Part 13
When the pirates' prisoner was arrested he was requested to step into a little boat on wheels, the doors of the ante-room were flung wide open and the boat was dragged into the presence of the pirate Captain, who stood in the centre of the room, with the pirate band playing "Down Among the Dead Men" on silvered papier-maché instruments to his left, and to his right the pirate crew flourishing pistols and cutlasses. The little boat paused for a moment while the pirates gave a blood-curdling boarding yell, and then continued its career at hydroplane pace into the dining-room, with the pirates following after.
The Crown Room had become a pirates' lair prepared for a feast. The walls had been shut out by scenery representing sea and mountain; the floor was an inch deep in sawdust; in the corners of the room were plantations of palm-trees, with parrots in cages in the midst of them. These parrots missed the opportunity of their lives, for they were so stunned by the noise the pirates made at their meal that they never uttered a single scream.
At one side of the pirates' lair was a great dhow, such as one sees sailing in and out of Aden. It was really a stage for the band and the after-dinner performers, but it had been converted into a dhow. In its tall stern a piano was housed; it had high bulwarks, a tall mast and a great lateen sail. From the mast-head flew the "Jolly Roger," and in the rigging was a huge red lantern.
A dozen round tables had been prepared for the pirates, with sheets of brown paper laid on them as tablecloths. The room was lighted by candles stuck into bottles and set on the tables. Of knives and forks there were none apparent; the salt was great lumps of the rock variety, the mustard was in teacups and the pepper in screws of brown paper. The menu, which is reproduced at the head of this chapter, was written with an inky stick on torn bits of brown paper, and each pirate's place was marked for him by a card with blood spots on it. Every table had a big card in a split cane set up to mark a pirate locality. There were Skeleton Cove and Murder Gulch, Coffin Marsh, Gallows' Hill, Cannibal's Creek, Dead Man's Rock and others, and the ship's officers, the roll of which included the Stale Mate, the Hangman, the Powder Monkey and the Ship's Parrot, presided each at a table. The first mate sat next to the Captain, and it was his business to wave a black flag over his great commander's head at intervals, and to beat constantly a big drum which was concealed under the table.
The waiters at the feast looked even greater ruffians than the feasters, which is saying a great deal. They were the most shocking set of criminals and marine cut-throats that ever carried a dish of salt junk. Most of them had black eyes; their bare arms were wondrously tattooed, and they all smoked short clay pipes as they went about their work. The pirates, because of their superior station, smoked long churchwardens, of which, and playing-cards, there was a plentiful supply scattered about the tables. One waiter entered so thoroughly into his part that he danced a little hornpipe as he took round the dishes.
When the feast had commenced with oysters, the pirate waiters suddenly produced a supply of knives and forks, and menus of what the real dinner was. Below is the menu of the real dinner, and an excellent dinner it was. Pirates who had known better days nodded to each other approvingly across the table when they had eaten the fish dish, which was exceptionally good. Mr George Harvey most certainly has succeeded in regilding the faded glories of the Freemasons' Tavern and in putting the Connaught Rooms, which is the title of the rebuilt house, very firmly on the dining map of London.
Huîtres Royales. Consommé Excelsior. Timbale de Sole Archiduc. Poularde Hongroise. Nouilles au Parmesan. Noisette de Pré-Salé Montmorency. Pommes Anna. Faisan en Cocotte à la Truffe. Salade Jolly Roger. Jambon d'York au Champagne. Poires St George. Friandises. Barquettes de Laitances. Dessert. Café Double.
The band, a real string orchestra, in white jackets, on the deck of the dhow, played rag-time melodies and other inspiriting airs, and occasionally made itself heard above the noise with which the pirates settled down to their feast. The big drum was always in action, and somewhere outside the hall a waiter shook a sheet of theatre-thunder in a vain attempt to equal the noise of the drum within; pistols were discharged in all parts of the lair, and the pirate with an emerald-green complexion, whenever he thought the Captain looked dull, walked over to his table and fired a pistol into his ear to cheer him up. When this failed to attract the Captain's attention, a large cracker was set fire to under his chair.
One of the groups of pirates, thinking that the band were having far too peaceable a time, suddenly drew pistols and cutlasses, boarded the dhow, and put the musicians to the sword, which delighted the fiddlers very much. There was also dancing during the dinner, for two of the pirates, wishing to give a real society touch to the function, rose and performed a wild Tango in and out of the tables. That was not the only dance, for a fat carver, who wore a conical white cap and white garments plentifully besprinkled with gore, had stood during the early stages of dinner and had looked on at the pirates' antics, being much amused thereat. One of the pirates, thinking that a spectator ought to have some share in the active work of the fun, seized him and forced him to dance, and dance the carver did, with such good will that he finally tired the pirate out, and remained, perspiring and smiling, the victor in the dance.
When dinner was over the guest of the evening was tried by court-martial. He was accommodated with a chair in the centre of the room and given a cigar and a drink; a wide circle of candles in bottles was put about him to give light to the proceedings, and all the pirates sat in groups in the sawdust, the master-at-arms, with drawn cutlass, behind the prisoner, the accuser, a picturesque ruffian, and the prisoner's friend, an equally forbidding scoundrel, and the pirate Captain being the only individuals standing up. This grouping formed a really striking picture, and I have no doubt that many artistic eyes took in its possibilities. The accusation brought against the prisoner was that he had paid income tax (groans from the pirates), that he was even suspected of paying super-tax (yells of fury from the pirates), that he kept tame animals, notably Welsh rarebits, and that he fed them. The pirate Captain had already warned the prisoner that his sentence had been determined upon, and therefore that it was no use for him, or anybody else on his behalf, to plead his cause; but the prisoner's friend had a speech ready, and loosed it off, making the case very much blacker against his client than it had been before. Sentence was then duly pronounced, but as the pirate Captain had mislaid the plank on which the victim was to walk, and as the goldfish which were to represent sharks had been left downstairs, the doom of the victim resolved itself into the presentation to him of a pair of silver hand-cuffs with a tiny watch at the end of one of them.
After the court-martial, the pirates gave themselves and their guest an entertainment. One pirate sang admirably; another pirate, whose name, I think, before he went to sea, was Walter Churcher, told excellent stories, and a third pirate went through the whole performance that the flashlight photographer inflicts on good-natured diners, his apparatus being a whisky bottle and a tin mug, and then handed round photographs he pretended to have taken of our guest.
There was more fun to come, but as midnight was drawing near, and as I belong now to the early-to-bed sect of sea-wolves, I departed quietly. The lift boy at my flat, when he saw the brick-dust of my marine complexion, said to me, as he took me up: "Good gracious, sir, whatever has happened to your face?"
It was a great night altogether!
XXVI
APPENRODT'S
I had been, like every other Londoner, aware of the coming of Appenrodt's shops into the panorama of the London streets; but I had never gone into one of the Appenrodt establishments until a year ago, and it was the dread of the armour-plate sandwich of the buffets that sent me there.
I often, when I am going to an early first night at the theatre, cut matters so fine as to dinner that I have only time to eat a couple of sandwiches at a buffet, and as often as not the barmaid, knowing that I am not a regular customer, does a feat of sleight of hand and gives me the roof, the two top sandwiches of the pile. If I protest I am assured that they were fresh-cut not a quarter of an hour ago, and being a moral coward in such matters, I eat them. If I postpone my sandwich meal until after the theatre a second thickness of armour-plate has been added to the bread.
One evening, walking home after the theatre to my flat in the wild north-west, I became aware when I reached Oxford Circus that I was very hungry. Through the windows of Appenrodt's shop at Oxford Circus I could see men in white jackets very busily slicing bread and making sandwiches for the people who sat at the little tables. I went in, ate a couple of ham sandwiches which had been made for me before my eyes, and blessed the name of Appenrodt, for they were all that a ham sandwich should be.
When Appenrodt's headquarters at No. 1 Coventry Street were a-building I watched with interest the putting in of the big plate-glass windows, and after its completion I looked whenever I passed at the big _cartes du jour_ which are put up outside wherever there is space for them. One evening, on my way to a club in the Leicester Square district to dine, I found, just as I arrived at the Coventry Street corner, that I had cut my time very close, and that if I dined at the club I should not be in my place at the rising of the curtain. I looked at the big bills of fare outside Appenrodt's, and went up into the restaurant on the first floor to see whether I could get there a quickly served meal. I had an excellent plate of _chicken consommé_, a cut from one of the joints of the day--roast veal and bacon--and a rice pudding. I found this simple food quite excellent, and I got to my theatre in plenty of time.
My first experience led me on to other dinners in Appenrodt's restaurant on the first floor, and I found that the dishes, without exception, were admirably cooked, and that the soup and the _soufflé omelette_ with which I now always begin and end a repast at Appenrodt's are noticeably excellent. There is plenty of choice, for the menu of the day comprises four soups, ten fish dishes, at least the same number of entrées, some of these being those that Germans love, vegetables and sweets in due proportion, four joints at lunch-time and the same number at dinner.
This is a typical dinner that I ate one night at Appenrodt's, and these are the prices I paid for the dishes:--_crème conti_, an excellent white soup, 6d.; _suprême de brill Dugleré_, 1s. 6d.; _pilaff de foie de volaille à la Grecque_, 1s. 3d.; and _omelette Mylord_, which is a form of _omelette surprise_, 1s. 6d.; and I drank therewith a pint of Rhenish sparkling muscatel with all the taste and bouquet of the grape in it.
The restaurant is all white and gold, and has a low ceiling, but as it has a row of windows on two sides I have no doubt it will be quite cool in summer. The curtains to the windows are of some pleasant straw-coloured material, with pink spots on it; the carpet is dark. A glass screen is in front of the lifts which bring the dishes down from the kitchen at the top of the house. There are two staircases, one, the main one, from Coventry Street, and another one from Wardour Street, leading up to the restaurant. The waiters are mostly Germans, who speak good English, and who have the bearing of drilled men. I have no doubt that Mr Appenrodt, who at one time sacrificed a growing business to go back to Germany to do his military training, does not engage any of his countrymen who have shirked their years of service. The only drawback to the restaurant that I have noticed is an unavoidable one owing to the construction of the house, that the personnel of the coffee kitchen have to pass through the restaurant coming and going about their work.
The people who dine in the restaurant at Appenrodt's seem to belong to all classes. When I have dined there early I have seen amongst the customers men and ladies whom I recognised as belonging to the Variety profession, and who eat an early meal before going to the theatres where they perform. Many of Appenrodt's countrymen and countrywomen dine in the restaurant, and the black-coated classes of respectable Londoners and their womenfolk have already found out how good the food is there.
Having seen all these things, and feeling sure that Appenrodt, with his many shops and his restaurants, meant a new power come into the centre of London, I became curious as to the owner, or owners, of the name and asked whether it was just a _nom de fantasie_ or whether there really is such a person in the flesh as a Mr Appenrodt. I was assured that there was a Mr Appenrodt and that if it would gratify my curiosity to talk to him he would be very pleased to meet me.
And so it came that I met Mr Appenrodt in his own restaurant, and found him to be a very quiet, patently sincere German gentleman, with a round face, pleasant, steady eyes, hair a little thin on the top and a large dark moustache. He told me across a luncheon-table the story of his life, and I was able to assure him that other people besides myself would find the history of his early struggles in England an interesting one.
He was born in Berlin in 1867, and, having been a clerk in a Hamburg shipping agency, came to this country when he was nineteen years old to learn the English language. He soon found a billet in a City office, as correspondence clerk at a pound a week, and he determined to stay in England, though his father, who was a spirit distiller, wished him to return to Germany and the distillery.
When he was twenty years old he thought he knew London well enough to engage in business on his own account. His father would not help him, but he had £2000 left him by his mother, and with this he engaged in various speculations, the thought of which now moves him to hearty laughter. He wanted to induce the English to smoke the German students' long pipes and to use washable india-rubber playing cards.
These and other such brilliant ideas made a very serious inroad on his capital. He held, amongst other agencies, one for a manufacturer of preserves, and this brought him into touch with German provision shops. These shops were all tucked away in little side streets in the Soho district, and Mr Appenrodt thought that there would be a good opening for German _delicatessen_ if it was possible to show them in better premises and with more appetising surroundings. He opened in a basement at the corner of Lombard Street and Gracechurch Street a shop, in a room about twenty feet square. At that time there were no light refreshment places in the City except the A.B.C. shops, and Mr Appenrodt soon had a large clientele for his little shop. He saw that there was a fortune to be made in catering for the wants of the middle classes, but before he experimented on a larger scale he went back to Germany to serve his one year of military service, having sold his little business to a man who transferred it to some licensed premises and made a fortune by it.
When Mr Appenrodt came back, having completed his term of military service, he found that his luck in the City had petered out, for not one of the shops he opened in succession proved to be a success. The last straw was a shop in the Commercial Road, which seemed likely to eat up all the funds he had left. But it was during this last attempt that his luck turned. He engaged a young lady as shop assistant, and she brought him good luck and success; and his love story, for it was a love story, led up to the right ending of all love stories, a happy marriage. And he backed his luck, for he and his wife made a last bold bid for fortune by taking a shop in the West End, at the corner of Coventry Street and Whitcomb Street. This venture proved an instantaneous success. Mr Appenrodt and his wife at first did all the work themselves, and their business hours were from nine A.M. until one the next morning. They had no afternoons or evenings off, and worked all and every Sunday.
Easier times came, assistant after assistant was engaged, and one branch after another was opened. Not all of these proved successes, but in spite of minor set-backs, the firm of two continued to flourish more and more, and has now the big shop and restaurant at Coventry Street, eight branches in various parts of London and a big depot in Paris. Mr Appenrodt has refused many offers to turn his undertaking into a company. He looks on his five hundred employees as his family, and is not willing to put them at the mercy of strangers.
That was Mr Appenrodt's story to me across the table, and when I asked him questions he amplified his personal history in various ways. He told me how the Parisian depot came to be established: that one day he met a former employee, one of his own countrymen, who talked French like a native of France. He knew his man, and he told him that he was just going over to Paris, and that if he could find a suitable shop to let there, he would take it and put his old friend in as his partner and as the manager. He found the shop, put his friend into it, and it has proved a most successful speculation. He told me of the various obstacles he had to overcome in building his premises in Coventry Street; of the large sums he expended to buy out the owners of the three houses he required and of the difficulties he experienced in obtaining a licence to sell beer and other liquors; how at last he bought two public-houses and surrendered their licences, and how the Licensing Magistrates then gave him permission to serve alcoholic drinks, but only with food. His prices, Mr Appenrodt told me, are fixed as being the lowest prices at which he can sell first-class food and make a reasonable profit on it without looking to any profit from the drinks that are sold, for no pressure whatever is put on the patrons of his restaurant to drink anything stronger than water.
I asked Mr Appenrodt what his special hobby was, and he told me that it was to buy public-houses and to turn them into Appenrodt establishments, which, if you come to think of it, is as true a work of reform as any that is being carried out in London.
He and his wife, he went on to say, love the work they do. They go together frequently to the firm's factory in the country, where workmen, many of them imported from Germany, make the sausages, the glassed delicacies and other specialities of the house, and on fine days to the farm they own at Hendon, a picturesque tract of country through which the River Brent flows, where they breed pigs for the pork sausages--though English pork is so firm that Dutch pork or other foreign porks must be mixed with it to make it bind--and fowls and other farm produce.
Before I said good-bye to Mr Appenrodt he asked me if I would like to see the kitchen and other parts of the house, and I said "With pleasure," for I never think that the final word can be said regarding a restaurant until one has seen the kitchen that supplies it. We went upstairs to the top of the house, passing on the way a room in which half-a-dozen women were peeling potatoes for the potato salads, potatoes specially imported from Germany, for English potatoes crumble too easily to be satisfactory material. And eventually we came to a big kitchen at the top of the house, very airy and very clean, where a French _chef de cuisine_ rules over cooks of all nationalities. Descending again, we went into the basement to look at Appenrodt's _Keller_, decorated after the German style with landscapes and figures, where two bands play alternately all the afternoon and evening, and where good Germans, and Englishmen who like good German beer, congregate to eat simple food and drink the produce of Austrian and German hop-fields.
And finally I walked round the big shop on the ground floor, where at the marble counter the men in white were busy cutting sandwiches, and Mr Appenrodt explained to me the beauties of the glassed delicacies and the great variety of sausages of all countries, and as he took up one after another, sausages of majestic size, products of Germany or Italy, cut so as to show a section, and smaller sausages in glass jars, and bunches and packages of sausages, and Swiss sausages in a shape to take up very little room in a knapsack, I felt coming over me exactly the same feeling that I experience when a collector of beautiful china, or priceless lacquer or wonderful metal-work explains to me the beauties of his collection, a feeling that I too want to collect that particular kind of curio. If I were much in Mr Appenrodt's company I feel quite sure that I should become an enthusiastic amateur in the matter of sausages.
XXVII
THE BURFORD BRIDGE HOTEL
One of the pleasantest short runs out of London by motor car is to Box Hill and the little hotel which lies just below it. In summer the most picturesque way of getting to the hotel is either by one of the Brighton coaches, which make it their lunching place, or by the coach which goes to Box Hill and back in a day. And by no means an uncomfortable, and certainly the cheapest, way of going down to the hotel is to do as I did one Sunday--journey by the L.B. & S.C. Railway, getting glimpses of Epsom and the great rolling common land of Ashtead, of little rivers, and old mills, and wooded downs, on the way.