Under the smoke-dimmed lights were curious, eager, interesting faces:  a pale little person with red hair I recognised instantly as an actress whom I had just seen at the Provincetown Players—­a Village Theatrical Company—­in a tense and terribly tragic role.  Beyond her was a white-haired man with keen eyes—­a distinguished writer and socialist.  A shabby poet announced to the sympathetic that he had sold something after two years of work.  Immediately they set about making a real fiesta of the unusual occasion.  Miss Bailey, a small, round, efficient person with nice eyes and good manners, moved about among her guests, all of whom she seemed to know.  The best cheese sandwiches in New York went round.  A girl in a vampire costume of grey—­hooded and with long trailing sleeves—­got up from her solitary place in the corner.  She seemed to be wearing, beneath the theatrical garment, a kimono and bedroom slippers.  Obviously she had simply drifted in for sandwiches before going to bed.  She vanished down the ladder.

An hour later, we, too, climbed down the ladderish stairs, my companion and I, and as we came out into the fresh quiet of Fourth Street at midnight, I had a really odd sensation.  I felt as though I had been reading a fascinating and unusual book, and had—­suddenly closed it for the night.

This was one of the first of the real Village eating places which I ever knew.  Perhaps that is why it comes first to my memory as I write.  I do not know that it is more representative or more interesting than others.  But it was worth going back to.

Yet, after all, it isn’t the food and drink, nor yet the unusual surroundings, that bring you back to these places.  It’s the—­well, one has to use, once in a while, the hard-worked and generally inappropriate word “atmosphere.”  Like “temperament” and “individuality” and the rest of the writer-folk’s old reliables, “atmosphere” is too often only a makeshift, a lazy way of expressing something you won’t take the trouble to define more expressively.  Dick says in “The Light That Failed” that an old device for an unskilful artist is to stick a superfluous bunch of flowers somewhere in a picture where it will cover up bad drawing.  I’m afraid writers are apt to use stock phrases in the same meretricious fashion.

But this is a fact just the same.  Nearly all the Greenwich Village places really have atmosphere.  You can be cynical about it, or frown at it, or do anything you like about it, but it’s there, and it’s the real thing.  It’s an absolute essence and ether which you feel intensely and breathe necessarily, but which no one can put quite definitely into the concrete form of words.  I have heard of liquid or solidified air, but that’s a scientific experiment, and who wants to try scientific experiments on the Village which we all love?

“But such an amount of play-acting and pose!” I hear someone complain, referring to the Village with contemptuous irritation.  “They pretend to be seeking after truth and liberty of thought, and that sort of thing, and yet they are steeped in artificiality.”