Cobb's Bill-of-Fare

by Irvin S. Cobb

Yet my reader should not argue from this admission that I am deaf to the charms of the human voice when raised in song. Unnaturalized aliens of a beefy aspect vocalizing in a strange tongue while an orchestra of two hundreds pieces performs—that, I admit, is not for me. But just let a pretty girl in a white dress with a flower in her hair come out on a stage, and let her have nice clear eyes and a big wholesome-looking mouth, and let her open that mouth and show a double row of white teeth that'd remind you of the first roasting ear of the season—just let her be all that and do all that, and then let her look right at me and sing The Last Rose of Summer or Annie Laurie or Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms—and I am hers to command, world without end, forever and ever, amen! My eyes cloud up for a rainy spell, and in my throat there comes a lump so big I feel like a coach-whip snake that has inadvertently swallowed a china darning-egg. And when she is through I am the person sitting in the second row down front who applauds until the flooring gives way and the plastering is jarred loose on the next floor. She can sing for me by the hour and I'll sit there by the hour and listen to her, and forget that there ever was such a person in the whole world as the late Vogner! That's the kind of a music-lover I am, and I suspect, if the truth were known, there are a whole lot more just like me.

If I may be excused for getting sort of personal and reminiscent at this point I should like to make brief mention here of the finest music I ever heard. As it happened this was instrumental music. I had come to New York with a view to revolutionizing metropolitan journalism, and journalism had shown a reluctance amounting to positive diffidence about coming forward and being revolutionized. Pending the time when it should see fit to do so, I was stopping at a boarding house on West Fifty-Seventh Street. It has been my observation that practically everybody who comes to New York stops for a while in a boarding house on West Fifty-Seventh Street.

West Fifty-Seventh Street was where I was established, in a hall bedroom on the top floor—a hall bedroom so form-fitting and cozy that when I went to bed I always opened the transom to prevent a feeling of closeness across the chest. If I had as many as three callers in my room of an evening and one of them got up to go first, the others had to sit quietly while he was picking out his own legs. But up to the time I speak of I hadn't had any callers. I hadn't been there very long and I hadn't met any of the other boarders socially, except at the table. I had only what you might call a feeding acquaintance with them.

Christmas Eve came round. I was a thousand miles from home and felt a million. I shouldn't be surprised if I was a little bit homesick. Anyhow it was Christmas Eve, and it was snowing outside according to the orthodox Christmas Eve formula, and upward of five million other people in New York were getting ready for Christmas without my company, co-operation or assistance. You'd be surprised to know how lonesome you can feel in the midst of five million people—until you try it on a Christmas Eve.

After dinner I went up to my room and sat down with my back against the door and my feet on the window-ledge, and I rested one elbow in the washpitcher and put one knee on the mantel and tried to read the newspapers. The first thing I struck was a Christmas poem, a sentimental Christmas poem, full of allusions to the family circle, and the old homestead, and the stockings hanging by the fireplace, and all that sort of thing.

That was enough. I put on my hat and overcoat and went down into the street. The snow was coming down in long, slanting lines and the sidewalks were all white, and where the lamplight shone on them they looked like the frosting on birthday cakes. People laden with bundles were diving in and out of all the shops. Every other shop window had a holly wreath hung in it, and when the doors were opened those spicy Christmassy smells of green hemlock and pine came gushing out in my face.

So far as I could tell, everybody in New York—except me—was buying something for his or her or some other body's Christmas. It was a tolerably lonesome sensation. I walked two blocks, loitering sometimes in front of a store. Nobody spoke to me except a policeman. He told me to keep moving. Finally I went into a little family liquor store. Strangely enough, considering the season, there was nobody there except the proprietor. He was reading a German newspaper behind the bar. I conferred with him concerning the advisability of an egg-nog. He had never heard of such a thing as an egg-nog. I mentioned two old friends of mine, named Tom and Jerry, respectively, and he didn't know them either. So I compromised on a hot lemon toddy. The lemon was one that had grown up with him in the liquor business, I think, and it wasn't what you would call a spectacular success as a hot toddy; but it was warming, anyhow, and that helped. I expanded a trifle. I asked him whether he wouldn't take something on me.

He took a small glass of beer! He was a foreigner and he probably knew no better, so I suppose I shouldn't have judged him too harshly. But it was Christmas Eve and snowing outside—and he took a small beer!

I paid him and came away. I went back to my hall bedroom up on the top floor and sat down at the window with my face against the pane, like Little Maggie in the poem.

By now the pavements were two inches deep in whiteness and in the circle of light around an electric lamp up at the corner of Ninth Avenue I could see, dimly, the thick, whirling white flakes chasing one another about madly, playing a Christmas game of their own. Across the way foot-passengers were still passing in a straggly stream. I heard the flat clatter of feet upon the stairs outside, heard someone wish somebody else a Merry Christmas, and heard the other person grunt in a non-committal sort of way. There was the sound of a hall door slamming somewhere on my floor. After that there was silence—the kind of silence that you can break off in chunks and taste.