Various Flavors of Coffee Read Free Page A

river—the river is full of vessels.Their masts and smokestacks stretch as far as the eye can see: sloops and schooners and bilanders, bafflers full of beer barrels and colliers laden with coal; hoys and eel boats, tea clippers and pleasure cruisers, gleaming mahogany-decked steamers and grimy working barges, all nosing higgledy-piggledy through the chaos, which echoes with the piercing shrieks of the steam whistles, the coalwhippers’ shouts, the klaxons of the pilot boats and the endlessly ringing bells of the barges.
    The mind would be moribund indeed that did not feel a stirring of excitement at the boundless, busy energy of it all; at the industry and endeavor which pours out all over the globe from this great city, like bees hurrying to and from the laden, dripping honeycomb at the center of their hive. I saw no moral force in it, though—it was exciting, but it was thoughtless, and I watched it go by as a man might cheer a circus parade. It took a man like Pinker to see more to it than that—to see that Civilization, and Commerce, and Christianity, were ultimately one and the same, and to grasp that mere trade, unfettered by government, could be the instrument that would bring a great light to the last remaining dark parts of the world.

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    “Cedar”—this lovely, fresh, countrified aroma is that of untreated wood, and is almost identical to that of pencil shavings. It is typified by the natural essential oil of the Atlas cedar. It is more pronounced in mature harvests.
    — jean lenoir, Le Nez du Café

    *

T
    he young man about my own age who opened the door to the house in Narrow Street was clearly one of the proficient secretaries Pinker had spoken of. He was impeccably dressed; his white collar was neatly starched, and his hair, which gleamed with Macassar oil, was short—much shorter than my own. “Can I help
    you?” he said, giving me a cool glance.
    I handed him Pinker’s card.“Would you tell your employer that Robert Wallis, the poet, is here?”
    The young man examined the card. “You’re to be admitted.
    Follow me.”
    I followed him into the building, which was, I now saw, a kind of warehouse. Bargemen were unloading burlap sacks from a jetty,
    and a long chain of storemen were hurrying to various parts of the store, a sack on each shoulder.The smell of roasting coffee hit me like a waft of spice. Oh, that smell . . . The building held over a thousand sacks of coffee, and Pinker kept his big drum roasters go-ing day and night. It was a smell halfway between mouth-watering and eye-watering, a smell as dark as burning pitch; a bitter, black, beguiling perfume that caught at the back of the throat, filling the nostrils and the brain.A man could become addicted to that smell, as quick as any opium.
    I only got the briefest glimpse of all that as the secretary led me up some stairs and showed me into an office. One window looked onto the street, but there was another, much larger, which gave onto the warehouse. It was at this window that Samuel Pinker was standing, watching the bustle below. Next to him, under a glass bell jar, a small brass instrument clattered quietly, unreeling a spool of thin white paper printed with symbols. The tangled loops, falling like a complicated fleur-de-lys onto the polished floorboards, were the only untidy thing in the room.Another secretary, dressed very like the first, was sitting at a desk, writing with a steel safety pen.
    Pinker turned and saw me. “I will take four tons of the Brazilian and one of the Ceylon,” he said sternly.
    “I beg your pardon?” I said, nonplussed.
    “Payment will be freight on board, with the proviso that none spoils during the voyage.”
    I realized he was dictating.“Oh, of course. Do carry on.”
    He frowned at my impertinence. “Ten percent will be held back against future samples. I remain, et cetera, et cetera. Take a seat.” This last comment clearly being addressed to me, I sat. “Coffee, Jenks, if you