"FORTY-FOLDS," went on the master, "be the best keeping potatoes. Thur
be so many new sorts now, but they bean't no good; they be very good for
gentlefolk as doan't know no better, and poor folk as can't help
theirselves. They won't grow everywhere neither; there bean't but one
patch in our garden as ull grow 'um well. It's that's big middle patch.
Summat different in the soil thur. There's a lot, bless you! to be
learned before you can grow a potato, for all it looks such a simple
thing. Farty-folds----"
"Farty-folds!" said Mrs. Iden, imitating his provincial pronunciation
with extreme disgust in her tone.
"Aw, yes, too," said Iden. "Varty-volds be ould potatoes, and thur
bean't none as can beat um."
The more she showed her irritation at his speech or ways, the more he
accentuated both language and manner.
"Talking with your mouth full," said Mrs. Iden. It was true, Iden did
talk with his mouth full, very full indeed, for he fed heartily. The
remark annoyed him; he grunted and spluttered and choked a
little--floury things are choky. He got it down by taking a long draught
at his quart of strong ale. Splendid ale it was, too, the stuff to
induce you to make faces at Goliath. He soon began to talk again.
"Th' ould shepherd fetched me these swede greens; I axed un three days
ago; I know'd we was going to have this yer mutton. You got to settle
these yer things aforehand."
"Axed," muttered Mrs. Iden.
"Th' pigeons have been at um, they be 'mazing fond of um, so be the
larks. These be the best as thur was. They be the best things in the
world for the blood. Swede greens be the top of all physic. If you can
get fresh swede tops you don't want a doctor within twenty miles.
Their's nothing in all the chemists' shops in England equal to swede
greens"--helping himself to a large quantity of salt.
"What a lot of salt you _do_ eat!" muttered Mrs. Iden.
"Onely you must have the real swedes--not thuck stuff they sells in
towns; greens they was once p'rhaps, but they be tough as leather, and
haven't got a drop of sap in um. Swedes is onely to be got about March."
"Pooh! you can get them at Christmas in London," said Mrs. Iden.
"Aw, can 'ee? Call they swede tops? They bean't no good; you might as
well eat dried leaves. I tell you these are the young fresh green shoots
of spring"--suddenly changing his pronunciation as he became interested
in his subject and forgot the shafts of irritation shot at him by his
wife. "They are full of sap--fresh sap--the juice which the plant
extracts from the earth as the active power of the sun's rays increases.
It is this sap which is so good for the blood. Without it the vegetable
is no more than a woody fibre. Why the sap should be so powerful I
cannot tell you; no one knows, any more than they know _how_ the plant
prepares it. This is one of those things which defy analysis--the
laboratory is at fault, and can do nothing with it." ("More salt!"
muttered Mrs. Iden. "How can you eat such a quantity of salt?") "There
is something beyond what the laboratory can lay hands on; something that
cannot be weighed, or seen, or estimated, neither by quantity, quality,
or by any means. They analyse champagne, for instance; they find so many
parts water, so much sugar, so much this, and so much that; but out of
the hundred parts there remain ten--I think it is ten--at all events so
many parts still to be accounted for. They escape, they are set down as
volatile--the laboratory has not even a distinct name for this
component; the laboratory knows nothing at all about it, cannot even
name it. But this unknown constituent is the real champagne. So it is
with the sap. In spring the sap possesses a certain virtue; at other
times of the year the leaf is still green, but useless to us."
"I shall have some vinegar," said Mrs. Iden, defiantly, stretching out
her hand to the cruet.
Mr. Iden made a wry face, as if the mere mention of vinegar had set his
teeth on edge. He looked the other way and ate as fast as he could, to
close his eyes to the spectacle of any one spoiling the sappy swede
greens with nauseous vinegar. To his system of edible philosophy vinegar
was utterly antagonistic--destructive of the sap-principle, altogether
wrong, and, in fact, wicked, as destroying good and precious food.
Amaryllis would not have dared to have taken the vinegar herself, but as
her mother passed the cruet to her, she, too, fell away, and mixed
vinegar with the green vegetables. All women like vinegar.
When the bottle was restored to the cruet-stand Mr. Iden deigned to look
round again at the table.
"Ha! you'll cut your thumb!" he shouted to Amaryllis, who was cutting a
piece of bread. She put the loaf down with a consciousness of guilt.
"Haven't I told you how to cut bread twenty times? Cutting towards your
thumb like that! Hold your left hand lower down, so that if the knife
slips it will go over. Here, like this. Give it to me."
He cut a slice to show her, and then tossed the slice across the table
so accurately that it fell exactly into its proper place by her plate.
He had a habit of tossing things in that way.
"Why ever couldn't you pass it on the tray?" said Mrs. Iden. "Flinging
in that manner! I hate to see it."
Amaryllis, as in duty bound, in appearance took the lesson in
bread-cutting to heart, as she had done twenty times before. But she
knew she should still cut a loaf in the same dangerous style when out of
his sight. She could not do it in the safe way--it was so much easier in
the other; and if she did cut her hand she did not greatly care.
"Now perhaps you'll remember," said the master, getting up with his
plate in his hand.
"Whatever _are_ you going to do now?" asked Mrs. Iden, who knew
perfectly well.
"Going to warm the plate." He went out into the kitchen, sat down by the
fire, and carefully warmed his plate for a second helping.
"I should think you couldn't want any more," said Mrs. Iden when he came
back. "You had enough the first time for three."
But Iden, who had the appetite of a giant, and had never ruined his
digestion with vinegar or sauces, piled another series of thick slices
on his plate, now hot to liquefy the gravy, and added to the meat a just
proportion of vegetables. In proportion and a just mixture the secret of
eating successfully consisted, according to him.
First he ate a piece of the dark brown mutton, this was immediately
followed by a portion of floury potato, next by a portion of swede
tops, and then, lest a too savoury taste should remain in the mouth, he
took a fragment of bread, as it were to sweeten and cleanse his teeth.
Finally came a draught of strong ale, and after a brief moment the same
ingredients were mixed in the same order as before. His dinner was thus
eaten in a certain order, and with a kind of rhythm, duly exciting each
particular flavour like a rhyme in its proper position, and duly putting
it out with its correct successor. Always the savour of meat and gravy
and vegetables had to be toned down by the ultimate bread, a vast piece
of which he kept beside him. He was a great bread eater--it was always
bread after everything, and if there were two courses then bread between
to prepare the palate, and to prevent the sweets from quarrelling with
the acids. Organization was the chief characteristic of his mind--his
very dinner was organized and well planned, and any break or disturbance
was not so much an annoyance in itself as destructive of a clever
design, like a stick thrust through the web of a geometrical spider.
This order of mouthfuls had been explained over and over again to the
family, and if they felt that he was in a more than usually terrible
mood, and if they felt his gaze upon them, the family to some extent
submitted. Neither Mrs. Iden nor Amaryllis, however, could ever educate
their palates into this fixed sequence of feeding; and, if Iden was not
in a very awful and Jovelike mood, they wandered about irregularly in
their eating. When the dinner was over (and, indeed, before it began)
they had a way of visiting the larder, and "picking" little fragments of
pies, or cold fowl, even a cold potato, the smallest mug--a quarter of a
pint of the Goliath ale between them, or, if it was to be had, a sip of
port wine. These women were very irrational in their feeding; they
actually put vinegar on cold cabbage; they gloated over a fragment of
pickled salmon about eleven o'clock in the morning. They had a herring
sometimes for tea--the smell of it cooking sent the master into fits of
indignation, he abominated it so, but they were so hardened and lost to
righteousness they always repeated the offence next time the itinerant
fish-dealer called. You could not drum them into good solid,
straightforward eating.
They generally had a smuggled bit of pastry to eat in the kitchen after
dinner, for Mr. Iden considered that no one could need a second course
after first-rate mutton and forty-folds. A morsel of cheese if you
liked--nothing more. In summer the great garden abounded with fruit; he
would have nothing but rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb, day after day, or else
black-currant pudding. He held that black currants were the most
wholesome fruit that grew; if he fancied his hands were not quite clean
he would rub them with black-currant leaves to give them a pleasant
aromatic odour (as ladies use scented soap). He rubbed them with
walnut-leaves for the same purpose.
Of salad in its season he was a great eater, cucumber especially, and
lettuce and celery; but a mixed salad (oil and a flash, as it were, of
Worcester sauce) was a horror to him. A principle ran through all his
eating--an idea, a plan and design.
I assure you it is a very important matter this eating, a man's fortune
depends on his dinner. I should have been as rich as Croesus if I
could only have eaten what I liked all my time; I am sure I should, now
I come to look back.
The soundest and most wholesome food in the world was set on Mr. Iden's
table; you may differ from his system, but you would have enjoyed the
dark brown mutton, the floury potatoes, the fresh vegetables and fruit
and salad, and the Goliath ale.
When he had at last finished his meal he took his knife and carefully
scraped his crumbs together, drawing the edge along the cloth, first one
way and then the other, till he had a little heap; for, eating so much
bread, he made many crumbs. Having got them together, he proceeded to
shovel them into his mouth with the end of his knife, so that not one
was wasted. Sometimes he sprinkled a little moist sugar over them with
his finger and thumb. He then cut himself a slice of bread and cheese,
and sat down with it in his arm-chair by the fire, spreading his large
red-and-yellow silk handkerchief on his knee to catch the fragments in
lieu of a plate.
"Why can't you eat your cheese at the table, like other people?" said
Mrs. Iden, shuffling her feet with contemptuous annoyance. A deep grunt
in the throat was the answer she received; at the same time he turned
his arm-chair more towards the fire, as much as to say, "Other people
are nothing to me."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]