CHAPTER V: THE DINNER PARTY
For some weeks after I began housekeeping I had a feeling that all was not right with Ruth. She would not talk about food when I went to the kitchen, but somehow or other she always managed to bring in some remark about the people in the houses near us.
“Underdone, m’m? Yes, m’m, I quite understand,” she said one day in answer to a criticism of mine. “Speaking of which, m’m, do you happen to be acquainted with Raws, in Windermere Place?”
“Do you mean Colonel and Mrs. Raw?” I asked.
“Yes, m’m; the young person who lives with them as cook is sister to my young man, and I just happened to mention who you were, m’m, and how I was living with you. She was very pleased to think I was so well off, and asked if we were very busy just now.”
She made two or three more references to the great and good on whose cast-off legs of mutton we lived so happily (they had the loins and the shoulders, and we had the necks and legs, and, I regret to say, the tripe). At last she became more explicit.
“Hardly seems worth while making these fancy dishes just for you and master, does it, m’m?” she said despondingly. “It would be different if you were having company and we wanted to show what wecoulddo.”
It dawned on me then that Ruth was craving for morbid excitement. She longed to be at her wits’ end—that land of the leal where every true domestic servant loves to wallow and bemoan her lot. It was not long before she had her heart’s desire. People began to call, and when they began there was no stopping them. They came in barouches and in motors, on foot and in four-wheeled flys, from which the chaste kid boots of the elderly and the Parisian shoes of the rejuvenated descended in rich profusion. Clara found it more and more difficult to bedressed in time; in fact, when Mrs. Ajax and Mrs. Beehive took me first on their rounds and arrived at a quarter to three, it was Ruth, smutty and indignant, who opened the door.
I spoke severely to Clara afterwards, and found that it was her migratory instinct which had betrayed her again. She had been upstairs to get dressed, and had wandered off to the washhouse in the middle of her toilet to fetch a clean apron.
“Which reminds me, Clara,” I said. “Why does it take you so long to get tea when people call? You were three-quarters of an hour yesterday after I rang.”
“The kettle wouldn’t boil, m’m,” Clara replied.
She gave me the impression of having at last lost patience with her former accomplice, the kettle, and decided to “tell on him.”
“Oh,” I said, “you don’t think we had better have a man in to see about it, do you?”
Clara wavered for a moment between professional scorn of this suggestion and theirresistible bait I had thrown out. She hesitated and compromised.
“Well, m’m, itoughtto boil quicker; but perhaps next time Mr. Whistle is in the house we might get him to have a look at it; it may be too heavy a make.”
I regard this as Clara’s masterpiece.
But Ruth’s prayers were answered. The “neighbourhood” called, we dined out, and by and by we had to feed others in return.
James and I decided against the professional cook and “hired help,” so it remained to break the news to Ruth and Clara. I told them separately, on a bright morning in June when the little juicy lambs were hanging in clusters in the shops, and expectant peas burst through their pods in every market garden of our hospitable suburb. Ruth bore up wonderfully; in fact, after the first sob of terrified ecstasy I had very little trouble with her. But Clara cried a good deal, and was afraid that her waiting would not do justice either to herself or to me.
However, I told her how Napoleon hadrisen from quite a little chap to what he afterwards became, entirely by his own efforts; and I also reminded her of a famous judge in my own family who had once been an office boy. And then we all three began to “see about” one thing and another. I felt like an ophthalmic fly by the time we had done, with all its numerous eyes in a state of acute inflammation. I saw the stock for the soup. I saw the fish, and the paper it came in (which means a lot), I saw the sweetbreads, and wondered how James can be so fond of them. I saw the potatoes and the peas; that was nothing, really—half an eye did it, and the other half-eye caught the salad, just to be sure it was fresh. The tournedos of beef took an immense lot of seeing, and when they came up James saw them all over again, and they were not good. The efficient female has since explained to me why theirs are always perfect, but in my soul I believe that there is hanky-panky, if not plain swank about her fillets. Anyhow, some evil planet always shines on mine, so Ihave made up my mind now that Providence does not wish me to have fillets, and that He knows best, so we have saddle of mutton instead.
There was more brain-work and less inspection required for the pudding. When Ruth asked me if I would like to see the eggs, I said no, that was a question for the hen’s conscience, and one must leave something to somebody. Neither would I waste precious eyesight on the butter. I knew it was a lot, and the less seen about it the better. If I could have seen an ice-machine amongst our kitchen properties I should have felt less irritable. I know that the efficient female makes hers in something very simple—a biscuit tin or a boot, I forget which—but we were all too amateurish for these conjuring tricks. We have to get our rabbits out of shops like other people, and I would not trust an omelette made in James’s hat. We bought a machine at great expense, and when at last, wet to the knee and chilled to the bone, I hurried upstairs to dress, Isaw with my last eye a vision of two alternatives—one, successive platefuls of congealed cream; the other, a petrified mass, bounding at the first touch of the spoon from end to end of our parquet floor. Which would it be?
I once read in the “Book of the Home” that the cook should lie down for a couple of hours before beginning the serious work of a dinner party. According to the author of the book all preparations should be made the day before; then, when thegeneralissimais roused from her bed at 5 p.m., there is practically nothing to do except to put the heavy guns in the oven and pass a salamander over the light infantry. The key to the situation, the brainy part, the staff office, whatever you like to call it, lies in the sauce-boats, and the gods alone decide what goes on there.
As a matter of fact, everything turned out quite differently. Ruth prepared nothing the day before; she rose late on the morning of the engagement, and omitted to clean theflues. We had a terrific fire going all day, and she ran about the kitchen at top speed, purple in the face, trembling and uncomplimentary. Far from the two hours of peaceful sleep anticipated by the “Book of the Home,” she had not even time to wash up after luncheon, and, as it was, dinner was more than ten minutes late. It is sad, but remarkable, that nothing ever happens to me in the way that books and efficient people claim as a certainty; but I am sure that Ruth enjoyed the dinner more than Mrs. Beeton ever enjoyed anything. You lose half the fun of a dish if you know beforehand what it is going to look like. The range, with his unfailing common sense and utter lack of artistic feeling, behaved strictly in accordance with his flues, slightly undercooking some things and burning others just a trifle: but the ice was perfect. I have often made ices in the same way, and they have turned out failures, which just proves what I have always said, that cookery books are written in the same spirit as “TheHome Conjurer,” “Every Man His Own Chauffeur,” “How to Become a Golf Champion by Post,” and so on. The people who write them do not want us to know how they do the things, so they keep us harmlessly employed with a few simple rules while they themselves go on cooking and conjuring and get paid for it.
Ruth, Clara, the charwoman, and a borrowed housemaid sat up until twelve washing dishes, breaking a few, and filling the air with hilarity born of tea, fatigue, and insufficient food. But Ruth was happy. We had had company and she had been at her wits’ end.