With a curious friendly glow upon me I set about helping Cousin Egbert
in the preparation of our evening meal, a work from which, owing to
the number and apparent difficulty of my suggestions, he presently
withdrew, leaving me in entire charge. It is quite true that I have
pronounced views as to the preparation and serving of food, and I dare
say I embarrassed the worthy fellow without at all meaning to do so,
for too many of his culinary efforts betray the fumbling touch of the
amateur. And as I worked over the open fire, doing the trout to a
turn, stirring the beans, and perfecting the stew with deft touches of
seasoning, I worded to myself for the first time a most severe
indictment against the North American cookery, based upon my
observations across the continent and my experience as a diner-out in
Red Gap.
I saw that it would never do with us, and that it ought, as a matter
of fact, to be uplifted. Even then, while our guest chattered gossip
of the town over her brown paper cigarettes, I felt the stirring of an
impulse to teach Americans how to do themselves better at table. For
the moment, of course, I was hampered by lack of equipment (there was
not even a fish slice in the establishment), but even so I brewed
proper tea and was able to impart to the simple viands a touch of
distinction which they had lacked under Cousin Egbert’s
all-too-careless manipulation.
As I served the repast Cousin Egbert produced a bottle of the brown
American whiskey at which we pegged a bit before sitting to table.
“Three rousing cheers!” said he, and the Mixer responded with “Happy
days!”
As on that former occasion, the draught of spirits flooded my being
with a vast consciousness of personal worth and of good feeling toward
my companions. With a true insight I suddenly perceived that one might
belong to the great lower middle-class in America and still matter in
the truest, correctest sense of the term.
As we fell hungrily to the food, the Mixer did not fail to praise my
cooking of the trout, and she and Cousin Egbert were presently
lamenting the difficulty of obtaining a well-cooked meal in Red Gap.
At this I boldly spoke up, declaring that American cookery lacked
constructive imagination, making only the barest use of its
magnificent opportunities, following certain beaten and
all-too-familiar roads with a slavish stupidity.
“We nearly had a good restaurant,” said the Mixer. “A Frenchman came
and showed us a little flash of form, but he only lasted a month
because he got homesick. He had half the people in town going there
for dinner, too, to get away from their Chinamen--and after I spent a
lot of money fixing the place up for him, too.”
I recalled the establishment, on the main street, though I had not
known that our guest was its owner. Vacant it was now, and looking
quite as if the bailiffs had been in.
“He couldn’t cook ham and eggs proper,” suggested Cousin Egbert. “I
tried him three times, and every time he done something French to ‘em
that nobody had ought to do to ham and eggs.”
Hereupon I ventured to assert that a too-intense nationalism would
prove the ruin of any chef outside his own country; there must be a
certain breadth of treatment, a blending of the best features of
different schools. One must know English and French methods and yet be
a slave to neither; one must even know American cookery and be
prepared to adapt its half-dozen or so undoubted excellencies. From
this I ventured further into a general criticism of the dinners I had
eaten at Red Gap’s smartest houses. Too profuse they were, I said, and
too little satisfying in any one feature; too many courses,
constructed, as I had observed, after photographs printed in the back
pages of women’s magazines; doubtless they possessed a certain
artistic value as sights for the eye, but considered as food they were
devoid of any inner meaning.
“Bill’s right,” said Cousin Egbert warmly. “Mrs. Effie, she gets up
about nine of them pictures, with nuts and grated eggs and scrambled
tomatoes all over ‘em, and nobody knowing what’s what, and even when
you strike one that tastes good they’s only a dab of it and you
mustn’t ask for any more. When I go out to dinner, what I want is to
have ‘em say, ‘Pass up your plate, Mr. Floud, for another piece of the
steak and some potatoes, and have some more squash and help yourself
to the quince jelly.’ That’s how it had ought to be, but I keep eatin’
these here little plates of cut-up things and waiting for the real
stuff, and first thing I know I get a spoonful of coffee in something
like you put eye medicine into, and I know it’s all over. Last time I
was out I hid up a dish of these here salted almuns under a fern and
et the whole lot from time to time, kind of absent like. It helped
some, but it wasn’t dinner.”
“Same here,” put in the Mixer, saturating half a slice of bread in the
sauce of the stew. “I can’t afford to act otherwise than like I am a
lady at one of them dinners, but the minute I’m home I beat it for the
icebox. I suppose it’s all right to be socially elegant, but we hadn’t
ought to let it contaminate our food none. And even at that New York
hotel this summer you had to make trouble to get fed proper. I wanted
strawberry shortcake, and what do you reckon they dealt me? A thing
looking like a marble palace--sponge cake and whipped cream with a few
red spots in between. Well, long as we’re friends here together, I may
say that I raised hell until I had the chef himself up and told him
exactly what to do; biscuit dough baked and prized apart and buttered,
strawberries with sugar on ‘em in between and on top, and plenty of
regular cream. Well, after three days’ trying he finally managed to
get simple--he just couldn’t believe I meant it at first, and kept
building on the whipped cream--and the thing cost eight dollars, but
you can bet he had me, even then; the bonehead smarty had sweetened
the cream and grated nutmeg into it. I give up.
“And if you can’t get right food in New York, how can you expect to
here? And Jackson, the idiot, has just fired the only real cook in Red
Gap. Yes, sir; he’s let the coons go. It come out that Waterman had
sneaked out that suit of his golf clothes that Kate Kenner wore in the
minstrel show, so he fired them both, and now I got to support ‘em,
because, as long as we’re friends here, I don’t mind telling you I
egged the coon on to do it.”
I saw that she was referring to the black and his wife whom I had met
at the New York camp, though it seemed quaint to me that they should
be called “coons,” which is, I take it, a diminutive for “raccoon,” a
species of ground game to be found in America.
Truth to tell, I enjoyed myself immensely at this simple but
satisfying meal, feeling myself one with these homely people, and I
was sorry when we had finished.
“That was some little dinner itself,” said the Mixer as she rolled a
cigarette; “and now you boys set still while I do up the dishes.” Nor
would she allow either of us to assist her in this work. When she had
done, Cousin Egbert proceeded to mix hot toddies from the whiskey, and
we gathered about the table before the open fire.
“Now we’ll have a nice home evening,” said the Mixer, and to my great
embarrassment she began at once to speak to myself.
“A strong man like him has got no business becoming a social
butterfly,” she remarked to Cousin Egbert.
“Oh, Bill’s all right,” insisted the latter, as he had done so many
times before.
“He’s all right so far, but let him go on for a year or so and he
won’t be a darned bit better than what Jackson is, mark my words. Just
a social butterfly, wearing funny clothes and attending afternoon
affairs.”
“Well, I don’t say you ain’t right,” said Cousin Egbert thoughtfully;
“that’s one reason I got him out here where everything is nice. What
with speaking pieces like an actor, I was afraid they’d have him
making more kinds of a fool of himself than what Jackson does, him
being a foreigner, and his mind kind o’ running on what clothes a man
had ought to wear.”
Hereupon, so flushed was I with the good feeling of the occasion, I
told them straight that I had resolved to quit being Colonel Ruggles
of the British army and associate of the nobility; that I had
determined to forget all class distinctions and to become one of
themselves, plain, simple, and unpretentious. It is true that I had
consumed two of the hot grogs, but my mind was clear enough, and both
my companions applauded this resolution.
“If he can just get his mind off clothes for a bit he might amount to
something,” said Cousin Egbert, and it will scarcely be credited, but
at the moment I felt actually grateful to him for this admission.
“We’ll think about his case,” said the Mixer, taking her own second
toddy, whereupon the two fell to talking of other things, chiefly of
their cattle plantations and the price of beef-stock, which then
seemed to be six and one half, though what this meant I had no notion.
Also I gathered that the Mixer at her own cattle-farm had been
watching her calves marked with her monogram, though I would never
have credited her with so much sentiment.
When the retiring hour came, Cousin Egbert and I prepared to take our
blankets outside to sleep, but the Mixer would have none of this.
“The last time I slept in here,” she remarked, “mice was crawling over
me all night, so you keep your shack and I’ll bed down outside. I
ain’t afraid of mice, understand, but I don’t like to feel their feet
on my face.”
And to my great dismay, though Cousin Egbert took it calmly enough,
she took a roll of blankets and made a crude pallet on the ground
outside, under a spreading pine tree. I take it she was that sort. The
least I could do was to secure two tins of milk from our larder and
place them near her cot, in case of some lurking high-behind, though I
said nothing of this, not wishing to alarm her needlessly.
Inside the hut Cousin Egbert and I partook of a final toddy before
retiring. He was unusually thoughtful and I had difficulty in
persuading him to any conversation. Thus having noted a bearskin
before my bed, I asked him if he had killed the animal.
“No,” said he shortly, “I wouldn’t lie for a bear as small as that.”
As he was again silent, I made no further approaches to him.
From my first sleep I was awakened by a long, booming yell from our
guest outside. Cousin Egbert and I reached the door at the same time.
“I’ve got it!” bellowed the Mixer, and we went out to her in the chill
night. She sat up with the blankets muffled about her.
“We start Bill in that restaurant,” she began. “It come to me in a
flash. I judge he’s got the right ideas, and Waterman and his wife can
cook for him.”
“Bully!” exclaimed Cousin Egbert. “I was thinking he ought to have a
gents’ furnishing store, on account of his mind running to dress, but
you got the best idea.”
“I’ll stake him to the rent,” she put in.
“And I’ll stake him to the rest,” exclaimed Cousin Egbert delightedly,
and, strange as it may seem, I suddenly saw myself a licensed
victualler.
“I’ll call it the ‘United States Grill,’” I said suddenly, as if by
inspiration.
“Three rousing cheers for the U.S. Grill!” shouted Cousin Egbert to
the surrounding hills, and repairing to the hut he brought out hot
toddies with which we drank success to the new enterprise. For a
half-hour, I dare say, we discussed details there in the cold night,
not seeing that it was quite preposterously bizarre. Returning to the
hut at last, Cousin Egbert declared himself so chilled that he must
have another toddy before retiring, and, although I was already
feeling myself the equal of any American, I consented to join him.
Just before retiring again my attention centred a second time upon the
bearskin before my bed and, forgetting that I had already inquired
about it, I demanded of him if he had killed the animal. “Sure,” said
he; “killed it with one shot just as it was going to claw me. It was
an awful big one.”
Morning found the three of us engrossed with the new plan, and by the
time our guest rode away after luncheon the thing was well forward and
I had the Mixer’s order upon her estate agent at Red Gap for admission
to the vacant premises. During the remainder of the day, between games
of cribbage, Cousin Egbert and I discussed the venture. And it was now
that I began to foresee a certain difficulty.
How, I asked myself, would the going into trade of Colonel Marmaduke
Ruggles be regarded by those who had been his social sponsors in Red
Gap? I mean to say, would not Mrs. Effie and the Belknap-Jacksons feel
that I had played them false? Had I not given them the right to
believe that I should continue, during my stay in their town, to be
one whom their county families would consider rather a personage? It
was idle, indeed, for me to deny that my personality as well as my
assumed origin and social position abroad had conferred a sort of
prestige upon my sponsors; that on my account, in short, the North
Side set had been newly armed in its battle with the Bohemian set. And
they relied upon my continued influence. How, then, could I face them
with the declaration that I meant to become a tradesman? Should I be
doing a caddish thing, I wondered?
Putting the difficulty to Cousin Egbert, he dismissed it impatiently
by saying: “Oh, shucks!” In truth I do not believe he comprehended it
in the least. But then it was that I fell upon my inspiration. I might
take Colonel Marmaduke Ruggles from the North Side set, but I would
give them another and bigger notable in his place. This should be none
other than the Honourable George, whom I would now summon. A fortnight
before I had received a rather snarky letter from him demanding to
know how long I meant to remain in North America and disclosing that
he was in a wretched state for want of some one to look after him. And
he had even hinted that in the event of my continued absence he might
himself come out to America and fetch me back. His quarter’s
allowance, would, I knew, be due in a fortnight, and my letter would
reach him, therefore, before some adventurer had sold him a system for
beating the French games of chance. And my letter would be compelling.
I would make it a summons he could not resist. Thus, when I met the
reproachful gaze of the C. Belknap-Jacksons and of Mrs. Effie, I
should be able to tell them: “I go from you, but I leave you a better
man in my place.” With the Honourable George Augustus Vane-Basingwell,
next Earl of Brinstead, as their house guest, I made no doubt that the
North Side set would at once prevail as it never had before, the
Bohemian set losing at once such of its members as really mattered,
who would of course be sensible of the tremendous social importance of
the Honourable George.
Yet there came moments in which I would again find myself in no end of
a funk, foreseeing difficulties of an insurmountable character. At
such times Cousin Egbert strove to cheer me with all sorts of
assurances, and to divert my mind he took me upon excursions of the
roughest sort into the surrounding jungle, in search either of fish or
ground game. After three days of this my park-suit became almost a
total ruin, particularly as to the trousers, so that I was glad to
borrow a pair of overalls such as Cousin Egbert wore. They were a tidy
fit, but, having resolved not to resist America any longer, I donned
them without even removing the advertising placard.
With my ever-lengthening stubble of beard it will be understood that I
now appeared as one of their hearty Western Americans of the roughest
type, which was almost quite a little odd, considering my former
principles. Cousin Egbert, I need hardly say, was immensely pleased
with my changed appearance, and remarked that I was “sure a live
wire.” He also heartened me in the matter of the possible disapproval
of C. Belknap-Jackson, which he had divined was the essential rabbit
in my moodiness.
“I admit the guy uses beautiful language,” he conceded, “and probably
he’s top-notched in education, but jest the same he ain’t the whole
seven pillars of the house of wisdom, not by a long shot. If he gets
fancy with you, sock him again. You done it once.” So far was the
worthy fellow from divining the intimate niceties involved in my
giving up a social career for trade. Nor could he properly estimate
the importance of my plan to summon the Honourable George to Red Gap,
merely remarking that the “Judge” was all right and a good mixer and
that the boys would give him a swell time.
Our return journey to Red Gap was made in company with the Indian
Tuttle, and the two cow-persons, Hank and Buck, all of whom professed
themselves glad to meet me again, and they, too, were wildly
enthusiastic at hearing from Cousin Egbert of my proposed business
venture. Needless to say they were of a class that would bother itself
little with any question of social propriety involved in my entering
trade, and they were loud in their promises of future patronage. At
this I again felt some misgiving, for I meant the United States Grill
to possess an atmosphere of quiet refinement calculated to appeal to
particular people that really mattered; and yet it was plain that,
keeping a public house, I must be prepared to entertain agricultural
labourers and members of the lower or working classes. For a time I
debated having an ordinary for such as these, where they could be shut
away from my selecter patrons, but eventually decided upon a tariff
that would be prohibitive to all but desirable people. The rougher or
Bohemian element, being required to spring an extra shilling, would
doubtless seek other places.
For two days we again filed through mountain gorges of a most awkward
character, reaching Red Gap at dusk. For this I was rather grateful,
not only because of my beard and the overalls, but on account of a hat
of the most shocking description which Cousin Egbert had pressed upon
me when my own deer-stalker was lost in a glen. I was willing to
roughen it in all good-fellowship with these worthy Americans, but I
knew that to those who had remarked my careful taste in dress my
present appearance would seem almost a little singular. I would rather
I did not shock them to this extent.
Yet when our animals had been left in their corral, or rude enclosure,
I found it would be ungracious to decline the hospitality of my new
friends who wished to drink to the success of the U.S. Grill, and so I
accompanied them to several public houses, though with the shocking
hat pulled well down over my face. Also, as the dinner hour passed, I
consented to dine with them at the establishment of a Chinese, where
we sat on high stools at a counter and were served ham and eggs and
some of the simpler American foods.
The meal being over, I knew that we ought to cut off home directly,
but Cousin Egbert again insisted upon visiting drinking-places, and I
had no mind to leave him, particularly as he was growing more and more
bitter in my behalf against Mr. Belknap-Jackson. I had a doubtless
absurd fear that he would seek the gentleman out and do him a
mischief, though for the moment he was merely urging me to do this. It
would, he asserted, vastly entertain the Indian Tuttle and the
cow-persons if I were to come upon Mr. Belknap-Jackson and savage him
without warning, or at least with only a paltry excuse, which he
seemed proud of having devised.
“You go up to the guy,” he insisted, “very polite, you understand, and
ask him what day this is. If he says it’s Tuesday, sock him.”
“But it is Tuesday,” I said.
“Sure,” he replied, “that’s where the joke comes in.”
Of course this was the crudest sort of American humour and not to be
given a moment’s serious thought, so I redoubled my efforts to detach
him from our honest but noisy friends, and presently had the
satisfaction of doing so by pleading that I must be up early on the
morrow and would also require his assistance. At parting, to my
embarrassment, he insisted on leading the group in a cheer. “What’s
the matter with Ruggles?” they loudly demanded in unison, following
the query swiftly with: “He’s all right!” the “he” being eloquently
emphasized.
But at last we were away from them and off into the darker avenue, to
my great relief, remembering my garb. I might be a living wire, as
Cousin Egbert had said, but I was keenly aware that his overalls and
hat would rather convey the impression that I was what they call in
the States a bad person from a bitter creek.
To my further relief, the Floud house was quite dark as we approached
and let ourselves in. Cousin Egbert, however, would enter the
drawing-room, flood it with light, and seat himself in an easy-chair
with his feet lifted to a sofa. He then raised his voice in a ballad
of an infant that had perished, rendering it most tearfully, the
refrain being, “Empty is the cradle, baby’s gone!” Apprehensive at
this, I stole softly up the stairs and had but reached the door of my
own room when I heard Mrs. Effie below. I could fancy the chilling
gaze which she fastened upon the singer, and I heard her coldly
demand, “Where are your feet?” Whereupon the plaintive voice of Cousin
Egbert arose to me, “Just below my legs.” I mean to say, he had taken
the thing as a quiz in anatomy rather than as the rebuke it was meant
to be. As I closed my door, I heard him add that he could be pushed
just so far.