A GARDEN OF PEACE
A Medley In Quietude
By F. Frankfort Moore
Author of “The Jessamy Bride,” Etc
With Illustrations
New York: George H. Doran Company
1920
[Illustration: 0001]
[Illustration: 0008]
[Illustration: 0009]
TO
DOROTHY
ROSAMUND, FRANCIE, OLIVE, MARJORIE, URSULA
A GARDEN OF PEACE
CHAPTER THE FIRST
Dorothy frowns slightly, but slightingly, at the title; but when
challenged to put her frown into words she has nothing worse to say
about it than that it has a certain catchpenny click--the world is
talking about The Peace and she has an impression that to introduce
the word even without the very definite article is an attempt to derive
profit from a topic of the hour--something like backing a horse with a
trusty friend for a race which you have secret information it has won
five minutes earlier--a method of amassing wealth resorted to every day,
I am told by some one who has tried it more than once, but always just
five minutes too late.
I don't like Dorothy's rooted objection to my literary schemes, because
I know it to be so confoundedly well rooted; so I argue with her,
assuring her that literary men of the highest rank have never shown any
marked reluctance to catch the pennies that are thrown to them by the
public when they hit upon a title that jingles with the jingle of the
hour. To descend to an abject pleasantry I tell her that a taking title
is not always the same as a take-in title; but, for my part, even if it
were----
And then I recall how the late R. D. Blackmore (whose works, by the way,
1 saw in a bookseller's at Twickenham with a notice over them--“by a
local author”) accounted for the popularity of _Lorna Doone_: people
bought it believing that it had something to do with the extremely
popular engagement--“a Real German Defeat,” Tenniel called it in his
_Punch_ cartoon--of the Marquis of Lorne and the Princess Louise. And
yet so far from feeling any remorse at arriving at the Temple of Fame
by the tradesman's entrance, he tried to get upon the same track again
a little later, calling his new novel _Alice Lorraine_: people were
talking a lot about Alsace-Lorraine at the time, as they have been doing
ever since, though never quite so loudly as at the present moment (I
trust that the publishers of the novel are hurrying on with that new
edition).
But Dorothy's reply comes pat: If Mr. Blackmore did that, all she can
say is that she doesn't think any the better of him for it; just what
the Sabbatarian Scotswoman said when the act of Christ in plucking the
ears of corn on the Sabbath Day was brought under her ken.
“My dear,” I cry, “you shouldn't say that about Mr. Blackmore: you seem
to forget that his second name was Doddridge, and I think he was fully
justified in refusing to change the attractive name of his heroine of
the South Downs because it happened to catch the ears (and the pence)
of people interested in the French provinces which were pinched by the
Germans, who added insult to injury by transforming Alsace-Lorraine to
Elsass-Lothringen. And so far as my own conscience is concerned----”
“Your own what?” cried Dorothy.
“My own conscience--_literary_ conscience, of course.”
“Oh, that one? Well?”
“I say, that so far as--as--as I am concerned, I would not have shrunk
from calling a book _A Garden in Tipperary_ if I had written it a few
years ago when all England and a third of France were ringing with the
name Tipperary.
“Only then it would have been a Garden of War, but now it suits
you--your fancy, to make it a Garden of Peace.”
“It's not too late yet; if you go on like this, I think I could manage
to introduce a note of warfare into it and to make people see the
appropriateness of it as well; so don't provoke me.”
“I will not,” said Dorothy, with one of her perplexing smiles.
And then she became interesting; for she was ready to affirm that every
garden is a battlefield, even when it is not run by a husband and his
wife--a dual system which led to the most notorious horticultural fiasco
on record. War, according to Milton, originated in heaven, but it has
been carried on with great energy ever since on earth, and the first
garden of which there is a literary record maintained the heavenly
tradition. So does the last, which has brought forth fruit and flowers
in abundance through the slaughter of slugs, the crushing of snails, the
immolation of leather-jackets, the annihilation of 'earwigs, and is now
to be alluded to as a Garden of Peace, if you please.
Dorothy con be very provoking when she pleases and is wearing the right
sort of dress; and when she has done proving that the most ancient
tradition of a garden points to a dispute not yet settled, between the
man and his wife who were running it, she begins to talk about the awful
scenes that have taken place in gardens. We have been together in a
number of gardens in various parts of the world: from those of the
Borgias, where, in the cool of the evening, Lucrezia and her relations
communed on the strides that the science and art of toxicology was
making, on to the little Trianon where the diamond necklace sparkled in
the moonlight on the eve of the rising of the people against such folk
as Queens and Cardinals--on to the gardens of the Temple, where the
roses were plucked before the worst of the Civil Wars of England
devastated the country--on to Cherry' Orchard, near Kingston in the
island of Jamaica, where the half-breed Gordon concocted his patriotic
treason which would have meant the letting loose of a jungle of savages
upon a community of civilisation, and was only stamped out by the firm
foot of the white man on whose shoulders the white man's burden was
laid, and who snatched his fellow-countrymen from massacre at the
sacrifice of his own career; for party government, which has been the
curse of England, was not to be defrauded of its prey because Governor
Eyre had saved a colony from annihilation. These are only a few of the
gardens in which we have stood together, and Dorothy's memory for their
associations is really disconcerting. I am disconcerted; but I wait, for
the wisdom of the serpent of the Garden comes to me at times--I wait,
and when I have the chance of that edgeways word which sometimes I can't
get in, I say,--
“Oh, yes, those were pleasant days in Italy among the cypresses and
myrtles, and in Jamaica with its palms. I think we must soon have
another ramble together.”
“If it weren't for those children--but where should we go?” she cried.
“I'm not sure,” I said, as if revolving many memories, “but I think some
part of the Pacific Slope----”
“Gracious, why the Pacific Slope, my man?”
“Because a Pacific Garden must surely be a Garden of Peace; and that's
where we are going now with the title-page of a book that is to
catch the pennies of the public, and resemble as nearly as I can make
it--consistent with my natural propensity to quarrel with things that do
not matter in the least--one of the shadiest of the slopes of the Island
Valley of Avilion--
Where falls not hall, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly, for it lies
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns
And bowery hollows, crown'd with summer sea.”
Luckily I recollected the quotation, for I had not been letter-perfect I
should have had a poor chance of a bright future with Dorothy.
As it was, however, she only felt if the big tomato was as ripe as it
seemed, and said,--
“'Orchard-lawns.' H'm, I wonder if Tennyson, with all his
'careful-robin' observation of the little things of Nature was aware
that you should never let grass grow in an apple orchard.”
“I wonder, indeed,” I said, with what I considered a graceful
acquiescence. “But at the same time I think I should tell you that there
are no little things in Nature.”
“I suppose there are not,” said she. “Anyhow, you will have the biggest
tomato in Nature in your salad with the cold lamb. Is that the bell?”
“It is the ghost-tinkle of the bell of the bell-wedder who was the
father of the lamb,” said I poetically.
“So long as you do not mention the mother of the lamb when you come to
the underdone stratum, I shall be satisfied,” said she.
PS.--(1.30)--And I didn't.
PFS.--(1.35)--But I might have.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
This town of ours is none other than Yardley Parva. Every one is
supposed to know that the name means “The Little Sheltered Garden,” and
that it was given this name by a mixed commission of Normans and Romans.
The Normans, who spoke a sort of French, gave it the first syllable,
which is the root of what became _jardin_, and which still survives in
the “backyard” of American literature; meaning not the backyard of an
English home, where broken china and glass and other incidental rubbish
are thrown to work their way into the bowels of the earth, but a place
of flowers and beans and pumpkins. The surname, Parva, represents the
influence of the Romans, who spoke a sort of Latin. Philologists are not
wholehearted about the “ley,” but the general impression is that it had
a narrow escape from being “leigh,” an open meadow; ley, however,
is simply “lee,” or a sheltered quarter, the opposite to “windward.”
Whatever foundation there may be for this philology--whether it is
derived from _post hoc_ evidence or not--every one who knows the place
intimately will admit that if it is not literally exact, it should
be made so by the Town Council; for it is a town of sheltered little
gardens. It has its High Street: and this name, a really industrious
philologist will tell you, is derived, not from its occupying any
elevated position, but from the fact that the people living on either
side were accustomed to converse across the street, and any one wishing
to chat with an opposite neighbour, tried to attract his attention with
the usual hail of “hie there!”; and as there was much crossquestioning
and answering, there was a constant chorus of “hie, hie!” so that it was
really the gibe of strangers that gave it its name, only some fool of a
purist seven or eight hundred years ago acquired the absurd notion that
the word was “High” instead of “Hie!” So it was that Minnesingers' Lane
drifted into Mincing Lane, I have been told. It had really nothing to do
with the Min Sing district of China, where the tea sold in that street
of tea-brokers came from. Philology is a wonderful study; and no one
who has made any progress in its by-paths should ever be taken aback or
forced to look silly.
The houses on each side of the High Street are many of them just as they
were four or five hundred years ago. Some of them are shops with bow
fronts that were once the windows of parlours in the days when
honest householders drank small ale for breakfast and the industrious
apprentices took down the shutters from their masters' shops and began
their day's work somewhere about five o'clock in midsummer, graduating
to seven in midwinter. There are now some noble plate-glass fronts
to the shops, but there are no apprentices, and certainly no masters.
Scores of old, red-tiled roofs remain, but they are no more red than
the red man of America is red. The roofs and the red man are of the same
hue. Sixty years ago, when slate roofs became popular, they found their
way to Yardley Parva, and were reckoned a guarantee of a certain social
standing. If you saw a slate roof and a cemented brick front you might
be sure that there was a gig in the stable at the back. You can now tell
what houses had once been tiled by the pitch of the roofs. This was not
altered on the introduction of the slates.
But with the innovations of plate-glass shop-fronts and slate roofs
there has happily been no change in the gardens at the back of the two
rows of the houses of the High Street. Almost every house has still
its garden, and they remain gay with what were called in my young days
“old-fashioned flowers,” through the summer, and the pear-trees that
sprawl across the high dividing walls in Laocoon writhings--the quinces
that point derisive, gnarled fingers at the old crabs that give way to
soundless snarls against the trained branches of the Orange Pippins--the
mulberries that are isolated on a patch of grass--all are to-day what
they were meant to be when they were planted in the chalk which may have
supplied Roman children with marbles when they had civilized themselves
beyond the knuckle-bones of their ancestors' games.
I cannot imagine that much about these gardens has changed during
the changes of a thousand years, except perhaps their shape. When the
Anglo-Saxon epidemic of church-building was running its course, the
three-quarters-of-a-mile of the High Street did not escape. There was a
church every hundred yards or so, and some of them were spacious enough
to hold a congregation of fifty or sixty; and every church had its
church-yard--that is, as we have seen--its garden, equal to the
emergencies of a death-rate of perhaps two every five years; but when
the churches became dwelling-houses, as several did, the church-yard
became the back-yard in the American sense: fruit-trees were planted,
and beneath their boughs the burgesses discussed the merits of ale
and the passing away of the mead bowl, and shook their heads when some
simpleton suggested that the arrow that killed Rufus a few months before
was an accidental one. There are those gardens to-day, and the burgesses
smoke their pipes over the six-thirty edition of the evening paper that
left London at five-fifteen, and listen to stories of Dick, who lost a
foot at the ford of the Somme, or of Tom, who got the M.C. after Mons,
and went through the four years without a scratch, or of Bob, who had
his own opinion about the taking of Jerusalem, outside which two fingers
of his left hand are still lying, unless a thieving Arab appropriated
them.
There the chat goes on from century to century on the self-same
subject--War, war, war. It is certain that men left Yardley Parva for
the First Crusade; one of the streets that ran from the Roman road to
the Abbey which was founded by a Crusading Norman Earl, returns the name
that was given to it to commemorate the capture of Antioch when the news
reached England a year or so after the event; and it is equally certain
that Yardley men were at Bosworth Field, and Yardley men at Tournai in
1709 as well as in 1918--at the Nile in 1798 as well as in 1915; and it
is equally certain that such of them as came back talked of what they
had seen and of what their comrades had done. The tears that the mothers
proudly shed when they talked of those who had not come home in 1918
were shed where the mothers of the Crusaders of 1099 had knelt to pray
for the repose of the souls of their dear ones whose bones were picked
by the jackals of the Lebanon. On the site of one of the churches of
the market-place there is now built a hall of moving pictures--Moving
Pictures--that is the whole sum of the bustle of the thousand
years--Moving Pictures. The same old story. Life has not even got the
instinct of the film-maker: it does not take the trouble to change the
scenes of the exploits of a thousand--ten thousand--years ago, and those
of to-day. Egypt, the Nile, Gaza, Jerusalem, Damascus, Mesopotamia.
Moving pictures--walking shadows--walking about for a while but all
having the one goal--the Garden of Peace; those gardens that surrounded
the churches, where now the apple-trees bloom and fruit and shed their
leaves.
These little irregular back-gardens are places of enchantment to me and
I think I like those behind the smallest of the shops, which are not
more than thirty feet square, rather than those higher up the town, of a
full acre or two. These bigger ones do not suggest a history beyond the
memory of the gardeners who trim the hedges and cut the grass with a
machine. The small and irregular ones suggest a good deal more than
a maiden lady wearing gloves, with a basket on her arm and a pair of
snipping shears opening its jaws to bite the head off every bloom that
has a touch of brown on its edge. But with me it is not a matter of
liking and not liking; it is a matter of liking and liking better--it is
the artisan's opinion of rival beers (pre-war): all good but some better
than others. The little gardens behind the shops are lyrics; the big
ones behind the villas are excellent prose, and excellent prose is
frequently quite as prosy as excellent verse. They are alive but they
are not full of the joy of living. The flowers that they bring forth
suggest nice girls whose education is being carefully attended to by
gentlemen who are preparing for Ordination. Those flowers do not sing,
and I know perfectly well that if they were made to sing it would be to
the accompaniment of a harmonium, and they would always sing in tune and
in time: but they would need a conductor, they would never try anything
on their own--not even when it was dark and no one would know anything
about it. Somehow these borders make me think of the children of
Blundell's Charity---a local Fund which provides for the education on
religious principles of fifteen children born in wedlock of respectable
parents. They occupy a special bench in the aisle of one of the
churches, and wear a distinctive dress with white collars and cuffs.
They attend to the variations of the Sacred Service, and are always as
tidy and uninteresting as the borders in the wide gardens behind the
houses that are a quarter of a mile beyond the gardens of the High
Street shops.
But it is in these wide gardens that the earliest strawberries are
grown, and to them the reporter of the local newspaper goes in search
of the gigantic gooseberry or the potato weighing four pounds and three
ounces; and that is what the good ladies with the abhorred shears and
the baskets--the Atropussiies, in whose hands lie the fates of the
fruits as well as of the flowers--consider the sum of high gardening:
the growth of the abnormal is their aim and they are as proud of their
achievement as the townsman who took to poultry was of his when he
exhibited a bantam weighing six pounds.
Now I hold that gardens are like nurseries--nurseries of children, I
mean--and that all make an appeal to one's better nature, that none can
be visited without a sense of pleasure even though it may be no more
than is due to the anticipation of getting away from them; therefore, I
would not say a word against the types which I venture to describe; as
I have found them. The worst that I can say of them is that they are
easily described, and the garden or the girl that can be described will
never be near my heart. Those gardens are not the sort that I should
think of marrying, though I can live on the friendliest of terms with
them, particularly in the strawberry season. They do not appeal to
the imagination as do the small and irregular ones at the rear of the
grocer's, the stationer's, the fishmonger's, the bootmaker's, or the
chymist's--in this connection I must spell the name of the shop with
a y: the man who sits in such a garden is a chymist, not a chemist. I
could not imagine a mere chemist sniffing the rosemary and the tansy and
the rue _au naturel_: the mere chemist puts his hand into a drawer and
weighs you out an ounce of the desiccated herbs.
In one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's earlier novels--I think it is _The Mayor of
Casterbridge_--he describes a town, which is very nearly as delightfully
drowsy as our Yardley Parva, as one through which the bees pass in
summer from the gardens at one side to those at the other. In our town
I feel sure that the bees that enter among the small gardens of sweet
scents and savours at one end of the High Street, never reach the
gardens of the gigantic gooseberry at the other; unless they make a
bee-line for them at the moment of entering; for they must find their
time fully occupied among the snapdragons of the old walls, the flowers
of the veronica bushes, and the buttons of the tall hollyhocks growing
where they please.
When I made, some years ago, a tour of Wessex, I went to Casterbridge on
a July day, and the first person I met in the street was an immense
bee, and I watched him hum away into the distance just as Mr. Hardy had
described him. He seemed to be boasting that he was Mr. Hardy's bee,
just as a Presbyterian Minister, who had paid a visit to the Holy Land
to verify his quotations, boasted of the reference made to himself in
another Book.
“My dear friends,” said he, “I read in the Sacred Book the prophecy
that the land should be in heaps; I looked up from the page, and there,
before my very eyes, lay the heaps. I read that the bittern should cry
there; I looked up, and lo! close at hand stood the bittern. I read that
the Minister of the Lord should mourn there: _I was that Minister_.”
[Illustration: 0031]
But there are two or three gardens--now that I come to think of it there
are not so many as three--governed by the houses of the “better-class
people” (so they were described to me when I first came to Yardley
Parva), which are everything that a garden should he. Their trees have
not been cut down as they used to be forty years ago, to allow the
flowers to have undisputed possession. In each there are groups of
sycamore, elm, and silver birch, and their position makes one feel that
one is on the border of a woodland through which one might wander
for hours. There are tulip-trees, and a fine arbutus on an irregular,
slightly-sloping lawn, and a couple of enormous drooping ashes--twenty
people can sit in the green shade of either. In graceful groups there
are laburnums and lilacs. Farther down the slope is a well-conceived
arrangement of flower-beds cut out of the grass. Nearly everything in
the second of these gardens is herbaceous; but its roses are invariably
superb, and its lawn with a small lily pond beside it, is ideal. The
specimen shrubs on a lower lawn are perfect as regards both form and
flower, and while one is aware of the repose that is due to a thoughtful
scheme of colour, one is conscious only of the effect, never being
compelled to make use of the word artistic. As soon as people begin
to talk of a garden being artistic you know that it has failed in its
purpose, just as a portrait-painter has failed if you are impressed with
the artistic side of what he has done. The garden is not to illustrate
the gardener's art any more than the portrait is to make manifest the
painter's. The garden should be full of art, but so artfully introduced
that you do not know that it is there. I have heard a man say as if he
had just made a unique discovery,--
“How extraordinary it is that the arrangements of colour in Nature are
always harmonious!”
Extraordinary!
Equally extraordinary it is that
“Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?
For if it prospers none dare call it treason.”
All our impressions of harmony in colour are derived from Nature's
arrangements of colour, and when there is no longer harmony there is no
longer Nature. Is it marvellous that Nature should be harmonious when
all our ideas of harmony are acquired from Nature? A book might be
written on this text--I am not sure that several books have not been
written on it. It is the foundation of the analysis of what may be
called without cant, “artistic impression.” It is because it is so trite
that I touch upon it in my survey of a Garden of Peace. We love the
green of the woodland because it still conveys to us the picture of our
happy home of some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We find beauty in
an oval outline because our ancestors of the woodland spent some happy
hours bird-nesting. Hogarth's line of beauty is beautiful because it
is the line of human life--the line that Nature has ever before her
eyes--the line of human love. The colours of countless fruits are a
delight to us because we have associated those colours for tens of
thousands of years with the delight of eating those fruits, and taking
pleasure in the tints of the fruits; we take pleasure in the tints of
flowers because they suggest the joys of the fruits. The impression of
awe and fear that one of Salvator Rosa's “Rocky Landscapes” engenders
is due to our very distant ancestors' experience of the frequent
earthquakes that caused these mighty rocks to be flung about when the
surface of our old mother Earth was not so cool as it is to-day, as
well as to the recollection of the very, fearsome moments of a much less
remote ancestor spent in evading his carnivorous enemies who had their
dens among these awful rocks. From a comparatively recent pastoral
parent we have inherited our love for the lawn. There were the sheep
feeding in quiet on the grass of the oasis in the days when man had made
the discovery that he could tame certain animals and keep them to eat at
his leisure instead of having to spend hours hunting them down.
But so deep an impression have the thousands of years of hunting made
upon the race, that even among the most highly civilised people hunting
is the most popular of all enjoyments, and the hunter is a hero while
the shepherd is looked on as a poor sort.
Yes, there are harmonies in Nature, though all makers of gardens do not
appreciate them; the discordant notes that occasionally assail a lover
of Nature in a garden that has been made by a nurseryman are due to the
untiring exertions of the hybridiser. It is quite possible to produce
“freaks” and “sports” both as regards form and colour--“Prodigious
mixtures and confusion strange.” I believe that some professional men
spend all their time over experiments in this direction, and I have no
doubt that some of them, having perpetrated a “novelty,” make money out
of it. Equally sure I am that the more conscientious, when they bit upon
a novelty that they feel to be offensive, destroy the product without
exhibiting it. They have not all the hideous unscrupulousness of Dr.
Moreau--the nearest approach to a devil trying to copy the Creator
who made man in His own image. Dr. Moreau made things after his own
likeness. He was a great hybridiser. (Mr. H. G. Wells, after painting
that Devil for us, has recently been showing his skill in depicting the
God.)
Now, every one knows that the garden of to-day owes most of its glory to
the judicious hybridiser, but I implore of him to be merciful as he is
strong. I have seen some heartrending results of his experiments which
have not been suppressed, as they should have been. I am told that a
great deal in the way of developing the natural colours of a certain
group of flowers can be done by the introduction of chemicals into their
drinking water. It is like poisoning a well! By such means I believe
an unscrupulous gardener could turn a whole border into something
resembling a gigantic advertisement card of aniline dyes.
But I must be careful in my condemnations of such possibilities. There
is a young woman named Rosamund, who is Dorothy's first-born, and she
is ready at all seasonable times to give me the benefit of her fourteen
years' experiences of the world and its ways, and she has her own views
of Nature as the mother of the Arts. After listening to my old-fashioned
railings against such chromatic innovations as I have abused, she
maintained a thoughtful silence that suggested an absence of conviction.
“Don't you see the awfulness of re-dying a flower--the unnaturalness of
such an operation?” I cried.
“Why, you old thing, can't you see that if it's done by aniline dyes
it's all right--true to Nature and all that?”
“Good heavens! that a child of mine--Dorothy, did you hear her? How can
you sit there and smile as if nothing had happened? Have you brought her
up as an atheist or what?”
“Every one who doesn't agree with all you say isn't a confirmed
atheist,” replied Dorothy calmly. “As for Rosamund, what I'm afraid of
is that, so far from being an atheist, she is rather too much in the
other direction--like 'Lo, the poor Indian.' She'll explain what's in
her mind if you give her a chance What do you mean, my dear, by laying
the emphasis on aniline dyes? Don't you know that most of them are
awful?”
“Of course I do, darling,” said Rosamund. “But I've been reading about
them, and so--well, you see, they come from coal tar, and coal is a bit
of a tree that grew up and fell down thousands of years ago, and its
burning is nothing more than its giving back the sunshine that it--what
is the word that the book used?--oh, I remember--the sunshine that
it hoarded when it was part of the forest. Now, I think that if it's
natural for flowers to be coloured by the sunshine it doesn't matter
whether it's the sunshine of to-day or the sunshine of fifty thousand
years ago; it comes from the sun all the same, and as aniline dyes are
the sunshine of long ago it's no harm to have them to colour flowers
now.”
“Daddy was only complaining of the horrid ones, my dear,” said the
Mother, without looking at me. “Isn't that what you meant?” she added,
and now she looked at me, and though I was suspicious that she was
smiling under her skin, I could not detect the slightest symptom of a
smile in her voice.
“Of course I meant the hideous ones--magenta and that other sort of
purple thing. I usually make my meaning plain,” said I, with a modified
bluster.
“Oh,” remarked Rosamund, in a tone that suggested a polite negation of
acquiescence.
There was another little silence before I said,--“Anyhow, it was those
German brutes who developed those aniline things.”
“Oh, yes; they could do anything they pleased with _coal_ tar,” said
Dorothy. “But the other sort could do anything he pleased with the
Germans--and he did.”
“The other sort?” said I inquiringly.
“Yes, the other sort--the true British product--the _Jack Tar_,” said
Dorothy; and Rosamund, who has a friend who is a midshipman in the Royal
Navy, clapped her hands and laughed.
It is at such moments as this that I feel I am not master in my own
house. Time was when I believed that my supremacy was as unassailable as
that of the Lord High Admiral; but since those girls have been growing
up I have come to realise that I have been as completely abolished as
the Lord High Admiral--once absolute, but now obsolete--and that the
duties of office are discharged by a commission. The Board of Admiralty
is officially the Lords Commissioners for discharging the office of Lord
High Admiral.
I hope that this _ménage_ will be maintained. The man who tries to
impose his opinions upon a household because he is allowed to pay all
the expenses, is--anyhow, he is not me.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
I believe I interrupted myself in the midst of a visit to one of the
gardens of the “better-class people” who live in the purely residential
end of the High Street. These are the people whose fathers and
grandfathers lived in the same houses and took a prominent part in
preparing the beacons which were to spread far and wide the news that
Bonaparte had succeeded in landing on their coast with that marvellous
flotilla of his. And from these very gardens more than two hundred and
fifty years earlier the still greater grandfathers had seen the blazing
beacons that sent the news flying northward that the Invincible Armada
of Spain was plunging and rolling up the Channel, which can be faintly
seen by the eye of faith from the tower of the Church of St. Mary
sub-Castro, at the highest part of the High Street. The Invincible
Armada! If I should ever organise an aggressive enterprise, I certainly
would not call it “Invincible.” It is a name of ill omen. I cannot for
the life of me remember where I read the story of the monarch who was
reviewing the troops that he had equipped very splendidly to go against
the Romans. When his thousand horsemen went glittering by with polished
steel cuirasses and plumed helmets--they must have been the Household
Cavalry of the period--his heart was lifted up in pride, and he called
out tauntingly to his Grand Vizier, who was a bit of a cynic,--
“Ha, my friend, don't you think that these will be enough for the
Romans?”
“Sure,” was the reply. “Oh, yes, they will be enough, avariciuus though
the Romans undoubtedly are.”
This was the first of the Invincible enterprises. The next time I saw
the word in history was in association with the Spanish Armada, and
to-day, over a door in my house, I have hung the carved ebony ornament
that belonged to a bedstead of one of the ships that went ashore at
Spanish Point on the Irish coast. Later still, there was a gang of
murderers who called themselves “Invincibles,” and I saw the lot of them
crowded into a police-court dock whence they filed out to their doom.
And what about the last of these ruffians that challenged Fate with that
arrogant word? What of Hindenburg's Invincible Line that we heard so
much about a few months ago? “Invincible!” cried the massacre-monger,
and the word was repeated by the arch-liar of the mailed fist in half a
dozen speeches. Within a few months the beaten mongrels were whimpering,
not like hounds, but like hyenas out of whose teeth their prey is
plucked. I dare say that Achilles, who made brag a speciality, talked
through his helmet about that operation on the banks of the Styx, and
actually believed himself to be invincible because invulnerable; but his
mother, who had given him the bath that turned his head, would not have
recognised him when Paris had done with him.
[Illustration: 0041]
The funny part of the Hindenburg cult--I suppose it should be written
“Kult”--was that there was no one to tell the Germans that they were
doing the work of necromancy in hammering those nails into his wooden
head. Everybody knows that the only really effective way of finishing
off an enemy is to make a wooden effigy of him and hammer nails into it
(every sensible person knows that as the nails are hammered home
the original comes to grief). The feminine equivalent of this
robust operation is equally effective, though the necromancers only
recommended it for the use of schools. The effigy is made of wax, and
you place it before a cheerful fire and stick pins into it. It has the
advantage of being handy and economical, for there are few households
that cannot produce an old doll of wax which would otherwise be thrown
away and wasted.
But the Germans pride themselves on having got rid of their
superstition, and when people have got rid of their superstition they
have got rid of their sense of humour. If they had not been so hasty in
naming their invincible lines after Wagner's, operas they would surely
have remembered that with the _Siegfried_, the _Parsifal_, and the rest
there was bound to be included _Der Fliegende Hollander_, the pet name
of the German Cavalry: they were the first to fly when the operatic line
was broken; and then--_Gôtterdàmmerung Hellroter!_
And why were the Bolsheviks so foolish as to forget that the Czar was
“Nicky” to their paymaster, William, and that that name is the Greek for
“Victory”?
Having destroyed Nicky, how could they look for anything but disaster?
The connection of these jottings with our gardens may not be apparent to
every one who reads them. But though the sense of liberty is so great in
our Garden of Peace that I do not hold myself bound down to any of the
convenances of composition, and though I cultivate rather than uproot
even the most flagrant forms of digression in this garden, yet it so
happens that when I begin to write of the most distinguished of the
gardens of Yardley Parva, I cannot avoid recalling that lovely Saturday
when we were seated among its glorious roses, eating peaches that had
just been plucked from the wall. We were a large and chatty company, and
among the party that were playing clock golf on a part of a lovely lawn
of the purest emerald, there did not seem to be one who had read the
menace of the morning papers. Our host was a soldier, and his charming
wife was the daughter of a distinguished Admiral. At the other side
of the table where the dish of peaches stood there was another naval
officer, and while we were swapping stories of the Cape, the butler was
pointing us out to a telegraph messenger who had come through the French
window. The boy made his way to us, taking the envelope from his
belt. He looked from one of us to the other, saying the name of my
_vis-a-vis_--“Commander A--------?”
“I'm Commander A--------” said he, taking the despatch envelope and
tearing it open. He gave a whistle, reading his message, and rose.
“No reply,” he told the messenger, and then turned to me.
“Great King Jehoshaphat!” he said in a low tone. “There is to be no
demobilisation of the Fleet, and all leave is stopped. I'm ordered
to report. And you said just now that nothing was going to happen.
Good-bye, old chap! I've got to catch the 6.20 for Devonport!”
We had been talking over the morning's news, and I had said that the
Emperor was a master of bluff, not business.
“I'm off,” he said. “You needn't say anything that I've told you. After
all, it may only be a precautionary measure.”
He went off; and I never saw him again.
The precautionary measure that saved England from the swoop that Germany
hoped to bring off as successfully as Japan did hers at Port Arthur in
1904, was taken not by the First Lord of the Admiralty, but by Prince
Louis of Battenberg, who was hounded out of the Service by the clamorous
gossip of a few women who could find no other way of proving their
power.
And the First Lord of the Admiralty let him go; while he himself
returned to his “gambling”--he so designated the most important--the most
disastrous--incident of his Administration--“a legitimate gamble.” A
legitimate gamble that cost his country over fifty thousand lives!
Within a month of the holding of that garden party our host had marched
away with his men, and within another month our dear hostess was a
widow.
*****
That garden, I think, has a note of distinction about it that is not
shared by any other within the circle taken by the walls of the little
town, several interesting fragments of which still remain. The house by
which it was once surrounded before the desire for “short cuts” caused
a road to be made through it, is by far the finest type of a minor
Elizabethan mansion to be found in our neighbourhood. It is the sort of
house that the house-agents might, with more accuracy than is displayed
in many of their advertisements, describe as “a perfect gem.” It has
been kept in good repair both as regards its stone walls and its roof of
stone slabs during the three hundred--or most likely four hundred years
of its existence, and it has not suffered from that form of destruction
known as restoration. It had some narrow escapes in its time, however.
An old builder who had been concerned in some of the repairs shook his
head sadly when he assured me that a more pigheaded gentleman than the
owner of the house at that time he had never known.
“He would have it done with the old material,” he explained sadly.
“That's how it comes to be like what it is to-day.” And he nodded in the
direction of the exquisitely-weathered old Caen blocks with the great
bosses of house-leek covering the coping. “It was no use my telling him
that I could run up a nine-inch brick wall with proper coping tiles that
would have a new look for years if no creepers were allowed on it, for
far less money; he would have the old stone, and those squared flints
that you see there.”
“Some people are very obstinate, thank God!” said I.
“I could have made as good a job of it as I did of St. Anthony's
Church--you know the new aisle in St. Anthony's, sir,” said he.
I certainly did know the new aisle in St. Anthony's; but I did not
say that I did in the tone of voice in which I write. It is the most
notorious example of what enormities could be perpetrated in the
devastating fifties and sixties, when a parson and his churchwardens
could do anything they pleased to their churches.
In a very different spirit was the Barbican of the old Castle of Yardley
repaired under the care of a reverential, but not Reverend, director.
Every stone was numbered and put back into its place when the walls were
made secure.
The gardens and orchards and lawns behind the walls which were
reconstructed by the owner whose obstinacy the builder was lamenting,
must extend over three or four acres. Such a space allows for a deep
enough fringe of noble trees, giving more than a suggestion of a
park-land which had once had several vistas after the most approved
eighteenth century type, but which have not been maintained by
some nineteenth century owners who were fearful of being accused of
tolerating anything so artificial as design in their gardens. But the
“shrubberies” have been allowed to remain pretty much as they were
planted, with magnificent masses of pink may and innumerable lilacs. The
rose-gardens and the mixed borders are chromatic records of the varying
tastes of generations.
What made the strongest appeal to me when I was wandering through the
grounds a year or two before that fatal August afternoon was the beauty
of the anchusas. I thought that I had never seen finer specimens or a
more profuse variety of their blues. One might have been looking down
into the indigo of the water under the cliffs of Capri in one place,
and into the delicate ultramarine spaces of the early morning among the
islands of the Ægean in another.
I congratulated one of the gardeners upon his anchusas, and he smiled in
an eminently questionable way.
“Maybe I'm wrong in talking to you about them,”
I said, looking for an explanation of his smile. “Perhaps it is not you
who are responsible for this bit.”
“It's not that, sir,” he said, still smiling. “I'm ready to take all the
responsibility. You see, sir, I was brought up among anchusas: I was one
of the gardeners at Dropmore.”
I laughed.
“If I want to know anything about growing anchusas I'll know where to
come for information,” I said.
The great charm about these gardens, as well as those of the Crusaders'
planting now enjoyed by the people of the High Street, is that among the
mystery of their shady places one would not be surprised or alarmed to
come suddenly upon a nymph or a satyr, or even old Pan himself. It does
not require one to be
“A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,”
to have such an impression conveyed to one, any more than it is
necessary for one to be given over exclusively to a diet of nuts and
eggs to enjoy, as I hope we all do, a swing on a bough, or, as we grow
old, alas! on one of those patent swings made in Paris, U.S.A., where
one gets all the exuberance of the oscillation without the exertion.
Good old Pan is not dead yet, however insistently the poet may announce
his decease. He will be the last of all the gods to go. We have no
particular use for Jove, except as the mildest form of a swear word,
nor for Neptune, unless we are designing a fountain or need to borrow
an emblem of the Freedom of the Seas--we can even carry on a placid
existence though Mercury has fallen so low as to be opposite “rain and
stormy” on the barometric scale, but we cannot do without our Pan--the
jolly, wicked old fellow whom we were obliged to incorporate in our new
theological system under the name of Diabolus. It was he, and not the
much-vaunted Terpsichore, who taught the infant world to dance, to
gambol, and to riot in the woodland. He is the patron of the forest
lovers still, as he was when he first appeared in the shape of an
antelope skipping from rock to rock while our arboreal ancestors
applauded from their boughs and were tempted to give over their
ridiculous swinging by their hands and tails and emulate him on our
common mother Earth.
Is there any one of us to-day, I wonder, who has not felt as Wordsworth
did, that the world of men and cities is too much with us, and that
the shady arbours hold something that we need and that we cannot find
otherwhere? The claims of the mysterious brotherhood assert themselves
daily when we return to our haunts of a hundred thousand years ago: we
can still enjoy a dance on a woodland clearing, and a plunge into the
sparkling lake by which we dwelt for many thousand years before some
wretch found that the earth could be built up into caves instead of dug
into for domestic shelter.
Let any one glance over the illustrated advertisements in _Country
Life_ and see how frequently the “old world gardens” are set forth as
an irresistible attraction of “a desirable residence.” The artful
advertisers know that the appeal of the old world is still all-powerful,
especially with those who have been born in a city and have lived in
a city for years. Around Yardley there has sprung up quite recently a
colony of red-brick and, happily, red-roofed villas. Nearly all have
been admirably constructed, and with an appreciation of the modern
requirements in which comfort and economy are combined. They have all
gardens, and no two are alike in every particular; but all are trim and
easily looked after. They produce an abundance of flowers, and they are
embowered in flowering shrubs, every one of which seems to me to be a
specimen. More cheerful living-places could not be imagined; but it is
not in these gardens that you need look for the cloven vestiges of a
faun or the down brushed from the butterfly wings of a fairy. Nobody
wants them there, and there is no chance of any of these wary folk
coming where they are not wanted. If old Pan were to climb over one of
these walls and his footprints were discovered in the calceolaria bed,
the master of the house would put the matter in the hands of the local
police, or write a letter signed “Ratepayer” to the local _Chronicle_,
inquiring how long were highly-taxed residents to be subjected to such
incursions, and blaming the “authorities” for their laxity.
But there is, I repeat, no chance of the slumbers of any of the
ratepayers being disturbed by a blurred vision of Proteus rising from
the galvanised cistern, or by the blast of Triton's wreathed horn. They
will not be made to feel less forlorn by a glimpse of the former, and
they would assuredly mistake the latter for the hooter of Simpson's
saw-mill.
“The authorities” look too well after the villas, and the very
suggestion of “authorities” would send Proteus and Triton down to the
deepest depths they had ever sounded. They only come where they are
wanted and waited for. It takes at least four generations of a garden's
growth to allow of the twisted boughs of the oak or the chestnut turning
into the horns of a satyr, or of the gnarled roots becoming his dancing
shanks.
It was one of the most intelligent of the ratepayers of these bright and
well-kept “residences” who took me to task for a very foolish statement
he had found in a novel of mine (6d. edition) which he said he had
glanced at for a few minutes while he was waiting for a train. I had
been thoughtless enough to make one of the personages, an enterprising
stockbroker, advocate the promotion of a company for the salvage of the
diamonds which he had been told Queen Guinevere flung into the river
before the appearance of the barge with the lily maid of Astolat
drifting to the landing-place below the terrace.
“But you know they were not real diamonds--only the diamonds of the
poet's imagination,” he said.
“I do believe you are right,” said I, when I saw that he was in earnest.
And then the mongoose story came to my mind. “They were not real
diamonds,” I said. “But then the man wasn't a real company promoter.”
CHAPTER THE FOURTH
Two hundred years is not a long time to look back upon in the history
of Yardley Parva: but it must have been about two hundred years ago that
there were in the High Street some houses of distinction. They belonged
to noblemen who had also mansions in the county, but who were too
sociable and not sufficiently fond of books to be resigned to such
isolation from their order as a mansion residence made compulsory. In
the little town they were in touch with society of a sort: they could
have their whist or piquet or faro with their own set every afternoon,
and compare their thirsts at dinner later in the day.
One of these modest residences of a ducal family faces the street
to-day, after suffering many vicissitudes, but with the character of
its façade unimpaired. The spacious ground-floor has been turned into
shops--it would be more correct to say that the shops had been turned
into the ground-floor, for structurally there has been no drastic
removal of walls or beams, it has not been subjected to any violent
evisceration, only to a minor gastric operation--say for appendicitis.
On the upper floors the beautiful proportions of the rooms remain
uninjured, and the mantelpieces and the cornices have also been
preserved.