Amaryllis at the Fair Part 2

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CHAPTER III.

"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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 quant.i.ty 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 p.r.o.nunciation 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 a.n.a.lysis--the laboratory is at fault, and can do nothing with it." ("More salt!"

muttered Mrs. Iden. "How can you eat such a quant.i.ty of salt?") "There is something beyond what the laboratory can lay hands on; something that cannot be weighed, or seen, or estimated, neither by quant.i.ty, quality, or by any means. They a.n.a.lyse 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 const.i.tuent 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 appet.i.te 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, cuc.u.mber 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 a.s.sure 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 sc.r.a.ped 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."

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CHAPTER IV.

THIS arm-chair, of old-fashioned make, had lost an arm--the screw remained sticking up, but the woodwork on that side was gone. It had been accidentally broken some ten years since; yet, although he used the chair every day, the arm had never been mended. Awkward as it was, he let it alone.

"Hum! where's _The Standard_, then?" he said presently, as he nibbled his cheese and sipped the ale which he had placed on the hob.

"Here it is, Pa," said Amaryllis, hastening with the paper.