I can remember sitting stiffly, a very little boy, at the polished mahogany board in the high ancestral dining-room in Ware, surrounded by an atmosphere heavy with the dignity of viands.
My mother set what was called, in the aristocratic New England of that day, a "bountiful" table. Cousins and indigent satellites galore came to replenish their meagre systems with the red meats and roast poultry and, upon occasion, game; the rich brown gravies; the vegetables in heaped, buttered mounds; the thick, steaming soups and aldermanic puddings. There was always more than plenty; and over the daily feast presided my mother and grandmother, grandes dames of a long descent, with something of Chinese benignity and a fine appreciation of their own importance.
As a trencherman, my father had no standing. His abstemiousness was laid, in an apologetic manner, to an old dyspepsia—dyspepsia being one of the genteel diseases. It was incomprehensible to the ladies of his household, and to me as their small pupil, that he should eat but little, by intellectual preference.
My grandfather, a valid aristocrat, had a red face and many odd little gustatory tricks. He and his red-faced friends—one of whom owned a gold dinner-service presented by a Reigning Monarch—depended heavily on dining at the same hour every evening, and took their toddies solemnly at midday at a mellow old bar near the centre of the city. They thought long and much, I now understand, about their food and liquor. Some of them died untimely deaths, from thinking too much about it.
My father was a self-made man—a fact never forgotten by his wife's family. His contempt for food (I now know) was regarded by them as evidence of low breeding. They endeavored to conceal that aspect of it, even from each other, but never with entire success. It was a skeleton, a lamentable fact ignored so far as possible by persons of gentle birth and cultivation.
I see again my father urging a second plateful of roast capon on my grandmother. He had the suavity of a Marquis de Caux, when he chose. No doubt it was a complete revenge for him for many slights, to see the proud old lady's greediness step to the front with sparkling eyes. But at that time I did not know. I thought it "queer" of him to be different. For breakfast he ate only one egg. Strange! My mother shrugged her shoulders—"Your father's way!" We all shrugged our shoulders more or less, from my grandmother to the last, most indigent cousin.
But with care; for my father was not only the source of supplies, but owner of a wit that nicked the hide where it struck.
I was allowed to have my own whims about food, provided that I ate enough. I liked fried potatoes better than mashed; "loved" waffles, "hated" eggplant. One sometimes heard:
"Oh, don't have stewed corn. Stevie likes it on the cob!"
It is possible that if I had not been jolted from the nest at an early age, I too would have grown up an aristocrat.
I cannot tell exactly at what period of my life the importance of food began definitely to recede. I must have eaten heavily at boarding-school, but never, I am sure, so thoroughly to the exclusion of other activities as modern writers of school stories would persuade us is the hobbledehoy habit.
I remember Sweet-Potato Minnie, ladler-out of helpings at the House on the Hill; Chatham's Jelly Lunch; and of later date, The Agate, where Muriel the Beautiful Scandinavian held forth to the titillation of adolescent yearnings. It seems to me, however, as I look back, that I leaned more heartily toward raw whiskey, at that stage of development, than toward any special kind of food.
Tante Manhattan would have taught me catholicity in appetite, if I had not learned before. In those days (1903-1904) there was an eating-place on 23rd Street at which one could buy dinner for twenty cents. They served what they could for the price, and one ate it and was thankful, or left it and starved. It was not so coarse or dirty as food I had eaten on cattle-ships, nor so good as that at which sons of ill-to-do parents had scoffed in the College Commons. It merely served its purpose; one does not scorn boiled beets if they will fill an aching void.
At what meals have I assisted since then, without paying separate homage to the food itself, its delicacy or variety! There was the dinner at Antoine's, beginning with the unique cocktails and proceeding, through the marvellous smoky oysters and I have forgotten what besides, to repletion and the inspired exclamation of Fleurette the Fair, as that frail one lifted humid eyes to mine:
"Oh, Gregory, how good that was!"
In a second she had corrected herself, but the error was incontestable—she had said Gregory instead of Stephen, and Gregory was a thousand miles away from New Orleans.
Often with Fleurette there was a sense of eating in the presence of a squad of other men and women, her bygone friends and mine. After a silence we looked up and met each other's eyes, and in the merging gazes old memories were afloat. Our glances fell in embarrassment while we made hurried conversation anent the probable favorite in the next day's fourth race.
Nevertheless, I sat pleasantly at table many times with her. Remembrance clings of little tricks, pleasantries of a languid woman versed in love. The soft eyes, with speculative treachery always lurking in their depths, the long hands, fashioned to be caressed, but robbed of character by the fervid clasping of too many men! A beautiful woman with a vapid smile, foolish, unfortunate; cursed with a vein of moral feeling too strong to let her be entirely unmoral,—and an unmoral nature too weak to engulf the moral vein.
Her tricks linger, but the food is forgotten—my privilege! Good chickens, and one bad one, at the Louisianne... We did not like the Sazerac, an acquired taste; and I thought that the fizzes of Ramos overrated... Adieu, Fleurette. Good luck, good appetite, good hunting! (I wonder if you betrayed your temper to the young aviator, down there in New Mexico. You wouldn't like frijoles much, I imagine.)
At Counterfeiters' Castle above Quaramaug, they used to serve a gorgeous dinner, after the sun went down behind the pines across the lake. Most of the dishes I cannot recall—a specialty was grenouilles—but the liquid refreshments were beyond cavil. Persons of all kinds met there: the fat female fancier of Griffons, the dramatic professor's wife (on the sly), Toinette l'Anson's husband and indestructible mother, and that naval pill peddler who wrote back from France to his wife to keep his memory green if he was killed in battle for his country.
Ostensibly the place was a kennels. Hemming, the smug proprietor, wore boots and sometimes joined the general conversation. Once when he was sitting at the table, Lil Kennedy, very drunk, described at length her strain of bird hunting—bull terriers, and the company went mad. He thought the insult an intentional one—you should have seen his purple face... On the east veranda of the Castle, where steps went down to the canoes, Dolores Costa tried to murder me with a Burgundy bottle, and did thereby convince me of the vitality of one of Turgenieff's types, previously unreal to me... Sometime, actions of living women may persuade me of the possible reality of Galsworthy's—to descend from the heights to mediocrity in a single penful.
The Kennedy is now mad; the Costa, repatriate. Little Flower o' the Corn, the life of the party, who used to dance most generously upon the table-top—ah, the poetry of her silken legs!—while dawn came stealing up the valley, has married a man to whom she confessed her past, and gone to swallow peas and mutton in Brooklyn. She who drove a team of seven, including two soldiers, with gay insouciance, now doubtless worries about a broken saucedish... The doggy Hemming overreached himself at last, and probably the grenouilles are honking undisturbed in Quaramaug.
The War, the tripe in the fashion of Caen, terrible stuff! There was a near-soldier from my native town, for whom I ordered mussels in Bordeaux, without his knowing what they were. They came, he saw, they conquered... "Schicoree." It was the only salad that they had, and after some Parisian days of it, one felt all curly. Simple Major Johnny Felton ate it at Papa Germain's, solemnly, nervously, thinking with longing of his plump wife at home, and giggling in abrupt falsetto when the French gels made eyes at him.
An interminable table d'hote at the Hotel du Grand Faisan in Tours. Curse the waiter, will he never take away the soup? Would that they had sent all waiters early to the Front! But patience; he has been doing this for thousands of nights, his forbears before him and he, and will be doing it, he and his progeny, after we are dead. There is a fixity about waiters, especially the French, and particularly at the Hotel du Grand Faisan, that old, respectable hostelry, in the old, not-so-respectable city beside the rushing Loire. Always the guests complain, and come again—the same complaints, the same guests, the same waiters, the same hotel. It is the Gallic genius of Habit, persistent as death itself... Les Américans, the gawks, are only incidents.
Always the same rigmarole at Tours, early in the morning. Scene: the little tin bar in the curve of the arm of the Place du Palais. Enter Yankee savior, to native mopping bar.
"D'cone-yack, veet! Ke zhay swof c'mattang!"
"Pardon, m'sieu, pas de cognac, c'est defendu, vous le savez bien."
"Ah, ah, n'mockay par, goddam! D'cone-yack, zhe voo pree, tood sweet, mantenong, oray voo?"
Three cognacs, and then des oeufs sur le plat at Madame Cinquante's, with frightful coffee. At noon, a wonderful dejeuner in the dining-room of Madame Lefebvre's pension bourgeois—wonderful, until les officiers Américains trouped in en masse and wrecked the pension.
Jeanne was the waitress, an altruist, very thin, small, tired in body, but smiling. She was to be married, no one seemed to know why, except that it had been arranged. Her grey eyes were kind and cool, too fine for marriage with a lout. It was like soaking sweet peas in a barrel of sack... Dinner on the Rue Nationale, usually, and a kettle of Vouvray... Angry foam under Espagne's bows; boards on the table-edges; and draw poker in the second smoking-room, against Bull Snyder and five morons, while the lights sway. We leave the War behind us before we touch America, where it never existed.
Fraternal banquets in New England, served by grim daughters of the Star admitted to the precincts for the purpose. Ice cream and large soft cake, with orange filling oozing from between the layers. Night upon night, descendants of the Pilgrims in rural New England swallow that layer cake, with no variety save in the color and in the flavor of the filling...
A quack persuaded me to live for a year on milk and nuts and grass. It can be done; and after the adventure, one never returns completely to the former attitude toward food.
I understand perfectly, now, my father's single egg. Though I no longer practice the doctrines of quackery—on the contrary, Tante Manhattan's fleshpots make a brisk appeal to me—I have the safe, comfortable feeling of the man to whom pertains the buried ace. It will never be said of me truthfully, as I once heard an eminent pastor declare of a confrere, defunct:
"He dug his grave with his teeth."
I can take it or let it alone—rich food, I mean. And consider how many cannot! Gaze with me at the patrons of a well-known restaurant, behold them in terms of food. Perchance you have not noticed how much their fodder means to them.
Those four males—I will not call them men—at yonder table, for example. What elbow-play; and their very hides are stretched with gluttony. Sometimes I think the celebrated dismissals of the Human Race by Swift and Balfour are too weak, the mere pratings of incorrigible optimists... And that high-colored female with the aged rake. She has told him that his lack of consideration spoils her lunch, that her appetite is gone; and she is pursuing vol-au-vents of sweetbread with artichoke and hollandaise, and a huge pear Condé... The quaint mixed foursome in the corner grows riotous. The waiter has chilled the wine too much, and forgotten to give Alfred a fork. Alfred is stuffed like a force-fed fowl, his eye is dull, his fat hand flabby, his liver will deal him the death blow soon; but he must have his fork when he wants it, poor laddie. Mabel's arms are like special Hoch-Deutsch sausages in shiny skins. The bracelet that George gave her two Christmases ago bites shrewdly into the gross flesh. Heart of my Heart, I love you—deal me some more prune whip. Kiss me again, my dearest, and do you think our venison hangs tender on the butcher's hook by now?... T. Shandy's mother and the familiar clock.
I bow.
Doubtless competent second-rate novelists of the Sienkiewiscz-Blasco Ibanez order will continue to shock us, between meals, with chapters on orgies of flamingo-tongues. Petronius was a dissolute dog, and the Romans generally in Spain and elsewhere were decadent fellows. But our own civilization is aging, and human nature remains the same. How long will it be, one queries, before we are compelled to acknowledge a condition in which, in the face of an all-conquering invading army, we would sacrifice, for immunity, all except palates?
STEPHEN TA VAN.