The Observations of Henry | Page 7

and he tucks her up
under his arm just as I remember his doing that day he first brought her
into the coffee-shop, and Lord, what a long time ago that was!
* * * * *
That is the story, among others, told me by Henry, the waiter. I have, at
his request, substituted artificial names for real ones. For Henry tells
me that at Capetown Captain Kit's First-class Family and Commercial
Hotel still runs, and that the landlady is still a beautiful woman with
fine eyes and red hair, who might almost be taken for a duchess--until
she opens her mouth, when her accent is found to be still slightly
reminiscent of the Mile-End Road.

THE USES AND ABUSES OF JOSEPH.
"It is just the same with what you may call the human joints," observed
Henry. He was in one of his philosophic moods that evening. "It all
depends upon the cooking. I never see a youngster hanging up in the
refrigerator, as one may put it, but I says to myself: 'Now I wonder
what the cook is going to make of you! Will you be minced and
devilled and fricasseed till you are all sauce and no meat? Will you be
hammered tender and grilled over a slow fire till you are a blessing to
mankind? Or will you be spoilt in the boiling, and come out a stringy

rag, an immediate curse, and a permanent injury to those who have got
to swallow you?'
"There was a youngster I knew in my old coffee-shop days," continued
Henry, "that in the end came to be eaten by cannibals. At least, so the
newspapers said. Speaking for myself, I never believed the report: he
wasn't that sort. If anybody was eaten, it was more likely the cannibal.
But that is neither here nor there. What I am thinking of is what
happened before he and the cannibals ever got nigh to one another. He
was fourteen when I first set eyes on him--Mile End fourteen, that is;
which is the same, I take it, as City eighteen and West End
five-and-twenty--and he was smart for his age into the bargain: a trifle
too smart as a matter of fact. He always came into the shop at the same
time--half-past two; he always sat in the seat next the window; and
three days out of six, he would order the same dinner: a fourpenny
beef-steak pudding--we called it beef-steak, and, for all practical
purposes, it was beef-steak--a penny plate of potatoes, and a penny
slice of roly-poly pudding--'chest expander' was the name our
customers gave it--to follow. That showed sense, I always thought, that
dinner alone; a more satisfying menu, at the price, I defy any human
being to work out. He always had a book with him, and he generally
read during his meal; which is not a bad plan if you don't want to think
too much about what you are eating. There was a seedy chap, I
remember, used to dine at a cheap restaurant where I once served, just
off the Euston Road. He would stick a book up in front of him--Eppy
something or other--and read the whole time. Our four-course shilling
table d'hote with Eppy, he would say, was a banquet fit for a prince;
without Eppy he was of opinion that a policeman wouldn't touch it. But
he was one of those men that report things for the newspapers, and was
given to exaggeration.
"A coffee-shop becomes a bit of a desert towards three o'clock; and,
after a while, young Tidelman, for that was his name, got to putting
down his book and chatting to me. His father was dead; which, judging
from what he told me about the old man, must have been a bit of luck
for everybody; and his mother, it turned out, had come from my own
village in Suffolk; and that constituted a sort of bond between us,

seeing I had known all her people pretty intimately. He was earning
good money at a dairy, where his work was scouring milk-cans; and his
Christian name--which was the only thing Christian about him, and that,
somehow or another, didn't seem to fit him--was Joseph.
"One afternoon he came into the shop looking as if he had lost a
shilling and found sixpence, as the saying is; and instead of drinking
water as usual, sent the girl out for a pint of ale. The moment it came he
drank off half of it at a gulp, and then sat staring out of the window.
"'What's up?' I says. 'Got the shove?'
"'Yes,' he answers; 'but, as it happens, it's a shove up. I've been taken
off the yard and put on the walk, with a rise of two bob