Part 10
When I began to ask questions about the regular House dinner and about that celebrated shilling dinner of which the outside public hear so much, the Chairman sent for the manager, a young man who has stepped from the post of assistant into the full-blown dignity of the managerial frock-coat, and asked him to show me the menus of the day and the wine list. There was a tone of pride in the manager's voice when he said that 300 dinners had been served that evening in the upstairs rooms, and he also told me the number of the guests in the downstairs rooms--186, I think he said, in all. The shilling dinner, of which about 150 are served each night, consists of fish or entrée, or joints, two vegetables, bread or plain toast, a pat of butter and Cheddar or Cheshire cheese. There is also a vegetarian dinner ready at a quarter of an hour's notice, from six till nine o'clock, which on that particular night consisted of _crème d'asperges, œufs a la tripe, carottes à la crème,_ or _haricots verts au beurre_ or _macaroni Milanaise,_ and cheese and butter. And there is a half-crown dinner of the day of four courses, vegetables and cheese and butter. Sixpence table money is charged for guests. This is the menu of the five-shilling dinner of that day, and it reads to me a very good one:
Melon Glacé. Consommé Froide or Crème d'Asperges. Filets de Sole Dejazet. Quartier d'Agneau à la Broche. Pommes Fondantes. Petits Pois au Beurre. Cailles de Vigne Casserole. Salade Romaine. Bombe Fraisalia. Croustades Maltaises. Dessert.
There is also a grill menu and a long list of cold joints. To make the list of menus complete, the manager showed me that of the two-shilling dinner, which is ready at six o'clock, served in the dining-room of the Press Gallery. Later on in the evening I was shown the separate kitchen which serves the dining-room of the Gallery and saw that it was as well organised as is everything else in the kitchen department of the House. Looking through the wine list, I noticed that some of the sherries have come from Windsor Castle, Marlborough House and Sandringham; the most expensive of these being that--bottled 1875--from Windsor, for which 12s. 6d. a bottle is charged. But a glass of Amontillado costs no more than 4d. Sixpence a glass is the lowest price charged for any port, and the most expensive on the list is Cockburn's 1847, bottled 1850, which is a guinea a bottle. There are some 1898 champagnes still on the list, and some 1900. The wines of 1904 make the longest list, Veuve Clicquot heading the roll at 13s. 6d. a bottle; Heidsieck Dry Monopole, Pommery and Greno, Pol Roger, Moët and Chandon, Krug and Monte Bello varying in price from 13s. 6d. to 10s. a bottle. The brand Deutz and Gelderman is represented by pints at 6s. 6d., and the magnums of Monte Bello cost 18s. 6d.
Our dinner finished and all the questions that I could think of asked and answered, my host took me out on to the terrace to drink our coffee. All the light of the sunset had died out, and the long lines of lamps on the Embankment across the river were shining brilliantly. Across Westminster Bridge the tramcars, all blazing with light, were passing and repassing each other, an effect I commend to Mr Arthur Collins for use in some future Drury Lane production. The terrace itself is dimly lighted by gas lamps, but this half light, pleasant and in keeping with the solemn mystery of the great, dark river that flows past, seems to frame fittingly the brilliance of the wonderful night scene. Little groups of ladies were about the tables in that centre space where members may dispense hospitality. The talk of the men who came to speak to my host was all of what was in progress in the chamber of debate upstairs, of the pity of it that no agreement had been come to and that a division was necessary, of the admirable speech that Mr Balfour had made in the afternoon, and such-like matters.
I felt that I had kept my host too long from his place and wished to bid him good-night there and then, but he said that though he had failed to obtain a ticket for me in the afternoon to hear the debate, he would try again; so upstairs we went, and he left me in charge, in the Members' Lobby, of a benign old gentleman with a pointed white beard and wearing knee-breeches, while he went inside to see what he could do. He returned waving a card, the white-bearded gentleman looked even more benign, and took my hat and coat, and I was sent with the card up a little flight of stairs. In perfect comfort I listened to Mr Bonar Law making his points on the Unionist side, rapping with his finger-nails on the big box on the table as he did so, and then heard Sir Edward Grey, tucking his right hand under his frock-coat as though that garment pinched him below the arm, reply for the Government; watched the members stream out for the division, heard the numbers read out, and saw the end of an historic debate.
A most pleasant and interesting evening.
XIX
A REGIMENTAL DINNER
AT THE TROCADERO
The Commissionaire at the centre entrance to the Trocadero greets me with "Regimental dinner, sir? First floor, leave your coat and hat to the right." A very intelligent man this commissionaire, an old soldier who knows another old soldier when he sees him. I leave my coat and hat as directed, ascend in the lift, and am disgorged into a corridor, the walls of which are covered with an inlay of gold Venetian glass tesseræ, pay the very small sum that subscribers to the Regimental Dinner Club are mulcted, and go into a screened-off space of the large banqueting-room in which the feast is to be held. Here two score gentlemen, old and young, most of them with a bar of miniature medals on the lapels of their evening coats, are talking, laughing, moving to and fro, and shaking hands with great heartiness. It is by no means a _mauvais quart d'heure_ these minutes of assembling before a regimental dinner, for old friends who see each other only once a year meet then, and the inquiries as to each other's health and prosperity and happiness are no formal compliments, but a real desire to know how the world wags with old comrades in arms.
The screens that divide the room in two are withdrawn and the company take their places at the table in no set order, though the veterans all try to sit next to some old friend of their soldiering days and the subalterns cling together in little swarms at the far ends of the table. The room in which we are dining, the Alexandra, is panelled to a man's height with dark marbles, with central squares of light marble, and there are at one end pillars of black wood fluted with gold. It is a room with a dignity of its own. Through the lace-curtained windows can be seen the electric advertisements on the other side of Shaftesbury Avenue, advertisements which set forth in a blaze of alternating red and green and white light the virtues of somebody's whisky and somebody else's cigarettes, and through the open windows come the roar of the traffic and the hoots of the motor horns. We are dining on the very hub of London. The table for the dinner is of horseshoe shape, with another length of table running up the centre. There are candles with pink shades, and pink flowers in vases and strewn on the table in garlands. The Major-General, who is the full Colonel of the regiment, who served in it for many long years, and was at one time the Adjutant of one of the battalions, sits at the top of the bend of the horseshoe, and chance, not precedence, has put me on one side of him. The two Brigadier-Generals who are amongst the diners, each of whom wears, as our chairman does, his C.B. cross at one end of his long bars of miniature medals and decorations, are somewhere farther down the curve of the horseshoe, and brevet colonels and subalterns and captains and lieutenant-colonels and majors all sit where fancy leads them, some of the seniors to talk to the son of an old friend, a boy who has just joined, some to talk polo, or fishing, or gardening, or shooting, or the iniquities of the Land Tax with friends of like tastes.
A Regimental Dinner ought to be described by some lady novelist who has never been to one and is in no way hampered by any unromantic facts. Grizzled men bearing the scars of old wounds should talk to each other of midnight marches and fierce charges and hand-to-hand combats, and tell the tale over their port of how Billy Bright Eyes, the curly-headed drummer of Company B, won the Victoria Cross on some day of awful slaughter. Unfortunately for picturesqueness' sake the grizzled men talk about nothing of the kind. The man who could narrate as moving stories as ever Othello dropped into Desdemona's willing ear tells his next-door neighbour of the fishing in Norway he has taken this year and of the advantages of travelling to it from the port in a motor car instead of going on the old country conveyances. The man who really earned a V.C. in South Africa, though there were no lookers-on to write glowing accounts to headquarters, is discussing with another man of many battles the advantages of Waterloo over other late-bearing strawberry plants, and laments that there are no pears this year on any of his trees. Tales of a big night at mess in "The Shiny," when a Highland regiment, passing through, was entertained at a dinner which only ended when the pipes were playing "Hey Johnnie Cope" in the grey before sunrise, may stray casually into the conversation, and a regretful word or two may be said that the regimental polo fund in India had not enough ready money to buy a certain pony which would just have won a match for the regiment in an important tournament. Cricket, polo, grouse moors, the coming hunting season, the present play at the Gaiety, the merits of the various revues are the things talked about, and "shop" is almost as rigidly excluded from the conversation as though the dinner was taking place in the regimental mess.
The length of a regimental dinner is as difficult to curtail as is that of a City feast or a Masonic banquet, for any manager of a restaurant or any _maître d'hôtel_ considers it to be an "important" meal, and believes that the guests will not think they have dined satisfactorily unless they have eaten prodigiously. But the three officers who manage our Regimental Dinner Club are happily men of the world as well as old soldiers, and they insist that the dinner shall be ordered to please the tastes of those who dine, and not of those who serve the dinner. This is the menu of the Trocadero dinner. The little circle of beef offered to each man is the only heavy dish in it, and the chicken with its tempting stuffing is the only rich dish that it contains:
Melon Glacé. Hors d'œuvre de Choix. Tortue Claire. Truite de Rivière au bleu, Beurre fondu. Pommes nature. Poularde du Mans Favorite. Médaillon de Bœuf Rossini. Spoom au Kummel. Caille de Vigne sur Croustade. Salade Romaine. Asperges nouvelles, Sauce Maltaise. Fraises à la Zouave. Corbeille de Friandises. Pailles au Parmesan. Dessert. Café.
VINS. Punch. Johannisberger, 1900. Chas. Heidsieck, 1904. Moët et Chandon, 1904. Château Branaire Ducru, 1900. Dow's 1890 Port. Courvoisier's 1831 Brandy.
The menu, according to custom immemorial, is decorated with the crests of the regiment, with the date of its raising, 1572, and with a little picture of the uniform of the regiment in the year 1684, when the full privates wore black boy-scout hats, bands such as barristers still wear, and coats with very long skirts.
Twenty years ago no regimental dinner could have been held without interminable speeches, which were sometimes listened to with scant patience by the subalterns, who wanted to get to the Empire or the Alhambra before the performance ended. Nowadays there are no speeches, at all events at our dinner, and the only toast proposed is that of "The King." After this loyal toast has been drunk and the cigars lighted, all formality vanishes, every man moves from his place and goes to talk to those of his old friends who have been out of earshot during dinner; the subalterns make inquiries as to whether the Cabaret Club or the Four Hundred Club is the most amusing place in which to keep awake after all the restaurants are shut, and as eleven o'clock comes some of the guests go off to the Service clubs, some have to catch last trains, and the commissionaire downstairs has a busy time whistling for taxis.
There is not much ancient history to delve into with regard to the Trocadero Restaurant. Part of it stands on the ground which, when Great Windmill Street was a cul-de-sac, before Shaftesbury Avenue was made, was occupied by the Argyle Dancing Rooms, familiarly known as "The Duke's." "The Duke's" played its part in the night life of London in the sixties and seventies, when Kate Hamilton's and the other night houses still existed in the Haymarket, and though there were occasional rows there, some of the officers of one of the Household cavalry regiments being on one occasion marched off to the police station, it was on the whole a well-conducted establishment, with an admirable orchestra to play dance music. But the spasm of morality which passed over London towards the end of the last century swept the Argyle Rooms out of existence, and their proprietor, Mr "Bob" Bignell, converted the vacant rooms into the Trocadero Music Hall. Mr "Sam" Adams was the next proprietor of the music-hall, and then Mr Joseph Lyons, who was not yet a knight, saw the possibilities of the site for a restaurant, and gave a very large price for the old hall. The Trocadero Restaurant, when it first was built, was only half as large as it is now, for that red-brick portion of it which faces Shaftesbury Avenue was a nest of flats and chambers, and the conversion of this building when Lyons & Company bought it, into restaurant premises, was an architectural feat. Where the old building ends and the additions begin can be clearly seen by the difference in the architecture.
It is a curious fact that Sir Joseph Lyons, the head and mainspring of the great organisation which controls the scores of restaurants and hundreds of tea-shops belonging to Lyons & Company, wished in his youthful days to be an artist, and that his amusement now, whenever he has any leisure, which he rarely has, is to paint sunsets.
XX
"JOLLY GOOD"
A HALF-GUINEA DINNER AT THE TROCADERO
No account of the Trocadero would be complete without an allusion to the _table d'hôte_ dinners which are served in the great hall of the restaurant, and I do not think that I can do better than reprint the account of a half-guinea dinner I gave there some ten years ago to a small Harrow boy. The Mr Lyons of the article is now Sir Joseph, and I fancy that the Messrs Salmon, who are now County Councillors and members of many other important bodies, are too busy to show even such an important person as a young Harrovian all the glories of the restaurant. But in all essentials the half-guinea dinner of to-day at the Trocadero is much as it was ten years ago. It was excellent then and is excellent now.
* * * * *
I dined one day early last week at the Trocadero, a little specially ordered _tête-à-tête_ dinner over which the chef had taken much trouble--his _Suprêmes de sole Trocadéro_ and _Poulet de printemps Rodisi_ are well worth remembering--and while I drank the Moët '84, cuvée 1714, and luxuriated in some brandy dating back to 1815, the solution of a problem that had puzzled me mildly came to me.
An old friend was sending his son, a boy at Harrow, up to London to see a dentist before going back to school, and asked me if I would mind giving him something to eat, and taking him to a performance of some kind. I said "Yes," of course; but I felt it was something of an undertaking. When I was at Harrow my ideas of luxury consisted of ices at Fuller's and sausages and mashed potatoes carried home in a paper bag. I had no idea as to what Jones minor's tastes might be; but if he was anything like what I was then he would prefer plenty of good food, combined with music and gorgeousness and excitement, to the most delicate _mousse_ ever made, eaten in philosophic calm. The Trocadero was the place; if he was not impressed by the dinner, by the magnificence of the rooms, by the beautiful staircase, by the music, then I did not know my Harrow boy.
Jones minor arrived at my club at five minutes to the half-past seven, and I saw at once that he was not a young gentleman to be easily impressed. He had on a faultless black short jacket and trousers, a white waistcoat, and a tuberose in his buttonhole. I asked him if he knew the Trocadero, and he said that he had not dined there; but plenty of boys in his house had, and had said that it was jolly good.
When we came to the entrance of the Trocadero, an entrance that always impresses me by its palatial splendour, I pointed out to him the veined marble of the walls and the magnificent frieze in which Messrs Moira and Jenkins, two of the cleverest of our young artists, have struck out a new line of decoration; and when I had paused a while to let him take it in I asked him what he thought of it, and he said he thought it was jolly good.
Mr Alfred Salmon, in chief command, and the good-looking _maître d'hôtel_, both saw us to our table, and a plump waiter whom I remember of old at the Savoy was there with the various menu cards in his hand. The table had been heaped with roses in our honour, and I felt that all this attention must impress Jones minor; but he unfolded his napkin with the calm of unconcern, and I regretted that I had not arranged to have the band play "See the Conquering Hero Comes" and have a triumphal arch erected in his honour.
I had intended to give him the five-shilling _table d'hôte_ meal; but in face of this calm superiority I abandoned that, skipped the seven-and-six _table d'hôte_ as well, and ordered the half-guinea one. I had thought that three-and-sixpennyworth of wine should be ample for a growing boy, but having rushed into reckless extravagance over the food I thought I would let him try seven-and-sixpenny worth of wine. I personally ordered a pint of 277, which is an excellent wine. I told Jones minor that the doctor told me not to mix my wines, and he said something about having to be careful when one got old that I did not think sounded at all nice.
While we paused, waiting for the _hors d'œuvre_, I drew his attention to all the gorgeousness of the grand restaurant, the cream and gold, the hand-painted ceiling-panels, on which the cupids sport, the brocades and silks of the wall-panels, the broad band of gold of the gallery running round the room, the crimson and gold draperies, the glimpse of the blue and white and gold of the _salon_ seen through the dark framing of the _portières_; I bade him note the morocco leather chairs with gold initials on the back, and the same initials on the collars of the servants. It is a blaze of gorgeousness that recalls to me some dream of the Arabian Nights; but Jones minor said somewhat coldly that he thought it jolly good.
We drank our _potage vert-pré_ out of silver plates, but this had no more effect on Jones minor than if they had been earthenware. I drew his attention to the excellent band up above, in their gilded cage. I pointed out to him amidst the crowd of diners two ex-Lord Mayors, an A.D.C. to Royalty, the most popular low comedian of the day, a member of the last Cabinet, our foremost dramatic critic and his wife, and one of our leading lawyers. Jones minor had no objection to their presence, but nothing more. The only interest he showed was in a table at which an Irish M.P. was entertaining his family, among them two Eton boys, and towards them his attitude was haughty but hostile.
So I tried to thaw him while we ate our whitebait, which was capitally cooked, by telling him tales of the criminal existence I led when I was a boy at Harrow. I told him how I put my foot in the door of Mr Bull's classroom when it was being closed at early morning school time. I told him how I took up alternate halves of one exercise of rule of three through one whole term to "Old Teek." I told him how I and another bad boy lay for two hours in a bed of nettles on Kingsbury race-course, because we thought a man watching the races with his back to us was Mr Middlemist. And I asked him if Harrow was likely to be badly beaten by Eton in the coming match at Lord's.
This for a moment thawed Jones minor into humanity. Harrow, he said, was going to jolly well lick Eton in one innings, and before the boy froze up again I learned that the Headmaster's had beaten some other house in the final of the Torpid football matches, and several other items of interesting news.
The _filets mignons_, from his face, Jones minor seemed to like; but he restrained all his emotions with Spartan severity. He did not contradict me when I said that the _petites bouchées à la St-Hubert_ were good; but he ate three _sorbets_, and looked as if he could tackle three more, which showed me that the real spirit of the Harrow boy was there somewhere under the glacial surface, if I could only get at it.
Mr Lyons, piercing of eye, his head-covering worn a little through by the worries of the magnitude of his many undertakings, with little side-whiskers and a little moustache, passed by, and I introduced the boy to him, and afterwards explained the number of strings pulled by this Napoleon of supply, and at the mention of a "grub shop in every other street" Jones minor's eyes brightened.
When Jones minor had made a clean sweep of the plate of _petits fours_, and had drained the last drops of his glass of Chartreuse, I thought I might venture to ask him how he liked his dinner, as a whole. This was what he had conscientiously eaten through:
Hors d'œuvre variés. Consommé Monte Carlo. Potage vert-pré. Petites soles à la Florentine. Blanchailles au citron. Filets mignons à la Rachel. Petites bouchées à la St-Hubert. Sorbet. Poularde de Surrey à la broche. Salade saison. Asperges nouvelles. Sauce mousseux. Charlotte russe. Soufflé glacé Pompadour. Petits fours. Dessert.