I say, Lord Sigismund who had given the expedition its decent air of being just an aristocratic whim, stamped it, marked it, raised it altogether above mere appearances. He was a Christian gentleman; more, he was the only one of the party who could cook. Were we, then, to be thrown for future sustenance entirely on Jellaby’s porridge?
That afternoon, dining in the mud of the deserted farmyard, we had sausages; a dinner that had only been served once before, and which was a sign in itself that the kitchen resources were strained. I have already described how Jellaby cooked sausages, goading them round and round the pan, prodding them, pursuing them, giving them no rest in which to turn brown quietly—as foolish a way with a sausage as ever I have seen. For the second time during the tour we ate them pink, filling up as best we might with potatoes, a practice we had got quite used to, though to you, my hearers, who only know potatoes as an adjunct, it will seem a pitiable state of things. So it was; but when one is hungry to the point of starvation a hot potato is an attractive object, and two hot potatoes are exactly doubly so. Anyhow my respect for them has increased tenfold since my holiday, and I insist now on their being eaten in much larger quantities than they used to be in our kitchen, for do I not know how thoroughly they fill? And servants quarrel if they have too much meat.
“That is poor food for a man like you, Baron,” said Menzies-Legh, suddenly addressing me from the other end of the table.
He had been watching me industriously scraping—picture, my friends, Baron von Ottringel thus reduced—scraping, I say, the last remnants of the potatoes out of the saucepan after the ladies had gone, accompanied by Jellaby, to begin washing up.
It was so long since he had spoken to me of his own accord that I paused in my scraping to stare at him. Then, with my natural readiness at that sort of thing, I drew his attention to his bad manners earlier in the afternoon by baldly answering “Eh?”
“I wonder you stand it,” he said, taking no notice of the little lesson.
“Pray will you tell me how it is to be helped?” I inquired. “Roast goose does not, I have observed, grow on the hedges in your country.” (This, I felt, was an excellent retort.)
“But it flourishes in London and other big towns,” said he—a foolish thing to say to a man sitting in the back yard of Frogs’ Hole Farm. “Have a cigarette,” he added; and he pushed his case toward me.
I lit one, slightly surprised at the change for the better in his behaviour, and he got up and came and sat on the vacant camp-stool beside me.
“Hunger,” said I, continuing the conversation, “is the best sauce, and as I am constantly hungry it follows that I cannot complain of not having enough sauce. In fact, I am beginning to feel that gipsying is a very health-giving pursuit.”