"When young De Ruyter went out from the library he carried a letter to a merchant on the dock, which got for him a situation at ten guilders a week, and this big cigar. All the way to his lodgings in the garret he kept his hand on it as it lay flat in his waist-coat-pocket. At every street corner he took it out carefully to see that it was not mashed or broken. When he pushed in his room door he began to look around for a place to put it. He was afraid to carry it around with him for fear of crushing it. At last he saw a crack in the plaster just above the bed, showing two open laths. He wrapped it most carefully in paper and laid it in the opening; here it would be dry and out of danger; here he could always be sure that it was safe. Then he presented his letter and went to work for the merchant on the dock.
"All that week he waited for Saturday night, when he would get his first ten guilders, and all that week before he went to sleep he would take a look at the cigar to be sure it was there. Every morning when he awoke he did the same thing. When Saturday night came, and the money was laid in his hand, he hurried to his garret, washed himself clean, brushed the only coat he owned, took out the precious cigar, laid it on his bed where it would be safe while he finished dressing, put his hat on one side of his head in his old rakish way, gave a look at himself in the broken glass, and downstairs he goes humming a tune to himself. He was very happy. Now he would have the best dinner he had had for months, and feel like a gentleman once more. And the cigar! Ah, that would end it all up! You see, gentlemen, with us the whole dinner is only the cigar; everything is arranged most carefully for that.
"Then De Ruyter walks into Van Hoesen's, the largest café we have in my town; stands until the head waiter recognizes him and comes over to his side; orders with his old magnificent manner the wines, the soup, the entrées, even the anchovies after the sweets—that is a custom of ours—the whole costing ten guilders, with one guilder to the waiter. When it was served he sat himself down, opened his napkin, tipped the newspaper where he could glance at it, and ate very slowly like a man of leisure.
"When the coffee was passed the head waiter brought to him an assortment of cigars on a tray, some one guilder each, some five cents. De Ruyter pushed them away with a contemptuous wave of the hand, saying, 'There is nothing you have to my taste; I will smoke my own.'
"The great moment had now arrived. He paid his bill, ordered a fresh candle, waited until the head waiter, whose guilder had made him all the more obsequious, had lighted it and stood waiting where he could see, and then slipped his hand into his inside pocket for the cigar. It was not there! Then he remembered that he had not taken it from the bed.
"He ran all the way home. There lay the cigar on the blanket. The next instant it was on the floor and under his heel.
"'Lie there, damn you!' he said, crushing it to pieces. 'You have spoiled my dinner!'
"You see, gentlemen, it was not the hunger of the empty stomach; it was a starved imagination that was ravenous like a wolf. Ah, cannot you feel for the poor fellow? All the week hungry, one great idea of the dignity of rank in his mind, and then to have his triumph spoiled, and under the eyes of the head waiter, too! And such beasts of waiters they are at home, with their eyes seeing everything and their tongues never still! My father, when he would tell the story, would tap his chair and say, 'Ah, poor devil! such a pity—such a pity he forgot it! It would have tasted so good to him!' That was a word of my father's—'He forgot it—he forgot it,' he would say, shaking his finger at us."
"All to the credit of your father, Van Brunt," burst out Marny; "but if you want my candid opinion of your blue-blooded, busted baron, I think he was a selfish brute, without the first glimmer of what a gentleman should have done under such circumstances, and I leave it to everybody here to decide whether I'm right or wrong. What he ought to have done was to hunt around for some of his friends, order a dinner for two, hand his friend the cigar and take a cheap one from the waiter for himself. What you call 'fine eating' has nothing to do with either the stomach or with the imagination. Fine eating is an excuse for good fellowship; when you don't have that, it is a 'stalled ox' and the rest of it. What you want is to open with a laugh and eat straight through to that same kind of music. All the good dinners in the world were jolly dinners; all the poor ones were funeral gatherings, no matter how good the cooking. I'll give you an idea of what a good dinner ought to be. None of your selfish, solitary-confinement sort of a meal like this self-centred Dutchman's, but a rip-roaring, waistcoat-swelling, breath-catching, hilarious feast, which began with a hurrah, continued with every man singing psalms of thanksgiving over the dishes and the company, and ended with a tempest of good cheer and everybody loving everybody else twice as much for having come together."