“After all,” said Elinor, consolingly, “it’s only to be expected.” She felt genuinely sorry for the poor girl. She looked at the child. He was crying—and she had expected (how unreasonably!) that it would be quite different now, that she would find him entirely rational and grown up. Her heart sank. She loved him, but children were terrible, terrible. And he was still a child. “Now, Phil,” she said severely, “you must eat. No more nonsense.”
The child howled louder. He would have liked to behave well, but he did not know how to stop behaving badly. He had voluntarily worked up this mood of rebellious misery within himself; but now the emotion was his master and stronger than his will. It was impossible for him, even though he desired it, to return by the way he had come. Besides, he had always rather disliked roast duck; and having now, for five minutes, thought of roast duck with concentrated disgust and horror, he loathed it. The sight, the smell, the taste of it really and genuinely made him sick.
Mrs. Bidlake meanwhile preserved her metaphysical calm. Her soul swam on steadily, like a great ship through a choppy sea; or perhaps it was more like a balloon, drifting high above the waters in the serene and windless world of fancy. She had been talking to Philip about Buddhism (Mrs. Bidlake had a special weakness for Buddhism). At the first screams, she had not even turned round to see what was the matter, contenting herself with raising her voice so as to make it audible above the tumult. The yelling was renewed, was continued. Mrs. Bidlake was silent and shut her eyes. A cross-legged Buddha, serene and golden, appeared against the red background of her closed lids; she saw the yellow-robed priests around him, each in the attitude of the god and plunged in ecstatic meditation.
“Maya,” she said with a sigh, as though to herself. “Maya—the eternal illusion.” She opened her eyes again. “It is rather tough,” she added, addressing herself to Elinor and Miss Fulkes, who were desperately trying to make the child eat.
Little Phil seized the excuse which she had thus gratuitously given him. “It’s tough,” he shouted tearfully, pushing away the fork on which Miss Fulkes, her hand trembling with the excess of painful emotions, was offering him a shred of roast duck and half a new potato.
Mrs. Bidlake shut her eyes again for a moment, then turned to Philip and went on discussing the Eightfold Way.
That evening Philip wrote at some length in the notebook, in which he recorded, pell-mell, thoughts and events, conversations, things heard and seen. “The Kitchen in the Old House,” was how he headed the page.
You can render it easily enough. The Tudor casements reflected in the bottoms of the copper pots. The huge black range with its polished steel trimmings and the fire peeping out through the half-opened porthole in the top. The mignonette in the window boxes. The cat, an enormous ginger eunuch, dozing in its basket by the dresser. The kitchen table so worn with time and constant scrubbing that the graining stands out above the softer wood—as though an engraver had prepared a wood-block of some gigantic finger print. The beams in the low ceiling. The brown beechwood chairs. The raw pastry in process of rolling. The smell of cookery. The leaning column of yellow sunlight full of motes. And finally old Mrs. Inman, the cook: small, frail, indomitable, the authoress of how many thousand meals! Work that up a little, and you’d have your picture. But I want something more. A sketch of the kitchen in time as well as space, a hint of its significance in the general human cosmos. I write one sentence: “Summer after summer, from the time when Shakespeare was a boy till now, ten generations of cooks have employed infrared radiations to break up the protein molecules of spitted ducklings; (‘Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird, etc.’).” One sentence, and I am already involved in history, art, and all the sciences. The whole story of the universe is implicit in any part of it. The meditative eye can look through any single object and see, as through a window, the entire cosmos. Make the smell of roast duck in an old kitchen diaphanous and you will have a glimpse of everything, from the spiral nebulae to Mozart’s music and the stigmata of St. Francis of Assisi. The artistic problem is to produce diaphanousness in spots, selecting the spots so as to reveal only the most humanly significant of distant vistas behind the near familiar object. But in all cases, the things seen at the end of the vista must be strange enough to make the familiar seem fantastically mysterious. Question: can this be achieved without pedantry, and without spinning out the work interminably? It needs a great deal of thinking about.
Meanwhile, how charming the kitchen is! How sympathetic its inhabitants! Mrs. Inman has been in the house as long as Elinor. A miracle of aged beauty. And how serene, how aristocratically commanding! When one has been monarch of all one surveys for thirty years, one looks the royal part, even when all one surveys is only the kitchen. And then there is Dobbs, the parlour maid, Dobbs has only been in the house since a little before the war. An invention of Rabelais. Six feet high and proportionately thick. And the enormous body houses Gargantua’s
