SCIENCE
The activities of the day at Outside Inn began with luncheon and the
preparation for it. Nancy longed to serve breakfast there, but as yet
it had not seemed practicable to do so. Most of the patrons of the
restaurant conducted the business of the day down-town, but had their
actual living quarters in New York's remoter fastnesses,--Brooklyn,
the Bronx or Harlem. Nancy was satisfied that the bulk of her
patronage should be the commuting and cliff dwelling contingent of
Manhattanites,--indeed it was the sort of patronage that from the
beginning she had intended to cater to.
Nancy did most of the marketing herself at first, but Gaspard--the big
cook--gradually coaxed this privilege away from her.
"You see," he said, "we sit--us together, and talk of eating"--he
prided himself on his use of English, and never used his native tongue
to help him out, except in moments of great excitement. "It is
immediately after breakfast. Yes! I am full of milk-coffee sopped with
bread, and you of bacon with eggs and marmalade. We say, what shall we
give to our custom for its dinner and its luncheon? We think sadly--we
who have but now brushed away the crumbs of breakfast--of those who
must sit down so soon to the table groaning with viands. Therefore we
say, 'Market delicately. Have the soup clear, the entrée light and the
salad green with plenty of vinegar.' Even your calories--they do not
help us much. They are in quantities so unexpected in the food that
weighs nothing in the scales. We say you shall go to market and buy
these things, and you go. I stir and walk about, and grow restless for
my _déjeuner_, and when you return from market, hungry too, we are not
the same people who had thought our soup should be clear, and our
entrée more beautiful than nutritious. If I go to market myself _late_
I am inspired there to buy what is right, because by that hour I have
a proper relish and understanding of what all the world should eat."
"I know he is right," Nancy said to Billy afterward in reporting the
conversation, "I hate to admit it, but even my notion of what other
people should eat is colored by my own relation to food. I never
realized before how little use an intellect is in this matter of food
values. I can actually get up a meal that according to the tables is
scientifically correct that wouldn't feed anybody if they were
hungry."
"One banana is equal to a pound and three-quarters of steak," Billy
misquoted helpfully.
"The trouble is that it _isn't_," Nancy said, "except technically."
"You can't eat it and grow thin."
"You can't eat it and grow _fat_ unless it happens to be the peculiar
food to which you are idiosyncratic."
"If that's really a word," Billy said, "I'll overlook your trying it
out on me. If it isn't you'll have to take the consequences." He went
through the pantomime of one preparing to do physical violence.
"Oh! it's a word. Ask Caroline." Nancy's eyes still held their look of
being focussed on something in the remote distance. "The trouble with
all this dietetic problem is that the individual is dependent on
something more than an adjustment of values. His environment and his
heredity play an active part in his diet problem. Some people can eat
highly concentrated food, others have to have bulk, and so on. You
can't substitute cheese and bananas for steak and do the race a
service no matter what the cost of steak may soar to. You can't even
substitute rice for potatoes."
"Not unless your patronage is more Oriental than Celtic."
"Healthy people have to have honest fare of about the type to
which their environment has accustomed them, but intelligently
supervised,--that's the conclusion I've come to."
"You may be right," Billy said, "my general notion has always been
that everybody ate wrong, and that everybody who would stand for it
ought to be started all over again. I wouldn't stand for it, so I've
never looked into the matter."
"People don't eat wrong, that's the really startling discovery I've
made recently. I mean healthy people don't."
"I don't believe it," said Billy; "the way people eat is one of the
most outrageous of the human scandals. I read the newspapers."
"The newspapers don't know," Nancy said; "the individual usually has
an instinctive working knowledge of the diet that is good for him, and
his digestional experiences have taught him how to regulate it to some
extent."
"How do you account for the clerk that orders coffee and sinkers at
Child's every day?"
"That's exactly it," Nancy said. "He knows that he needs bulk and
stimulation. He's handicapped by his poverty, but he gets the nearest
substitute for the diet that suits him that he can get. If he could
afford it he would have a square meal that would nourish him as well
as warm and fill him."
"I don't see but what this interesting theory lets you out altogether.
Why Outside Inn, with its foxy table d'hôte, if what's one man's meat
is another man's poison, and natural selection is the order of the
day?"
"Outside Inn is all the more necessary to the welfare of a nation
that's being starved out by the high cost of living. All I need to do
is to have a little more variety, to have all the nutritive
requirements in each meal, and such generous servings that every
patron can make out a meal satisfying to himself."
"Everybody knows that all fat people eat all the sweets that they can
get, and all thin people take tea without sugar with lemon in it."
"These people aren't healthy. That's where the intelligent supervision
comes in."
"What do you intend to do about them?"
"Watch over them a little more carefully. Regulate their servings
craftily. Be sure of my tables. I have lots of schemes. I'll tell you
about them sometime."
"_Sometime_,--for this relief much thanks," murmured Billy; "just now
I've had as much of these matters as I can stand. I don't see how you
are going to run this thing on a profit, though."
"I'm not," Nancy said, "I'm losing money every minute. That fifteen
thousand dollars is almost gone now, of course. Billy, do you think it
would be perfectly awful if I didn't try to make money at all?"
"I think it would be a good deal wiser. I'll raise all the money you
want on your expectations."
"All right then. I'm not going to worry."
Billy looked down into the courtyard from the room up-stairs in which
they had been talking. Already the preparations for lunch were under
way. The girls were moving deftly about, laying cloths and arranging
flower vases and silver.
"Can I get right down there and sit down at one of those tables and
have my lunch," Billy inquired, "or do I have to go out of the back
door and come in the front like a regular customer?"
"Whichever you prefer. There's Caroline coming in at the gate now."
"Well, then, I know which I prefer," Billy said, swimming realistically
toward the stairs.
"You are getting fat, Billy," Caroline informed him critically after
the amenities were over, and the meal appropriately begun. "You ought
to watch your diet a little more carefully."
"No," Billy said firmly, "I don't need to watch my diet, I'm perfectly
healthy, and therefore my natural cravings will point the way to my
most judicious nourishment. Nancy has explained all to me."
"That's a very interesting theory of Nancy's," Caroline said, "but I
don't altogether agree with it."
"I do," said Billy, then he added hastily, "but I agree with you, too,
Caroline. You are to all other women what moonlight is to sunlight, or
I mean--what sunlight is to moonlight. In other words--you are the
goods."
"Don't be silly, Billy."
"There's only one thing in all this wide universe that you can't say
to me, Caroline, and 'don't be silly, Billy,' is that thing,--express
this same thing in _vers libre_ if you must say it! Look at the
handsome soup you're getting. What is the name of that soup, Molly?"
He smiled ingratiatingly at the little waitress, who always beamed at
any one of Nancy's particular friends that came into the restaurant,
and made a point of serving them if she could possibly arrange it.
"Cream of spinach," she said, "it's a special to-day."
"Beautiful soup so rich and green," Billy began in a soulful baritone,
"waiting in a hot tureen. Where's mine, Molly?"
"Dolly's bringing your first course, sir."
Billy gazed in perplexity at the half of a delicious grapefruit set
before him by the duplicate of the pretty girl who stood smiling
deprecatingly behind Caroline's chair.
"Where's my soup, Dolly?" Billy asked with a thundering sternness of
manner.
"I'm sorry, sir," Dolly began glibly, "but the soup has given out.
Will you be good enough to allow the substitution of--"
"That's a formula," Billy said. "The soup can't be out. We're the
first people in the dining-room. Go tell Miss Nancy that I will be
served with some of that green soup at once, or know the reason why."
The two waitresses exchanged glances, and went off together
suppressing giggles, to return almost immediately, their risibility
still causing them great physical inconvenience.
"Intelligent supervision, she says." Dolly exploded into the miniature
patch of muslin and ribbon that served her as an apron.
"She says that's the reason why," Molly contributed,--following her
sister's example.
"Nancy doesn't serve soup to a fat man if she can possibly avoid it.
That's part of her theory," Caroline explained. "There's no use making
a fuss about it, because you won't get it."
Billy sat looking at his grapefruit for some seconds in silence. Then
he began on it slowly.
"Well, I'll be damned," he said.
Nancy was learning a great many things very rapidly. The practical
application of her theories of feeding mankind to her actual
experiments with the shifting population of New York, revolutionized
her attitude toward the problem almost daily. She had started in with
a great many ideas and ideals of service, with preconceived notions of
balanced rations, and exact distribution of fuel stuffs to the human
unit. She had come to realize very shortly, that the human unit was a
quantity as incalculable in its relation to its digestive problems as
its psychological ones. She had believed vaguely that in reference to
food values the race made its great exception to its rule of working
out toward normality; but she changed that opinion very quickly as she
watched her fellow men selecting their diet with as sure an instinct
for their nutritive requirements as if she had coached them personally
for years.
From the assumption that she lived in a world gone dietetically mad,
and hence in the process of destroying itself, she had gradually come
to see that in this phase of his struggle for existence, as well as in
every other, the instinct of man operated automatically in the
direction of his salvation. This new attitude in tie matter relieved
her of much of her responsibility, but left her not less anxious to do
what she could for her kind in the matter of calories. She was, as she
had shown in her treatment of Billy, not entirely blinded by her
growing predilection in favor of the doctrine of natural selection.
Every day she had Gaspard make, in addition to his regular table
d'hôte menu, dozens of nutritive custards, quarts of stimulating
broths and jellies and other dishes containing the maximum of
easily digested and highly concentrated nutriment, and these she
managed to have Molly or Dolly or even Hildeguard--the Alma Tadema
girl--introduce into the luncheon or dinner service in the case of
those patrons who seemed to need peculiarly careful nourishing. Let a
white-faced girl sink into a seat within the range of Nancy's
vision,--she always ensconced herself in the doorway screened with
vines at the beginning of a meal,--and she gave orders at once for
the crafty substitution of invalid broth for soup, of rich nut
bread for the ordinary rolls and crackers, of custards or specially
made ice-cream for the dessert of the day. No overfed, pasty-faced
man ever escaped from Outside Inn until an attempt at least had been
made to introduce a portion of stewed prunes into his diet; and
all such were fed the minimum of bread and other starchy foods, and
the maximum of salad and green vegetables. Nancy had gluten bread made
in quantities for the stouter element of her patronage, and in
nine cases out of ten she was able to get it served and eaten
without protest. Some of her regular patrons began to change weight
gradually, a heavy man or two became less heavy, and a wraithlike
girl now and then took on a new bloom and substantiality. These were
the triumphs for which Nancy lived. Her only regret was that she
was not able to give to each her personal time and attention, and
establish herself on a footing with her patrons where she might learn
from their own lips the secrets of their metabolism.
She was not known as the proprietor of the place. In fact, the
management of the restaurant was kept a careful secret from those who
frequented it and with the habitual indifference of New Yorkers to the
power behind the throne, so long as its affairs were manipulated in
good and regular order, they soon ceased to feel any apparent
curiosity about it. Betty, who sometimes rebelled at remaining so
scrupulously incognita, defiantly took the limelight at intervals and
moved among the assembled guests with an authoritative and possessive
air, adjusting and rearranging small details, and acknowledging the
presence of _habitués_, but since her attentions were popularly
supposed to be those of a superior head waitress, she soon tired of
the gesture of offering them.
Nancy's intention had been to allow the restaurant to speak for
itself, and then at the climactic moment to allow her connection with
it to be discovered, and to speak for it with all the force and
earnestness of which she was capable. She had meant to stand sponsor
for the practical working theory on which her experiment was based,
and she had already partially formulated interviews with herself in
which she modestly acknowledged the success of that experiment, but
the untoward direction in which it was developing made such a
revelation inexpedient.
There was one regular patron to whom she was peculiarly anxious to
remain incognita. Collier Pratt made it his almost invariable habit to
come sauntering toward the table in the corner, under the life-sized
effigy of the _Vênus de Medici_, at seven o'clock in the evening, and
that table was scrupulously reserved for him. To it were sent the
choicest of all the viands that Outside Inn could command. Michael was
tacitly sped on his way with his teapot full of claret. Gaspard did
amazing things with the breasts of ducks and segments of orange, with
squab chicken stuffed with new corn, with _filets de sole a la
Marguery_. Nancy craftily spurred him on to his most ambitious
achievements under pretense of wishing her own appetite stimulated,
and the big cook, who adored her, produced triumph after triumph of
his art for her delectation, whereupon the biggest part of it was
cunningly smuggled out to the artist. From behind her screen of vines
Nancy watched the fine features of her quondam friend light with the
rapture of the _gourmet_ as be sampled Gaspard's sauce _verte_ or
Hollandaise or lifted the glass cover from the mushrooms _sous cloche_
and inhaled their delicate aroma.
"I wonder if he finds our food very American in character, now," she
said to herself, with a blush at the memory of the real southern
cornbread and candied sweet potatoes that were offered him in the
initial weeks of his patronage. Gaspard still made these delicacies
for luncheon, but they had been almost entirely banished from the
dinner menu. Afternoon tea at the Inn was famous for the wonderful
waffles produced with Parisian precision from a traditional Virginian
recipe, but Collier Pratt never appeared at either of these meals to
criticize them for being American.