The
garnishing was even more remarkable than the cheese. All the way
round the plate were piled articles that I had never before seen at
a dinner, and that I do not ever want to see there again. There was
a little heap of split-peas, three or four remarkably small
potatoes - at least, I suppose they were potatoes; if not, they were
pea-nuts boiled soft, - some caraway-seeds, a very young-looking
fish, apparently of the stickleback breed, and some red paint. It
was quite a little dinner all to itself.
What the red paint was for, I could not understand. B. thought that
it was put there for suicidal purposes. His idea was that the
customer, after eating all the other things in the plate, would wish
he were dead, and that the restaurant people, knowing this, had
thoughtfully provided him with red paint for one, so that he could
poison himself off and get out of his misery.
I thought, after swallowing the first mouthful, that I would not eat
any more of this cheese. Then it occurred to me that it was a pity
to waste it after having ordered it, and, besides, I might get to
like it before I had finished. The taste for most of the good
things of this world has to be acquired. I can remember the time
when I did not like beer.
So I mixed up everything on the plate all together - made a sort of
salad of it, in fact - and ate it with a spoon. A more disagreeable
dish I have never tasted since the days when I used to do Willie
Evans's "dags," by walking twice through a sewer, and was
subsequently, on returning home, promptly put to bed, and made to
eat brimstone and treacle.
I felt very sad after dinner. All the things I have done in my life
that I should not have done recurred to me with painful vividness.
(There seemed to be a goodish number of them, too.) I thought of
all the disappointments and reverses I had experienced during my
career; of all the injustice that I had suffered, and of all the
unkind things that had been said and done to me. I thought of all
the people I had known who were now dead, and whom I should never
see again, of all the girls that I had loved, who were now married
to other fellows, while I did not even know their present addresses.
I pondered upon our earthly existence, upon how hollow, false, and
transient it is, and how full of sorrow. I mused upon the
wickedness of the world and of everybody in it, and the general
cussedness of all things.
I thought how foolish it was for B. and myself to be wasting our
time, gadding about Europe in this silly way.
