness, all of them. You expect somebody to produce a set of flamingos at any moment and start a game of croquet among the tiny tables.

Not all of the Greenwich restaurants have definite individual characters to maintain consistently. Sometimes it is just a general spirit of picturesqueness, of adventure, that they are trying to keep up. The ”Mouse Trap,” except for the trap hanging outside and a mouse scrawled in chalk on the wall of the entry, carries out no particular suggestion either of traps or mice. But take a look at the proprietress (Rita they call her), with her gorgeous t.i.tian hair and delft-blue ap.r.o.n; at her son Sidney, fair, limp, slim, English-voiced, with a deft way of pouring after-dinner coffee, and hair the colour of corn. They are obviously play-acting and enjoying it.

Ask Rita her nationality. She will fix you with eyes utterly devoid of a twinkle and answer: ”I? I am part Scotch terrier, and part Spanish mongrel, but _mostly_ mermaid!”

Rita goes to the sideboard to cut someone a slice of good-looking pie.

She overhears a reference to the ”Candlestick,” a little eating place chiefly remarkable for its vegetables and poetesses.

”If they eat nothing but vegetables no wonder they take to poetry,” is her comment. But still she does not smile. If you giggle, as every child knows, you spoil the game. They laugh heartily enough and often enough down in the Village, but they never laugh at the Village itself,--not because they take it so reverentially, but because they know how to make believe altogether too well.

Let me whisper here that the most fascinating hour in the ”Mouse Trap” is in the late afternoon, when no one is there, and the ebony hand-maiden in the big back kitchen is taking the fat, delicious-smelling cakes from the oven. Drop in some afternoon and sniff the fragrance that suggests your childhood and ”sponge-cake day.” You will feel that it is a trap no sane mouse would ever think of leaving! On a table beside you is a slate with, obviously, the day's specials:

”Spice cakes.

Chocolate cake.

Strawberry tarts with whipped cream.”

And still as you peep through the door at the back you see more and still more goodies coming hot and fresh and enticing from the oven.

White cakes, golden cakes, delicately browned pies,--if you are dieting by any chance you flee temptation and leave the ”Mouse Trap”

behind you.