boar’s side, and some thrushes flew out of the gash.”
In the winter of 1895 a dinner was given in a New York studio. This
dinner, locally known as the “Girl in the Pie Dinner,” was based upon
Petronius, Martial, and the thirteenth book of Athenaeus. In the summer
of 1919, I had the questionable pleasure of interviewing the chef-caterer
who got it up, and he was, at the time, engaged in trying to work out
another masterpiece to be given in California. The studio, one of the
most luxurious in the world, was transformed for the occasion into a
veritable rose grotto, the statuary was Pompeian, and here and there
artistic posters were seen which were nothing if not reminiscent of
Boulevard Clichy and Montmartre in the palmiest days. Four negro banjo
players and as many jubilee singers titillated the jaded senses of the
guests in a manner achieved by the infamous saxophone syncopating jazz of
the Barbary Coast of our times. The dinner was over. The four and one
half bottles of champagne allotted to each Silenus had been consumed, and
a well-defined atmosphere of bored satiety had begun to settle down when
suddenly the old-fashioned lullaby “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” broke
forth from the banjoists and singers. Four waiters came in bearing a
surprisingly monstrous object, something that resembled an impossibly
large pie. They, placed it carefully in the center of the table. The
negro chorus swelled louder and louder--“Four and Twenty Blackbirds Baked
in a Pie.”
The diners, startled into curiosity and then into interest, began to poke
their noses against this gigantic creation of the baker. In it they
detected a movement not unlike a chick’s feeble pecking against the shell
of an egg. A quicker movement and the crust ruptured at the top.
A flash of black gauze and delicate flesh showed within. A cloud of
frightened yellow canaries flew out and perched on the picture frames and
even on the heads and shoulders of the guests.
But the lodestone which drew and held the eyes of all the revellers was
an exquisitely slender, girlish figure amid the broken crust of the pie.
The figure was draped with spangled black gauze, through which the girl’s
marble white limbs gleamed like ivory seen through gauze of gossamer
transparency. She rose from her crouching posture like a wood nymph
startled by a satyr, glanced from one side to the other, and stepped
timidly forth to the table.