Shad

by Laura Spencer Portor

SHAD

BY LAURA SPENCER PORTOR

I WENT into a fish market of the better sort not long ago, a fish market of distinction, as was testified by this sign in the window, "We Have Shad from the River Washington Crossed." It was that early season when a livelier iris burns upon the turtle dove, and when a housekeeper's fancy, lightly or heavily, according to the weight of her purse, turns to thoughts of shad roe.

I had for ten days or more been inquiring casually, while the fishman was tying up my pan fish, as to the price of shad roe. And he would say sympathetically, with that engaging smile of his which he turns on me in contradistinction to the great gravity, not to say reverence, with which he serves the rich:

"Pretty high yet."

He is kind, that fishman, and his "Pretty high yet," with which he always prefaced his quotation of the price, was meant to soften the blow and to show that his judgment was sound—that he knew at a glance that I was not of the very rich, yet that he nevertheless did not hold that against me; that he honored me also, after a fashion, and even quite liked me.

"Pretty high yet!—Two dollars and a half a pair." "Pretty high yet!—Two dollars a pair!" "Pretty high yet!—A dollar and eighty-five a pair!" "A dollar fifty!"

So by gradations, day after day!

Then a day dawned! It was neither pan fish nor oysters that I was destined to carry home with me.

He came forward wiping his large, clean hands on his large, immaculate apron. I almost thought he was going to shake hands with me.

"How much is shad roe to-day?" I ventured.

"Beautiful shad roe!" he declared, and, with his chest out, led me to them. "Ever see prettier ones than that?" He took a pair up deftly, delicately, and flapped them on to a sheet of white wrapping paper and held them forward on one palm. "That's as beautiful a pair of shad roe as you'd ever see. Beautiful!"

"How much?"

Pride, delight—delight in the chance now afforded me—could not have been better expressed than his manner and voice expressed them.

"One dollar and a quarter!"

He hardly waited for my assent. His was a skilled eye. I do not know whether it was by some subtle impression conveyed to him by the make and fashion of my hat, or my shoes, or my manner of speaking, or the timbre of my voice, or whether by some delicate impression composite of all these that he knew my type and possibilities so accurately that he could be sure that my conscience, stopping short of all former prices, would not stop short of this.

"You'll take this pair? Beautiful! Certainly! I thought you'd like them! You'll never get better! Beautiful!"

He was an artist, you see. He called them "beautiful," leaving it to utilitarians or a later hour to call them delicious. I turned, perhaps fatuously, to my old, original, philosophic tendencies of a tender sort. "I suppose everybody wants shad roe these days."

"Yes, they do. In the market where I got these this morning I saw one man buy eleven hundred pairs for one hotel. He paid a dollar apiece for them straight."

"Eleven hundred!" I said. "For one hotel?"

"Yes."

"Mercy! I wonder there are any shad left."

"Oh, they're very fortunate," he said; "they've only got a short season. Only about two months. The rest of the time they're off and there's nobody wanting them, and you can't get them."

"Still," I said, dubiously, "eleven hundred for one hotel!"

He smiled at this; gave me my neatly tied-up bundle, my price check, assured me again with a gracious smile I should be sure to find the roe "beautiful." I think he would have accompanied me to the door but for the advent of a middle-aged dame whom even my unpracticed eye recognized as a wealthy customer, who then crossed his vision. I saw him suddenly grow grave, reverent, as pompous as a fish-selling parson, were there such a species. I left him, and, free from his engaging smile, noticed for the first time a lesser employee, a fish boy who was unpacking at that moment a barrel of shad, laying each one in its place in the neat rows which he was making of them on the marble-topped fish counter—all this performed with an accustomed, deft, repetitious movement.

These shad were, indeed, worthy the fishman's adjective! These were "beautiful" shad—beautiful beyond any words of mine to describe.

I know! They are looked on usually with a marketable eye, which appraises them for weight, freshness, and possible price. To such an eye they were but shad—fresh-looking, choice, of a goodly size, lying on a marble fish counter, already temptingly decorated with delicate sprigs of parsley, like the frail shadow of coming events—shad, soon to be eaten and enjoyed.

But had you that habit of detachment which the mind acquires when it has learned to look upon created creation without personal bias, nor thought of personal gain nor hunger, nor hope of possession, then you would have seen them for creatures of a most marvelous order.

Take any one of them, just as the fish boy lifts it up. Is there not something kingly about it? Look at this creature, finally still now, but who, even before that, never, like the domesticated animals, capitulated to heed men's speech. Is he not fit to bring up the King's most priceless jewel in his mouth, if he chose, now, as he did in the ancient fairy tale? Might not Gulnare herself, troubled, have gone to such an one for silver counsel? Who, looking at these, can wonder that in our less arrogant days we built up such a noble mythology and so much worthy fairy lore?

Beautiful? Beautiful indeed, exceedingly. Clothed in preciousness. As they lay there before me they were such creatures—I am serious—as an angel might have stopped to look at; such as an eye that had never seen them might have doted on. Clean, silver, ruby, and opal! I have often wondered at the maintained smoothness and the immitigable severity of that extreme beauty of order in which the birds go clothed, which nothing successfully as sails, and which not even the driven storms of the heavens can disarrange; yet I am not sure but there may be here a still better marvel—this shining mail, in which the best imagination might clothe invulnerably a fairy prince—these silver scales, silver, ruby, and opal and pearl! Did ever Galahad go clothed in such armor, seeking the Grail? Let anyone with a fresh eye and a heart without prejudice give himself the answer.

I have seen the most beautiful of our own species—our women—bedeck themselves in an expensive but poor imitation of this spangled beauty, that is but the common daily garb of these. And I have seen them drift, in the arms of men of a not too high order, in "swallow-tails," to the rhythms of a labored and contrived music, in the making of which musicians, for the most part, get red in the face and break many a fiddle string. Whereas these, but a little while since, moved in inimitable beauty and to immemorial rhythm of their own and the many-tided sea; in caves of sea pearl and in dim sea twilight, among the unthinkable softness of sea shadows; pearl within pearl; fire within immeasurable coolness; moving opal within sea sapphire, emerald, and forever-changing aquamarine, tourmaline, and amber; these, mind you, only a little while before eleven hundred shad roe were sold for a dollar apiece in the market to one man, for one hotel.

Meantime the day goes on. By noon eleven hundred and many times eleven hundred pairs of shad roe will be busily broiling on electric devices in subterranean chambers of vast hostelries; and, with obsequiousness, in gaudily gilded chambers above-stairs, black-clothed waiters will be serving them for the delectation of men and women—mostly women—of a species which, originally naked in the sight of God, count it now to be one of its glories as well as its prerogatives that its women go decked in the appropriated feathers of birds, the leather of kid, the silk of the cocoon, the wool of the lamb, and the fur of many animals. Women, light women, with tumults of feathers on their heads, who laugh and chatter headlessly; and in the midst of the chatter pause to remark how delicious is the shad roe.

I know of nothing comparable to this save a horse I once saw—beautiful exceedingly, his neck as of old clothed with thunder, his nostrils as it were breathing "Ha-ha" among the trumpets, beautiful beyond words! fit, in our human idiom, to have been sire of all the sultan's stables—driven by a drunken groom to a corner tavern in the old days. I saw this one then snap the hitching chain to make sure of the creature's waiting. And there, incomparable, it waited until the groom, much elated with the company he had enjoyed, came out again, and with scarcely any guiding of the reins, but much wabbling of the head, allowed this marvel of power and beauty and sagacity to take him safely home.

Who would wonder that man has fashioned a God in his own image, and thinks upon himself as a creature of special privilege!

I think again of those marvelous and exquisite creatures, lying there, so unremonstrant under the fish boy's careless hand!

As is obvious by my marketing, I am not a vegetarian. I have no ax to grind. It is simply that I wonder. It is simply that, though my eye has passed over them many times, once I chanced to see—shad.