“It costs money to go to London.”
Pettie sighed and reached for his bowler hat, his rolled umbrella, and his cuffs (he attached them with little clips).
“Let's have lunch, chap, and talk it over.”
“Right, Corot and cutlets.”
We went to an old place near the great status of Jeanne d' Arc that directs traffic on a busy corner, and next to the place was a small church where they sang, “Misericordias Domini in aeternum cantobo …I will sing the mercies of the Lord forever”…and at a small table we settled our business under a very bad copy of Miller's “Angelus.”
We had a dish of mushrooms with fennel, a popular dish with the priests next door on meatless days, when they had plenty of time to say their paternosters.
To make it take two tablespoons of fennel root and chop it fine. In a hot, buttered pan, put the fennel and a pinch of chopped parsley and a finely sliced onion. Slice two pints of mushrooms, add them to the fennel root, and cover with a dusting of salt and freshly ground black pepper. Simmer until the mushrooms are soft under the lid of the pan. Meanwhile make a sauce of butter, flour and warm milk; heat and stir this until it is smooth. Now add some of the fennel leaves and pour the sauce over the mushrooms. Let it all become very hot and then add sour cream, three tablespoons into which an egg yolk had been added. Stir this, remove, and serve on a bed of hot rice into which you have chopped three or four big hazelnuts. Even an art dealer has been known to swoon over this during a meatless Friday in Paris.
And we talked about Pinturicchio's frescoes at Siena, women with smooth, waxy, colored eyelids, and the habits of the English in taking their pleasures sadly.
And then he gave me a large Dutch cigar and said, “But be sure about that Corot.”
“I will be.”
“Wire me the moment you know.”
“One way or the other, I'll wire…”
London in those days, and it's not so long ago, before Munich and the depression, and before Lady Astor stopped talking and gave people a chance to shop laughing at her, was a city I always liked. I was to be there later in '41, when the blitz was on, working as a reporter, but at the time I went to see Lord D's paintings, it was just London, touched on one side by characters out of Dickens and on the other by dirty high-class people in love with Hitler.
I always stay in London at a little lodging called the Bagsby Bags; it was bombed out twice later and I lost a valuable letter from Harry Luce of Time inviting me to have lunch, but in those days Mrs. Bagsby Bags was a light blonde woman with a full face, bust, and for an English woman, very lively ways. She had been a waitress in an A B C shop when Colonel Bagsby Bags, Indian Army Ret. (there was talk of something about a mess fund found short) found her and married her and rebuilt the family house into a lodging house “for refined young men and women, rooms and two full baths, good food, a roast every Sunday, and two vegs…”
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