He learned nothing much here save to be cheery when his eyes were gummed with smoke and sleepiness, and the craft of lightning cookery--cracking open an egg and frying it in, apparently, ten seconds after the order had been given.
There was much drawling gossip at the Bijou. One night in January the Eagle 'bus-driver confided that the meat-cook at the Eagle was 'getting through', because he had a better job in Hartford.
That morning, at nine, after an hour and a half of sleep, Myron was in the office of Mr. Coram.
'Oh, Lord, I suppose I'll have to give you the job to get rid of you. But can you do it?'
'Yes, sir. Been cooking at the Bijou Lunch-Wagon since September.'
'That's not roasting and boiling. Lunch-wagon! Huh! Short orders! Ham and eggs! Hamburger steak! Fried spuds on the side and make it snappy! Lunch-wagon! This is an hotel, young man.' Mr. Coram spoke proudly. He was forty-two years old, and he had worked in hotels for thirty-one.
'Done lots of roasting and boiling and so on, sir. American House, Black Thread. Mother's cook there. Helped her on everything.'
'Well, all right, I suppose I'll have to try you, so you'll get it out of your system and have the sense to go back home. I'll start you at thirty a month, and board and laundry. You'll have to hire your own room. When can you come?'
'Week from to-morrow, sir--week's notice at the lunch-wagon.'
'All right. Be here at 6.45 in the morning. By the way: of course you have your own white jackets and aprons and cap and light overalls? And your own knives and cleavers?'
'Certainly, sir.'
That was the only lie of our young moralist, and it was no longer a lie when he reported for work. He had spent every penny he had saved, along with five dollars borrowed from his mother, for his kit.
All the first morning he was in a panic. They'd find him out--he was merely a brat who knew nothing about cooking. He was quiveringly polite and anxious when he met the head cook (rarely called 'chef' except by himself), who was a dried codfish from New Hampshire, named Clint Hosea.
By noon he perceived that though the Eagle Hotel kitchen was twice as large as that of the American House, and served three or four times as many people, the food was of about the same dreariness, and no more than Mother Weagle did Clint Hosea ever do anything so revolutionary as to study a cook-book. Neither of them had tried any new dish these ten years. By night Myron was confident, and rejoicing in the fact that, though he was not exactly over them, the kitchen maid who peeled vegetables and cleaned floors, the proud lady dishwasher, and the waitresses all received less wages than he.
For two years, Myron worked for the Eagle Hotel, and several times Mr. Coram gave him a two-for cigar, and once a slight rise in wages.
He had learned the carving of cooked meat from his father. His difficulty was cutting up the raw material, for he was butcher as well as meat-cook. But he had the originality to study the diagrams for dissecting unfortunate beasts, as given in any cook-book, and evenings he gave voluntary help at a butcher shop with whose proprietor he had been friendly at the Bijou Lunch.
Neither the Weagles, Clint Hosea, nor any of the three bell-boys with whom Myron had worked at the Fandango Inn knew that there were such things in the world as hotel periodicals. Mr. Coram subscribed to the weekly Hotel Era, but he rarely read any of it save the gossip that Jack Barley, 'the well-known and ever-popular chief clerk of the Memphis-Corona, has accepted a corresponding position in that ever-popular establishment, the Tartley, of Chicago, and his many friends and well-wishers all over the south are wishing him every success in his new position and predicting for him an ever enlarging career as a Boniface', and that 'M. Wilson Stewkey, Mine Host of the Hoamfrumhoam Villa, in bustling and beautiful Jax, Fla., is planning an extensive three-weeks' tour of the West Indies with his missus. Bum voyadj, as the Frogs say, Bill.' (This was almost a generation before hotel trade-journals became less jolly and along with personals featured such articles as a treatise on 'The Norm in Kilowatt Production in Independent Hotel Plants', which could be readily understood by any manager with authoritative knowledge of graphs, differential calculus, thermo-dynamics, and electrical engineering.)
Myron saw the Era in Mr. Coram's office, and he was excited. That was a fine idea! A publication all about hotel-keeping, from which he could become acquainted with managers and chefs and stewards all over the country, from which he could learn about new recipes and kitchen-ranges and material for sheets, about silver-polishing machines and bottle-openers and linoleum for floors. He subscribed for the Hotel Era with the money he had been saving for new shoes--a bold and doubtful piece of adventure, since kitchen work is even harder on the feet than store-clerking or being a colonel of infantry or any like proletarian occupation.
In the Era he found an advertisement of a book called The Steward's Handbook and Dictionary, by Jessup Whitehead, and rather doubtfully he sent for it. The book had first been published in 1887; in 1899, when Myron discovered it, it was still an authority, and well into a twentieth century that was to be anaemic with 'scientific diets' the handbook carried rich savours from a time when citizens, not yet being much afflicted by time-saving machinery, considered time not as something just to be fanatically saved, but to be devoted to eating, hymn-singing, and laughter. Beside it, the contemporary manuals of the 1930's on the preparation of canned clam juice and sandwiches of cream cheese and walnuts look pallid and vomitable.
So Myron found his Book of Words.
Whitehead was to him what an anthology of Shelley, Milton, Chaucer, Byron, Swinburne, and the lyrics of Lewis Carroll would have been to a young poet who, reared in the sticks, had never seen any verse save Longfellow and Bryant. Opening it, Myron felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, like a scientist with his first microscope, a youthful capitalist with his first dollar. Whitehead revealed to him all the succulences of eating, the perfections of service, the elegancies of table-decoration which he had, without ever seeing them, vaguely known must exist.
Not for himself did Myron Weagle desire these juicy dishes, these tables fantastic with glass and silver. All his life, though he was, as a scientist, curious to taste new dishes, for his own daily fare he preferred toast and cold chicken and a glass of milk, eaten on a corner of a kitchen table, in a surrounding of busy cookery. But he had the instinct to provide them for other people. Why he should have had that instinct, why he should want to provide too-rich food for too-rich people, is as much a mystery as why other, more verbal poets, should actually desire to provide rich and smoking sonnets for unknown readers.
For many months Myron read Whitehead every evening in his narrow, straw-matted furnished room, and every luxurious half hour of loafing between crises of bending over reeking broilers and stew-pans. He saw and seized the world not only of Waldorfs and Tremonts and St. Charleses, but of hotels in London and Paris and Berlin as well. He was as fascinated by it as any newly rich guest first staying in a Grand International Royal Hotel, with the difference that Myron, unlike the parvenu, knew that gorgeous tables are not entirely evolved in the brains of affable super-gents in morning clothes, equipped with gardenias, in the panelled Front Office, but by sweaty cooks in overalls, an agitated steward in shirt-sleeves, and a panting crew of helpers in that hidden, humble, greasy, all-important mass of dens, the Back of the House.