All the leaves of the New Forest, save those of the holly and
mistletoe, some evergreen spines, and the blinder sort, that know not
a wink from a nod—all the leaves, I mean, that had sense of their
position, and when to blush and when to retire, and how much was due
to the roots that taught them—all these leaves were beginning to feel
that their time in the world was over. The trees had begun to stand
tier upon tier, in an amphitheatrical fashion, and to sympathise more
with the sunset; while the sun every evening was kissing his hands, and
pretending to think them younger. Some outspoken trees leaned forward,
well in front of the forest–galleries, with amber sleeves, and loops of
gold, and braids of mellow abandonment, like liberal Brazilian ladies,
bowing from the balconies. Others drew away behind them, with their
mantles folded, leaning back into unprobed depths of semitransparent
darkness, as the forest of the sky amasses, when the moon is rising.
Some had cast off their children in parachutes, swirling as the linden
berries do throughout September; some were holding their treasures
grimly, and would, even when they were naked. Now the flush of the
grand autumnal tide had not risen yet to its glory, but was freaking,
and glancing, and morrising round the bays and the juts of the foliage.
Or it ruffled, among the ferny knaps, and along the winding alleys. The
sycamores truly were reddening fast, and the chestnut palms growing
bronzy; the limes were yellowing here and there, and the sere leaves
of the woodbine fluttered the cob of clear red berries. But the great
beechen hats, which towered and darkened atop of the moorland hollows
and across the track of the woodman—these, and the oaks along the rise,
where the turtle–dove was cooing, had only shown their sense of the age
by an undertint of olive.
It was now the fifth day of October—a day to be remembered long by all
the folk of Nowelhurst. Mr. Garnet stood at the end of his garden,
where a narrow pinewood gate opened to one of the forest rides. Of
course he was doing something, and doing it very forcibly. His life
was a fire that burned very fast, having plenty of work to poke it.
But the little job which he now had in hand was quite a relaxation:
there was nothing Bull Garnet enjoyed so much as cutting down a tree.
He never cared what time of year it was, whether the leaves were on
or off, whether the sap were up or down, as we incorrectly express
it. The sap of a tree is ever moving, like our own life–blood; only
it feels the change of season more than we who have no roots. Has a
dormouse no circulation, when he coils himself up in his elbowed hole?
Is there no evaporation from the frozen waters? The two illustrations
are wide apart, but the principle is the same. Nature admits no
absolute stoppage, except as death, in her cradle of life; and then
she sets to, and transmutes it. Why Bull Garnet so enjoyed the cutting
down of a tree, none but those who themselves enjoy it may pretend to
say. Of course, we will not refer it to the reason assigned in the
well–known epigram, which contains such a wholesale condemnation of
this arboricidal age. In another century, London builders will perhaps
discover, when there are no trees left, that a bit of tuck–pointing by
the gate, and a dab of mud–plaster beside it, do not content the heart
of man like the leaves, and the drooping shadowy rustle, which is the
type of himself.
Bull Garnet stood there in the October morning, with the gate wide
open, flung back by his strong hand upon its hinges, as if it had no
right to them. The round bolt dropped from the quivering force, dropped
through the chase of the loop, and bedded deep in the soft, wet ground.
With much satisfaction the gate brought up, and felt itself anchored
safely; Bull Garnet gave the bolt a kick, which hurled all the rusty
screws out. Then he scarcely stopped to curse the blacksmith; he wanted
the time for the woodcutters. At a glint from the side of his vast
round eyes—eyes that took in everything, and made all the workmen
swear and believe that he could see round a corner—he descried that
the axemen were working the tree askew to the strain of the ropes. The
result must be that the comely young oak, just proud of its first big
crop of acorns, would swerve on the bias of the wind, stagger heavily,
and fall headlong upon the smart new fence. There was no time for
words—in a moment he had kicked the men right and left, torn off his
coat, and caught up an axe, and dealt three thundering strokes in the
laggard twist of the breach. Away went the young oak, swaying wildly,
trying once to recover itself, then crashing and creaking through the
brushwood, with a swish from its boughs and leaves, and a groan from
its snaggy splinters. A branch took one of the men in his face, and
laid him flat in a tussock of grass.
“Serve you right, you lubber; Iʼm devilish glad”, cried Bull Garnet;
“and I hope you wonʼt move for a week”.
The next moment, he went up and raised him, felt that his limbs were
sound, and gave him a dram of brandy.
“All right, my fine fellow. Next time youʼll know something of the way
to fell a tree. Go home now, and Iʼll send you a bottle of wine”.
But the change of his mood, the sudden softening, the glisten that
broke through the flash of his eyes, was not caused this time by the
inroad of rapid Christian feeling. It was the approach of his son that
stroked the down of his heart the right way. Bull Garnet loved nothing
else in this world, or in the world to come, with a hundredth part of
the love wherewith he loved his only son. Lo, the word “love” thrice in
a sentence—nevertheless, let it stand so. For is there a word in our
noble tongue, or in any other language, to be compared for power and
beauty with that little word “love”?
Bob came down the path of the kitchen garden at his utmost speed. He
was like his father in one or two things, and most unlike in others.
His nature was softer and better by far, though not so grand and
striking—Bull Garnet in the young Adam again, ere ever the devil came.
All this the father felt, but knew not: it never occurred to him to
inquire why he adored his son.
The boy leaped the new X fence very cleverly, through the fork of the
fingers, and stood before his father in a flame of indignation. Mr.
Garnet, with that queer expression which the face of a middle–aged man
wears when he recalls his boyhood, ere yet he begins to admire it,
was looking at his own young life with a contemplative terror. He was
saying to himself, “What cheek this boy has got”! and he was feeling
all the while that he loved him the more for having it.
“Hurrah, Bob, my boy; youʼre come just in time”.
Mr. Garnet tried very hard to look as if he expected approval. Well
enough all the time he knew that he had no chance of getting it. For
Bob loved nature in any form, especially as expressed in the noble
eloquence of a tree. And now he saw why he had been sent to the village
on a trifling errand that morning.
“Just in time for what, sir”? Bobʼs indignation waxed yet more. That
his father should dare to chaff him!
“Just in time to tell us all about these wonderful red–combed fungi.
What do you call them—some long name, as wonderful as themselves”?
Bob kicked them aside contemptuously. He could have told a long story
about them, and things which men of thrice his age, who have neglected
their mother, would be glad to listen to. Nature, desiring not revenge,
has it in the credulous itch of the sons who have turned their backs on
her.
“Oh, father”, said Bob, with the tears in his eyes; “father, you canʼt
have known that three purple emperors came to this oak, and sat upon
the top of it, every morning for nearly a week, in the middle of July.
And it was the most handsomest thirty–year oak till you come right to
Brockenhurst bridge”.
“Most handsomest, Bob”! cried Mr. Garnet, glad to lay hold of anything;
“come along with me, my son; I must see to your education”.
Near them stood a young spruce fir, not more than five feet high. It
had thrown up a straight and tapering spire, scaled with tender green.
Below were tassels, tufts, and pointlets, all in triple order, pluming
over one another in a pile of beauty. The tips of all were touched with
softer and more glaucous tone. But all this gentle tint and form was
only as a framework now, a loom to bear the web of heaven. For there
had been a white mist that morning—autumnʼs breath made visible; and
the tree with its net of spiderʼs webs had caught the lucid moisture.
Now, as the early sunlight opened through the layered vapours, that
little spruce came boldly forth a dark bay of the forest, and met all
the spears of the orient. Looped and traced with threads of gauze, the
lacework of a fairyʼs thought, scarcely daring to breathe upon its veil
of tremulous chastity, it kept the wings of light on the hover, afraid
to weigh down the whiteness. A maiden with the love–dream nestling
under the bridal faldetta, a child of genius breathing softly at his
own fair visions, even an infantʼs angel whispering to the weeping
mother—what image of humanity can be so bright and exquisite as a
common treeʼs apparel?
“Father, can you make that”? Mr. Garnet checked his rapid stride; and
for once he admired a tree.
“No, my son; only God can do such glorious work as that”.
“But it donʼt take God to undo it. Smash”!
Bob dashed his fists through the whole of it, and all the draped
embroidery, all the pearly filigree, all the festoons of silver, were
but as a dream when a yawning man stretches his scraggy arms forth.
The little tree looked wobegone, stale, and draggled with drunken tears.
“Why, Bob, I am ashamed of you”.
“And so am I of you, father”.
Before the bold speech was well out of his mouth, Bob took heartily to
his heels; and, for once in his life, Mr. Garnet could not make up his
mind what to do. After all, he was not so very angry, for he thought
that his son had been rather clever in his mode of enforcing the moral;
and a man who loves ability, and loves his boy still more, regards with
a liberal shrewdness the proof of the one in the other.
Alas, it is hard to put Mr. Garnet in a clear, bold stereoscope,
without breach of the third commandment. Somehow or other, as fashion
goes—and happily it is on the go always—a man, and threefold thrice
a woman, may, at this especial period, in the persons of his or her
characters, break the sixth commandment lightly, and the seventh with
great applause. Indeed, no tale is much approved without lèse–majesté
of them both. Then for what subterranean reason, or by what diabolical
instrumentality (that language is strictly parliamentary, because it
is words and water), is a writer now debarred from reporting what his
people said, unless they all talked tracts and milk, or rubrics and
pommel–saddles? In a word—for sometimes any fellow must come to the
point—Why do our judicious and highly–respected Sosii score out all our
d—ns?
Is it not true that our generation swears almost as hard as any?
And yet it will not allow a writer to hint the truth in the matter.
Of course we should do it sparingly, and with due reluctance. But,
unless all tales are written for women, and are so to be accepted, it
is a weak attempt at imposture on our sons and grandsons to suppress
entirely in our pictures any presence not indecent, however unbecoming.
Mr. Garnet was a Christian of the most advanced intelligence, so far as
our ideas at the present time extend. He felt the beauty and perfection
of the type which is set before us. He never sneered, as some of us do,
at things which were too large for him, neither did he clip them to the
shape of his own œsophagus. Only in practice, like the rest of us, he
was sadly centrifugal.
Now with his nostrils widely open, and great eyes on the ground, he was
pacing rapidly up and down his sheltered kitchen garden. Every square
was in perfect order, every tree in its proper compass, all the edging
curt and keen. The ground was cropped with that trim luxuriance which
we never see except under first–rate management. All the coleworts for
the winter, all the wellearthed celery, all the buttoning Brussels
sprouts, salsify just fit to dig, turnips lifting whitely forth (as
some ladies love to show themselves), modest savoys just hearting in
and saying “no” to the dew–beads, prickly spinach daily widening the
clipped arrowhead—they all had room to eat and drink, and no man
grudged his neighbour; yet Puck himself could not have skipped through
with dry feet during a hoar–frost. As for weeds, Bull Garnet—well, I
must not say what he _would_ have done. Suddenly a small, spare man
turned the corner upon him, where a hedge of hornbeam, trimmed and
dressed as if with a pocket–comb, broke the south–western violence.
Most men would have shown their hats above the narrow spine, but Rufus
Hutton was very short, and seldom carried a chimney–pot.
“Sir, what can I do for you”? said Mr. Garnet, much surprised, but
never taken aback.
“Excuse me, sir, but I called at your house, and came this way to find
you. You know me well, by name, I believe; as I have the pleasure of
knowing you. Rufus Hutton; ahem, sir! Delightful occupation! I, too, am
a gardener. ‘Dumelow Seedling’, I flatter myself. Know them well by the
eye, sir. But what a difference the soil makes! Ah, yes, let them hang
till the frost comes. What a plague we have had with earwigs! Get into
the seat of the fruit; now just let me show you. Ah, you beggars, there
you are. Never take them by the head, sir, or theyʼd nip my fingers.
Take them under the abdomen, and they havenʼt room to twist upon you.
There, now; what can he do”?
“Not even thank you, sir, for killing him. And now what can I do for
you”?
“Mr. Garnet, I will come to the point. A man learns that in India.
Too hot, sir, for much talking. Bless my heart, I have known the
thermometer at 10 oʼclock P.M., sir—not in the barracks, mind me, nor
in a stifling nullah——”
“Excuse me, I have read of all that. I have an engagement, Dr. Hutton,
at eight minutes past eleven”.
“Bless my heart, and I have an appointment at 11.9 and five seconds.
How singular a coincidence”!
Bull Garnet looked down at the little doctor, and thought him too small
to be angry with. Moreover, he was a practical man, and scarcely knew
what chaff meant. So he kept his temper wonderfully, while Rufus looked
up at him gravely, with his little eyes shining like glow–worms between
the brown stripes of his countenance.
“I have heard of you, Dr. Hutton, as a very skilful gardener. Perhaps
you would like to look round my garden, while I go and despatch my
business. If so, I will be with you again in exactly thirty–five
minutes”.
“Stop, stop, stop! youʼll be sorry all your life, if you donʼt hear my
news”.
So Rufus Hutton thought. But Mr. Garnet was sorry through all the rest
of his life that he ever stopped to hear it.