Windfalls

ON DINING

There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb’s spendthrift spent his money – while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that it shan’t escape, I have done it myself – often. I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate – in short, the happy mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart’s. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.

It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren’t many families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her’s did, and I can claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join very heartily in Peacock’s chorus:

“How can a man, in his life of a span,Do anything better than dine.”

Give me a satisfactory’ dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city – a famous man, too – who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A hot day and a lobster salad – what happier conjunction can we look for in a plaguey world?

But, in making this confession, I am neither gourmand nor gourmet. Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and the great language of the menu does not stir my pulse. I do not ask for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes – eggs and a rasher, a rabbit smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke approvingly of Sancho’s choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart’s desire at the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship – obliging, but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of hors d’ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest four-course table d’hôte begins, and when at the end you light your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with the subtle note of a personality.

And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is “discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.

IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA

I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship’s clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.

But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us, beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of all three.

In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom – a parochial illusion of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light and dark – what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark – not many days, but just one day and that always midday.

At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky – specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that Neptune’s year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it – our Psalmist’s span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year’s Day and live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune – if, that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.

And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.

As I reached this depressing conclusion – not a novel or original one, but always a rather cheerless one – a sort of orphaned feeling stole over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday’s storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!” counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller’s coppers were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.

The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d’Oison. And that other experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains – by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.

All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor, tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.

Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.” It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:

Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.

Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have been in another state of existence… Ah no, of course, it was this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked through the shadow into the deeps.

But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust reminded me of something… Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal’ by this time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.

TWO DRINKS OF MILK

The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the open Atlantic.

A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down the rocks.

We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.

Milk? Yes. Would we come in?

We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.

She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and untroubled as a child’s. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played the hostess.

If you have travelled in Kerry you don’t need to be told of the charm of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry, O’Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.

The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint – only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry temperament – the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.

The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost to the brim, and a couple of mugs.

We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to pay.

“Sure, there’s nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of pride in her sweet voice. “There’s not a cabin in Kerry where you’ll not be welcome to a drink of milk.”

The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M’Carty’s hotel – Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with many-coloured flies – we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.

When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)

In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage – neat and well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.

Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly less friendly.

In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two glasses – a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.

“What have we to pay, please?”

“Sixpence.”

And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.

It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant memory.

ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH

It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.