Another persistent “nostril memory,” as I have said, is that of the orange. It is a curious one. Of a certainty I must have eaten of the golden apple many a time before that notable night when I was first taken to a theatre. And yet it is invariably that delirious occasion which is recalled, for however fleeting a moment, when the bursting of the essential oil cells of an orange peel sends forth its fragrance.
The drama was “Bas-de-Cuir”—an adaptation of Fenimore Cooper’s Red Indian tale “Leather Stocking.” When I say that the part of “Leather Stocking” was taken by Frederic Lemaitre—personified genius of the old Romantic Melodrama!—that the playhouse was Les Folies Dramatiques—it will be patent to anyone familiar with the annals of the Paris stage that I refer to a very distant period. I could not have been more than eight years old. In those days, apparently, the custom, delectable to the boys if less so to their elders, of consuming oranges between the acts had not yet fallen into desuetude.
It is very odd. There are as we know a large number of recognized methods of eating an orange: from the elaborate and super-epicurean Japanese dissection within the skin, which removes every pellicule and every pip out of the fruit, preparatory to “spooning” the pure pulp, with or without sugar, down to the simple suction known as “Mattie’s way.” Whatever be the process, the effect never fails if I stand by: as sure as the first puff of fresh orange peel meets me, so is my mind instantly brought back to some scene connected with “Leather Stocking”; to some sense of the very first dramatic emotion ever known—the silent laughter of the trapper; the faint, distant war yell of the Huron; the darting of the bark canoe down the rapid; the crack of a gun: the flare of the camp fire—what not? It is, of course, but a transient flash now, but there it always starts, harking, for a second or so, back half a century in the middle of completely unrelated thoughts and in surroundings the least likely to evoke the past—in the silence of a sick bedside, or amid the hot dustiness of a holiday crowd; or even, at dessert time, in the company of some fair neighbour whose young, healthy powers of table enjoyment enable her to conclude a regular dinner with a whole orange eaten in the appreciative and fragrant manner known as à la Maltaise.
Scent alone, and that only for a second at a time, possesses this fantastic power. The taste of marmalade, for instance, is fraught with no special memories. As for the pleasure of sight in connexion with the orange, it is now concentrated upon the half-dozen trees—in pots, but bravely bearing year by year their little burden of fruit destined to grow for purely ornamental and “Italian” effect within doors at the Villino.
What a marvel would an orange be considered, had it not become an object of our everyday life! We take it as a matter of course; but how much poorer would the world suddenly seem if oranges became henceforth unobtainable! And the lemon! If lemons cost a guinea apiece, I once heard a physician say who had a special experience of its wide-reaching healing powers, then would mankind appreciate the treasure it has at hand! One-half of its being, and by no means the less important, the rind, is deplorably neglected. We deal with it as with a practically worthless husk. If we more generally understood the value of its ethereal oil, we might save ourselves many a spell of unaccountable physical depression. I can personally testify to numerous instances of feverish bouts cured solely by a hot decoction of lemon zest.
A similar virtue, by the way, seems to reside in the leaves of the Citrus Limonum. In southern countries—especially, I am told, in Spanish America—these leaves are obtainable in the dry state, and used as a febrifuge and alternative “tea,” or rather tisane, with marked results.
XIII
THE INVALUABLE ONION