Day,” said Captain MacKellar.
“Ye shortened sail though,” said Mr. MacClackan. “Ay; on Saturday nicht:
I never let her do more than just sail on the Sawbath. But what for did
ye no run up a signal, ye loons, if ye spied me sae weel?”
“Hoot awa'--hoot awa', man, ye wouldna hae a body mak' a signal on the
Sawbath Day.”
“Na--na; no a reglar signal; but ye micht hae run up a wee bittie--just
eneuch tae catch me e'en on. Ay an' mebbe ye'll be steppin' aboard the
noo?”
“Weil hae to hae a clash about it, Captain.”
Well, they talked it over cautiously for a few hours; for captain
MacKellar was a hard man at a bargain, and he would not agree to give
them a passage under two pound a head. At last, however, negotiations
were concluded, the men got aboard the _Bonnie Doon,_ and piloted her
through the channel. They reached the Clyde in safety, and Captain
Mac-Kellar remarked,--
“Weel, ma freens, I'm in hopes that ye'll pay me ower the siller this
day.”
“Ay, ye maun be in the quare swithers till ye see the siller; but we'll
hand it ower, certes,” said the passengers. “In the meantime, we'd tak'
the leeberty o' callin' your attention to a wee bit contra-claim that we
hae japped doon on a bit slip o' paper. It's three poon nine for
Harbour Dues that ye owe us, Captain MacKellar, and twa poon ten for
pilotage--it's compulsory at yon island, so 'tis, so mebbe ye'll mak'
it convenient to hand us ower the differs when we land. Ay, Douglas
MacKellar, ma mon, ye shouldna try to get the better o' Brither-Scots!”
Captain MacKellar was a God-fearing man, but he said, “Dom!”
CHAPTER THE TWENTY-FOURTH
Whatever my garden may be, I think I can honestly claim for it that it
has no educational value. The educational garden is one in which all
the different orders and classes and groups and species and genera are
displayed in such a way as to make no display, but to enable an ordinary
person in the course of ten or twelve years to become a botanist. Botany
is the syntax of the garden. A man may know everything about syntax and
yet never become a poet; and a garden should be a poem.
I remember how a perfect poem of a garden was translated into the most
repulsively correct prose by the exertions of a botanist. It was in a
semi-public pleasure ground maintained by subscribers of a guinea each,
and of course it was administered by a Committee. After many years of
failure, an admirable head-gardener was found--a young and enthusiastic
man with eye for design and an appreciation of form as well as colour.
Within a short space of time he turned a commonplace pleasure-ground
into a thing of beauty; and, not content with making the enormous domed
conservatory and the adjoining hothouse a blaze of colour and fragrance,
he attacked an old worn-out greenhouse and, without asking for outside
assistance, transformed it into a natural sub-tropical landscape--palms
and cacti and giant New Zealand ferns, growing amid rocky surroundings,
and wonderful lilies filling a large natural basin, below an effective
cascade. The place was just what such a place should be, conveying the
best idea possible to have of a moist corner of a tropical forest, only
without the overwhelming shabbiness which was the most striking note
of every tropical forest I have ever seen in a natural condition. In
addition to its attractiveness in this respect, it would have become a
source of financial profit to the subscribers, for the annual “thinning
out” of its superfluous growths would mean the stocking of many private
conservatories.
On the Committee of Management, however, there was one gentleman whose
aim in life was to be regarded by his fellow-tradesmen as a great
botanist: he was, to a great botanist, what the writer of the cracker
mottoes is to a great poet, or the compiler of the puzzle-page of a
newspaper is to a great mathematician; but he was capable of making a
fuss and convincing a bunch of tradesmen that making a fuss is a proof
of superiority; and that botany and beauty are never to be found in
association. He condemned the tropical garden as an abomination, because
it was impossible that a place which could give hospitality to a growth
of New Zealand fern, _Phormium Hookeri_, should harbour a sago palm
_Metroxylon Elatum_, which was not indigenous to New Zealand; and then
he went on to talk about the obligations of the place to be educational
and not ornamental, showing quite plainly that to be botanical should be
the highest aim of any one anxious for the welfare of his country.
The result of his harangue was the summoning of the head-gardener
before the Board and his condemnation on the ground that he had put the
Beautiful in the place that should be occupied by the Educational. He
was ordered to abandon that unauthorised hobby of his for gratifying
the senses of foolish people who did not know the difference between
_Phormium Hookeri_ and _Metroxylon Elatum_, and to set to work to lay
out an Educational Garden.
He looked at the members of the Board, and, like the poker player
who said, “I pass,” when he heard who had dealt the cards, he made no
attempt to defend himself. He laid out the Educational Garden that was
required of him, and when he had done so and the Board thought that he
was resigned to his fate as the interpreter of the rules of prosody as
applied to a garden, he handed in his resignation, and informed them
that he had accepted a situation as Curator of a park in a rival town,
and at a salary--a Curator gets a salary and a gardener only wages--of
exactly double the sum granted to him by the employers from whom he was
separating himself.
In three years the place he left had become bankrupt and was wound up.
It was bought at a scrapping figure by the Municipality, and its swings
are now said to be the highest in five counties.
I saw the Educational Garden that he laid out, and knew, and so did he,
that he was “laying out”--the undertaker's phrase--the whole concern.
When he had completed it, I felt that I could easily resist the
temptation to introduce education at the expense of design into any
garden of mine.
It is undeniable that a place constructed on such a botanical system may
be extremely interesting to a number of students, and especially so to
druggists' apprentices; but turning to so-called “educational purposes”
a piece of garden that can grow roses, is like using the silk of an
embroiderer to darn the corduroys of a railway porter.
But it was a revelation to some people how the growing of war-time
vegetables where only flowers had previously been grown, was not out
of harmony with the design of a garden. I must confess that it was with
some misgiving that I planted rows of runner beans in a long wall border
which had formerly been given over to annuals, and globe artichokes
where lilies did once inhabit--I even went so far as to sow carrots in
lines between the echeverias of the stone-edged beds, and lettuces
at the back of my fuchsia bushes. But the result from an æsthetic
standpoint was so gratifying that I have not ceased to wonder why such
beautiful things should be treated as were the fruit-trees, and looked
on as steerage passengers are by the occupants of the fifty-guinea
staterooms of a fashionable Cunarder. The artichoke is really a garden
inmate; alongside the potatoes in the kitchen garden, it is like the
noble Sir Pelleas who was scullery-maid in King Arthur's household.
The globe artichoke is like one of those British peers whom we hear
of--usually when they have just died--as serving in the forecastle of a
collier tramp. It is a lordly thing, and, I have found, it makes many
of the most uppish forms in the flower garden hide diminished heads. An
edging of dwarf cabbages of some varieties is quite as effective as one
of box, and Dell's “black beet” cannot be beaten where a foliage effect
is desired. Of course the runner bean must be accepted as a flower. If
it has been excluded from its rightful quarters, it is because the idea
is prevalent that it cannot be grown unless in the unsightly way that
finds favour in the kitchen garden. It would seem as if the controllers
of this department aimed at achieving the ugly in this particular. They
make a sort of gipsy tripod of boughs, only without removing the twigs,
and let the plant work its way up many of these. This is not good enough
for a garden where neatness is regarded as a virtue.
I found that these beans can be grown with abundant success in a border,
by running a stout wire along brackets, two or three feet out from a
wall, and suspending the roughest manila twine at intervals to carnation
wires in the soil below. This gives an unobtrusive support to the
plants, and in a fortnight the whole, of this flimsy frontage is hidden,
and the blossoms are blazing splendidly. I have had rows of over a
hundred feet of these beans, but not one support gave way even in the
strongest wind, and the household was supplied up to the middle of
November.
I am sure that such experiments add greatly to the interest of
gardening; and I encourage my Olive branch in her craving after a flower
garden that shall be made up wholly of weeds. She has found out, I
cannot say how, that the dandelion is a thing of beauty--she discovered
one in a garden that she visited, and having never seen one before,
inquired what was its name. I told her that the flower was not
absolutely new to me, but lest I should lead her astray as to its name,
she would do well to put her inquiry to the gardener and ask him for
any hints he could give her as to its culture, and above all, how to
propagate it freely. If he advised cuttings and a hot bed, perhaps
he might be able to tell her the right temperature, and if he thought
ordinary bonemeal would do for a fertiliser for it.
Beyond a doubt a bed of dandelions would look very fine, but one cannot
have everything in a garden, and I hope I may have the chance, hitherto
denied to me, of resigning myself to its absence from mine, even though
it be only for a single week.
But there are many worthy weeds to be found when one looks carefully for
them, and I should regard with great interest any display of them in a
bed ( in a neighbour's garden, providing that that garden was not within
a mile of mine).
The transformation just mentioned of a decrepit greenhouse into the
sub-tropical pleasure-ground, was not my inspiration for my treatment of
a greenhouse which encumbered a part of my ground only a short time ago.
It was a necessity for a practice of rigid economy that inspired me when
I examined the dilapidations and estimated the cost of “making good” at
something little short of fifty pounds. It had been patched often enough
before, goodness knows, and its wounds had been poulticed with putty
until in some places it seemed to be suffering from an irrepressible
attack of mumps.
Now the building had always been an offence to me. It was like an
incompetent servant, who, in addition to being incapable of earning
his wages, is possessed of an enormous appetite. With an old-fashioned
heating apparatus the amount of fuel it consumed year by year was
appalling; and withal it had more than once played us false, with the
result that several precious lives were lost in a winter when we looked
to the greenhouse to give us some colour for indoors. With such a list
of convictions against it, I was not disposed to be lenient, and the
suggestion of the discipline of a Reformatory was coldly received by me.
The fact was, that in my position as judge, I resembled too closely the
one in Gilbert's _Trial by Jury_ to allow of my being trusted implicitly
in cases in which personal attractions are to be put in the scales of
even-handed Justice; and with all its burden of guilt that greenhouse
bore the reputation of unsightliness. If it had had a single redeeming
feature, I might have been susceptible to its influence; but it had
none. It had been born commonplace, and old age had not improved it.
Leaning against the uttermost boundary wall of the garden, it had been
my achievement to hide it by the hedge of briar roses and the colonnade;
but it was sometimes only with great difficulty that we could head
off visitors from its doors. Heywood heaped on it his concentrated
opprobrium by calling it the Crystal Palace; but Dorothy, who had been a
student of _Jane Eyre_, had given it the name of “Rochester's Wife,” and
we had behaved toward it pretty much as Jane's lover had behaved in his
endeavour to set up a younger and more presentable object in the place
of his mature demented partner: we had two other glass-houses that we
could enter and see entered without misgiving; so that when we
stood beside the offending one with the estimate of the cost of its
reformation, I, at any rate, was not disposed to leniency.
“A case for the Reformatory,” said Dorothy, and in a moment the word
brought to my mind the advice of the young lord Hamlet, and I called
out,--
“Reform it altogether.”
“What do you mean?” she asked; for she sometimes gives me credit for
uttering words with a meaning hidden somewhere among the meshes of
verbiage.
“I have spoken the decision of the Court,” I replied. “'Reform it
altogether.'”
“At a cost--a waste--of sixty odd pounds?”
“I will not try to renew its youth like the eagles,” said I, in the tone
of voice of a prophet in the act of seeing a vision. “I shall make a new
thing of it, and a thing of beauty into the bargain.”
She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days Sara, laughed at the
forecast of an equally unlikely occurrence.
After an interval she laughed again, but with no note of derision.
“I see it all now-all!” she cried. “You will be the Martin Luther of its
Reformation: you will cut the half of it away; but will the Church stand
when you have done with it?”
“Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice of no protestant
against it,” I replied.
My scheme had become apparent to her in almost every particular as it
had flashed upon me; and we began operations the very next day.
And this is what the operation amounted to--an Amputation.
When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make its recovery hopeless
as well as a danger to the whole body, the saving grace of the surgeon's
knife is resorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the
patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten parts of the roof
of the greenhouse and convert the remainder, which was perfectly sound,
into a peach-shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation had
been performed with what appeared to us to be complete success.
We removed the lower panes of glass without difficulty--the difficulty
_was_ to induce the others to remain under their bondage of ancient
putty: “They don't make putty like that nowadays,” remarked my builder,
who is also, in accordance with the dictation of a job like this, a
housebreaker, a carpenter, and a glazier--a sort of unity of many tools
that comes to our relief (very appropriately) from the United States.
[Illustration: 0340]
I replied to him enigmatically that putty was a very good servant, but
a very bad master. The dictum had no connection with the matter in hand,
but it sounded as if it had, and that it was the crystallisation of
wisdom; and the good workman accepted it at its face value. He removed
over two hundred panes, each four feet by ten inches, without breaking
one, and he removed more than a thousand feet of the two-inch laths from
the stages, the heavier ones being of oak; he braced up the seven foot
depth of roof which we decreed should shelter our peaches, and “made
good” the inequalities of the edges. In short, he made a thoroughly good
job of the affair, and when he had finished he left us with a new and
very interesting feature of the garden. A lean-to greenhouse is, as a
rule, a commonplace incident in a garden landscape, and it is doubtful
if it pays for its keep, though admittedly useful as a nursery; but a
peach-alley is interesting because unusual. In our place of peace
this element is emphasised through our having allowed the elevated,
brick-built border that existed before, to remain untouched, and also
the framework where the swing-glass ventilators had been hung. When
our peach-trees were planted, flanked by plums and faced by apples _en
espalier,_ we covered the borders with violas of various colours, and
enwreathed the framework with the Cape Plumbago and the Jasmine Solanum.
and both responded nobly to our demands.
Nothing remained in order to place the transformation in harmony with
its surroundings but to turn the two large brick tanks which had served
us well in receiving the water from the old roof, into ornamental
lily ponds, and this was accomplished by the aid of some of the stone
carvings which I had picked up from time to time, in view of being able
to give them a place of honour some day. On the whole, we are quite
satisfied with this additional feature. It creates another surprise for
the entertainment of a visitor, and when the peaches and plums ripen
simultaneously, following the strawberries, we shall have, if we are to
believe Friswell, many more friends coming to us.
“If they are truly friends, we shall be glad,” says Dorothy.
“By your fruits ye shall know them,” says he, for like most professors
of the creed of the incredulous, he is never so much at his ease as when
quoting Scripture.
This morning as I was playing (indifferently) the part of Preceptress
Pinkerton, trying to induce on Rosamund, Olive, Francie, Marjorie, and
our dear, wise John, a firm grasp of the elements of the nature of the
English People as shown by their response to the many crusades in which
they have taken part since the first was proclaimed by Peter the Hermit,
I came to that part of nay illuminating discourse which referred to the
Nation's stolidity even in their hour of supreme triumph.
“This,” said I, “may be regarded by the more emotional peoples of Europe
as showing a certain coldness of temperament, in itself suggesting a
want of imagination, or perhaps, a cynical indifference--'cynical,' mind
you, from _kyon_, a dog--to incidents that should quicken the beating of
every human heart. But I should advise you to think of this trait of
our great Nation as indicating a praiseworthy reserve of the deepest
feelings. I regard with respect those good people who to-day are going
about their business in the streets of our town just in the usual way,
although the most important news that has reached the town since the
news of the capture of Antioch in 1099, is expected this evening. And
you will find that they will appear just as unconcerned if they learn
that the terms of the Armistice have been accepted--they will stroll
about with their hands in their pockets--not a cheer.... Is that your
mother calling you, John?”
“No; I think it's somebody in the street?” said John.
“Oh, I forgot. It's Monday--market day. There's more excitement in
Yardley High Street if a cow turns into Waterport Lane than there
will be when Peace is proclaimed. But still, I repeat, that this
difference... What was that? two cows must have turned into--Why, what's
this--what's--sit down, all of you--I tell you it's only--”
“Hurrah--hurrah--hurrah--hurrah--hurrah!” comes from the five young
throats of five rosy-cheeked, unchecked children, responding to the five
hundred that roar through the streets.
In five minutes the front of our house is ablaze with flags, and five
Union Jacks are added to the hundreds that young and old wave over
their heads in the street; and amid the tumult the recent admirer of
the stolid English People is risking his neck in an endeavour to fix a
Crusader's well-worn helmet in an alcove above the carven lions on the
perch of his home.
There, high over us, stands the Castle Keep as it stood in the days of
the First Crusade.
“And ever above the topmost roof the banner of England blew.”
Going out I saw a cow stray down Waterport Lane; but no one paid any
attention to its errantry.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Garden of Peace, by Frank Frankfort Moore