Funny father!
Or how to eat a herring.
“Herrings! Well, a herring is one of the most delicious fish, if it’s eaten properly. There’s a right way to eat a herring and a wrong way. Now watch me and I’ll show you how to eat a herring. Rosalie, watch.”
“Rosalie, dear,” (from her mother) “watch while your father shows you how to eat a herring.”
All eyes on father demonstrating how to eat a herring!
And Rosalie used to notice this about the watching eyes. Her mother’s eyes—most anxiously and nervously upon the operation, as if watching a thing she would soon be called upon to perform and would not be able to perform; the eyes of Robert (14) sulkily; of Flora (18) admiringly (it was getting to be a complaint in the family circle that Flora “sucked up” to father); the eyes of Anna (20) wearily; the eyes of Harold (22) contemptuously.
The herrings (a very frequent dish at the rectory, so much cheaper than meat) came headless to the table. First father nipped off the tail with a firm, neat stroke. Then he deftly slit the herring down the stomach. It fell into two exact perfectly divided halves. Then he lifted out the backbone, not one scrap of flesh adhering to it, and laid it on the side of his plate. Then four firm pressures of his knife and the little lateral bones were exactly removed and exactly laid on the backbone. Next a precise insertion of his fork and out came the silvery strip known to Rosalie as “the swimming thing” and was laid in its turn upon the bones, exactly, neatly, as if it were a game of spillikins. “Now pepper. Plenty of pepper for the roe, you see. There. Now.”
And in about six mouthfuls father’s plate would be as clean as when it was brought in, decorated rather than marred by the exquisitely neat pile of the backbone, the tail, the little bones, and the silvery swimming thing. “There! Delicious! That’s the way to eat a herring”; and he would direct a glance at the plate of Rosalie’s mother. Rosalie’s mother made a herring into the most frightful mess it was possible to imagine. She spent the whole of her time in removing bones from her mouth; and her plate, when she was half-way though, looked to contain the mangled remains of about two dozen herrings. “Very few women know how to eat a herring,” Rosalie’s father would say.
Wonderful father! How to sharpen a pencil, how to eat a herring, how to do up a parcel, how to undo a parcel, how to cut your finger nails, how to sit with regard to the light when you wrote or read, how to tie a knot, how to untie a knot. Clever father, natty father!
Yes, still enormously wonderful father; but also rather strangely proud of being wonderful father. Rosalie now was constantly being struck by that. It began to give her rather a funny sensation. She couldn’t describe the sensation or interpret it, but it was a feeling, when father was glowing with pride over one of these things he did so wonderfully well—a feeling of being rather uncomfortable, shy, ashamed—something like that. She contracted the habit when father beamed and glowed and looked around for applause of giving a sudden little blink.