“Two,” said the grandfather.
“One in 1802,” went on Amaryllis, “while in 1775 the site was covered with furze.” “How it has changed!” she said. He nodded, and coughed, and smiled; his great grey hat rocked on his head and seemed about to extinguish him.
“There’s a note at the bottom in pencil, grandpa. It says, ‘A hundred voters in this street, 1884.’ ”
“Ah!” said the old man, an ah! so deep it fetched his very heart up in coughing. When he finished, Amaryllis read on—
“In 1802 there were only ten voters in the town.”
“Ah!” His excitement caused such violent coughing Amaryllis became alarmed, but it did him no harm. The more he coughed and choked the livelier he seemed. The thought of politics roused him like a trumpet—it went straight to his ancient heart.
“Read that again,” he said. “How many voters now?”
“A hundred voters in this street, 1884.”
“We’ve got them all”—coughing—“all in my lord’s houses, everyone; vote Conservative, one and all. What is it?” as someone knocked. Dinner was ready, to Amaryllis’s relief.
“Perhaps you would like to dine with me?” asked the grandfather, shuffling up his papers. “There—there,” as she hesitated, “you would like to dine with young people, of course—of course.”
XII
Old Grandfather Iden always dined alone in the parlour, with his housekeeper to wait on him; they were just bringing in his food. The family and visitors had their meals in a separate and much more comfortable apartment in another part of the house, which was large. Sometimes, as a great favour and special mark of approval, the old Pacha would invite you to eat with him.
Amaryllis, though anxious to please him, hesitated, not only because of the smoke, but because she knew he always had pork for dinner.
The rich juices of roast pork sustained his dry and withered frame—it was a sort of Burgundy of flesh to him. As the good wine of Burgundy fills the blood with iron and strengthens the body, so the rich juice of the pork seemed to supply the oil necessary to keep the sinews supple and to prevent the cartilages from stiffening.
The scientific people say that it is the ossification of the cartilages—the stiffening of the firmer tissues—that in time interferes with the processes of life. The hinges rust, as if your tricycle had been left out in the rain for a week—and the delicate watchwork of the human frame will not run.
If suppleness could only be maintained there is no reason why it should not continue to work for a much longer period, for a hundred and fifty, two hundred years—as long as you fancy. But nothing has yet been devised to keep up the suppleness.
Grandfather Iden found the elixir of life in roast pork. The jokers of Woolhorton—there are always jokers, very clever they think themselves—considered the reason it suited him so well was because of the pig-like obstinacy of his disposition.
Anything more contrary to common sense than for an old man of ninety to feed on pork it would be hard to discover—so his friends said.
“Pork,” said the physician, had down from London to see him on one occasion, “pork is the first on the list of indigestible articles of food. It takes from six to eight hours for the gastric apparatus to reduce its fibres. The stomach becomes overloaded—acidity is the result; nightmares, pains, and innumerable ills are the consequence. The very worst thing Mr. Iden could eat.”
“Hum,” growled the family doctor, a native of Woolhorton, when he heard of this. “Hum!” low in his throat, like an irate bulldog. If in the least excited, like most other country folk, he used the provincial pronunciation. “Hum! A’ have lived twenty years on pork. Let’n yet it!”
Grandfather Iden intended to eat it, and did eat it six days out of seven, not, of course, roast pork every dinner; sometimes boiled pork; sometimes he baked it himself in the great oven. Now and then he varied it with pig-meat—good old country meat, let me tell you, pig-meat—such as sparerib, griskin, blade-bone, and that mysterious morsel, the “mouse.” The chine he always sent over for Iden junior, who was a chine eater—a true Homeric diner—and to make it even, Iden junior sent in the best apples for sauce from his favourite russet trees. It was about the only amenity that survived between father and son.
The pig-meat used to be delicious in the old house at home, before we all went astray along the different paths of life; fresh from the pigs fed and killed on the premises, nutty, and juicy to the palate. Much of it is best done on a gridiron—here’s heresy! A gridiron is flat blasphemy to the modern school of scientific cookery. Scientific fiddlestick! Nothing like a gridiron to set your lips watering.
But the “mouse,”—what was the “mouse?” The London butchers can’t tell me. It was a titbit. I suppose it still exists in pigs; but London folk are so ignorant.
Grandfather Iden ate pig in every shape and form, that is, he mumbled the juice out of it, and never complained of indigestion.
He was up at five o’clock every morning of his life, pottering about the great oven with his baker’s man. In summer if it was fine he went out at six for a walk in the Pines—the promenade of Woolhorton.
“If you wants to get well,” old Dr. Butler used to say, “you go for a walk in the marning afore the aair have been braathed auver.”
Before the air has been breathed over—inspired and re-inspired by human crowds, while it retains the sweetness of the morning, like water fresh from the spring; that was when it possessed its value, according to bluff, gruff, rule-of-thumb old Butler. Depend upon it, there is something in his dictum, too.
Amaryllis hesitated at the thought of the pork, for he often had it underdone, so the old gentleman dismissed her in his most gracious manner to dine with the rest.
She went
