The "Goldfish" / Being the Confessions af a Successful Man

by Arthur Cheney Train

Social life is one of the objects of living in New York; and social life to ninety per cent of society people means nothing but eating one another's dinners. Men never pay calls or go to teas. The dinner, which has come to mean a heavy, elaborate meal, eaten amid noise, laughter and chatter, at great expense, is the expression of our highest social aspirations. Thus it would seem, though I had not thought of it before, that I work seven or eight hours every day in order to make myself rather miserable for the rest of the time.

"I am going to lie down and rest this afternoon," my wife will sometimes say. "We're dining with the Robinsons."

Extraordinary that pleasure should be so exhausting as to require rest in anticipation! Dining with these particular and other in-general Robinsons has actually become a physical feat of endurance—a tour de force, like climbing the Matterhorn or eating thirteen pounds of beefsteak at a sitting. Is it a reminiscence of those dim centuries when our ancestors in the forests of the Elbe sat under the moss-hung oaks and stuffed themselves with roast ox washed down with huge skins of wine? Or is it a custom born of those later days when, round the blazing logs of Canadian campfires, our Indian allies gorged themselves into insensibility to the sound of the tom-tom and the chant of the medicine-man—the latter quite as indispensable now as then?

If I should be called on to explain for what reason I am accustomed to eat not wisely but too well on these joyous occasions, I should be somewhat at a loss for any adequate reply. Perhaps the simplest answer would be that I have just imbibed a cocktail and created an artificial appetite. It is also probable that, in my efforts to appear happy and at ease, to play my part as a connoisseur of good things, and to keep the conversational ball in the air, I unconsciously lose track of the number of courses I have consumed.

It is also a matter of habit. As a boy I was compelled to eat everything on my plate; and as I grew older I discovered that in our home town it was good manners to leave nothing undevoured and thus pay a concrete tribute to the culinary ability of the hostess. Be that as it may, I have always liked to eat. It is almost the only thing left that I enjoy; but, even so, my palate requires the stimulus of gin. I know that I am getting fat. My waistcoats have to be let out a little more every five or six months. Anyhow, if the men did not do their part there would be little object for giving dinner parties in these days when slender women are the fashion.

After the long straight front and the habit back, social usage is frowning on the stomach, hips and other heretofore not unadmired evidences of robust nutrition. Temperance, not to say total abstinence, has become de rigueur among the ladies. My dinner companion nibbles her celery, tastes the soup, waves away fish, entrée and roast, pecks once or twice at the salad, and at last consumes her ration of ice-cream with obvious satisfaction. If there is a duck—well, she makes an exception in the case of duck—at six dollars and a half a pair. A couple of hothouse grapes and she is done.

It will be observed that this gives her all the more opportunity for conversation—a doubtful blessing. On the other hand, there is an equivalent economic waste. I have no doubt each guest would prefer to have set before her a chop, a baked potato and a ten-dollar goldpiece. It would amount to the same thing, so far as the host is concerned.

* * * * *

I had, until recently, assumed with some bitterness that my dancing days were over. My wife and I went to balls, to be sure, but not to dance. We left that to the younger generation, for the reason that my wife did not care to jeopardize her attire or her complexion. She was also conscious of the fact that the variety of waltz popular thirty years ago was an oddity, and that a middle-aged woman who went hopping and twirling about a ballroom must be callous to the amusement that followed her gyrations.

With the advent of the turkey trot and the tango, things have changed however. No one is too stout, too old or too clumsy to go walking solemnly round, in or out of time to the music. I confess to a consciousness of absurdity when, to the exciting rhythm of Très Moutard, I back Mrs. Jones slowly down the room and up again.