Shooting-Lunches
in their relation to talk:—
(1.) Be extremely careful, unless you know exactly the ways of your host with regard to his shooting-lunch, not to express to him before lunch any very definite opinion as to what the best kind of lunch is. If, for instance, you rashly declare that, for your own part, you detest a solemn sit-down-in-a-farmhouse lunch, and that your ideal is a sandwich, a biscuit and a nip out of a flask, and if you then find yourself lunching off three courses at a comfortable table, why you'll be in a bit of a hole. Consistency would prompt you to abstain, appetite urges you to eat. What is a poor talker to do? Obviously, he must get out somehow. Here is a suggested method. Begin by admiring the room.
"By Jove, what a jolly little room this is. It's as spick and span as a model dairy. I wish you'd take me on as your tenant, CHALMERS, when you've got a vacancy."
CHALMERS will say, "It's not a bad little hole. Old Mrs. NUBBLES keeps things wonderfully spruce. This is one of the cottages I built five years ago."
There's your first move. Your next is as follows. Every rustic-cottage contains gruesome china-ornaments and excruciating-cheap German-prints of such subjects as "The Tryst" (always spelt "The Trist" on the German print), "The Saylor's Return," "The Warior's Dreem," "Napoleon at Arcola," and so forth. Point to a china-ornament and say, "I never knew cows in this part of the country were blue and green." Then after you've exhausted the cow, milked her dry, so to speak, you can take a turn at the engravings, and make a sly hit at the taste in art generated by modern education. Hereupon, someone is dead certain to chime in with the veteran grumble about farmers who educate their children above their station by allowing their daughters to learn to play the piano, and their sons to acquire the rudiments of Latin: "Give you my word of honour, the farmers' daughters about my uncle's place, get their dresses made by my aunt's dressmaker, and thump out old WAGNER all day long." This horrible picture of rural depravity will cause an animated discussion. When it is over, you can say, "This is the very best Irish-stew I've ever tasted. I must get your cook to give me the receipt."
"Ah, my boy," says CHALMERS, "you'll find there's nothing like a stew out shooting."
"Of course," you say, "nothing can beat it, if you've got a nice room to eat it in, and aren't pressed for time; but, if you've got no end of ground to cover, and not much time to do it in, I can always manage to do myself on a scrap of anything handy. Thanks, I don't mind if I do have a chunk of cake, and a whitewash of sherry."
Thus you have fetched a compass—I fancy the phrase is correct—and have wiped out the memory of your indiscretion. Of course the thing may happen the other way round. You may have expressed a preference for solid lunches, only to find yourself set down on a tuft of grass, with a beef sandwich and a digestive biscuit. In that case you can begin by declaring your delight in an open-air meal, go on to admire the scenery, and end by expressing a certain amount of judicious contempt for the Sybarite who cannot tear himself away from effeminate luxuries, and the trick's done.
But this subject is so great, and has so many varieties, that we must recur to it in our next.
