Eating in Two or Three Languages

"'Kindly pass the ice water. That's it. Thank you. Join me, won't you, in a brimming beaker? It may interest you to know that I am now on my second carafe of this wholesome, delicious and satisfying beverage. Where I have lately been, in certain parts of the adjacent continent, there isn't any ice, and nobody by any chance ever drinks water. Nobody bathes in it either, so far as I have been able to note. You'll doubtless be interested in hearing what they do do with it over on that side. It took me months to find out.

"'Then finally, one night in a remote interior village, I went to an entertainment in a Y.M.C.A. hut. A local magician came out on the platform; and after he had done some tricks with cards and handkerchiefs which were so old that they were new all over again, he reached up under the tails of his dress coat and hauled out a big glass globe that was slopping full of its crystal-pure fluid contents, with a family of goldfish swimming round and round in it, as happy as you please.

"'So then, all in a flash, the answer came and I knew the secret of what the provincials in that section of Europe do with water. They loan it to magicians to keep goldfish in. But I prefer to drink a little of it while I am eating and to eat a good deal while I am drinking it; both of which, I may state, I am now doing to the best of my ability, and without let or hindrance, Herb.'"

To be exactly correct about it, I began mapping out this campaign long before I took ship for the homeward hike. The suggestion formed in my mind during those weeks I spent in London, when the resident population first went on the food-card system. You had to have a meat card, I think, to buy raw meat in a butcher shop, and you had to have another kind of meat card, I know, to get cooked meat in a restaurant; and you had to have a friend who was a smuggler or a hoarder to get an adequate supply of sugar under any circumstances. Before I left, every one was carrying round a sheaf of cards. You didn't dare go fishing if you had mislaid your worm card.

The resolution having formed, it budded and grew in my mind when I was up near the Front gallantly exposing myself to the sort of table-d'hôte dinners that were available then in some of the lesser towns immediately behind the firing lines; and it kept right on growing, so that by the time I was ready to sail it was full sized. En route, I thought up an interchangeable answer for two of the oldest conundrums of my childhood, one of them being: "Round as a biscuit, busy as a bee; busiest thing you ever did see," and the other, "Opens like a barn door, shuts like a trap; guess all day and you can't guess that." In the original versions the answer to the first was "A watch," and to the second, "A corset"--if I recall aright But the joint answer I worked out was as follows: "My face!"

Such was the pleasing program I figured out on shipboard. But, as is so frequently the case with the most pleasing things in life, I found the anticipation rather outshone the realisation. Already I detect myself, in a retrospective mood, hankering for the savoury _ragoûts_ we used to get in peasant homes in obscure French villages, and for the meals they gave us at the regimental messes of our own forces, where the cooking was the home sort and good honest American slang abounded.

They called the corned beef Canned Willie; and the stew was known affectionately as Slum, and the doughnuts were Fried Holes. When the adjutant, who had been taking French lessons, remarked "What the _la_ hell does that _sacré-blew_ cook mean by serving forty-fours at every meal?" you gathered he was getting a mite tired of baked army beans. And if the lieutenant colonel asked you to pass him the Native Sons you knew he meant he wanted prunes. It was a great life, if you didn't weaken--and nobody did.

But, so far as the joys of the table are concerned, I think I shall be able to wait for quite a spell before I yearn for another whack at English eating. I opine Charles Dickens would be a most unhappy man could he but return to the scenes he loved and wrote about.