Part 15 (2/2)
It would be impossible to give even an approximately complete inventory of the representative places of the Village. I have had to content myself with some dozen or so examples,--recorded almost haphazard, for the most part, but as I believe, more or less typical, take them all in all, of the Village eating place in its varied and rather curious manifestations.
Then there is a charming shop presided over by a pretty girl with the inevitable smock and braided hair, where tea is served in order to entice you to buy carved and painted trifles.
And then there is, or was, the place kept by Polly's brother, which was heartlessly raided by the police, and much maligned, not to say libelled, by the newspapers.
And then there was and is the ”h.e.l.l Hole.” Its ancient distinction used to be that it was one of the first cheap Bohemian places where women could smoke, and that it was always open. When all the other resorts closed for the night you repaired to the ”h.e.l.l Hole.” As to the smoking, it has taken a good while for New York to allow its Bohemian women this privilege, though society leaders have enjoyed it for ages. We all know that though most fas.h.i.+onable hotels permitted their feminine guests to smoke, the Haymarket of dubious memory always tabooed the custom to the bitter end!
The ”h.e.l.l Hole” has always stoutly approved of cigarettes, so all honour to it! And many a happy small-hours party has brought up there to top off the night in peace without having to keep an eye on the clock.
There is a little story told about one of these restaurants of which I have been writing--never mind which. A visiting Englishman on his way from his boat to his hotel dropped in at a certain place for a drink.
He found the company congenial and drifted into a little game which further interested him. It was a perfectly straight game, and he was a perfectly good sport. He stayed there two weeks. No: I shall _not_ state what the place was. But I think the story is true.
Personally, I don't blame the Englishman. Even shorn of the charm of a game of chance, there is many a place in Greenwich Village which might easily capture a susceptible temperament--not merely for weeks, but for years!
The last of the tea shops is the ”Wigwam,” in which, take note, it is the Indian game that is played. Its avowed aim is ”Tea and Dancing,”
and it is exceedingly proud of its floor. It lives in the second story of what, for over fifty years, has been the old Sheridan Square Tavern, and its proprietors are the Mosses,--poet, editor and incidental ”pirate” on one side of the house; and designer of enchanting ”art clothes” on the other. Lew Kirby Parrish, no less, has made the decorations, and he told me that the walls were grey with Indian decorations, and the ceiling a ”live colour.” I discovered that that meant a vivid, happy orange.
The spirit of the play is always kept in the Village. Let us take the opening night of the ”Wigwam” as a case in point.
The Indian note is supreme. It is not only the splendid line drawings of Indian chiefs, forming the panels of the room--those mysterious and impressive shades created by the imagination of Lew Parrish--it is the general mood. Only candles are burning,--big, fat candles, giving, in the aggregate, a magical radiance.
The victrola at the end of the room begins to play a curious Indian air with an uneven, fascinating, syncopated rhythm. A graceful girl in Indian dress glides in and places a single candle on the floor, squatting before it in a circle of dim, yellow light.
She lifts her dark head with its heavy band about the brows and shades her eyes with her hand. You see remote places, far, pale horizons, desert regions of sand. There are empty skies overhead, instead of the ”live-colour” ceiling. With an agile movement, she rises and begins to dance about the candle, and you know that to her it is a little campfire; it is that to you, too, for the moment. Something like the west wind blows her fringed dress; there is a dream as old as life in her eyes.
Faster and faster she dances about the candle, until at last she sinks beside it and with a strange sure gesture--puts it out.
Silence and the dark. The prairie fades.... The little dark-wood tables with their flowers and candles begin to glow again; the next musical number is a popular one step!...
CHAPTER VIII
Villagers
Although the serious affairs of life are met as conscientiously by the man or woman who has the real spirit of the Village, nevertheless each of them a.s.suredly shows less of that sordidness and mad desire for money so prevalent throughout the land....
The real villager's life is better balanced. He produces written words of value, or material objects that offer utility and delight. _He sings his songs. He has a good time._--From the _Ink Pot_ (a Greenwich Village paper).
I quoted the above to a practical friend and he countered by quoting d.i.c.kens' delightful fraud, ”Harold Skimpole”:
”This is where the bird lives and sings! They pluck his feathers now and then, and clip his wings, but he sings, he sings!... Not an ambitious note, but still he sings!”
And my friend proceeded heartlessly: ”'Skimpole' would have made a perfect Villager!”
It is hard to answer cold prose when your arguments are those of warm poetry. Not that prose has power to conquer poetry, but that the languages are so hopelessly dissimilar. They need an interpreter and the post is not a sinecure.
I want to try to throw a few dim sidelights on these Villagers whom I love and whom I know to be as alien to the average metropolitan consciousness and perception as though they were aboriginal representatives of interior and unexplored China. They are perhaps chiefly strange because of their ridiculous and lovely simplicity.
The artistic instinct, or impulse, is not particularly rare. Many persons have a real love for beautiful things, even a real apt.i.tude for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something vastly different. Creative artists,--great painters or sculptors, great ill.u.s.trators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal effects,--must be both born and made; and there are, the G.o.ds know, few enough of them, all told! Until comparatively recent times, everyone gifted with the blessing of an artistic sense turned it into a curse by trying to paint, draw or model, while the world yawned, laughed, turned away in disgust; and the real artists flung up their hands to heaven and cried: ”What next?”
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