By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, June 29, 1935.
“Ah,” cried Jimmie Frise, “come illy bong!”
Come what?” I requested anxiously.
“Come illy bong,” explained Jimmie. “It’s a French saying. It means, ‘Ah, how good it is’.”
“How good what is?” I asked.
“Everything,” cried Jim, expanding his chest and sighing. “This June day. This new flannel suit I’ve got on. This blue tie. This crisp, fresh underwear. I feel like a million dollars.”
“I’m glad you feel good,” I said. “I feel kind of dowdy myself.”
“Ah,” sighed Jim. “To feel good all the time. To feel fresh and crisp and cool and listless, if you get me?”
“I think so,” I said doubtfully.
“I mean, life could be so swell,” said Jim tenderly, “If only we could surround ourselves with the finer things, good clothes, nice furniture, pleasant people. Just to hold this feeling I have right now and hold it all my life!”
“Maybe it would be kind of monotonous,” I suggested.
“I think,” said Jim thoughtfully, “that this feeling I have right now, this sense of well-being, this cleanness and peacefulness, is the goal of all human life. I think this is what millionaires and kings and princes, all those swell people you read about in England and Boston and the Riviera are aiming at. What you call culture. Culture is the business of getting hold of this feeling I have right now and making it permanent.”
“Some days it would be rainy,” I suggested.
“Do you ever read those society magazines?” asked Jim. “They sometimes show two or three pages of somebody’s estate. Beautiful big gardens all filled with flagstone walks and statues and fountains.”
“And nobody in them,” I pointed out.
“And big cool houses,” went on Jim, “and rooms filled with only a little bit of furniture, but all of it old and antique and oval and lovely.”
The chairs look as if nobody had ever sat in them,” I remarked.
“And grand staircases,” continued Jim. “Great curving walnut staircases. And panelled walls with maybe two paintings.”
“I’ve seen them,” I agreed. “The living quarters are in the attic.”
“I’m trying to explain something,” said Jim, “if you’d give me a chance. What I mean is that sense of peace and purity you see in those estates. That’s culture. That’s the way these rich people try to seize hold of this feeling I have got to-day and keep it forever. Now, you take food. Do you know what a gourmet is?”
“A guzzler,” I said.
“Just the reverse,” said Jim. “A gourmet is a person of discrimination in eating. He is a judge of good food. He never eats anything but what is cooked by an artist. He has taste. He wants food prepared for his sense, not to fill him up like pancakes.”
“I like waffles,” I admitted. “They fill you up.”
“Ugh,” said Jim, waving his hand delicately. “A gourmet feels the way I do all the time. Only it is his eating that keeps him cool and dreamy and peaceful. He thinks of eating all the time. As soon as he finishes one meal of, say, goose’s brains and truffles, which is a kind of mushroom, he lies back and starts thinking up something he will have for supper, say, plover’s eggs and filet of sole a la Mornay.”
Culture is a Food
“Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked.
“It comes to me naturally,” said Jim, “when I feel like this. I think some of my ancestors were French gourmets. The French are the most cultured people on earth.”
“Well,” I said, “between thinking of those pictures of beautiful estates in the society magazines and thinking of fancy eating, sort of dreamy like, taking little nibbles and rolling your eyes between each taste, I don’t think I would care much about being cultured.”
“You will observe,” said Jim, “that the big game hunters, the African lion hunters, are always rich people and Belgian barons and so forth. That is their occasional reaction. When they get too much culture, they go lion hunting in Africa and eat corn pones1 cooked by Congo natives.”
“Culture,” I said, “is all right in its place, but it must be awful as a regular thing. Suppose you wanted to yawn and yell and get up and kick the cuspidor? You couldn’t do that if you were cultured.”
“The more I think of it,” ignored Jim, “the more I realize that we masses…”
“Ah,” said I.
“We masses are missing the greatest things in life,” said Jim, “by not cultivating this inward peace, this feeling of perfection. We toil and slave for some cheap and tawdry goal. We live amidst higgledy-piggledy furniture and eat food that fills us, that’s all. If only we could give all mankind a hint of how lovely life can be, every passing hour of life, every day. And have all mankind gently, culturedly striving, without effort, to achieve this goal.”
“I like that about gently striving, without effort,” I admitted. “Sort of dreamily working, like.”
“If, instead of the terrible drive of modern life,” declared Jim, “we could gear life down to a gentle pursuit of a feeling, a sense, a state of mind, even taxi-drivers and steam shovel men could be cultured.”
“How would we go about getting cultured?” I asked. “Would we have to go back to the university and all that sort of thing?”
“If you didn’t get it at the university the first time,” said Jim, “you won’t get it the second time. I venture to say that I could give you a better feeling of culture by taking you through an antique store for a couple of hours, and then leisurely wandering into a high-class restaurant where there is a good French chef and ordering a dinner for a gourmet, than five years at the university would give you.”
“I’ll do that some day,” I confessed. “Because the two years I was at the university, there was no talk about culture. A man away off at the far end of a big amphitheatre with 700 students in shouted something about the corollary of the some theorem. That wasn’t culture. And going to rugby games and having to yell the way the fellow in the white sweater signalled at us wasn’t culture. One time I tried to spend a night wandering amongst those lovely old stone towers on ‘Varsity campus to look at the stars, but Christie, the campus cop, chased me and told me to go home. It was no good.”
“Culture,” said Jim, “is a feeling, a mood. I’m in it now. Right now, I am cultured. I could go through an antique store right now and appreciate everything, the old glossy wood, the curves of the carving on chairs, the size and proportions of tables and dressers. I could look and fondle old silver. Away back in me something would wake and start to glow, like an ember in a fire that had gone out…”
“Jim,” I said, “I have a little feeling like that, too. Let’s go.”
“When one feels this way, one ought to go,” admitted Jim, rising elegantly.
“They’re My Set-Up”
So we went to a little antique store that Jim knew of because the man who runs it often meets Jim at the races where they choose the same horse. Dim and shadowy was the little store, and filled to the roof with lovely old antique furniture. So dim and shadowy was it, that the furniture seemed more antique than ever.
Old chairs, tables, funny little stands, pictures, old silver, tall cabinets, foot stools, the young lady who was in charge because Jim’s friend was away for the afternoon allowed us to wander among. We sat on old sofas, examined old tables and looked at the pegs that held them together instead of nails; fondled old silver teapots the girl brought us reverently: Jim working tears in his eyes several times, tears of appreciation of something specially fine. Most of all, we liked two chairs and a little table that stood in the window of the store.
They were perfect. The wood seemed to glow from within. The design actually flowed.
“We were still admiring these pieces when the boss came in, very dejectedly. He shook Jim’s hand sadly. Jim said:
“Not getting them these days, Ernie?”
“To-day,” said Ernie, “five of the six ran in the can. And the sixth one paid $1.15.”
So they talked horses for a while, and then Jim gradually wooed Ernie off horses and on to antiques. But Ernie was off antiques for good.
“Just like the horses I bet on,” he growled.
“We like those two chairs and that table in the window,” said Jim.
“You can’t have those,” said Ernie firmly. They’re my set up.”
“Your what?” asked Jim.
“My set up,” said Ernie. “I spent eight years in the antique business to get those. They’re what bring people in here.”
“Naturally,” said Jim, “you put your prize pieces in the window. But wouldn’t you sell them?”
“Sell those!” exclaimed Ernie indignantly. “They’re genuine.”
“Er-” said Jimmie, turning to look back in the shadowy store.
“Er-to you,” said Ernie. “Do you imagine for one minute that a gang of hicks working with hand tools a hundred and fifty years ago could make as good antiques as trained men with modern machinery can make? Be yourself, Jimmie.”
“But those in the window,” I protested.
“Listen,” said Ernie, “there were about ten artists a hundred and fifty years ago, and every stick they made is known to the world, just the way every picture Rembrandt painted is known. If you want any good antiques, I can get them made for you better than all the wood-choppers of Queen Anne’s reign. And within six days.”
“The silver?” said Jim, a little brokenly. “That teapot?”
“Exquisite 1934,” said Ernie contemptuously. “Stick to horse racing. Jim.”
“That sofa?” said Jim. “Horse hair?”
“My man made it in two days,” said Ernie. “Listen, Jim, when that sofa was supposed to be made the mobs of France were burning the chateaux: in England, millions were starving before the Napoleonic wars put up the price of goods, and the world was poverty-stricken in a way you can’t even imagine. How many swell homes do you suppose there were in the eighteenth century in order to equip all the swell mansions of the States, Canada, England, France and Germany to-day?”
A Silence As of Watching
Jim took another long look at the lovely dusky furniture, the gleaming silver, the smudgy oil paintings on the walls.
“Well, I’ll be seeing you at the races,” he said, and we went out.
We drove down the street.
“I’ve lost the feeling,” said Jim. “I feel soggy and damp. But maybe if we could get a little good food, if we could find a chef, a real chef.”
“I saw the dearest little place,” I told him. “Just a plain little restaurant, with small menus in ordinary handwriting on the windows. Let’s take a look at it.”
Jim followed my directions and we came, just as the crowds were going home, to the restaurant with the small, unimposing front, and the menus stuck in the window. We got out of the car and studied the carte du jour,
“Hors d’oeuvres varies
Potage paysanne
Filets de brochet
Poule Rotie
Asperges, petits pois.
Pommes de toutes sortes,
Petits fours
Cafe.”
“Read that” hissed Jimmie. “See that paysanne? That means peasant. I bet we have here the sort of chef you’d find in those little lost French towns, where kings and prime ministers go and hide in order to eat the incomparable cooking.”
“Not much on the menu, Jim,” I cautioned.
“Not much on the outside of the shop, either,” snorted Jim, “because, unlike the local beaneries, the value is inside, not outside. Let’s go in.”
Inside were five tables and one aged waiter in a black coat and white apron, who immediately began flicking around with his serviette when we came in the door. A silence filled the little restaurant. A silence as of watching.
“Good evening,” said Jim to the waiter, “what sort of a chef have you here?”
“Best in the country, sir,” replied the waiter, with an Irish accent. “Best in the country.”
Disillusioned Again
“Where has he been besides here?” asked Jim, still standing up.
“All over, in the foinest places,” the waiter. “He done a long time in Vancouver. He’s been in Montreal, Quebec and many foreign places.”
“Foreign places?”
“Sure, foreign places. I couldn’t remember the names,” said the waiter enthusiastically.
We sat down.
“Start,” said Jimmie, “at the top and go right down the menu.”
“It’s a fifty-cent dinner2,” warned the waiter.
“Tut, tut,” said Jim.
Hors d’oeuvres varies were four olives, two pieces of celery and two radishes. Potage paysanne was vegetable soup, filets de brochet looked like pike to me, the poule was plain chicken, asperges were asparagus the same ever, and petits fours were little fancy biscuits with a local factory name printed on them in the baking.
But Jim persuaded me the meal was incomparable.
“Ex-squeezy,” he said. “Come illy bong!”
“I’ve tasted that vegetable soup on camping trips,” I whispered. “Out of cans.”
“My dear boy, you’ll need to take a course,” he said. “Your palate is dulled. This fish! Taste it!”
“Pike, I swear,” I whispered.
But the old waiter kept coming in and out, so I caught some of Jim’s enthusiasm, and by the time we had finished the coffee and fancy biscuits, the old waiter, whose name was Patrick, was practically sitting at the table with us. He seemed lonesome.
“You don’t get many people in here,” said Jim.
“Just the crame,” said Patrick.
“Now, look here,” said Jim, “amongst my kind of people, as you know, Patrick, it is a custom when we have enjoyed a meal and recognized the hand of a master in the cooking, we see the chef and pay him our compliments direct.”
“Sure, sure,” said Patrick.
“Now would you be kind enough to step in there and ask Monsieur to come into the room while we compliment him?”
“Sure, sure,” said Patrick, uneasily. “He’s a busy man right now. Maybe some other time, when you’re dining?”
“Busy?” cried Jim. “Patrick, be so good as to ask Monsieur to step out here a minute.”
Patrick got up, waving his serviette hopelessly. He vanished through the kitchen door and was gone quite a long time. Presently the door slowly opened, and in backed Patrick.
“Here he is, gintlemen,” said he.
And in a large white hat and an oversize apron, freshly unfolded, appeared a Chinese, smiling uncertainly.
“Ah,” said Jim.
“Ha,” said Monsieur. “Muchee like?”
“Very nice meal,” said Jim, rising. And we both laid a dime down for Patrick. And got our hats. And were rather awkward getting out the door.
In the car, as we went down towards the lake shore for home, Jim said:
“Culture is a bit elusive nowadays.”
And he tooted his horn violently at a fat lady scuffling across Dundas street against the red light.
Editor’s Notes: This story appeared in Silver Linings (1978).
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