I always was fond of eating and drinking, even as a child--especially
eating, in those early days. I had an appetite then, also a digestion. I
remember a dull-eyed, livid-complexioned gentleman coming to dine at
our house once. He watched me eating for about five minutes, quite
fascinated seemingly, and then he turned to my father with--
"Does your boy ever suffer from dyspepsia?"
"I never heard him complain of anything of that kind," replied my
father. "Do you ever suffer from dyspepsia, Colly wobbles?" (They called
me Colly wobbles, but it was not my real name.)
"No, pa," I answered. After which I added:
"What is dyspepsia, pa?"
My livid-complexioned friend regarded me with a look of mingled
amazement and envy. Then in a tone of infinite pity he slowly said:
"You will know--some day."
My poor, dear mother used to say she liked to see me eat, and it has
always been a pleasant reflection to me since that I must have given
her much gratification in that direction. A growing, healthy lad, taking
plenty of exercise and careful to restrain himself from indulging in
too much study, can generally satisfy the most exacting expectations as
regards his feeding powers.
It is amusing to see boys eat when you have not got to pay for it. Their
idea of a square meal is a pound and a half of roast beef with five
or six good-sized potatoes (soapy ones preferred as being more
substantial), plenty of greens, and four thick slices of Yorkshire
pudding, followed by a couple of currant dumplings, a few green apples,
a pen'orth of nuts, half a dozen jumbles, and a bottle of ginger-beer.
After that they play at horses.
How they must despise us men, who require to sit quiet for a couple
of hours after dining off a spoonful of clear soup and the wing of a
chicken!
But the boys have not all the advantages on their side. A boy never
enjoys the luxury of being satisfied. A boy never feels full. He can
never stretch out his legs, put his hands behind his head, and, closing
his eyes, sink into the ethereal blissfulness that encompasses the
well-dined man. A dinner makes no difference whatever to a boy. To a
man it is as a good fairy's potion, and after it the world appears
a brighter and a better place. A man who has dined satisfactorily
experiences a yearning love toward all his fellow-creatures. He strokes
the cat quite gently and calls it "poor pussy," in tones full of the
tenderest emotion. He sympathizes with the members of the German band
outside and wonders if they are cold; and for the moment he does not
even hate his wife's relations.
A good dinner brings out all the softer side of a man. Under its genial
influence the gloomy and morose become jovial and chatty. Sour, starchy
individuals, who all the rest of the day go about looking as if they
lived on vinegar and Epsom salts, break out into wreathed smiles after
dinner, and exhibit a tendency to pat small children on the head and
to talk to them--vaguely--about sixpences. Serious men thaw and become
mildly cheerful, and snobbish young men of the heavy-mustache type
forget to make themselves objectionable.
I always feel sentimental myself after dinner. It is the only time when
I can properly appreciate love-stories. Then, when the hero clasps "her"
to his heart in one last wild embrace and stifles a sob, I feel as sad
as though I had dealt at whist and turned up only a deuce; and when the
heroine dies in the end I weep. If I read the same tale early in the
morning I should sneer at it. Digestion, or rather indigestion, has
a marvelous effect upon the heart. If I want to write any thing very
pathetic--I mean, if I want to try to write anything very pathetic--I
eat a large plateful of hot buttered muffins about an hour beforehand,
and then by the time I sit down to my work a feeling of unutterable
melancholy has come over me. I picture heartbroken lovers parting
forever at lonely wayside stiles, while the sad twilight deepens
around them, and only the tinkling of a distant sheep-bell breaks the
sorrow-laden silence. Old men sit and gaze at withered flowers till
their sight is dimmed by the mist of tears. Little dainty maidens wait
and watch at open casements; but "he cometh not," and the heavy years
roll by and the sunny gold tresses wear white and thin. The babies that
they dandled have become grown men and women with podgy torments of
their own, and the playmates that they laughed with are lying very
silent under the waving grass. But still they wait and watch, till the
dark shadows of the unknown night steal up and gather round them and the
world with its childish troubles fades from their aching eyes.
I see pale corpses tossed on white-foamed waves, and death-beds stained
with bitter tears, and graves in trackless deserts. I hear the wild
wailing of women, the low moaning of little children, the dry sobbing of
strong men. It's all the muffins. I could not conjure up one melancholy
fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.
A full stomach is a great aid to poetry, and indeed no sentiment of any
kind can stand upon an empty one. We have not time or inclination
to indulge in fanciful troubles until we have got rid of our real
misfortunes. We do not sigh over dead dicky-birds with the bailiff
in the house, and when we do not know where on earth to get our next
shilling from, we do not worry as to whether our mistress' smiles are
cold, or hot, or lukewarm, or anything else about them.
Foolish people--when I say "foolish people" in this contemptuous way I
mean people who entertain different opinions to mine. If there is one
person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think
exactly the same on all topics as I do--foolish people, I say, then,
who have never experienced much of either, will tell you that mental
distress is far more agonizing than bodily. Romantic and touching
theory! so comforting to the love-sick young sprig who looks down
patronizingly at some poor devil with a white starved face and thinks to
himself, "Ah, how happy you are compared with me!"--so soothing to fat
old gentlemen who cackle about the superiority of poverty over riches.
But it is all nonsense--all cant. An aching head soon makes one forget
an aching heart. A broken finger will drive away all recollections of
an empty chair. And when a man feels really hungry he does not feel
anything else.
We sleek, well-fed folk can hardly realize what feeling hungry is like.
We know what it is to have no appetite and not to care for the dainty
victuals placed before us, but we do not understand what it means to
sicken for food--to die for bread while others waste it--to gaze with
famished eyes upon coarse fare steaming behind dingy windows, longing
for a pen'orth of pea pudding and not having the penny to buy it--to
feel that a crust would be delicious and that a bone would be a banquet.
Hunger is a luxury to us, a piquant, flavor-giving sauce. It is well
worth while to get hungry and thirsty merely to discover how much
gratification can be obtained from eating and drinking. If you wish
to thoroughly enjoy your dinner, take a thirty-mile country walk after
breakfast and don't touch anything till you get back. How your eyes will
glisten at sight of the white table-cloth and steaming dishes then! With
what a sigh of content you will put down the empty beer tankard and take
up your knife and fork! And how comfortable you feel afterward as you
push back your chair, light a cigar, and beam round upon everybody.
Make sure, however, when adopting this plan, that the good dinner is
really to be had at the end, or the disappointment is trying. I remember
once a friend and I--dear old Joe, it was. Ah! how we lose one another
in life's mist. It must be eight years since I last saw Joseph Taboys.
How pleasant it would be to meet his jovial face again, to clasp his
strong hand, and to hear his cheery laugh once more! He owes me 14
shillings, too. Well, we were on a holiday together, and one morning
we had breakfast early and started for a tremendous long walk. We had
ordered a duck for dinner over night. We said, "Get a big one, because
we shall come home awfully hungry;" and as we were going out our
landlady came up in great spirits. She said, "I have got you gentlemen a
duck, if you like. If you get through that you'll do well;" and she held
up a bird about the size of a door-mat. We chuckled at the sight and
said we would try. We said it with self-conscious pride, like men who
know their own power. Then we started.
We lost our way, of course. I always do in the country, and it does make
me so wild, because it is no use asking direction of any of the people
you meet. One might as well inquire of a lodging-house slavey the way
to make beds as expect a country bumpkin to know the road to the next
village. You have to shout the question about three times before the
sound of your voice penetrates his skull. At the third time he slowly
raises his head and stares blankly at you. You yell it at him then for
a fourth time, and he repeats it after you. He ponders while you count
a couple of hundred, after which, speaking at the rate of three words a
minute, he fancies you "couldn't do better than--" Here he catches
sight of another idiot coming down the road and bawls out to him the
particulars, requesting his advice. The two then argue the case for
a quarter of an hour or so, and finally agree that you had better go
straight down the lane, round to the right and cross by the third stile,
and keep to the left by old Jimmy Milcher's cow-shed, and across the
seven-acre field, and through the gate by Squire Grubbin's hay-stack,
keeping the bridle-path for awhile till you come opposite the hill where
the windmill used to be--but it's gone now--and round to the right,
leaving Stiggin's plantation behind you; and you say "Thank you" and go
away with a splitting headache, but without the faintest notion of your
way, the only clear idea you have on the subject being that somewhere
or other there is a stile which has to be got over; and at the next turn
you come upon four stiles, all leading in different directions!
We had undergone this ordeal two or three times. We had tramped over
fields. We had waded through brooks and scrambled over hedges and walls.
We had had a row as to whose fault it was that we had first lost our
way. We had got thoroughly disagreeable, footsore, and weary. But
throughout it all the hope of that duck kept us up. A fairy-like vision,
it floated before our tired eyes and drew us onward. The thought of it
was as a trumpet-call to the fainting. We talked of it and cheered each
other with our recollections of it. "Come along," we said; "the duck
will be spoiled."
We felt a strong temptation, at one point, to turn into a village inn
as we passed and have a cheese and a few loaves between us, but we
heroically restrained ourselves: we should enjoy the duck all the better
for being famished.
We fancied we smelled it when we go into the town and did the last
quarter of a mile in three minutes. We rushed upstairs, and washed
ourselves, and changed our clothes, and came down, and pulled our chairs
up to the table, and sat and rubbed our hands while the landlady removed
the covers, when I seized the knife and fork and started to carve.
It seemed to want a lot of carving. I struggled with it for about five
minutes without making the slightest impression, and then Joe, who had
been eating potatoes, wanted to know if it wouldn't be better for some
one to do the job that understood carving. I took no notice of his
foolish remark, but attacked the bird again; and so vigorously this time
that the animal left the dish and took refuge in the fender.
We soon had it out of that, though, and I was prepared to make another
effort. But Joe was getting unpleasant. He said that if he had thought
we were to have a game of blind hockey with the dinner he would have got
a bit of bread and cheese outside.
I was too exhausted to argue. I laid down the knife and fork with
dignity and took a side seat and Joe went for the wretched creature. He
worked away in silence for awhile, and then he muttered "Damn the duck"
and took his coat off.
We did break the thing up at length with the aid of a chisel, but it
was perfectly impossible to eat it, and we had to make a dinner off the
vegetables and an apple tart. We tried a mouthful of the duck, but it
was like eating India-rubber.
It was a wicked sin to kill that drake. But there! there's no respect
for old institutions in this country.
I started this paper with the idea of writing about eating and drinking,
but I seem to have confined my remarks entirely to eating as yet. Well,
you see, drinking is one of those subjects with which it is inadvisable
to appear too well acquainted. The days are gone by when it was
considered manly to go to bed intoxicated every night, and a clear head
and a firm hand no longer draw down upon their owner the reproach
of effeminacy. On the contrary, in these sadly degenerate days an
evil-smelling breath, a blotchy face, a reeling gait, and a husky voice
are regarded as the hall marks of the cad rather than or the gentleman.
Even nowadays, though, the thirstiness of mankind is something
supernatural. We are forever drinking on one excuse or another. A man
never feels comfortable unless he has a glass before him. We drink
before meals, and with meals, and after meals. We drink when we meet a
friend, also when we part from a friend. We drink when we are talking,
when we are reading, and when we are thinking. We drink one another's
healths and spoil our own. We drink the queen, and the army, and the
ladies, and everybody else that is drinkable; and I believe if the
supply ran short we should drink our mothers-in-law.
By the way, we never eat anybody's health, always drink it. Why should
we not stand up now and then and eat a tart to somebody's success?
To me, I confess the constant necessity of drinking under which the
majority of men labor is quite unaccountable. I can understand people
drinking to drown care or to drive away maddening thoughts well enough.
I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in
drink--oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course--very
shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures
of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics
should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the
public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their
dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin.
But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living,
what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the
squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year
in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they
welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and
fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where
the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a
bedlam of riot and stench.
Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them,
devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and
munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at
the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields,
and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the
clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From
the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when
they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life.
Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy,
sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle
words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon
their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them
forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to
one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never
start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour
the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment
that they live!
Ah! we may talk sentiment as much as we like, but the stomach is the
real seat of happiness in this world. The kitchen is the chief temple
wherein we worship, its roaring fire is our vestal flame, and the cook
is our great high-priest. He is a mighty magician and a kindly one. He
soothes away all sorrow and care. He drives forth all enmity, gladdens
all love. Our God is great and the cook is his prophet. Let us eat,
drink, and be merry.