HE was not asleep--he was thinking. Sometimes, of course, it happened
that slumber was induced by the position in which he placed himself;
slumber, however, was not his intent. He liked to rest after his midday
meal and think. There was no real loss of time in it--he had been at
work since half-past five.
His especial and striking characteristic was a very large, high, and
noble forehead--the forehead attributed to Shakespeare and seen in his
busts. Shakespeare's intellect is beyond inquiry, yet he was not
altogether a man of action. He was, indeed, an actor upon the stage;
once he stole the red deer (delightful to think of that!), but he did
not sail to the then new discovered lands of America, nor did he fight
the Spaniards. So much intellect is, perhaps, antagonistic to action, or
rather it is averse to those arts by which a soldier climbs to the
position of commander. If Shakespeare by the chance of birth, or other
accident, had had the order of England's forces, we should have seen
generalship such as the world had not known since Cæsar.
His intellect was too big to climb backstairs till opportunity came. We
have great thoughts instead of battles.
Iden's forehead might have been sculptured for Shakespeare's. There was
too much thought in it for the circumstances of his life. It is possible
to think till you cannot act.
After the mice descended Iden did sleep for a few minutes. When he awoke
he looked at the clock in a guilty way, and then opening the oven of the
grate, took out a baked apple. He had one there ready for him almost
always--always, that is, when they were not ripe on the trees.
A baked apple, he said, was the most wholesome thing in the world; it
corrected the stomach, prevented acidity, improved digestion, and gave
tone to all the food that had been eaten previously. If people would
only eat baked apples they would not need to be for ever going to the
chemists' shops for drugs and salines to put them right. The women were
always at the chemists' shops--you could never pass the chemists' shops
in the town without seeing two or three women buying something.
The apple was the apple of fruit, the natural medicine of man--and the
best flavoured. It was compounded of the sweetest extracts and essences
of air and light, put together of sunshine and wind and shower in such a
way that no laboratory could imitate: and so on in a strain and with a
simplicity of language that reminded you of Bacon and his philosophy of
the Elizabethan age.
Iden in a way certainly had a tinge of the Baconian culture, naturally,
and not from any study of that author, whose books he had never seen.
The great Bacon was, in fact, a man of orchard and garden, and gathered
his ideas from the fields.
Just look at an apple on the tree, said Iden. Look at a Blenheim orange,
the inimitable mixture of colour, the gold and bronze, and ruddy tints,
not bright colours--undertones of bright colours--smoothed together and
polished, and made the more delightful by occasional roughness in the
rind. Or look at the brilliant King Pippin. Now he was getting older he
found, however, that the finest of them all was the russet. For eating,
at its proper season, it was good, but for cooking it was simply the
Imperial Cæsar and Sultan of apples; whether for baking, or pies, or
sauce, there was none to equal it. Apple-sauce made of the real true
russet was a sauce for Jove's own table. It was necessary that it should
be the real russet. Indeed in apple trees you had to be as careful of
breeding and pedigree as the owners of racing stables were about their
horses.
Ripe apples could not be got all the year round in any variety; besides
which, in winter and cold weather the crudity of the stomach needed to
be assisted with a little warmth; therefore bake them.
People did not eat nearly enough fruit now-a-days; they had too much
butcher's meat, and not enough fruit--that is, home-grown fruit,
straight from orchard or garden, not the half-sour stuff sold in the
shops, picked before it was ready.
The Americans were much wiser (he knew a good deal about America--he had
been there in his early days, before thought superseded action)--the
Americans had kept up many of the fine old English customs of two or
three hundred years since, and among these was the eating of fruit. They
were accused of being so modern, so very, very modern, but, in fact, the
country Americans, with whom he had lived (and who had taught him how to
chop) maintained much of the genuine antique life of old England.
They had first-rate apples, yet it was curious that the same trees
produced an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in
this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its
peculiar piquancy--a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a
sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and
so on--"talk, talk, talk," as Mrs. Iden said.
After his baked apple he took another guilty look at the clock, it was
close on four, and went into the passage to get his hat. In farmhouses
these places are called passages; in the smallest of villas, wretched
little villas not fit to be called houses, they are always "halls."
In the passage Mrs. Iden was waiting for him, and began to thump his
broad though bowed back with all her might.
"Sleep, sleep, sleep!" she cried, giving him a thump at each word.
"You've slept two hours. (Thump.) You sleep till you stupefy yourself
(thump), and then you go and dig. What's the use of digging? (Thump.)
Why don't you make some money? (Thump.) Talk and sleep! (Thump.) I hate
it. (Thump.) You've rubbed the paint off the wainscot with your sleep,
sleep, sleep (thump)--there's one of your hairs sticking to the paint
where your head goes. (Thump.) Anything more hateful--sleep (thump),
talk (thump), sleep (thump). Go on!"
She had thumped him down the passage, and across the covered-in court to
the door opening on the garden. There he paused to put on his hat--an
aged, battered hat--some sort of nondescript bowler, broken, grey,
weather-stained, very battered and very aged--a pitiful hat to put above
that broad, Shakespearian forehead. While he fitted it on he was thumped
severely: when he opened the door he paused, and involuntarily looked up
at the sky to see about the weather--a habit all country people
have--and so got more thumping, ending as he started out with a
tremendous push. He did not seem to resent the knocks, nor did the push
accelerate his pace; he took it very much as he took the March wind.
Mrs. Iden slammed the door, and went in to clear the dinner things, and
make ready for tea. Amaryllis helped her.
"He'll want his tea in half an hour," said Mrs. Iden. "What's the use of
his going out to work for half an hour?"
Amaryllis was silent. She was very fond of her father; he never did
anything wrong in her eyes, and she could have pointed out that when he
sat down to dinner at one he had already worked as many hours as Mrs.
Iden's model City gentleman in a whole day. His dinner at one was, in
effect, equivalent to their dinner at seven or eight, over which they
frequently lingered an hour or two. He would still go on labouring,
almost another half day. But she held her peace, for, on the other hand,
she could not contradict and argue with her mother, whom she knew had
had a wearisome life and perpetual disappointments.
Mrs. Iden grumbled on to herself, working herself into a more fiery
passion, till at last she put down the tea-pot, and rushed into the
garden. There as she came round the first thing she saw was the
daffodil, the beautiful daffodil Amaryllis had discovered. Beside
herself with indignation--what was the use of flowers or potatoes?--Mrs.
Iden stepped on the border and trampled the flower under foot till it
was shapeless. After this she rushed indoors again and upstairs to her
bedroom, where she locked herself in, and fumbled about in the old black
oak chest of drawers till she found a faded lavender glove.
That glove had been worn at the old "Ship" at Brighton years and years
ago in the honeymoon trip: in those days bridal parties went down by
coach. Faded with years, it had also faded from the tears that had
fallen upon it. She turned it over in her hands, and her tears spotted
it once more.
Amaryllis went on with the tea-making; for her mother to rush away in
that manner was nothing new. She toasted her father a piece of toast--he
affected to despise toast, but he always ate it if it was there, and
looked about for it if it was not, though he never said anything. The
clock struck five, and out she went to tell him tea was ready. Coming
round the house she found her daffodil crushed to pieces.
"Oh!" The blood rushed to her forehead; then her beautiful lips pouted
and quivered; tears filled her eyes, and her breast panted. She knew
immediately who had done it; she ran to her bedroom to cry and to hide
her grief and indignation.
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