SPRINGTIME A LA CARTE

It was a day in March.

Never, never begin a story this way when you write one. No opening could

possibly be worse. It is unimaginative, flat, dry and likely to consist

of mere wind. But in this instance it is allowable. For the following

paragraph, which should have inaugurated the narrative, is too wildly

extravagant and preposterous to be flaunted in the face of the reader

without preparation.

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare.

Think of a New York girl shedding tears on the menu card!

To account for this you will be allowed to guess that the lobsters were

all out, or that she had sworn ice-cream off during Lent, or that she

had ordered onions, or that she had just come from a Hackett matinee.

And then, all these theories being wrong, you will please let the story

proceed.

The gentleman who announced that the world was an oyster which he with

his sword would open made a larger hit than he deserved. It is not

difficult to open an oyster with a sword. But did you ever notice any

one try to open the terrestrial bivalve with a typewriter? Like to wait

for a dozen raw opened that way?

Sarah had managed to pry apart the shells with her unhandy weapon far

enough to nibble a wee bit at the cold and clammy world within. She knew

no more shorthand than if she had been a graduate in stenography just

let slip upon the world by a business college. So, not being able to

stenog, she could not enter that bright galaxy of office talent. She was

a free-lance typewriter and canvassed for odd jobs of copying.

The most brilliant and crowning feat of Sarah's battle with the world

was the deal she made with Schulenberg's Home Restaurant. The restaurant

was next door to the old red brick in which she ball-roomed. One

evening after dining at Schulenberg's 40-cent, five-course _table

d'hote_ (served as fast as you throw the five baseballs at the coloured

gentleman's head) Sarah took away with her the bill of fare. It was

written in an almost unreadable script neither English nor German, and

so arranged that if you were not careful you began with a toothpick and

rice pudding and ended with soup and the day of the week.

The next day Sarah showed Schulenberg a neat card on which the menu was

beautifully typewritten with the viands temptingly marshalled under

their right and proper heads from "hors d'oeuvre" to "not responsible

for overcoats and umbrellas."

Schulenberg became a naturalised citizen on the spot. Before Sarah left

him she had him willingly committed to an agreement. She was to furnish

typewritten bills of fare for the twenty-one tables in the restaurant--a

new bill for each day's dinner, and new ones for breakfast and lunch as

often as changes occurred in the food or as neatness required.

In return for this Schulenberg was to send three meals per diem to

Sarah's hall room by a waiter--an obsequious one if possible--and

furnish her each afternoon with a pencil draft of what Fate had in

store for Schulenberg's customers on the morrow.

Mutual satisfaction resulted from the agreement. Schulenberg's patrons

now knew what the food they ate was called even if its nature sometimes

puzzled them. And Sarah had food during a cold, dull winter, which was

the main thing with her.

And then the almanac lied, and said that spring had come. Spring comes

when it comes. The frozen snows of January still lay like adamant in

the crosstown streets. The hand-organs still played "In the Good Old

Summertime," with their December vivacity and expression. Men began to

make thirty-day notes to buy Easter dresses. Janitors shut off steam.

And when these things happen one may know that the city is still in the

clutches of winter.

One afternoon Sarah shivered in her elegant hall bedroom; "house heated;

scrupulously clean; conveniences; seen to be appreciated." She had no

work to do except Schulenberg's menu cards. Sarah sat in her squeaky

willow rocker, and looked out the window. The calendar on the wall kept

crying to her: "Springtime is here, Sarah--springtime is here, I tell

you. Look at me, Sarah, my figures show it. You've got a neat figure

yourself, Sarah--a--nice springtime figure--why do you look out the

window so sadly?"

Sarah's room was at the back of the house. Looking out the window she

could see the windowless rear brick wall of the box factory on the next

street. But the wall was clearest crystal; and Sarah was looking down a

grassy lane shaded with cherry trees and elms and bordered with

raspberry bushes and Cherokee roses.

Spring's real harbingers are too subtle for the eye and ear. Some must

have the flowering crocus, the wood-starring dogwood, the voice of

bluebird--even so gross a reminder as the farewell handshake of the

retiring buckwheat and oyster before they can welcome the Lady in

Green to their dull bosoms. But to old earth's choicest kin there come

straight, sweet messages from his newest bride, telling them they shall

be no stepchildren unless they choose to be.

On the previous summer Sarah had gone into the country and loved a

farmer.

(In writing your story never hark back thus. It is bad art, and cripples

interest. Let it march, march.)

Sarah stayed two weeks at Sunnybrook Farm. There she learned to love old

Farmer Franklin's son Walter. Farmers have been loved and wedded and

turned out to grass in less time. But young Walter Franklin was a modern

agriculturist. He had a telephone in his cow house, and he could figure

up exactly what effect next year's Canada wheat crop would have on

potatoes planted in the dark of the moon.

It was in this shaded and raspberried lane that Walter had wooed and won

her. And together they had sat and woven a crown of dandelions for her

hair. He had immoderately praised the effect of the yellow blossoms

against her brown tresses; and she had left the chaplet there, and

walked back to the house swinging her straw sailor in her hands.

They were to marry in the spring--at the very first signs of spring,

Walter said. And Sarah came back to the city to pound her typewriter.

A knock at the door dispelled Sarah's visions of that happy day. A

waiter had brought the rough pencil draft of the Home Restaurant's next

day fare in old Schulenberg's angular hand.

Sarah sat down to her typewriter and slipped a card between the rollers.

She was a nimble worker. Generally in an hour and a half the twenty-one

menu cards were written and ready.

To-day there were more changes on the bill of fare than usual. The soups

were lighter; pork was eliminated from the entrees, figuring only with

Russian turnips among the roasts. The gracious spirit of spring pervaded

the entire menu. Lamb, that lately capered on the greening hillsides,

was becoming exploited with the sauce that commemorated its gambols. The

song of the oyster, though not silenced, was _dimuendo con amore_. The

frying-pan seemed to be held, inactive, behind the beneficent bars of

the broiler. The pie list swelled; the richer puddings had vanished;

the sausage, with his drapery wrapped about him, barely lingered in a

pleasant thanatopsis with the buckwheats and the sweet but doomed maple.

Sarah's fingers danced like midgets above a summer stream. Down through

the courses she worked, giving each item its position according to its

length with an accurate eye. Just above the desserts came the list of

vegetables. Carrots and peas, asparagus on toast, the perennial tomatoes

and corn and succotash, lima beans, cabbage--and then--

Sarah was crying over her bill of fare. Tears from the depths of some

divine despair rose in her heart and gathered to her eyes. Down went her

head on the little typewriter stand; and the keyboard rattled a dry

accompaniment to her moist sobs.

For she had received no letter from Walter in two weeks, and the next

item on the bill of fare was dandelions--dandelions with some kind of

egg--but bother the egg!--dandelions, with whose golden blooms Walter

had crowned her his queen of love and future bride--dandelions, the

harbingers of spring, her sorrow's crown of sorrow--reminder of her

happiest days.

Madam, I dare you to smile until you suffer this test: Let the Marechal

Niel roses that Percy brought you on the night you gave him your

heart be served as a salad with French dressing before your eyes

at a Schulenberg _table d'hote_. Had Juliet so seen her love tokens

dishonoured the sooner would she have sought the lethean herbs of the

good apothecary.

But what a witch is Spring! Into the great cold city of stone and iron a

message had to be sent. There was none to convey it but the little hardy

courier of the fields with his rough green coat and modest air. He is a

true soldier of fortune, this _dent-de-lion_--this lion's tooth, as the

French chefs call him. Flowered, he will assist at love-making, wreathed

in my lady's nut-brown hair; young and callow and unblossomed, he goes

into the boiling pot and delivers the word of his sovereign mistress.

By and by Sarah forced back her tears. The cards must be written. But,

still in a faint, golden glow from her dandeleonine dream, she fingered

the typewriter keys absently for a little while, with her mind and heart

in the meadow lane with her young farmer. But soon she came swiftly back

to the rock-bound lanes of Manhattan, and the typewriter began to rattle

and jump like a strike-breaker's motor car.

At 6 o'clock the waiter brought her dinner and carried away the

typewritten bill of fare. When Sarah ate she set aside, with a sigh,

the dish of dandelions with its crowning ovarious accompaniment. As this

dark mass had been transformed from a bright and love-indorsed flower

to be an ignominious vegetable, so had her summer hopes wilted and

perished. Love may, as Shakespeare said, feed on itself: but Sarah could

not bring herself to eat the dandelions that had graced, as ornaments,

the first spiritual banquet of her heart's true affection.

At 7:30 the couple in the next room began to quarrel: the man in the

room above sought for A on his flute; the gas went a little lower; three

coal wagons started to unload--the only sound of which the phonograph is

jealous; cats on the back fences slowly retreated toward Mukden. By

these signs Sarah knew that it was time for her to read. She got out

"The Cloister and the Hearth," the best non-selling book of the month,

settled her feet on her trunk, and began to wander with Gerard.

The front door bell rang. The landlady answered it. Sarah left Gerard

and Denys treed by a bear and listened. Oh, yes; you would, just as she

did!

And then a strong voice was heard in the hall below, and Sarah jumped

for her door, leaving the book on the floor and the first round easily

the bear's. You have guessed it. She reached the top of the stairs just

as her farmer came up, three at a jump, and reaped and garnered her,

with nothing left for the gleaners.

"Why haven't you written--oh, why?" cried Sarah.

"New York is a pretty large town," said Walter Franklin. "I came in a

week ago to your old address. I found that you went away on a Thursday.

That consoled some; it eliminated the possible Friday bad luck. But it

didn't prevent my hunting for you with police and otherwise ever since!

"I wrote!" said Sarah, vehemently.

"Never got it!"

"Then how did you find me?"

The young farmer smiled a springtime smile.

"I dropped into that Home Restaurant next door this evening," said he.

"I don't care who knows it; I like a dish of some kind of greens at this

time of the year. I ran my eye down that nice typewritten bill of fare

looking for something in that line. When I got below cabbage I turned my

chair over and hollered for the proprietor. He told me where you lived."

"I remember," sighed Sarah, happily. "That was dandelions below

cabbage."

"I'd know that cranky capital W 'way above the line that your typewriter

makes anywhere in the world," said Franklin.

"Why, there's no W in dandelions," said Sarah, in surprise.

The young man drew the bill of fare from his pocket, and pointed to a

line.

Sarah recognised the first card she had typewritten that afternoon.

There was still the rayed splotch in the upper right-hand corner where a

tear had fallen. But over the spot where one should have read the name

of the meadow plant, the clinging memory of their golden blossoms had

allowed her fingers to strike strange keys.

Between the red cabbage and the stuffed green peppers was the item:

"DEAREST WALTER, WITH HARD-BOILED EGG."

Date: 2015-01-11; view: 715