Roast Beef, Medium.
by Edna Ferber.
FOREWORD
Roast Beef, Medium, is not only a food. It is a philosophy.
Seated at Life"s Dining Table, with the Menu of Morals before you, your eye wanders a bit over the entrees, the hors d"oeuvres, and the things _a la_, though you know that Roast Beef, Medium, is safe, and sane, and sure. It agrees with you. As you hesitate there sounds in your ear a soft and insinuating Voice.
"You"ll find the tongue in aspic very nice today," purrs the Voice.
"May I recommend the chicken pie, country style? Perhaps you"d relish something light and tempting. Eggs Benedictine. Very fine. Or some flaked crab meat, perhaps. With a special Russian sauce."
Roast Beef, Medium! How unimaginative it sounds. How prosaic, and dry!
You cast the thought of it aside with the contempt that it deserves, and you a.s.sume a fine air of the epicure as you order. There are set before you things encased in pastry; things in frilly paper trousers; things that p.r.i.c.k the tongue; sauces that pique the palate. There are strange vegetable garnishings, cunningly cut. This is not only Food.
These are Viands.
"Everything satisfactory?" inquires the insinuating Voice.
"Yes," you say, and take a hasty sip of water. That paprika has burned your tongue. "Yes. Check, please."
You eye the score, appalled. "Look here! Aren"t you over-charging!"
"Our regular price," and you catch a sneer beneath the smugness of the Voice. "It is what every one pays, sir."
You reach deep, deep into your pocket, and you pay. And you rise and go, full but not fed. And later as you take your fifth Moral Pepsin Tablet you say Fool! and Fool! and Fool!
When next we dine we are not tempted by the Voice. We are wary of weird sauces. We shun the cunning aspics. We look about at our neighbor"s table. He is eating of things French, and Russian and Hungarian. Of food garnished, and garish and greasy. And with a little sigh of Content and resignation we settle down to our Roast Beef, Medium.
E. F.
I
ROAST BEEF, MEDIUM
There is a journey compared to which the travels of Bunyan"s hero were a summer-evening"s stroll. The Pilgrims by whom this forced march is taken belong to a maligned fraternity, and are known as traveling men.
Sample-case in hand, trunk key in pocket, cigar in mouth, brown derby atilt at an angle of ninety, each young and untried traveler starts on his journey down that road which leads through mora.s.ses of chicken _a la_ Creole, over greasy mountains of queen fritters made doubly perilous by slippery glaciers of rum sauce, into formidable jungles of breaded veal chops threaded by sanguine and deadly streams of tomato gravy, past sluggish mires of dreadful things _en ca.s.serole_, over hills of corned-beef hash, across shaking quagmires of veal glace, plunging into sloughs of slaw, until, haggard, weary, digestion shattered, complexion gone, he reaches the safe haven of roast beef, medium. Once there, he never again strays, although the pompadoured, white-ap.r.o.ned siren sing-songs in his ear the praises of Irish stew, and pork with apple sauce.
Emma McChesney was eating her solitary supper at the Berger house at Three Rivers, Michigan. She had arrived at the Roast Beef haven many years before. She knew the digestive perils of a small town hotel dining-room as a guide on the snow-covered mountain knows each treacherous pitfall and chasm. Ten years on the road had taught her to recognize the deadly snare that lurks in the seemingly calm bosom of minced chicken with cream sauce. Not for her the impenetrable mysteries of a hamburger and onions. It had been a struggle, brief but terrible, from which Emma McChesney had emerged triumphant, her complexion and figure saved.
No more metaphor. On with the story, which left Emma at her safe and solitary supper.
She had the last number of the _Dry Goods Review_ propped up against the vinegar cruet and the Worcestershire, and the salt shaker. Between conscientious, but disinterested mouthfuls of medium roast beef, she was reading the snappy ad set forth by her firm"s bitterest compet.i.tors, the Strauss Sans-silk Skirt Company. It was a good reading ad. Emma McChesney, who had forgotten more about petticoats than the average skirt salesman ever knew, presently allowed her luke- warm beef to grow cold and flabby as she read. Somewhere in her subconscious mind she realized that the lanky head waitress had placed some one opposite her at the table. Also, subconsciously, she heard him order liver and bacon, with onions. She told herself that as soon as she reached the bottom of the column she"d look up to see who the fool was. She never arrived at the column"s end.
"I just hate to tear you away from that love lyric; but if I might trouble you for the vinegar--"
Emma groped for it back of her paper and shoved it across the table without looking up. "--and the Worcester--"
One eye on the absorbing column, she pa.s.sed the tall bottle. But at its removal her prop was gone. The _Dry Goods Review_ was too weighty for the salt shaker alone.
"--and the salt. Thanks. Warm, isn"t it?"
There was a double vertical frown between Emma McChesney"s eyes as she glanced up over the top of her _Dry Goods Review_. The frown gave way to a half smile. The glance settled into a stare.
"But then, anybody would have stared. He expected it," she said, afterwards, in telling about it. "I"ve seen matinee idols, and tailors" supplies salesmen, and Julian Eltinge, but this boy had any male professional beauty I ever saw, looking as handsome and dashing as a bowl of cold oatmeal. And he knew it."
Now, in the ten years that she had been out representing T. A. Buck"s Featherloom Petticoats Emma McChesney had found it necessary to make a rule or two for herself. In the strict observance of one of these she had become past mistress in the fine art of congealing the warm advances of fresh and friendly salesmen of the opposite s.e.x. But this case was different, she told herself. The man across the table was little more than a boy--an amazingly handsome, astonishingly impudent, c.o.c.kily confident boy, who was staring with insolent approval at Emma McChesney"s trim, shirt-waisted figure, and her fresh, attractive coloring, and her well-cared-for hair beneath the smart summer hat.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," he announced, glibly.]
"It isn"t in human nature to be as good-looking as you are," spake Emma McChesney, suddenly, being a person who never trifled with half- way measures. "I"ll bet you have bad teeth, or an impediment in your speech."
The gorgeous young man smiled. His teeth were perfect. "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," he announced, glibly. "Nothing missing there, is there?"
"Must be your morals then," retorted Emma McChesney. "My! My! And on the road! Why, the trail of bleeding hearts that you must leave all the way from Maine to California would probably make the Red Sea turn white with envy."
The Fresh Young Kid speared a piece of liver and looked soulfully up into the adoring eyes of the waitress who was hovering over him. "Got any nice hot biscuits to-night, girlie?" he inquired.
"I"ll get you some; sure," wildly promised his handmaiden, and disappeared kitchenward.
"Brand new to the road, aren"t you?" observed Emma McChesney, cruelly.
"What makes you think--"
"Liver and bacon, hot biscuits, Worcestershire," elucidated she. "No old-timer would commit suicide that way. After you"ve been out for two or three years you"ll stick to the Rock of Gibraltar--roast beef, medium. Oh, I get wild now and then, and order eggs if the girl says she knows the hen that layed "em, but plain roast beef, unchloroformed, is the one best bet. You can"t go wrong if you stick to it."
The G.o.d-like young man leaned forward, forgetting to eat.
"You don"t mean to tell me you"re on the road!"
"Why not?" demanded Emma McChesney, briskly.
"Oh, fie, fie!" said the handsome youth, throwing her a languishing look. "Any woman as pretty as you are, and with those eyes, and that hair, and figure--Say, Little One, what are you going to do to-night?"
Emma McChesney sugared her tea, and stirred it, slowly. Then she looked up. "To-night, you fresh young kid, you!" she said calmly, "I"m going to dictate two letters, explaining why business was rotten last week, and why it"s going to pick up next week, and then I"m going to keep an engagement with a nine-hour beauty sleep."
"Don"t get sore at a fellow. You"d take pity on me if you knew how I have to work to kill an evening in one of these little townpump burgs.
Kill "em! It can"t be done. They die harder than the heroine in a ten, twenty, thirty. From supper to bedtime is twice as long as from breakfast to supper. Honest!"
But Emma McChesney looked inexorable, as women do just before they relent. Said she: "Oh, I don"t know. By the time I get through trying to convince a bunch of customers that T. A. Buck"s Featherloom Petticoat has every other skirt in the market looking like a piece of Fourth of July bunting that"s been left out in the rain, I"m about ready to turn down the spread and leave a call for six-thirty."
"Be a good fellow," pleaded the unquenchable one. "Let"s take in all the nickel shows, and then see if we can"t drown our sorrows in--er--"
Emma McChesney slipped a coin under her plate, crumpled her napkin, folded her arms on the table, and regarded the boy across the way with what our best talent calls a long, level look. It was so long and so level that even the airiness of the buoyant youngster at whom it was directed began to lessen perceptibly, long before Emma began to talk.
"Tell me, young "un, did any one ever refuse you anything? I thought not. I should think that when you realize what you"ve got to learn it would scare you to look ahead. I don"t expect you to believe me when I tell you I never talk to fresh guys like you, but it"s true. I don"t know why I"m breaking my rule for you, unless it"s because you"re so unbelievably good-looking that I"m anxious to know where the blemish is. The Lord don"t make "em perfect, you know. I"m going to get out those letters, and then, if it"s just the same to you, we"ll take a walk. These nickel shows are getting on my nerves. It seems to me that if I have to look at one more Western picture about a fool girl with her hair in a braid riding a show horse in the wilds of Clapham Junction and being rescued from a band of almost-Indians by the handsome, but despised Eastern tenderfoot, or if I see one more of those historical pictures, with the women wearing costumes that are a pa.s.s between early Egyptian and late State Street, I know I"ll get hysterics and have to be carried shrieking, up the aisle. Let"s walk down Main Street and look in the store windows, and up as far as the park and back."