DID ANYBODY SAY “CHICKEN”?
Sometimes we take luncheon with us and sometimes we don’t. If we do,
we see nice, clean-looking places on the road, such as the Parmly at
Plainsville between Erie and Cleveland and the Avelon at Norwalk between
Cleveland and Toledo; if we don’t we find nothing but hotels of the
saloon-front and ladies’-entrance-in-the-back variety.
Between South Bend and Chicago we had not intended to stop, but found
ourselves rather hungry and unwilling to wait until about three o’clock
to lunch in Chicago. We looked in the Blue Book and saw the advertisement
of a restaurant a few miles ahead. “Mrs. Seth Brown. Chicken dinners a
specialty.” That is not her real name.
The very words “chicken dinner” made us suddenly conscious that we were
ravenous.
“Do you remember the chicken dinners at the different places near Bar
Harbor?” reminisced the lady-who-was-traveling-with-us. I am not going to
call her that any more! It is too long to say. I will call her “Celia”
instead. It is not her name, but it is an anagram of it, which will do as
well. Also a repetition of our “chauffeur” sounds tiresome, and his own
initials of E. M. would be much simpler.
Anyway, all three of us conjured up visions of the chicken that was in a
little while going to be set before us.
“Country chickens are so much better than town ones!” said Celia. “They
are never the same after they have been packed in ice and shipped, and
I do wonder whether it will be broiled, with crisp fried potatoes, or
whether it will be fried with corn fritters and bacon!”
“—And pop-overs,” suggested E. M.
“Couldn’t we drive a little faster?” I asked. For by now my imagination
had conjured up not only the actual aroma of deliciously broiled chicken,
but I was already putting fresh country butter on crisp hot pop-overs.
But in my greediness for the delectable dinner that was awaiting us, I
lost my place in the Blue Book. Nothing that I could find any longer
tallied with the road we were on, and it took us at least half an hour
to find ourselves again. By the time we finally reached the little town
of delectable dinners we were so hungry we would have thought any kind
of old fowl good. But search as we might we could not discover any place
that looked even remotely like a restaurant. There was a saloon, and
a factory, and some small frame tenements. Nothing else in the place.
Inquiring of some men standing on a corner, one of them answered, “The
ladies’ entrance of the saloon is Mrs. Seth Brown’s place, and the
eating’s all right.” We were very hungry and the lure of chicken being
strong, also feeling that perhaps the interior might prove better than
the entrance promised, we went in. In the rear of a bar was a dingy
room smelling of fried fat and stale beer. There were three groups of
perfectly respectable-looking people sitting at three tables. A barkeeper
with a collarless shirt, ragged apron, and a cigar in his mouth, sat us
at a fourth table with a coffee-stained cloth on it, rusty black-handled
cutlery, and plates that were a little dusty.
“What y’want!”
“Do you serve chicken dinners?” I asked.
“D’ye see it advertised?”
“Yes, in the Blue Book.”
“Y’ c’n have dinner,” he said as though he was obliged against his
inclination to live up to his advertisement.
E. M. was drawing water out of the well to fill the radiator tank.
Celia and I began wiping off the plates and forks on the corners of the
tablecloth.
At the table nearest us were four men and a woman. One of the men kept
hugging the woman, who paid no attention to him. Two of the others went
continually back and forth to the bar, while the fourth was occupied
solely with his food. At another table was a family motoring party, and
at the third, a second family, with a baby that cried without stopping
and a little child who screamed from time to time in chorus.
Our chicken dinner proved to be some greasy fried fish, cold bluish
potatoes, sliced raw onions, pickled gherkins, bread and coffee.
We ate some bread and drank the coffee. If we had been blindfolded it
wouldn’t have been so bad.
There is one consoling feature in such an incident, that although it is
not especially enjoyable at the time, it is just such experiences and
disappointments, of course, that make the high spots of a whole motor
trip in looking back upon it. It is your troubles on the road, your bad
meals in queer places, your unexpected stops at people’s houses; in
short, your misadventures that afterwards become your most treasured
memories. In fact, after years of touring, I have in a vague, ragged sort
of way tried to hold to what might be called a motor philosophy. Anyway,
I have found it a splendid idea when things go very uncomfortably to
remember—if I can—what a very charming diplomat, who was also a great
traveler, once told me: that in motoring, as in life, since trouble gives
character, obstacles and misadventures are really necessary to give the
_trip_ character! The peaceful motorist who has no motor trouble or
weather trouble or road trouble has a pleasant enough time, but after all
he gets the least out of it in the way of recollections. Not that our one
disappointment about our chicken dinner is meant to serve as a backbone
of character for this trip, neither do I hope we shall run into any
serious misadventure, but I really quite honestly hope that everything
will not be so easy as to be entirely colorless.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE EXCITING THINGS IN MOTORING IS WONDERING WHAT
SORT OF A HOTEL YOU WILL ARRIVE AT FOR THE NIGHT]
I was turning these thoughts over in my mind as we sped on to Chicago
and they suggested a most discouraging possibility, which I immediately
confided to Celia:
“Suppose so little happens that there will be nothing to write about? No
one wants descriptions of scenery or too many details of directions as to
roads or hotels, and supposing that is all we know?”
“You could make some up, couldn’t you?” said she sympathetically.
“Do you think that I could tell you a lot of things that never happened
and that you would believe me?” I asked.
She answered positively: “Of course you couldn’t.”
“Then I’m certain nobody else would believe me either.”
“No, I don’t suppose they would,” she agreed, but suddenly she suggested:
“I tell you what we could do. We could stop over in little places and
pass those where we mean to stop—and we can in many ways make ourselves
uncomfortable, if you think it necessary for interesting material.”
But our conversation turned at that point into admiration of our
surroundings; for we had come into a long drive through a park on the
very edge of the Lake that is the beautiful, welcoming entrance to
Chicago.