A second bell and rolling away of doors revealed a long dining-room, with three parallel tables, cleanly set and watched over by Chinamen, whose fresh, white clothes and bright, olive-buff skin made a contrast of color which was always chief among my yearnings for the Nile.
While I loitered in the background every seat was taken, and I found myself with a few dilatory teamsters destined to await a second table.
The dinner-room communicated with a kitchen beyond by means of two square apertures cut in the partition wall. Through these portholes a glare of red light poured, except when the square framed a Chinese cook’s head, or discharged hundreds of little dishes.
The teamsters sat down in patience; a few of the more elegant sort cleaned their nails with the three-tine forks, others picked their teeth with them, and nearly all speared with this implement small specimens from the dishes before them, securing a pickle or a square inch of pie or even that luxury, a dried apple; a few, on tilted-back chairs, drummed upon the bottom of their plates the latest tune of the road.
When fairly under way the scene became active and animated beyond belief. Waiters, balancing upon their arms twenty or thirty plates, hurried along and shot them dexterously over the teamsters’ heads with crash and spatter.
Beans swimming in fat, meats slimed with pale, ropy gravy, and over everything a faint Mongol odor,—the flavor of moral degeneracy and of a disintegrating race.
Sharks and wolves may no longer be figured as types of prandial haste. My friends, the teamsters, stuffed and swallowed with a rapidity which was alarming but for the dexterity they showed, and which could only have come of long practice.
In fifteen minutes the room was empty, and those fellows who were not feeding grain to their mules lighted cigars and lingered round the bar.
Just then my artist rushed in, seized me by the arm, and said in my ear, “We’ll have our supper over to Mrs. Copples’s. O no, I guess not—Sarah Jane—arms peeled—cooking up stuff—old woman gone into the milk-room with a skimmer.” He then added that if I wanted to see what I had been spared, I might follow him.
We went round an angle of the building and came upon a high bank, where, through wide-open windows, I could look into the Chinese kitchen.