Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 133, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 June 1915 — SEEING LIFE with JOHN HENRY [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

SEEING LIFE with JOHN HENRY

by George V.Hobart

John Henry On Home Dinners

SAY! did get ready and i more Into a new apartment? Take it from me it’s an occupation that makes the burning ofjßome look like an election-night bonfire. I’m going to talk harshly about It some day when I recover the use of three fingers, disfranchised by the unexpected closing of a folding door which had previously refused to fold. However, here we are in the “cozy little nest” that Peaches sopranoed so canaryishly for many weeks before we finally flew up/into this tenement tree. . Now that we are in “the nest” she sings a different tune, poor girl, because she finds it mighty hard to hit a high C of joy when she has to put in eighteen hours a day waiting for the dumb-waiter to be fixed, and the hot water to be turned on, and the knob introduced to the dining room door, and all the other thousand and one pre-election promises, so earnestly given and so eagerly unkept. Now we coffie to the plot of the jplece. Peached invited*a few friends to a house-warming dinner and an hour after they had vociferously accepted our cook got mad becauses he found out the Persian rug on her boudoir ' floor was made In New Jersey and quit—left us flat with a bunch of friends on our hands who had already gone In training for a long heavy feed; catch as catch can, strangle-hold barred, but go to the mat with everything from clams to the printer’s name..

For twenty-four hours Peaches Spent her time hurrying between the intelligence offices and the depths of despair, and that dinner party began to look like cold turkey. And the next day, just as I was about to send out the S. O. S. signal?, a tramp cook arrived with the milkman, prepared to pour oil on our troubled kitchen stove. The name of the new cook was Helga. She was half Swede and half deaf. * Peaches asked her for recommendations, and Helga said that her only recommendation was her face, but that she tripped the night before and broke it just above the chin. Peaches engaged her —what else could she do with kind and loving fidends eager to exercise our silverware and gurgling their hunger at our outer walls? Helga was shown to her room. She kicked a little because there wasn’t a Southern exposure, but. subsided when Peaches promised her a bunch of fresh cut flowers every morning. Then the

procession started for the kitchen, •halting for a moment in the butler’s pantry so that Helga could inform herself ajjko whether we voted the Prohibition or Progressive ticket. Helga discovered four hotties of beer eoyly reposing on the ice In the refrigerator, whereupon her face became lighted up with -the joys of anticipation and she rushed out and embraced the- gas stove; When, later on, Peaches joined me in the front room she looked woe-be-gone and frightened. “It’s an awful risk,”-she sighed; “I feel that the friendship of years may be interrupted because we have a new and uncertain cook in the kitchen—do you get me, John?” “Sure!” I said; "but what are we going to do about it. Kid? It’s too late to cancel your bookings now. These friends of ours have been saving up their hunger for three days. We can’t send them a buttered biscuit on a postal card and pass them up. Let’s go through with it and hope for the best—-maybe Helga is a good cook.” *Tm afraid not, John,” Peaches moaned. "She picked up a bowl of radishes just now and said she thought strawberries were out of season. When I asked her if she knew how to cook, chicken-a-la-king she ■wanted to know which- King—Denmark or Germany!” During the rest of the day Peaches worried so much about the new cook

that she almost had an attack of nervous postponement. She walked around the apartment with her fingers crossed, murmuring little prayers to herself and making wishes that Helga’S idea of potato salad wouldn’t turn out to be imitation chop suey. Oqr guests arrived promptly and we could see from their eager that they’d fight that dinner to a finish. Under ordinary conditions the arrival of frends with hearty appetites* is a compliment to be cherished, but with a visitation like Helga in the kitchen, likely at any moment to kick over the can containing the milk of human kindness, I felt like eight cents’ worth of God-help-us. The ladies in the party began to chat pleasantly while they sized up our furniture out of the corners of their eyes, and the men glanced carelessly around to see if I had a box of cigars which could be attended to after dinner. t At least I imagined that’s what they were doing—having qualified as a bum sport from the moment Helga began to rehearse a dishrag. Presently dinner was announced and the entire cast jumped to their feet as though they’d stepped on a third rail. The first round was oyster cocktails, and everybody drew cards. This was maiden effort at oyster cocktails and she had original ideas about the cocktail, consisting chiefly of salad oil and tabasco. The salad came from Italy, consequently the oysters were extremely foreign to the taste.

After exploring her cocktail glass with a fork Mrs. Fitzenstaatz politely inquired it we raised our own oysters, but Just then a gill of tabasco struck Mr. Fitzenstaatz between the thorax and the epiglottis and he spent the rest of the evening screaming for the fire department. The round was mock turtle soup, but nobody under the wide canopy of heaven can ever guess where Helga found the mock. Sometimes I think I may have surprised her secret, because later on, when I looked for my rubber boots, one of them was missing. Then we had fish- —blue fish. It had arrived in the kitchen just a simple, plain, kind-hearted fish with the blues, but after watching Helga’s work it had developed acute melancholia. Then came the roast turkey, and right here was where Helga stepped

to the footlights and clamored for the Victoria Cross. Peaches had told Helga to stuff the turkey with chestnuts, but Helga was

firm in her belief that a chestntft is an old wheeze, so she stuffed the turkey with peanut brittle. Helga had noticed several other things around the kitchen which appeared to be bored and lonely, so she stuffed them in tfce turkey—one of which was the corkscrew. When I started to carve the turkey the first thing I struck was a horseshoe which Helga had put in for luck. It made Peaches extremely nervous to see the can-opener, a pair of scissors and seven clothespins come out of<he interior, but when Mrs. Fltzenstaatz said that their latest cook had tried to etuft their latest turkey with the garden hose friend wife felt better. ** The next round was some salad which Helga had dressed in the kitchen, but the dress was such, a bad fit that nobody would speak of it Then we had some home-made ice cream for dessert t The Ice was very good, but Helga forgot to add the cream. Consequently it tasted rather insipid. Then came the last round —end the knockout. rfelga had been told to serve the coffee demitasse. When the cue came Helga floated in the room dad in a low neck gown such as the merry-merries wear in the Bal Tabarin scene in the second act just before the police break in.

Then she splashed down fa front of all assembled a cup of brown cough mixture and floated ont again, while Peaches turned red, white and blue and I had all I could do to keep from be* coming a murderer. It afterwards transpired that in the shredded which Helga was using as a brain the words demitasse and decollete had become mixed and, having taken the low-neck as a souvenir of a former employer, she had decided demitasse meant “Enter from kitchen, smilingly, with anatomical display; placid coffee on table, Center, and exit, showing vertebrae.” However, the house warming dinner came to a finish without any casualties and the guests went home, hungry but unpoisoned. The next morning Peaches gave Helga Helga and she left us abruptly, followed by the prayers of all present, including the gas stove. The only thing about the house that loved Helga was a diamond brooch belonging to Peaches and it followed Helga out into the land of adventure. - We’ve made up our minds, friend wife and I have, that we’ll give no

more dinners till we get a cook who knows the difference between breaded lamb chops and the coal scuttle. Even the friendship of a lifetime isn’t proof against a brass key-ring in the stomach, which lies there, tossing restlessly for weeks and weeks, sometimes. P. S. —Helga’s contract called for 135.00 per month, Sundays and Thursday evening out, and nix on the wash. Have you a little fairy in your home?

Helga Floated Into the Room Clad in a Low-Neck Gown.

"Helga Said That Her Only Recommendation Was Her Face.”