"To be born an Englishman and a cook—it's like being born a bird without wings. You can't soar—not however hard you try—not above roasts and boils. Take vegetables. An Englishman natur'lly boils. And it's no good going against nature. You're a doctor—or going to be—and you know that. You've got to do the best you can, but you can't do more. That's my motto. But if I'd been born a Frenchman—— Well it's no use dreaming. If them potatoes are ready, Jim, so'm I."
Mr. Brown had taken a fancy to Robert Stonehouse from the moment that the latter had challenged him on the very threshold of his kitchen and explained, coolly and simply, his needs and his intentions. Mr. Brown was frankly a Romantic, and Robert made up to him for the souffles and other culinary adventures which Fate had denied him. He liked to dream himself into Robert's future.
"One of these days I'll be pointing you out to my special customers—'Yes, sir, that's Sir Robert himself. Comes here every Saturday night for old times' sake. Used to work here with me—waited with his own hands, sir—for two square meals and ten per cent. of his tips. You don't get young men like that these days—no, sir."
Robert accepted his prophetic vision gravely. It was what he meant to happen, and it did not seem to him to be amusing.
Brown's was tucked away in a quiet West End side street, and there was only one entrance. At six o'clock the tables were still empty, and Robert walked through into the employees' dressing-room. He put on his white jacket, slightly stained with iodoform, and a black apron which concealed his unprofessional grey trousers, and went to work in the pantry, laying out plates and dishes in proper order, after the manner of a general marshalling his troops for action. He was deft handed, and responsible for fewer breakages than any of the old-timers—foreigners for the most—who flitted up and down the passages with the look of bats startled from their belfries and only half awake. Through an open, glass window he could see into the huge kitchen, where Mr. Brown brooded over his oven, and catch rich, sensuous odours that went to his head like so many etherealized cocktails. He had not eaten since the morning, and though he was too strong to faint, it grew increasingly difficult to fix his mind on the examination question which he had set himself. He found himself wondering instead, what would happen if old Brown lost his flair for the psychological moment in roasts, and why it was that a man who had performed an operation successfully a hundred times should suddenly go to pieces over it? What made him lose faith in himself? Nerves? A matter of the liver? We were only at the beginning of our investigations. And then poor little Cosgrave, who as suddenly began to believe in himself and in life generally because he had fallen in love with a chorus girl!
The head waiter looked round the pantry door. He was a passionate Socialist who, in his spare time, preached the extermination of all such as did not work for their daily bread. But he disliked Robert bitterly, as a species of bourgeois blackleg.
"You're wanted. There's a party of ten just come in. Hurry up, can't yer?"
Robert put down his plates and went into the dining-room with the wine list. His table-napkin he carried neatly folded over one arm.
And there was Francey Wilmot.
She had other people with her, but he saw her first. He could not have mistaken her. Of course, she had changed. She was taller, for one thing, and wore evening dress instead of the plain brown frock that he remembered. But her thick hair had always been short, and now it was done up it did not seem much shorter. And it still had that quaint air of being brushed up from her head by a secret, rushing wind—of wanting to fly away with her. She was burnt, too, with an alien sun and wind. Her face and neck were a golden brown, and in reckless contrast with her white shoulders. One saw how little she cared. She sat with her elbows on the table, and the sight of the supple hands and strong, slender wrists stopped Robert Stonehouse short, as though a deep, old wound which had not troubled him for years had suddenly begun to hurt again. And yet how happy he had been, as a little boy, when she had just touched him.