There is certainly
more difference between good food and bad than between five millions and
fifty (which, I take it, is a figure that buys immunity over here). I
don't think any man's hospitality would have ranked him permanently on
Naapu if his dinners had been uneatable. Though perhaps--to be
frank--drinks counted more than food as a measuring-rod of aristocracy.
Well, Follet trained with the people who received consignments of
champagne and good whiskey. And Stires did not. Anyhow, Stires was a
temperance man: he took only one or two drinks a day, and seldom went
beyond a modest gin-fizz. With the remarkable native punch, compounded
secretly and by unknown ways, but purchasable, and much esteemed by the
knowing, he never would have anything to do. Stires looked like a cowboy
and was, in truth, a melancholy New Englander with a corner-grocery
outlook on life, and a nasal utterance that made you think of a barrel
of apples and a corn-cob pipe. He was a ship-chandler in a small--a very
small--way. Follet lived at the ramshackle hotel, owned by the ancient
Dubois and managed, from roof to kitchen-midden, by Ching Po. French Eva
dwelt alone in a thatched cottage built upon poles, and sold eggs and
chickens and fish. The poultry she raised herself; for the fish, she was
a middleman between fishermen and householders.
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