I MEET AN OLD FRIEND AND RECEIVE
A LESSON IN PHILOSOPHY
It was not so easy to run down to Esher to see Miss Gold. Cowardice
intervened. It requires not a little courage for a naturally
diffident and sympathetic person to renew a friendship that thirty
years ago was in danger of becoming the closest of all intimacies
between a man and a woman.
Miss Gold--Agnes, as I called her--was then a girl of twenty-one or
two, and I fancy that people were beginning to join our names. We
were together a great deal; her society gave me extraordinary
pleasure, for she had a natural frankness and shrewdness and was
intellectually a rebel. To be a rebel then was, for a girl, very
exceptional. Also she danced beautifully and so masterfully as to
make me as a partner cut some kind of a figure, which no other woman
could do, and she liked me enough to give me three or four dances
every evening. Our last meeting was at a party in Hyde Park Street,
I remember, on the last night of the year 1874--and I held her hand
for a few moments longer than I should. I did not mean anything by
it but affection. It was one of those sudden impulses to convince
persons that you like them very much or feel for them very much; but
I believe it meant more to her. I often regretted it, and never so
much as when I heard of her accident.
Her accident! She was intensely fond of horses, and rode every
morning. I have seen her in the Row many a time and envied the men
with her their power to afford a horse. One day, when she was still
a mere girl, soon after I left England, she was thrown, and has never
stood upright since. She is carried from her bed to a couch and from
her couch to bed. That is her life, and has been these thirty years.
I can assure you that I (who am still vigorous and last saw her
dancing) dreaded the visit. To see Miss Gold again was for long an
unbearable thought, for I possess little of that fortitude in bearing
other persons' calamities that La Rochefoucauld attributed to the
world at large.
But I made up my mind at last, and Naomi accompanied me to a flower
shop to buy some flowers as an offering.
It was then that I made a discovery of my own with regard to the
changes that have come upon England, for, looking round the
florist's, I suddenly realised the vast increase not only in interest
in flowers but in the variety of flowers that has been witnessed by
the thirty years and more that I have been abroad. Where can it
lead? I have wondered often since, after luxurious travels amid
nursery gardens and Temple marquees? Take, for example, daffodils.
In my youth there were daffodils too--but they were in two varieties
only, the double and the single. That was all. To-day there must be
hundreds, all beautiful and all named. In my day they were not grown
among grass as now they are: there was no encouragement of wild
exuberance as one now sees. No one said, "How sweet Sir Watkin looks
under the trees!" How could they, for Sir Watkin had not been
evolved.
I wish, by the way, that some one would call a flower after me. I
should feel that indeed I had lived to some purpose could I, even
from my death-bed, raise a weary head and, straining my poor,
exhausted, failing auditories, catch the words, "How luxuriantly the
Kent Falconers bloom this year!" Thus hearing I could die in peace.
And the anemone. That is a totally new discovery. I saw for
fourpence bunches of anemones of a deep purple such as was never
heard of in my time. And tulips are even more wonderful. We had
tulips, of course, but they were the flaunting type. The new tulips
can burn too, but also how sweet and grave they can be; and again,
how cheery and courageous! But most of the new colours are
wonderful. Sweet-peas we used to call merely sweet-peas and grow for
scent: to-day the sweet-pea has a thousand names and colours, and
every year, I am told, new and exquisite hues find expression in its
butterfly bloom. The delphinium again is a magical revelation. I
seem to remember something dingily like it--a larkspur we called
it--but that this flower should ever adventure so gently up and down
the scale of blue into the tenderest melodies--who would have
expected that? The delphinium seems to me the perfect flower against
or under a grey sky. It is not till the sun has left that it comes
to its delicate own. I like to think of all the care and thought
that the great florists have been spending during my absence to
evolve this lovely apparition against my return.
Naomi tells me that gardening has become as fashionable as motoring,
and England surely is very fortunate in this pretty hobby, although
it hurts me a little not only to think of what I missed by being born
too soon, but also to have such difficulty in finding some of my old
favourites. The Sweet William, for example, eludes me in garden
after garden, and mignonette I no longer smell. In our garden at
home, before artistic gardening was heard of, these were grown
profusely. The only flower in which I see no improvement is the
rose. No doubt there are beautiful new roses; but all my favourites
are the old ones, and I do not find that the new roses smell as
sweet. The cabbage rose remains the most satisfying of all.
Miss Gold lives in a large and cheerful Georgian house. Her
sitting-room is on the ground floor, with high French windows uniting
it to the lawn. Like so many invalids, she is far less susceptible
to cold than most of us, and she lies there with the windows open
most of the time. On fine days she is wheeled into the garden itself
or into the paddock. All the pretty apparatus for ingratiating human
beings with birds is to be seen in the garden--the bath and the nest
boxes and the cocoanut for the tits. This means, of course, the
privation of a cat; but instead of a cat Miss Gold keeps several
dogs, with a King Charles spaniel as the most privileged, and in the
paddock she has a home of rest for old horses.
The garden is very full of flowers--so full that I might well have
bought something else with my money--and it has also two large
cedars, beneath which her wheeled couch often stands.
Very nervously did I ring Miss Gold's bell; but, as is usual in this
life, I found the realisation of the visit far easier than the
anticipation. The little lady was brave enough for two. "My dear
Kent," she said, after a little while, "you must not come and see me
if you are going to look so sad. I want you to come often: you will
do me so much good. But it is quite useless if you have such a
mournful expression. What is it after all? I am very happy lying
here. I have many kind friends. The garden is so wonderful always,
and I have a gardener who is also an invaluable companion and never
wants to make a rustic fence. The birds trust me: there is a robin
that comes right into the room and will do so until he is a month or
so older and has been told more about man's nature. I have letters
every morning, and my eyes are so good that I can read and write all
day if I like. As for death, my dear Kent, we must not be so
frightened of it. I have grown to think of death without any fear or
shuddering. After all, if I live to be eighty, my life on my
eightieth birthday will be as much behind me as a child's of five.
It is only to-day that we live for--to-day and to-morrow. No one
dares to look much more forward than that. The past is so completely
over that in a kind of way one life may be said to be as long as
another."
I did my best to be equally optimistic, and quoted an old epigram of
my friend Trist's to the effect that every birth certificate is in a
manner of speaking a death warrant.
Miss Gold liked that. "And another thing," she said: "considering
how uncertain is life and how many fatal accidents occur every day,
it is illogical to be cheerful with every one else, and pull a long
face when you come to see me. Because I may be lying on this couch
in ten years' time just as I am to-day; whereas one of your strong,
healthy friends with whom you dine to-night may be knocked down and
killed by a motor car to-morrow morning. No, Kent, with me you must
be gay."
I so far fell into her humour as to tell her about one or two of Mr.
Giles's Chinese heroes, whose quiet acceptance of death is perhaps
their most astonishing characteristic to a Western reader--the
characteristic which most differentiates them from ourselves, who
cling to life more passionately with each generation. I told her of
the death of Wang Ching-wên of the fifth century A.D., who one
evening, as he was playing chess with a friend, received orders to
commit suicide. "After having read the Imperial mandate, he finished
his game and put the board away. A bowl of poison was brought to
him; and then turning to his friend he remarked jestingly, 'I am
afraid I cannot ask you to join me!' and quietly drained the bowl."
"That is the way," said Miss Gold; "but it certainly is not English."
I told her also of the death of Hsieh Chiu-chēng, whose was
perhaps the most ludicrously ironical end on record, since it came
"from poisoning himself with a compound which he fancied was the
Elixir of Life."
Miss Gold asked me if any women were included in the book. There
are, of course, a few, but China is not a woman's country. One is
Liu Shih, the wife of an official at Court, who also had dealings
with the cup. The Emperor one day sent her "a potion which he
commanded her to drink, and which he said would cause instant death
if she was jealous; adding that if she was not jealous she need not
drink it. Without hesitation she drank it off, saying that death
would be preferable to such a life."
Another Chinese lady is Li Fu-jen of the second century B.C., who was
so beautiful that "one glance of hers," said a poet, "would destroy a
City, two glances a State." Li Fu-jen, however, lived for pleasure;
more heroic was Li Hsien, who, finding that she fascinated a student
named Chêng Yüan-ho to such an extent that he began to neglect his
career, she tore out her eyes: "after which," says the historian,
"her lover rapidly rose to distinction." But--and here comes in the
surprise to the Western reader accustomed to think of the Chinese as
monsters of impassive selfishness--after he had achieved distinction
he married her, all sightless as she was. Isn't that a pretty story?
To my mind, one of the most agreeable girls in the book is the
sarcastic waiting-maid who rebuked the meanness of Táo Ku. "On one
occasion he bade a newly purchased waiting-maid get some snow and
make tea in honour of the Feast of Lanterns, asking, somewhat
pompously, 'Was that the custom in your old home?' 'Oh no,' the girl
replied; 'they were a rough lot. They just put up a gold-splashed
awning, and had a little music and some old wine.'"
We talked also of the Wynnes, and Miss Gold made me promise to bring
Naomi to see her, and she asked also if I would bring Trist, whom
neither of us had seen since the early seventies, but who was in
those days my inseparable friend and very attractive also to her.
She was greatly amused by my discovery of her name at Bemerton's and
the chance which had taken me to live over her favourite bookseller's
shop. But in Mr. Dabney she was even more interested.
"How extraordinary to think he should be in the same house," she
said. "There is no journalist whom I follow so closely. He has a
fearless mind and a hatred of injustice. Do you like him?"
"Well, he compels attention," I said, "but he is a little too near
white heat for me."
"If he were cooler," said Miss Gold, "he would probably be
tolerant--like you--and then he would be no use. There is so much
comfortable tolerance to-day, so little anger. I hope he will go on
being angry."
"He will," I said.