I
"You eat too much, Marny." It was Joplin, of Boston, who was
speaking--Samuel Epigastric Joplin, his brother painters called him.
"You treat your stomach as if it were a scrap-basket and you dump into
it everything you--"
"I do? You caricature of a codfish ball!"
"Yes, you do. You open your mouth, pin back your ears and in go
pickles, red cabbage, Dutch cheese. It's insanity, Marny, and it's
vulgar. No man's epigastric can stand it. It wouldn't make any
difference if you were a kangaroo with your pouch on the outside, but
you're a full-grown man and ought to have some common-sense."
"And you think that if I followed your idiotic theory it would keep me
out of my coffin, do you? What you want, Joppy, is a square meal. You
never had one, so far as I can find out, since you were born. You drank
sterilized milk at blood temperature until you were five; chewed
patent, unhulled wheat bread until you were ten, and since that time
you've filled your stomach with husks--proteids, and carbohydrates, and
a lot of such truck--isn't that what he calls em, Pudfut?"
The Englishman nodded in assent.
"And now just look at you, Joppy, instead of a forty-inch chest--"
"And a sixty-inch waist," interjected Joplin with a laugh, pointing at
Marny's waistcoat.
"I acknowledge it, old man, and I'm proud of it," retorted Marny,
patting his rotundity. "Instead, I say, of a decent chest your
shoulders crowd your breast-bone; your epigastric, as you call it--it's
your solar plexus, Joppy--but that's a trifle to an anatomist like
you--your epigastric scrapes your back-bone, so lonely is it for
something warm and digestible to rub up against, and your-- Why, Joppy,
do you know when I look at you and think over your wasted life, my eyes
fill with tears? Eat something solid, old man, and give your stomach a
surprise. Begin now. Dinner's coming up--I smell it. Open your port
nostril, you shrivelled New England bean, and take in the aroma of
beatific pork and greens. Doesn't that put new life into you? Puddy,
you and Schonholz help Joppy to his feet and one or two of you fellows
walk behind to pick up the pieces in case he falls apart before we can
feed him. There's Tine's dinner-bell!"
White-capped, rosy-checked, bare-armed Tine had rung that bell for this
group of painters for two years past--ever since Mynheer Boudier of the
Bellevue over the way, who once claimed her services, had reproved
Johann, the porter, for blocking up with the hotel trunks that part of
the sidewalk over which the steamboat captain slid his gangplank.
Thereupon Tine slipped her pretty little feet into her white
sabots--she and Johann have been called in church since--and walked
straight over to the Holland Arms. Johann now fights the steamboat
captain, backed not only by the landlord of the Arms, who rubs his
hands in glee over the possession of two of his competitor's best
servants, but by the whole coterie of painters whose boots Johann
blacks, whose kits be packs and unpacks, whose errands he runs; while
Tine, no less loyal and obliging, darns their stockings, mends their
clothes, sews on buttons, washes brushes, stretches canvases, waits on
table, rings the dinner-bell, and with her own hands scrubs every
square inch of visible surface inside and out of this quaint old inn in
this sleepy old town of Dort-on-the-Maas--side-walks, windows,
cobbles--clear to the middle of the street, her ruddy arms bare to the
elbow, her sturdy, blue-yarn-stockinged legs thrust into snow-white
sabots to keep her trim feet from the wet and slop.
Built in 1620, this inn of the Holland Arms--so the mildewed brick in
the keystone over the arch of the doorway says--and once the home of a
Dutchman made rich by the China trade, whose ships cast anchor where
Fop Smit's steamboats now tie up (I have no interest in the Line); a
grimy, green-moulded, lean-over front and moss-covered, sloping-roof
sort of an inn, with big beams supporting the ceilings of the bedrooms;
lumbering furniture blackened with the smoke of a thousand pipes
flanking the walls of the coffee-room; bits of Delft a century old
lining the mantel; tiny panes of glass with here and there a bull's-eye
illumining the squat windows; rows of mugs with pewter tops crowding
the narrow shelves beside the fireplace, and last, and by no means
least, a big, bulky sun-moon-and-stars clock, with one eye always open,
which strikes the hours as if it meant to beat the very life out of
them.
But there is something more in this coffee-room--something that neither
Mynheer Boudier of the Bellevue nor any other landlord in any other
hostelry, great or small, up and down the Maas, can boast. This is the
coffee-room picture gallery--free to whoever comes.
It began with a contribution from the first impecunious painter in
payment of an overdue board-bill, his painting being hung on a nail
beside the clock. Now; all over the walls--above the sideboard with its
pewter plates and queer mugs; over the mantel holding the Delft, and
between the squat windows--are pinned, tacked, pasted and hung--singly
and in groups--sketches in oil, pastel, water color, pencil and
charcoal, many without frames and most of them bearing the signature of
some poor, stranded painter, preceded by the suggestive line, "To my
dear friend, the landlord"--silent reminders all of a small cash
balance which circumstances quite beyond their control had prevented
their liquidating at the precise hour of their departure.
Mynheer had bowed and smiled as each new contribution was handed him
and straightway had found a hammer and a nail and up it went beside its
fellows. He never made objection: the more the merrier. The ice wind
would soon blow across the Maas from Papendrecht, the tall grasses in
the marshes turn pale with fright, and the lace-frost with busy fingers
pattern the tiny panes, and then Johann would pack the kits one after
another, and the last good-byes take place. But the sketches would
remain. Oh! yes, the sketches would remain and tell the story of the
summer and every night new mugs would be filled around the coal-fire,
and new pipes lighted--mugs and pipes of the TOWNSPEOPLE this time, who
came to feast their eyes,--and, although the summer was gone, the long
winter would still be his. No, Mynheer never objected!
And this simple form of settlement--a note of hand (in color), payable
in yearly patronage--has not been confined to modern times. Many an inn
owes its survival to a square of canvas--the head of a child, a copper
pot, or stretch of dune; and more than one collector now boasts of a
masterpiece which had hung for years on some taproom wall, a sure but
silent witness of the poverty of a Franz Hals, Wouverman or Van der
Helst.
Each year had brought new additions to the impecunious group about
Mynheer's table.
Dear old Marny, with his big boiler amidships, his round, sunburned
face shaded by a wide-brimmed, slouch hat--the one he wore when he
lived with the Sioux Indians--loose red tie tossed over one shoulder,
and rusty velveteen coat, was an old habitue. And so was dry, crusty
Malone, "the man from Dublin," rough outside as a potato and white
inside as its meal. And so, too, was Stebbins, the silent man of the
party, and the only listener in the group. All these came with the
earliest birds and stayed until the boys got out their skates.
But there were others this year who were new. Pudfut, the Englishman,
first--in from Norway, where he had been sketching on board some lord's
yacht--he of the grizzly brown beard, brown ulster reaching to his
toes, gray-checked steamer-cap and brierwood pipe--an outfit which he
never changed--"slept in them," Marny insisted.
"Me name's Pudfut," he began, holding out his hand to Marny. "I've got
a letter in my clothes for ye from a chap in Paris."
"Don't pull it out," had come the answer. "Put it there!" and within an
hour the breezy fellow, his arm through the Englishman's, had trotted
him all over Dort from the Groote Kerk to the old Gate of William of
Orange, introducing him to every painter he met on the way, first as
Pudfut, then as Puddy, then as Pretty-foot, then as Tootsie-Wootsie,
and last as Toots--a name by which he is known in the Quartier to this
day. This done, he had taken him up to his own room and had dumped him
into an extra cot--his for the rest of the summer.
Then Schonholz wandered in--five gulden a week board was the magnet--a
cheese-faced, good-natured German lad with forehead so high that when
he raised his hat Marny declared, with a cry of alarm, that his scalp
had slipped, and only regained his peace of mind when he had twisted
his fat fingers in the lad's forelock to make sure that it was still
fast. Schonholz had passed a year at Heidelberg and carried his diploma
on his cheek--two crisscross slashes that had never healed--spoke
battered English, wore a green flat-topped cap, and gray bobtailed coat
with two rows of horn buttons ("Come to shoot chamois, have you?" Marny
had asked when he presented his credentials.)--laughed three-quarters
of the time he was awake, and never opened his kit or set a palette
while he was in Dort. "Too vet and too fodgy all dime," was the way he
accounted for his laziness.
Last came Joplin--a man of thirty-five; bald as an egg and as shiny.
("Dangerous to have a hen around," Marny would say, rubbing the pate
after the manner of a phrenologist.) Gaunt, wiry; jerky in his
movements as a Yankee clock and as regular in his habits: hot water
when he got up--two glasses, sipped slowly; cold water when he went to
bed, head first, feet next, then the rest of him; window open all night
no matter how hard it blew or rained; ate three meals a day and no
more; chewed every mouthful of food thirty times--coffee, soup, even
his drinking-water (Gladstone had taught him that, he boasted)--a
walking laboratory of a man, who knew it all, took no layman's advice,
and was as set in his ways as a chunk of concrete.
And his fads did not stop with his food; they extended to his
clothes--everything he used, in fact. His baggy knickerbockers ended in
leather leggins to protect his pipe-stem shanks; his shirts buttoned
all the way down in front and went on like a coat; he wore health
flannels by day and a health shirt at night ("Just like my old Aunt
Margaret's wrapper," whispered Marny in a stage voice to Pudfut);
sported a ninety-nine-cent silver watch fastened to a leather strap
(sometimes to a piece of twine); stuck a five-hundred-dollar scarab pin
in his necktie--"Nothing finer in the Boston Museum," he maintained,
and told the truth--and ever and always enunciated an English so pure
and so undefiled that Stebbins, after listening to it for a few
minutes, proposed, with an irreverence born of good-fellowship, that a
subscription be started to have Joplin's dialect phonographed so that
it might be handed down to posterity as the only real and correct thing.
"Are you noticing, gentlemen, the way in which Joplin handles his
mother tongue?" Stebbins had shouted across the table: "never drops his
'g's,' never slights his first syllable; says 'HUmor' with an accent on
the 'HU.' But for the fact that he pronounces 'bonnet' 'BUNNIT' and
'admires' a thing when he really ought only to 'like' it, you could
never discover his codfish bringing up. Out with your wallets--how much
do you chip in?"
These peculiarities soon made Joplin the storm-centre of every
discussion. Not only were his views on nutrition ridiculed, but all his
fads were treated with equal disrespect. "Impressionism," "plein air,"
the old "line engraving" in contrast to the modern "half-tone"
methods--any opinion of Joplin's, no matter how sane or logical, was
jostled, sat on, punched in the ribs and otherwise maltreated until
every man was breathless or black in the face with assumed rage--every
man except the man jostled, who never lost his temper no matter what
the provocation, and who always came up smiling with some such remark
as: "Smite away, you Pharisees; harmony is heavenly--but stupid. Keep
it up--here's the other cheek!"
On this particular night Joplin, as I have said, had broken out on
diet. Some movement of Marny's connected with the temporary relief of
the lower button of his waistcoat had excited the great Bostonian's
wrath. The men were seated at dinner inside the coffee-room, Johann and
Tine serving.
"Yes, Marny, I'm sorry to say it, but the fact is you eat too much and
you eat the wrong things. If you knew anything of the kinds of food
necessary to nourish the human body, you would know that it should
combine in proper proportions proteid, fats, carbohydrates and a small
percentage of inorganic salts--these are constantly undergoing
oxidation and at the same time are liberating energy in the form of
heat."
"Hear the bloody bounder!" bawled Pudfut from the other end of the
table.
"Silence!" called Marny, with his ear cupped in his fingers, an
expression of the farthest-away-boy-in-the-class on his face.
Joplin waved his hand in protest and continued, without heeding the
interruption: "Now, if you're stupid enough to stuff your epigastrium
with pork, you, of course, get an excess of non-nitrogenous fats, and
in order to digest anything properly you must necessarily cram in an
additional quantity of carbohydrates--greens, potatoes,
cabbage--whatever Tine shoves under your nose. Consult any scientist
and see if I am not right--especially the German doctors who have made
a specialty of nutrition. Such men as Fugel, Beenheim and--"
Here a slice of Tine's freshly-cut bread made a line-shot, struck the
top of Joplin's scalp, caromed on Schonholz's shirt-front and fell into
Stebbins's lap, followed instantly by "Order, gentlemen!" from Marny.
"Don't waste that slab of proteid. The learned Bean is most interesting
and should not be interrupted."
"Better out than in," continued Joplin, brushing the crumbs from his
plate. "Bread--fresh bread particularly--is the very worst thing a man
can put into his stomach."
"And how about pertaties?" shouted Malone. "I s'pose ye'd rob us of the
only thing that's kep' us alive as a nation, wouldn't ye?"
"I certainly would, 'Loney, except in very small quantities. Raw
potatoes contain twenty-two per cent. of the worst form of
non-nitrogenous food, and seventy-eight per cent. of water. You,
Malone, with your sedentary habits, should never touch an ounce of
potato. It excites the epigastric nerve and induces dyspepsia. You're
as lazy as the devil and should only eat nitrogenous food and never in
excess. What you require is about one hundred grams of protein, giving
you a fuel value of twenty-seven hundred calories, and to produce this
fifty-five ounces of food a day is enough. When you exceed this you run
to flesh--unhealthy bloat really--and in the wrong places. You've only
to look at Marny's sixty-inch waist-line to prove the truth of this
theory. Now look at me--I keep my figure, don't I? Not a bad one for a
light-weight, is it? I'm in perfect health, can run, jump, eat, sleep,
paint, and but for a slight organic weakness with my heart, which is
hereditary in my family and which kills most of us off at about seventy
years of age, I'm as sound as a nut. And all--all, let me tell you, due
to my observing a few scientific laws regarding hygiene which you men
never seem to have heard of."
Malone now rose to his feet, pewter mug in hand, and swept his eye
around the table.
"Bedad, you're right, Joppy," he said with a wink at Marny--"food's the
ruination of us all; drink is what we want. On yer feet,
gintlemen--every mother's son of ye! Here's to the learned, livin'
skeleton from Boston! Five per cint. man and ninety-five per cint.
crank!"