Read Online Grab Bag by Charlotte MacLeod - Free Book Online

had engaged many Mistress Coddies in their long and sometimes glorious history, but never one who swooned with more élan or finesse. As they rose in admiration of their recumbent hostess of the day, Comrade Bardwell voiced the consensus.
    “By gad, this Mistress Coddie is a ring-tailed doozy with a snood on.”
    “Any objections or abstentions?” said the Exalted Chowderhead.
    There being none, he raised the Ancient and Timeworn Overalls which had occasioned Mrs. Coddie’s well-feigned swoon slowly from the cauldron.
    “Fluke Flounder he got fighting mad, his eyes were bulging out.
    He jumped upon the pi-an-o and loudly he did shout.”
    This year, Comrade Archer of the real estate Archers was Fluke Flounder. Despite his fourscore years and then some, despite the fact that he had to be boosted to the top of the Steinway by a dozen comradely hands, right loudly did Comrade Archer in good sooth manage to shout.
    “Who threw the overalls in Mistress Coddie’s chowder?
    Nobody spoke, so he hollered all the louder.”
    And, by George, he did. So did they all. In reasonably close harmony, making up in volume for what they lacked in tone, the Comrades bellowed their way through the ballad composed in 1899 by George Geifer and bastardized in 1923 by Jeremy’s late uncle Serapis Kelling.
    At the end of the first chorus, Mistress Coddie (actually Mistress Cholmondely of the Perkins Square Cholmondelys) recovered her senses with fine dramatic effect and rose to take away the Ceremonial Cauldron, into which the Exalted Chowderhead had again lowered the Ancient and Timeworn Overalls with due ceremony and pomp. Escorted again by the Highmost, Midmost, and Leastmost Hod-carriers, she bore away the sacred relics and returned with a tureen full of genuine codfish chowder.
    Excellent chowder it was, and full justice did the Comrades do it. Not until the tureen was bone dry did they quit baling. And not until Jeremy Kelling had untied his green napkin from beneath his nethermost jowl did he realize he was no longer wearing his insignia of office.
    “The Codfish,” he gasped. “It’s gone!”
    “It fell into the Cauldron, you jackass,” said Comrade Archer, who’d got his wind back after a bellyful of chowder and several more restorative flagons.
    “I didn’t hear it clink.”
    “Of course you didn’t. You’re deaf as a haddock and drunk as a skunk.”
    This was the kind of after-dinner speaking in which the Comrades delighted. They kept it up with variations and embellishments while their leader commanded the Keeper of the Cauldron to go get the goddamn thing and bring it back. This done, the Exalted Chowderhead personally shook out the overalls, fished in the pockets and down the mortar-crusted legs to the accompaniment of ribaldries most uncouth, and finally stuck his head into the empty pot.
    “It’s not there,” he wailed.
    “Then it’s under the table, where you generally wind up, you old souse,” shouted Archer the wit.
    It was not. It wasn’t anywhere. That cumbrous chain of heavy silver with its dependent silver codfish, so recently ornamenting Jeremy Kelling’s neat little paunch, was now vanished like the chowders of yesteryear.
    “You forgot to put it on,” sneered the Highmost Hod-carrier. “Softening of the brain, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. Let’s have our Codly coffee.”
    All hailed this sage counsel except the Exalted Chowderhead. A relative infant among the Comrades of the Convivial Codfish, being yet on the sunny side of seventy, Jeremy Kelling had labored long to achieve high office. He’d worked his way up from Journeyman Bouncer to Leastmost Hod-carrier. He’d been Fluke Flounder for one halcyon term, during which he’d pulled a calf muscle leaping to the piano and strained a tonsil putting too much fortissimo into his shouts.
    At every meeting and frequently in between, he’d dreamed of the day when he would wear the Great Chain, sit behind the Ceremonial Cauldron, and show