I looked at him again; certainly, he did appear strong enough.
“But you Britishers won’t try anything, I suppose, from the States, now.”
I hastened to assure him I had no prejudice of that sort—if it would cure me, it might come from anywhere.
“You begin with five drops,” he said, solemnly. “Or three, if you like, and work up to ten. It soon gets easy to take. You’ll soon pick up. But I doubt if you’ll get a keg of the crude oil in this country; you’ll have to send over for it. I haate to hear anybody cough”—and so we parted.
He was so much in earnest, that if I had egged him on, I verily believe he would have got the keg for me himself. It seemed laughable at the time; but I don’t laugh now. I almost think that good-natured American was right; he certainly meant well.
Crude petroleum! Could anything be more nauseous? But probably it acts as a kind of cod-liver oil. Sometimes I wish I had tried it. Like him, I hate to hear anybody cough! Better take a ten-gallon keg of petroleum.
Alere’s crude petroleum was the Goliath ale, and he had hardly begun to approach the first hoop, when, as I tell you, he was heard to hum old German songs; it was the volatile principle.
Songs about the Pope and the Sultan
But yet he’s not a happy man,
He must obey the Alcoran,
He dares not touch one drop of wine,
I’m glad the Sultan’s lot’s not mine.
Songs about the rat that dwelt in the cellar, and fed on butter till he raised a paunch that would have done credit to Luther; songs about a King in Thule and the cup his mistress gave him, a beautiful old song that, none like it—
He saw it fall, he watched it fill,
And sink deep, deep into the main;
Then sorrow o’er his eyelids fell,
He never drank a drop again.
Or his thought slipped back to his schooldays, and beating the seat in the summerhouse with his hand for time, Alere ran on:—
Horum scorum suntivorum,
Harum scarum divo,
Tag-rag, merry derry, perriwig, and a hatband,
Hic hoc horum genitivo—
To be said in one breath.
Oh, my Ella—my blue bella,
A secula seculorum,
If I have luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies Benedictorum!
Or something about:
Sweet cowslips grace, the nominative case,
And She’s of the feminine gender.
Days of Valpy the Vulture, eating the schoolboy’s heart out, Eton Latin grammar, accidence—do not pause, traveller, if you see his tomb!
“Play to me,” said Amaryllis, and the Fleet-Street man put away his pipe, and took up his flute; he breathed soft and low—an excellent thing in a musician—delicious airs of Mozart chiefly.
The summer unfolded itself at their knees, the high buttercups of the meadow came to the very door, the apple-bloom poured itself out before them; music all of it, music in colour, in light, in flowers, in song of happy birds. The soothing flute strung together the flow of their thoughts, they were very silent, Amaryllis and Amadis Iden—almost hand in hand—listening to his cunning lips.
He ceased, and they were still silent, listening to their own hearts.
The starlings flew by every few minutes to their nests in the thatch of the old house, and out again to the meadow.
Alere showed how impossible it was to draw a bird in flight by the starling’s wings. His wings beat up and down so swiftly that the eye had not time to follow them completely; they formed a burr—an indistinct flutter; you are supposed to see the starling flying from you. The lifted tips were depressed so quickly that the impression of them in the raised position had not time to fade from the eye before a fresh impression arrived exhibiting them depressed to their furthest extent; you thus saw the wings in both positions, up and down, at once. A capital letter X may roughly represent his idea; the upper part answers to the wings lifted, the lower part to the wings down, and you see both together. Further, in actual fact, you see the wings in innumerable other positions between these two extremes; like the leaves of a book opened with your thumb quickly—as they do in legerdemain—almost as you see the spokes of a wheel run together as they revolve—a sort of burr.
To produce an image of a starling flying, you must draw all this.
The swift feathers are almost liquid; they leave a streak behind in the air like a meteor.
Thus the genial Goliath ale renewed the very blood in Alere’s veins.
Amaryllis saw too that the deadly paleness of Amadis Iden’s cheeks—absolute lack of blood—began to give way to the faintest colour, little more than the delicate pink of the apple-bloom, though he could take hardly a wineglass of Goliath. If you threw a wineglassful of the Goliath on the hearth it blazed up the chimney in the most lively manner. Fire in it—downright fire! That is the test.
Amadis could scarcely venture on a wineglassful, yet a faint pink began to steal into his face, and his white lips grew moist. He drank deeply of another cup.
XXXII
“Let me try,” said Amadis, taking the handle of the churn from Jearje. The butter was obstinate, and would not come; it was eleven o’clock in the morning, and still there was the rattle of milk in the barrel, the sound of a liquid splashing over and over. By the
