UNDER THE GARDEN WALL.
NOT much time could we have together in the land of Goshen, where the
boils and blains of the ungodly world are not yet sprinkled in the
radiant air. Uncle Corny gave us for our honeymoon one week—which
has often proved much longer than the silver cord would stretch—but
we, intending all our lives to be of sparkling sweetness, cared very
little where we spent the hours, if only with each other. And perhaps
we scarcely deserved to be in a place so calmly beautiful, not so far
away as to take a cliff of money to get there, and yet having fine
brave crags of its own. Perhaps it may be found in ancient charts
as Baycliff, although it is such a quiet, homely place, without any
railway to advertise it, and I have seen some maps which were too
good to give the name. But they could not annihilate it by such petty
silence; and a pleasant seaside village is like a pleasing woman; the
less it is talked about the more it keeps its charms.
For my part, I could not see the need of going back in such hot haste
to Sunbury, dearly as I loved that desirable village. For here were
many things that we could never have there, the level space and leisure
of the many-coloured sea, the majesty of cliffs white-browed with
centuries of tempest, the gliding of white sails across the gleaming
ruffle of the cove, and the crisp, elastic sands that kept the fairy
trace of Kitty’s feet close to my great clumsy prints.
“Let us steal another week,” I said; “it is but a fleeting holiday, and
we shall never know such a time again.”
But my beloved, growing dearer every day, if that could be, gave good
advice, against her own delight, that we should not begin our married
life with selfishness. We had been so kindly treated that we must not
slur our gratitude, and forget our duties in our joys.
“And I want to see our little home,” she said, to make the best of it;
“the house that is to be all our own; where I shall keep you in order,
Kit, and make you as happy as the day is long.”
So with many a backward glance, we left that bower of bliss, and
returned to the world of work and action. And when we found what had
been done, to welcome and to please us, we could not help confessing
that our virtue was well rewarded. For Honeysuckle Cottage looked as
bright and fresh as sunrise, and the first half of May is not the time
to find much fault with nature. The earth was damp and clammy yet,
in places where the wind and sun could not get fairly into it; and
the spring was late and shivered still among the gaps it had to stop.
For one might look through a big tree yet, and see a lamp in the road
beyond it; and many of those that were being scarfed wore spangles
rather than patins. And people, who pay little heed, might stop in
doubt—if they stopped at all—and wonder if what they saw coming might
prove in the end to be a blossom or a leaf.
In our little house I had the bud, the blossom, and the fruit combined.
The bud of youth scarce come to prime, the blossom of fair womanhood,
and the fruit of sweet and golden peace, not sleepy, but sprightly
flavoured. It was a fair view from the window, but inside ten times as
fair, without the chance of adverse weather nipping hope and bright
content.
An ancient writer (whom I had just been scholar enough to understand,
when he is easy, in his native tongue) assures us that this perfect
state is never long allowed by Heaven. According to him, and others
whom he considers wiser than himself, all the powers that govern man
are stung with envy when they see him happier than he ought to be.
Generally they take good care to have no occasion for this grudge;
but when, by any slip of theirs, a mortal has attained such pitch of
comfort and prosperity, there is no peace in Olympus, till this robber
of delight is crushed. And the more he has flourished and rejoiced, the
deeper shall his misery be.
Having only thirty shillings a week, without counting our presents
which had been put by, and paying five and sixpence out of that for the
rent and rates of our small Paradise, we scarcely can have affronted
Heaven by any gorgeous insolence. And without daring to impugn the
wisdom of true philosophers, I venture still to hold by that which we
find in larger and nobler Writ, that when the Heavenly Power stoops to
cut off our brief happiness, it is to make it more abiding, where there
is no brevity.
But we did not think of such things then; and who would be sad enough
to say that we were bound to do so? Care would come quite soon enough,
we did not care to beckon him. He must have been a doleful wight, and
born with black crape round his eyes, who could have looked at my merry
Kitty, without catching her bright smile. In the morning, when I went
to work, I carried it with me like a charm, and whenever I came back at
night, it put my memory to the blush.
For we had settled with one accord, that until I had overtaken the
large arrears of work which had lapsed behind through my long illness
and absence, there should be no time lost by any return for early
dinner. And this was better for my wife too, inasmuch as she had only
Polly Tompkins to assist her, the eldest daughter of Selsey Bill, a
very clean and tidy girl, but of small experience in cookery. I was
busy at a long peach-wall, not the red-brick one, but further down,
and the trees being large and sadly out of order, patient as well as
skilful hands were required urgently. There was a very fine crop yet
unthinned, feeble wood to be removed, robber shoots to be docked or
tamed, green-fly to be dipped or dusted, and all the other crying needs
of neglected trees to be made good. And Kitty used to appear exactly
as the old church clock struck one, with a basket of bread and meat, a
pint of ale, and a pipe filled by her own fair hands, which she used to
light for me, and then trip home, singing merrily among the trees, to
see to the business of the afternoon.
Dare anybody tell me that a wife like this would leave her dear husband
of her own accord, without a word, without a letter, leave him to
wonder, and mourn, and rage, and despair of his own life and hers? Yet
this is what all the world believed, and impressed upon me, till my
spirit failed.
“Now this is all very fine,” exclaimed my uncle, as he came round the
corner of the wall one day, and caught me in the very act of hugging
Kitty, as she was preparing to light my pipe. She was looking up and
laughing, and pretending to pull my hair, when the deepening of her
blush showed that an enemy was nigh. “This is all very fine; but how
long will it last? How many quarrels have you had already? I suppose
you are making up one of them now.”
“Uncle Corny, you are a disgrace,” cried Kitty, “a disgrace to the name
of humanity. Mayn’t I even whisper in my husband’s ear, without being
accused of quarrelling? We have never had a single word. Have we, Kit?”
“Then perhaps you will now. Here’s a telegram for you. I was going to
send Kit home with it. But as you are so uncommonly close together,
why, it saves the trouble. Hope some of your enemies are dead, my dear.”
“Hush! Don’t be so wicked,” she said, as she handed it to me, and I
opened it with my pruning-knife, and held it for her to read first. But
this required our united efforts, for it was badly written, as so often
happens, and some of the words were run together. At last we made it
out as follows:—
“Spoke _All Kites_ off Scilly May 7th. Captain Fairshort desires love
and best wishes to his daughter. Will be away two years perhaps. From
Jenkins, s.s. _Hibernia_, Falmouth.”
“_All Kites!_” said my uncle, who had read some of the Georgics, as
rendered by Dryden with lofty looseness, but never a line of Horace;
“what a name for a ship, if it is a ship! Kitty, my dear, is that the
proper word?”
“No, Uncle Corny, it should be _Archytas_. I am not sure who he was,
but rather think that he must have been a king of Sparta.”
“I know who he was,” I said, to show how much I had learned at Hampton,
though I never was much of a hand at Horace, and had only found this
out in the dictionary; “a great man of science, who measured the seas,
and the sand, and all that, but could not get to heaven, because nobody
would throw a pinch of dust upon his body. And he lay upon the shore,
imploring somebody to do it.”
“If he could call out, he could have done it for himself,” replied my
uncle, who was not poetical. “Serve him right, at any rate, for having
such a name. But I hope that your father won’t do that, my dear.”
“I think it was very kind of him, when he could not help going, and was
far away at sea, to get this kind captain of a ship they met, if we
understand it properly, to send me this farewell message from the deep.
And it makes my mind ever so much more comfortable, because I shall
have another message by-and-by, I dare say. If he meets one ship he
must meet others: and I shall always have a good idea where he is, and
have my mind relieved, when there has been a stormy night. Thank you,
Uncle Corny, you have brought me pleasant news. Kit, it is high time
for you to go on with your wall.”
In this sort of way, by making the best of everything, and thanking
everybody, even if they did not mean to do her any good, she
established in a week a sweet dominion, not over us, but within us. My
uncle, though he liked to have his little cut at her—for old men treat
young ladies as chicks to be carved—got into the habit of coming up
every night of his life to have his pipe at Honeysuckle Cottage. It may
seem very ungrateful of me, and I now feel ashamed when I think of it,
but after being hard at work all day, and having a bit of cold duck
under the wall, I thought that I might have been allowed when I came
home to tell my dear wife all my thoughts about her, and how many times
I had hammered my thumb-nail through that. But there Uncle Corny sat,
carrying on, as if I had cut off my tongue with my pruning-knife!
Kitty used to laugh, and ask me who was jealous now. But I answered,
with good reason, that the case was widely different. Miss Sally
Chalker never crossed her legs, and sat with a long pipe blowing over a
supper-table, neither did she go on talking, as if I were nobody; but
rather put me foremost, even when Kitty herself was present, and asked
what my opinion was, before she gave her own almost.
However, I made the best of my uncle’s conduct at our cottage; for it
was not only my duty, but my important interest to do so. What was to
become of us if Uncle Corny (who might be called a huffy man, and
stuck to a huff, whenever he contracted it) should take it into his
head that I was not what he used to take me for? I know that he was
full of truth and justice, according to his own view of them; but if
anything went against his liking, so did truth and justice. So I had to
sink my opinions often, even when they agreed with his, for he never
liked to have them put into any other language than his own. Kitty was
clever enough to see this, and she always praised me afterwards; but
it went against one’s sense of right, that she might say exactly what
I had said, and from her lips it became true wisdom, when it had been
simple silliness from mine. But Kitty smiled at him, and laughed at me,
and went into his heart more deeply every time she filled his pipe.
Then a new anxiety arose, and Uncle Corny had more than he could do to
lay down the law for his own affairs. The wind went into the east, with
a hard blue sky, and not a cloud in it. We had passed the date of the
“icy Saints,” as they are called in Germany, when a cold wave of air
is said to flow over hundreds of leagues of smiling land, and smite it
all into one dark frown. If I can remember, without an almanac, that
date is about the seventh of May; but I have never found it quite so
punctual here; and according to my observation, the bloom of England
hovers in nightly peril, from the middle of April to the very end of
May. It is one of the many sad things we meet, but can only fold our
hands and watch, that for nearly six weeks of the year, and in early
seasons even more, through all our level southern lands, the fruit-crop
trembles on the hazard of a single night’s caprice. The bright sun
and the lovely day delude the folk who know no better; these are the
very things that lead to the starry night, and the quiet cold, and the
white sheet over the grass at five a.m., and the black death following.
The barren grower walks between his rows of wounded blossom; there is
little harm to be seen at first, some of the petals are as fair as
ever, others are just tipped with brown; and perhaps his wife runs up
and says—“Oh, you need not be in a fright, my dear; why, they all look
as well as ever.”
But he, with deeper wisdom, and the smile of prophetic silence, pulls
out his budding-knife, and nips the fairest truss he can find of bloom.
Then he lays it in his palm, and haply with keen edge bisects the pips.
A keener edge has been there before him; a little black line passes up
from the baby stalk to the pistil. The ovary is dead and shrunken,
though the anthers still may be tipped with pink. Never shall a fruit
grow there, to swell and stripe itself with sun, to flood a plate with
sprightly juice, and in its dissolution hear some sweet voice say—“Oh,
I never did taste such a lovely pear!”
All these horrors threatened now, in spite of the lateness of the
spring. In a forward spring, they more than threaten, they come down
and smash everything. But being now so late, we began to have some
confidence, misplaced as it might be, in the meaning of the sky. And
now for the wind to go back to the east (after living there so many
months, that it ought to be downright sick of it), and the sun to go
down red and clear, like a well-grown turnip-radish, and the stars to
come out small and sharp like a lot of glaziers’ diamonds, and the
mercury in the thermometer to drop, as if the bulb had been tapped
about six o’clock, and scarcely a breath of wind to stir the fans of
radiation—it was more than enough to make any grower fetch a groan at
the day when himself was grown.
But my uncle was not of the groaning order, neither did he even
hang himself; as one of our very best neighbours did, when he saw
his thermometer at twenty-two degrees, one radiant May morning; but
his wife, who could enter into his feelings, cut him down with a
gooseberry-knife, and enabled him to grow out of it. My uncle used to
read the gardening papers; which always bloom with fine advice; and one
of them had lately been telling largely how, in Continental vineyards,
these cold freaks of heaven are met by the sacrificial smoke of earth.
To wit, a hundred pyres are raised of the rakings and refuse of the
long vine-alleys, and ready for kindling on the frosty verge. Then a
wisp of lighted straw is applied to each, when the sparkling shafts of
frost impend, and a genial smoke is wafted through, and Sagittarius
has his eyes obscured. I told my uncle that this was rubbish, at least
as regarded our level lands; though it might be of service upon a
hillside. That if there were wind enough to spread the smoke, there
must also be enough to prevent the hoar-frost, which alone need be
feared at this season. But he told me to stick to what I understood;
for these scientific things were beyond me, and my business was to tend
the fires.
But in spite of all this brave talk, he was afraid of casting a slur
upon his old experience by a new experiment. For the British workman
disdains new ideas, and there was not a man upon our place but would
say that the governor was turned cranky, if he got any inkling of this
strange scheme.
“I shall have all the stuff put there,” said Uncle Corny, “ready for
lighting, when they are gone. Those thick-heads will never suspect that
I want to do anything more than burn up the weeds, as we generally do
at this time of the year. Then as soon as we see the danger coming, you
and I will go out and attend to it, my boy. Not that I place any great
faith in it, although it seems very sensible, to those who understand
the principles, which young fellows cannot be supposed to do. At any
rate, I mean to try it. It can do no harm, if it does no good. You
need not say another word; but do just what I tell you. I wasn’t born
yesterday, as you ought to know by this time.”
I knew that well; for it takes many years to root a man into such
obstinacy. As a rule, I was much more inclined to give fair trial to
anything new than he was, and much more ready to risk money on it. But
this would cost nothing, except a little work, and that I could not
grudge him. So I told my dear wife not to be uneasy, if I did not come
home till after dark some night, for our doings depended of course
upon the weather; and the quarter of young pear-trees, which my uncle
meant to smoke, was the furthest part almost of all the premises from
Honeysuckle Cottage. Kitty smiled, and said she would come down and
see it, and roast a potato or two for our supper, and we would go home
together, when the work was done, and make Uncle Corny come with us.
Alas, how differently it all turned out!