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 Caesar and Sultan of apples; whether for baking, or pies, or sauce, there was none to equal it. Applesauce 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 nowadays; they had too much butcher’s meat, and not enough fruit—that is, homegrown 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The Americans were much wiser (he knew a good deal about America—he had been there in his early days, before thought superseded action)—the Americans had kept up many of the fine old English customs of two or three hundred years since, and among these was the eating of fruit.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 subacid 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 teapot, and rushed into the garden. There as she came round the first thing she saw was the
