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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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