Work of Art

7

He shared, with the other three bell-boys at the Fandango Inn, a small room slashed by the slope of the roof almost into a pentahedron. The only ventilation was from windows two feet high, down on the floor, under the roof-slope. This carpetless, paperless room was frequented by bedbugs, and the beds were hard canvas cots without sheets, and nothing can be harder, after six hours' sleep (which was about what Myron got, nightly) than tight-stretched canvas. It was rather like a prison cell, but probably not so interesting. Myron had been more comfortable in the littered 'single room' he had shared with Ora at the American House; he had even been more comfortable on rush nights, when travelling-men were sleeping on billiard tables, on dining-room tables, and on cots set out in the hall, and Ora and he had bunked on blankets in the airy kitchen.

His uniform was another distress; it was very tight, it had such crampingly tight trousers, and there was a confounded row of little brass buttons to do up and keep done up. In it he felt like a grind-organ monkey, though when he presented this thought to his fellow bell-boys, they assured him that he didn't look so--he merely looked like a gorilla.

And he was badly paid and worse tipped.

But it was the toughness, the boisterousness, the shadiness of the guests at the Fandango that most worried the innocence of Myron, fresh from his mother's housewifely inn-keeping. Bad eggs had come to the American House; Myron and Jock McCreedy had dragged a homicidal drunk to bed and locked him in; but for the most part the travelling-salesmen and farmers and widows and itinerant oculists who had been their guests were glad to get wearily to bed at ten.

The guests of the Fandango had all the vices of Monte Carlo, done in oilcloth instead of in velvet. They were the 'cheap skates', the 'tinhorn sports', the 'two-bit spendthrifts' whom in secret confidences hotel-men bewail along with taxes, leaky coffee percolators, devils who cut new towels while wiping razor blades, ash-tray stealers, skippers, passers of rubber checks, loose carpet edges in dark halls, and the other major tragedies of their profession. The Fandango guests left Torrington and Hartford and Waterbury and New Britain as humble clerks or shop-keepers; they arrived at the hotel as two-weeks gentlemen, as millionaires who by God were used to Service by God and were going to by God have it or know the reason why; and they simply threw away money--on everything but laundry and tips.

The goodwife who for years had sat down contentedly at home to a supper of creamed chipped beef, johnny cake, cocoa, and apple sauce now expanded her proud, jet-glittering bosom in hauteur as she viewed a menu with bisque of lobster, brook trout, sweetbreads, roast duck, curaçoa sherbet, glace panacheé, and thirty other items, and wailed, 'Is this all they got for supper?'

How they ate! How they drank! And how, and how badly, they sang of a moonlit evening, like hound-dogs howling down the moon. Half an hour before meal-times, even though for the men-folks it meant leaving the delights of the bar-room thirty minutes early, the whole corps of guests planted their rocking-chairs as near as they could get to the dining-room entrance, and the second the double doors were slid open by the stately negro head waiter, they made a cavalry charge, while the head waiter, visibly paling, leaped away to save his life.

Fat men ate and re-ordered and ate three helpings of steak, two helpings of salmon, three kinds of pie. Fat men ate and drank and panted, and all day long, between meals, delicately rested their tender and uneasy bellies against the bar rail, while they tried the interesting effect of lacing rum punch with gin and maraschino. Lean men stalked ladies along the immense porch and crept into rockers beside them and cleared their throats and began, 'Hm. Nice day. Been here long, Madame?'

Almost every night, Myron and the other bell-boys and the porters had to remove some lean man from the bedroom of a more or less indignant lady, while the lean man explained alcoholically that he had mistaken this for his own room, and that the Fandango had gone to hell and he would be leaving in the morning. And lean men and fat men and indescribable between-men played poker all night long, noisily, quarrelsomely, not with the deft, swift quiet of J. Hector Warlock.

The Fandango Inn had unusual facilities for sport--for 1898. There were four croquet grounds and a tennis court. There were saddle-horses and, not very far away, through not very much of a thicket, a small lake where one could swim if one liked that sort of thing. It was rumoured that in North Buttermilk, only a few miles distant, one could even play this new-fangled game, golf. But none of the Fandango's guests over the age of eighteen wasted their hours in sport. They ate. They drank. They rocked. They dozed, and waked to eat again. They made the resplendent night loud with the smack of wide dripping kisses, and before they went to bed, they had light snacks of ham, tongue, corned beef, and fish salad at the bar.

The manager of the Fandango, a smooth-spoken person with oily black hair, who never glanced at you when he talked, rubbed his hands and looked content, and when there was a perfect devil of a shindy in some bedroom after midnight, over a euchre game or an affair of gallantry, this manager walked the other way and said softly to the bellboys, 'Mind your own business. What you don't hear won't ever make you deaf!'

And once, when the manager was behind the desk and a lady and gentleman, with no baggage other than a bottle of bourbon in a paper bag, registered 'President McKinley and grandmother,' he simpered and gave them a room. He left it to the bell-boys and porters to hush illuminated guests when other rooms complained too much; if they didn't quiet the rioters, he threatened to fire the boys; if they did quiet them, and the rioters themselves complained, he fined the boys a day's salary, and beamed, and went into the bar and had a drink on the money thus saved.

But that summer Myron learned, or so he believed, how to handle any sort of objectionable guest short of a maniac with a meat-axe.

The bell-boys had one way of revenge for underpayment and over-work. Drinks of rye served in a bedroom, as frequently they were, over card-games, cost twenty cents a drink; and a dollar bottle of rye furnished from ten to twelve drinks--and late at night, fifteen. The oldest bellboy invented an interesting device of buying a new bottle at the bar and paying for it, on pretence that it was for a guest, then hiding it in an empty room and from it serving the separate drinks in the bedrooms, at a profit of one to two dollars. He generously gave the idea to his colleagues; two of them adopted it, with cheers, but Myron balked.

'It's grafting,' he complained.

'Sure it is. Don't they graft on us? The way they pay us--telling us when we signed on what a whale of a lot of tips we'd get, and then about one lone dime a day from these cheap pikers! And the room and grub we get! Anything we can hold out on this joint belongs to us,' explained the senior bell-boy, who got fifty cents a week extra, and the title of Captain free.

'I know--I know--but it's bad practice. If we don't like it here, we ought to get out.'

'F' Christ's sake, Weagle, do you like it here?'

'Well, you can learn a lot.'

'The hell with that! I've done my learning. Say, I went clear through eighth grade and had prett' near a whole year in high school! I've done my learning! So you won't come in with us! Getting religious on us, are you? Our little Y.M.C.A. secretary! Our cute Sunday-school teacher!'

The senior bell-boy meant by 'religious' something like 'moral', Myron decided. Naturally, at eighteen, there is no accusation so grievous as that of morality and general priggishness. Myron didn't want to be anything like that. He didn't want to be moral. He spoke very evilly of morality to the senior bell-boy. He asserted that he was a practising hellion; probably about the worst young fellow that the senior bell-boy had ever met. He hinted that he drank like a cart-horse and was a menace to all women. But he could not graft on the job.

Even to himself he could not explain it. The word 'loyalty' was not yet in his vocabulary--which was, perhaps, just as well, for within a couple of decades 'loyalty' was to be altogether too much in the vocabularies of all luncheon-club inspiration-merchants. It was just . . .

'Oh, thunder!' he writhed, trying to get it straight. 'I'd of been sore if I'd caught Jock McCreedy knocking down even ten cents on us at the American House. Even if he did think we gave him a raw deal--which I bet Pa did, sometimes! I guess I'm a fool not to do the Romans like the Romans do. But I'll be everlastingly doggone hornswoggled if I'll get ahead by dirty little grafts, even if I never do get to the top. . . . But I will!'

When he returned to Torrington, in September, Myron again stalked into the Eagle Hotel and asked the manager for a job.

Mr. Coram demanded, 'Aren't you the young chap that was here early this summer?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Do you propose to keep on coming around here bothering me till I do give you a job?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What can you do around an hotel?'

'Everything, sir.'

'No. Oh, no. There's only one man in any hotel that can do everything, front office or back of the house, and that's the manager. At least, that's the theory. And unfortunately, son, the manager's job here seems to be taken. So I'm afraid there's nothing for you. Besides. Why don't you start some easy career, while you're young, instead of taking up hotel-keeping, which means having to stand for all the meanest cranks just when they're away from home and at their meanest? You seem a wide-awake young fellow. Take up something comparatively easy--say deep-sea diving or Arctic exploration. Sorry there's not a thing for you. Good morning!'

'Yes, sir.'

Myron lived luxuriously on his summer's savings, $18.65, with lovely long hours of sleep, for the two and a half weeks before he found the job of assistant night cook at the Bijou Lunch-Wagon--Never Closes, in Torrington.

Being eighteen, he found working all night at the lunch-wagon exciting. He felt like a man grown, to stay up through the forbidden hours. There was mystery in the shadowed alleys, the still street lamps, the huddled hurrying figures of strangers by night, and dawn was freshest and most grateful when it came after a trance not of snoozing but of back-break over a low gas-range, in the fumes of frying. His customers had a leisure unknown in the busy day, and they were odd people, phantoms of the night--the two town policemen, the Eagle Hotel 'bus-driver who had been a sailor, stray hoboes with a precious dime, and furtive travellers.

He learned nothing much here save to be cheery when his eyes were gummed with smoke and sleepiness, and the craft of lightning cookery--cracking open an egg and frying it in, apparently, ten seconds after the order had been given.

There was much drawling gossip at the Bijou. One night in January the Eagle 'bus-driver confided that the meat-cook at the Eagle was 'getting through', because he had a better job in Hartford.

That morning, at nine, after an hour and a half of sleep, Myron was in the office of Mr. Coram.

'Oh, Lord, I suppose I'll have to give you the job to get rid of you. But can you do it?'

'Yes, sir. Been cooking at the Bijou Lunch-Wagon since September.'

'That's not roasting and boiling. Lunch-wagon! Huh! Short orders! Ham and eggs! Hamburger steak! Fried spuds on the side and make it snappy! Lunch-wagon! This is an hotel, young man.' Mr. Coram spoke proudly. He was forty-two years old, and he had worked in hotels for thirty-one.

'Done lots of roasting and boiling and so on, sir. American House, Black Thread. Mother's cook there. Helped her on everything.'

'Well, all right, I suppose I'll have to try you, so you'll get it out of your system and have the sense to go back home. I'll start you at thirty a month, and board and laundry. You'll have to hire your own room. When can you come?'

'Week from to-morrow, sir--week's notice at the lunch-wagon.'

'All right. Be here at 6.45 in the morning. By the way: of course you have your own white jackets and aprons and cap and light overalls? And your own knives and cleavers?'

'Certainly, sir.'

That was the only lie of our young moralist, and it was no longer a lie when he reported for work. He had spent every penny he had saved, along with five dollars borrowed from his mother, for his kit.

All the first morning he was in a panic. They'd find him out--he was merely a brat who knew nothing about cooking. He was quiveringly polite and anxious when he met the head cook (rarely called 'chef' except by himself), who was a dried codfish from New Hampshire, named Clint Hosea.

By noon he perceived that though the Eagle Hotel kitchen was twice as large as that of the American House, and served three or four times as many people, the food was of about the same dreariness, and no more than Mother Weagle did Clint Hosea ever do anything so revolutionary as to study a cook-book. Neither of them had tried any new dish these ten years. By night Myron was confident, and rejoicing in the fact that, though he was not exactly over them, the kitchen maid who peeled vegetables and cleaned floors, the proud lady dishwasher, and the waitresses all received less wages than he.

For two years, Myron worked for the Eagle Hotel, and several times Mr. Coram gave him a two-for cigar, and once a slight rise in wages.

He had learned the carving of cooked meat from his father. His difficulty was cutting up the raw material, for he was butcher as well as meat-cook. But he had the originality to study the diagrams for dissecting unfortunate beasts, as given in any cook-book, and evenings he gave voluntary help at a butcher shop with whose proprietor he had been friendly at the Bijou Lunch.

Neither the Weagles, Clint Hosea, nor any of the three bell-boys with whom Myron had worked at the Fandango Inn knew that there were such things in the world as hotel periodicals. Mr. Coram subscribed to the weekly Hotel Era, but he rarely read any of it save the gossip that Jack Barley, 'the well-known and ever-popular chief clerk of the Memphis-Corona, has accepted a corresponding position in that ever-popular establishment, the Tartley, of Chicago, and his many friends and well-wishers all over the south are wishing him every success in his new position and predicting for him an ever enlarging career as a Boniface', and that 'M. Wilson Stewkey, Mine Host of the Hoamfrumhoam Villa, in bustling and beautiful Jax, Fla., is planning an extensive three-weeks' tour of the West Indies with his missus. Bum voyadj, as the Frogs say, Bill.' (This was almost a generation before hotel trade-journals became less jolly and along with personals featured such articles as a treatise on 'The Norm in Kilowatt Production in Independent Hotel Plants', which could be readily understood by any manager with authoritative knowledge of graphs, differential calculus, thermo-dynamics, and electrical engineering.)

Myron saw the Era in Mr. Coram's office, and he was excited. That was a fine idea! A publication all about hotel-keeping, from which he could become acquainted with managers and chefs and stewards all over the country, from which he could learn about new recipes and kitchen-ranges and material for sheets, about silver-polishing machines and bottle-openers and linoleum for floors. He subscribed for the Hotel Era with the money he had been saving for new shoes--a bold and doubtful piece of adventure, since kitchen work is even harder on the feet than store-clerking or being a colonel of infantry or any like proletarian occupation.

In the Era he found an advertisement of a book called The Steward's Handbook and Dictionary, by Jessup Whitehead, and rather doubtfully he sent for it. The book had first been published in 1887; in 1899, when Myron discovered it, it was still an authority, and well into a twentieth century that was to be anaemic with 'scientific diets' the handbook carried rich savours from a time when citizens, not yet being much afflicted by time-saving machinery, considered time not as something just to be fanatically saved, but to be devoted to eating, hymn-singing, and laughter. Beside it, the contemporary manuals of the 1930's on the preparation of canned clam juice and sandwiches of cream cheese and walnuts look pallid and vomitable.

So Myron found his Book of Words.

Whitehead was to him what an anthology of Shelley, Milton, Chaucer, Byron, Swinburne, and the lyrics of Lewis Carroll would have been to a young poet who, reared in the sticks, had never seen any verse save Longfellow and Bryant. Opening it, Myron felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, like a scientist with his first microscope, a youthful capitalist with his first dollar. Whitehead revealed to him all the succulences of eating, the perfections of service, the elegancies of table-decoration which he had, without ever seeing them, vaguely known must exist.

Not for himself did Myron Weagle desire these juicy dishes, these tables fantastic with glass and silver. All his life, though he was, as a scientist, curious to taste new dishes, for his own daily fare he preferred toast and cold chicken and a glass of milk, eaten on a corner of a kitchen table, in a surrounding of busy cookery. But he had the instinct to provide them for other people. Why he should have had that instinct, why he should want to provide too-rich food for too-rich people, is as much a mystery as why other, more verbal poets, should actually desire to provide rich and smoking sonnets for unknown readers.

For many months Myron read Whitehead every evening in his narrow, straw-matted furnished room, and every luxurious half hour of loafing between crises of bending over reeking broilers and stew-pans. He saw and seized the world not only of Waldorfs and Tremonts and St. Charleses, but of hotels in London and Paris and Berlin as well. He was as fascinated by it as any newly rich guest first staying in a Grand International Royal Hotel, with the difference that Myron, unlike the parvenu, knew that gorgeous tables are not entirely evolved in the brains of affable super-gents in morning clothes, equipped with gardenias, in the panelled Front Office, but by sweaty cooks in overalls, an agitated steward in shirt-sleeves, and a panting crew of helpers in that hidden, humble, greasy, all-important mass of dens, the Back of the House.

The handbook quoted the menu of an Italian dinner given to Sr. Salvini. What more swagger language could there be, yearned Myron, than 'Animelle di Vitello alla Minuta con Tartuffi' or 'Ravioli al Brodo' or 'Zabbaglione'? He had no notion what they meant, but weren't they simply lovely words?

Later, when he learned from the handbook's dictionary of dishes that they were only veal and paste and beaten eggs and wine, he was yet not disappointed. Mighty nice things, he reflected, you could do with eggs and paste and veal; grand noble dishes to rejoice the stomach of mankind and make a hotel famous.

There were other literary novelties in the steward's handbook. The menu of a dinner given by an association of travelling-men in New York was 'written in imitation of a railroad ticket, with coupon attachments, to be read from bottom to top', and it displayed with each course quotations from the choicest poets. With the chicken and terrapin there was somewhat cryptically quoted, 'This lapwing runs away with the shell on her head', and with the liqueurs, 'Spirits, which by mine art I have from their confines call'd to enact my present fancies'.

A Pink Dinner, in Washington, had fairy lamps with pink shades, cheese sticks tied with pink ribbons, and 'menus printed on broad pink satin ribbon, fringed at either end, and bearing at the top the name of the guest for whom it was intended'.

This thirty-dollar-a-month meat-cook, aged nineteen, was exhilarated by reading about 'a tropical dinner given by a wealthy man, which cost $175.00 a cover, exclusive of wine and music. The table was arranged around a miniature lake, in which palms, lilies and ferns appeared to be growing, while tropical trees rose from the banks amid miniature parterres of flowers. Small electric lights, with varicoloured globes, were arranged about the lake, and by a unique arrangement electricity was introduced under the water of the lake and caused to dance about in imitation of varicoloured fish. A beautiful palm-leaf fan was placed on the table before each guest, and on these the plates rested.'

'Golly, it would be nice to have a chance to fix a spread like that, without having to worry about the amount of butter you used,' thought Myron.

If he felt envy or any irritation at this superb example of Conspicuous Waste, he did not know it.

Still more enticing to the folly of the young poet were the decorated dishes at the renowned reception given by the first ducal Mrs. Vanderbilt: '. . . a game pie of pheasants resting on a flat surface of wax, the entire piece upheld with deer's antlers. Underneath were two rabbits playing cards, while to the side of the players was a bridge, under which gleamed a lake of water with goldfish swimming about. One of the most artistic pieces was a two-foot salmon, resting in a wax boat, while on the back of the fish sat a cupid; the boat was supported by a Neptune at each end, seated in sea shells and driving sea horses before them. A fine piece was a flying Mercury poised upon a ham, finely ornamented with a delicate tracing of truffles.'

'Gosh almighty!' breathed Myron.

And menus presenting ortolans!

He was not quite sure what sort of a bird an ortolan was, but it sounded far-off and romantic. When he read in the dictionary of the handbook a quotation from some casual European chef to the effect that 'ortolans should not be killed with violence, like other birds, as this might crush and bruise the delicate flesh--to avoid which the usual mode is to plunge the head of the ortolan into a glass of brandy', then he felt sick.

It came to him, as he sat tilted back against the bed in a hard straight chair in his little bedroom, that all the animals and birds he cooked had to be slaughtered, bloodily, messily, cruelly; that the veal which some red-faced, grunting guest slobbered over came from a soft-eyed calf that had come frisking up to the butcher and had its head instantly crushed with a sledge hammer.

He forgot it, then, as the medical student forgets the dissecting-room with its cold hacked corpses, as all young and ambitious men forget--for else they could not endure living--the perpetual horror and cruelty of the world.

Myron had read in his handbook for many weeks before he dared to criticize it . . . the young poet had long read his Milton before it came to him to wonder whether there may not be some thumpingly dull passages in Paradise Lost. In his Book of Words Myron found the menu of an annual game dinner given by Mr. John B. Drake, once the dean of Chicago hotel-men, to the dignitaries of the city.

There were one hundred and fourteen items, including (for this must have been given back in the '8o's, when such frenzied novelties still existed) ham of black bear, leg of mountain sheep, buffalo tongue, saddle of antelope, opossum, woodchuck, wild turkey, killdeer, plover, Wilson snipe, sandhill crane, Gadwall and canvas-back and red-bill Merganser ducks, American widgeon, red-necked grebe, Dunlin sandpiper, red-winged starling, and scores of equally fantastic prey. For the first three or four readings, he was awed. The poet was privileged to peep through glass at a volume of sonnets, printed in gold on blue-dyed vellum and bound in scarlet silk--and suddenly his common sense flashed out and he wanted it bound in morocco and printed in honest black on decent white!

'This darn bill of fare is a darn sight too darn long!' he protested, feeling reckless. 'Too darn much is bad as not enough. Take a fellow, say he has ten dishes out of all this; still he'll see all these others that he didn't get, and be sore, and feel he just hasn't had anything. When I own an hotel, I'm going to keep the bill of fare small and everything awful good!'

With a pencil he cut fifty-two items out of the hundred and fourteen.

'And still it's too big,' he sighed. 'But anyway, I've saved some money for Mr. Drake and not hurt his party! Hope he remembers it on my steward's salary! . . . I wonder what the deuce American widgeon is? I wonder if I'll ever taste it? I'm going to taste an awful lot of curious new things, in a lot of curious new places, before I get through!'

The appendix to Whitehead's handbook was a section entitled 'How to Fold Napkins, with Many Handsome Styles and Diagrams Which Show How It is Done'. At that period, the great restaurants and hotel dining-rooms were prouder of nothing than of tortuously twisted napkins, stiff and white and tall, in files on the long tables, and in this appendix were revealed the secrets of the greatest conjurors in napkin-folding. There was the 'chestnut pocket', making four pockets to be stuffed with nuts; the 'mitre' with its centre and horns; the 'double horn of plenty', whose folds were to be filled with flowers, the 'bridal serviette', which looked like a model of a four-story decagonal building, and such spirited modelling in stiff linen as 'the heraldic rose and star', 'the fleur-de-lis', and 'the colonne de triomphe'.

They seemed, after the simple cocked hats which decorated the American House and the Eagle Hotel, like the masterpieces of a napkinate Michael Angelo. Myron gaped at the sketches of their frosty beauty. And here was something he could do with his fingers, forthwith.

It was difficult to start cooking Filet Mignapour aux Truffes et aux Champignons with the resources of the Eagle Hotel kitchen, but napkins were napkins, and filching half a dozen of the Sunday Dinner best ones from the pantry, Myron began trying to erect a 'Hamburg drum'. It is quite simple, if you know how. 'Fold the serviette in half lengthways. Turn down the corners, fold it in half across the centre, inwards, from A to B, keeping the corners inside. Fold it again from C to D, let down the point E, turn down the corners F and G to make a triangle. . . .'

Perfectly straightforward and simple. Yet Myron sweated over it for quarter-hours, till his chair was surrounded by piles of crumpled napkins and the head waiter came in to stare, bellow, and complain, 'What in hell are you doing with my clean napkins, you damn pot-walloper?'

After that, Myron tried it at home, with stiff paper as a substitute for linen . . . a tall, rangy young man, with rope-coloured hair, sitting in a stale furnished room with his small chair drawn up to the bed, patiently folding paper for hours, solemnly, with the tip of his tongue in the corner of his mouth. In a fortnight he could do even such intricate jewel-work as 'the Victoria Regia', 'Mercury's cap', 'the swan', and 'the lorgnettes', and felt himself prepared to meet any dining-room crisis.

For did not Whitehead himself say, 'Hotel napkin folding--an art worth more than foreign languages. There is nothing a waiter can do, if a stranger in a strange place, that will so quickly give him introductions and acquaintances as to take a dozen sheets of stiff white paper and with them execute the finer patterns shown in this book and set them up for display. They attract attention at once and prove better than a letter of introduction for a young man seeking employment, and fortunately, this useful art is far easier to learn than a foreign language.'

Myron saw himself studying the innkeeper's art all over the world, able to get instant and agreeable employment in Egypt, China, Finland, or Wales by setting up for display his sculptures in linen or stiff white paper. He'd do it. And by and by . . .

Suppose, he reflected, he were a waiter in Claridge's in London, and the head waiter dashed into the pantry just before a banquet to Royalty, clapping his hands to his brow and moaning, 'Who amongst you, my waiters, can fold an "Imperial crown"?'

The other waiters would flinch and stand dumb, while Myron Weagle, from distant America, would step forward and say modestly, 'I can, sir.' And next day he would be made a captain of waiters, on his way to becoming steward.

Myron was getting into exalted society. He read in the handbook that the Earl Cadogan (hm! that was a slicker name for a lord than any he had encountered in the few novels he had read) had given a dinner at Chelsea House to forty-eight, including the Kings of Denmark, Greece, and Belgium, the Crown Princes of Sweden, Austria, and Portugal, the Prince and Princess of Wales.

In waking dreams Myron saw that feast. What would kings be like in private life? Did they wear dress suits, or uniforms plastered all over with gold lace and medals? The King of Greece, now; Myron was sure he had a half-moon of black moustache, the Crown Prince of Portugal had black whiskers.

The waiters were leaning over them, reverentially murmuring, 'Sure, Your Majesty, I'll hustle in another side order of peas right away'. And perhaps Claridge's had lent that clever captain of waiters, Myron Weagle, the American, to the Earl Cadogan for his dinner, and Weagle was standing quietly but authoritatively back by the big--buffet, would it be? and was Chelsea House a private home or a London hotel?--but anyway: he stood back there quietly, but his eagle eye never missed a single miscue of the waiters, and afterwards, when they were smoking fifty-cent cigars and drinking big goblets of brandy, one of the kings said to Earl Cadogan (that was his title and not his first name, wasn't it?)--he said, 'Earl, I want to congratulate you on that dandy head waiter you had here to-night. He knows service like I know my throne. Never missed a trick. Don't suppose I could get him for my palace, do you? I'd make him a Sir, and give him a swell house of his own.'

And during the dinner a princess had whispered to her neighbour, 'Who is that tall, handsome man with the blond hair standing back there by the sideboard? Isn't he one of the guests? Why don't he sit down with us?'

Myron studied the dinner which (according to Whitehead) he had caused to be served for the Earl Cadogan. It included Whitebait, Cotelettes d'Agneau Duchesse, Chaudfroid de Cailles aux Truffes, Poulardes aux Pruneaux, Filets Piqués froids Sauce Cumberland, Ortolans sur Canapes, Bavaroise à la Montreuil, Soufflés de Fraises, Croustades aux Fromages.

It was not a mere list of things to guzzle. It was the Catalogue of Ships. It was the recitative of names that were fourteen sweet symphonies. It was, to Myron Weagle, poetry with Sauce Cumberland.

'Not much like cornbeef and cabbage and fried pork chop and apple sauce,' he sighed, and, 'I wonder if they had any of the chow resting in wax boats with cupids on it?' and then, violently, 'American widgeon me eye!'

Along with the wax cupid nonsense and menus on pink ribbon, he stored away solid notions from Whitehead, Ranhofer of Delmonico's, Monselet, Brillat-Savarin, and from hotel magazines. These he clipped and rustled and sputtered over with the air of an earnest beaver. He knew at least the names and ingredients of a thousand dishes.

But it had, like all other poetic frenzies, the disadvantage of alarming more prosaic souls. When he prepared an experimental dish of mutton cutlets and brought it proudly to Clint Hosea, boasting, 'Taste this. I think it would be swell to serve. It's with Sauce Béarnaise! I made it!' the sardonic Yankee cook piped, 'It's with what?'

'Sauce Béarnaise.'

'And will you tell me what the hell Sauce Bernice may be?'

'Oh, there's white wine vinegar, and young onions--couldn't get shallots--and beef extract and egg yolks and herbs. . . .'

'Take it away. Taste it, hell! Want to poison me?'

'Well, could I make it with some Sauce Duchesse then, and just try it once and see if the guests like it?'

'You could not! We don't want any Bernice sauce or any Dutch sauce or any other kind of crazy Dago sauce! You put some decent brown gravy on it, like any other cook ought to, and get out of this and don't bother me. You know what I think? What's the matter with you? You been reading books!'