Various Flavors of Coffee (2 page)

isting literary magazine in London had yet seen fit to accept his verses—he believed I should take up the coffee merchant’s offer and call.

“He hardly seemed a literary type.” I turned the card over. On the back was written in pencil,
Admit to my office, please. S.P.

“Look around you,” Hunt said, waving a hand at our surround-ings.“This place is full of those who clutch at the petticoats of the Muse.” It was true that there were often as many hangers-on in the Café Royal as there were writers or artists.

“But he particularly liked it that I called the coffee ‘rusty.’ ” The third member of our group—the artist Percival Morgan,

who had so far taken no part in the speculation—suddenly laughed.“I know what your Mr. Pinker wants.”

“What, then?”

He tapped the back page of the
Gazette.
“ ‘Branah’s patented invigorating powders,’ ” he read aloud. “ ‘Guaranteed to restore rosy health to the convalescent. Enjoy the effervescent vigor of the alpine rest cure in a single efficacious spoonful.’ It’s obvious, isn’t it—the man wants you to write his advertising.”

I had to admit that this sounded much more likely than a magazine. Pinker had specifically asked if I was good at describing—an odd sort of question for a magazine proprietor, but one that made perfect sense for someone who wanted advertisements composed. Doubtless he simply had a new coffee he wished to push.
Pinker’s pick-me-up breakfast blend. Richly roasted for a healthy complexion,
or some such nonsense. I felt an obscure sense of disappointment. For a moment I had hoped—well, that it might be something more exciting.

“Advertising,” Hunt said thoughtfully, “is the unspeakable expression of an unspeakable age.”

“On the contrary,” Morgan said, “I adore advertising. It is the only form of modern art to concern itself, however remotely, with the truth.”

They looked at me expectantly. But for some reason I was no longer in the mood for epigrams.

T
HE FOLLOWING
afternoon
saw me sitting at my desk, working on a translation of a poem by Baudelaire. At my side, a goblet of pale Venetian glass was filled with golden Rhenish wine; I was writing with a silver pencil on mauve paper infused with oil of bergamot, and I was smoking innumerable cigarettes of Turkish tobacco, all in the approved manner. Even so, it was utterly tedious work. Baudelaire, of course, is a great poet, and thrillingly perverse, but he also tends to be somewhat vague, which makes the transla-tor’s job a slow one, and were it not for the three pounds a publisher had promised me for the work, I would have jacked it in several hours ago. My rooms were in St. John’s Wood, close to the Regent’s Park, and on a sunny spring day such as this I could hear the distant cries of the ice-cream sellers as they paced back and forth by the gates. It made staying inside rather difficult. And for some reason, the only word I could think of that rhymed with “vice” was “strawberry ice.”

“Hang it,” I said aloud, putting down my pencil.

Pinker’s card lay on one side of the desk. I picked it up and looked at it again.
Samuel
PINKER
,
coffee importer and distributor.
An address in Narrow Street, Limehouse. The thought of getting out of my rooms, if only for an hour or two, tugged at me like a dog pulling at its master’s leash.

On the other side of the desk was a pile of bills. Of course, it was inevitable that a poet should have debts. In fact you could scarcely call yourself an artist if you did not. But just for a moment, I grew dispirited at the thought of eventually having to find the means to pay them off. I fingered the top one, a chit from my wine merchant.The Rhenish wine was not only golden in color: it had cost damn nearly as much as gold as well.Whereas if I agreed to do

Mr. Pinker’s advertisements . . . I had no idea what a person charged to write those bits of nonsense. But then, I reasoned, the fact that Pinker had resorted to hanging around the Café Royal in search of a writer suggested that he was as much a novice at this as I was. Supposing he could be prevailed upon to give me, not just a lump sum, but a retainer? Say that it was—I reached for a reasonable sum and then, finding it not enough, quadrupled it—forty pounds a year? And if the coffee merchant had other friends, business acquaintances, who wanted the same sort of service—why, it wouldn’t be long before a man had an income of four hundred pounds a year, and all from writing lines like “Enjoy the effervescent vigor of the alpine rest-cure in a single efficacious spoonful.” There would still be plenty of time left over for Baudelaire.True, the Muse might feel somewhat slighted that one was prostituting one’s talents in this way, but since one would have to keep the whole business secret from one’s literary acquaintances in any case, perhaps the Muse might not find out either.

I made a decision. Pausing only to pick up Pinker’s card, and to pull on a paisley-pattern coat I had bought at Liberty the week be-fore, I hastened to the door.

L
ET US
travel
now across London, from St. John’s Wood to Limehouse. Put like that, it does not sound so very exciting, does it? Allow me, then, to rephrase my invitation. Let us cross the greatest, most populous city in the world, at the very moment when it is at its peak—a journey on which, if you are to accompany me, you will have to employ every one of your senses. Up here by Primrose Hill the air—smell it!—is relatively fresh, with only the faintest sulphuric tinge from the coal fires and kitchen ranges which, even at this time of year, burn in every house. It is once we get past Marylebone that the real fun begins.The hansom cabs and coaches exude a rich smell of leather and sweating horse;

their wheels clatter on the stones; gutters are thick with their soft, moist dung. Everywhere streets are brought to a halt by the press of traffic: carts, coaches, carriages, broughams, cabriolets, gigs, coupes, landaus, clarences, barouches, all struggling in different directions. Some are even constructed in the shape of colossal top hats, with the hat makers’ names emblazoned in gold letters. The omnibus drivers are the worst offenders, veering from one side to the other, drawing up next to pedestrians, trying to tempt them inside for thruppence or, for a penny less, up onto the roof.Then there are the velocipedes and bicycles, the flocks of geese being driven to the markets, the peripatetic placard-men pushing through the crowds with their boards advertising umbrellas and other sundries, and the milkmaids who simply wander the streets with a bucket and a cow, waiting to be stopped for milk. Hawkers parade trays of pies and pastries; flower sellers thrust lupines and marigolds into your hands; pipes and cigars add their pungent perfume to the mix. A man cooking Yarmouth bloaters at a brazier waves one, speared on a fork, under your nose.
“Prime toasters,”
he cries hoarsely,
“tuppence for a toaster.”
Immediately, as if in response, a chorus of other shouts rises all around.
“Chestnuts, ’ot, ’ot, a penny a score... Blacking, an ’aypenny a skin... Fine walnuts sixteen a penny.. .”
yell the costermongers’ boys.
“Here’s your turnips,”
roars back a farmer on a donkey cart. Knife-grinders’ wheels shriek and sparkle as they meet the blades. Cadgers offer penny boxes of lucifers, their hands mutely outstretched.And on the outskirts of the crowd—always, always—shuffle the spectral figures of the desti-tute: the shoeless, breadless, homeless, penniless, waiting to take whatever chances might come their way.

If we ride the underground railway from Baker Street to Waterloo, we will be sharing the narrow platforms with the hot, wet, sooty steam from the locomotives; if we walk down the grand new thoroughfares such as Northumberland Avenue, built to cut through the slums of central London, we will find ourselves

amongst a crush of unwashed humanity—since each fine avenue is still surrounded by tenements, and each tenement is a rookery containing up to a hundred families, all living cheek-by-jowl in a fetid stew of sweat, gin, breath and skin. But the day is fine: we shall walk.Though many eye us as we hurry through the back streets of Covent Garden, searching for an exposed handkerchief or a pair of gloves to relieve us of, only the teenage whores in their cheap, gaudy finery speak as we pass, murmuring their lascivious saluta-tions in the hope of fanning a momentary spark of lust. But there is no time for that—no time for anything; we are already horribly late. Perhaps after all we will take a cab; look, there is one now.

As we clatter down Drury Lane we become aware of a faint odor, hardly pleasant, which creeps up these side streets like a poisonous fog. It is the smell of the river.True, thanks to Bazalgette’s sewers the Thames is no longer responsible for a stink of rotting waste so foul that Members of Parliament were once forced to souse their curtains with sulphate of lime; but sewers are only effective for those whose modern lavatories are connected to them, and in the tenements great putrid cesspits are still the norm, leak-ing their malodorous ooze into London’s underground streams. Then there are all the other smells from the industries clustered, for reasons of access, along the waterfront. Roasting hops from the breweries—that’s pleasant enough, as is the scent of exotic botani-cals from the gin distilleries; but then comes a reek of boiling horse bones from the glue factories, of boiling fat from the soap makers, of fish guts from Billingsgate, of rotting dog-dung from the tan-neries. Small wonder that those with sensitive constitutions wear nosegays, or keep brooches filled with eucalyptus salts fixed to their lapels.

As we approach the Port of London, we pass beneath great towering warehouses, high and dark as cliffs. From this one comes the rich, heavy smell of tobacco leaves, from the next a sugary waft of molasses, from another the sickly vapors of opium. Here the

going is sticky from a burst hogshead of rum; here the way is blocked by a passing phalanx of red-coated soldiers. All around is the chattering of a dozen different languages—flaxen-haired Germans, Chinamen with their black hair in pigtails, Negroes with bright handkerchiefs knotted round their heads. A blue-smocked butcher shoulders a tray of meat; after him comes a straw-hatted bos’n, carrying a green parakeet in a cage of bamboo. Yankees sing boisterous sail-making songs; coopers roll barrels along the cobbles with a deafening drum-like cacophony; goats bleat from their cages on their way to the ships.And the river—the river is full of vessels.Their masts and smokestacks stretch as far as the eye can see: sloops and schooners and bilanders, bafflers full of beer barrels and colliers laden with coal; hoys and eel boats, tea clippers and pleasure cruisers, gleaming mahogany-decked steamers and grimy working barges, all nosing higgledy-piggledy through the chaos, which echoes with the piercing shrieks of the steam whistles, the coalwhippers’ shouts, the klaxons of the pilot boats and the endlessly ringing bells of the barges.

The mind would be moribund indeed that did not feel a stirring of excitement at the boundless, busy energy of it all; at the industry and endeavor which pours out all over the globe from this great city, like bees hurrying to and from the laden, dripping honeycomb at the center of their hive. I saw no moral force in it, though—it was exciting, but it was thoughtless, and I watched it go by as a man might cheer a circus parade. It took a man like Pinker to see more to it than that—to see that Civilization, and Commerce, and Christianity, were ultimately one and the same, and to grasp that mere trade, unfettered by government, could be the instrument that would bring a great light to the last remaining dark parts of the world.

[
four
]

“Cedar”—this lovely, fresh, countrified aroma is that of untreated wood, and is almost identical to that of pencil shavings. It is typified by the natural essential oil of the Atlas cedar. It is more pronounced in mature harvests.

—
jean lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

he young man about my own age who opened the door
to the house in Narrow Street was clearly one of the proficient secretaries Pinker had spoken of. He was impeccably dressed; his white collar was neatly starched, and his hair, which gleamed with Macassar oil, was short—much shorter than my own. “Can I help

you?” he said, giving me a cool glance.

I handed him Pinker’s card.“Would you tell your employer that Robert Wallis, the poet, is here?”

The young man examined the card. “You’re to be admitted.

Follow me.”

I followed him into the building, which was, I now saw, a kind of warehouse. Bargemen were unloading burlap sacks from a jetty,

and a long chain of storemen were hurrying to various parts of the store, a sack on each shoulder.The smell of roasting coffee hit me like a waft of spice. Oh, that smell . . . The building held over a thousand sacks of coffee, and Pinker kept his big drum roasters go-ing day and night. It was a smell halfway between mouth-watering and eye-watering, a smell as dark as burning pitch; a bitter, black, beguiling perfume that caught at the back of the throat, filling the nostrils and the brain.A man could become addicted to that smell, as quick as any opium.

I only got the briefest glimpse of all that as the secretary led me up some stairs and showed me into an office. One window looked onto the street, but there was another, much larger, which gave onto the warehouse. It was at this window that Samuel Pinker was standing, watching the bustle below. Next to him, under a glass bell jar, a small brass instrument clattered quietly, unreeling a spool of thin white paper printed with symbols. The tangled loops, falling like a complicated fleur-de-lys onto the polished floorboards, were the only untidy thing in the room.Another secretary, dressed very like the first, was sitting at a desk, writing with a steel safety pen.

Pinker turned and saw me. “I will take four tons of the Brazilian and one of the Ceylon,” he said sternly.

“I beg your pardon?” I said, nonplussed.

“Payment will be freight on board, with the proviso that none spoils during the voyage.”