The Wood Fire in No. 3 Part 3

"Were you really on exhibition, Lonny?" Mac's impatience never lasts many seconds.

The architect nodded, then answered slowly:

"Five dinners and a tea."

"All rich houses, I suppose?"

"Very rich."

"And all wanted plans for country seats, of course?"

"Some of them--two, I think."

"Extra dry champagne, under-done canvas-backs and costly terrapin served every five minutes?"

"No. Extra dry canvas-backs, done-over terrapin, and cheap champagne.

Served but once, thank G.o.d!"

"Wore your swell clothes, I presume?"

"Yes, swallow-tail on me every night and a head on me every morning,"

answered Lonnegan with a grave face. "Why do you ask, Mac?"

"Oh, just to keep in touch with the history of my country, old man."

While the two men talked, Pitkin and Van Brunt walked in--the latter a Dutch painter in New York for the winter, just arrived by steamer. The atmosphere of No. 3 was evidently congenial to the man, for, after a hand-shake all round, the Hollander produced his own pipe, filled it from a leather pouch in his pocket, and sat down before the fire as unconcerned and as contented as if he'd been one of the fire's circle from the day of its lighting. Good Bohemians, so called the world over, have an international code of manners, just as all club men of equal cla.s.s agree upon certain details of dress and etiquette, no matter what their tongue. The brush, the chisel, the trowel, and the test-tube are so many talismans--open sesames to the whole fraternity.

The Hollander had overheard the last half of Mac's sally and Lonnegan's grave rejoinder.

"Yes, the terrapin and the canvas-back, I hear much of them. What does a terrapin look like, Mr. Lonnegan?"

"A terrapin, Van Brunt," interrupted Boggs, "is a hide-bound little beast that sleeps in the mud, is as ugly as the devil, and can bite a tenpenny nail in two with his teeth when he's awake. When he is boiled and picked clean, and served with Madeira, he is the most toothsome compound known to cookery."

"Correctly described, Boggs--'compound' is good," said Lonnegan. "The up-to-date-modern-millionnaire-terrapin, Mr. Van Brunt, is a reptile compounded of glue, chicken-bones, chopped calf's head, and old India-rubber shoes. When ready for use it tastes like flour paste served in hot flannel. I may be wrong about the chopped calf's head, but I'm all right about the India-rubber shoes. I've been eating them this week, and part of a heel is still here"--and he tapped his shirt-front.

"And the canvas-back?" continued Van Brunt, laughing. "It is a duck, is it not?"

"Occasionally a duck--I speak, of course, of tables where I have dined--but seldom a canvas-back."

"And they live in the marshes, I hear, and feed on the wild celery--do they not?"

"No; they live in a cold storage six months in the year, and feed on sawdust and ice," replied Lonnegan with the face of a stone G.o.d.

"Hard life, isn't it?" remarked Boggs to the circle at large.

"For the duck?" asked Pitkin.

"No--for Lonnegan. Orders for country houses come high."

"Serves him right!" ventured Marny. "No business eating such messes; ought to get back to----"

"Hog and hominy," interrupted Lonnegan, still with the same grave face.

"Both. That's what most of your millionnaires were brought up on."

Pitkin sprang from his seat, and, thrusting both hands into his pockets, burst out with--

"Gentlemen, you really don't know what good eating is! The taste for terrapin and canvas-back is part of the degeneration of the age; so is it for truffles, mushrooms, caviare, and a lot of such messes. The French, whose cuisine we imitate, turn out a lot of flat-chested, spindle-shanks on sauces and ragouts. We'll go to the devil in the same way if we follow their cooks. The English raise the highest standard of man on tough bread and the most insipid boiled mutton in the world. What we have got to do is to get back to our plain old-fashioned kitchens.

The best dinner I ever had in my life was when I was sixteen years old, and even now, whenever I get a whiff from a shop where they are cooking the same combination, I can no more pa.s.s it than a drunkard can pa.s.s a rum-mill."

"Drunk on pork and beans!" growled Boggs in a low voice to Marny. "I knew you'd come to no good end, Pitkin. You ought to sign a pledge and join a non-adulterated food society."

"Something better than pork and beans, you beggar!" retorted Pitkin--"something that makes my mouth water every time I think of it.

And hungry! the prodigal son was an over-fed alderman to me; real gnawing, empty kind of hunger."

Ford stood up and faced the circle.

"The great sculptor, gentlemen, is about to tell us what he knows of biblical history. Silence!"

"I had been out gunning all day----"

"I didn't know you were a sportsman," interpolated Boggs.

"I had been gunning all day," Pitkin repeated firmly, ignoring the Chronic Interrupter, "and had lost my way over the mountains. Just about dark I reached the valley and made for a small cabin with a curl of smoke coming out of the chimney. As I came nearer I got a whiff from a fry-pan that made me ravenous--one of those smells you never forget to your dying day. As I opened the gate I could see the glow of a fire in the stove, the smell getting stronger every minute. Inside, I found a man sitting in his shirt-sleeves by a table. The table had two plates on it, two knives, two forks, and two big china cups. Bending over the hot stove was his wife. She was stirring a large bowl filled to the brim with buckwheat batter. On the stove was a hot griddle and a fry-pan, and coiled in the fry-pan, trim as a rope coiled flat on a yacht's deck, lay a string of link sausages, with the bight of the line sticking up in the centre, like Mac's thumb.

"'Are you Pitkin's boy?' the man said, after I had explained.

"'Yes.'

"'Sit down and eat'

"The old man had two cakes, and I had two cakes. They were griddled in fours, and we both had a link of sausage with each instalment. I never moved from my chair until the tide-mark oh the bowl had gone down five inches, and the core of the sausages looked as if a solid shot had struck it. That smell! and the way it all tasted, and the little brown frazzlings around the edges of the celestial cakes, and the sizzlings of fat on the sausages, and the boiling hot coffee that washed it all down!

Oh, go to with your Delmonico dishes! Give me the days of my youth! If I had but four breaths left in me, and if somebody should pa.s.s that pan of sausages under my nose, I could rise up and whip my weight in wild-cats.

And yet that smell doesn't bring to my memory the way my hunger was satisfied, or how the food tasted. What I recall is the low-ceiled room, and the glow of the fire; the warmth and comfort everywhere, and the high light on the old Frau's face bending over her griddle. You'd just love to have painted that old woman, Mac."

The Hollander had listened quietly and without comment, both to Lonnegan's chaff and to Pitkin's enthusiastic recital.

"Ah, yes, you are quite right, Mr. Pitkin; after all, it is the imagination that is fed, not the stomach."

The measured tones of the speaker's voice at once commanded attention; even Boggs twisted his head to catch his words:

"It is his imagination, too, which suffers when a man loses his money and becomes poor. What he misses most, then, is not his horses and carriages and fine houses; it is his table, and the clean napkins and the linen, and hot plates and the quite thin gla.s.ses. Is it not so? I can think of nothing more satisfying than a well-appointed table, with the servants about and the dishes properly served, and with the flowers, silver, and gla.s.s, the better wines coming later, the coffee and cigar at the end. And I can think of nothing more pitiful than for a man who has had all this, to be obliged to stand at a cheap counter and eat a cheap sandwich. My father used to tell me a story about the spendthrift son of an old baron who lived in my town, by the name of De Ruyter, and who spent in just two years every guilder his father left him. Then came roulette, and at last he was a tout for gaming-houses--so poor that he had but one coat to his back. All this time, having been born a gentleman, he managed to keep himself clean, his clothes brushed and mended, and his shirt and collar ironed. That is quite difficult for a man who is poor.

"One day an old friend of his dead father's, a very rich man, took pity on him, and asked him to call at his house so that he might arrange to get him work. He received him in his library and rang for cigars and brandy, which his servant brought on a silver plate. The brandy the poor fellow drank, but the cigar he begged permission to put in his pocket and smoke later in the day. It was one of those great cigars the rich Hollanders smoke, about as long as your hand and thick like two fingers.

This one had a little band around it, with the coat of arms of the gentleman stamped in gold; not a cigar you can buy even in Amsterdam, but a cigar made especially for very big customers like this one.

"When young De Ruyter went out from the library he carried a letter to a merchant on the dock, which got for him a situation at ten guilders a week, and this big cigar. All the way to his lodgings in the garret he kept his hand on it as it lay flat in his waist-coat-pocket. At every street corner he took it out carefully to see that it was not mashed or broken. When he pushed in his room door he began to look around for a place to put it. He was afraid to carry it around with him for fear of crushing it. At last he saw a crack in the plaster just above the bed, showing two open laths. He wrapped it most carefully in paper and laid it in the opening; here it would be dry and out of danger; here he could always be sure that it was safe. Then he presented his letter and went to work for the merchant on the dock.

"All that week he waited for Sat.u.r.day night, when he would get his first ten guilders, and all that week before he went to sleep he would take a look at the cigar to be sure it was there. Every morning when he awoke he did the same thing. When Sat.u.r.day night came, and the money was laid in his hand, he hurried to his garret, washed himself clean, brushed the only coat he owned, took out the precious cigar, laid it on his bed where it would be safe while he finished dressing, put his hat on one side of his head in his old rakish way, gave a look at himself in the broken gla.s.s, and downstairs he goes humming a tune to himself. He was very happy. Now he would have the best dinner he had had for months, and feel like a gentleman once more. And the cigar! Ah, that would end it all up! You see, gentlemen, with us the whole dinner is only the cigar; everything is arranged most carefully for that.