Part 14 (2/2)
The moment was too grave for instant reply; Mr. Crossbin was allowing the aroma to mount to the innermost recesses of his nostrils. It had only been a few years since he had performed this same trick with a gourd suspended from a nail in his father's back kitchen, overlooking a field of growing corn; but that fact was not public property--not here in New York.
”Yes--smooth, and with something of the hills in it. Chateau Lamont, is it not, of '61?” It was Chateau of something-or-other, and of some year, but Breen was too wise to correct him. He supposed it was Chateau Lafitte--that is, he had instructed Parkins to serve that particular wine and vintage.
”Either '61 or '63,” replied Breen with the air of positive certainty.
(How that boy in the white ap.r.o.n, who had watched the boss paste on the labels, would have laughed had he been under the table.)
Further down the cloth Hodges, the epicure, was giving his views as to the proper way of serving truffles. A dish had just pa.s.sed, with an underpinning of crust. Hodges's early life had qualified him as an expert in cooking, as well as in wines: Ten years in a country store swapping sugar for sausages and tea for b.u.t.ter and eggs; five more clerk in a Broadway cloth house, with varied boarding-house experiences (boiled mutton twice a week, with pudding on Sundays); three years junior partner, with a room over Delmonico's; then a rich wife and a directors.h.i.+p in a bank (his father-in-law was the heaviest depositor); next, one year in Europe and home, as vice-president, and at the present writing president of one of the certify-as-early-as-ten-o'
clock-in-the-morning kind of banks, at which Peter would so often laugh.
With these experiences there came the usual blooming and expanding--all the earlier life for gotten, really ignored. Soon the food of the country became unbearable. Even the canvasbacks must feed on a certain kind of wild celery; the oysters be dredged from a particular cove, and the terrapin drawn from their beds with the Hodges' coat of arms cut in their backs before they would be allowed a place on the ex-clerk's table.
It is no wonder, then, that everybody listened when the distinguished epicure launched out on the proper way to both acquire and serve so rare and toothsome a morsel as a truffle.
”Mine come by every steamer,” Hodges a.s.serted in a positive tone--not to anybody in particular, but with a sweep of the table to attract enough listeners to make it worthwhile for him to proceed. ”My man is aboard before the gang-plank is secure--gets my package from the chief steward and is at my house with the truffles within an hour. Then I at once take proper care of them. That is why my truffles have that peculiar flavor you spoke of, Mr. Portman, when you last dined at my house. You remember, don't you?”
Portman nodded. He did not remember--not the truffles. He recalled some white port--but that was because he had bought the balance of the lot himself.
”Where do they come from?” inquired Mason, the man from Chicago. He wanted to know and wasn't afraid to ask.
”All through France. Mine are rooted near a little village in the Province of Perigord.”
”What roots'em?”
”Hogs--trained hogs. You are familiar, of course, with the way they are secured?”
Mason--plain man as he was--wasn't familiar with anything remotely connected with the coralling of truffles, and said so. Hodges talked on, his eye resting first on one and then another of the guests, his voice increasing in volume whenever a fresh listener craned his neck, as if the information was directed to him alone--a trick of Hodges' when he wanted an audience.
”And now a word of caution,” he continued; ”some thing that most of you may not know--always root on a rainy day--suns.h.i.+ne spoils their flavor--makes them tough and leathery.”
”Kind of hog got anything to do with the taste?” asked Mason in all sincerity. He was learning New York ways--a new lesson each day, and intended to keep on, but not by keeping his mouth shut.
”Nothing whatever,” replied Hodges. ”They must never be allowed to bite them, of course. You can wound a truffle as you can everything else.”
Mason looked off into s.p.a.ce and the Colonel bent his ear. Purviance's diet had been largely drawn from his beloved Chesapeake, and ”dug-up dead things”--as he called the subject under discussion--didn't interest him. He wanted to laugh--came near it--then he suddenly remembered how important a man Hodges might be and how necessary it was to give him air s.p.a.ce in which to float his pet balloons and so keep him well satisfied with himself.
Mason, the Chicago man, had no such scruples. He had twice as much money as Hodges, four times his digestion and ten times his commonsense.
”Send that dish back here, Breen,” Mason cried out in a clear voice--so loud that Parkins, winged by the shot, retraced his steps. ”I want to see what Mr. Hodges is talking about. Never saw a truffle that I know of.” Here he turned the bits of raw rubber over with his fork. ”No. Take it away. Guess I'll pa.s.s. Hog saw it first; he can have it.”
Hodges's face flushed, then he joined in the laugh. The Chicago man was too valuable a would-be subscriber to quarrel with. And, then, how impossible to expect a person brought up as Mason had been to understand the ordinary refinements of civilization.
”Rough diamond, Mason--Good fellow. Backbone of our country,” Hodges whispered to the Colonel, who was sore from the strain of repressed hilarity. ”A little coa.r.s.e now and then--but that comes of his early life, no doubt.”
Hodges waited his chance and again launched out; this time it was upon the various kinds of wines his cellar contained--their cost--who had approved of them--how impossible it was to duplicate some of them, especially some Johannesburg of '74.
”Forty-two dollars a bottle--not pressed in the ordinary way--just the weight of the grapes in the basket in which they are gathered in the vineyard, and what naturally drips through is caught and put aside,”
etc.
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