Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

TEA AND MR. BENNETT

I knew that my friend Mr. Arnold Bennett was a handy man. It is his foible to do many things, and he does most of them surprisingly well. The villagers in the poem were left wondering how the schoolmaster's small head "could carry all he knew"; and I have myself often idly wondered how Mr. Bennett has managed to become an expert in so many arts and crafts in the intervals of pouring out a stream of books and plays that would alone seem the abundant occupation of all his waking hours. I suppose the explanation is, first, that he has in an unusual degree an industrious habit under iron discipline and an orderly mind that parcels out its minutes as a miser parcels out his gold; and, second, that he has a devouring curiosity about life.

He is a taster of life. He goes about like a country boy at a fair, taking a shy at every Aunt Sally, a ride on every roundabout, a shot at every shooting-range. The bearded woman delights him, and Punch and Judy hold him as the glittering eye of the ancient mariner held the wedding guest. He never grows tired of the show. He keeps into middle age the juvenile wonder which most of us lose when we lose our youth—hence the unfailing freshness of his mind. He is always interesting, because he is always interested. I would trust him to get along on a desert island as comfortably as any living man. He would write his own books, pen his own criticisms, paint his own pictures, make his own music, sail his own boat, take his own physic, run his own farm, engross his own conveyance, drive his own car, cook his own dinner—probably cut his own hair. For he can explain to you why the barbers of Italy are superior to the barbers of France and wherein the Dutch barber fails to touch the highest pinnacle of his calling. And all these things he would do, not clumsily or grudgingly as one driven into a corner by cruel circumstance, but joyfully, as a boy on a picnic. He would rejoice that at last he could do things as they should be done, instead of having them done for him by others in ways in which they should not be done.

For example, he would be able to have a cup of tea worth drinking. I did not know, but I am not surprised to learn, that he is an artist with the tea-pot. "I would undertake," he has just told the world, "to make better tea than nineteen-twentieths of the housewives of this country." If it were anybody else, we should say this was conceit; but Mr. Bennett without this note of childlike self-assurance would not be the Mr. Bennett we love. We should not know him. We should think he was just an ordinary man like the rest of us, and pass him by in the crowd. Moreover, when he tells us that he is a master craftsman with the tea-pot, I have no doubt he is speaking the truth. He will, I am sure, have studied this great subject as profoundly as he has studied the technique of play-writing.

And I daresay he would agree that it is at least as well worth studying as play-writing. Plays are only a very occasional affair in our life, but tea flows on for ever. At this moment I hear the pleasant clatter of the tea-things in the next room, and I suppose there is hardly a house in the land where the kettle is not boiling and the cups are not tinkling. When I went to see my lawyer yesterday afternoon he rang for "another cup," and if I go to see my publisher to-morrow afternoon he will ring for "another cup," too. Next to the Russians, we are, I suppose, the greatest tea-topers in the world. Tea-drinking has ceased to be merely a custom and has become a ritual as well. It is what the pipe of reconciliation is to the Indian or the eating of salt is to the Mussulman.

Yet though every day we drink enough tea to float the British Navy, it is probably true, as Mr. Bennett suggests, that few of us know how to make it. I do not pretend to be one of the few. But I delight in the rare occasions on which I get the real article, and in a casual way, quite different I am sure from Mr. Bennett's orderly experiments, I have picked up the rudiments of a system from those whose brews have pleased me. Thus from one great artist of the tea-pot, a fine old gentleman with a long white beard, who used to sit and watch the kettle boiling as anxiously as the doctor feels the pulse of his patient, I learned that the water should be poured on the tea the moment it comes to the boil. From another, a learned scientist, I gathered that boiling water (from another kettle, I fancy) should be poured in the pot before the tea is put in. A bachelor acquaintance of mine, on whom I called one afternoon, indoctrinated me with the idea of washing the tea with a rapid drench of boiling water drawn off instantly before pouring in the water intended for the brew. From another friend (this time a lady) I picked up the fact that the way to weaken your tea is not to pour more water into the tea-pot, but to dilute the beverage in the cup.

A small matter you say; but the art of making tea is composed of these small delicacies. What, for example, could seem a matter of more indifference than that of the order in which you pour the milk and the tea in the cup? Yet it is a capital point. Put the tea in first, and the virtue seems to have gone out of the cup; put the milk in first, and the subtle law of the art is observed. And the proportion of milk must be exact; you cannot add to it afterwards and get the same effect.

I pass by such fundamental points as the selection of the right tea for the water and the duty of pouring off the tea quickly so as to catch the first fine rapture of the leaf. But I hope I have said enough to set tongues wagging on this fruitful subject, and enough to win the respect (perhaps even the envy) of Mr. Arnold Bennett. I don't mind confessing that that is the reason I am writing this article. I am weary of the omniscience of Mr. Bennett. I am humiliated by the sense of the number of things I don't know or can't do when I am in his presence or read his books. If I did not love him I should hate him. I should write to the papers to denounce him as a charlatan. I should guy his pictures and scoff at his books and make fun of his criticisms about this, that and the other and quote slighting things about Jacks-of-all-trades and generally make myself unpleasant. But since I love him I content myself with saying firmly and even defiantly, that I have ideas on the art and science of tea-making, too. True, I have never made it, but I could make it at a pinch.