“Lord love yer, mister, I can dispense with ’em easy enough. That’s not the question. The question is, ’ow am I to feed ’em, now I’ve got ’em? An’ ’ow am I to avoid ’em, me bein’ a man, mind, an’ not a lump o’ dry wood?”
Like all theorists, I am hard put for an answer. I look round me, and watch my interlocutor preparing to make bread. There is a mammoth pan on the bench beside me containing a coast-line of flour with a lake of water in the middle. Cook is opening the yeast-jar, an expression of serious intent on his face. Some cooks sing when they make bread; the Scotchman I told you of in a previous letter invariably trilled “Stop yer ticklin’, Jock,” and his bread was invariably below par. But this cook does not warble. He only releases the stopper with a crack like a gun-shot, flings the liquid “doughshifter” over the lake in a devastating shower, and commences to knead, swearing softly. Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass. For five pounds a month this man toils from four a.m. to eight p.m., and his wife can find nothing better to do than present him with twins!
I look into the glowing fire and think.
I feel this is delicate ground, even allowing for the natural warmth of a man who has twins, so I am silent.
“Sometimes,” Cook continues, growing pensive as the dough grows stiff, “sometimes I feel as though I could jump over the side with a ‘’ere goes nothink’ and a bit of fire-bar in me ’ip-pocket. Same blasted work, day after day. Monday curry an’ rice, fresh meat an’ two veg., ‘’arriet lane’ and spuds. Toosday, salt meat ditto. Wednesday, bully soup an’ pastry. Thursday, similar. Friday, kill a pig an’ clean the galley. Sat’day, ‘’arriet lane’ an’ spuds, fresh meat, two veg., an’ tart. Sunday, similar with eggs an’ bacon aft. What good do it do? Who’s the better for it all? Not me. ‘’Ere goes nothink!’”
He stabs the fire savagely through a rivet-hole in the door, and pushes his cauldrons about. To one who knows Cook all this is merely the safety-valve lifting. The ceaseless grind tells on the hardest soul, and you behold the result. In an hour or so he will be smiling again, and telling me how nearly he married a laundryman’s daughter in Tooley Street, a favourite topic which he tries to invest with pathos. It appears that, after bidding the fair blanchisseuse good-night, he chanced one evening to take a walk up and down Liverpool Street, where he fell into conversation with a girl of prepossessing appearance. Quite oblivious of the fact that Mademoiselle Soap-Suds had followed him, “just to see if he was as simple as he looked,” he enjoyed himself immensely for some twenty minutes, and then ran right into her. He assures me he was “’orror-struck.” Like a man, he admitted that he was conversing with “that—that there.” I always like this part of the tale. His confession seems to him to have been the uttermost depths of mortal self-abnegation. Alas, the heiress of Soap-Suds Senior had no appreciation of the queenly attribute of forgiveness. She boxed his ears, and he never saw her again. “She was allus a spiteful cat,” he observes pensively; “so p’raps the wash ’us ’ud ha’ been dear at the price. Still, it was a nice little business, an’ no kid.”
As I raise my pot of shaving-water a huge head and shoulders fill up the upper half of the galley doorway. The mighty Norseman has come for some “crawfish legs.” Like Mr. Peggotty and the crustacea he desires to consume, he has gone into hot water very black, and emerges very red. His flannel shirt only partially drapes his illuminated chest—I see the livid scar plainly. He beams upon me, and asks for a match.
“Well, Donkey,” says Cook, “’ow goes it?”; “Donkey” is the mighty Norseman’s professional title aboard ship.
“Aw reet, mon,” says he with the fiendish aptitude of his race for idiom. “How is the Kuck?”