A glowing log rolls down from its allotted place on the hearth, sending
into the room a jet of wood smoke, blue at the stem, white feathering as
it spreads out; and the pungent smell immediately revives a fresh set of
scenes from the past.
[Sidenote: NOSTRIL MEMORIES]
[Illustration: man on path in town]
That nothing brings back old memories so suddenly and so vividly as
perfume is a commonplace remark. But I wonder whether the extraordinary
persistency of a first impression, in the case of odours constantly met
with, has been so generally noticed. Perhaps I am peculiar in this
sensitiveness. Smells, pleasant, indifferent, or otherwise, which one is
liable to encounter in the most varied circumstances, should, one would
think, cease in time to recall any particular period of existence.
For example, the delicious smell of roasting coffee—an aroma not common
in England—may well bring you back, at a jump, to some foreign,
unfamiliar experience of your youth—to that early morning walk in the
little Flemish town of which you have forgotten the name; where, as you
sauntered down the street, you were greeted at nearly every doorstep by
this pungent savour. The black cylindrical family roaster, its berries
rattling musically within, was being carefully revolved over its bed of
live charcoal by the boy of the house, or perhaps by the housewife
herself. The delicate, diaphanous sky-blue smoke of the beans, as they
reached the perfecting point of their charring, struck your eye as
gratefully as the fragrance it conveyed to your nostrils. No wonder
that, after a long spell, even a distant whiff of that odour of promise
should bring back a definite picture. But that essences of such everyday
character, say, as petrol; or that which accompanies the peeling of an
orange, should still have the power of bringing me back, instantly, to
the hours of my early schooling, is in truth a curious matter.
In the case of petrol, perhaps, the connexion is less extraordinary.
Until the age of the motor was ushered in—and that is barely a score of
years ago—the smell of “petroleum,” as it was still called, could come
upon the sense as an odour out of the usual run.
Whenever I come across it now, it never fails to waft me back to the old
class-room of the _Institution_, the _Etude No. 3_, where I first made
acquaintance with the possibly wholesome but not otherwise attractive
redolence of the _lampes à petrole_. That was during the short days of
the year, when these luminaries were brought in soon after four o’clock,
and suspended over our young heads—a ceremony coinciding with the last
hour of _classe_—at the end of which the assembly would be dispersed for
the day: the bigger boys walking back to their neighbouring homes, the
smaller being fetched by their _bonnes_, or it might be the footman; or
yet, in unpropitious weather, by anxious parents in carriage or
_fiacre_.
[Illustration: back of child sitting on bench]
Quaint place, that _Institution_—when one looks back on it from this far
end of the road! I think I can breathe its peculiar atmosphere this
instant—and see the queer, long, low room, with the beams across the
ceiling; the whitewashed walls, covered with highly coloured elementary
maps and graphic pictures of the metrical system applied to measures
lineal and cubical, solid and liquid, and to the national coinage....
There they are: the six rows of benches and desks, each with its
half-dozen youngsters, some elaborately drawing a steel nib, in strokes
alternately swelling and slender, over a copybook of bafflingly soft
paper, productive of periodical splutters; others reading ‹in earnest or
in pretence› a chapter of _Epitome_; others, again, committing, with
dumb mouthing, a fable of La Fontaine to memory for to-morrow’s
recitation, until such moment as the cracked voice of the courtyard
clock striking five should proclaim the hour of release. The usher,
ensconced _in cathedra_, at his high desk; a smaller lamp for his
especial benefit burning ‹and smelling› by his side; a book before
him.—In his own walk he must have passed, methinks now, for something of
a dandy, in the cheap line; for he remains associated more with sedulous
trimming of nails, with pulling out of curly brown whiskers; with a
nervous, tricky settling of collar, tie and cuffs ‹obviously false›,
than with anything else.... He yawns amain. He consults his watch, and
closes it with a click in the midst of the great silence of the room—the
silence made more sensible, rather than disturbed, by the recurrent
splutter of a pen-nib, or the turning of a leaf of _Epitome_.
That _Epitome Historiae Sacrae_ was a primer adapted to first year
boys—a small buckram-bound book compendized, poetically expurgated, and
made in truth singularly attractive to the young imagination—more
attractive even, I fancy, than those Fables of La Fontaine and of
Florian that, read in the light of “short stories,” were such
favourites. It was, by the way, called _Epitome Sacrae_ or even _Sacrae_
pure and simple, in the same manner as the volumes allotted to the two
subsequent years were known respectively as _Latinae_ and _Graecae_.
I would give a fairly large coin of our present money for a copy now,
could I come across one in some old bookstall on the quays. But, from
their very nature, the cheapest books are among the rarest things to
recover at second hand.
[Sidenote: SCRIPTURE STORIES]
It was within the pale green covers of that queer little tome that I
tasted for the first time the literary savour of the various _genres_ in
tale-telling; of pastoral and romance, of idyll and tragedy. One could
not truly say that any very strong impression of a sacred character was
conveyed through the collection of Holy Scripture stories. But it is
doubtful whether anything read in after-life was stamped so clearly on
the imagination as the poetry of Ruth amid the ears of barley, of
Rebecca and the pitcher of water, of Rachel; as the romance of Joseph
and his brethren; as the tragedy of Samson and Delilah; as the war
pictures of Jericho and Jerusalem. It may have been a jumble of
disconnected tales—and, for the boys, nothing more than tales—but each
remains cut out in clean outline and brightest colours that are never
likely to fade. To this day a field of golden corn, newly reaped, in
pastoral Dorset, under a hot harvest sun, will raise the bright phantom
of Boaz and the gentle gleaner. A country lass at the fountain, or even
merely the rim of some disused and filled-up well, aye even such cryptic
names as Jakin and Boaz, the pillars, will conjure up again some picture
first raised from the pages of that _Epitome Sacrae_, read under the
light of the brown lamp gently swaying in the draught of the school-room
above our ruffled heads ... and steadily smelling of petrol!
------------------------------------------------------------------------