Mixed up with this entirely characteristic theology of theirs and their
elaborate planning-out of a new life in London were other strands of
thought. Queer memories of London and old times together would flash
with a peculiar brightness across their contemplation of the infinities
and the needs of mankind. Out of nowhere, quite disconnectedly, would
come the human, finite: "Do you remember----?"
Two things particularly pressed into their minds. One was the thought of
their children, and I do not care to tell how often in the day now they
calculated the time in England, and tried to guess to a half mile or
so where those young people might be and what they might be doing. "The
shops are bright for Christmas now," said Marjorie. "This year Dick was
to have had his first fireworks. I wonder if he did. I wonder if he
burnt his dear little funny stumps of fingers. I hope not."
"Oh, just a little," said Trafford. "I remember how a squib made my
glove smoulder and singed me, and how my mother kissed me for taking it
like a man. It was the best part of the adventure."
"Dick shall burn his fingers when his mother's home to kiss him. But
spare his fingers now, Dadda...."
The other topic was food.
It was only after they had been doing it for a week or so that they
remarked how steadily they gravitated to reminiscences, suggestions,
descriptions and long discussions of eatables--sound, solid eatables.
They told over the particulars of dinners they had imagined altogether
forgotten; neither hosts nor conversations seemed to matter now in the
slightest degree, but every item in the menu had its place. They nearly
quarrelled one day about _hors-d'oeuvre_. Trafford wanted to dwell on
them when Marjorie was eager for the soup.
"It's niggling with food," said Marjorie.
"Oh, but there's no reason," said Trafford, "why you shouldn't take a
lot of _hors-d'oeuvre_. Three or four sardines, and potato salad and
a big piece of smoked salmon, and some of that Norwegian herring, and so
on, and keep the olives by you to pick at. It's a beginning."
"It's--it's immoral," said Marjorie, "that's what I feel. If one needs a
whet to eat, one shouldn't eat. The proper beginning of a dinner is
soup--good, hot, _rich_ soup. Thick soup--with things in it, vegetables
and meat and things. Bits of oxtail."
"Not peas."
"No, not peas. Pea-soup is tiresome. I never knew anything one tired of
so soon. I wish we hadn't relied on it so much."
"Thick soup's all very well," said Trafford, "but how about that clear
stuff they give you in the little pavement restaurants in Paris. You
know--_Croute-au-pot_, with lovely great crusts and big leeks and
lettuce leaves and so on! Tremendous aroma of onions, and beautiful
little beads of fat! And being a clear soup, you see what there is.
That's--interesting. Twenty-five centimes, Marjorie. Lord! I'd give a
guinea a plate for it. I'd give five pounds for one of those jolly
white-metal tureens full--you know, _full_, with little drops all over
the outside of it, and the ladle sticking out under the lid."
"Have you ever tasted turtle soup?"
"Rather. They give it you in the City. The fat's--ripping. But they're
rather precious with it, you know. For my own part, I don't think soup
should be _doled_ out. I always liked the soup we used to get at the
Harts'; but then they never give you enough, you know--not nearly
enough."
"About a tablespoonful," said Marjorie. "It's mocking an appetite."
"Still there's things to follow," said Trafford....
They discussed the proper order of a dinner very carefully. They
decided that sorbets and ices were not only unwholesome, but nasty. "In
London," said Trafford, "one's taste gets--vitiated."...
They weighed the merits of French cookery, modern international cookery,
and produced alternatives. Trafford became very eloquent about old
English food. "Dinners," said Trafford, "should be feasting, not the
mere satisfaction of a necessity. There should be--_amplitude_. I
remember a recipe for a pie; I think it was in one of those books that
man Lucas used to compile. If I remember rightly, it began with: 'Take a
swine and hew it into gobbets.' Gobbets! That's something like a
beginning. It was a big pie with tiers and tiers of things, and it kept
it up all the way in that key.... And then what could be better than
prime British-fed roast beef, reddish, just a shade on the side of
underdone, and not too finely cut. Mutton can't touch it."
"Beef is the best," she said.
"Then our English cold meat again. What can equal it? Such stuff as they
give in a good country inn, a huge joint of beef--you cut from it
yourself, you know as much as you like--with mustard, pickles, celery, a
tankard of stout, let us say. Pressed beef, such as they'll give you at
the Reform, too, that's good eating for a man. With chutney, and then
old cheese to follow. And boiled beef, with little carrots and turnips
and a dumpling or so. Eh?"
"Of course," said Marjorie, "one must do justice to a well-chosen
turkey, a _fat_ turkey."
"Or a good goose, for the matter of that--with honest, well-thought-out
stuffing. I like the little sausages round the dish of a turkey, too;
like cherubs they are, round the feet of a Madonna.... There's much to
be said for sausage, Marjorie. It concentrates."
Sausage led to Germany. "I'm not one of those patriots," he was saying
presently, "who run down other countries by way of glorifying their own.
While I was in Germany I tasted many good things. There's their
Leberwurst; it's never bad, and, at its best, it's splendid. It's only a
fool would reproach Germany with sausage. Devonshire black-pudding, of
course, is the master of any Blutwurst, but there's all those others on
the German side, Frankfurter, big reddish sausage stuff again with great
crystalline lumps of white fat. And how well they cook their rich
hashes, and the thick gravies they make. Curious, how much better the
cooking of Teutonic peoples is than the cooking of the South Europeans!
It's as if one needed a colder climate to brace a cook to his business.
The Frenchman and the Italian trifle and stimulate. It's as if they'd
never met a hungry man. No German would have thought of _souffle_. Ugh!
it's vicious eating. There's much that's fine, though, in Austria and
Hungary. I wish I had travelled in Hungary. Do you remember how once or
twice we've lunched at that Viennese place in Regent Street, and how
they've given us stuffed Paprika, eh?"
"That was a good place. I remember there was stewed beef once with a lot
of barley--such _good_ barley!"
"Every country has its glories. One talks of the cookery of northern
countries and then suddenly one thinks of curry, with lots of rice."
"And lots of chicken!"
"And lots of hot curry powder, _very_ hot. And look at America! Here's a
people who haven't any of them been out of Europe for centuries, and yet
they have as different a table as you could well imagine. There's a kind
of fish, planked shad, that they cook on resinous wood--roast it, I
suppose. It's substantial, like nothing else in the world. And how
good, too, with turkey are sweet potatoes. Then they have such a
multitude of cereal things; stuff like their buckwheat cakes, all
swimming in golden syrup. And Indian corn, again!"
"Of course, corn is being anglicized. I've often given you
corn--latterly, before we came away."
"That sort of separated grain--out of tins. Like chicken's food! It's
not the real thing. You should eat corn on the cob--American fashion!
It's fine. I had it when I was in the States. You know, you take it up
in your hands by both ends--you've seen the cobs?--and gnaw."
The craving air of Labrador at a temperature of -20 deg. Fahrenheit, and
methodically stinted rations, make great changes in the outward
qualities of the mind. "_I'd_ like to do that," said Marjorie.
Her face flushed a little at a guilty thought, her eyes sparkled. She
leant forward and spoke in a confidential undertone.
"_I'd--I'd like to eat a mutton chop like that_," said Marjorie.