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Page 21
The only thing we missed at McSorley's, we might add, was the
old-time plate of onions. But then we were not there at lunch time,
and the pungent fruit may have been hidden away in the famous tall
ice box. Hutchins Hapgood once said, in an article about McSorley's
in _Harper's Weekly_: "The wives of the men who frequent McSorley's
always know where their husbands have been. There is no mistaking a
McSorley onion." He was right. The McSorley onion--"rose among
roots"--was _sui generis_. It had a reach and authenticity all its
own.
We have said a good deal, now and then, about some of the taverns
and chophouses we enjoy; but the one that tingles most strongly in
our bosom is one that doesn't exist. That is the chophouse that
might be put in the cellar of that glorious old round-towered
building at 59 Ann Street.
As you go along Ann Street, you will come, between numbers 57 and
61, to an old passage-way running down to a curious courtyard, which
is tenanted mostly by carpenters and iron-workers, and by a crowded
store which seems to be a second-hand ship-chandlery, for old
sea-boots, life preservers, fenders, ship's lanterns, and flags hang
on the wall over the high stairway. In the cellars are smithies
where you will see the bright glare of a forge and men with faces
gleaming in tawny light pulling shining irons out of the fire. The
whole place is too fascinating to be easily described. That
round-tower house is just our idea of the right place for a quiet
tavern or club, where one would go in at lunch time, walk over a
sawdusted floor to a table bleached by many litres of slopovers,
light a yard of clay, and call for a platter of beefsteak pie. The
downtown region is greatly in need of the kind of place we have in
mind, and if any one cares to start a chophouse in that heavenly
courtyard, the Three Hours for Lunch Club pledges itself to attend
regularly.
[Illustration]
A PORTRAIT
"My idea of life," said my friend S----, "would be to have a nice
lawn running down to the water, several deck-chairs, plenty of
tobacco, and three or four of us to sit there all day long and
listen to B---- talk."
I suppose that B----,--I wish I could name him, but it would be an
indecency to do so, for part of his charm is his complete
unconsciousness of the affection, and even adoration, of the little
group of younger men who call themselves his "fans"--I suppose that
B----'s talk is as nearly Johnsonian in virtue and pungency as any
spoken wisdom now hearable in this country. To know him is, in the
absolute truth of that enduring phrase, a liberal education. To his
simplicity, his valorous militancy for truth, he joins the mind of
a great scholar, the placable spirit of an eager child.
I said "Johnsonian"--yet even in the great Doctor as we have him
recorded there were a certain truculence and vehemence that are a
little foreign to B----'s habit. Fearless champion as he is, there
is always a gentleness about him. Even when his voice deepens and he
is well launched on a long argument, he is never brutally dogmatic,
never cruelly discourteous.
The beauty of B----'s talk, the quality that would make it a
delight to listen to him all a summer afternoon, is that he gives,
unconsciously, a perfect exhibition of a perfect process, a great mind
in motion. His mind is too full, too crowded, too ratiocinative, for
easy and frugal utterance. Sometimes, unless one is an acute listener,
he is almost incoherent in his zeal to express all the phases and
facets of the thought that flashes upon him. And yet, if one could
(unknown to him) have a stenographer behind the arras to take it all
down, so that his argument could be analyzed at leisure, it would show
its anatomical knitting and structure. Do you remember how Burke's
speech on Conciliation was parsed and sub-headed in the preface to the
school-texts? Just so, in I and II and III, A. B. and C, ([alpha]),
([beta]), and ([gamma]), i, ii, and iii, we could articulate the
strict and bony logic that vertebrates B----'s talk. Reservations,
exceptions, qualifications, parentheses, sub-clauses, and humorous
paraphrases swim upon him as he goes, and he deals with each as it
comes. Sometimes, one thinks, he has lost the spine of the discourse,
is mazed in a ganglion of nerves and sinews. But no! give him time and
back he comes to the marrow of his theme!
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