CHAPTER IXTINS
If E. M. were put in charge of the commissary department we would be given hardtack and water—his suggestions as to food never go any further. I, on the other hand, feel impelled toward chocolate in the way a drunkard is impelled toward rum, and if the supplies were left to me I should fill every thermos with chocolate ice-cream soda water and the sandwich boxes with chocolate cake. But Celia, having little opinion of hardtack and still less of chocolate, which she declared was making me as fat as butter, suddenly took the matter of food supplies into her own hands. Although she acknowledged that she had invited herself upon the expedition in the first place, and that she had agreed to sit under the luggage in the back, she protested that a heavy hamper full of silver and crockery and nothing to eat in it was an inhumanly heavy weight to put her up against, and she would like to arrange things differently.
Of course we told her that if she felt like rising above her surroundings it was not for us to hold her down. So without any more ado she shipped the beautiful lunch basket home by freight anddragged me out with her to buy a more practical substitute. Her first purchase was a large, white, tin breadbox—just an ordinary box with a padlock, neither lining nor fixtures.
“What for?” I asked.
“To put things in,” said she. “It is going to be padlocked and it is going to stand flat on the floor of the tonneau and stay there, and not tumble over on me! Also we won’t have to have it lugged up to our room at night or carted down in the morning.”
“Excellent!” I agreed enthusiastically. “Let’s have paper plates and five-cents-a-dozen spoons and throw them away and not have to fuss with anything to be washed.”
At a ten-cent store we bought only three knives, but dozens of plates and spoons and enough oiled paper to wrap sandwiches for an expedition. Then we went to a beautiful grocery store near the hotel and laid in a supply of everything imaginable that comes in china, glass, or tin! Chicken, ham, tongue, pheasant in tubes like tooth paste, pâté de foie gras in china, big pieces of chicken in glass, nuts, jam, marmalade, and honey.
One article of food that we had tried to find ever since leaving New York was still unobtainable. Neither brittle bread nor protopuffs had ever been heard of west of New York, and our Chicago grocer looked as blank as the rest. Either New York women are the only ones who worry about keeping their figures or else the women ofother cities stay slim naturally! Nothing but good, rich fat-producing bread and butter to be had, to say nothing of chocolate! And our waistbands getting tighter every day! Not E. M.—he being very young is as lathlike as ever.
Having bought everything else, we repeated our question, was hesurehe had no gluten or Swedish bread, no dry, flourless bread of any kind! No, he had only hardtack, and then produced—round packages of brittle bread!
Wonderful! We were so delighted we fairly floundered in it. “Bring us more; we are going to cross the continent; we must have lots of it!” I said greedily. Then we hurried home and waited for our supplies to arrive.
First came a big basket, bulging. Had we really bought all that? But it was only the beginning. Bread, bread, and more bread! Bales of it! It was I who had ordered “lots of it.” Celia looked sorry for me.
“It looks like rain! We could shelter the car under it,” was all I, idiotically, could think of. And in my absent-mindedness I broke open one of the bales. It was certainly Swedish bread, the nicest, crispest imaginable, and then I took a bite. Caraway seeds!
In our family some ancestor must have been done to death on caraway seeds. The strongest of us becomes a queer green at even so much as a whiff of one. Celia ran out into the hall as though I had exclaimed “Snakes!” And I, like the onewho had just been bitten, followed unstably after her.
“Is there a bat in your room?” asked the floor clerk, sympathetically.
“N-o,—car-a-way s-seeds,” said Celia, all in a tremble.
“We none of us can bear them—and they are in the bread,” I explained.
“Caraway seeds?” exclaimed the bewildered floor clerk. “Oh, but I like caraway seeds very much!”
“Do you?” we gasped. “Well, then if you will send a staff of porters into Room 2002, you can have enough to last all your life! You can stack a whole mountain of it around your desk and eat your way out.”
It rained all last night and drizzled off and on all morning. As everyone has warned us against muddy roads west of Chicago, we sat with our faces pressed to the windows overlooking the Lake, feeling alternately hopeful and downcast and asking each other questions in circles. Might we try to get on? Had we perhaps better unpack and stay? Twice the sun struggled out and we sent down for the porters to come for our luggage, but both times when they arrived it had begun to rain and we sent them away again. By twelve o’clock, having finally decided to stay over a day, E. M. went to the Saddle and Cycle Club to lunch with some friends. Celia and I were about to godown to the restaurant for our own luncheon when the breadbox caught her attention. I saw her lift the cover and look wistfully at the two neatly tied white paper packages and three brightly shining thermos jars that were on top. Expecting to start early in the morning we had the night before ordered a luncheon put up. And now what were we to do with the food?
“It was so expensive!” she said wistfully. “The pâté sandwiches were sixty cents apiece and they will be horrid and dry tomorrow!”
“And the lobster salad was a dollar and a half—and that certainly won’t keep!”
“And we don’t even know whether it is good or not!” she almost wailed, but quite as quickly she exclaimed happily: “Let’s picnic here!”
“Here?” I said vaguely, looking about at the rose silk hangings and the velvet carpet.
“Why not? It is ever so much more comfortable here than it would have been out on a dusty roadside. Besides, we really ought to see how our commissary department works. We ought to be sure that we haven’t any more caraway seeds!” she shivered.
A few minutes later we had spread our picnic on the floor and were having a perfect time. Also while we were about it we thought we had better sample the various things we had bought the day before.
“There is no use,” said the food expert, “in carting about a lot of stuff that we don’t like!”So we opened and tasted a tin of this and a jar of that until we were surrounded with what looked like the discards of a canning factory. Suppose our New York friends who had exclaimed at our going without any servants could see us now!
I was jabbing a hole in a can of condensed milk with a silver and tortoise-shell nail file when someone knocked at the door. Without a thought of the picture we were presenting to the probable chambermaid, I called, “Come in!” but was too busy to look up until I heard a sort of gasp and a man’s voice stammered:
“I only came to see—to see if Mrs. Post—if there was anything I could do to—serve——”
“Miller!” It was the head waiter of one of the dining-rooms downstairs—a man who had for several years been a second head waiter in a celebrated New York hotel and who had once been a butler for a member of our family. The expression on his face was one of such surprise, bewilderment, apology, shame and humility that I found myself explaining:
“We were to have picnicked along the road, but it rained. And so we have picnicked——! It is very simple!”
“Yes, madam,” he agreed, stoically. But it was not until I had assured him that we never picnicked more than once a day indoors and had given him permission to order our dinner at what time and wherever he pleased, and most particularly after I refused to allow him to send awaiter to put the room in order and be a witness to the family’s eccentricities that he became his urbane, impassible self once more.
Tonight I suppose we will have to deck ourselves out in our best bibs and tuckers and sit through a conventionally complete dinner at the most prominent table in the dining-room so that Miller may suffer no loss to his proper pride.