In his autobiography Wheatley recalls what a splendid era the Twenties were, at the time he had mixed feelings. In autumn 1921 he complained to Hilda that he was broke, Christmas was coming, and he had to spend it at Bexhill with the Newtons. “This will mean spending more money,” he wrote, and standing around in a crowded bar. Instead,
If I am going to drink – I like it to be with my own friends, – I like it to be in a quiet and secluded spot – not a bar – I like it to be a good wine over which I can linger, with joy, – not continual rounds of gin and vermouth – and if I dance, I like it to be with one girl all the evening – and one who enjoys it in the way I enjoy it – revelling in the sensuous movements of the music, the light, the colour … from the aesthetic point of view.
“Of course,” he added, in their way
I suppose these people are very nice – their parents I believe term them “jolly young people”, and they term each other “cheery souls” a terrible expression! – but it annoys me so to think that they go home and tell all their friends that they have had “the time of their lives” and moreover believe it – poor people, – well one day perhaps they will know what it is to Live with a Capital L – but I doubt it.
Wheatley had acquired these “aesthetic” and condescending values largely from Eric.
*
Despite their own forays into living with a capital L, Wheatley had been lonely through 1921, without a girl. Then one morning in Bond Street he saw the Chinese goddess Kwan-Yin, Queen of Heaven, in the window of Asprey’s. Wheatley prayed to her to send him a mistress.
As if in answer, he saw an attractive girl’s reflection in the window as she walked past, walked after her and managed to strike up a conversation. They had lunch, and she agreed to see him again the following Saturday, when he took her down to Yeoman House, slipped Sims some money, and spent the night with her. She was eighteen and an artist’s model from a poor background (“but her accent was not common”). They continued to see each other for a few weeks.
Wheatley’s loneliness was made worse when Hilda Gosling married John Gardner, a dealer in old prints. He was not long out of uniform, but in due course he became a respected dealer with a shop on Buckingham Gate. Wheatley was best man at their wedding, and made a characteristic list of expenses (“Tea 1lb Souchong 5/6”; “Special mouthwash 4/-” and so on) coming to £16/9/6 against the £12/10 he was given for the occasion, with an invoiced shortfall of £3/19/6.
Wheatley wrote an Orientalist paean to their happiness immediately after their honeymoon: “My dear, dear People,” he wrote
… The joy which I derived from seeing you both so happy – was greater than the joy contained in many bottles – many dinners – and any that a Maiden has to offer, in Allah’s Garden – beneath which rivers flow.
You see – the choicest bottles – leave a bitter taste, the morning after – the most Lucullan feast – a heaviness and tension, undesirable – and even the most seductive Houri – one sometimes grows – a little weary.
But in the spectacle of your happiness together – I find a wine, of which I can drink long and deep – but yet it leaves no bitterness because – I love you both. – In your companionship – I have a dish – in which there is no legacy of heaviness – instead – it lightens wonderfully my burdens – how much so you can never know – and in your friendship, I can thank the Gods – there is no chance of waking up one morning – satiated and disillusioned.
…
One thing only – do I say – never rob me of my wine – let me drink of it for many moons, even unto the time when we shall pass into the land which no man knoweth.
Wheatley was looking forward to seeing them again, because time was going slowly on his own: “Sunday is a miserable day I find now – particularly the mornings – therefore forget not that you are wealthy – let a few crumbs I beg fall from your table.”
A couple of weeks later he wrote again: “Will you please forgive an ordinary mortal – if for a few moments he breaks in upon the peace and happiness of the Elysian Fields in which you dwell …”. Continuing the Oriental theme, he thought John had shut himself up in his Palace,
eschewing all the works of man, – happy, in hunting the game within his pastures and revelling in the joys of Allah’s Paradise that lie within his gates …
They had all but disappeared into their happiness, Wheatley wrote a couple of weeks later, “like divers into so deep a sea that we do not even see the bubbles … rising from your helmets.”
*
With the time on his hands, Wheatley tried to write a play. He envisaged the life of a writer, complete with Oriental rugs and Eastern decor:
if I could get a novel published or a play accepted – it would mean so much to me – I should not be such a fool as to give up business, but it would mean independence and the things I love – a little flat somewhere, with eastern rugs – hanging lantern and the room of a thousand cushions …
This would be a place “to entertain my few very dear friends” (Wheatley was still living with his parents), and “it would be another lease of life for me, and before I am too old to appreciate the joys that a bachelor can have.”
As for the alleged joys of being a bachelor, Wheatley wrote hopefully to Hilda and John about a girl at the wedding: “also when you write – tell me of the girl in grey who was at the wedding and the Station afterwards – who is she – I thought her very charming –”
*
A few weeks later, Wheatley’s parents held a dinner party and invited a friend of theirs from Harrogate, a Mrs Robinson. Mrs Robinson’s daughter Nancy, a blue-eyed blonde, sat next to Wheatley, and they were very taken by one another. Wheatley escorted her home, bowed and kissed her hand. Next day he telephoned her and they had lunch. He wrote again comparing her to Scheherezade, and she wrote back to her “Prince of a Thousand Charms.” Within a week they were engaged.
Wheatley had once written over ninety stanzas of lugubrious doggerel for Barbara Symonds, but Nancy inspired better efforts. Wheatley was still in Oriental mode, and his verses came straight from the mystic East of J.E.Flecker, Omar Khayyam, and Oscar Asche:
If I were King of Babylon and Tetrarch of Judaea,
The Lord of all Assyria and Mighty in Chaldea,
I’d overthrow the Idols and slay the Sacred Bull
That men might worship thee instead – my own most beautiful.
And so it went on, splendidly: divans and caravans, a marble temple “with Crystal Lamps set in a Mystic Sign”, oriental carpets, silks from far Cathay, secret gardens, fountains flowing wine, a Marble Lotus Pool, and Nancy’s myrrh-perfumed breasts. Nancy wrote back a sixteen page story called ‘The Legend of the Lovers Nancia and Denesco’.
Wheatley’s parents were not displeased by the fact that Nancy was not only beautiful but an heiress, with the Nugget Boot Polish fortune behind her.
*
Wheatley wrote and told Tombe about “Scheherezade”, and Tombe wrote back from Austria, where he and Beatrice were staying: “how wonderful it is, and I am so glad, dear boy, if, and I am sure she is, the little lady is all you say, it is truly wonderful, and you have achieved the miraculous. She sounds so curious in the strange Eastern setting you give her – and your progress is that of Adonis himself. Well, one cannot wonder that she is attracted … I am deeply interested, and so glad for you.” And here Tombe modestly took a little credit for himself:
How often I have told you of this strange Elixir of Life, now you experience it, and all is well. It is very good of you to say all you do about my teaching, such as it is and has been – I have done very little – you over appreciate me dear boy. I but long for your happiness, and the ability to taste of the fruit of all [underlined twice] the trees in the Garden, using each one to the more perfect development of your individuality, and appreciation of the beautiful in all things. “To cure the senses by the soul, and to indulge the soul by means of the senses”, that is our gospel.
“The fruit of all the trees” is from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, while “our gospel” is (mis)quoted from his Picture of Dorian Gray, where Lord Henry Wotton explains to young Dorian “that is one of the great secrets of life – to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.”
All this time Tombe had been continuing with Wheatley’s education. “Do not, amid all you have to do, neglect your reading”, Tombe urged him: particularly since it would be “one’s chief pleasure in one’s later years.” Tombe was a conscious disciple of Wilde, and from Wilde he discovered Walter Pater. Pater’s famous ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance would become Tombe’s bible for the rest of his short life: “it is true that I find many of my own ideas crystallised, but he goes further than I had ever dreamed of. My whole philosophy you will find epitomised in his ‘Conclusion’ – to which I most earnestly draw your attention.”
Along with Wilde, Pater, Flaubert, and Lao Tzu, Tombe was particularly fond of cultured erotica, a taste later reflected in Wheatley’s own library. When Wheatley went to Marseilles, Tombe asked him to look out for a copy of The Perfumed Garden, and Tombe’s own preferred book shop was The London Foreign Book Company at 2 Langham Place, which was run by a Russian named Ohzol. He recommended this to Wheatley, adding “mention that you were recommended to call by Major Macsweeney and Major Coode” (a Major Gilbert Macswiney was secretary of the Anti-Prohibition League, so Coode seems to be a Tombe alias).
“I visited our Russian bookselling friend the other day”, Tombe reported, “and bought The Principles of Lao Tze and also a most amusing little book in three volumes, which you must read – its astonishing crudity smacks of Swift at his zenith – but it is most amusing.” Before long Mr Ohzol was writing to Wheatley: “With reference to your enquiry I beg to say that I have now an opportunity of purchasing the following, viz. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis at 31/6 and Bloch’s Book at 32/6.” This was Regina Bloch’s The Book of Strange Loves, which Wheatley annotated as “delightful.”
Tombe kept Wheatley under his spell with his unceasing solicitude and flattery, granting Wheatley membership of a highly superior club of two. When Wheatley sent Tombe a copy of a speech by Tanko, Tombe said “I should imagine it will exactly suit the hoi polloi [sic] it is intended for –”
Has it ever struck you that the ideals and life of the latter, while excellent for them per illos, constitute for us the very dread inspired by the head of Medusa, without, of course, its grandeur!
However, ordinary people had their compensations: “Perhaps the abysmally uncultured have more chance of domestic happiness than we intellectuals.”
It was important for superior beings to stick together and remember their duties to each other, which in Wheatley’s case included making the effort to write regularly, and Tombe had to admonish him: “Now, part of the vital creed is that we never do anything which we are disinclined to do – but frankly I miss your letters as the public do not matter to me!!!”
Tombe was not quite the intellectual he imagined. As the error of “the hoi polloi” – i.e. “the ‘the people’ ” – suggests, he was operating at the limits of a self-educated vocabulary. “Thank you over and over again for your so charming gifts,” he wrote to Wheatley: “you forget nothing, not even such lacunae [sic] as my penchant for crystallised fruit.”
At one point Tombe congratulates Wheatley on his style: “your style is excellent, and graceful – while your soupcon of 17th century maniere titillates my artistic palate. The pupil is far outstripping the master!” For all that, pupil and master were beginning to diverge in their tastes: Tombe was leaning decadently towards pure style while Wheatley – anticipating the research-packed world of his fiction – was finding that what he really liked from books was information. “Our ways of ascending the mount of Olympus may be slightly different,” Tombe conceded,
But the same translucent beacon beckons us both – and the combination is wonderful. To me literature is beauty – beauty of language – and poetry of rhythm – information, qua information, takes a secondary place; it has taken me all my life to reach this – and I have only fully realized it during the last 3 or 4 weeks – so you must forgive my somewhat boyish enthusiasm!!
Tombe recommends Walter Pater to Wheatley, while Wheatley recommends Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son to Tombe. Described by Doctor Johnson as teaching “the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing master”, Chesterfield’s Letters are essentially a handbook of social climbing1.
The pair of them, Tombe felt, still had a great deal to learn, including the Greeks (“the Pagan coupled with the worship of beauty in its all and every form”) and “the Eastern point of view” (“I think that you are very right when you say that we shall find our philosophy … there”). “How short one’s life is,” Tombe wrote, “for all one must do and experience!”
*
Tombe had made a new base with Beatrice in Totland Bay, on the Isle of Wight, and he was also abroad for much of the time. His letters come back to Wheatley as if from a world tour. From America he sent postcards from New York and the Grand Canyon, and reported from California that not only was the bathing wonderful (“One can actually see the bottom of the sea at a depth of 90ft”) but “This is the paradise of ‘oggins! Imagine all the women do it …”
Writing from the Hotel Continental in the rue Castiglione, Tombe reports “Paris is wonderful, what a change from London and the stolid ones who live there!! Save your wonderful self, who indeed possess the Gallic soul and art.”
Vienna was even better (“the air like champagne, and the people are charming”) particularly because things were so cheap. Tombe writes excitedly about the price of silk socks, champagne, night clubs, and pearls. “The excellent kroner is now 29,500 to the pound and we grow fat thereon.” As for the charming Austrians, Tombe reported innocently – one of several ominous notes in his correspondence – that they couldn’t afford anything: “whole town is packed with foreigners, a good many of them Jews.”
Italy was just as good: “dear boy, a heaven on earth.” In Taormina (in those days “a synonym for Sodom”, associated with the photography of Baron von Gloeden and others), Tombe treated himself to some pictures: “quite perfect studies (photographic), and in the nude, of the purely Greek-type of boy one sees here so much – they are rather wonderful.” Palermo was “Paradise (complete with houris)”, even lovelier than California. The women were marvellous, and “here one dreams one’s life away – lotus eating … It is really considered bad form to do any work here – and I never felt so much at home anywhere in my life.”
In Rome they went to see the dead Pope, Benedict XV, in all his robes:
It was a most impressive spectacle, yet curiously pathetic – to see how utterly helpless is even the head of the greatest church in Christendom before the Reaper.
“I wonder if he was sufficiently Pagan to have no regrets?” Tombe wondered, adding – straight from Pater’s ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance – “For I do not suppose that my gospel – experience for the sake of experience, and not for its fruits – would have appealed to him.”
*
Tombe’s grand touring alternated with spells of domestic bliss on the Isle of Wight, where he and Beatrice rented a house. Wheatley went to stay, going via Lymington; this was probably his first experience of Lymington, where he would later live.
Beatrice’s letters to Wheatley reveal a more fragile side to Tombe: his arthritis is less severe than it used to be, she says, he manages to play a little tennis, and “really gets about quite a lot”. All in all, “we are as happy as the day is long.” Sometimes Tombe had to absent himself on missions of one sort or another, but “when Boy” – as she called him – “is here it is Heaven itself … hoping before long he will be back again, so we can be ideally happy once again.”
Tombe was getting about quite a lot more than Beatrice realised, and Wheatley was helping him. Wheatley was instructed to send them a wire that read “Important business, come to town as early as possible tomorrow. Bill.” (“Just that, no more. I have my reasons”). When Wheatley went to Marseilles, Tombe sent him a letter to re-post from there, “on June 21st, without fail … PS will you stamp enclosed letter old man.” As for Dolly, “I am in the East, and you have not heard from me.” All this was typical Tombe: even in Paradise, Tombe’s movements were clandestine, and he wrote from Palermo “I want you, dear boy, to regard all information re our movements as absolutely confidential, as a curious contretemps has taken place in England – which I will relate when I see you.”
*
Wheatley entered into the spirit of all this and suggested writing to Tombe in code, which Tombe greatly approved of (“The word for the key word of the code you suggest is admirable, and I commend the whole idea.”) Tombe added that if he was writing a coded or otherwise confidential letter, Wheatley should write a harmless letter to go into the same envelope, which he could show to Beatrice, “and all will be very well!”.
Tombe conducted his criminal as well as romantic deceits from a letter drop at 131 Jermyn Street; this was only a minute or two from his flat in Yeoman House, but it formed one of his “cul de sacs”. The mining fraud, for example, was conducted from 131 Jermyn Street. When Tombe was out of London, it was Wheatley’s job to attend to business at 131. There was a code for this, when Tombe would simply put an ‘X’ at the top of letters. This meant “will you go to 131 Jermyn St and fix up”, and occasionally it had to be emphasised: “Will you attend to ‘X’ at once?”
And so it went on. “I was so glad you fixed things up all right at 131 … be very careful to destroy (burn) both letters and envelopes … Acknowledge receipt of this letter by a cross at the top of your letter, but do not allude to it in any other way. Will you like a good chap post enclosed letter to D anywhere in the West End.” On another occasion Wheatley had to make a telephone call:
As soon as you get this ring up Mrs BELL, Hammersmith 1447, do not ask to speak to her specially, unless a man should answer, and do not give your name. Simply say “Please give Mrs Bell this message,” “that Mr Gordon-Tombe will arrive in town on Friday next, and will ring up at about 5 o’c pm.”
That’s all. Quite simple. The comic idea being, as your astute brain will guess, that I wish her to think I have been abroad in foreign lands! Quelle vie!! All the very best dear old boy, and burn this.
*
Among the Tombe materials in Wheatley’s personal archive are some odds and ends which resemble nothing so much as the material ‘clues’ in Wheatley’s celebrated ‘Crime Dossiers’ of the Thirties. There are some theatre tickets; and a key label, marked “D. Key”, which on closer examination evidently comes from Harrods; and there is a scrap of paper with some authors jotted down (Rabindranath Tagore, and Henri Murger with his La Vie Bohème) along with the words “David Watson 131 Jermyn St.”
It is possible that the D Key is Dennis’s duplicate key, perhaps to a Harrod’s safe-deposit box owned by Tombe. And – given that people choosing pseudonyms often keep the same initials – it is also possible that “David Watson” is a Wheatley alias for use at no.131. It is difficult to know where these clues really lead, if anywhere, but quelle vie.
*
Mrs Bell, a.k.a. “Desirée”, was a new passion in Tombe’s life, the only one who really competed with Beatrice. She was a minor actress, married to a doctor, and what made her particularly exciting was that she was relatively intellectual, with a strong if somewhat neurotic character.
Tombe had spent a week at Yeoman House with Desirée before going to America with Beatrice, and there was now a possibility that he would leave Beatrice on his return, while Desirée would leave not only her husband but her children. Wheatley was deputed as go-between in Tombe’s absence, and his account reads like a literary work in its own right.
*
Desirée is a semi-invalid, almost unable to eat. She has been in bed since Eric left for America, getting up only for a single taxi journey around midnight, when she went to look at Yeoman House.
Now she has recovered enough to ring Wheatley and invite him over to 25 Shepherd’s Bush Green, where she lives with Dr. Hugh Bell. Wheatley was not impressed by Shepherd’s Bush, with its cheap coffee stalls and a Bolshevik disturbance in progress at the tube station. The pavements were thronged with “bimina”, and what with “the haggard looking women, the ornamented, ready-tongued girls in their cheap finery, the round shouldered, dirty-looking youths, it’s hardly a place that even the most elastic-minded estate agent could term ‘a high-class residential district’.”
This led Wheatley to think on urban decline, something he had seen in South London. Like “Brixton, Camberwell, Catford, Lewisham etc” the area had seen better days, and Desirée’s house was of the type once lived in by a prosperous city merchant, when it had fields nearby. Wheatley paints a fanciful picture of the upstairs room, with bygone Richard and Arabella, but now, “Gone is Arabella with her blushes and her bun, gone is Richard with his magnificent waistcoats … Gone are the horse hair chairs and waxed fruits that under glass cases adorned the mantle.” Instead we have “Desirée in her own setting. An eastern room.”
The walls patterned with a striped pattern paper of a dark reddish colour, giving warmth and comfort … dark hangings of an oriental stuff … in Chinese design, Eastern rugs upon the floor, a long low divan before the fire, which burnt brightly despite the warmth of the evening, flanked by two armchairs, all having coverings of material embellished with oriental patterns, over the low back of the divan a large square of Chinese silk bright crimson, flowered with gold, making a brilliant patch in the rather sombre apartment, a few small tables, otherwise little furniture except a large stand upon which incense was burning in Chinese holders, the whole lit up by the soft light of a hanging lamp covered with red silk.
How far it seemed from the trams and tubes that run within fifty yards, and the jostling puppets of fate who throng the pavements outside.
The eastern room has all the cheap exoticism of Desirée’s neurasthenic desire for a better life.
Wheatley talked for a while with Dr. Bell, a progressive Socialist, “rather a dreamer and a missionary” and in Wheatley’s estimation a good, unselfish man who would not object if Desirée left him, if he thought it would make her happier. Dr. Bell left after twenty minutes, and Wheatley and Desiree spent the next three hours talking about Eric, until it was time to make a dash for the last tube train.
Wheatley found all this a delicate responsibility, since he was mindful of both Beatrice and Desirée’s children, and he urged Tombe not to string Desirée along. This bore directly on whether Wheatley should, as he put it, be helping her to build the house of her dreams, “her house of love and sacrifice,” or whether he should be watering the cement.
Wheatley proceeded to weigh up the pros and cons. There was Desirée’s mind: “She undoubtedly possesses a mind far above the average woman and you have already tasted to a certain extent the pleasures of each others conversations. She is a woman in a million and one who might even when she had lost her beauty retain your affection by her intellect alone … She firmly believes that by these powers she could overcome for once and all the loneliness that comes upon you at times so much so, that even when she is not with you she swears that if she once possessed you, you would never be lonely again.”
Then there was the intensity of her passion for Eric: “she is just like the convent school girl, she has a few scraps of your writing which she treasures, your favourite handkerchief, and greatest treasure of all the famous piece of artichoke.”
Wheatley proceeds to dream on the perfect, self-contained relationship, very similar to the sort that he envisaged Hilda and John enjoying, and which he longed for himself.
In her love there are boundless possibilities; if you had as much for her, you might rank with Abelard and Heloise or Helen of Troy and Paris. If you went away together you might almost defy the Gods and find on earth the peace that passeth all understanding.
If you took your courage in both hands you might really take a little island, with palm trees and a lagoon, there are many such scattered down the coasts of Africa and America and there you might sample the joys that come only to one in a million, the perfect peace of mutual dependence …
And yet even then, says Wheatley, the exile in sunny lands hankers for Piccadilly Circus at night, the call of the news boys in Trafalgar Square, even “the sight of the multitude that we despise.”
Comparing Desirée to Beatrice, Wheatley conceded that Eric would never have such “thrilling discussions” with Beatrice, “because all she knows you have taught her yourself.” On the other hand, “remember that there are great possibilities here for she is the child of your brain, to a great extent, and to watch her open and develop as a flower the seed of which you have sown would be wonderful.”
And in any case, Wheatley thought, the whole intellectual business is overvalued and grows less interesting as one gets older. “These glorious talks are a great joy but all the same it does seem to me that we wander in a circle, older people seem to realise this more particularly; they shrug their shoulders and pass on where they see the younger generation expounding new theories, and wandering knee deep in the philosophies of bygone times. I sometimes think that Old Omar was right when he said
Myself when young didst eagerly frequent
Doctor and saint, and heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.”
Tombe too, when older, might be less interested in “abstruse questions.”
Tombe had suggested to Wheatley that Desirée could join in his life of fraud, but “Last night she told me that her dearest ambition was that you should give it up, far from aiding you she will seek to deter you … Her idea is that you will never learn what real peace is until you do give it up. In this I must say I think there is a great deal …”
Wheatley never had any illusions about the importance of money, and he points out that Desirée might be a financial liability. And yet even without much money, Eric and Desirée could still afford to live on a little island. Wheatley mentions that one in the Channel was recently let for 99 years at £100 pounds (still only about £2500 today): “and there is much to be said for it during the Revolution that is coming here.”
*
Beatrice, on the other hand, offered security, and if he stayed with Beatrice he could give up crime. Eric and Beatrice should have “great expectations … they may take a few years to mature but they should come to fruition someday”, on the death of old ’Undreds.
Beatrice also offered emotional stability, and on this point the twenty-three year old Wheatley writes a treatise on the great difference between women: “All women from the age of Puberty onwards are one of two things – either A Mother or a Prostitute.”
A woman who has no children may be a Mother.
A woman who has never committed the sexual act may be a Prostitute.
This is a close relative of the Madonna / Whore polarity, and Wheatley argues that while some women offer calm, family-type stability (Beatrice as Mother) others offer precarious and demanding romantic excitement (Desirée as Prostitute). “To marry a Prostitute is to court Divorce” says Wheatley, whereas
A Mothers love is more lasting than a Prostitutes
Love is the greater part of her being
Mother love is not so intense so it is not so exacting
To love a Mother is to have always a refuge …
…
To marry a mother is to marry a life long friend
The love of the Mother is hard to kindle … but gradually brightens to a steady light … the brighter as the years roll on.
Underlining his definitions of Beatrice and Desirée as “Mother” and “Prostitute” respectively, Wheatley foresees a tranquil and happy future for Eric with Beatrice, becoming increasingly necessary to each other as time goes by.
Taking up the attack from another angle, Wheatley compares the two women to wines:
God who is the Maitre de Hotel of Fate bows before you in the Restaurant of Life which is the World. On one hand he holds a bottle of the Widow Clicquot ’06, in the other a bottle of Chateau D’Issan.
He holds them carefully because they are both his children and he loves them well.
He murmurs softly:
“What will monsieur take to drink?”
It is the difference between a champagne and a good Burgundy.
You hesitate, knowing that the Widow as she is will warm you through and through, that if you drink her your eyes will shine, your red blood will rush in your veins for very joy of life, your tongue will loosen and wit will flow from your lips, your brain will unfold as the moon flowers in the moon light, your being will be filled with exaltation and her sparkle will turn you from a man into a demi-god.
And yet the effect will not remain, finally the reaction will set in; you will need more and you will find the bottle empty. It is the wine of youth.
But with reliable old Burgundy Beatrice,
You turn to the Chateau D’Issan … you know it will not make you gay and sparkling, it will not cause your brains to reel with the joy of great sensation, and yet it will give you warmth and comfort over you will steal the gentle feeling of well being and of contentment out of its mellow depths will come the sense of quiet happiness and of companionship it is the wine of age.
When you have finished the bottle, you will not require another; the sense of contentment and that all’s well with the world goes with you as you leave the restaurant and make your way to bed. Your mouth is not parched or dry, and its beautiful bouquet lingers in your nostrils long after the bottle is empty.
So that was the choice.
God who is the Maitre D’Hotel bows before you in the Restaurant of Fate which is the World.
He murmurs softly.
“What will Monsieur like to drink?”
1 They were also a favourite of the popular novelist Catherine Cookson, whose own edition of Chesterfield was subtitled A Strategy for Rising in the World.