Outside Inn Part 24

CLOUDS OF GLORY

Nancy, trailing clouds of glory, took up the management of her Inn with renewed vigor. She had found her touchstone. The flower of love, which she had scarcely understood to be indigenous to the soil of her own practical little garden, had suddenly lifted up its head there in fragrant, radiant bloom. She was so happy that she was impatient of all the inadequate, inefficient manipulation of affairs in the whole world. She felt strong and wise to put everything right in a neglected universe.

She loved. She was satisfied to live in that love for the present, with no imagination of the future except as her lover should construct it for her; and in him she had absolute faith. The things that he had said or left unsaid had no significance to her. Before she had dreamed of a personal relation with him he had singled her out as a creature made for the consummation and fulfilment of the greatest pa.s.sion of all. The merest suspicion that there had been a man in the world who could have frustrated this beautiful potentiality in her had moved him profoundly. There was nothing in her experience to help her to differentiate between the sensibility of the artistic temperament and the manifestations of the more reliable emotions. The presence in the human breast of a fire that gave out light and not heat was a condition undreamed of in her philosophy. To doubt Collier Pratt's love for her in the face of his tacit pursuit of her, and the acceptance of the obligation she had chosen to put him under, would have seemed to her the rankest kind of heresy.

She had been brought up on terms of comradely equality with boys and men, and she understood the rules of all the pretty games of fluffing and light flirtation that young men and women play with each other, but serious love-making--that was a thing apart. In the world of honor and fair dealing a man took a woman's kiss of surrender for one reason and one reason only----that she was his woman, and he so held her in his heart.

Now that she was in this sort committed to her love for Collier Pratt, her one ambition was to put her life in order for him,--to pick up the raveling threads of her achievement and prove to him and to herself that she was the kind of woman who accomplishes that which she attempts. In the light of his indefatigable patience in all matters that pertained to his art--his clean-cut workmans.h.i.+p--his skill in handling his material--she blushed for the amateur spirit that animated all her undertakings, and for the first time recognized it for what it was.

"Gaspard," she said one morning soon after her miracle had been achieved, "where do you think the greatest leak is? We spend a great deal too much money in running this place. As you know, that is not the most important matter to me. Getting my customers properly nourished with invitingly prepared food is the essential thing, but if there was a way to adjust the economical end of it, I should feel a great deal more comfortable in my mind."

"But certainly, mademoiselle, I should like myself to try the pretty little economies. The Frenchman he likes to spend his money when it is there, but it hurts him in the heart to waste this money without cause."

"Am I wasting money without cause, Gaspard, in your opinion?"

"What else?"

"How can I stop it?"

"By calculation of the tall cost of living, and by buying what is good instead of what is expensive."

"What do you mean, Gaspard?"

Gaspard contemplated her for a moment.

"We have had this week--squab chicken," he said, "racks of little unseasonable lambs, sweetbreads, guinea fowl and _filet du boeuf_. We have with them mushrooms, fresh string bean, cooked endive, and new, not very good peas grown in gla.s.s. We have the salted nuts, the radish, the olive, the celery, the _bon bon_, all extra without pay.

Then you make in addition to this the health foods, and your bills are sky high up. Is it not?"

"I'm afraid it is, Gaspard. I had no idea I was as reckless as all that."

"But yes, and more of it."

"What would you do if you were running this restaurant, Gaspard?"

"I would give _ragout_, and rabbits--so cheap and so good too--stewed in red wine, and the good pot roast with vegetables all in the delicious sauce, and carrots with parsley and the peas out of the can, cooked with onion and lettuce, and macedoine of all the other things left over. Lentils and flageolet I should buy dried up, and soak them out.--All those things which you have said were needless.--In my way they would be so excellent."

"You make my mouth water, Gaspard. I don't know whether it's a Gallic eloquence, or whether that food really would work. They might like it for a change anyhow."

"I have many personal patrons now," Gaspard said with some pride; "all day they send me messages, and very good tips. I think what I would serve them they would eat.--But there is one thing--" he paused and hesitated dejectedly, "that, what you say, takes the heart out of the beautiful cooking."

"What thing is that, Gaspard?"

"Those calories."

"Why, Gaspard, surely you're used to working with tables now. It must be almost second nature to you. My whole end and aim has been to serve a balanced ration."

"I know, but the ration when he is right, he balances himself. These tables they are like the steps in dancing--to learn and to forget. I figure all day all night to get those calories, and then I find I have eight--and eight are so little--lesser than I would have had without the figuring, and if our customer he has taken himself one piece of sweetmeat outside, he has more than made it up."

"I always have worried about what they eat between meals," Nancy said,--"but that, of course, we can't regulate."

"Could I perhaps go to it, as you say, and cook like the _bourgeoisie_ for a week or two of trials?"

"Yes, I think you could, Gaspard," Nancy said thoughtfully. "Go to it, as we say, and I won't interfere in any way. Maybe they'd like it.

Perhaps our food is getting to be too much like hotel food, anyway."

She knew in her heart that the gradually increasing scale of luxury on which she had been running her cuisine had been largely due to her desire to provide Collier Pratt with all the delicacies he loved, without making the fact too conspicuous. The specially prepared dishes sent out to his table had become a matter of so much comment among the members of the staff, and the target of so much piquant satire from Betty that she had become sensitive on the subject, especially since Betty had access to the books, and knew in actual dollars and cents how much this favoritism was costing her. Now that matters had been settled between herself and her lover, she felt vaguely ashamed of this elaboration of method. It was so simple a thing to love a man and give him all you had, with the eyes of the world upon you, if necessary. She felt that she handled the matter rather unworthily.

She had also a consultation with Molly and Dolly about the economic problem, and discovered that they agreed with Gaspard about the unnecessary extravagance of her management.

"Them health foods," Dolly said,--she was not the more grammatical of the twins, "the ones that gets them regular gets so tired of them, or else they gets where they don't need them any more. There's one girl that crumbs up her health m.u.f.fins and puts them on the window-sill every day when I ain't looking, so's not to hurt my feelings."

"That accounts for all those chittering sparrows," Nancy said.

"And some of those b.u.t.termilk men threatens not to come any more if I don't stop serving it to them."

"What do you say to them, Dolly, when they object to it?"

"Well, sometimes I say one thing, and sometimes another. Sometimes I say it's orders to serve it; and sometimes I say will they please to let it stand by their plate not to get me in trouble with the management; and sometimes I coax them to take it."

"By an appeal to their better nature," Nancy said. "I'm glad d.i.c.k can't hear all this,--he'd think it was funny."

"We don't have so much trouble with the broths," Molly said, "but so many people would rather have the cream soups Gaspard makes, that we waste a good deal."

"It sours on us," Dolly elucidated.

"What do you think would be the best way out of that?"

"I think to charge for the invalid things," Dolly said; "people would think more of them if they was specials, and had to be paid good money for. Health bread, if you didn't call it that, would go good, if it cost five cents extra."

"What would you call it?" Nancy asked.

"California fruit nut bread, or something like that, and call the custards creme renverse, and the ice-cream, French ice-cream."

"Oh, dear!" Nancy said, "that isn't the way I want to do things at all."

"We can slip the ones that needs them a few things from time to time, can't we, Molly?" Dolly said.

"We'll do it," Nancy said. "I hate the way that the most uninspired ways of doing things turn out to be the best policy after all. I don't believe in stereotyped philanthropy, but I did think I had found a way around this problem of feeding up people who needed it."

"They get fed up pretty good if they do pay a regular price for it,"

Dolly said. "You can't get something for nothing in this world, and most everybody knows it by now."

"I'm managing my restaurant a little differently," she told Collier Pratt a few days later, as she took her place at the little table beside him, where she habitually ate her dinner. "If you don't like it you are to tell me, and I'll see that you have things you will like."

"This dinner is good," he said reflectively, "like French home cooking. I haven't had a real _ragout_ of lamb since I left the pension of Madame Pellissier. Has your mysterious patroness got tired of furnis.h.i.+ng _diners de luxe_ to the populace?"

"Not exactly that," Nancy said, "but she--she wants me to try out another way of doing things."