Part 11

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.

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.

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!

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XII

Connected with those enthralling first tales, now that I come to think of it, is the development of certain simple tastes in food which have endured through a life not altogether devoid of gastronomic discrimination. Among these may be mentioned a special delight in lentils—later on extended to other members of the pulse tribe, but in its origin especially concerned with lentils. It is to be noted that the Epitome rendering of what in the Authorised Version appears as red pottage is un plat de lentilles. Now lentils, stewed in some toothsome reddish sauce ‹not innocent of the savoury onion› was a standing Friday dish in the refectory at Delescluzes ‹together, be it said, with a Saint Jean fish-pie—Saint Jean being the equivalent of our own mediæval “Poor John,” otherwise salt cod›. The small boy, however, who was destined, at the maturity of time, to become the Master of the House at the Villino Loki, was allowed a fair mutton chop of his own by special compact with M. Delescluze, as a concession to his Protestant heresy.

The arrangement had been made when the dietary of the jours maigres came, quite accidentally, to the knowledge of his anxious parents. Such a concession might have bidden fair to scandalize the youthful republic at dinner time—if not perhaps on purely dogmatic ground, at least upon a question of invidious privilege. But it happened that the intended beneficiary of the bi-weekly côtelette had been struck by that puzzling tale of Esau’s birthright so readily exchanged for a plat de lentilles.—Red pottage had become invested with an almost mystical quality.

There is often a good deal of auto-suggestion connected with matters of food pleasure. At any rate the Friday plat de lentilles ranked among the most desirable of eatable things, in his young opinion. The answer to the jeer that greeted him from the neighbour on his right, as the appetizing grill was laid by the grinning attendant for the first time upon the wooden board before him, was a prompt offer of half the flesh portion for the whole of his allowance of pulse—and a similar disposal of the remainder on the left-hand side. One chop for two plates of the savoury mess: the barter, as far as the pleasures of the table were concerned, was one of gain, for all parties. It had the further advantage of cutting at the root of conversational unpleasantness. The exchange of a single fat, heretical chop for two helpings of orthodox meagre fare became an established compact—one, it must be said, which demanded not only secrecy but adroitness for its fulfilment.

The redistribution of the courses was usually carried out under the shelter of an enormous broc ‹a relic of conventual furniture›, the French representative of our old English Black Jack; an obese, jug-like, wooden contrivance with iron hoops, containing something better than a gallon of the anodyne mixture called abondance—one part thin red wine to four of water. It was a supply which could, without danger to sobriety, be drawn upon, as the regulation had it, à discretion.

The parties to this lentil transaction, which took place at the end of the long table farthest from the eyes of the presiding usher, had to bid for turns.... Where are you this day, you the only two whilom reprobate amateurs of chops on fast days whose names I can yet recall? You, Victor de Mussy, with the notable store of infantile catches and conundrums? And you, Guilleaume Moreau, of more plebeian stamp, who used to look up words for me in the dictionary—a task I truly loathed—at the rate of three words for one bec-de-plume? If you are still in the land of the living, I would take a fair bet that it never occurs to you now to order, of your own accord, a dish of lentils!

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Another persistent “nostril memory,” as I have said, is that of the orange. It is a curious one. Of a certainty I must have eaten of the golden apple many a time before that notable night when I was first taken to a theatre. And yet it is invariably that delirious occasion which is recalled, for however fleeting a moment, when the bursting of the essential oil cells of an orange peel sends forth its fragrance.

The drama was “Bas-de-Cuir”—an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper’s Red Indian tale “Leather Stocking.” When I say that the part of “Leather Stocking” was taken by Frederic Lemaitre—personified genius of the old Romantic Melodrama!—that the playhouse was Les Folies Dramatiques—it will be patent to anyone familiar with the annals of the Paris stage that I refer to a very distant period. I could not have been more than eight years old. In those days, apparently, the custom, delectable to the boys if less so to their elders, of consuming oranges between the acts had not yet fallen into desuetude.

It is very odd. There are as we know a large number of recognized methods of eating an orange: from the elaborate and super-epicurean Japanese dissection within the skin, which removes every pellicule and every pip out of the fruit, preparatory to “spooning” the pure pulp, with or without sugar, down to the simple suction known as “Mattie’s way.” Whatever be the process, the effect never fails if I stand by: as sure as the first puff of fresh orange peel meets me, so is my mind instantly brought back to some scene connected with “Leather Stocking”; to some sense of the very first dramatic emotion ever known—the silent laughter of the trapper; the faint, distant war yell of the Huron; the darting of the bark canoe down the rapid; the crack of a gun: the flare of the camp fire—what not? It is, of course, but a transient flash now, but there it always starts, harking, for a second or so, back half a century in the middle of completely unrelated thoughts and in surroundings the least likely to evoke the past—in the silence of a sick bedside, or amid the hot dustiness of a holiday crowd; or even, at dessert time, in the company of some fair neighbour whose young, healthy powers of table enjoyment enable her to conclude a regular dinner with a whole orange eaten in the appreciative and fragrant manner known as à la Maltaise.

Scent alone, and that only for a second at a time, possesses this fantastic power. The taste of marmalade, for instance, is fraught with no special memories. As for the pleasure of sight in connexion with the orange, it is now concentrated upon the half-dozen trees—in pots, but bravely bearing year by year their little burden of fruit destined to grow for purely ornamental and “Italian” effect within doors at the Villino.

What a marvel would an orange be considered, had it not become an object of our everyday life! We take it as a matter of course; but how much poorer would the world suddenly seem if oranges became henceforth unobtainable! And the lemon! If lemons cost a guinea apiece, I once heard a physician say who had a special experience of its wide-reaching healing powers, then would mankind appreciate the treasure it has at hand! One-half of its being, and by no means the less important, the rind, is deplorably neglected. We deal with it as with a practically worthless husk. If we more generally understood the value of its ethereal oil, we might save ourselves many a spell of unaccountable physical depression. I can personally testify to numerous instances of feverish bouts cured solely by a hot decoction of lemon zest.

A similar virtue, by the way, seems to reside in the leaves of the Citrus Limonum. In southern countries—especially, I am told, in Spanish America—these leaves are obtainable in the dry state, and used as a febrifuge and alternative “tea,” or rather tisane, with marked results.

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XIII

Talking of the proper need of appreciation that might be rendered to some of nature’s goodly gifts, if only they were presented to us as something rare and novel—what of the humble but invaluable onion? “The onion,” as Stevenson says in his masterpiece, Prince Otto ‹and great was my satisfaction when I first read the pronouncement›, “which ranks with the truffle and the nectarine in the chief place of honour of earth’s fruit.”

Truffle and nectarine are doubtless honourable terms of comparison, but I make bold to believe that any well-constituted jury of epicures would not hesitate to award the humble onion the place paramount among all the savours of civilized cookery. There are a certain number of curiously constituted people who absolutely refuse to countenance the onion in any connexion, however subdued and distant; who profess, whether in æsthetic affectation or through some innate queasiness, to look upon it as pure abomination. There are also those who assume a similar intolerant attitude towards tobacco. But who shall deny that, even as tobacco to the meditative and restful moments, the savoury onion has not added through the ages an incalculable zest to the hour of physical restoration? There could be no cuisine, on any varied scale, without it.

“If the onion did not exist,” said a great cordon-bleu, paraphrasing a well-known philosophical pronouncement, “it would have to be invented.”

Discreetly introduced, and subdued by happy blendings, it holds the finest of fumets for your gastronomist’s palate: and, in all its own undisguised vigour, it will invest the coarsest or most tasteless food with never-failing allurement for robust appetites, whatever changes be rung upon the raw or pickled, the white-boiled, the golden-fried, or the brown-stewed.

It must have been that russet background of onion which justified my youthful preconceived notion of the pricelessness of “Red Pottage” as an article of food. It no doubt fixed the taste for life. Of course, in all matters of earthly enjoyment, the “psychological” moment ‹which, by the way, is so often purely physiological› plays an important part. Certain tastes reveal themselves only as pleasurable in certain surroundings. A draught of coarse, dark wine of la Mancha, sucked out of the goat-skin sack, with its obtrusive, pitchy twang, will be a pure delight on the side of some dusty, stony Castillian road. And no one who has not had, in some wild out-of-the-way mountain village, to break his fast at peep-o’-day upon a chunk of grey bread, stone-ground and tasting of the wheat-fields, a handful of salt and a couple of Spanish onions, will ever know all the excellences of that juicy bulb.

It is reported that, like his furiously assertive relation, garlic, the onion has very definite medical virtues. Some claim for it a power to cure sleeplessness—dreaded distemper—and also various antiseptic properties. This is as may be. The province of the precious plant, the duty which it fulfils well and simply, is that of supplying savour to things that may be nutritious but lack appetizing virtue. Many are the instances that might be adduced in support of this economic plea, but none more directly to the point than that of the soupe à l’oignon, which your thrifty French housewife contrives at shortest notice—the traditional “soup meagre,” object of such bitter contempt in our beef-gorging Hogarthian days.

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