SOME OF OUR GUESTS
The best fun of having a home is sharing it with your friends. But you
deprive yourself of this fun--in a very large measure, at least--if you
make entertaining a burden or a great expense. In the Rue Servandoni we
tried out theories about hospitality that have become firmly rooted
family principles. Guests are _always_ welcome, and we never feed them
better than we feed ourselves. Company is the rule: not the exception. I
suppose my Irish temperament made this possible in the beginning. Now we
would not give up our way of living for anything in the world. By the
standards of my own family I am not regarded as a good housekeeper. I am
finicky only about cleanliness and the quality and quantity of food. The
rest doesn't matter. That is, I have no almanac to show me when to put
away the winter clothes and when to do Spring house-cleaning. I do not
get "all out of kelter" if the wash is done on Thursday instead of
Monday: and I never "put up" fruit or bake. I buy my preserves from the
grocer and my bread and cake from the baker.
When I look back on Rue Servandoni days and try to analyze my attitude
towards housekeeping, I think first that I may have been demoralized by
living through the Armenian massacres just before going to Paris. It was
enough to make me happy in the morning to realize that my husband and
baby were alive. Did I have a new sense of values, born of suffering? Or
perhaps it wasn't anything as high-brow or pious as that. Perhaps it was
the inheritance of shiftlessness that came down to me from the ancient
Irish kings. This curious form of original sin persists and makes me
able to agree with one who sang when things all got messed up,
"The cow's in the hammock,
The baby's in the lake,
The cat's in the garbage:
WHAT difference does it make?"
Now I do not claim that my way is altogether right and that my maternal
Pennsylvania Dutch strain does not occasionally assert itself, though
feebly. I enjoy formal and well-ordered entertaining when it is not a
pretense--when I do not have the uncomfortable feeling that my hostess
has worn herself out getting the meal ready or is offering a meal beyond
her income.
The alternative in the Rue Servandoni was to have friends take us as we
were or to make an occasional splurge. The latter was thoroughly
distasteful to us both. We held that what was good enough for ourselves
was good enough for our friends, and that they would rather come to our
simple meals than not come at all. How could we hope to compete with
the Café de Paris or Arménonville? And we knew that many who came to us
paid their cook more than our total income.
[Illustration: Where stood the walls of old Lutetia]
Is not the question of entertaining a good deal like the question of
other people's wealth? If you are continually striving to keep up with
friends richer than you, you are bound to feel poor. We could put our
heads out of our window, and pity ourselves because we were not living
in steam-heated, electric-lighted Number Nineteen or Number
Twenty-Three. But then, across the street, Number Twenty and Number
Eighteen had _logements_ beside which our apartment was a palace.
Shortly after setting up our Lares and Penates in Number Twenty-One, a
friend from Denver dropped in just before supper. He was a judge and
silver-mine owner, the father of one of my Bryn Mawr college-mates. I
urged him to stay. He was excusing himself, when I volunteered the
information that our supper consisted of cornmeal mush with milk, and
that was all. He stayed, and told us that it was the best meal he had
eaten in Paris. "I just love cornmeal mush, and I cannot get it at my
hotel," he said. We believed him. He spoke the truth.
There was always room at our table for friends. An extra plate, and a
little more of what we were having for ourselves--that was all there was
to it. In a big city, especially a city like Paris where shops are in
every street, getting more food quickly is no problem. Herbert would
just slip downstairs to Sempé's for eggs, another chop, another can of
peas, an additional bottle of wine. Next door was the bakery.
The best friends of our married life have come to us through
unpretentious entertaining. The contact of the home is different from
the contact of the office or club or formal gathering, and it has
enabled me to take every step forward with my husband. Our broadened
vision, our intimate sources of information, the steps upward in our
profession are largely the result of the dinner-table and the
after-dinner smoke before the fire. One illustration shows how chance
influences the whole life.
Early in the autumn of 1909, we received a letter from a Paris lawyer
who had just returned from settling insurance claims in
massacre-stricken Cilicia. He had been in Tarsus just after we left, and
wanted to meet us. I wrote back to him, as I would have done to anyone
with an introduction like his, "Come to dinner, and if there is a Mrs.
K. bring her with you." He sought us out in our little street. There was
no Mrs. K., but the spontaneity of the invitation and its inclusiveness
had prompted him to break his rule of not accepting dinner invitations.
He was a charming man, full of information and inspiration. When I
brought on the asparagus, he said that in Poland they put burnt bread
crumbs into drawn-butter sauce. I jumped right up, and exclaimed,
"Nothing easier! We shall have _asperges à la polonaise_ right away." In
three minutes the asparagus was to his taste. The lawyer thought out,
and made a suggestion that would certainly never have occurred to him
had I arranged a formal meeting in response to his letter. He told us
that the experience we had in Turkey we should not regard as accidental.
"Why did the massacres occur? You must have asked yourselves that. Now
drop your research into Gallicanism and French ecclesiastical history. A
thousand men are as well equipped for that as you. Turn your attention
to the Turks and the Eastern Question, and from that go into the study
of the contemporary diplomacy of Europe. The Russian and Hapsburg
Empires are built upon the Ottoman Empire. Study the relation of Turkey
to Poland. This is the field for you!"
In the last few years I have often thought of that evening. We followed
the lawyer's advice. He helped us. He encouraged us. He used to come to
dinner every Tuesday night. We went back to Turkey and came again to
Paris before the Great War. During the years of absence, there had been
frequent correspondence. When we returned, the Tuesday evenings were
resumed. If my husband was ready for the work that came to him with the
war, it is thanks to the Paris lawyer. _The Foundation of the Ottoman
Empire_, _The New Map of Europe_, _The Reconstruction of Poland and the
Near East_, are the outcome of table-talks with the lawyer that began in
the Rue Servandoni.
In the _pension_ of the Rue Madame we met people whom we invited to come
to see us in the Rue Servandoni. We asked them to our table. They came.
And they have been dinner guests in our different Paris homes during the
past decade.
There was the Catholic Archbishop of Cairo, an Arab who had the
story-telling gift of his race. You do not know what it is to hear a
story told until you have listened to an Arab. The Archbishop unfolded
to us the lore of the East. There must have been something about _les
petits américains_ that interested him, for our meals could not compete
with Mademoiselle Guyenot's. He used to sit in the steamer-chair, with
his arms folded over his gold crucifix, his cape thrown back on both
shoulders (which gave a dash of red), the end of a long white beard
rubbing the most prominent buttons of his cassock front, and eyes
twinkling in unpriestly fashion. He was the reincarnation of Nasreddin
Hodja, prince of Anatolian story-tellers. Herbert pokes in his bath. One
night, when Scrappie went to sleep earlier than usual, Herbert started
to make his ablutions before the dining-room fire while I was busy in
the kitchen. The door-bell rang. In came the archbishop. There was a
swift change of persons and rooms. Herbert finished his bath in the
kitchen in an incredibly short time. He did not want to miss a moment
of the archbishop.
Michi Kawai was with me in school as well as in college. Imagine my
delight at finding her one day looking at old furniture in the Rue des
Saints-Pères. If I ever thought of Michi, it was in Tokio. And I never
would have thought of Michi in connection with French antique furniture.
But that is Paris for you. Sooner or later all your friends come to
Paris. You run across them accidentally and invariably they are doing
something you would never have dreamed of associating them with. During
her months in Paris Michi was a frequent visitor in the Rue Servandoni.
She was one of those delightful combinations of Occident and Orient that
Japan produces better than any other nation. She was equally at home
with French and American friends, and, when Emilie was not there, knew
how to juggle my eight cups and saucers and spoons back and forth
between the tea-table and the kitchen, without guests catching on, more
dexterously than any of my American girl friends.
We started our married life among the peoples of the Near East, and we
found them out there just like other folks, when we took the trouble to
come into intimate contact with them. Racially of course they are
different from us as they are different from each other. Greeks,
Bulgarians, Turks, Armenians, Syrians, Egyptians, Persians--each one of
these names calls up faces of people I love. I have known them in their
homes and in my home. A strong tie binds us to the Armenians. When you
have shared the sufferings, dangers and hardships of a people, they
belong to you and you belong to them in a peculiar way. Armenians came
to the Rue Servandoni, poor boys with no money and no home who had
escaped from Turkey, struggling students, successful painters, brilliant
musicians, wealthy merchants. Every collector of Egyptian curios, of
Turkish and Persian rugs, of Oriental pottery, knows Kelekian of the
Place Vendôme. His small shop is wedged in between a florist and a
ticket-scalper. In the window you never see more than half a dozen
objects. There is always a bowl as a _pièce de résistance_, a bowl that
only a Morgan could afford to own. Pause and look over the curtain, the
chances are that you will see Monsieur Kelekian sitting by a glass case
of Egyptian scarabs. He will be smoking, and his right hand will be on
the case. To know Monsieur Kelekian is to have faith in the resurrection
of Armenia and in the future of one of the oldest races of history. We
came to know him through his interest in the Adana massacres. He had
never heard of the Rue Servandoni, and the street was hardly wide enough
for his automobile. But he came to dinner with his wife--in spite of a
disapproving _chauffeur_, who thought there must be some mistake and who
insisted on inquiring for us first at Number Twenty-Three and then at
Number Nineteen. Although his nose never turned down, he became
accustomed to stopping in front of the grocery!
Other _chauffeurs_ and _cochers_ learned during that winter a new street
in Paris, and the first time they, too, made the mistake of stopping
next door. Mrs. Evans, sister-in-law of the famous dentist, had a pair
of black horses that shone like the varnish of her victoria. "Dear Mrs.
Evans," as all the women called her, was interested in every good work.
She approved of my husband, because he was a parson, and of me because I
had lived in a missionary college. She knew we had no money and did not
expect us to have any. Her carriage was ours for afternoon rides in the
Bois de Bologne. Scrappie, "that darling missionary baby," must have her
weekly outing. Mrs. Evans, I am sure, believed that the air was not what
it ought to be in our quarter of Paris and that God had intrusted her
with the responsibility of seeing that we were occasionally transported
elsewhere. During that year we made other friends in the American
Colony, who, like Mrs. Evans, cared for us for what we were. They made
Paris home to us in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and the
intimacies then formed have never been broken.
Gypsy Smith was an English evangelist who came to Paris that winter for
a series of revival meetings in the English-speaking community. He had
been traveling all over the world for twenty years. His wife had had to
stay at home to look after the children. Now, for the first time, she
was free to accompany him, and came to Paris with him. We showed the
Smiths some of the principal tourist points of interest one morning, and
they came home to lunch with us. In the way of entertaining, they had
been "touching the high spots" in Paris, as Gypsy Smith was sought after
by the substantial people of the British and American communities. Our
little home was a revelation to them of the fact that there were other
foreigners living in Paris than the rich. Mrs. Gypsy was greatly pleased
with the novelty of finding "just folks" in Paris. "A cozy little nest
you have here," she said, giving me a nudge with her elbow.
There were so many people to see in Paris, old friends from home as well
as new friends, that I soon began to have my afternoon. On Wednesdays I
received in that tiny dining-room, with my eight cups and saucers and
spoons, just as if I were mistress of a large establishment. At first,
our neighbors thought it was a christening or funeral. When they
realized that _les petits américains_ over the _épicerie_ were having a
weekly "at home," they were confirmed in their impression of our wealth.
I confess that it was crowded at times and that the party had to
overflow into the bedroom. But it was fun, especially when one of my
girlhood friends, who had known me in Germantown days in my mother's
home, would bring her whole family along to see me, and exclaim, "Why,
Helen Brown--!" But I would get them all in.
Two days after Christmas, my husband urged me to go walking with him. He
pointed out that no one would come. But I refused. I had more conscience
when I was young than I have now. Being "at home" meant sticking by the
game. I had cheered up the _boulet_ fire in the dining-room. The cups
were on the table. My china platter held a _gâteau mocha_ of dear
memory. Shall we ever again be able to buy layer-cakes with coffee icing
an inch thick done in the delectable ups and downs like a wedding cake?
And that at one franc-twenty-five?
"Run down, dear, and get me some hot crescents. It's after four o'clock,
so they'll be ready."
"Now, look here. You've got to be sensible. Everyone has hosts of things
to do Christmas week. Nobody will come. We'll eat the cakes for supper.
Let's go over the river."
"No, that wouldn't be fair. Somebody might come."
Herbert got the crescents, put more _boulets_ where I could get them
easily, and was gone.
I settled myself in the steamer-chair. No sound except the ticking of
our little traveling-clock, and the dropping of a _boulet_ on the
hearth. An hour slipped by, and I began to realize that I might just as
well have gone out. A ring at the bell. When I opened the door, there
was my husband holding a bouquet of roses big enough for a bridesmaid.
"Good afternoon," said he, bowing low; "do Mr. and Mrs. Gibbons live
here?"
"To be sure," said I, stifling a giggle. "I am Mrs. Gibbons."
"Indeed." My visitor shook hands with me and explained, "Mrs. Gibbons, I
am delighted to meet you. I knew your husband years and years
ago--before he was married, in fact. The first pleasure I have allowed
myself in Paris is to look up my friend Gibbons and his wife."
He hung hat and overcoat in the hall, and handed me the flowers. "What a
charming dining-room. Dear me, have I intruded? You were having a
party?"
"Just my day at home."
We chatted for a full hour, discussing the fate of the House of Lords,
about which my new friend confided that he was writing an article. He
hoped some editor would publish it. We talked of the possibilities of
next year's Salons and disagreed on the subject of futurist painting. I
told my visitor about the many American friends that were turning up,
and how the Gibbonses realized that if they wanted to get any work done
in Paris they would have to stop acting as guides. What did he think
about adopting a policy of telling people that Thomas Cook had mighty
good guides at ten francs a day? Perhaps, however, we should make the
last exception with him, and show him the town.
We talked of Christmas, and then I was asked if I had a baby. I replied
that of course I did. She was over in the Luxembourg Garden with Marie,
who kept her out late on my at-home day, but who would soon bring her
in.
"People that see resemblance in coloring say she looks like me, but
those that see resemblance in contour say she's the image of her daddy."
"So!" said my visitor.
I put my arms around the contour.