South Wind Part 38

"You are quite right," the Count was saying to Mr. Heard. "The ideal cuisine should display an individual character; it should offer a menu judiciously chosen from the kitchen-workshops of the most diverse lands and peoples-a menu reflecting the master's alert and fastidious taste.

Is there anything better, for instance, than a genuine Turkish pilaf?

The Poles and Spaniards, too, have some notable culinary creations. And if I were able to carry out my ideas on this point I would certainly add to my list of dishes a few of those strange Oriental confections which Mr. Keith has successfully taught his Italian chef. There is suggestion about them; they conjure up visions of that rich and glowing East which I would give many years of my remaining life to see."

"Then why not do what I have proposed several times already?" queried the millionaire. "I am in the East every winter; we reckon this year to reach Bangkok the first fortnight in November. We can find room for you on board. We'll make room! Your company would give me more pleasure than I can say."

Count Caloveglia was probably the only male person on earth to whom the owner of the FLUTTERBY would have extended such an invitation.

"My dear friend!" replied the other. "I shall never be able to repay your kindness, as it is. Alas, it cannot be done, not now. And don't you think," he went on, reverting to his theme, "that we might revive a few of those forgotten recipes of the past? Not their over-spiced entremets, I mean--their gross joints and pasties, their swans and peac.o.c.ks--but those which deal, for example, with the preparation of fresh-water fishes? A pike, to my way of thinking, is a coa.r.s.e, mud-born creature. But if you will take the trouble, as I once did, to dress a pike according to the complicated instructions of some obsolete cookery-book, you will find him sufficiently palatable, by way of a change."

"You would make an excellent chef!"

"It is plain," added Mr. Heard, "that the Count does not disdain to practise his skill upon the most ancient and honourable of domestic arts."

"Indeed I don't. I would cook CON AMORE if I had leisure and materials.

All culinary tasks should be performed with reverential love, don't you think so? To say that a cook must possess the requisite outfit of culinary skill and temperament--that is hardly more than saying that a soldier must appear in uniform. You can have a bad soldier in uniform.

The true cook must have not only those externals, but a large dose of general worldly experience. He is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.

That is why you will never obtain adequate human nourishment from a young girl or boy. Such persons may do for housework, but not in the kitchen. Never in the kitchen! No one can aspire to be a philosopher who is in an incomplete state of physical development. The true cook must be mature; she must know the world form her social point of view, however humble it be; she must have pondered concerning good and evil, in however lowly and incongruous a fas.h.i.+on; she must have pa.s.sed through the crucible of sin and suffering or, at the very least--it is often the same thing--of married life. Best of all, she should have a lover, a fierce and brutal lover who beats and caresses her in turns; for every woman worthy of the name is subject and ent.i.tled to fluctuating psychic needs--needs which must be satisfied to the very core, if the master is to enjoy sound, healthy fare."

"We don't always allow them to fulfil that last condition," observed Mr. Heard.

"I know we don't. That is precisely why we are so often poisoned or starved, instead of being cheered with wholesome food."

"You were speaking of woman-cooks?" asked van Koppen.

"I was. But it stands to reason that no woman can be trusted with so responsible a task--so sacred a mission, I ought to call it--in regions south of Bordeaux or east of Vienna. Among many other reasons the whole s.e.x is too drowsy, outside that radius. And if she drinks a little--"

"Drinks a little?"

"If she drinks a little, why it is all to the good. It shows that she is fully equipped on the other side of her dual nature. It proves that she possesses the prime requisite of the artist; sensitiveness and a capacity for enthusiasm. Indeed, I often doubt whether you will ever derive well-flavoured victuals from the atelier of an individual who honestly despises or fears--it is the same thing--the choicest gift of G.o.d. Andrea, my man here, is abstemious to the last degree; not, I am glad to say, from conviction or ill-health--it is the same thing--but because he is incurably desirous of saving my money. What is the consequence? You can taste his self-imposed asceticism in the very ZABBAGLIONE, for which I must really apologize! It speaks to the eye, but not to the heart. Let us hope the coffee will be more harmonious."

"Would you not include some of our American dishes in your bill of fare?"

"To be sure I would; a fine selection. I have most pleasant recollections of the cuisine of Baltimore."

"You can get all those things in New York."

"No doubt; no doubt. But one thing invariably distresses me in transatlantic dinners: the unseemly haste in rising. One might really think the company were ashamed of so natural and jovial a function as that to which a dining-room is consecrated. And then, have you not noticed that, sitting at table, a certain intellectual tone, an atmosphere of a definite kind, is insensibly generated among the guests, whatever the subject of conversation may be? They are often quite unaware of its existence, but it hangs none the less about the room and binds the inmates together for the time being. Suddenly we are bidden to rise and betake ourselves elsewhere; to sit on other chairs in a different temperature among different surroundings. It is a wrench. That peculiar atmosphere is dissipated; the genius of the earlier moment driven out beyond recapture; we must adapt ourselves to other conditions and begin anew, often with a good deal of trouble--often, how often, against our inclination! I call that a perverse custom. Every state of the mind, whether we are in society or alone, should be pressed to the last drop, irrespective of whether we happen to have swallowed a final mouthful of food or not. When the conversation has died, as everything must die, from sheer inability to draw further breaths of life, then is the time to break up that old encircling dome of thought; to construct a fresh one, if need be, in a fresh environment."

"I confess," said the American, "it has always struck me as rather barbarous--this running away. I like to linger. But the ladies don't.

They know that their dresses show off better in a parlour than under a boards of a mahogany table; perhaps their conversation, too, sounds better among arm-chairs and rugs. So we run after then, as we generally do; instead of making them run after us" ("as I do," he added to himself). "But, Count! If you like our American dishes, why not get this man of yours to learn a few from the d.u.c.h.ess? I know she would gladly teach him; she is not jealous of her knowledge like a professional chef."

"I would have asked her that favour long ago, if Andrea had been a born cook, like Keith's men. Unfortunately he is quite different. The philosopher is represented in his nature, but not the artist. He is only a devoted Arcadian, overflowing with good intentions."

"And are they of no avail?" queried the bishop.

"I have been told that, in art and literature, they will atone for deficiency of natural talent. It may be so; some persons, at least, have been able to cajole their brains into believing this. However that may be, I do not think the rule can be extended into the domain of cookery. Good intentions--no. n.o.body need attempt such an imposture on his stomach, an upright and uncompromising organ, which refuses to listen to nonsense. Or let them try the experiment. Gastritis will be the result of good intentions...."

Mr. Heard stretched out his legs. He was beginning to feel at ease. He like this comely old man; he detected an abiding quality in his outlook and person. And he felt at home in these surroundings. There was an air of simplicity and refinement in that calm ground-floor chamber, with its subdued light filtering through windows that opened upon the courtyard, groined vaulting of n.o.ble proportions, stucco frieze stained with age to an ivory hue, and those other decorations which the Count, loyal to the traditions of old-world peasant architecture, had piously left unaltered--or, it may be, adapted to modern needs by touches so deft as not to reveal his own consummate artistry. Through the open door by which they had entered came breathings of warm wind laden with the suave odour of a tuft of Madonna lilies that grew, half neglected, in a shady corner. He had noticed them on his entry--how they stood in proud cl.u.s.ters, bending forward with mighty effort to reach the light.

His eye strayed into the courtyard and moved about the green penumbra created by the fig tree's ma.s.sy foliage; it glanced over fragments of statuary half buried under a riot of leaves and nodding flowers, and rested with complaisance upon the brickwork flooring of herring-bone pattern, coloured in a warm, velvety Indian-red. It was worn down here and there by tread of feet, and pleasantly marked with patches of emerald-green moss and amber-tinted streaks of light that played about its surface wherever the sunbeams could pierce the dense leaf.a.ge overhead.

From where he sat he could see the Locri Faun on its pedestal. The figure was drowned in twilight. It seemed to slumber.

Meanwhile Andrea, looking uncommonly ceremonious in white tie and white cotton globes, was handing round the coffee. It was p.r.o.nounced an unqualified success. "Absolutely harmonious," declared the bishop, who had no hesitation, after a critical sip or two, in extending his approval to a curiously flavoured liqueur of unknown ingredients.

"From my little property on the mainland," the Count explained. "If it were a clear day I would take you up to my roof and show you the very site, although it is leagues and leagues away. But the south wind always casts a haze over the mainland at this time of day--a kind of veil."

Mr. van Koppen, connoisseur of cigars, opened his capacious case and offered its contents, without disclosing the fact that they were specially manufactured for him at a fabulous price.

"You will find them smokable, I hope. As a matter of fact it's no use trying to keep a cigar in good condition on the yacht. And it must be the same on an island like this. So far as tobacco is concerned, Nepenthe can be nothing but a s.h.i.+p at anchor."

"True," said the Count. "The moist sirocco is injurious to the finer growths."

"This south wind!" exclaimed Mr. Heard. "This African pest! Is there no other wind hereabouts? Tell me, Count, does the sirocco always blow?"

"So far as I have observed it blows constantly during the spring and summer. Hardly less constantly in autumn," he added. "And in winter, often for weeks on end."

"Sounds promising," observed the bishop. "And has it no influence on the character?"

"The native is accustomed, or resigned. Foreigners, sometimes, are tempted to strange actions under its influence."

The American said:

"You spoke of amalgamating our cuisine with yours, or vice versa. It can doubtless be done, to the profit of both parties. Why not go a step further? Why not amalgamate our respective civilizations?"

"A pleasant dream, my friend, with which I have occasionally beguiled myself! Our contribution to human happiness, and that of America--are they not irreconcilable? What is yours? Comfort, time and labour saving contrivances; abundance; in a word, all that is summed up under the denomination of utility. Ours, let us say, is beauty. No doubt we could saturate ourselves with each other's ideals, to our mutual advantage.

But it would never be an amalgam; the joints would show. It would be a successful graft, rather than a fusion of elements. No; I do not see how beauty and utility are ever to be syncretized into a h.o.m.ogeneous conception. They are too antagonistic to coalesce."

"But there is abundant beauty and grandeur in modern American life,"

said the millionaire, "quite apart, I mean, from that of the natural scenery. A fine steam-engine, for instance--I call that a beautiful thing, perfectly adapted to its end. Is its beauty really so antagonistic to that of your civilization?"

"I know that some excellent persons have been writing lately about the beauty of a swift-gliding motor-car and things of that kind. They are right, in one sense of the word. For there is a beauty to mechanical fitness which no art can enhance. But it is not the beauty of which I spoke."

"And therefore," observed the bishop, "we ought to have another word for it."

"Precisely, my dear sir! We ought to have another word. All values are continually being revised, and tested anew. Are they not? We have been restating moral values within the last half-century; it is the same with artistic ones. New canons of taste, new standards, are continually being evolved; there is a general widening and multiplying of notions.

This, I think, ought to make us careful as to the words we employ, and ready to coin new ones whenever a new idea is to be expressed. If we enlarge our concepts, we should likewise enlarge our vocabulary. When I spoke of beauty, I used the word in its narrow cla.s.sical meaning, a meaning which may be out of fas.h.i.+on, but which has the great advantage that it happens to be irrevocably fixed and defined for us by what the ancients themselves have handed down in the way of art and criticism.

This particular beauty, I say, is irreconcilable with that other beauty of which you spoke."

"How so?" asked the millionaire.

"There resides, for example, in h.e.l.lenic sculpture a certain ingredient--what shall we call it? Let us call it the factor of strangeness, of mystery! It is a vague emanation which radiates from such works of art, and gives us a sense of their universal applicability to all our changing moods and pa.s.sions. That, I suppose, is why we call them ever young. They beckon to all of us familiarly and yet, as it were, from an unexplored world. They speak to us at all seasons in some loving and yet enigmatical language, such language as we may read, at times, in the eyes of a child that wakes from sleep.

Now the swiftest and fairest steam-engine in the world is not for ever young; it grows obsolete and ends, after a short life, on the sc.r.a.p-heap. That is to say, where usefulness enters, this spirit of mystery, of eternal youth, is put to flight. And there is yet another element of cla.s.sical beauty which is equally at variance with your modern conception of it: the element of authority. Beholding the Praxitelean Eros, the veriest ruffian feels compelled to reverence the creator and his work. 'Who was the man?' he asks; for he acknowledges that such things impose themselves upon his untutored mind. Now a certain Monsieur Cadillac builds the most beautiful motor-cars. Who is this man? We do not care a fig about him. He is probably a Jewish syndicate. Such being the case, I cannot bring myself to reverence Monsieur Cadillac and his cars. They are comfortable, but that factor of authority, which compels our homage to the Eros, is wholly lacking.

Yet both things are called beautiful. That we should apply the same word to products so different, so hopelessly conflicting, as those of Praxiteles and Monsieur Cadillac--what does it prove? It proves our poverty of invention. And what does it explain? It explains our confusion of thought."