Such was the last will and testament of "Tom Paine, Infidel."



CHAPTER VI

Pages of Romance

In the resolute spirit of another Andor Andorra, the Village of Greenwich maintains its independence in the very midst of the city of New York—submitting to no more of a compromise in the matter of its autonomy than is evolved in the Procrustean sort of splicing which has hitched fast the extremities of its tangled streets to the most readily available streets in the City Plan. The flippant carelessness with which this apparent union has been effected only serves to emphasise the actual separation. In almost every case these ill-advised couplings are productive of anomalous disorder, which in the case of the numbered streets they openly travesty the requirements of communal propriety and of common-sense: as may be inferred from the fact that within this disjointed region Fourth Street crosses Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth streets very nearly at right angles—to the permanent bewilderment of nations and to the perennial confusion of mankind.—THOMAS JANVIER.

It seems a far cry from the Greenwich of the last century to the Greenwich of this; from such quaint, garden-enclosed houses as the Warren homestead and Richmond Hill, from the alternately adventurous and tranquil lives of the great men who used to walk its crooked streets long and long ago, to the Studio quarter of today. What tie between the Grapevine, Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Brannan's, and all the ancient hostelries and mead houses and the modern French and Italian restaurants and little tea shops which are part and parcel of the present Village? So big did the gap appear to your servant, the author, so incongruous the notion of uniting the old and the new Greenwich harmoniously that she was close to giving the problem up in despair and writing her story of Greenwich Village in two books instead of one. But—whether accidentally or by inspiration, who knows?—three sovereign bonds became accidentally plain to her. May they be as plain to you who read—bonds between the Green Village of an older day and the Bohemian Village of this our own day, points that the old and the new settlements have in common—more—points that show the soul and spirit of the Village to be one and the same, unchanged in the past, unchanged in the present, probably to be unchanged for all time. The first of these points I have already touched upon in an earlier chapter—the deathless element of romance that has always had its headquarters here. Every city, like every brain, should have a corner given over to dreams. Greenwich is the dream-corner of New York. Everyone feels it. I found an old article in the Tribune written by Vincent Pepe which shows how the romance of the neighbourhood has crept into bricks and stone and even the uncompromising prose of real estate.

"Each one of these houses in the Village is from seventy-five to one hundred years old," writes Mr. Pepe (he might have said a hundred and fifty with equal accuracy in a few cases), "and each one of them has a history of its own, individually, as being one of the houses occupied by someone who has made American history and some of these houses have produced some of our present great men.

"New York has nothing of the old, with the exception of those old Colonial houses and for this reason we are trying to preserve them.... This is the great advantage and distinction of Washington Square and Greenwich Village and this is what has made it popular and it will be greater as the years go by. It will improve more and more with age, like an old wine.

"There is only one old section of New York and that is Greenwich Village and Washington Square, and the public are also going to preserve this little part of old New York."

Then there is that curious quality about Greenwich so endearing to those who know it, the quality of a haven, a refuge, a place of protected freedom.

"It's a good thing," said a certain brilliant young writer-man to me, "that there's one place where you can be yourself, live as you will and work out your scheme of life without a lot of criticism and convention to keep tripping you up. The point of view of the average mortal—out in the city—is that if you don't do exactly as everyone else does there's something the matter with you, morally or mentally. In the Village they leave you in peace, and take it for granted that you're decent until you've blatantly proven yourself the opposite. I'd have lost my nerve or my wits or my balance or something if I hadn't had the Village to come and breathe in!"

Not so different from the reputation of Old Greenwich, is it?—a place where the rich would be healed, the weary rest and the sorrowful gain comfort. Not so different from the lure that drew Sir. Peter out to the Green Village between his spectacular and hazardous voyages; that gave Thomas Paine his "seven serene months" before death came to him; that filled the grassy lanes with a mushroom business-life which had fled before the scourge of yellow fever; not so different from the refreshing ease of heart that came to Abigail Adams and Theodosia Alston when they came there from less comforting atmospheres. Greenwich, you see, maintains its old and honourable repute—that of being a resort and shelter and refuge for those upon whom the world outside would have pressed too heavily.

There is no one who has caught the inconsequent, yet perfectly sincere spirit of the Village better than John Reed. In reckless, scholarly rhyme he has imprisoned something of the reckless idealism of the Artists' Quarter—that haven for unconventional souls.

"Yet we are free who live in Washington Square, We dare to think as uptown wouldn't dare, Blazing our nights with arguments uproarious; What care we for a dull old world censorious, When each is sure he'll fashion something glorious?"

So we find that the romance of Colonial days still blooms freshly below Fourteenth Street and that people still rush to the Village to escape the world and its ways as eagerly as they fled a hundred years ago. But the third and last point of unity is perhaps the most striking. Always, we know, Greenwich has refused rebelliously to conform to any rule of thumb. We know that when the Commissioners checker-boarded off the town they found they couldn't checker-board Greenwich. It was too independent and too set in its ways. It had its lanes and trails and cow-paths and nothing could induce it to become resigned to straight streets and measured avenues. It would not conform, and it never has conformed. And even more strenuously has its mental development defied the draughtsman's compass and triangle. Greenwich will not straighten its streets nor conventionalise its views. Its intellectual conclusions will always be just as unexpected as the squares and street angles that one stumbles on head first. Its habit of life will be just as weirdly individual as its tangled blocks. It asks nothing better than to be let alone. It does not welcome tourists, though it is hospitality itself to wayfarers seeking an open door. It is the Village, and it will never, never, no never be anything else—the Village of the streets that wouldn't be straight!

Janvier, who has already been quoted extensively, but who has written of Greenwich so well that his quotations can't be avoided, says: "In addition to being hopelessly at odds with the surrounding city, Greenwich is handsomely at variance with itself."

New York, and especially Greenwich, grew by curious and indirect means, as we have seen. This fact and a lively and sympathetic consciousness of it, leads often to seemingly irrelevant digressions. Yet, is it not worth a moment's pause to find out that the stately site of Washington Square North, as well as other adjacent and select territory, was originally the property of two visionary seamen; and that the present erratic deflection of Broadway came from one obstinate Dutchman's affection for his own grounds and his uncompromising determination to use a gun to defend them, even against a city?

So, lest what follows appears to be a digression or an irrelevance, let me venture to remind you that the Village has always grown not only with picturesque results but by picturesque methods and through picturesque mediums. It is frankly, incurably romantic. Sir. Peter Warren's estates, or part of them, were sold off in parcels by the fine old custom of dice-throwing. Here is the official record of that episode, by the bye:

"In pursuance of the powers given in the said antenuptial deeds the trustees therein named, on March 31, 1787, agreed upon a partition of the said lands, which agreement was with the approbation and consent of the cestui que trusts, to wit: Earl and Lady Abingdon, and Charles Fitsroy and Ann his wife, the said Susannah Skinner the second not then having arrived at age. In making the partition, the premises were divided into three parts on a survey made thereof and marked A, B and C; and it was agreed that such partition should be made by each of the trustees naming a person to throw dice for and in behalf of their respective cestui que trusts, and that the person who should throw the highest number should have parcel A; the one who should throw the next highest number parcel B; and the one who should throw the lowest number, parcel C,—for the persons whom they respectively represented; and the premises were partitioned accordingly."

Eleventh Street was never cut through because old Burgher Brevoort did not want his trees cut down and argued conclusively with a blunderbuss to that effect—a final effect. It never has been cut through, as a matter of fact, to this day. And by way of evening things up, Grace Church, which stands almost on the disputed site, had for architect one James Renwick, who married the only daughter of Henry Brevoort himself. So by a queer twisted sort of law of compensation, the city gained rather than lost by what a certain disgruntled historian calls the "obstinacy of one Dutch householder."



These things are all true; the most amazing thing about Greenwich Village is that the most unlikely things that you can find out about it are true. The obvious, every-day things that are easily believed are much the most likely to be untenable reports or the day dreams of imaginative chroniclers. You are safe if you believe all the quaint and romantic and inconsistent and impossible things that come to your knowledge concerning the Village. That is its special and sacred privilege: to be unexpected and always—yes, always without exception—in the spirit of its irrational and sympathetic role. It needs Kipling's ambiguous "And when the thing that couldn't has occurred" for a motto. And yet—and yet—like all true nonsense, this nonsense is rooted in a beautiful and disconcerting compromise of truth.

Cities do grow through their romances and their adventures. The commonplaces of life never opened up new worlds nor established them after; the prose of life never served as a song of progress. Never a great onward movement but was called impossible. The things that the sane-and-safe gentleman accepts as good sense are not the things that make for growth, anywhere. And the principle, applied to lesser things, holds good. Who wants to study a city's life through the registries of its civic diseases or cures? We want its romances, its exceptions, its absurdities, its adventures. We not only want them, we must have them. Despite all the wiseacres on earth we care more for the duel that Burr and Hamilton fought than for all their individual achievements, good or bad. It is the theatrical change from the Potter's Field to the centre of fashion that first catches our fancy in the tale of Washington Square. In fact, my friend, we are, first and last, children addicted to the mad yet harmless passion of story-telling and story-hearing. I do hope that, when you read these pages, you will remember that, and be not too stern in criticism of sundry vastly important historic points which are all forgot and left out of the scheme—asking your pardon!

The Village, old or new, is the home of romance (as we have said, it is to be feared at least once or twice too often ere this) and it is for us to follow those sweet and crazy trails where they may chance to lead.

Since, then, we are concerned chiefly with the spirit of adventure, we can hardly fail to note that this particular element has haunted the neighbourhood of Washington Square fairly consistently.

If you will look at the Ratzer map you will see that the Elliott estate adjoined the Brevoort lands. It is today one of the most variously important regions in town, embracing as it does both Broadway and Fifth Avenue and including a most lively business section and a most exclusive aristocratic quarter. Andrew Elliott was the son of Sir. Gilbert Elliott, Lord Chief Justice, Clerk of Scotland. Andrew was Receiver General of the Province of New York under the Crown and a most loyal Royalist to the last. When the British rule passed he, in common with many other English sympathisers, found himself in an embarrassing position. The De Lanceys—close friends of his—lost their lands outright. But Elliott, like the canny Scotchman that he was, was determined that he would not be served the same way.

To quote Mr. J.H. Henry, who now handles that huge property: "He must have had friends! Apparently they liked him, if they didn't like his politics."

This is how they managed it: He transferred his entire estate to a Quaker friend of his in Philadelphia—this was before the situation had become too critical; then a little group of friendly New Yorkers, among whom was Alexander Hamilton, bought it in; next it passed into the hands of one Friedrich Charles Hans Bruno, Baron Poelnitz, who appears to have been not much more than a figurehead. However, it was legally his property at the time of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, and so it was not confiscated. It probably is safe to assume that Mr. Andrew Elliott still remained the power behind the throne, and benefited by the subsequent sale of the land to Capt. Robert Richard Randall.

Which brings us to a most picturesque page of New York history.

I wonder what there is about privateering that attracts even the most law-abiding imagination. This ancient, more than half dishonourable, profession has an unholy glamour about it and there are few respectable callings that so appeal to the colour-loving fancy. Not that privateering was quite the same as piracy, but it came so close a second that the honest rogues who plied the two trades must often have been in danger of getting their perquisites and obligations somewhat merged. It would have taken a very sharp judicial mind, or a singularly stout personal conscience, to make the distinctions between them in sundry and fairly numerous cases.

Wilson says:

"In these troublous and not over-squeamish times, when commerce was other than the peaceful pursuit it has since become, a promising venture in privateering was often preferred to slower if safer sources of profit by the strong-stomached merchants and mariners of New York.... News that piracy under the guise of privateering was winked at by the New York authorities spread quickly among the captains serving under the black flag."

Now there never was a lustier freebooter of the high seas than Capt. Thomas Randall, known familiarly as "Cap'n Tom," commander of the privateering ship Fox, and numerous other vessels. This boat, a brigantine, was well named, for she was quick and sly and yet could fight on occasion. Many a rich haul he made in her in 1748, and many a hairbreadth escape shaved the impudent bow of her on those jolly, nefarious voyages of hers. One of her biggest captures was the French ship L'Amazone. In 1757 he took out the De Lancey, a brigantine, with fourteen guns, and made some more sensational captures. He is said to have plied a coastwise trade for the most part from New York to New Orleans, but, to quote Mr. Henry once more, "The Captain went wherever the Spanish flag covered the largest amount of gold." At all events he amassed a prodigious fortune even for a privateer. In 1758 he withdrew from active service himself, but still sent out privateering vessels. Some of them he lost. The De Lancey was captured, and so was the Saucy Sally—the latter by the British ship Experiment. The De Lancey however made some excellent hauls first. Peter Johnson, a seaman, made a will in 1757, leaving to a friend all debts, dues and "prize money which may become payable by the cruise of the De Lancey, Captain Randall commanding." The luckless De Lancey was taken by the Dutch off Curacoa and the crew imprisoned. Perhaps poor Johnson was one of them.

In spite of occasional ill-luck these were good days for the Captain, because the law, never over scrupulous, allowed him especial license, the country being at war. Never was there a better era for adventurers, never a time when fortunes were to be sought under more favourable stars!

A third quotation from Mr. Henry:

"In those days a man was looked upon as being highly unfortunate if he had not a vessel which he could put to profitable use!"

He was part owner of the Snow with sixteen guns, full owner of the Mary and also of the Lively. He had a bad time in connection with the latter. He sent her out with Thomas Quigley for captain. Quigley took the little schooner down the Jersey coast and stayed there. He never put out to sea at all. He rode comfortably at anchor near shore and when he ran out of rum put in and got more. After a while the mates and crew sent in a round robin to Captain Randall telling him the story. The Lively was swiftly called in and—what Captain Tom did to Quigley history does not state!

The jolly piratical seaman did finely and flourished, green-bay like, in the sight of men. He was not without honours either. When Washington was rowed from Elizabethtown Point to the first inauguration, his barge was manned by a crew of thirteen ships' captains, and he who had the signal distinction of being coxswain of that historic boat's company, was Cap'n Tom!

Indeed there seems to be abundant proof that the Captain engineered the whole proceeding. It is certain that it was he who presented the "Presidential barge" to Washington for his use during his stay in New York, and he who selected that unusual crew,—practically every noted shipmaster then in port. On the President's final departure for Mount Vernon, he again used the barge, putting out from the foot of Whitehall and when he reached Elizabethtown, he very courteously returned it as a gift to Captain Randall, and wrote him a letter of warm thanks.

It is believed that Captain Thomas came from Scotland some time in the early part of the eighteenth century, but we know nothing of his antecedents and not much of his private life. He married in America, but we do not know the name of his wife. We do know that in 1775 his son, Robert Richard, was a youth of nineteen and a student at Columbia. This was the same year that the old Captain was serving on important committees and playing a conspicuous part in public affairs. Oh, yes! he was a most eminent citizen, and no one thought a whit the worse of him for what he called his "honest privateering." He was a member of the Legislature in 1784 and voted in favour of bringing in tea free—when it was carried by American ships!

And I picture Cap'n Tom as a stout and hearty rogue, with an open hand and heart and a certain cheery fashion of plying his shady calling, rather endearing than otherwise (I have no notion of his real looks nor qualities, but one's imagination must have its fling on occasion!). After all, there is not such a vast difference between the manner of Sir. Peter Warren's gains and Cap'n Tom Randall's. You may call a thing by one name or by another, but, when it comes down to it, is the business of capturing enemy prize ships in order to grow rich on the proceeds so different from holding up merchantmen for the same reason? But we are concerned for the moment with the Randalls, father and son, and most excellent fellows they appear to have both been. I should like to believe that Cap'n Tom owned a cutlass, but I fear it was a bit late for that!

Captain Tom appears to have been generous and kindly,—like most persons of questionable and picturesque careers. The Silversmith who left his entire belongings to the Captain in 1796 is but one of many who had reason to love him. One historian declares that he settled down, after retiring from the sea, and "became a respectable merchant at 10 Hanover Street," where he piled up more and more gold to leave his son Robert Richard. But it is a matter of record that the address at which he died was 8 Whitehall. On Friday, October 27, 1797, he set forth on his last cruise,—after seventy-four adventurous years on earthly seas.

He died much respected,—by no one more than his son, Robert Richard Randall, who had an immense admiration and reverence for his memory. It was he who, in 1790, bought the Elliott estate from "Baron" Poelnitz, for the sum of five thousand pounds—a handsome property of some twenty-four acres covering the space between Fourth and Fifth avenues, Waverly Place and approximately Ninth Street. The Elliott house which has been described as being of "red brick with white" was clearly a rather pretentious affair, and stood, says Mrs. Lamb, so that Broadway when it was laid down "clipped the rear porch."

It is a curious fact and worthy of note that the old, original house stood undamaged until 1828, and that, being sold at auction and removed at that date, its materials were used in a house which a few years ago was still in good condition.

Robert Richard Randall was also, like his father, known as "Captain," though there is no record of his ever having gone to sea as a sailor. Indeed he would scarcely have been made an "honourary" member of the Marine Society had he been a real shipmaster. Courtesy titles were de rigueur in those days, when a man was popular, and he appears to have been thoroughly so.

When it came time for him, too, to die, he paid his father's calling what tribute he could by the terms of his will.

His lawyer—no less a person that Alexander Hamilton himself—called to discuss the terms of this last document. By the bye, Hamilton's part in the affair is traditional and legendary rather than a matter of official record;—certainly his name does not appear in connection with the will. But Hamilton was the lawyer of Randall's sister, and a close family friend, so the story may more easily be true than false.

This, then, is the way it goes: Alexander Hamilton was summoned to make out the last will and testament, or at least, to advise concerning it. Randall was already growing weak, but had a clear and determined notion of what he wanted to do with his money. This was on June 1, 1801. The dying man left a number of small bequests to friends, families and servants, before he came to the real business on his mind. His bequests, besides money, included, "unto Betsey Hart, my housekeeper, my gold sleeve buttons," and "unto Adam Shields, my faithful overseer, my gold watch," and "unto Gawn Irwin, who now lives with me, my shoe-buckles and knee-buckles." Adam Shields married Betsey Hart. They were both Scotch—probably from whatever part of Scotland the Randalls hailed in the first place.

When these matters were disposed of, he began to speak of what was nearest his heart. He had a good deal of money; he wanted to leave it to some lasting use. Hamilton asked how he had made his money, and Randall explained he had inherited it from his father.

"And how did he get it?" asked the great lawyer.

"By honest privateering!" declared Captain Tom's son proudly.

And then, or so the story goes, he went on to whisper:

"My father's fortune all came from the sea. He was a seaman, and a good one. He had money, so he never suffered when he was worn out, but all are not like that. I want to make a place for the others. I want it to be a snug harbour for tired sailors."

So the will, July 10, 1801, reads that Robert Richard Randall's property is left to found: "An Asylum or Marine Hospital, to be called 'The Sailors' Snug Harbour,' for the purpose of maintaining aged, decrepit, worn-out sailors."

One of the witnesses, by the bye, was Henry Brevoort.

The present bust of Randall which stands in the Asylum is, of course, quite apocryphal as to likeness. No one knows what he looked like, but out of such odds and ends of information as the knee-buckles and so on, mentioned in the will, the artistic imagination of St. Gaudens evolved a veritable beau of a mariner, with knee-buckles positively resplendent and an Admiral's wig. And, though it may not be a good likeness, it is an agreeable enough ideal, and I think everyone approves of it.

Robert Richard Randall is buried down there now and on his monument is a simple and rather impressive inscription commemorating this charity which—so it puts it—was "conceived in a spirit of enlarged Benevolence."

Shortly afterwards he died, but his will, in spite of the inevitable wrangling and litigation of disgusted relations, lived on, and the Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors is an accomplished fact. Randall had meant it to be built on his property there—a good "seeded-to-grass" farm land,—and thought that the grain and vegetables for the sailor inmates of this Snug Harbour on land could be grown on the premises. But the trustees decided to build the institution on Staten Island. The New York Washington Square property, however, is still called the Sailors' Snug Harbour Estate, and through its tremendous increase in value the actual asylum was benefited incalculably. At the time of Captain Randall's death, the New York estate brought in about $4,000 a year. Today it is about $400,000,—and every cent goes to that real Snug Harbour for Tired Sailors out near the blue waters of Staten Island. So the "honest privateering" fortune has made at least one impossible seeming dream come true.

As time went on this section—the Sailors' Snug Harbour Estate and the Brevoort property—was destined to become New York's most fashionable quarter. Its history is the history of American society, no less, and one can have no difficulty in visualising an era in which a certain naive ceremony combined in piquant fashion with the sturdy solidity of the young and vigorous country. In the correspondence of Henry Brevoort and Washington Irving and others one gets delightful little pictures—vignettes, as it were—of social life of that day. Mr. Emmet writes begging for some snuff "no matter how old. It may be stale and flat but cannot be unprofitable!" Brevoort asks a friend to dine "On Thursday next at half-past four o'clock." He paints us a quaint sketch of "a little, round old gentleman, returning heel taps into decanters," at a soiree, adding: "His heart smote him at beholding the waste & riot of his dear adopted." We read of tea drinkings and coaches and his father's famous blunderbuss or "long gun" which he is presenting to Irving. And there are other chroniclers of the times. Lossing, the historian, quotes an anonymous friend as follows:

"We thought there was a goodly display of wealth and diamonds in those days, but, God bless my soul, when I hear of the millions amassed by the Vanderbilts, Goulds, Millses, Villards and others of that sort, I realise what a poor little doughnut of a place New York was at that early period!"

He goes on to speak of dinner at three—a formal dinner party at four. The first private carriage was almost mobbed on Broadway. Mrs. Jacob Little had "a very showy carriage lined with rose colour and a darky coachman in blue livery."

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort's house stood on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street—it is now occupied by the Charles de Rhams. And it chanced to be the scene of a certain very pretty little romance which can scarcely be passed over here.

New York, as a matter of course, copied her fashionable standards from older lands. While Manhattan society was by no means a supine and merely imitative affair, the country was too new not to cling a bit to English and French formalities. The great ladies of the day made something of a point of their "imported amusements" as having a specific claim on fashionable favour. So it came about that the fascinating innovation of the masked ball struck the fancy of fashionable New York. There was something very daring about the notion; it smacked of Latin skies and manners and suggested possibilities of romance both licensed and not which charmed the ladies, even as it abashed them. There were those who found it a project scarcely in good taste; it is said indeed that there was no end of a flutter concerning it. But be that as it may, the masked ball was given,—the first that New York had ever known, and, it may be mentioned, the very last it was to know for many a long, discreet year!

Haswell says that in this year there was a "fancy" ball given by Mr. and Mrs. Henry Brevoort and that the date was February 24th. It certainly was the same one, but he adds that it was generally pronounced "most successful." This one may doubt, since the results made masked balls so severely thought of that there was, a bit later, a fine of $1,000 imposed on anyone who should give one,—one-half to be deducted if you told on yourself!

Nevertheless, George S. Hellman says that Mrs. Brevoort's ball, February 24, 1840,—was "the most splendid social affair of the first half of the nineteenth century in New York."

There was great preparation for it, and practically all "society" was asked—and nothing and nobody else. It was incidentally the occasion of the first "society reporting." Attree, of the New York Herald, was an invited guest and went in costume—quite an innovation for conservative old Manhattan.

Lossing tells us: "At the close of this decade the features of New York society presented conspicuous transformations. Many exotic customs prevailed, both public and private, and the expensive pleasures of the Eastern Hemisphere had been transplanted and taken firm root. Among other imported amusements was the masked ball, the first of which occurred in the city of New York in 1840, and produced a profound sensation, not only per se, but because of an attending circumstance which stirred 'society' to its foundation."

The British Consul in New York at that time was Anthony Barclay,—he lived at College Place,—who was destined later to fall into evil repute, by raising recruits here during the Crimean trouble. He had a daughter, Matilda, who was remarkably lovely and—if we may believe reports—a very great belle in American society. She had a number of "suitors," as they were gracefully called in those days, and among them was one Burgwyne, from South Carolina—very young, and, we may take it, rather poor.

Lossing says: "There was also in attendance a gay, young South Carolinian named Burgwyne."

The Consul and Mrs. Barclay disapproved of him strongly. But Matilda who was beautiful, warm-blooded and wayward did not. She loved Burgwyne with a reciprocal ardour, and when the masked ball at the Brevoorts' came on the tapis it seemed as though the Goddess of Romance had absolutely stretched out her hands to these two reckless, but adorable lovers.

They had a favourite poem—most lovers have favourite poems;—theirs was "Lalla Rookh."

There may be diverse opinions as to Thomas Moore's greatness, but there can scarcely be two as to his lyric gift. He could write charming love-songs, simple and yet full of colour, and, given the Oriental theme, it is no wonder that youths and maidens of his day sighed and smiled over "Lalla Rookh" as over nothing that had yet been written for them. It is a delightful tale, half-prose and half-poetry, written entirely and whole-heartedly for lovers, and Burgwyne and Matilda found it easy to put themselves in the places of the romantic characters in the drama—Lalla Rookh, the incomparably beautiful Eastern Princess and Feramorz, the young Prince in disguise, "graceful as that idol of women, Crishna."



They secretly agreed to go to the masked ball at the Brevoorts' as their romantic favourites and prototypes. The detailed descriptions in the book gave them sufficient inspiration. She wore floating gauzes, bracelets, "a small coronet of jewels" and "a rose-coloured, bridal veil." His dress was "simple, yet not without marks of costliness," with a "high Tartarian cap.... Here and there, too, over his vest, which was confined by a flowered girdle of Kaskan, hung strings of fine pearls, disposed with an air of studied negligence."

So they met at the ball and danced together, and I suppose he quoted:

"Fly to the desert, fly with me, Our Arab tents are rude for thee; But, oh! the choice what heart can doubt, Of tents with love, or thrones without?"

Obviously she chose the tents with love, for as the clock struck four they slipped away together and were married!

As Lossing puts it:

"They left the festive scene together at four o'clock in the morning, and were married before breakfast."

They did not change their costumes, dear things! They wanted the romantic trappings for their love poem—a love poem which was to them more enchanting—more miraculous—than that of Lalla Rookh and the King of Bucharia. I hope they lived happily ever after, like the brave, young romanticists they were!

In 1835 a hotel was opened on the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, and it was appropriately named for the illustrious family over the way. The Brevoort House is certainly as historic a pile, socially speaking, as lower New York has to offer. Arthur Bartlett Maurice says of it:

"In the old-time novels of New York life visiting Englishmen invariably stopped at the Brevoort."

Of this hotel more anon, since it has recently become knit into the fabric of the modern Village.

But a scant two blocks away from the Brevoort stands another hostelry which is indissolubly a part of New York's growth—especially the growth of her Artist's Colony. It is the Lafayette, or as many of its habitues still love to call it—"The Old Martin." This, the first and most famous French restaurant of New York, needs a special word or two. It must be considered alone, and not in the company of lesser and more modern eating places.

John Reed says that the "Old Martin" was the real link between the old Village and the new, since it was the cradle of artistic life in New York. Bohemians, he declared, first foregathered there as Bohemians, and the beginnings of what has become America's Latin Quarter and Soho there first saw the light of day—or rather the lights of midnight.

Jean Baptiste Martin who had been running a hotel in Panama during the first excavations there—made by the French, as you may or may not remember—came to New York in 1883. He had been here the year before for a time and had decided the city needed a French hotel. He arrived on the 25th of June, and on the 26th he bought the hotel! He chose a house on University Place—No. 17—a little pension kept by one Eugene Larru, and from time to time bought the adjoining houses and built extensions until he had made it the building we see today. He called it the Hotel de Panama.

But it was not as the Hotel de Panama that it won its unique place in the hearts of New Yorkers. "In 1886," Mr. Martin says, "I decided to change the name of my place. 'Panama' gave people a bad impression. They associated it with fever and Spaniards, and neither were popular! So it became the Hotel Martin. Then, when I started another restaurant at Twenty-sixth Street, the 'Old Martin' became the Lafayette."

The artists and writers came to the Hotel Martin to invite their respective Muses inspired by Mr. Martin's excellent food and drink. From the bachelors' quarters on the nearby square—the Benedick and other studio houses—shabby, ambitious young men came in droves. Mr. Martin remembers "Bob" Chambers, and some young newspaper men from the World—Goddard, Manson and others. From uptown the great foreigners came down—some of them stayed there, indeed. In 1889, approximately, it started its biggest boom, and it went on steadily. Ask either Mr. Martin or its present proprietor, Mr. Raymond Orteig, and he will tell you, and truthfully, that it has never flagged, that "boom." The place is as popular as ever, because, in a changing world, a changing era and a signally changing town, it—does not change.

It was to the Hotel Martin that the famous singers came—Jean and Edouard de Reszke and Pol Plancon and Melba; the French statesman, Jules Cambon, used to come, and Maurice Grau—then the manager of the Metropolitan—and Chartran, the celebrated painter, and the great Ysaye and Bartholdi. And Paulus—Koster and Bial's first French importation—to say nothing of Anna Held and Sandow!

A motley company enough, to be sure, and certainly one worthy to form the nucleus of New York's Bohemia.

Says Mr. Martin: "The most interesting thing that ever happened in the 'Old Martin'? I can tell you that quite easily. It was the blizzard of 1888, when we were snowed in. The horse cars ran on University Place then, the line terminating at Barclay Street. I have a picture of one car almost snowed under, for the snow was fully six feet deep. It was a Saturday night and very crowded. When it became time for the people to go home they could not go. So they had to stay, and they stayed three days. They slept on billiard tables, on the floor or where they could. We did our best, but it was a big crowd. Interesting? It was most interesting indeed to me, for I could get no milk. I could supply them with all the wine they wanted, but no milk! And they demanded milk for their coffee. Oh, that blizzard!"

Mr. Martin, in remembering interesting episodes, forgot that trifling incident—the Spanish-American War, in 1898. Whether because of his early connections with Panama (there were countless Spaniards and Mexicans who patronised the hotel at that time) or whether because of a national and political misunderstanding, he was justifiably and seriously concerned as to the feeling of New York for the Hotel Martin. Many good and wise persons expected France to side with Spain, and many others watched curiously to see what Frenchmen in New York would do.

Mr. Martin left them but a short time for speculation. Today, with our streets aflutter with Allied colours, perhaps we fail to appreciate an individual demonstration such as this—but at that time there were few banners flying, and Mr. Martin led the patriotic movement with an American flag in every one of the fifty windows of the Hotel Martin and a French flag to top off the whole display! Perhaps it was the first suggestion, in street decoration, of what has recently proved to be so strong a bond between this nation and France.

If any of you who read have even begun to peer into Bohemian New York you have undoubtedly visited the Lafayette as it is today. And, if you have, you have undoubtedly seen or perhaps even played the "Lafayette Game." It is a weird little game that is played for drinks, and requires quite a bit of skill. It is well known to all frequenters; the only odd thing is that it is not better known.

"Americans are funny!" laughs Raymond Orteig. "When I go abroad and see something which is new and different from what has been before, my instinct is to get hold of it and bring it back. If I can I bring it back in actual bulk; if I were a writer I would bring it back in another way. But through these years, while everyone has played our absurd little game, no one has ever suggested writing about it—until tonight!"

Its name? It is Culbuto. That is French,—practically applied,—for failure! It is, you see, an effort to keep the little balls from falling into the wrong holes. As it so often results in failure Culbuto is an ideal game to play for drinks! Someone has to pay all the time! It is an unequal contest between the individual and the law of gravity!

But we must not linger too long at the Lafayette, alluring though it may be. All Greenwich is beckoning to us, a few blocks away. We have a new world to explore—the world below Fourteenth Street.

Fourteenth Street is the boundary line which marks the Greenwich Village's utmost city limits, as it marked those of our great-grandfathers. Like a wall it stands across the town separating the new from the old uncompromisingly. Miss Euphemia Olcott, who has been quoted here before, describes the evolution of Fourteenth Street in the following interesting way:

"Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues I have seen with three sets of buildings—first shanties near Sixth Avenue from the rear of which it was rumoured a bogy would be likely to pursue and kidnap us.... These shanties were followed by fine, brownstone residences.... Some of these, however, I think came when there had ceased to be a village. Later on came business into Fourteenth Street...."

And today those never-to-be-sufficiently-pitied folk who live in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies think of Fourteenth Street as downtown!



CHAPTER VII

Restaurants, and the Magic Door

I

What scenes in fiction cling more persistently in the memory than those that deal with the satisfying of man's appetite? Who ever heard of a dyspeptic hero? Are not your favourites beyond the Magic Door all good trenchermen?

—ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE.

It was O. Henry, I believe, who spoke of restaurants as "literary landmarks." They are really much more than that—they are signposts, psychical rather than physical, which show the trend of the times—or of the neighbourhood. I suppose nothing in Greenwich Village could be more significantly illuminating than its eating places. There are, of course, many sorts. The Village is neither so unique nor so uniform as to have only one sort of popular board. But in all the typical Greenwich restaurants you will find the same elusive something, the spirit of the picturesque, the untrammelled, the quaint and charming—in short, the different!

The Village is not only a locality, you understand, it is a point of view. It reaches out imperiously and fastens on what it will. The Brevoort basement—after ten o'clock at night—is the Village. So is the Lafayette on occasion. During the day they are delightful French hostelries catering to all the world who like heavenly things to eat and the right atmosphere in which to eat them. But as the magic hour strikes, presto!—they suffer a sea change and become the quintessence of the Spirit of the Village!

It is 10.20 P.M. at the Brevoort in the restaurant upstairs. All the world and his wife—or his sweetheart—are fully represented. Most of the uptowners—the regulation clientele—are going away, having finished gorging themselves on delectable things; some few of them are lingering, lazily curious; a certain small number are still coming in, moved by that restless Manhattanic spirit that hates to go home in the dark.

Among these is a discontented, well-dressed couple, seen half an hour before completing their dinner a block away at the Lafayette. The head waiter at that restaurant explained them nonchalantly, not to say casually:

"It is the gentleman who married his manicurist. Regard, then—one perceives they are not happy—eh? It is understood that she beats him."

Yonder is a moving-picture star, quite alone, eating a great deal, and looking blissfully content. There is a man who has won a fortune in war-brides—the one at the next table did it with carpets. There is a great lady—a very great lady indeed—who, at this season, should be out of town.

Swiftly moving, deft-handed waiters, the faint perfume of delicate food, the sparkle of light upon rare wine, the complex murmur of a well-filled dining-room. It is so far not strikingly different, in the impression it gives, from uptown restaurants.

But the hands of the clock are pointing to the half-hour after ten.

Hasten, then, to the downstairs cafe,—the two rooms, sunk below the level of Fifth Avenue, yet cool and airy. If you hurry you will be just in time to see the Village come in. For this is their really favourite haunt—their Mecca when their pockets will stand it—the Village Restaurant de Luxe!

Upstairs are exquisite frocks and impeccable evening clothes; good jewels and, incidentally, a good many tired faces—from uptown. Down here it is different. The crowd is younger, poorer, more strikingly bizarre—immeasurably more interesting. Everyone here does something, or thinks he does—which is just as good;—or pretends to—which is next best. There is a startling number of girls. Girls in smocks of "artistic" shades—bilious yellow-green, or magenta-tending violet; girls with hair that, red, black or blonde, is usually either arranged in a wildly natural bird's-nest mass, or boldly clubbed after the fashion of Joan of Arc and Mrs. Vernon Castle; girls with tense little faces, slender arms and an astonishing capacity as to cigarettes. And men who, for the most part, are too busy with their ideals to cut their hair; men whose collars may be low and rolling, or high and bound with black silk stocks after the style of another day; men who are, variously, affectedly natural or naturally affected, but who are nearly all of them picturesque, and, in spite of their poses, quite in earnest, after their queer fashion. They are all prophets and seers down here; they wear their bizarre hair-cuts and unusual clothes with a certain innocently flaunting air which rather disarms you. Their poses are not merely poses; they are their almost childlike way of showing the prosaic outer world how different they are!

Here they all flock—whenever they have the price. That may be a bit beyond them sometimes, but usually there is someone in the crowd who is "flush," and that means who will pay. For the Villagers are not parsimonious; they stand in no danger of ever making themselves rich and thus acquiring place in the accursed class called the Philistines!

It is beyond question that the French have a genius for hospitality. It must be rooted in their beautiful, national tact, that gracious impulse combining chivalry to women, friendliness to men and courtesy to all which is so characteristic of "the world's sweetheart" France. I have never seen a French restaurant where the most casual visitor was not made personally and charmingly welcome, and I have never seen such typically French restaurants as the Lafayette and the Brevoort. And the Villagers feel it too. From the shabbiest socialist to the most flagrantly painted little artist's model, they drift in thankfully to that atmosphere of gaiety and sympathy and thoughtful kindliness which is, after all, just—the air of France.

Next let us take a restaurant of quite another type, not far from the Brevoort—all the Village eating places are close together—walk across the square, a block further, and you are there.

It is not many years since Bohemia ate chiefly in the side streets, at restaurants such as Enrico's, Baroni's—there are a dozen such places. They still exist, but the Village is dropping away from them. They are very good and very cheap, and the tourist—that is, the uptowner—thinks he is seeing Bohemia when he eats in them, but not many of them remain at all characteristic. Bertolotti's is something of an exception. It is a restaurant of the old style, a survival of the days when all Bohemian restaurants were Italian. La Signora says they have been there, just there on Third Street, for twenty years. If you are a newcomer you will probably eat in the upstairs room, in cool and rather remote grandeur, and the pretty daughter with the wondrous black eyes will serve you the more elaborate of the most extraordinarily named dishes on the menu. But if, by long experience, you know what is pleasant and comfortable you will take a place in the basement cafe. At the clean, bare table, in the shadow of the big, bright, many-bottled bar, you will eat your Risotta alla Milanese, your coteletti di Vitelle, your asparagi—it's probably the only place in the city where they serve asparagus with grated cheese—finally your zambaione,—a heavenly sort of hot "flip," very foamy and seductive and strongly flavoured with Marsarla wine.

If you stand well with the house you may have the honour to be escorted by the Signora herself—handsome, dignified, genial, with a veritable coronal of splendid grey hair—to watch the eternal bowling in the alley back of the restaurant. I have watched them fascinated for long periods and I have never learned what it is they are trying to do with those big "bowling balls." They have no ninepins, so they are not trying to make a ten-strike. Apparently, it is a game however, for now and then a shout of triumph proclaims that someone has won. He orders the drinks and they go at it again.

"But, what is it?" I asked the Signora.

"Eh—oh—just a Giocho di Bocca," she returned vaguely, "a game of bowls—how should I know?"

Beyond the bowling alley is a long, narrow yard with bushes. It would make quite a charming summer garden with little tables for after-dinner coffee. But the Signora says that the Chiesa, there at the back of it, objects. The Chiesa, I think, is the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square. Just why they don't want the Signora to have tables in her own back yard is not clear. She, being a Latin, shrugs her shoulders and makes no comment. Standing in the darkness, there is a real freshness in the air; there is also a delicious, gurgling sound, the music of summer streams.

"How lovely!" you whisper. "What a delightful, rippling sound."

"Yet, it is the ice plant of the big hotel," says La Signora sweetly.

There is, at Bertolotti's one of the queerest little old figures in all that part of the world, the bent and aged Italian known universally as Castagna (Chestnuts), because of the interminable anecdotes he tells over and over again. No one knows his real name, not even the Signor or the Signora. Yet he has worked for them for years. He wants no wages—only a living and a home. In the aforementioned back yard he has built himself a little house about the size of a dog kennel. It is a real house, and like nothing so much as the historic residence of the Three Bears. It has a window, eaves, weather-strips and a clothesline, for he does his own washing. He trots off there very happily when his light work is done, and, when his door is closed, opens it for no one. That scrap of a building is Castagna's castle. One evening I went to call on him, but he had put out his light. In the gleam that came from the bowling alley behind me, something showed softly red and green and white against the wooden door. I put out my hand and touched that world-famous cross. It was about six inches long, and only of paper, but it was the flag of Italy, and it kept watch outside the Casa Castagna. I am certain that he would not sleep well without it.

Probably the most famous Bohemian restaurant in the quarter is the Black Cat. It is not really more typical than the others,—indeed it is rather less so,—but it is extremely striking, and most conspicuous. There is, in the minds of the hypercritical, the sneaking suspicion that the Black Cat is almost too good to be true; it is too obviously and theatrically lurid with the glow of Montmartre; it is Bohemianism just a shade too much conventionalised. Just the same, it is fascinating. From the moment you pass the outer, polite portals and intermediate anterooms and enter the big, smoke-filled, deafening room at the back, you are enormously interested, excellently entertained. The noise is the thing that impresses you first. In most Village resorts you find quiet the order of the day—or rather night. Even "Polly's," crowded as it is, is not noisy. In the Brevoort there is a steady, low rumble of talk, but not actual noise. At the Black Cat it is one continual and all-pervading roar—a joyous roar, too; these people are having a simply gorgeous time and don't care who knows it. It is a wonder that the high-set rafters do not fall—that the lofty, whitewashed walls of brick do not tremble, and that the little black cats set in a rigid conventional design around the whole room do not come to life in horror, and fly spitting up the short stairway and out of the door!

When you go to the Black Cat you would better check what prejudices you have as to what is formal and fitting, and leave them with your coat at the entrance. Not that it is disreputable—Luigi would pale with the shock of such a thought! It is just—Bohemian! Everyone does exactly what he wishes to do. Sometimes, one person's wishes conflict with someone else's, and then there is a fight, and the police are called, and the rest of the patrons have a beautiful time watching a perfectly good and unexpected free show! As a rule, however, this determination on the part of each one to do what he wants to has no violent results. An incident will show something of the entire liberty allowed in the Black Cat. A man came in with two girls, and, seeing a jolly stag party at another table, decided to join them. He promptly did so, with, as far as could be seen, no word of excuse to his feminine companions. In a moment two young men strolled up to their table and sat down.

"Your friend asked us to come over here and take his place," explained one nonchalantly. "You don't object, ladies?"

The girls received them amiably. Apparently no one thought of such a formality as names or introductions. The original host stayed away for the rest of the evening, but the four new acquaintances seemed to get along quite satisfactorily without him.

A young married woman from uptown came in with her husband and two other men. A good-looking lad, much flushed and a little unsteady, stopped by her chair.

"Say, k-kid," he exclaimed, with a disarming chuckle, "you're the prettiest girl here—and you come here with three p-protectors! Say, it's a shame!"

He lurched cheerfully upon his way and even the slightly conservative husband found a grudging smile wrung out of him.

There is a pianist at the Black Cat—a real pianist, not just a person who plays the piano. She is a striking figure in a quaint, tunic-like dress, greying hair and a keen face, and a personal friend of half the frequenters. She has an uncanny instinct for the psychology of the moment. She knows just when "Columbia" will be the proper thing to play, and when the crowd demands the newest rag-time. She will feel an atmospheric change as unswervingly as any barometer, and switch in a moment from "Good-bye Girls, Good-bye" to the love duet from Faust. She can play Chopin just as well as she can play Sousa, and she will tactfully strike up "It's Always Fair Weather" when she sees a crowd of young fellows sit down at a table; "There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight" to welcome a lad in khaki; and the very latest fox trot for the party of girls and young men from uptown, who look as though they were dying to dance. She plays the "Marseillaise" for Frenchmen, and "Dixie" for visiting Southerners, and "Mississippi" for the frequenters of Manhattan vaudeville shows. And, then, at the right moment, her skilled fingers will drift suddenly into something different, some exquisite, inspired melody—the soul-child of some high immortal—and under the spell the noisy crowd grows still for a moment. For even at the Black Cat they have not forgotten how to dream.

Probably the Black Cat inspired many other Village restaurants—the Purple Pup for instance.

The Purple Pup is a queer little place. It is in a most exclusive and aristocratic part of the Square—in the basement of one of the really handsome houses, in fact. It is, so far as is visible to the naked eye, quite well conducted, yet there is something mysterious about it. Doubtless this is deliberately stage-managed and capitalised, but it is effectively done. It is an unexpected sort of place. One evening you go there and find it in full blast; the piano tinkling, many cramped couples dancing in the two tiny rooms, and every table covered with tea cups or lemonade glasses. Another night you may arrive at exactly the same time and there will be only candlelight and a few groups, talking in low tones.

Here, as in all parts of the Village, the man in the rolling collar, and the girl in the smock, will be markedly in evidence. Yes; they really do look like that. Lots of the girls have their hair cut short too.

And "Polly's"!

In many minds, "Polly's" and the Village mean one and the same thing. Certainly no one could intelligently write about the one without due and logical tribute to the other. Polly Holliday's restaurant (The Greenwich Village Inn is its formal name in the telephone book) is not incidental, but institutional. It is fixed, representative and sacred, like Police Headquarters, Trinity Church and the Stock Exchange. It is indispensable and independent. The Village could not get along without it, but the Village no longer talks about it nor advertises it. It is, in fact, so obviously a vital part of Greenwich that often enough a Greenwicher, asked to point out hostelries of peculiar interest, will forget to mention it.

"How about 'Polly's'?" you remind him.

"Oh—but 'Polly's'!" he protests wonderingly. "Why, it wouldn't be the Village at all without 'Polly's.' It—why, of course, I never thought anyone had to be told about 'Polly's'!"

His attitude will be as disconcerted as though you asked him whether he was in the habit of using air to breathe,—or was accustomed to going to bed to sleep.

Polly Holliday used to have her restaurant under the Liberal Club—where the Dutch Oven is now,—but now she has her own good-sized place on Fourth Street, and it remains, through fluctuations and fads, the most thoroughly and consistently popular Village eating place extant. It is, outwardly, not original nor superlatively striking in any way. It is a clean, bare place with paper napkins and such waits between courses as are unquestionably conducive to the encouragement of philosophic, idealistic, anarchistic and aesthetic debates. But the food is excellent, when you get it, and the atmosphere both friendly and—let us admit frankly—inspiring. The people are interesting; they discuss interesting things. You are comfortable, and you are exhilarated. You see, quickly enough, why the Village could not possibly get along without its inn; why "Polly's" is so essential a part of its life that half the time it overlooks it. Outsiders always know about "Polly's." But the Villager?

"'Polly's'? But of course 'Polly's.'"

There it is. Of course "Polly's." "Polly's" is Greenwich Village in little; it is, in a fashion, cosmic and symbolic.

Under the Liberal Club, where "Polly's" used to be located, the "Dutch Oven," with its capacious fireplace and wholesome meals, now holds sway. The prices are reasonable, the food substantial and the atmosphere comfortable, so it is a real haven of good cheer to improvident Villagers.

The Village Kitchen on Greenwich Avenue is another place of the same sort. And Gallup's—almost the first of these "breakfast and lunch" shops—is another. They are not unlike a Childs restaurant, but with the rarefied Village air added. You eat real food in clean surroundings, as you do in Childs', but you do it to an accompaniment that is better than music—a sort of life-song, rather stirring and quite touching in its way—the Song of the Village. How can people be both reckless and deeply earnest? But the Villagers are both.

One of the oddest sights on earth is a typical "Breakfast" at "Polly's," the "Kitchen" or the "Dutch Oven," after one of the masked balls for which the Village has recently acquired such a passion. After you have been up all night in some of these mad masquerades—of which more anon—you may not, by Village convention, go home to bed. You must go to breakfast with the rest of the Villagers. And you must be prepared to face the cold, grey dawn of "the morning after" while still in your war paint and draggled finery. It is an awful ordeal. But "it's being done in the Village"!

Quite recently a new sort of eating place has sprung up in Greenwich Village—of so original and novel a character that we must investigate it in at least a few of its manifestations. Speaking for myself, I had never believed that such places could exist within sound of the "L" and a stone's throw from drug stores and offices.

But see what you think of them.



II

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said. "One can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."—"Through the Looking Glass."

"But it can't be this!" I said. "You've made a mistake in the number!"

"It is this," declared my guide and companion. "This is where Nanni Bailey has her tea shop."

"But this is—is—isn't anything!"

Indeed the number to which my friend pointed seemed to indicate the entrance to a sort of warehouse, if it indicated anything at all. On peering through the dim and gloomy doorway, it appeared instead to be a particularly desolate-looking cellar. There were old barrels and boxes about, an expanse of general dusty mystery and, in the dingy distance, a flight of ladder-like steps leading upwards to a faint light.

"It's one of Dickens' impossible stage sets come true!" I exclaimed. "It looks as though it might be a burglars' den or somebody's back yard, but anyway, it isn't a restaurant!"

"It is too!" came back at me triumphantly. "Look at that sign!"

By the faint rays of a street light on nearby Sixth Avenue, I saw the shabby little wooden sign, "The Samovar." This extraordinary place was a restaurant after all!

We entered warily, having a vague expectation of pickpockets or rats, and climbed that ladder—I mean staircase—to what was purely and simply a loft.

But such a loft! Such a quaint, delicious, simple, picturesque apotheosis of a loft! A loft with the rough bricks whitewashed and the heavy rafters painted red; a loft with big, plain tables and a bare floor and an only slightly partitioned-off kitchenette where the hungry could descry piles of sandwiches and many coffee cups. And there in the middle of the loft was the Samovar itself, a really splendid affair, and one actually not for decorative purposes only, but for use. I had always thought samovars were for the ornamentation either of houses or foreign-atmosphere novels. But you could use this thing. I saw people go and get glasses-full of tea out of it.

Under the smoke-dimmed lights were curious, eager, interesting faces: a pale little person with red hair I recognised instantly as an actress whom I had just seen at the Provincetown Players—a Village Theatrical Company—in a tense and terribly tragic role. Beyond her was a white-haired man with keen eyes—a distinguished writer and socialist. A shabby poet announced to the sympathetic that he had sold something after two years of work. Immediately they set about making a real fiesta of the unusual occasion. Miss Bailey, a small, round, efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among her guests, all of whom she seemed to know. The best cheese sandwiches in New York went round. A girl in a vampire costume of grey—hooded and with long trailing sleeves—got up from her solitary place in the corner. She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a kimono and bedroom slippers. Obviously she had simply drifted in for sandwiches before going to bed. She vanished down the ladder.

An hour later, we, too, climbed down the ladderish stairs, my companion and I, and as we came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth Street at midnight, I had a really odd sensation. I felt as though I had been reading a fascinating and unusual book, and had—suddenly closed it for the night.

This was one of the first of the real Village eating places which I ever knew. Perhaps that is why it comes first to my memory as I write. I do not know that it is more representative or more interesting than others. But it was worth going back to.

Yet, after all, it isn't the food and drink, nor yet the unusual surroundings, that bring you back to these places. It's the—well, one has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally inappropriate word "atmosphere." Like "temperament" and "individuality" and the rest of the writer-folk's old reliables, "atmosphere" is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing something you won't take the trouble to define more expressively. Dick says in "The Light That Failed" that an old device for an unskilful artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a picture where it will cover up bad drawing. I'm afraid writers are apt to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion.

But this is a fact just the same. Nearly all the Greenwich Village places really have atmosphere. You can be cynical about it, or frown at it, or do anything you like about it, but it's there, and it's the real thing. It's an absolute essence and ether which you feel intensely and breathe necessarily, but which no one can put quite definitely into the concrete form of words. I have heard of liquid or solidified air, but that's a scientific experiment, and who wants to try scientific experiments on the Village which we all love?

"But such an amount of play-acting and pose!" I hear someone complain, referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation. "They pretend to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality."

Yes, to a certain extent that is true—true of a portion of the Village, at any rate, and a certain percentage of the Villagers. But even if it is true, it is the sort of truth that needs only a bit of understanding to make us tender and tolerant instead of scornful and hard. My dear lady, you who complained of the "play-acting," and you other who, agreeing with her, see in the whimsies and pretenses in Our Village only a spectacle of cheap affectation and artifice, have you lived so long and yet do not know that the play-acting instinct is one of the most universal of all instincts—the very first developed, and the very last, I truly believe, to die in our faded bodies? From the moment when we try to play ball with sunbeams through those intermediate years wherein we imagine ourselves everything on earth that we are not, down to those last days of all, when we live, all furtive and unsuspected, a secret life of the spirit—either a life of remembrance or a life of imagination visualising what we have wanted and have missed,—what do we do but pretend,—make believe,—pose, if you will? When we are little we pretend to be knights and ladies, pirates and fairy princesses, soldiers and Red Cross nurses, and sailors and hunters and explorers. We people the window boxes with elves and pixies and the dark corners with Red Indians and bears. The commonplace world about us is not truly commonplace, since our fancy, still fresh from eternity, can transform three dusty shrubs into an enchanted forest, and an automobile into the most deliciously formidable of the Dragon Family. A bit later, our pretending is done more cautiously. We do not confess our shy flights of imagination: we take a prosaic outward pose, and try not to advertise the fact that our geese wear (to our eyes) swans' plumage, and that our individual roles are (to our own view) always those of heroes and heroines. No one of us but mentally sees himself or herself doing something which is as impracticable as cloud-riding. No one of us but dreams of the impossible and in a shamefaced, almost clandestine, fashion pictures it and lingers over it. All make-believe, you see, only we hate to admit it! The different thing about Greenwich is that there they do admit it, quite a number of them. They accept the pretending, play-acting spirit as a perfectly natural—no, as an inevitable—part of life, and, with a certain whimsical seriousness, not unlike that of real children, they provide for it. You know children can make believe, know that it is make believe, yet enjoy it all the more for that. So can the Villagers. Hence, places like—let us say, as an example—"The Pirate's Den."

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 bump 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 cutlass 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 embarrassed, 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 basement tea room, is an inscription in chalk. It looks like anything but English. But if you held a looking-glass 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 scrap of a monkey; there is a youth with a manuscript and a pile of cigarette butts. 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 Titian hair and delft-blue apron; 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.

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 "Hell 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 "Hell 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 fashionable hotels permitted their feminine guests to smoke, the Haymarket of dubious memory always tabooed the custom to the bitter end!

The "Hell 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 assuredly 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 Dickens' 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 aptitude for designing or reproducing them. The creative instinct is something vastly different. Creative artists,—great painters or sculptors, great illustrators, and wizards in pencil and pen and charcoal effects,—must be both born and made; and there are, the gods 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?"

But lately,—in many places, but preeminently in Greenwich Village,—these folk who love art, but can't achieve great art expression, have evolved a new sort of art life. They are developing the embryo of what was the arts-and-crafts idea into a really fine, useful and satisfying art form. They have left mission furniture and Morris designs behind. They are making their own models, and making them well. They are turning their restless, beauty-loving energies into sound, constructive channels. The girl who otherwise might have painted atrocious pictures is, in the Village, decorating delightful-looking boxes and jars, or hammering metals into quaint, original shapes that embody her own fleeting fancies. The man who wanted to draw but could never get his perspective right is carving wood—a work where perspective is superfluous—and achieving pleasure for others, and comfort and a livelihood for himself, at one and the same time.

I know of nothing which is so typical or so significant in all the Village as this new urge toward good craftsmanship, elementary poetic design,—the fundamentals of a utilitarian, beautiful and pervading art life apart from clay or canvas.

The capitol of the Village shifts a bit from time to time, as befits so flexible, so fluid a community. Just at the present writing, it is at Sheridan Square that you will find it most colourfully and picturesquely represented. Tomorrow, no man may be able to say whence it has flitted.

You will find much golden sunshine in Sheridan Square—not the approved atmosphere of Bohemia, yet the real thing nevertheless. It is a broad, clean, brazen sort of sunshine—a sunshine that should say, "See me work! See me shine! See me show up the least last ugliness or smallness or humbleness, and glorify it to something Village-like and picturesque!"

When you leave the sunny square, you will enter the oddest little court in all New York; it has not to my knowledge any name, but it is the general address of enough tea shops and studios and Village haunts to stock an entire neighbourhood. The buildings are old—old, and, of course, of wood. These artist folk have metamorphosed the shabby and dilapidated structures into charming places.

Following the sign of deep blue with yellow letters which indicates that this is the place where the Hand-Painted Wooden Toys are made, you must climb in the sunshine up the outside staircase, which looks as though it had been put up for scaffolding purposes and then forgotten. Pausing on the rickety stairway and looking out beyond the crazy little court and over the drowsy Square, you will have a great deal of difficulty in believing that you left your cable car about a minute and a half before. Pass on up the stairs. You may nearly fall over the black-and-white feline which belongs to no one in any of the buildings, but which haunts them all like an unquiet ghost, and which is known by everyone as the Crazy Cat; so to the door of the studio-workshop where the toys are made.



And have you ever seen anything quite like that workshop?

A little light studio full of colour and the smell of paint. On one side blue-green boxes stacked on shelves; on the other finished sample toys not ready to be boxed. Shallow dishes of orange and emerald green and bright pink and primrose and black and vivid blue.

"Yes," says the girl who is working there—she is fair and wears a pale-green frock and a black work-apron,—"I do this part. Mr. Dickerman, the artist, makes the pictures or designs, then we have them turned out by the mill. See"—she shows queer shaped pieces of wood that suggest nothing to the casual observer—"Then the rest is done here!"

The room is full of all manner of curious and charming playthings. Here is a real pirate's chest for your treasures—the young workwoman is just painting the yellow nails on it—and here is a fierce-looking pirate with a cutlass for a bookshelf end; here is a futurist coat-hanger—a cubist-faced burglar with a jaw and the peremptory legend: "Give me your hat, scarf and coat!" Here is a neatly capped little waiting maid whose arms are constructed for flower holders; here are delightful watering-pots, exquisitely painted; wonderful cake covers, powder-boxes, blotters, brackets;—every single thing a little gem of clever design and individual workmanship. It is more fascinating than Toyland or Santa Claus' shop. These "rocking toys" are particularly fascinating: the dreadnought that careens at perilous angles, and the kicking mule which knocks its driver over as often as you like to make it. Shelves on shelves of these wonder-things complete, and a whole great table laden with them in half-finished forms. Some of the little wooden figures are set in a long rack to dry, for after the shellac has hardened each colour is put on and allowed to dry thoroughly before applying the next. The flesh-coloured enamel goes on first, then the other lighter shades, leaving the darker for the last, and the inevitable touches of black to finish off with.

"This way," says the girl in the black apron (which is really a smock), taking up a squat but adorable little wooden figure which is already coloured all over, but has a curiously unfinished aspect nevertheless. She fills a tiny brush with glittering, black enamel and begins to apply it in dots and lines. "This long dab is supposed to be his gun. These two little squares of black make his belt. One line for his trousers,—now he's done. He's for a blotter."

The little soldier has now taken on character and solidity as though by magic. He grins at us, very martial and smart indeed, as he is stood in the rack for the enamel to harden.

No one who has ever been to the workroom of one of those art shops will ever forget it. Personally I found it more enchanting than any regular studio I ever visited. There was quite real art there. Remember, those designs show no mean order of genius and imagination, and the more mechanical work is beautifully done and is constantly given a little individual, quaint twist which stamps the toys as personal works of art. And the whole picture,—I wish I could paint it! The low-ceilinged room, set high up above the little court; the sunshine and the golden square outside; the girl in the black smock and the huge table covered with pots and saucers and jars of every shape and size; and the vivid splashes of colour in the bright afternoon light—scarlet and violet and yellow and indigo and red-brown. And the wall full of strange and brilliant little figures grinning, scowling and staring down like so many goblins!

Just as you go out of the studio your eye can scarcely fail to fall upon one particular wooden hanger to be screwed on a door. If you know the "Rose and the Ring" by heart, as you should, it will give you quite a shock. It is the image of the Doorknocker into which the Fairy Blackstick changed the wicked porter Gruffanuff! It is indeed!

You know, if all these toys should come to life some moonlit night they would make quite a formidable array! Imagine the pirates and the kicking mules and the cubist burglars all running wild together! And there is something uncanny about them and their expressions that makes one suspect that such an event is more than half likely.

Even the advertisements for such a shop could not be commonplace. The artist in charge proclaims that: "Pirates are his specialty, and that he will gladly furnish estimates on anything from the services of a Pirate Crew to a Treasure Island or a Pirate Ship."

On Washington Square is another sort of workshop,—a place where jewelry is made by hand. The girl who does this work draws her own designs and executes them, and the results are infinitely quainter and more beautiful than the things to be bought at jewelry shops. She buys her copper and silver and the little gold she uses in bulk; her jewels—semi-precious stones for the most part—come from all over the world. In her cool, airy workroom with the green trees of the big Square outside, this little woman heats and bends and bores her metals and shines her stones in their quaint settings, with a rapt absorption that is balanced by her steady skill. It is no light or easy work, this making of hand-made jewelry, and it requires no inconsiderable gift of delicate fancy and artistic judgment. This girl is an artist, not the less so because she makes her flowers and dragons and symbolic figures out of metal instead of canvas and paint; not the less so because her colours do not come in tubes but imprisoned in the rare, exotic tints of shimmering gems.

Here is a ring of slightly dulled silver—the design is of a water lily, fragile and delicate. In the heart of it lies, like a dewdrop, a pale-green jewel called peridot. Here is the soft, rich blue of lapis lazuli—here the keener azure of turquoise matrix. Here is a Mexican opal, full of fire, almost blood-red, glowing feverishly from its burnished-copper setting. What a terrible, yet beautiful ornament! One would be, I imagine, under a sort of fierce and splendid spell while wearing it. Here, cool and pale and pure as a moonbeam, is a little water opal,—set in silver of course. Here is an "abalone blister," iridescent like mother-of-pearl, carrying in it something of "the shade and the shine of the sea" from which the mother-shell originally came. Here is matrix opal, and here are numbers of strange-hued, crystalline gems with names all ending in "ite." To model with metal for clay—to paint with jewels for colour! Does it not sound like very real and very fascinating art?

These are passing glimpses of but two of the art industries of the Village. There are many others—enough to fill a book all by themselves. There are the Villagers who hammer brass, and those who carve wood; who make exquisite lace, who make furniture of quaint and original design. There are the designers and decorators, whose brains are full of graceful images and whose fingers are quick and facile to carry them out. There are, in fact, numbers on numbers of enthusiastic young people—they are nearly all of them young—who from sunrise to sunset spend their lives in adding to the sum of beauty that there is on earth.