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Through the rest of the dinner he was silent, a prey to that dark exultancy, to that uncanny agitation. This silence persisted while the cab bore us back into the city. In the narrow streets a blaze of light from the open fronts of cook-shops flooded the lower stories of some palaces which once on a time had housed much fierceness and beauty, treachery and perverse seductiveness.
It is not to be wondered at, if the town of Cambridge cannot receive, or entertain the numbers of people that come to this fair; not Cambridge only, but all the towns round are full; nay, the very barns and stables are turned into inns, and made as fit as they can to lodge the meaner sort of people: as for the people in the fair, they all universally eat, drink, and sleep in their booths and tents; and the said booths are so intermingled with taverns, coffee-houses, drinking-houses, eating-houses, cook-shops, etc., and all in tents too; and so many butchers and higglers from all the neighbouring counties come into the fair every morning with beef, mutton, fowls, butter, bread, cheese, eggs, and such things, and go with them from tent to tent, from door to door, that there is no want of any provisions of any kind, either dressed or undressed.
Perched in among the rude cells of industry are cook-shops and tea-drinking establishments of an inferior grade; and the occupants of these places eye me curiously, and call one another's attention to the unusual circumstance of a Ferenghi passing through their quarter. After half a mile of this, my progress is abruptly terminated by a high mud wall, with a narrow passage leading to the right.
A considerable portion of the population of Bombay, and the same is true of all other Indian cities, depends upon these cook-shops for food as a measure of economy and convenience. People can send out for dinner, lunch, or breakfast at any hour, and have it served by their own servants without being troubled to keep up a kitchen or buy fuel.
Can any of you guess the great party which he proposes to create in the Chamber, and of which he intends to be the leader? That of the righteous man, the impartial man, the honest man! as if any such thing could live and breathe in the parliamentary cook-shops; and as if, moreover, all opinions, to hide their ugly nothingness, had not, from time immemorial, wrapped themselves in that banner."
Go to the seaports, visit the cook-shops and taverns on the quays, and look at these men who have come to hire themselves, crowding round the dock-gates, which they besiege from early dawn, hoping to be allowed to work on the vessels. Look at these sailors, happy to be hired for a long voyage, after weeks and months of waiting.
But fires are little used only a brazier of charcoal now and then for cooking purposes; and as most of the people eat at cook-shops, there is never any fire at all in many of the houses. Long ladders are erected as fire-towers, and upon these watchmen sit through the night to give the alarm.
Enough for one meal only was brought home, in a piece of printed paper, or an old letter. Unsuccessful books thus found their use at the grocer's. Before dinner the supply for dinner was bought; before supper, that for supper. After the meal nothing was left. The poorer citizens carried their dinners to be baked at the cook-shops, and saved something in the price of wood.
For the gay pleasures and lewd resorts of other Greek cities were not known to the Spartan. Not for him were the cook-shops and baths and revels of Ionian idlers. When the State ceased to claim him, he had nothing but his Home. As Lysander thus exclaimed, the door of the room had opened noiselessly, and Agesilaus stood unperceived at the entrance, and overheard his son.
A savory dinner or supper is, therefore, an easy matter, and the English worker fares better in this respect than the American, for whom there is much less provision in the way of cheap food and cook-shops. In fact the last are almost unknown with us, the cheap restaurant by no means taking their place.
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