Faces in the Fire, and Other Fancies

Strawberries are delicious, as every one knows. 'It may be,' says Dr. Boteler, a quaint old English writer, 'it may be that God could make a better berry than a strawberry, but most certainly He never did.' Yes, strawberries are delicious; but I am not going to write about strawberries. Cream is also very nice, very nice indeed; but nothing shall induce me to write about cream. I have promised myself a chapter, neither on strawberries nor on cream, but on strawberries and cream. The distinction, as I shall endeavour to show, is a vitally important one.

Now the theme was suggested on this wise. I was walking through the city this afternoon, when I met a gentleman from whom, only this morning, I received an important letter. We shook hands, and were just plunging into the subject-matter of his letter when a tall policeman reminded us of the illegality of loitering on the pavement. Yet it was too hot to walk about.

'Come in here,' my companion suggested, pointing 25 to a café near by, 'and have a cup of afternoon tea.'

'No, thank you,' I replied, 'I had a cup not long ago.'

'Well, strawberries and cream, then?'

The temptation was too strong for me; he had touched a vulnerable point; and I succumbed. The afternoon was very oppressive; the restaurant looked invitingly cool; a quiet corner among the ferns seemed to beckon us; and the strawberries and cream, daintily served, soon completed our felicity.

Strawberries and cream! It is an odd conjunction when you come to think of it. The gardener goes off to his well-kept beds and brings back a big basket, lined with cabbage leaves, and filled to the brim with fine fresh strawberries. The maid slips off to the dairy and returns with a jug of rich and foamy cream. To what different realms they belong! The gardener lives, moves, and has his being in one world; the milkmaid spends her life in quite another. The cream belongs to the animal kingdom; the strawberries to the vegetable kingdom. But here, on these pretty little plates in the fern-grot are the gardener's world and the milkmaid's world beautifully blended. Here, on the table before us, are the animal and the vegetable kingdom perfectly supplementing and completing each other. It is 26 another phase of the wonder which suggested the nursery rhyme:

Flour of England, fruit of Spain,

Met together in a shower of rain.

Empires confront each other within the compass of a plum-pudding; continents salute each other in a tea-cup; the great subdivisions of the universe greet each other in a plate of strawberries and cream. What ententes, and rapprochements, and international conferences take place every day among the plates and dishes that adorn our tables!

It is a thousand pities that we have no authentic record of the discoverer of strawberries and cream. For ages the world enjoyed its strawberries, and for ages the world enjoyed its cream. But strawberries and cream was an unheard-of mixture. Then there dawned one of the great days of this planet's little story, a day that ought to have been carefully recorded and annually commemorated. History, as it is written, betrays a sad lack of perspective. It has no true sense of proportion. There came a fateful day on which some audacious dietetic adventurer took the cream that had been brought from his dairy, poured it on the strawberries that had been plucked from his garden, and discovered with delight that the whole was greater than the sum 27 of all its parts. Yet of that memorable day the historian takes no notice. With the amours of kings, the intrigues of courts, and the squabbles of statesmen he has filled countless pages; yet only in very rare instances have these things contributed to the sum of human happiness anything comparable to the pleasures afforded by strawberries and cream. We have never done justice to the intellectual prowess of the men who first tried some of the mixtures that are to us a matter of course. Salt and potatoes, for example. I heard the other day of a little girl who defined salt as 'that which makes potatoes very nasty if you have none of it with them.' It is not a bad definition. But, surely, something is due to the memory of the man who discovered that the insipidity might be removed, and the potato be made a staple article of diet, by the simple addition of a pinch of salt! Then, too, there are the men who found out that horseradish is the thing to eat with roast beef; that apple sauce lends an added charm to a joint of pork; that red currant jelly enhances the flavour of jugged hare; that mint sauce blends beautifully with lamb; that boiled mutton is all the better for caper sauce; and that butter is the natural corollary of bread. 'The man of superior intellect,' says Tennyson, in vindication of his weakness for boiled beef and new potatoes, 'knows what is good to eat.' And George Gissing 28 in a reference to these selfsame new potatoes, adds a corroborative word. 'Our cook,' he says, 'when dressing these new potatoes, puts into the saucepan a sprig of mint. This is genius. Not otherwise could the flavour of the vegetable be so perfectly, yet so delicately, emphasized. The mint is there, and we know it; yet our palate knows only the young potato.' There have been thousands of statues erected to the memory of men who have done far less to promote the happiness of mankind than did any of these. Every great invention is preceded by thousands and thousands of fruitless attempts. Think of the nauseous conglomerations that must have been tried and tasted, not without a shudder, before these happy combinations were at length launched upon the world. Think of the jeers of derision that greeted the first announcement of these preposterous concoctions! Imagine the guffaws when a man told his companions that he had been eating red currant jelly with jugged hare! Imagine the nameless dietetic atrocities that that ingenious epicure must have perpetrated before he hit upon his ultimate triumph! I have not the initiative to attempt it. I lack the splendid daring of the pioneer. In a thousand years' time men will smack their lips over all kinds of mixtures of which I should shudder to hear. I am content to go on eating this by itself and that by itself, just as for 29 ages men were content to eat strawberries by themselves and cream by itself, never dreaming that this thing and that thing as much belong to each other as do strawberries and cream.

Now this genius for mixing things is one of the hall-marks of our humanity. Strawberry leaves are part of the crest of a duchess; but strawberries and cream might be regarded as a suitable crest for the race. Man is an animal, but he is more than an animal; and he proves his superiority by mixing things. His poorer relatives of the brute creation never do it. They eat strawberries, and they are fond of cream; but it would never have occurred to any one of them to mix the strawberries with the cream. An animal, even the most intelligent and domesticated animal, will eat one thing and then he will eat another thing; but the idea of mixing the first thing with the second thing before eating either never enters into his comprehension.

The strawberries and cream represent, therefore, in a pleasant and attractive way, our human genius for mixing things. There is nothing surprising about it. Indeed, it is eminently fitting and characteristic. For we are ourselves such extraordinary medlies. Let any man think his way back across the ages, and mark the ingredients that have woven themselves into his make-up, and he will not be surprised at the extraordinary miscellany of passions 30 that he sometimes discovers within the recesses of his own soul. 'I remember,' Rudyard Kipling makes the Thames to say:

... I remember, like yesterday,

The earliest Cockney who came my way,

When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand,

With paint on his face and a club in his hand.

He was death to feather and fin and fur,

He trapped my beavers at Westminster,

He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer,

He killed my herons off Lambeth Pier;

He fought his neighbour with axes and swords,

Flint or bronze, at my upper fords,

While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin

The tall Phoenician ships stole in.

Men of the island caves mixed their blood with men of the great continental forests. It was an extraordinary agglomeration.

Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek

Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,

And the Romans came with a heavy hand,

And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,

And the Roman left and the Danes blew in-

And that's where your history books begin!

Is it any wonder that sometimes I feel, mingling with the emotions inspired by a recent communion service, 31 the savagery of some long-forgotten caveman ancestor? Civilization is so very young, and barbarism was so very old, that it is not surprising that I occasionally hark back involuntarily to the days to which my blood was most accustomed. I am an odd mixture considered from any point of view. 'There are very few human actions,' says Mark Rutherford, 'of which it can be said that this or that, taken by itself, produced them. With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed.' Of course not! It is my duty, that is to say, to take myself to pieces as little as possible. It does not really matter how much of my present temperament I got from the communion service, and how much I got from the caveman with the club in his hand. Here I am, a present entity, with the caveman, the tribesman, the Roman, and the Dane all mixed up together in me; and it is my business, instead of taking the complex mechanism to pieces, to make it, as a united and harmonious whole, do the work for which I have been sent into the world. I am not 32 to talk one moment of the strawberries on my plate, and then, in the next breath, to speak of the cream. It is not so much a matter of strawberries and cream as of strawberriesandcream.

There is, I fancy, a good deal in that. We are too fond of taking the cream from the strawberries, and the strawberries from the cream. I have on my plate here, not two things, but one thing; and that one thing is strawberriesandcream. One of the oldest and one of the silliest mistakes that men have made is their everlasting inclination to divide strawberries-and-cream into strawberries and cream. Think of the toothless chatter concerning the sexes. Have men or women done most for the world? Is the husband or is the wife most essential to the home? It will be quite time enough to attempt to answer such ridiculous questions when the waitresses at the restaurants begin to ask us whether we will have strawberries or cream! In the beginning, we are told, God created man in His own image, male and female created He them. It is not so much a matter of male and female: it is maleandfemale, just as it is strawberriesandcream. The thing takes other forms. Which do you prefer-summer or winter? As though we should appreciate summer if we never had a winter, or winter if we never had a summer! Is song or speech the most effective evangelistic agency? As though there would be 33 anything to sing about if the gospel had never been preached! Or anything worth preaching if the gospel had never set anybody singing! It is so very ridiculous to try to separate the strawberries from the cream. Miss Rosaline Masson, in commenting upon Wordsworth's beautiful sonnet on Westminster Bridge, says that it is the outcome of Dorothy Wordsworth's divine power of perception and her brother's divine power of expression. But who would dare to take the sonnet to pieces and say how much is Dorothy's, and how much is William's? It is Dorothy's and William's. It is strawberries and cream.

I always feel extremely sorry for the man who tries to move a vote of thanks at the close of a pleasant and successful function. Not for worlds could I be persuaded to attempt it. It is a most difficult and complicated business, and I should collapse utterly. It consists in taking the whole performance to pieces and allocating the praise. So much for the decorators; so much for the singers; so much for the elocutionists; so much for the speakers; so much for the chairman; so much for the pianist; so much for the secretary; and so on. To me it would be like furnishing a statistical table on leaving the restaurant showing how much of my enjoyment I owed to the strawberries and how much to the cream. Dissection is not in my 34 line. I only know that I thoroughly enjoyed the strawberriesandcream.

In selecting strawberries and cream as emblems of the mixed things of life, I fancy that my choice is a particularly happy one. That cream must be mixed with other foods goes without saying; and in Shakespeare's most notable reference to strawberries it is the same peculiarity that seems to have impressed him. He has a very pleasing allusion to the facility with which the strawberry mixes with other things. The passage occurs at the beginning of King Henry the Fifth. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely are discussing the new king. They are astonished at the change which has overtaken him since his accession. As a prince he was wild and dissolute, and broke his father's heart. But, as soon as he became king, he instantly sent for his boon-companions, told them that he intended by God's good grace to live an entirely new life, and begged them to follow his example. As the Archbishop of Canterbury puts it:

The breath no sooner left his father's body

But that his wildness, mortified in him,

Seemed to die, too. Yea, at that very moment.

Consideration like an angel came,

And whipped the offending Adam out of him.

Leaving his body as a paradise,

To envelop and contain celestial spirits.

35 To which the Bishop of Ely replies:

The strawberry grows underneath the nettle,

And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best,

Neighboured by fruit of baser quality.

It is a suggestive passage, considered from any point of view We live mixed lives in a mixed world, and we do not come upon the strawberries by themselves or all at once. We may find strawberries to-morrow where we can discover nothing but stinging-nettles to-day 'Madcap Harry' was not the only son whose life at first yielded nothing but nettles that stung and lacerated his father's soul, and yet afterwards produced strawberries that were the delight, not only of the Church, but of the world at large.