We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience, and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized men cannot live without cooks.
—Meredith: Lucile
When I crossed the border of the Enchanted Empire, in the dusk of that
entry to the Agency, I re-lived fancies caught out of Nicholas
Nickleby, his winter journey into Yorkshire, coaching in company with
the incomparable Squeers; his arrival at the bleak and cheerless
Dotheboys Hall, and the atmosphere of that strange institution; and
while there was something forlorn about them, there was also enough of
their humor to keep me alive.
Considering what I have written concerning “the Boss,” who would have
to be Squeers, this may seem a sorry and unkind reflection. But really,
forgetting for the moment his generous heart and his earnest pride in
the little desert kingdom, there was a superficial resemblance to old
Squeers—the odd cock of the head, a certain quaint expression, a
quizzical look after some solemn pronouncement, the rough
exterior,—which in this case belied the man,—and that rare touch of the
grotesque given by his wig: “Sack-hair.” The atmosphere of the Agency
supported these impressions.
The ensemble of an Indian school, the cast of characters, their point
of view, their quarters and customs—is something unique and quite
beyond comparison with normal things. One is often first conscious of
odors; and the Navajo have many sheep. Once a desert station is given
over to Indian school purposes, where a number of children and their
mentors must be fed, it acquires the fragrance of boiled mutton for its
very own. There is nothing else like it. Even an abandoned school
retains this poignant atmosphere for years.
Bare—stark naked—calcimined walls, grim in their poverty and unashamed;
bare pine floors; cheap pine trimmings covered with hideous varnish,
the gloss of which seemed an uncaring grin; the whole sparsely strewn
with Government-contract furniture, feeble in the beginning and now in
the last stages of pathetic senility. This was the quarters for
unmarried employees. And when you take such a scene and thoroughly
impregnate it with the clinging atmosphere of yesterday’s, and last
week’s, and last year’s boiled mutton; animate it with characters
gathered by the grab-bag method from the forty-eight States, persons
warped and narrowed by their monotonous duties, impressed by the savage
rather than impressing him, fulsome with petty gossip and radiating a
cheap evangelical virtue, you have the indescribable—and
invariable—locale of an isolated desert school. Dickens would have made
it immortal, and his gallery of portraits would have gained many
varieties of Bumbles and Mr. Chucksters and Sairey Gamps. I have walked
in the Desert with Dick Swiveller and Mr. Cheggs; Mark Tapley I have
known intimately; and I have dined several times with Pecksniff in the
flesh, he lacking only a large shirt-collar to complete the picture.
Hugh Walpole has glimpsed something similar to this in The Gods and Mr.
Perrin. “It will be all right next term” is the fiscal cry of the
restless, unsatisfied, and for the most part misfitted employees of the
Indian Service. And the Indian stands mute, inarticulate, unable to
express his confused amazement at this bizarre and ever-changing
exhibition.
A strong sense of humor may keep one from going mad, but even the
keenest humor grows blunted after a few months of such stolid
association. If one has no relief in other mental pursuits, he succumbs
finally to a moroseness that is not good in the unchanging, uncaring
Desert.
We sat at a belated meal in the dining-hall. The drive of twenty odd
miles and the tang of the desert air had given me an unusual appetite
that promised the making of weight, when behold! in the doorway giving
on to the kitchen appeared a vision, perhaps I should say an
apparition, the cook! The expression turned on me was intended, I have
no doubt, to be one of welcome; but whatever it was supposed to
register, I have never forgotten the sardonic leer of that unkempt
individual, promising worse to come. And it arrived. Leathery mutton,
cold; baking-powder biscuit, lacking character; coffee, lukewarm,
weakly concocted from the Arbuckle blend that retreated westward after
the Civil War; milk, fresh from tin-plate Holsteins, mixed with water
from an alkali pump; and last, but not least for a sick man’s stomach,
the “bull butter,” innocent of ice, slimy, having the flavor of
kerosene.
Farewell! a long farewell to Maryland cooking!
I remember having been snowed-in, on a time, back in the farthest
Arizona hills, with a Government physician recently from the East. He
had sought Arizona to stimulate a lagging constitution that threatened
to initiate him as one of the Club. He had traveled westward, visioning
the tropic palms, the date trees, the pomegranate hedges of Phœnix; and
there we were at an altitude of 7000 feet above sea-level, with the
snow two feet deep, and a frigid blast coming straight off the range.
He had been lost that night and nearly frozen on the desert where the
roads were obliterated, and only the sense of his team had brought him
to this haven. We tore the harness from them first, and an engineer
helped me to warm him into amiability after the horses were cared for.
The time came for retiring, and I recall his diving between dank sheets
in an unheated room at this little hill station, his teeth chattering,
his lips blue, and the fervid expression of him:—
“Blank! And blankety-double-blank the damned Philadelphia fool who told
me Arizona was warm!”
And as I surveyed that tempting array of victuals, I had the same
feeling toward those kindly disposed men of Washington who, out of a
crass ignorance, had assured me that their desert stations possessed
food.
Later, a couple of obliging employees carried my trunk upstairs to a
room that would have been a credit to a penitentiary. It welcomed one
with four walls and possessed a window. There were also a ceiling and a
floor. These necessary ornaments, together with a bed and a decrepit
chair, which had crashed under many disconsolate employees and had been
skillfully and maliciously fitted together again to lure me, comprised
the generous list of fittings. All and several extras thought to be
necessary to comfort could be supplied by the employee from his salary,
the proportions of which had been established during the administration
of Carl Schurz, and have changed but little since, despite wars and
rumors of wars and the coming of the income tax, “which includes the
quarters as part of the compensation.”
Next morning I was aroused about dawn, or a little before, by the
business of breaking stove-wood, a bombardment of mishandled crockery,
and the hiss of vicious cooking. A thick wave of reanimated
mutton-grease fogged upward and invaded my boudoir, which I sought to
vacate as quickly as possible. I encountered the cook at the foot of
the stairs, and she had not improved during the night.
“Good morning,” I tried to say cheerfully, which caused her to notice
me. “Who cares for the rooms?” I asked. She bent on me a sinister eye,
as if divining my thought.
“You mean, who cleans ‘em, an’ all that?”
“Just so,” I admitted.
“Well—you’ll care for your own.”
And that was that. It was final, with the wall-eyed finality that had
become unwritten law in all properly conducted Agencies.
At table I met an Irrigation Service man who had just returned from a
survey of farther desert conditions. He expressed great joy in having
accomplished his journey without accident or delay, and in successfully
returning to this oasis. He said he was always sure of decent meals at
this place, whereas, at that post from which he had arrived, life was
unbearable because of the atrocious and altogether impossible menu. I
requested that he repeat this statement. There could not be two such
places. But he was certain of his facts, and his wife confirmed the
story. They cautioned me never to go to that other post—an entirely
superfluous piece of advice.
Then I learned that at each of the Government establishments was
maintained a Thing (as Carlyle would have phrased it), a fixture, an
Institution Horrible, that dominated the people and to which they
suffered allegiance. It was termed “a Mess.” And such had been its
ascendancy and its acquired power, that they were more or less proud of
its traditional horrors in due proportion to the misery produced. I
learned that Washington recognized this thing, and actually advertised
it to innocent incoming employees, suppressing with a cautious
diplomacy its evils, and sounding aloud the one thing to be praised—the
small cost per individual. The nomenclature is good. Never before was
an hideous evil so briefly and so thoroughly described.
Having been deceived as to nearly everything concerning this Vale of
Sharon, with the exception of the climate,—there it was before one,
three hundred square miles of it in sight, unlimited, free and untaxed
as yet; I learned of the altitude when I went to purchase a pair of
shoes,—dispatched a telegram for a case of prepared food, the kind that
has everything from soup to nuts in one bottle, and began to debate
whether it would be braver to die unflinchingly silent or to carry my
views to the chief. The bottled food came in, and I tightened my belt
on it for seven days, learning meantime that there was no dairy herd
other than the kind that comes nested forty-eight tin cows to the case;
that only the chief was rich enough to afford poultry, and therefore
there were no eggs; there was no fruit save the oranges that dried at
the trading-post, and an occasional wagonload of melons sold by the
pound. One could buy a very fair sample of undernourished watermelon
for a dollar.
The refrigerator freights, however, booming east from California,
carrying fish and vegetables and fruit, passed that place twice a week
and within thirteen miles. One could see the railroad water-tank from
the mess-kitchen window. But it required three things to procure food
from that refrigerator service, to wit: desire, energy and money; and
they were all noticeably absent from these people. I decided to
protest.
The Chief had wearied of such complaints, as indeed I did later when I
faced the same problem. But it was his duty, nay his very safety, to
settle everything. The skipper of this desert ship had no first-officer
to take the deck with pride and responsibility, to smother complaints,
and to avoid or crush mutinies. He must do it himself. Quelling revolts
was one of his regular tasks; and he had become unusually—not to say
cunningly—proficient in the various methods. Some he roared down, and
others he trapped into submission.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked, sourly.
“Well, sir, I came here to keep alive, and aside from my natural
intelligence, several physicians of the East urged me to absorb
food—food—as little of it tinned as possible. Now I have been out to
survey the can-pile, and have arrived at the conclusion that your
employees must consume several tons of embalmed materials each year.
And too, my food must be cooked. My ancestors quit eating acorns
several centuries ago. The true state of your people is that of slow
starvation. They have somehow got used to it. I shall not last that
long. Their tradition has it that they can maintain life on a meal-bill
of eleven dollars per month—”
“Give ’em credit,” he interrupted, darkly; “they got it down to nine
once.”
“Which recalls your Mormon’s idea of luxury,” I hurried on. “Remember
that story you told me coming in? Said the tourist—‘What would you do
if you had a million dollars?’ ‘A million dollars!’ cried the Mormon,
his eyes shining; ‘I’d buy a six-mule team, pull freight, an’ eat
nothing but canned goods!’ That Mormon was weaned at this mess.”
The Chief rubbed his wig reflectively, and from his rueful smile I knew
that he possessed the remnant of a starved sense of humor. He glanced
furtively about his office, and when he spoke it was in a low, cautious
tone.
“True,” he said; “The mess would drive a goat to suicide. But what can
I do? They like it. It is a dangerous thing, young man, to disturb
anything the proletariat likes. Thank God! I am married and have
separate quarters. It has been a mystery to me for years how they keep
alive, and turn out each morning for work.”
And where Squeers’s face would have cracked into a malevolent leer, the
countenance of the Boss suddenly bubbled over with a wholesome
expression that announced the winning of my case. He slapped his hand
on his knee. He had found a solution—a Machiavellian scheme calculated
to strike down at one blow the system and its latest critic. He leveled
his finger at me.
“I’ll make you manager of the mess!” he cried, triumphantly. “That’s
the ticket. It’ll be up to you to provide real food, cooked, an’ all,
an’—”
Evidently a very hopeful light came into my eyes. He paused, grinned
somewhat shamefacedly, and hastened to advise me.
“Don’t accept too hastily.” He avoided my gaze. “At best it is a
thankless job, this nourishing those who would rather starve that they
may pay installments to California land-boosters. You’ll be no
benefactor. You will find it depressing. You will be ostracized, and it
may even be unsafe for you to stroll around unguarded at night.”
Notwithstanding these perils, I accepted.
The unwritten law, like most futile and messy things requiring the
democratic knowledge of all and the wisdom of none, demanded that a
solemn conclave of those to be fed was necessary in any change of the
routine of it, and that a vote be taken, after devious discussion and
debate. Imagine convening a group of circus lions to inform them that
hereafter, at feeding time—and so on!
The Chief knew that a popular vote would demonstrate the usual popular
row. There are only two kinds of Indian Agents: those who compromise
with everything and have interminable hell on their weakling hands, to
the end that they are respected neither at home nor abroad, and those
who compromise with nothing. The first sort is never defeated, and
never resigns. He remains continually in service, shifted from point to
point, cluttering it with his inefficiency and indecision. Neglected
plants and chaotic systems are monuments, kept at national expense, to
these amiable bench-warmers and trimmers. The second variety rides the
waves for a season or two, and crashes down finally, as all tyrants,
however benevolent, before the clamorous indignation of outraged and
inefficient democracy.
The Chief being one of the last sort, the electorate was disfranchised.
There was no session of Parliament. The whole thing was done in much
the same fashion as had cost Charles the First his head.