When the evening came I went to the house in one of the big West End squares. A couple of old soldiers were acting as footmen in the hall, and scarcely had I taken off my coat when General Dickson in person appeared out of a room to the right and welcomed me cordially. He was a fine-looking man, above middle-height, well set up with broad shoulders. He had good features, too, and his bronzed face was framed by a mass of silver hair.
"I'm glad to see you," he said warmly, giving me a strong handclasp.
"I am delighted to be here," I said, "but I thought myself quite unknown in London. It was therefore doubly kind of you to invite me. I didn't think you'd remember me!"
"I met you at Wolseley's," he said, "and at dinner you said something about beauty that struck me. You said, 'There must be something strange in any excelling beauty.' Now beauty has passed out of my life, but a good dinner still appeals to me, so I took your phrase and applied it to a dinner-where, mind you, it's equally appropriate. 'There must be something strange in any excelling dinner'. So as I knew I'd have something strange tonight, I thought it only fair to ask you for your opinion of my attempt," and he laughed heartily, pleasantly.
The dinner was very good. There was a pretty, blond woman on the General's right, whose name I forget, though I got to know her fairly well later in London. She played hostess excellently and the service was faultless, too, though all the attendants were evidently old soldiers. The butler, I remember, with silver hair like his master, had the pleasant old custom of announcing the wine he was offering you, 'Chateau Lafitte 1870,' and so on. The dinner was very good, indeed, but no surprise in it till we came to the 'savoury,' when the door at the side opened and a Russian appeared in national costume with a great silver dish. "Milk caviar," our host announced, "sent to me by His Majesty, the Czar, whom I have the honour to know slightly," and he turned smiling to me.
"'Something strange,' indeed," I cried in response, "for even in Moscow or Nijni I have never tasted it. I've heard somewhere that it all goes to the Czar."
We all enjoyed the delicacy, though I noticed that the blond mistress of the ceremony did not take any of the cut-up onions which went with the caviar, but contented herself with a squeeze of lemon, and all of us followed her example.
This dinner at General Dickson's taught me that good eating was more studied in London than anywhere else in the world. Agg Gardner knew the General for his table, just as Gardner himself was known to everyone as a gourmet and fine taster in both food and wine. He's the head still, I believe of the kitchen committee in the House of Commons.
Strange that we had no word for gourmet in English, though we have gormandiser for gourmand, and glutton for goinfre, and others could be formed as gutler-even German has got Feinschmecker, but English has no dignified word, I'm afraid, for one who has a fine palate both in food and drink. Even "feaster" has a touch of greed in it instead of discrimination; so I've coined "fine taster," though it's not very good.
But it is only among the better classes that one dines to perfection in London.
The best restaurants are no better than the best in Paris or Vienna or Moscow; and the English middle class dine worse than the French middle class because they know nothing of cooking as an art; and the poor live worse and fare harder than any class in Christendom. English liberty and aristocratic harshness result in the degradation of the weak and the wastrel, and alas; often in the martyrdom of the best and most gifted. There are no Davidsons and Middletons, no despairing suicides of genius in any other country of Christendom, though in this respect America runs England close, for her two greatest, Poe and Whitman, lived in penury and died in utter neglect. "It's needful," we are told, "that offences come, but woe unto him by whom the offence cometh."
The old bad habit of eating and drinking to excess was still rampant in the eighties at city dinners. I remember how astonished I was at my first Lord Mayor's Banquet in 1883. The Evening News being Conservative, I was given a good seat at the Lord Mayor's table, nearly opposite him and the chief speakers.
After the first banquet I never missed one for years because of the light these feasts cast on English customs and manners. I will not tell about them in detail, indeed, I couldn't if I would, for my notes only apply to two or three out of a dozen or more. The first thing that struck me was the extraordinary gluttony displayed by seven out of ten of the city magnates. Till that night I had thought that as a matter of courtesy every man in public suppressed any signs of greed he might feel, but here greed was flaunted. The man next to me ate like an ogre. I took a spoonful or two of turtle soup and left the two or three floating morsels of green meat. When he had finished his first plateful, which was emptied to the last drop in double quick tune, my neighbour, while waiting for a second helping, turned to me. "That's why I like this table," he began, openly licking his lips. "You can have as many helpings as you want."
"Can't you at the other tables?" I asked.
"You can," he admitted, "but here the servants are instructed to be courteous and they all expect a tip. Most people give a bob, but I always give half a crown if the flunkey's attentive. Why do you leave that?" he exclaimed, pointing to the pieces of green meat on my plate. "That's the best part," and he turned his fat, flushed, red face to his second plateful without awaiting my answer. The gluttonous haste of the animal and the noise he made in swallowing each spoonful amused me. In a trice he had cleared the soupplate and beckoned to the waiter for a third supply. "I'll remember you, my man," he said in a loud whisper to the waiter, "but see that you get me some green fat. I want some Calipash."
"Is that what you call Calipash?" I asked, pointing with a smile to the green gobbets on my plate.
"Of course," he said. "They used to give you Calipash and Calipee with every plateful. I'll bet you don't know the difference between them: well, Calipash conies from the upper shell and Calipee from the lower shell of the turtle.
Half these new men," and he swung his hand contemptuously round the table, "don't know the difference between real turtle and mock turtle, but I do."
I couldn't help laughing. "Now you," he went on, "this is your first banquet, I can see. You're either a Member of the 'Ouse or perhaps a journalist. Now, ain't ye?"
"I'm the editor of the Evening News," I replied, "and you've guessed right. This is my first Lord Mayor's Banquet."
"Eat that up," he said, pointing to the green pieces on my plate. "Eat that up; it'll go to your ribs and make a man of you. I gamed three pounds at my first banquet, I did, but then I'm six inches taller nor you." He was indeed a man of huge frame.
"No place like this," he went on, "no place in the world," and he emptied another glass of champagne. "The best food and the best drink in God's world and nothing to pay for it, nothing. That's England, this is London, the grandest city on earth, I always say, and I'm proud to belong to it!"
When the first helping of mutton was brought to him, he demanded jelly, and when it was brought he cleared his plate in a twinkling and asked for more.
"Do you know what that is?" he cried, turning again to me. "That's the finest Southdown mutton in the world, three or four years old, if it's a day, and fit for a prince to eat. Fair melts in your mouth, it does. I don't say nuthin' against Welsh mutton, mind ye, or Exmoor, tasty and all that, but give me Southdown. Now that," he added, pointing to the full plate the waiter had brought him, "that's a bellyful; that's cut and come again style!" And he winked approval at the waiter.