我看得懂文章
但组合起来 不知道他想表达什么
他大概故事就是kraft是个画家 跟朋友去餐厅吃饭
看到女仆很正 觉得这是自然美景
后来有一个外人进来想把她追走
kraft很生气 跟他决斗喝酒
最后外人赌酒醉倒
结局 最后那一段 我不懂他想表达什么
an adjustment of nature
[N.Y. Sunday World, July 16, 1905]
In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that
had been sold for $5,000. The painter was a young scrub out
of the West named Kraft, who had a favourite food and a pet
theory. His pabulum was an unquenchable belief in the
Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature. His theory was
fixed around corned-beef hash with poached egg. There was a
story behind the picture, so I went home and let it drip
out of a fountain-pen. The idea of Kraft—but that is not
the beginning of the story.
Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins (a poet), and I took
our meals at Cypher’s, on Eighth Avenue. I say “took.”
When we had money, Cypher got it “off of” us, as he
expressed it. We had no credit; we went in, called for food
and ate it. We paid or we did not pay. We had confidence in
Cypher’s sullenness and smouldering ferocity. Deep down in
his sunless soul he was either a prince, a fool or an
artist. He sat at a worm-eaten desk, covered with files of
waiters’ checks so old that I was sure the bottomest one
was for clams that Hendrik Hudson had eaten and paid for.
Cypher had the power, in common with Napoleon III. and the
goggle-eyed perch, of throwing a film over his eyes,
rendering opaque the windows of his soul. Once when we left
him unpaid, with egregious excuses, I looked back and saw
him shaking with inaudible laughter behind his film. Now
and then we paid up back scores.
But the chief thing at Cypher’s was Milly. Milly was a
waitress. She was a grand example of Kraft’s theory of the
artistic adjustment of nature. She belonged, largely, to
waiting, as Minerva did to the art of scrapping, or Venus
to the science of serious flirtation. Pedestalled and in
bronze she might have stood with the noblest of her heroic
sisters as “Liver-and-Bacon Enlivening the World.” She
belonged to Cypher’s. You expected to see her colossal
figure loom through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from
frying fat just as you expect the Palisades to appear
through a drifting Hudson River fog. There amid the steam
of vegetables and the vapours of acres of “ham and,” the
crash of crockery, the clatter of steel, the screaming of “
short orders,” the cries of the hungering and all the
horrid tumult of feeding man, surrounded by swarms of the
buzzing winged beasts bequeathed us by Pharaoh, Milly
steered her magnificent way like some great liner cleaving
among the canoes of howling savages.
Our Goddess of Grub was built on lines so majestic that
they could be followed only with awe. Her sleeves were
always rolled above her elbows. She could have taken us
three musketeers in her two hands and dropped us out of the
window. She had seen fewer years than any of us, but she
was of such superb Evehood and simplicity that she mothered
us from the beginning. Cypher’s store of eatables she
poured out upon us with royal indifference to price and
quantity, as from a cornucopia that knew no exhaustion. Her
voice rang like a great silver bell; her smile was
many-toothed and frequent; she seemed like a yellow sunrise
on mountain tops. I never saw her but I thought of the
Yosemite. And yet, somehow, I could never think of her as
existing outside of Cypher’s. There nature had placed her,
and she had taken root and grown mightily. She seemed
happy, and took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights
with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an
unexpected donation.
It was Kraft who first voiced the fear that each of us must
have held latently. It came up apropos, of course, of
certain questions of art at which we were hammering. One of
us compared the harmony existing between a Haydn symphony
and pistache ice cream to the exquisite congruity between
Milly and Cypher’s.
“There is a certain fate hanging over Milly,” said Kraft,
“and if it overtakes her she is lost to Cypher’s and to
us.”
“She will grow fat?” asked Judkins, fearsomely.
“She will go to night school and become refined?” I
ventured anxiously.
“It is this,” said Kraft, punctuating in a puddle of
spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger. “Cæsar had his
Brutus—the cotton has its bollworm, the chorus girl has
her Pittsburger, the summer boarder has his poison ivy, the
hero has his Carnegie medal, art has its Morgan, the rose
has its——”
“Speak,” I interrupted, much perturbed. “You do not
think that Milly will begin to lace?”
“One day,” concluded Kraft, solemnly, “there will come
to Cypher’s for a plate of beans a millionaire lumberman
from Wisconsin, and he will marry Milly.”
“Never!” exclaimed Judkins and I, in horror.
“A lumberman,” repeated Kraft, hoarsely.
“And a millionaire lumberman!” I sighed, despairingly.
“From Wisconsin!” groaned Judkins.
We agreed that the awful fate seemed to menace her. Few
things were less improbable. Milly, like some vast virgin
stretch of pine woods, was made to catch the lumberman’s
eye. And well we knew the habits of the Badgers, once
fortune smiled upon them. Straight to New York they hie,
and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who serves them
beans in a beanery. Why, the alphabet itself connives. The
Sunday newspaper’s headliner’s work is cut for him.
“Winsome Waitress Wins Wealthy Wisconsin Woodsman.”
For a while we felt that Milly was on the verge of being
lost to us.
It was our love of the Unerring Artistic Adjustment of
Nature that inspired us. We could not give her over to a
lumberman, doubly accursed by wealth and provincialism. We
shuddered to think of Milly, with her voice modulated and
her elbows covered, pouring tea in the marble teepee of a
tree murderer. No! In Cypher’s she belonged—in the bacon
smoke, the cabbage perfume, the grand, Wagnerian chorus of
hurled ironstone china and rattling casters.
Our fears must have been prophetic, for on that same
evening the wildwood discharged upon us Milly’s
preordained confiscator—our fee to adjustment and order.
But Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the
visitation.
We were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he
trotted in as if on the heels of a dog team, and made one
of the mess at our table. With the freedom of the camps he
assaulted our ears and claimed the fellowship of men lost
in the wilds of a hash house. We embraced him as a
specimen, and in three minutes we had all but died for one
another as friends.
He was rugged and bearded and wind-dried. He had just come
off the “trail,” he said, at one of the North River
ferries. I fancied I could see the snow dust of Chilcoot
yet powdering his shoulders. And then he strewed the table
with the nuggets, stuffed ptarmigans, bead work and seal
pelts of the returned Klondiker, and began to prate to us
of his millions.
“Bank drafts for two millions,” was his summing up, “and
a thousand a day piling up from my claims. And now I want
some beef stew and canned peaches. I never got off the
train since I mushed out of Seattle, and I’m hungry. The
stuff the niggers feed you on Pullmans don’t count. You
gentlemen order what you want.”
And then Milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare
arm—loomed up big and white and pink and awful as Mount
Saint Elias—with a smile like day breaking in a gulch. And
the Klondiker threw down his pelts and nuggets as dross,
and let his jaw fall half-way, and stared at her. You could
almost see the diamond tiaras on Milly’s brow and the
hand-embroidered silk Paris gowns that he meant to buy for
her.
At last the bollworm had attacked the cotton—the poison
ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer
boarder—the millionaire lumberman, thinly disguised as the
Alaskan miner, was about to engulf our Milly and upset
Nature’s adjustment.
Kraft was the first to act. He leaped up and pounded the
Klondiker’s back. “Come out and drink,” he shouted. “
Drink first and eat afterward.” Judkins seized one arm and
I the other. Gaily, roaringly, irresistibly, in
jolly-good-fellow style, we dragged him from the restaurant
to a café, stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds
and indigestible nuggets.
There he rumbled a roughly good-humoured protest. “That’s
the girl for my money,” he declared. “She can eat out of
my skillet the rest of her life. Why, I never see such a
fine girl. I’m going back there and ask her to marry me. I
guess she won’t want to sling hash any more when she sees
the pile of dust I’ve got.”
“You’ll take another whiskey and milk now,” Kraft
persuaded, with Satan’s smile. “I thought you up-country
fellows were better sports.”
Kraft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave
Judkins and me such an appealing look that we went down to
the last dime we had in toasting our guest.
Then, when our ammunition was gone and the Klondiker, still
somewhat sober, began to babble again of Milly, Kraft
whispered into his ear such a polite, barbed insult
relating to people who were miserly with their funds, that
the miner crashed down handful after handful of silver and
notes, calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the
imputation.
Thus the work was accomplished. With his own guns we drove
him from the field. And then we had him carted to a distant
small hotel and put to bed with his nuggets and baby
seal-skins stuffed around him.
“He will never find Cypher’s again,” said Kraft. “He
will propose to the first white apron he sees in a dairy
restaurant to-morrow. And Milly—I mean the Natural
Adjustment—is saved!”
And back to Cypher’s went we three, and, finding customers
scarce, we joined hands and did an Indian dance with Milly
in the centre.
This, I say, happened three years ago. And about that time
a little luck descended upon us three, and we were enabled
to buy costlier and less wholesome food than Cypher’s. Our
paths separated, and I saw Kraft no more and Judkins seldom.
But, as I said, I saw a painting the other day that was
sold for $5,000. The title was “Boadicea,” and the figure
seemed to fill all out-of-doors. But of all the picture’s
admirers who stood before it, I believe I was the only one
who longed for Boadicea to stalk from her frame, bringing
me corned-beef hash with poached egg.
I hurried away to see Kraft. His satanic eyes were the
same, his hair was worse tangled, but his clothes had been
made by a tailor.
“I didn’t know,” I said to him.
“We’ve bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money,”
said he. “Any evening at 7.”
“Then,” said I, “when you led us against the lumberman—
the—Klondiker—it wasn’t altogether on account of the
Unerring Artistic Adjustment of Nature?”
“Well, not altogether,” said Kraft, with a grin.”
(‧)