“Might that be your mother’s?” William nodded. “Well! Well! I wonder now! I do wonder. It’s a great name. There was a Sawyer in the cooking line once, but ’e was a Frenchman and spelt it different. Glasse is serious though. And you say it was your ma’s.” He fell into an abstraction, frying-pan in hand. Anon, as he cracked an egg miraculously on its edge—“Whether you’re a descendant or not, it’s worth livin’ up to, a name like that.”
“Why?” said William, as the egg slid into the pan and spread as evenly as paint under an expert’s hand.
“I’ll tell you some day. She was a very great cook—but she’d have come expensive at to-day’s prices. Now, you take the pan an’ I’ll draw me own conclusions.”
The boy worked the pan over the level red fire with a motion that he had learned somehow or other while “boiling up” things for his uncle. It seemed to him natural and easy. Mr. Marsh watched in unbroken silence for at least two minutes.
“It’s early to say—yet,” was his verdict. “But I ’ave ’opes. You ’ave good ’ands, an’ your knowin’ I was a cook shows you ’ave the instinck. If you ’ave got the Touch—mark you, I only say if—but if you ’ave anything like the Genuine Touch, you’re provided for for life. An’ further—don’t tilt her that way!—you ’old your neighbours, friends and employers in the ’ollow of your ’and.”
“How do you mean?” said William, intent on his egg.
“Everything which a man is depends on what ’e puts inside ’im,” was the reply. “A good cook’s a King of men—besides being thunderin’ well off if ’e don’t drink. It’s the only sure business in the whole round world; and I’ve been round it eight times, in the Mercantile Marine, before I married the second Mrs. M.”
William, more interested in the pan than Mr. Marsh’s marriages, made no reply. “Yes, a good cook,” Mr. Marsh went on reminiscently, “even on Board o’ Trade allowance, ’as brought many a ship to port that ’ud otherwise ’ave mut’nied on the ’igh seas.”
The eggs and bacon mellowed together. Mr. Marsh supplied some wonderful last touches and the result was eaten, with the Walrus’s help, sizzling out of the pan and washed down with some stone ginger-beer from the convenient establishment of Mr. E. M. Marsh outside the Park wall.
“I’ve ruined me dinner,” Mr. Marsh confided to the boys, “but I ’aven’t enjoyed myself like this, not since Noah was an able seaman. You wash up, young Sherlock, an’ I’ll tell you something.”