The beauty of the border is to be found in the masses, we are told in
the Guides to Gardening. We should not allow the blues to mix with the
buffs, and the orange element should not assert its ascendancy over the
green. But what is the use of laying down hard and fast rules here when
the essence of the constitution of the system is No Rule. My experience
leads me to believe that without a rule of life and a firm ruler, this
portion of the garden will become in the course of time allied to
the prairie or the wilderness, and the hue that will prevail to the
destruction of any governing scheme of colour or colourable scheme of
government will be Red.
Which things are an allegory, culled from a garden of herbs, which, as
we have been told, will furnish a dinner preferable to one that has for
its _pièce de resistance_ the stalled ox, providing that it is partaken
of under certain conditions rigidly defined.
We have never been able to bring our herbaceous border to the point of
perfection which we are assured by some of those optimists who compile
nurserymen's catalogues, it should reach. We have massed our colours and
nailed them to the mast, so to speak--that is, we have not surrendered
our colour schemes because we happen to fall short of victory; but still
we must acknowledge that the whole border has never been the success
that we hoped it would be. Perhaps we have been too exacting--expecting
over much; or it may be that our standard was too Royal a one for the
soil; but the facts remain and we have a sense of disappointment.
It seems to me that this very popular feature depends too greatly
upon the character of the season to be truly successful as regards
_ensemble_. Our border includes many subjects which have ideas of
their own as regards the weather. A dry spring season may stunt (in
its English sense) the growth of some dowers that occupy a considerable
space, and are meant to play an important part in the design; whereas
the same influence may develop a stunt (in the American sense) in a
number of others, thereby bringing about a dislocation of the whole
scheme, when some things will rush ahead and override their neighbours
some that lasted in good condition up to the October of one year look
shabby before the end of July the next. One season differs from another
on vital points and the herbs differ in their growth had almost written
their habit--in accordance with the differences of the season. We have
had a fine show in one place and a shabby show next door; we have had
a splendid iris season and a wretched peony season--bare patches beside
luxuriant patches. The gailardias have broken out of bounds one summer,
and when we left “ample verge and room enough” for them the next, they
turned sulky, and the result was a wide space of soil on which a score
of those _gamins_ of the garden, chickweed and dandelion, promptly began
operations, backed up by those _apaches_ of a civilised borderland,
the ragged robin, and we had to be strenuous in our surveillance of the
place, fearful that a riot might ruin all that we had taken pains to
bring to perfection. So it has been season after season--one part quite
beautiful, a second only middling, and a third utterly unresponsive.
That is why we have taken to calling it the facetious border.
Our experience leads us to look on this facetious herbaceous border as
the parson's daughter looks on the Sunday School--as a place for the
development of all that is tricky in Nature, with here and there a bunch
of clean collars and tidy trimmings--something worth carrying on over,
but not to wax enthusiastic over. So we mean to carry on, and take
Flora's “buffets and awards” “with equal thanks.” We shall endeavour to
make our unruly tract in some measure tractable; and, after all, where
is the joy of gardening apart from the trying? It was a great
philosopher who affirmed at the close of a long life, that if he were
starting his career anew and the choice were off not to wax enthusiastic
over. So we mean to carry on, and take Flora's “buffets and awards”
“with equal thanks.” We shall endeavour to make our unruly tract in some
measure tractable; and, after all, where is the joy of gardening apart
from the trying? It was a great philosopher who affirmed at the close of
a long life, that if he were starting his career anew and the choice
were offered to him between the Truth and the Pursuit of Truth, he would
certainly choose the latter. That man had the true gardening spirit.
Any one who enters a garden without feeling that he is entering a big
household of children, should stay outside and make a friend of the
angel who was set at the gate of the first Paradise with a flaming
sword, which I take it was a gladiolus--the gladiolus is the _gladius_
of flowerland--to keep fools on the outside. The angel and the proper
man will get on very well together at the garden gate, talking of things
that are within the scope of the intelligence of angels and men Who
think doormats represent Nature in that they are made of cocoa-nut
fibre. We have long ago come to look on the garden as a region of living
things--shouting children, riotous children, sulky children; children
who are rebellious, perverse, impatient at restriction, bad-tempered,
quarrelsome, but ever ready to “make it up,” and fling themselves into
your arms and give you a chance of sharing with them the true joy of
life which is theirs.
This is what a garden of flowers means to any one who enters it in
a proper spirit of comradeship, and not in the attitude of a School
Inspector. We go into the garden not to educate the flowers, but to be
beloved by them--to make companions of them and, if they will allow us,
to share some of the secrets they guard so jealously until they find
some one whom they feel they can trust implicitly. A garden is like the
object of Dryden's satire, “Not one, but all mankind's epitome,” and a
knowledge of men that makes a man a sympathetic gardener. I think that
Christ was as fond of gardens as God ever was. “Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not neither do they spin, and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one
of these.”
[Illustration: 0314]
There is the glorious charter of the garden, the truth of which none can
dispute--there is the revelation of the spirit of the garden delivered
to men by the wisest and the most sympathetic garden-lover that ever
sought a Gethsemane for communion With the Father of all, in an hour of
trial.
I wonder what stores of knowledge of plant-life existed among the wise
Orientals long ago. Were they aware of all that we suppose has only been
revealed to us--“discovered” by us within recent years? Did they
know that there is no dividing line between the various elements of
life--between man, who is the head of “the brute creation,” and the
creatures of what the books of my young days styled “the Vegetable
Kingdom”? Did they know that it is possible for a tree to have a deeper
love for its mate than a man has for the wife whom he cherishes? I made
the acquaintance some years ago of an Eastern tree which was brought
away from his family in the forest and, though placed in congenial sod,
remained, for years making no advance in growth--living, but nothing
more--until one day a thoughtful man who had spent years studying
plants of the East, brought a female companion to that tree, and had the
satisfaction of seeing “him” assume a growth which was maintained year
by year alongside “her,” until they were both shown to me rejoicing
together, the one vieing, with the other in luxuriance of foliage
and fruit. Every one who has grown apples or plums has had the same
experience. We all know now of the courtship and the love and the
marriage of things in “the Vegetable Kingdom,” and we know that there
is no difference in the process of that love which means life in “the
Animal Kingdom” and “the Vegetable Kingdom.” In some directions their
“human” feelings and emotions and passions have been made plain to
us; how much more we shall learn it is impossible to tell; but we know
enough to save us from the error of fancying that they have a different
existence from ours, and every day that one spends in a garden makes us
ready to echo Shelley's lyrical shout of “Beloved Brotherhood!”
That is what 1 feel when I am made the victim of some of the pranks of
the gay creatures of the herbaceous border, who amuse themselves at our
expense, refusing to be bound down to our restrictions, to travel the
way we think good plants should go, and declining to be guided by an
intelligence which they know to be inferior to their own. The story of
the wilful gourd which would insist on crossing a garden path in the
direction it knew to be the right one, though a human intelligence tried
to make it go in another, was told by an astonished naturalist in the
pages of _Country Life_ a short time ago. I hope it was widely read. The
knowledge that such things can be will give many thousand readers access
to a held of study and of that legitimate speculation which is the
result of study and observation. It will ever tend to mitigate the
disappointment some of us may be inclined to harbour when we witness
our floral failures, though it is questionable if the recognition of the
fact that our failures are due to our own stupid bungling, will diminish
the store of that self-conceit which long ago induced us to think of
ourselves as the sole _raison d'être_ of all Creation.
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-THIRD
WE, were working at the young campanulas when our friend Heywood came
upon us--Heywood, for whose intelligence we have so great a respect,
because he so frequently agrees with our outlook upon the world of woman
and other flowers cherished by us. Heywood is a good artist; but because
he believes that Womankind is a kind woman indefinitely multiplied,
he paints more faithful portraits of men than of women; he also paints
landscapes that live more faithfully than the human features that
he depicts and receives large sums for depicting. He is a student of
children, and comes to Rosamund quite seriously for her criticism. She
gives it unaffectedly, I am glad to notice; and without having to make
use of a word of the School-of-Art phraseology.
We have an able surgeon (retired) living close to us here, and he is
still so interested in the Science he practised--he retired from the
practice, not from the science--that when he is made aware of an unusual
operation about to be performed in any direction--London, Paris, or (not
recently) Vienna, he goes off to witness the performance, just as we go
to some of the most interesting _premières_ in town. In the same
spirit Heywood runs off every now and again to Paris to see the latest
production of his old master, or the acquisition of an old Master at
one of the galleries. It lets him know what is going on in the world, he
says, and I am sure he is quite right.
But, of course, Atheist Friswell has his smile--a solemn smile it is
this time--while he says,--
“Old Masters? Young mississes rather, I think.”
“Young what?” cried Dorothy.
“Mysteries,” he replied. “What on earth do you think I said?”
“Another word with the same meaning,” says she.
But these artistic excursions have nothing to do with us among our
campanulas to-day. Heywood has been aware of a funny thing and came to
make us laugh with him.
“Campanulas!” he cried. “And that is just what I came to tell you
about--the campanile at St. Katherine's.”
Yardley Parva, in common with Venice, Florence, and a number of other
places, has a campanile, only it was not designed by Giotto or any other
artist. Nor is it even called a campanile, but a bell-tower, and it
belongs to the Church of St. Katherine-sub-Castro--a Norman church
transformed by a few-adroit touches here and there into the purest
Gothic of the Restoration--the Gilbert Scoti-Church-Restoration period.
But no one would complain with any measure of bitterness at the
existence of the bell-tower only for the fact that there are bells
within it, and these bells being eight, lend themselves to many feats
of campanology, worrying the inhabitants within a large area round about
the low levels of the town. The peace of every Sabbath Day is rudely
broken by the violence of what the patient folk with no _arrière pensée_
term “them joy bells.”
“You have not heard a sound of them for some Sundays,” said Heywood.
“I have not complained,” said I. “Ask Dorothy if I have.”
“No one has, unless the bell-ringers, who are getting flabby through
lack of exercise,” said he. “But the reason you have not heard them is
because they have been silent.”
“The British Fleet you cannot see, for it is not in sight,” said I.
“And the reason that they have been silent was the serious illness
of Mr. Livesay, whose house is close to St. Katherine's. Dr. Beecher
prescribed complete repose for poor Livesay, and as the joy bells of St.
Katherine's do not promote that condition, his wife sent a message to
the ringers asking them to oblige by refraining from their customary
uproar until the doctor should remove his ban. They did so two Sundays
ago, and the Sunday before last they sent to inquire how the man was. He
was a good deal worse, they were told, so they were cheated out of their
exercise again. Yesterday, however, they rang merrily out--merrily.”
“We heard,” said Dorothy. “So I suppose Mr. Livesay is better.”
“On the contrary, he is dead,” said Heywood.
“He died late on Saturday night. My housekeeper, Mrs. Hartwell, had just
brought me in my breakfast when the bells began. 'Listen,' she cried.
'Listen! the joy bells! Mr. Livesay must have died last night.'”
It was true. The bell-ringers had made their call at poor Livesay's
house on Sunday morning, and on receiving the melancholy news, they
hurried off to let their joy bells proclaim it far and wide.
But no one in Yardley Parva, lay or clerical, except Heyward and
ourselves seemed to think that there was anything singular in the
incident.
We had a few words to say, however, about joy bells spreading abroad the
sad news of a decent man's death, and upon campanology in general.
But when Friswell heard of the affair, he said he did not think it more
foolish than the usual practice of church bells.
“We all know, of course, that there is nothing frightens the devil like
the ringing of bells,” said he.
“That is quite plausible,” said I. “Any one who doubts it must have
lived all his life in a heathen place where there are no churches. Juan
Fernandez, for example,” I added, as a couple of lines sang through my
recollection. “Cowper made his Alexander Selkirk long for 'the sound of
the churchgoing bell.'”
“That was a good touch of Cowper's,” said Friswell. “He knew that
Alexander Selkirk was a Scotsman, and with much of the traditional
sanctimoniousness of his people, when he found himself awful bad or
muckle bad or whatever the right phrase is, he was ready to propitiate
heaven by a pious aspiration.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried Dorothy. “He was quite sincere. Cowper knew
that there is nothing that brings back recollections of childhood, which
we always think was the happiest time of our life, like the chiming of
church bells.”
“I dare say you are right,” said he, after a little pause. “But like
many other people, poet Cowper did not think of the church bells except
in regard to their secondary function of summoning people to the sacred
precincts. He probably never knew that the original use of the bells was
to scare away the Evil One. It was only when they found out that he
had never any temptation to enter a church, that the authorities turned
their devil-scaring bells to the summoning of the worshippers, and they
have kept up the foolish practice ever since.”
“Why foolish?” asked Dorothy quite affably. “You don't consider it
foolish to ring a bell to go to dinner, and why should you think it so
in the matter of going to church?”
“My dear creature, you don't keep ringing your dinner bell for half an
hour, with an extra five minutes for the cook.”
“No,” said she quickly. “And why not? Because people don't need any
urging to come to dinner, but they require a good deal to go to church,
and then they don't go.”
“There's something in that,” said he. “Anyhow they've been ringing those
summoning bells so long that I'm sure they will go on with them until
all the churches are turned into school-houses.”
“And then there will be a passing-bell rung for the passing of the
churches themselves--I suppose the origin of the passing-bell was the
necessity to scare away the devil at the supreme moment,” remarked
Heywood.
“Undoubtedly it was,” said Friswell. “The practice exists among many of
those races that are still savage enough to believe in the devil--a good
handmade tom-tom does the business quite effectually, I've heard.”
“Do you know, my dear Friswell, I think that when you sit down with us
in our Garden of Peace, the conversation usually takes the form of the
dialogue in _Magnall's Questions_ or the _Child's Guide_ or _Joyce's
Science_. You are so full of promiscuous information which you cannot
hide?”
He roared in laughter, and we all joined in.
“You have just said what my wife says to me daily,” said he. “I'll try
to repress myself in future.”
“Don't try to do anything of the sort,” cried Dorothy. “You never cease
to be interesting, no matter how erudite you are.”
“What I can't understand is, how he has escaped assassination all these
years,” remarked Heywood. “I think the time is coming when whoso slayeth
Friswell will think that he doeth God's service. Just think all of you
of the mental state of the man who fails to see that, however heathenish
may be the practice of church-bell-ringing, the fact that it has brought
into existence some of the most beautiful buildings in the world makes
the world its debtor for evermore!”
“I take back all my words--I renounce the devil and all his work,” cried
the other man. “Yes, I hold that Giotto's Campanile justifies all the
clashing and banging and hammering before and since. On the same
analogy I believe with equal sincerity that the Temple of Jupiter fully
justifies the oblations to the Father of gods, and the Mosque of Omar
the massacres of Islam.”
“Go on,” said Dorothy. “Say that the sufferings of Alexander Selkirk
were justified since without them we should not have _Robinson Crusoe_.”
“I will say anything you please, my Lady of the Garden,” said he
heartily. “I will say that the beauty of that border beside you
justifies Wakeley's lavish advertisements of Hop Mixture.”
I felt that this sort of thing had gone on long enough, so I made a
hair-pin bend in the conversation by asking Dorothy if she remembered
the day of our visit to Robinson Crusoe's island.
“I never knew that you had been to Juan Fernandez,” said Friswell.
And then I saw how I could score off Friswell.
“I said Robinson Crusoe's island, not Alexander Selkirk's,” I cried.
“Alexander Selkirk's was Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's was Tobago in
the West indies, which Dorothy and I explored some years ago.”
“Of course I should have remembered that,” said he. “I recollect now
what a stumbling-block to me the geography of _Robinson Crusoe_ was when
I first read the book. A foolish explanatory preface to the cheap copy I
read gave a garbled version of the story of Selkirk and his island, and
said no word about Daniel Defoe having been wise enough to change Juan
Fernandez for another.”
“You were no worse than the writer of a paragraph I read in one of the
leading papers a short time ago, relative to the sale of the will which
Selkirk made in the year 1717--years after Captain Woodes Rodgers had
picked him up at the island where he had been marooned nearly four years
before,” said Dorothy, who, I remembered, had laughed over the erudition
of the paragraph. “The writer affirmed that the will had been made
before the man 'had sailed unwittingly for Tristan d'Acunha'--those
were his exact words, and this island he seemed to identify with Bishop
Keber's, for he said it was 'where every prospect pleases and only man
is vile.' What was in the poor man's mind was the fact that some one
had written a poem about Alexander Selkirk, and he mixed Cowper up with
Heber.”
“You didn't write to the paper to put the fellow right,” said Heywood.
“Good gracious, no!” cried Dorothy. “I knew that no one in these
aeroplaning days would care whether the island was Tristan d'Acunha or
Juan Fernandez. Besides, there was too much astray in the paragraph for
a simple woman to set about making good. Anyhow the document fetched £60
at the sale.”
“You remember the lesson that was learnt by the man who wrote to correct
something a newspaper had written about him, said Heywood. The editor
called me a swindler, a liar, and a politician,' said he, relating his
experience, 'and like a fool 1 wrote to contradict it. I was a fool: for
what did the fellow do in the very next issue but prove every statement
that he had made!'”
“Oh, isn't it lucky that I didn't write to that paper?” cried Dorothy.
But when we began to talk of the imaginary sufferings of Robinson
Crusoe, and to try to imagine what were the real sufferings of Selkirk,
Friswell laughed, saying,--
“I'm pretty sure that what the bonnie Scots body suffered from most
poignantly was the island not having any of his countrymen at hand, so
that they could start a Burns Club or a Caledonian Society, as the six
representatives of Scotland are about to do in our town of Yardley,
which has hitherto been free from anything of that sort. Did you ever
hear the story of Andrew Gareloch and Alec MacClackan?”
We assured him that we had never heard a word of it.
He told it to us, and this is what it amounted to:--Messrs. Andrew
Gareloch and Alec MacClackan were merchants of Shanghai who were
unfortunate enough to be wrecked on their voyage home. They were the
sole survivors of the ship's company, and the desert island on
which they found themselves was in the Pacific, only a few miles in
circumference. In the lagoon were plenty of fish and on the ridge of the
slope were plenty of cocoa-nuts. After a good meal they determined to
name the place. They called it St. Andrew Lang Syne Island, and became
as festive and brotherly--they pronounced it “britherly”--as was
possible over cocoa-nut milk: it was a long time since either of
them had tasted milk of any sort. The second day they founded a local
Benevolent Society of St. Andrew, and held the inaugural dinner; the
third day they founded a Burns Club, with a supper; the fourth day they
starts a Scots Association, with a series of monthly reunions for the
discussion of the Minstrelsy of the Border; the fifth day they laid out
golf links with the finest bunkers in the world, and instituted a club
lunch (strictly nonalcoholic); the sixth day they formed a Curling
Club--the lagoon would make a braw rink, they said, if it only froze;
and if it didn't freeze, well, they could still have an annual Curlers'
Supper; the Seventh Day they _kept_. On the evening of the same day a
vessel was sighted bearing up for the island; but of course neither of
the men would hoist a signal on the Seventh Day, and they watched the
craft run past the island; though they were amazed to see that she had
only courses and a foresail set, in spite of the fact that the breeze
was a light one. The next morning, when they were sitting at breakfast,
discussing whether they should lay the foundation stone--with
a commemorative lunch--of a Free Kirk, a Wee Free Kirk, a U.P.
meeting-house or an Ould Licht meeting-house--they had been fiercely
debating on the merits of each during the previous twenty years--they
saw the vessel returning with all sail on her. To run up one of their
shirts to a pole at the entrance to the lagoon was a matter of a moment,
and they saw that their signal was responded to. She was steered by
their signals through the entrance to the lagoon and dropped anchor.
She turned out to be the _Bonnie Doon_, of Dundee, Douglas MacKellar,
Master. He had found wreckage out at sea and had thought it possible
that some survivors of the wreck might want passages “hame.”
“Nae, nae,” cried both men. “We're no in need o' passages hame just
the noo. But what for did ye no mak' for the lagoon yestreen in the
gloamin'?”