XXXV
"You may think us very foolish," said the tall man, as he seated himself.
"Or very greedy," said his wife.
"But we want some advice about food, and seeing your signboard, which reminded me of the inn my father used to keep in Helmsley," the man continued, "we thought we'd come in and ask. But," he said, "I never thought to find a beautiful young lady like you, miss. You are 'miss,' I take it?"
"Yes," said Ben, laughing.
"Somehow," said the tall man, "our difficulty is more one to put to an older woman. But it's like this. My wife and I are just back from New Zealand, where we've lived ever since I was twenty. I've done very well, and we're having a look round London. We're staying at the Hotel Splendid, you know. Everything bang up. Private suite. Gold clock under a glass shade."
"Which doesn't go," said his wife.
"Steam heat," he continued, "that dries up all my tobacco. Everything perfect, in fact. But we can't get the food we like. You see, miss, we're very simple folk, and we want the old-fashioned things. All the way home we have been thinking and talking about the things we would eat, and now that we're here we can't get them. They serve them, but they're not right. Sausages and mashed—I know just how they ought to taste; but at the 'Splendid' they taste of nothing. And lots of things I used to be so fond of at home they don't serve at all. I can't get a pork-pie—'porch-peen,' as we used to call it. When I asked the head waiter for cow's heel, I thought he'd throw a fit. Batter pudding, boiled onions, apple dumplings; it's no good, they can't make them to taste of anything, or they can't make them at all. They've got such a horror of the flavour of apple that they smother it with lemon and cloves. Now, miss, couldn't you tell us of some smaller places—we don't mind how small or how common—where we could get some of the old homely stuff? My poor wife here is wasting away."
"Oh, John, it's you that want them much more than I do," said his wife.
"I don't know much about food myself," said Ben, "but I've heard my father say that there are certain things that no restaurant can ever do as well as home cooks. He says that no restaurant can make bread sauce or horse-radish sauce properly. No restaurant can be trusted with mushrooms. My advice to you," she continued, "would be to cut out London altogether, unless you were set on it, and go either to a country inn or to a farm, where the milk isn't watered and the cream hasn't any boric acid, and the eggs are this morning's, and things taste as they should. London never gets anything really fresh. Why don't you go to your own Yorkshire?" she asked.