room in which I had been working no breeze entered. Though September had
but a quarter more of its course to run, it was like some sultry July
midnight, portending storm, for when I went out to take the night-breath
the sky was thickly overcast, so that no direct ray either of moonlight
or of starshine, came earthwards. The serrated outline of the elms at
the end of the lawn was scarce distinguishable against the scape of the
clouds, and the low land of the water-meadows was blanketed in a mist
that was only just visible by its whiteness against the black blot of
the hills behind. Fifi, who had very sensibly decided to sleep on the
veranda, did not stir when I came out, though I heard the instinctive
thump of her short tail on the tiles, the natural politeness of the dear
dog, though she really could not stand on ceremony with me to the length
of getting up. So, maliciously, I am afraid, since I thought this
slightly cavalier conduct, I said ‘Puss,’ though there was no Puss of
any sort, as far as I was aware. But my malice was again thwarted, for
Fifi just tapped again with her tail, in courteous recognition of a
stale old joke, just to show that she appreciated my intention, but she
made not the smallest further effort towards activity.
So she was half asleep, and all the world, this dear, blessed world,
which is so full of merriness and simple, innocent pleasure, despite the
fulminations of fashionable priests, was quite asleep, not stirring,
scarcely breathing, just sleeping, sleeping. It was not yet the hour
when, just before the hold of the night begins to tremble and be
weakened in the sky, all living things wake for a moment--that
mysterious moment, when sheep take a bite of grass and cows twitch their
grave ears, and horses stand up for a minute before they settle down to
the light morning sleep which dissolves with day, and when even indoors,
if you sleep with a dog in your room, and happen yourself to be awake,
you will hear a stretching of limbs on your bed or on the carpet, and a
long sigh breathed into the blankets. Plants and flowers, so I truly
believe, feel the same thing; and though there may be no wind
perceptible to you if you are abroad, as sometimes I am, at that hour,
you will hear, just at the moment when cattle move and sheep take their
bite of grass, a stir go through the trees, and a hushed whisper lisp in
the flower-beds. At that moment, too (you need not credit this, though
it is absolutely true), though it has rained all night till then, and
will rain thereafter, steadily, soakingly till morning, the rain ceases,
as suddenly as if a tap was turned off. Time and again I have tested
that.
But, as I have said, that mysterious moment was not due yet. It was
still two hours short of it, and everything was still asleep. Even in
the last minute or two Fifi had fallen fast asleep, too, after I had sat
down in a wicker chair on the veranda, for when I called her there was
no tap of response. To-night, too, the sleep of the world seemed to me
(feeling it as one does by that sixth sense, which still exists dormant
in us, and is most awake at night) to be extraordinarily deep. It was
the sleep of a world that was very tired with this long hot summer.
There seemed no pulse stirring in it at all, as you may find it stir in
the light sleep in which Nature indulges in June, or still more in the
dark, wet nights of spring, when the secret boiling up of life begins
again from hidden root to budding tendril, so that if you lay your ear
to the trunk of a tree it seems that the effervescence of the young year
is audible, and sings within it, even as the telegraph poles are
resonant with the wind that hums in the wires. Nor could I hear, when I
rose and walked across the lawn, even though the dew was heavy on the
grass, the hiss of startled worms, withdrawing from the approaching
footfall. Black, too, and lifeless, was the oblong of the house except
where the lights burned in the room in which I had been trying to be
honest. The long herbaceous hedge was black, the lawn was black, Helen’s
windows and Legs’ were black.
I went back to the seat I had just left, and lit a cigarette, meaning to
go upstairs to bed when I had smoked it. Fifi still lay motionless,
though generally any excursion into the garden at any time of day or
night sets her scampering. And then, quite suddenly, quite unexpectedly,
for nothing was further from my thoughts, I became aware that, though
the physical world was asleep, there was some enormous stir and activity
going on in the occult world which surrounds and permeates us. Yet that
is perhaps a wrong expression, for the same activity and stir always
goes on in that unsleeping realm; and I must express it more accurately
by saying that the part of me which was able to perceive it was suddenly
quickened. It is possible, of course, since I confess to being able to
go to sleep whenever I choose, and often without delay, when I do not,
that at that moment I fell asleep. But whether I fell asleep or not,
does not make the slightest difference, for there was clearly some part
of my brain awake, and it made my eyes think that they saw, and my ears
think that they heard, that which immediately followed.
As far as I am aware, in any case, I sat down again in a rather creaky
basket-chair and lit a cigarette. The match with which I lit it, I threw
on to the gravel path in front of me, and, since I required it no
further, it proceeded to burn prosperously. By its light I could see
Fifi with her nose between her paws. I saw, also, that my shoe-lace was
untied.
And then I heard my name called from the garden, in a voice that was
perfectly familiar to me, though for the moment I could not say, so
elusive is the ear, whose voice it was that called. It was not Helen’s,
it was not Legs’, it was not ... and then I remembered whose voice it
was. It called me by name, once only, in the voice that had said, ‘It is
from the cross that He smiles at us all.’
I do not think I was frightened, but simply for the purely personal
reason, that to me there was nothing to be frightened at. The match
still burned on the gravel path, so short had been the measurement of
this in the world of time, and I could still see Fifi’s nose buried
between her paws. Then she raised it, looked out into the garden with
terrified scrutinizing eyes, focussing them on something, invisible to
me, and gave one long howl. But there was no moon. It was at something
else she howled.
Then, I confess, as if some bomb had burst within me, terror flooded my
whole mind, submerging it, and I sprang up. Simultaneously I heard a
sort of strangled scream from the room above, and the scurry of unshod
feet overhead. Next moment the sound of an opening door came to my ears,
and a quick stumbling tread on the stairs. I ran indoors, and reached
the door leading from my room into the hall, just as the handle was
seized and shaken by someone on the other side of it, and Legs burst
into the room, his hair all tumbled and erect, and his face wearing such
a mask of terror that for the moment I recognized him only because it
must be he.
‘Who is that in the garden?’ he said. ‘Someone in white, who looked up
at my window? And Fifi howled at her.’
This would never do. Nerves, terror are the most infectious things in
the world, and unless I took steps, there would, I knew, be standing
here two babbling lunatics.
‘I was dozing in the veranda,’ I said, ‘and Fifi woke me by howling. She
woke you, too! Legs, don’t be an ass! Pull yourself together. If there
had been anything, I should have seen it.’
Legs was as white as a sheet. The whiteness somehow showed through his
freckled sun-tanned skin. He was swaying to and fro on his feet, as if
he would fall, and I put my arm around him, and deposited him in a
chair. Then I poured out a wineglassful of neat whisky.
‘Don’t speak another word till you have drunk that,’ I said. ‘Then I
shall count ten slowly, and then you may speak.’
Fifi had followed me in, and sat close to the door whimpering. With my
heart in my mouth and a perspiring forehead, I went across to the
window as I counted, shut and locked it, and pulled down the blind.
‘Nine, ten,’ I said.
A little colour had begun to come back to Leg’s face. He had drunk the
whisky, a beverage which he detested, like water, and the frozen fear of
his eyes was less biting. And then, as suddenly as it had come on, my
terror left me. Whatever it was that I had heard, whatever it was that
Legs had seen and Fifi perceived, there was nothing to terrify. Besides,
within myself, now that the cowardly disorder of my nerves had passed, I
believed I knew what it was that had made its presence so strangely
perceived by us all. The mortal suffering of a dear friend was over.
Already I was ashamed of having told Legs that I had been asleep and had
neither seen nor heard anything.
‘Legs, I lied just now,’ I said. ‘I heard my name called from the garden
in Margaret’s voice.’
‘You mean she is dead?’ asked he gently. ‘The last accounts had been
better, I thought.’
‘I’m sure she is.’
Then for a moment, like a sudden squall, the white terror passed over
Legs’ face again.
‘It was not her I saw,’ he said hoarsely; ‘it was Death. I thought she
had come for me. Fifi saw her too.’
I sat down on the arm of his chair.
‘Yes, old boy,’ I said, ‘I think that you and Fifi both saw some
manifestation of what I heard. But there is nothing to be frightened at.
But how was it you were at your window? You had gone to bed hours ago.’
‘I know, but I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and sat by the window.’
* * * * *
We sat there for some time after that, and by degrees Legs recovered
from his collapse, and soon, instead of terror, mere sleepiness invaded
his face. Once or twice he stifled a yawn, and at length he got up.
‘I am dead sleepy,’ he said. ‘I think I shall go to bed.’
‘You are not frightened any longer, are you?’ I asked.
Legs looked at me out of drooping eyelids, and he seemed puzzled.
‘Frightened? What about?’ he said. ‘Good-night.’
* * * * *
I was very late down next morning, and found that Helen and Legs had
nearly finished breakfast. As I came in he jumped up.
‘Ah, here he is!’ he cried. ‘Now, did you sit up very late last night?’
When he asked that I began to have some suspicion of what was coming
next.
‘Yes, very. Why?’
‘Well, were you talking to yourself? Helen and I both woke in the night,
and heard talking in your room. I had had some dream that frightened me,
and I nearly came downstairs for human companionship.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I was too sleepy. But--were you talking?’
‘No. You were dreaming. So was Helen. I may have groaned now and then
over proofs, but not more than that.’
* * * * *
Legs nodded at Helen.
‘I told you it was ghosts,’ he said.
‘And you heard voices too?’ I asked Helen.
‘Yes; at least, I thought so. But I was very sleepy. I thought also I
heard Fifi howl.’
* * * * *
So, you see, there is no corroboration of my story, and if I dreamed it
at all, or made it up, there is no one to whom I can appeal for
confirmation of its verity. But there is just this little bit of
evidence--namely, that though Legs had finished breakfast, he went on
drinking cup after cup of tea. When Helen left us he explained this to
me.
‘I woke with a mouth like a lime-kiln,’ he said--‘just as if I had been
drinking that dreadful whisky of yours. I drank most of my jug, too, and
they had to bring me more water to wash in.’
What happened last night, then, had been wiped clean off Legs’ brain
again. Whatever it was that he had seen, that which made him stumble
white-faced downstairs, had gone. But an hour or two later, while we
were out playing croquet in the garden, some faint echo of it, I think,
crossed him again. A telegram was brought out for me, which contained
what I knew it would contain, and I handed it to him when I had read
it. Then we went quietly indoors.
Just as we got into my room again, he said:
‘How odd that sensation is of feeling that something has happened
before! When you handed me the telegram, I felt I knew what was in it.
And during the last week she had been rather better, had she not?’
OCTOBER
The business of the dining-room carpet (a case of conscience makes the
whole world kin, so I confidently return to this matter) was settled
more beautifully than I had thought possible. I told Helen all about it,
and she said:
‘Thank goodness you tore the thing up! Dear, you _are_ such a silly ass!
There’s nothing whatever more to be said. You are, aren’t you?’
‘There’s nothing more to be said, I believe you remarked.’
‘Well, you may just say “Yes,”’ said she.
So I said ‘Yes.’ It was a variant of the woman’s last word, spoken by a
man instead.
‘There, now we’ll go and quarrel about the rose-garden,’ said she.
We went and quarrelled. She was flushed with triumph over making me say
‘Yes,’ and in consequence I got my way about several disputed points,
which to-day the darling thinks she chose herself.
The rose-garden is a design of unparalleled audacity, and when it grows
up, it will be nothing short of stupendous. For between us Helen and I
are territorial magnates, and beyond this house and garden, which are
hers, I am owner of two fields, and limitless possibilities. I bought
them a year ago, in a sudden flush of extravagance, and for six months
we maintained there (at staggering loss) a poultry-yard in one corner
and a cow over the rest. The original design, of course, was to make a
sound investment in land, which, in addition to the fathomless pleasure
of owning it, would keep us in butter, eggs, chickens to eat (not to
mention, as I hasten to do, savouries of chicken liver on toast), and
possibly beef. If one considers the question closely, it is difficult to
see how a cow can (1) give milk, and (2) give beef; but Helen, in
visionary enthusiasm, said we should have oxen as well, and why not pigs
in the farther corner? I did not at once see why not, and I bought the
two fields with the same unconcern as I should have bought a box of
matches, which yield so sure an enjoyment in the matter of lighting
cigarettes.
Then we both began to learn that, though we might be gardeners, we were
not farmers. The poultry-yard was (mistakenly, no doubt) erected at the
corner of the field nearest the house, and morning after morning we were
awakened at dead and timeless hours. Helen said that when a hen made a
long clucking noise, it meant she had laid an egg, and that, till the
thing became incredible, consoled me. For if she was right, it was clear
that hens laid invisible eggs, or that they were doing tiresome
conjuring tricks, and that the long-drawn crow meant, ‘I have laid an
egg, but see if you can find it. I am the mother of this disappearing
egg.’ We usually were not able to do so, but sometimes an egg was found
in a hedge, or in a ditch, which when found was totally uneatable,
except by the Chinese. Personally, I believe that by some unhappy
mischance we had bought celibate and barren poultry, whose customs drove
us daily nearer Bedlam; in fact, it the pig that was our hellebore.
The pig was not a pig, but a sow. She went mad, too--or so I must
believe--jumped the pigsty in the opposite corner, made a bee-line for
the poultry-yard, went through our beautiful wire-fencing as if it had
been a paper hoop in a circus, and ate two hens. The cock beat a
masterly retreat, and was never heard of again. The other four hens
followed him. And the sow, dripping with gore, lay down in the hen-house
and slept. Almost before she woke, she was sold for a song.
Then the cow came. I do not wish to libel her, but I think I may safely
say that she was milkless and excitable, and had a wild eye. She roamed
over my fields (mine, I had bought them) as if they were her own. Had
not Legs been so agile and swift, she might have tossed him. As it was,
she ran into the brick wall at the lower end of the garden, and made her
nose bleed. As far as I know, that was the only liquor that she parted
with. She was probably mad also, for she used to low in the middle of
the night, when all proper cows are fast asleep. Asleep or awake,
however, now she makes her fantasias elsewhere. I almost hope she is
dead, for it requires a larger optimism than I possess to believe that
she will ever become a proper cow, for she was more of a steed for
Mazeppa. Perhaps she was a horse after all, a horned horse. I wish we
had thought of that at the time. As it was, we sold her at outrageous
loss, as a cow. And with her we parted with any idea of keeping farmyard
animals for purposes of gain. Perhaps we were not serious enough about
it, and the animals saw that.
* * * * *
Through last spring and summer the fields rested after this invasion of
outrageous animals, and about the middle of May it struck Helen and me
simultaneously that we were going to have a crop of hay. That was
delightful, and much less harassing than hens. Hay would not wake one at
timeless hours, nor would it go mad, and have to be sold at a quarter of
the price we gave for it, since we gave nothing for it at all. It was
the pound of tea thrown in with the fields we had bought, or the _Times_
newspaper thrown in with your subscription to that extraordinary
library.
From this there was born the scheme of giving a haymaking party, to
which we originally planned to ask everybody we knew, amended that to
asking all the children we knew, and afterwards (this was Helen’s
amendment) decided not to ask anybody at all, partly because children
were so serious, but chiefly because there might not be enough hay to go
round. We neither of us knew how many square yards of hay it was
reasonable to supply to each person, and it would be dreadful if there
was not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us, would have to go
without, and it was safer to give the haymaking party to each other. We
were in town all May, and the first half of June, but had left word with
the gardener to send us a postcard when the hay was ready. The weather
throughout these weeks was gloriously sunny, and in our mind’s eye we
saw the crop growing taller and thicker with each blazing day.
Then one evening came the memorable postcard:
‘A reddy.’
We flew to the ‘A.’ In the middle of the largest field was a small
haycock like a penwiper. One not quite so large and round at the top,
more like a pincushion, was visible in the next field.
* * * * *
It was clear after this that the Powers that Are willed that our fields
should not be used for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception of the
rose-garden.
A brick wall (the one against which the insane cow had blooded her nose)
bounded the garden. From there the ground declined steeply away into the
middle of the larger field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising on
all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the cup, where the sugar is,
that the penwiper had been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps
made of broken paving-stones--an entrancing material--led down the side
of the cup from the garden-gate, and up the opposite slope. Standing
where the sugar is, therefore, you saw on every side of you rising
ground, which had been terraced, and walks of broken paving-stone,
communicating with the two staircases, lay concentrically round. And the
Herculean labour which had already occupied us so many rapturous
afternoons was to plant the whole cup with rose-trees, so that,
standing in the centre, there was nothing visible except sky and roses.
That was practically done; and to-day what occupied us was the
consideration of the level remainder of the field, of which there was
some half acre. It was rough, coarse grass, starred with dandelion,
which gave the first hint. We wanted to get rid of the dandelion,
and----
At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed together in a wheelbarrow an
infinity of bulbs, and other delectable roots. There were big onion-like
daffodils, neat crocuses with an impatient little yellow horn sticking
up, fritillary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of anemones, and
the orris of the iris. Then, trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs
taken haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with a bag of sand to make a
delectable sprouting-place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion
encountered was to be dug up with honesty and thoroughness, and where
the dandelion had been there was to be planted a bulb taken at random
out of the bag. Helen said it would take ten years. Personally, when I
looked, I thought longer, but I did not say so, for I practice reticence
on discouraging occasions.
I wonder how many people know the extraordinary delight of doing a thing
for oneself, starting from the beginning. I do not say that it gives me
the smallest pleasure to black my boots or brush my clothes, since
somebody has already made those boots and woven the cloth. But there is
nothing more entrancing than to deal first-hand with Nature, to make
holes in the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest back that we can
go with regard to vegetable life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a
pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy of creation itself.
Whether we write a book, or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we,
though we do not really create, but only arrange what is in existence
already, are going back as far as we can, taking just the root-thoughts
and translating them to song or shape. And though we do not really
create at all, but only use and arrange, as I have said, the already
existing facts of the world, passing them, it may be, through the
crucible of the mind, we get quite as near to Nature, if not nearer,
when we go a-bulb-planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pigments,
what you will, and when in spring-time we shall see them making a meadow
of Fra Angelico, it will be because we have actually planted these
things ourselves that the joy of creation will be ours. Not to do that
would be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas himself, but merely
dictated to a dependent where such a colour should be spread. But given
that he had a slave so intelligent and so obedient that he could follow
to a hair’s-breadth the directions given him, can you imagine the artist
feeling the possessive joy of creation in the result, even though it
realized the conception to the uttermost? Not I; nor, in the garden, do
I care, like that, to see what others have done. It is not sufficient to
direct; one has to do it oneself.
I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving, getting hot and dirty over
the wrestling with the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense is
talked about the dignity of labour, but it is chiefly talked by those
whose labour lies indoors, who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go
spudding about in the intangible realms of the mind. I doubt, indeed,
whether any market-gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of labour. We
leave that to those who only know it by repute. But I long to put down
the manner of the transaction. I do not in the least think it dignified,
but it is such fun.
* * * * *
The green had mostly faded from the grass, leaving the meadow, as is
always the case in October, far more grey than green. Certain plants,
however, were still of varnished brightness, and the dandelion leaf was
one. There was no need to pick and choose, and without moving a step, I
dug the trowel down into the earth, loosened it all round the vegetable
enemy, and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came from inches down in
the earth, which I tried to pretend I had not heard. But one could not
cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my excavation, was a milky
root, showing a danger-signal of white against the brown loam. I had to
go deeper yet: the whole of the tap-root must be exhumed. Another dig,
another snap, a raw-looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just in
time, and eventually up came the remotest fibre. How good the earth
smelt! How reeking with the life of the world! Cold, clammy, rich earth,
ever drawn upon by the needs of the Bank of Life, ever renewed by that
which life paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to the formation
of my trowelful, and a few inches below was the chalk, where a million
lives a million years ago had spent themselves on the square inch of it.
Slowly, by work of the myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was
heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became a myriad myriad, and here I
had the little lump of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel which
told of the labourers of the unnumbered years. Then, in a spoonful of
sand, I put the sign, the evidence of another decade of millions on the
top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-like daffodil root that was born
last year. In a fortnight’s time that child of to-day will have reached
downwards, feeling with delicate, pleased touch the sand of a thousand
years ago, will delve through the time of the pyramids of Egypt, will
draw moisture from the chalk that was old when our computation of time
was not yet born, and will blossom next April, feeding its sap on the
primeval years. And for what? To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh,
what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that
prospers a yard away.