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[Illustration: Book Cover]
[Illustration: Frontispiece]
_Cobb's Bill-of-Fare_
_By_
_Irvin S. Cobb_
_Author of_
"_The Escape of Mr. Trimm_," "_Back Home_,"
"_Cobb's Anatomy_," _etc._
_Illustrated by_
_Peter Newell and James Preston_
[Illustration]
_New York_
_George H. Doran Company_
COPYRIGHT, 1911 1912,
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
TO
R. H. DAVIS
(NOT RICHARD HARDING--
THE OTHER ONE)
_AS FOLLOWS_
PAGE
I. VITTLES 13
II. MUSIC 47
III. ART 81
IV. SPORT 113
_ILLUSTRATIONS_
PAGE
"I now greatly desire to eat some regular food." 15
"Those who in the goodness of their hearts may
undertake a search for the sucking pig." 35
"Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics
running highest?" 41
"She tries to tear all its front teeth out with her
bare hands." 51
"Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep,
I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep!" 57
"Shem undoubtedly sang it when the animals were
hungry." 61
"And I enjoy it more than words can tell!" 67
"We looked in vain for the kind of pictures that
mother used to make and father used to buy." 83
"The inscrutable smile of a saleslady would make
Mona Lisa seem a mere amateur." 93
"A person who for reasons best known to the police
has not been locked up." 97
"Collision between two heavenly bodies or premature
explosion of a custard pie." 103
"Everything you catch is second-hand." 119
"He could beat me climbing, but at panting I had
him licked to a whisper." 125
"She was not much larger than a soapdish." 137
"Think of being laid face downward firmly across
a sinewy knee and beaten forty-love with one of
those hard catgut rackets!" 143
_VITTLES_
[Illustration]
Upon a certain gladsome occasion a certain man went into a certain
restaurant in a certain large city, being imbued with the idea that he
desired a certain kind of food. Expense was with him no object. The
coming of the holidays had turned his thoughts backward to the care-free
days of boyhood and he longed for the holidaying provender of his youth
with a longing that was as wide as a river and as deep as a well.
"Me, I have tried it all," he said to himself. "I have been down the
line on this eating proposition from alphabet soup to animal crackers. I
know the whole thing, from the nine-dollar, nine-course banquet, with
every course bathed freely in the same kind of sauce and tasting exactly
like all the other courses, to the quick lunch, where the only
difference between clear soup and beef broth is that if you want the
beef broth the waiter sticks his thumb into the clear soup and brings it
along.
"I have feasted copiously at grand hotels where they charge you corkage
on your own hot-water bottle, and I have dallied frugally with the
forty-cent table d'hote with wine, when the victuals were the product of
the well-known Sam Brothers--Flot and Jet--and the wine tasted like the
stuff that was left over from graining the woodwork for a mahogany
finish.
[Illustration: "I NOW GREATLY DESIRE TO EAT SOME REGULAR FOOD."]
"I now greatly desire to eat some regular food, and if such a thing be
humanly possible I should also prefer to eat it in silence unbroken
except by the noises I make myself. I have eaten meals backed up so
close to the orchestra that the leader and I were practically wearing
the same pair of suspenders. I have been howled at by a troupe of
Sicilian brigands armed with their national weapons--the garlic and the
guitar. I have been tortured by mechanical pianos and automatic
melodeons, and I crave quiet. But in any event I want food. I cannot
spare the time to travel nine hundred miles to get it, and I must,
therefore, take a chance here."
So, as above stated, he entered this certain restaurant and seated
himself; and as soon as the Hungarian string band had desisted from
playing an Italian air orchestrated by a German composer he got the
attention of an omnibus, who was Greek, and the bus enlisted the
assistance of a side waiter, he being French, and the side waiter in
time brought to him the head waiter, regarding whom I violate no
confidence in stating that he was Swiss. The man I have been quoting
then drew from his pockets a number of bank notes and piled them up
slowly, one by one, alongside his plate. Beholding the denominations of
these bills the head waiter with difficulty restrained himself from
kissing the hungry man upon the bald spot on his head. The sight of a
large bill invariably quickens the better nature of a head waiter.
"Now, then," said the enhungered one, "I would have speech with you. I
desire food--food suitable for a free-born American stomach on such a
day as this. No, you needn't wave that menu at me. I can shut my eyes
and remember the words and music of every menu that ever was printed. I
don't know what half of it means because I am no court interpreter, but
I can remember it. I can sing it, and if I had my clarinet here I could
play it. Heave the menu over the side of the boat and listen to me. What
I want is just plain food--food like mother used to make and mother's
fair-haired boy used to eat. We will start off with turkey--turkey _a
la_ America, understand; turkey that is all to the Hail Columbia, Happy
Land. With it I want some cramberry sauce--no, not cranberry, I guess I
know its real name--some cramberry sauce; and some mashed
potatoes--mashed with enthusiasm and nothing else, if you can arrange
it--and some scalloped oysters and maybe a few green peas. Likewise I
want a large cup of coffee right along with these things--not served
afterward in a misses' and children's sized cup, but along with the
dinner."
"Salad?" suggested the head waiter, reluctantly withdrawing his
fascinated vision from the pile of bills. "Salad?" he said.
"No salad," said the homesick stranger, "not unless you could chop me up
some lettuce and powder it with granulated sugar and pour a little
vinegar over it and bring it in to me with the rest of the grub. Where I
was raised we always had chewing tobacco for the salad course, anyhow."
The head waiter's whole being recoiled from the bare prospect. He seemed
on the point of swooning, but looked at the money and came to.
"Dessert?" he added, poising a pencil.
"Well," said the man reflectively, "I don't suppose you could fix me up
some ambrosia--that's sliced oranges with grated cocoanut on top. And in
this establishment I doubt if you know anything about boiled custard,
with egg kisses bobbing round it and sunken reefs of sponge cake
underneath. So I guess I'd better compromise on some plum pudding; but
mind you, not the imported English plum pudding. English plum pudding is
not a food, it's a missile, and when eaten it is a concealed deadly
weapon. I want an American plum pudding. Mark well my words--an
American plum pudding.
"And," he concluded, "if you can bring me these things, just so, without
any strange African sauces or weird Oriental fixings or trans-Atlantic
goo stirred into them or poured on to them or breathed upon them, I
shall be very grateful to you, and in addition I shall probably make you
independently wealthy for life."
It was quite evident that the head waiter regarded him as a
lunatic--perhaps only a lunatic in a mild form and undoubtedly one
cushioned with ready money--but nevertheless a lunatic. Yet he indicated
by a stately bow that he would do the best he could under the
circumstances, and withdrew to take the matter up with the house
committee.
"Now this," said the man, "is going to be something like. To be sure the
table is not set right. As I remember how things used to look at home
there should be a mustache cup at Uncle Hiram's plate, so he could drink
his floating island without getting his cream-separators mussy, and
there ought to be a vinegar cruet at one end and a silver cake basket at
the other and about nine kinds of pickles and jellies scattered round;
and in the center of the table there should be a winter bouquet--a nice,
hard, firm, dark red winter bouquet--containing, among other things, a
sheaf of wheat, a dried cockscomb and a couple of oak galls. Yet if the
real provender is forthcoming I can put up with the absence of the
proper settings and decorations."
He had ample leisure for these thoughts, because, as you yourself may
have noticed, in a large restaurant when you order anything that is out
of the ordinary--which means anything that is ordinary--it takes time to
put the proposition through the proper channels. The waiter lays your
application before the board of governors, and after the board of
governors has disposed of things coming under the head of unfinished
business and good of the order it takes a vote, and if nobody blackballs
you the treasurer is instructed to draw a warrant and the secretary
engrosses appropriate resolutions, and your order goes to the cook.
But finally this man's food arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at
it daintily--like a reluctant patient going under the ether--and he
tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into
low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing
of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before
serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with
dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the art
preservative--meaning by that the cold-storage packing and pickling
industry. And if you can believe what Doctor Wiley says--and if you
can't believe the man who has dedicated his life to warning you against
the things which you put in your mouth to steal away your membranes,
whom can you believe?--the cranberry sauce belonged in a paint store and
should have been labeled Easter-egg dye, and the green peas were green
with Paris green.
As for the plum pudding, it was one of those burglar-proof,
enamel-finished products that prove the British to be indeed a hardy
race. And, of course, they hadn't brought him his coffee along with his
dinner, the management having absolutely refused to permit of a thing so
revolutionary and unprecedented and one so calculated to upset the whole
organization. And at the last minute the racial instincts of the cook
had triumphed over his instructions, and he had impartially imbued
everything with his native brews, gravies, condiments, seasonings,
scents, preservatives, embalming fluids, liquid extracts and
perfumeries. So, after weeping unrestrainedly for a time, the man paid
the check, which was enormous, and tipped everybody freely and went away
in despair and, I think, committed suicide on an empty stomach. At any
rate, he came no more. The moral of this fable is, therefore, that it
can't be done.
But why can't it be done? I ask you that and pause for a reply. Why
can't it be done? It is conceded, I take it, that in the beginning our
cookery was essentially of the soil. Of course when our forebears came
over they brought along with them certain inherent and inherited Old
World notions touching on the preparation of raw provender in order to
make it suitable for human consumption; but these doubtless were soon
fused and amalgamated with the cooking and eating customs of the
original or copper-colored inhabitants. The difference in environment
and climate and conditions, together with the amplified wealth of native
supplies, did the rest. In Merrie England, as all travelers know, there
are but three staple vegetables--to wit, boiled potatoes, boiled
turnips, and a second helping of the boiled potatoes. But here, spread
before the gladdened vision of the newly arrived, and his to pick and
choose from, was a boundless expanse of new foodstuffs--birds, beasts
and fishes, fruits, vegetables and berries, roots, herbs and sprouts. He
furnished the demand and the soil was there competently with the supply.
We owe a lot to our red brother. From him we derived a knowledge of the
values and attractions of the succulent clam, and he didn't cook a clam
so that it tasted like O'Somebody's Heels of New Rubber either. From
the Indian we got the original idea of the shore dinner and the
barbecue, the planked shad and the hoecake. By following in his
footsteps we learned about succotash and hominy. He conferred upon us
the inestimable boon of his maize--hence corn bread, corn fritters,
fried corn and roasting ears; also his pumpkin and his sweet
potato--hence the pumpkin pie of the North and its blood brother of the
South, the sweet-potato pie. From the Indian we got the tomato--let some
agriculturist correct me if I err--though the oldest inhabitant can
still remember when we called it a love apple and regarded it as
poisonous. From him we inherited the crook-neck squash and the okra
gumbo and the rattlesnake watermelon and the wild goose plum, and many
another delectable thing.
So, out of all this and from all this our ancestors evolved cults of
cookery which, though they differed perhaps as between themselves, were
all purely American and all absolutely unapproachable. France lent a
strain to New Orleans cooking and Spain did the same for California.
Scrapple was Pennsylvania's, terrapin was Maryland's, the baked bean
was Massachusetts', and along with a few other things spoon-bread ranked
as Kentucky's fairest product. Indiana had dishes of which Texas wotted
not, nor kilowatted either, this being before the day of electrical
cooking contrivances. Virginia, mother of presidents and of natural-born
cooks, could give and take cookery notions from Vermont. Likewise, this
condition developed the greatest collection of cooks, white and black
alike, that the world has ever seen. They were inspired cooks, needing
no notes, no printed score to guide them. They could burn up all the
cook-books that ever were printed and still cook. They cooked by ear.
And perhaps they still do. If so, may Heaven bless and preserve them!
Some carping critics may contend that our grandfathers and grandmothers
lacked the proper knowledge of how to serve a meal in courses. Let 'em.
Let 'em carp until they're as black in the face as a German carp. For
real food never yet needed any vain pomp and circumstance to make it
attractive. It stands on its own merits, not on the scenic effects.
When you really have something to eat you don't need to worry trying to
think up the French for napkin. Perhaps there may be some among us here
on this continent who, on beholding a finger-bowl for the first time,
glanced down into its pellucid depths and wondered what had become of
the gold fish. There may have been a few who needed a laprobe drawn up
well over the chest when eating grapefruit for the first time. Indeed,
there may have been a few even whose execution in regard to consuming
soup out of the side of the spoon was a thing calculated to remind you
of a bass tuba player emptying his instrument at the end of a hard
street parade.
But I doubt it. These stories were probably the creations of the
professional humorists in the first place. Those who are given real food
to eat may generally be depended upon to do the eating without undue
noise or excitement. The gross person featured in the comic papers, who
consumes his food with such careless abandon that it is hard to tell
whether the front of his vest was originally drygoods or groceries,
either doesn't exist in real life or else never had any food that was
worth eating, and it didn't make any difference whether he put it on the
inside of his chest or the outside.
Only a short time ago I saw a whole turkey served for a Thanksgiving
feast at a large restaurant. It vaunted itself as a regular turkey and
was extensively charged for as such on the bill. It wasn't though. It
was an ancient and a shabby ruin--a genuine antique if ever there was
one, with those high-polished knobs all down the front, like an
old-fashioned highboy, and Chippendale legs. To make up for its manifold
imperfections the chef back in the kitchen had crowded it full of
mysterious laboratory products and then varnished it over with a
waterproof glaze or shellac, which rendered it durable without making it
edible. Just to see that turkey was a thing calculated to set the mind
harking backward to places and times when there had been real turkeys to
eat.
Back yonder in the old days we were a simple and a husky race, weren't
we? Boys and girls were often fourteen years old before they knew
oysters didn't grow in a can. Even grown people knew nothing, except by
vague hearsay, of cheese so runny that if you didn't care to eat it you
could drink it. There was one traveled person then living who was
reputed to have once gone up to the North somewhere and partaken of a
watermelon that had had a plug cut in it and a whole quart of imported
real Paris--France--champagne wine poured in the plugged place. This,
however, was generally regarded as a gross exaggeration of the real
facts.
But there was a kind of a turkey that they used to serve in those parts
on high state occasions. It was a turkey that in his younger days ranged
wild in the woods and ate the mast. At the frosted coming of the fall
they penned him up and fed him grain to put an edge of fat on his lean;
and then fate descended upon him and he died the ordained death of his
kind. But, oh! the glorious resurrection when he reached the table! You
sat with weapons poised and ready--a knife in the right hand, a fork in
the left and a spoon handy--and looked upon him and watered at the mouth
until you had riparian rights.
His breast had the vast brown fullness that you see in pictures of old
Flemish friars. His legs were like rounded columns and unadorned,
moreover, with those superfluous paper frills; and his tail was half as
big as your hand and it protruded grandly, like the rudder of a
treasure-ship, and had flanges of sizzled richness on it. Here was no
pindling fowl that had taken the veil and lived the cloistered life;
here was no wiredrawn and trained-down cross-country turkey, but a lusty
giant of a bird that would have been a cassowary, probably, or an emu,
if he had lived, his bosom a white mountain of lusciousness, his
interior a Golconda and not a Golgotha. At the touch of the steel his
skin crinkled delicately and fell away; his tissues flaked off in tender
strips; and from him arose a bouquet of smells more varied and more
delectable than anything ever turned out by the justly celebrated
Islands of Spice. It was a sin to cut him up and a crime to leave him
be.
He had not been stuffed by a taxidermist or a curio collector, but by
the master hand of one of those natural-born home cooks--stuffed with
corn bread dressing that had oysters or chestnuts or pecans stirred into
it until it was a veritable mine of goodness, and this stuffing had
caught up and retained all the delectable drippings and essences of his
being, and his flesh had the savor of the things upon which he had
lived--the sweet acorns and beechnuts of the woods, the buttery goobers
of the plowed furrows, the shattered corn of the horse yard.
Nor was he a turkey to be eaten by the mere slice. At least, nobody ever
did eat him that way--you ate him by rods, poles and perches, by
townships and by sections--ate him from his neck to his hocks and back
again, from his throat latch to his crupper, from center to
circumference, and from pit to dome, finding something better all the
time; and when his frame was mainly denuded and loomed upon the platter
like a scaffolding, you dug into his cadaver and found there small
hidden joys and titbits. You ate until the pressure of your waistband
stopped your watch and your vest flew open like an engine-house door and
your stomach was pushing you over on your back and sitting upon you, and
then you half closed your eyes and dreamed of cold-sliced turkey for
supper, turkey hash for breakfast the next morning and turkey soup made
of the bones of his carcass later on. For each state of that turkey
would be greater than the last.
There still must be such turkeys as this one somewhere. Somewhere in
this broad and favored land, untainted by notions of foreign cookery and
unvisited by New York and Philadelphia people who insist on calling the
waiter _garçon_, when his name is Gabe or Roscoe, there must be spots
where a turkey is a turkey and not a cold-storage corpse. And this being
the case, why don't those places advertise, so that by the hundreds and
the thousands men who live in hotels might come from all over in the
fall of the year and just naturally eat themselves to death?
Perchance also the sucking pig of the good old days still prevails in
certain sheltered vales and glades. He, too, used to have his vogue at
holiday times. Because the gods did love him he died young--died young
and tender and unspoiled by the world--and then everybody else did love
him too. For he was barbered twice over and shampooed to a gracious
pinkiness by a skilled hand, and then, being basted, he was roasted
whole with a smile on his lips and an apple in his mouth, and sometimes
a bow of red ribbon on his tail, and his juices from within ran down his
smooth flanks and burnished him to perfection. His interior was crammed
with stuff and things and truck and articles of that general nature--I'm
no cooking expert to go into further particulars, but whatever the
stuffing was, it was appropriate and timely and suitable, I know that,
and there was onion in it and savory herbs, and it was exactly what a
sucking pig needed to bring out all that was good and noble in him.
You began operations by taking a man's-size slice out of his midriff,
bringing with it a couple of pinky little rib bones, and then you ate
your way through him and along him in either direction or both
directions until you came out into the open and fell back satiated and
filled with the sheer joy of living, and greased to the eyebrows. I
should like to ask at this time if there is any section where this brand
of sucking pig remains reasonably common and readily available? In these
days of light housekeeping and kitchenettes and gas stoves and electric
cookers, is there any oven big enough to contain him? Does he still
linger on or is he now known in his true perfection only on the magazine
covers and in the Christmas stories?
[Illustration: "THOSE WHO IN THE GOODNESS OF THEIR HEARTS MAY UNDERTAKE
A SEARCH FOR THE SUCKING PIG"]
As a further guide to those who in the goodness of their hearts may
undertake a search for him in his remaining haunts and refuges, it
should be stated that he was no German wild boar, or English pork pie on
the hoof, and that he was never cooked French style, or doctored up with
anchovies, caviar, _marrons glacés_, pickled capers out of a
bottle--where many of the best capers of the pickled variety come
from--imported truffles, Mexican tamales or Hawaiian poi. He was--and
is, if he still exists--just a plain little North American baby-shoat
cooked whole. And don't forget the red apple in his mouth. None genuine
without this trademark.
But, shucks! what's the use of talking that way? Patriotism is not dead
and a democratic form of government still endures, and surely real
sucking pigs are still being cooked and served whole somewhere this very
day. And in that same neighborhood, if it lies to the eastward, there
are cooks who know the art of planking a shad in season--not the
arrangement of the effete East, consisting of a greased skin wrapped
round a fine-tooth comb and reposing on a charred clapboard--but a real
shad; and if it lies to the southward one will surely find in the same
vicinity a possum of a prevalent dark brown tint, with sweet potatoes
baked under him and a certain inimitable, indescribable dark rich gravy
surrounding him, and on the side corn pones--without any sugar in them.
I think probably the reason why the possum doesn't flourish in the North
is that they insist on tacking an O on to his name, simply because some
misguided writer of dictionaries ordained it so. A possum is not Irish,
nor is he Scotch. His name is not Opossum, neither is it MacPossum. He
belongs to an old Southern family and his name is just possum.
Once I saw ostensible 'possum at a French restaurant in New York. It was
advertised as _Opossum, Southern style_, and it was chopped up fine and
cooked in a sort of casserole effect, with green peas and carrots and
various other things mixed in along with it. The quivering sensations
which were felt throughout the South on this occasion, and which at the
time were mistaken for earthquake tremors, were really caused by so many
Southern cooks turning over petulantly in their graves.
Still going on the assumption that the turkey and the sucking pig and
their kindred spirits are yet to be found among us or among some of us,
anyhow, it is only logical to assume that the food is not served in
courses at the ratio of a little of everything and not enough of
anything, but that it is brought on and spread before the company all
together and at once--the turkey or the pig or the ham or the chickens;
the mashed potatoes overflowing their receptacle like drifted snow; the
celery; the scalloped oysters in a dish like a crock; the jelly layer
cake, the fruit cake and Prince of Wales cake; and in addition,
scattered about hither and yon, all the different kinds of
preserves--pusserves, to use the proper title--including sweet peach
pickles dimpled with cloves and melting away in their own sweetness, and
watermelon-rind pickles cut into cubes just big enough to make one
bite--that is to say in cubes about three inches square--and the various
kinds of jellies--crab-apple, currant, grape and quince--quivering in an
ecstacy as though at their very goodness, and casting upon the white
cloth where the light catches them all the reflected, dancing tints of
beryl and amethyst, ruby and garnet--crown-jewels in the diadem of real
food.
People who eat dinners like this must, by the very nature of things,
cling also to the ancient North American custom of starting the day with
an amount of regular food called collectively a breakfast. This, of
course, does not mean what the dweller in the city by the seaboard calls
a breakfast, he knowing no better, poor wretch--a swallow of tea, a bite
of a cold baker's roll, a plate of gruel mayhap, or pap, and a sticky
spoonful of the national marmalade of Perfidious Albumen, as the poet
has called it, followed by a slap at the lower part of the face with a
napkin and a series of V-shaped hiccoughs ensuing all the morning. No,
indeed.
In speaking thus of breakfast, I mean a real breakfast. If it's in New
England there'll be doughnuts and pies on the table, and not those
sickly convict labor pies of the city either, with the prison pallor yet
upon them, but brown, crusty, full-chested pies. And if it's down South
there will be hot waffles and fresh New Orleans molasses; and if it's in
any section of our country, north or south, east or west, such comfits
and kickshaws as genuine country smoked sausage, put up in bags and
spiced like Araby the Blest, and fresh eggs fried in pairs--never less
than in pairs--with their lovely orbed yolks turned heavenward like
the topaz eyes of beauteous prayerful blondes; and slices of home-cured
ham with the taste of the hickory smoke and also of the original hog
delicately blended in them, and marbled with fat and lean, like the
edges of law books; and cornbeef hash, and flaky hot biscuits; and an
assortment of those same pickles and preserves already mentioned; the
whole being calculated to make a hungry man open his mouth until his
face resembles the general-delivery window at the post-office--and sail
right in.
[Illustration: "WHERE DO YOU FIND THE PERCENTAGE OF DYSPEPTICS RUNNING
HIGHEST?"]
The cry has been raised that American cooking is responsible for
American dyspepsia, and that as a race we are given to pouring pepsin
pellets down ourselves because of the food our ancestors poured down
themselves. This is a base calumny. Old John J. Calumny himself never
coined a baser one. You have only to look about you to know the truth of
the situation, which is, that the person with the least digestion is the
one who always does the most for it, and that those who eat the most
have the least trouble. Where do you find the percentage of dyspeptics
running highest, in the country or the city? Where do you find the
stout woman who is banting as she pants and panting as she bants? Again,
the city. Where do you encounter the unhappy male creature who has been
told that the only cure for his dyspepsia is to be a Rebecca at the Well
and drink a gallon of water before each meal and then go without the
meal, thus compelling him to double in both roles and first be Rebecca
and then be the Well? Where do you see so many of those miserable ones
who have the feeling, after eating, that rude hands are tearing the
tapestries of the walls of their respective dining rooms?
Not in the country, where, happily, food is perhaps yet food. In the
city, that's where--in the cities, where they have learned to cook food
and to serve it and to eat it after a fashion different from the
fashions their grandsires followed.
That's a noble slogan which has lately been promulgated--See America
First. But while we're doing so wouldn't it be a fine idea to try to see
some American cooking?
_MUSIC_
[Illustration]
If you, the reader, are anything like me, the writer, it happens to you
about every once in so long that some well-meaning but semi-witted
friend rigs a dead-fall for you, and traps you and carries you off, a
helpless captive, for an evening among the real music-lovers.
Catching you, so to speak, with your defense leveled and your
breastworks unmanned, he speaks to you substantially as follows: "Old
man, we're going to have a few people up to the house tonight--just a
little informal affair, you understand, with a song or two and some
music--and the missus and I would appreciate it mightily if you'd put on
your Young Prince Charmings and drop in on us along toward eight. How
about it--can we count on you to be among those prominently present?"
Forewarned is forearmed, and you know all about this person already. You
know him to be one of the elect in the most exclusive musical coterie of
your fair city, wherever your fair city may be. You know him to be on
terms of the utmost intimacy with the works of all the great composers.
Bill Opus and Jeremiah Fugue have no secrets from him--none
whatever--and in conversation he creates the impression that old Issy
Sonata was his first cousin. He can tell you offhand which one of the
Shuberts--Lee or Jake--wrote that Serenade. He speaks of Mozart and
Beethoven in such a way a stranger would probably get the idea that Mote
and Bate used to work for his folks. He can go to a musical show, and
while the performance is going on he can tell everybody in his section
just which composer each song number was stolen from, humming the
original air aloud to show the points of resemblance. He can do this, I
say, and, what is more, he does do it. At the table d'hote place, when
the Neapolitan troubadours come out in their little green jackets and
their wide red sashes he is right there at the middle table, poised and
waiting; and when they put their heads together and lean in toward the
center and sing their national air, Come Into the Garlic, Maud, it is he
who beats time for them with his handy lead-pencil, only pausing
occasionally to point out errors in technic and execution on the part of
the performers. He is that kind of a pest, and you know it.
What you should do under these circumstances, after he has invited you
to come up to his house, would be to look him straight in the eye and
say to him: "Well, old chap, that's awfully kind of you to include me in
your little musical party, and just to show you how much I appreciate it
and how I feel about it here's something for you." And then hit him
right where his hair parts with a cut-glass paperweight or a bronze
clock or a fire-ax or something, after which you should leap madly upon
his prostrate form and dance on his cozy corner with both feet and cave
in his inglenook for him. That is what you should do, but, being a
vacillating person--I am still assuming, you see, that you are
constituted as I am--you weakly surrender and accept the invitation and
promise to be there promptly on time, and he goes away to snare more
victims in order to have enough to make a mess.
And so it befalls at the appointed time that you deck your form in your
after-six-P. M. clothes and go up. On the way you get full and fuller of
dark forebodings at every step; and your worst expectations are realized
as soon as you enter and are relieved of your hat by a colored person in
white gloves, and behold spread before you a great horde of those ladies
and gentlemen whose rapt expressions and general air of eager expectancy
stamp them as true devotees of whatever is most classical in the realm
of music. You realize that in such a company as this you are no better
than a rank outsider, and that it behooves you to attract as little
attention as possible. There is nobody else here who will be interested
in discussing with you whether the Giants or the Cubs will finish first
next season; nobody except you who cares a whoop how Indiana will go for
president--in fact, most of them probably haven't heard that Indiana
was thinking of going. Their souls are soaring among the stars in a
rarefied atmosphere of culture, and even if you could you wouldn't dare
venture up that far with yours, for fear of being seized by an
uncontrollable impulse to leap off and end all, the same as some persons
are affected when on the roof of a tall building. So you back into the
nearest corner and try to look like a part of the furniture--and wait in
dumb misery.
Usually you don't have to wait very long. These people are beggars for
punishment and like to start early. It is customary to lead off the
program with a selection on the piano by a distinguished lady graduate
of somebody-with-an-Italian-name's school of piano expression. Under no
circumstances is it expected that this lady will play anything that you
can understand or that I could understand. It would be contrary to the
ethics of her calling and deeply repugnant to her artistic temperament
to play a tune that would sound well on a phonograph record. This would
never do. She comes forward, stripped for battle, and bows and peels
off her gloves and fiddles with the piano-stool until she gets it
adjusted to suit her, and then she sits down, prepared to render an
immortal work composed by one of the old masters who was intoxicated at
the time.
She starts gently. She throws her head far back and closes her eyes
dreamily, and hits the keys a soft, dainty little lick--tippy-tap! Then
leaving a call with the night clerk for eight o'clock in the morning,
she seems to drift off into a peaceful slumber, but awakens on the
moment and hurrying all the way up to the other end of Main Street she
slams the bass keys a couple of hard blows--bumetty-bum! And so it goes
for quite a long spell after that: Tippy-tap!--off to the country for a
week-end party, Friday to Monday; bumetty-bum!--six months elapse
between the third and fourth acts; tippetty-tip!--two years later; dear
me, how the old place has changed! Biffetty-biff! Gracious, how time
flies, for here it is summer again and the flowers are all in bloom! You
sink farther and farther into your chair and debate with yourself
whether you ought to run like a coward or stay and die like a hero. One
of your legs goes to sleep and the rest of you envies the leg. You can
feel your whiskers growing, and you begin to itch in two hundred
separate places, but can't scratch.
The strangest thing about it is that those round you appear to be
enjoying it. Incredible though it seems, they are apparently finding
pleasure in this. You can tell that they are enjoying themselves because
they begin to act as real music-lovers always act under such
circumstances--some put their heads on one side and wall up their eyes
in a kind of dying-calf attitude and listen so hard you can hear them
listening, and some bend over toward their nearest neighbors and murmur
their rapture. It is all right for them to murmur, but if you so much as
scrooge your feet, or utter a low, despairing moan or anything, they all
turn and glare at you reproachfully and go "Sh!" like a collection of
steam-heating fixtures. Depend on them to keep you in your place!
[Illustration: "SHE TRIES TO TEAR ALL ITS FRONT TEETH OUT WITH HER BARE
HANDS"]
All of a sudden the lady operator comes out of her trance. She comes out
of it with a violent start, as though she had just been bee-stung. She
now cuts loose, regardless of the piano's intrinsic value and its
associations to its owners. She skitters her flying fingers up and down
the instrument from one end to the other, producing a sound like
hailstones falling on a tin roof. She grabs the helpless thing by its
upper lip and tries to tear all its front teeth out with her bare hands.
She fails in this, and then she goes mad from disappointment and in a
frenzy resorts to her fists.
As nearly as you are able to gather, a terrific fire has broken out in
one of the most congested tenement districts. You can hear the engines
coming and the hook-and-ladder trucks clattering over the cobbles.
Ambulances come, too, clanging their gongs, and one of them runs over a
dog; and a wall falls, burying several victims in the ruin. At this
juncture persons begin jumping out of the top-floor windows, holding
cooking stoves in their arms, and a team runs away and plunges through a
plate-glass window into a tinware and crockery store. People are all
running round and shrieking, and the dog that was run over is still
yelping--he wasn't killed outright evidently, but only crippled--and
several tons of dynamite explode in a basement.
As the crashing reverberations die away the lady arises, wan but game,
and bows low in response to the applause and backs away, leaving the
wreck of the piano jammed back on its haunches and trembling like a leaf
in every limb.
All to yourself, off in your little corner, you are thinking that surely
this has been suffering and disaster enough for one evening and
everybody will be willing to go away and seek a place of quiet. But no.
In its demand for fresh horrors this crowd is as insatiate as the
ancient Romans used to be when Nero was giving one of those benefits at
the Colosseum for the fire sufferers of his home city. There now
advances to the platform a somber person of a bass aspect, he having a
double-yolk face and a three-ply chin and a chest like two or three
chests.
[Illustration: "RO-HOCKED IN THE CRA-HADLE OF THE DA-HEEP I LA-HAY ME
DOWN IN PE-HEACE TO SA-LEEP!"]
You know in advance what the big-mouthed black bass is going to
sing--there is only one regular song for a bass singer to sing. From
time to time insidious efforts have been made to work in songs for
basses dealing with the love affairs of Bedouins and the joys of life
down in a coal mine; but after all, to a bass singer who really values
his gift of song and wishes to make the most of it, there is but one
suitable selection, beginning as follows:
_Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep,
I la-hay me down in pe-heace to sa-leep!
Collum and pa-heaceful be my sa-leep
Ro-hocked in the cra-hadle of the da-heep!_
[Illustration: "SHEM UNDOUBTEDLY SANG IT WHEN THE ANIMALS WERE HUNGRY"]
That is the orthodox offering for a bass. The basses of the world have
always used it, I believe, and generally to advantage. From what I have
been able to ascertain I judge that it was first written for use on the
Ark. Shem sang it probably. If there is anything in this doctrine of
heredity Ham specialized in banjo solos and soft-shoe dancing, and
Japhet, I take it, was the tenor--he certainly had a tenor-sounding kind
of a name. So it must have been Shem, and undoubtedly he sang it when
the animals were hungry, so as to drown out the sounds of their
roaring.
So this, his descendant--this chip off the old cheese, as it
were--stands up on the platform facing you, with his chest well extended
to show his red suspender straps peeping coyly out from the arm openings
of his vest, and he inserts one hand into his bosom, and over and over
again he tells you that he now contemplates laying himself down in peace
to sleep--which is more than anybody else on the block will be able to
do; and he rocks you in the cradle of the deep until you are as seasick
as a cow. You could stand that, maybe, if only he wouldn't make faces at
you while he sings. Some day I am going to take the time off to make
scientific research and ascertain why all bass singers make faces when
they are singing. Surely there's some psychological reason for this, and
if there isn't it should be stopped by legislative enactment.
When Sing-Bad the Sailor has quit rocking the boat and gone ashore, a
female singer generally obliges and comes off the nest after a merry
lay, cackling her triumph. Then there is something more of a difficult
and painful nature on the piano; and nearly always, too, there is a
large lady wearing a low-vamp gown on a high-arch form, who in
flute-like notes renders one of those French ballads that's full of
la-las and is supposed to be devilish and naughty because nobody can
understand it. For the finish, some person addicted to elocution usually
recites a poem to piano accompaniment. The poem Robert of Sicily is much
used for these purposes, and whenever I hear it Robert invariably has my
deepest sympathy and so has Sicily. Toward midnight a cold collation is
served, and you recapture your hat and escape forth into the starry
night, swearing to yourself that never again will you permit yourself to
be lured into an orgy of the true believers.
But the next time an invitation comes along you will fall again. Anyhow
that's what I always do, meanwhile raging inwardly and cursing myself
for a weak and spineless creature, who doesn't know when he's well off.
Yet I would not be regarded as one who is insensible to the charms of
music. In its place I like music, if it's the kind of music I like.
These times, when so much of our music is punched out for us by
machinery like buttonholes and the air vents in Swiss cheese, and then
is put up in cans for the trade like Boston beans and baking-powder,
nothing gives me more pleasure than to drop a nickel in the slot and
hear an inspiring selection by the author of Alexander's Ragtime Band.
I am also partial to band music. When John Philip Sousa comes to town
you can find me down in the very front row. I appreciate John Philip
Sousa when he faces me and shows me that breast full of medals extending
from the whiskerline to the beltline, and I appreciate him still more
when he turns round and gives me a look at that back of his. Since
Colonel W. F. Cody practically retired and Miss Mary Garden went away to
Europe, I know of no public back which for inherent grace and poetry of
spinal motion can quite compare with Mr. Sousa's.
I am in my element then. I do not care so very much for Home, Sweet
Home, as rendered with so many variations that it's almost impossible
to recognize the old place any more; but when they switch to a march, a
regular Sousa march full of um-pahs, then I begin to spread myself. A
little tingle of anticipatory joy runs through me as Mr. Sousa advances
to the footlights and first waves his baton at the great big German who
plays the little shiny thing that looks like a hypodermic and sounds
like stepping on the cat, and then turns the other way and waves it at
the little bit of a German who plays the big thing that looks like a
ventilator off an ocean liner and sounds like feeding-time at the zoo.
And then he makes the invitation general and calls up the brasses and
the drums and the woods and the woodwinds, and also the thunders and the
lightnings and the cyclones and the earthquakes.
[Illustration: "AND I ENJOY IT MORE THAN WORDS CAN TELL!"]
And three or four of the trombonists pull the slides away out and let go
full steam right in my face, with a blast that blows my hair out by the
roots, and all hands join in and make so much noise that you can't hear
the music. And I enjoy it more than words can tell!
On the other hand, grand opera does not appeal to me. I can enthuse over
the robin's song in the spring, and the sound of the summer wind
rippling through the ripened wheat is not without its attractions for
me; but when I hear people going into convulsions of joy over Signor
Massacre's immortal opera of Medulla Oblongata I feel that I am out of
my element and I start back-pedaling. Lucy D. Lammermore may have been a
lovely person, but to hear a lot of foreigners singing about her for
three hours on a stretch does not appeal to me. I have a better use for
my little two dollars. For that amount I can go to a good minstrel show
and sit in a box.
You may recall when Strauss' Elektra was creating such a furor in this
country a couple of years ago. All the people you met were talking about
it whether they knew anything about it or not, as generally they didn't.
I caught the disease myself; I went to hear it sung.
I only lasted a little while--I confess it unabashedly--if there is such
a word as unabashedly--and if there isn't then I confess it
unashamedly. As well as a mere layman could gather from the opening
proceedings, this opera of Elektra was what the life story of the Bender
family of Kansas would be if set to music by Fire-Chief Croker. In the
quieter moments of the action, when nobody was being put out of the way,
half of the chorus assembled on one side of the stage and imitated the
last ravings of John McCullough, and the other half went over on the
other side of the stage and clubbed in and imitated Wallace, the
Untamable Lion, while the orchestra, to show its impartiality, imitated
something else--Old Home Week in a boiler factory, I think. It moved me
strangely--strangely and also rapidly.
Taking advantage of one of these periods of comparative calm I arose and
softly stole away. I put a dummy in my place to deceive the turnkeys and
I found a door providentially unlocked and I escaped out into the night.
Three or four thousand automobiles were charging up and down Broadway,
and there was a fire going on a couple of blocks up the street, and I
think a suffragette procession was passing, too; but after what I'd
just been through the quiet was very soothing to my eardrums. I don't
know when I've enjoyed anything more than the last part of Elektra, that
I didn't hear.
Yet my reader should not argue from this admission that I am deaf to the
charms of the human voice when raised in song. Unnaturalized aliens of a
beefy aspect vocalizing in a strange tongue while an orchestra of two
hundreds pieces performs--that, I admit, is not for me. But just let a
pretty girl in a white dress with a flower in her hair come out on a
stage, and let her have nice clear eyes and a big wholesome-looking
mouth, and let her open that mouth and show a double row of white teeth
that'd remind you of the first roasting ear of the season--just let her
be all that and do all that, and then let her look right at me and sing
The Last Rose of Summer or Annie Laurie or Believe Me, If All Those
Endearing Young Charms--and I am hers to command, world without end,
forever and ever, amen! My eyes cloud up for a rainy spell, and in my
throat there comes a lump so big I feel like a coach-whip snake that has
inadvertently swallowed a china darning-egg. And when she is through I
am the person sitting in the second row down front who applauds until
the flooring gives way and the plastering is jarred loose on the next
floor. She can sing for me by the hour and I'll sit there by the hour
and listen to her, and forget that there ever was such a person in the
whole world as the late Vogner! That's the kind of a music-lover I am,
and I suspect, if the truth were known, there are a whole lot more just
like me.
If I may be excused for getting sort of personal and reminiscent at this
point I should like to make brief mention here of the finest music I
ever heard. As it happened this was instrumental music. I had come to
New York with a view to revolutionizing metropolitan journalism, and
journalism had shown a reluctance amounting to positive diffidence about
coming forward and being revolutionized. Pending the time when it should
see fit to do so, I was stopping at a boarding house on West
Fifty-Seventh Street. It has been my observation that practically
everybody who comes to New York stops for a while in a boarding house on
West Fifty-Seventh Street.