The Crow’s-Nest
The Crow’s-Nest
By
Mrs. Everard Cotes
(_Sara Jeannette Duncan_)
Author of “An American Girl in London,”
“A Social Departure,” etc.
[Illustration]
New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1901
COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
_The Crow’s-Nest_
CHAPTER I
There is an attraction about carpets and curtains, chairs and sofas,
and the mantelpiece which is hard to explain, and harder to resist. I
feel it in all its insidious power this morning as I am bidding them
farewell for a considerable time; I would not have believed that a
venerable Axminster and an arm-chair on three casters could absorb
and hold so much affection; verily I think, standing in the door, it
was these things that made Lot’s wife turn her unlucky head. Dear me,
how they enter in, how they grow to be part of us, these objects of
ordinary use and comfort that we place within the four walls of the
little shelters we build for ourselves on the fickle round o’ the
world! I have gone back, I have sat down, I will not be deprived of
them; they are necessary to the courage with which every one must face
life. I will consider nothing without a cushion, on the hither side of
the window, braced by dear familiar bookshelves, and the fender. And
Tiglath-Pileser has come, and has quoted certain documents, and has
used gentle propulsive force, and behold, because I am a person whose
contumacy cannot endure, the door is shut, and I am on the outside
disconsolate.
I would not have more sympathy than I can afterwards sustain; I am
only banished to the garden. But the banishment is so definite, so
permanent! Its terms are plain to my unwilling glance, a long cane deck
chair anchored under a tree. Overhead the sky, on the four sides the
sky, without a pattern, full of wind and nothing. Abroad the landscape,
consisting entirely of large mountains; about, the garden. I never
regarded a garden with more disfavour. Here I am to remain--but to
_remain_! The word expands, you will find, as you look into it. Man,
and especially woman, is a restless being, made to live in houses
roaming from room to room, and always staying for the shortest time
moreover, if you notice, in the one which is called the garden. The
subtle and gratifying law of arrangement that makes the drawing-room
the only proper place for afternoon tea operates all through. The
convenience of one apartment, the quiet of another, the decoration of
another regularly appeal in turn, and there is always one’s beloved
bed, for retirement when the world is too much with one. All this I am
compelled to resign for a single fixed fact and condition, a cane chair
set in the great monotony of out-of-doors. My eye, which is a captious
organ, is to find its entertainment all day long in bushes--and grass.
All day long. Except for meals it is absolutely laid down that I am
not to “come in.” They have not locked the doors, that might have
been negotiated, they have gone and put me on my honour. From morning
until night I am to sit for several months and breathe, with the grass
and the bushes, the beautiful pure fresh air. I don’t know why they
have not asked me to take root and be done with it. In vain I have
represented that microbes will agree with them no better than with
me; it seems the common or house microbe is one of the things that I
particularly mustn’t have. Some people are compelled to deny themselves
oysters, others strawberries or artichokes; my fate is not harder than
another’s. Yet it tastes of bitterness to sit out here in an April wind
twenty paces from a door behind which they are enjoying, in customary
warmth and comfort, all the microbes there are.
I have consented to this. I have been wrought upon certainly, but I
have consented. For all that, it is not so simple as it looks. It is my
occupation to write out with care and patience the trifles the world
shows me, revolving as it does upon its axis before every intelligent
eye; and I cannot be divorced from all that is upholstered and from my
dear occupation by the same decree. And how, I ask you, how observe
life from a cane chair under a tree in a garden! There is the beautiful
pure fresh air certainly, and there are the things coming up. But
what, tell me, can you extract from air beside water; and though a
purely vegetable romance would be a novelty, could I get it published?
Tiglath-Pileser has contributed to my difficulty a book of reference, a
volume upon the coleoptera of the neighbourhood, and I am to take care
of it. I am taking the greatest care of it, but I do not like to hand
it back to him with the sentiments I feel in case one fine day I should
be reduced to coleoptera and thankful to get them.
Nevertheless I have no choice, I cannot go forth in the world’s ways
and see what people are doing there, I must just sit under my tree and
think and consider upon the current facts of a garden, the bursting
buds I suppose and the following flowers, the people who happen that
way and the ideas the wind brings; the changes of the seasons--there’s
fashion after all in that--the behaviour of the ants and earwigs; oh, I
am encouraged, in the end it will be a novel of manners!
Besides, there ought to be certain virtues, if one could find them, in
_plein air_, for scribbling as well as for painting. One’s head always
feels particularly empty in a garden, but that is no reason why one
should not see what is going on there, and if one’s impressions are a
trifle incoherent--the wind does blow the leaves about--they will be on
that account all the more impressionistic.
Yet it is _not_ so simple as it looks. In such a project everything
depends, it will be admitted, upon the garden; it must be a tolerably
familiar, at least a conceivable spot. The garden of Paradise, for
instance, who would choose it as a _point de repaire_ from which to
observe the breed of Adam at the beginning of the twentieth century?
One would be interrupted everywhere by the necessity of describing
the flora and fauna; it would be like writing a botany book with
interpolations which would necessarily seem profane; and the whole
thing would be rejected in the end because it was not a scientific
treatise upon the origin of apples. Certainly, if one might select
one’s plot, the first consideration should be the geographical, and I
am depressed to think that my garden is only less remote than Eve’s.
It is not an English garden--ah, the thought!--nor a French one where
they count the seeds and the windfalls, nor an Italian one sunning
down past its statues to the blue Adriatic, nor even a garden in the
neighbourhood of Poughkeepsie where they grow pumpkins. Elizabeth in
her German garden was three thousand miles nearer to everybody than my
cane chair is at this moment. How can I possibly expect people to come
three thousand miles just to sit and talk under my pencil-cedar? So
“long” an invitation requires such confidence, such assurance!
Who indeed should care to hear about every day as it goes on under
a conifer in a garden, when that garden--let me keep it back no
longer--is a mere patch on a mountain top of the Himalayas? Not even
India down below there, grilling in the sun which is not quite warm
enough here--that would be easy with snakes and palm-trees and mangoes
and chutneys all growing round, ready and familiar; but Simla, what is
Simla? An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand
feet out of the world to be cool. Who ever leaves Charing Cross for
Simla? Who among the world’s multitudes ever casts an eye across the
Rajputana deserts to Simla? Does Thomas Cook know where Simla is? No;
Simla is a geographical expression, to be verified upon the map and
never to be thought of again, and a garden in Simla is a vague and
formless fancy, a possibility, no more.
Yet people have to live there, I have to live there; and certainly for
the next few months I have to make the best of it from the outside. If
you ask yourself what you really think of a garden you will find that
you consider it a charming place to go out into. So much I gladly admit
if you add the retreat and background of the house. The house is such
an individual; such a friend! Even in Simla the house offers corners
where may lurk the imagination, nails on which to hang a rag of fancy;
but in this windy patch under the sky surrounded by Himalayas, one
Himalaya behind another indefinitely, who could find two ideas to rub
together?
Also my cane chair is becoming most pitiably weary; it aches in every
limb. The sun was poor and pale enough; now it has gone altogether, a
greyness has blown out of Thibet, my fingers are almost too numb to
say how cold it is. The air is full of an apprehension of rain--if
it rains do you suppose I am to come in? Indeed no, I am to have an
umbrella. Uncomforted, uncomfortable fate! I wish it would rain; I
could then pity myself so profoundly, so abjectly, I would lie heroic,
still and stoic; and at the appointed time I would take my soaking,
patient person into the house with a trail of drops, pursued by Thisbe
with hot-water bottles, which I would reject, to her greater compassion
and more contrition. And in the morning it would be a queer thing if I
couldn’t produce rheumatism somewhere. Short of rain, however, it will
be impossible to give a correct and adequate impression of the bald
inhospitality of out-of-doors. They will think I want to be pitied and
admired, and Thisbe will say, “But didn’t you really enjoy it--just a
little?”
Walls are necessary to human happiness--that I can asseverate.
Tiglath-Pileser, in bringing me to this miserable point, argued that
I should experience the joys of primitive man when he took all nature
for his living-room; subtle, long-lost sensations would arise in me, he
said, of such a persuasive character that in the end I should have to
combat the temptation to take entirely to the woods. I expect nothing
of the kind. My original nomad is too far away, I cannot sympathize
with him in his embryotic preferences across so many wisest centuries.
Moreover, if the poor barbarian had an intelligent idea it was to get
under shelter, and that is the only one, doubtless, for which we have
to thank him.
The windows are blank; they think it kindest, I suppose, not to appear
to find entertainment in my situation. It is certainly wisest; if
Thisbe showed but the tip of her pretty nose I should throw it up.
The windows are blank, the door is shut, but hold--there is smoke
coming out of the drawing-room chimney! Thisbe has lighted unto
herself a fire and is now drawn up around it awaiting the tea-things.
The house as an ordinary substantive is hard enough to resist, but
the-house-with-a-fire! No, I cannot. Besides it is already half-past
four and I was to come in at five to tea. I will obey the spirit and
scorn the letter of the law--I will go in now.