PLANTING THYME
The morning she came was the morning Eric said good-bye "just for a few
days," he dreaming, as little as we, of what those few days were to
bring.
And so, ignorant of what I was facing, I was almost happy in spite of
the parting, because of what Eric said to me that last Monday morning.
The cart had been ordered to go for Madame Aurore at 9:42. Directly
after breakfast my mother and Bettina set about trimming hats--a
business in which they scorned my help. I had something particular to
finish in the garden. I went on digging up the bare patches on the south
bank, sharing the delight of all things growing and blowing and flying
under the glorious cloud-piled sky of May. I listened intently, as I
worked, to that orchestra of tiny sound underneath the loud birds'
singing. The spring, unlike last year's, had been cold and late; many
days like this--with crisp air and fitful sunshine. Only here, in the
sheltered south-west corner, were the bees in any number tuning up
their fiddles.
I looked up from my work and saw--at that most unusual hour--Eric Annan
at the gate! I saw, too, that he looked odd--excited. I dropped the
garden-fork. "What is the matter?" I said.
"Matter? What should be the matter?"
I only smiled. It was so like Eric not to be pleased at hearing he had
betrayed himself.
"I thought you looked as if--as if something had happened," I said. What
I meant was, as if something were about to happen. Only one thing, I
thought, could make Eric look like that; make him interrupt his precious
morning; one thing, alone, could have grown so great overnight that the
heart of man could not conceal it, or contain it, for another hour.
But, even if my hopes were not misleading me, I felt that Eric would not
like my having guessed so much. To hide my eyes from him I bent down
over my basket. I lifted out tufts of aromatic green, and set them
firmly in the loosened soil. I pressed the earth down tight about their
roots.
"What are you planting there?" he asked.
"Re-planting the wild thyme," I said. Something had killed it last
year.
"Where do you find wild thyme?" he asked.
I told him how far I had to go for it. And when? Before breakfast! He
looked astonished.
I did not like to explain that I had got into the habit of waking early
to study. And, now that studying was no use, I spent the time in taking
delicious walks in the early morning, before other people were awake. I
confessed the walks.
"You ought not to have told me," he said.
"Why?"
"Because, for these next days, I can't come too."
I went on planting thyme.
"Promise me, for these next days _you_ won't go either."
"Why?" I asked again.
"Because my thoughts might go wandering."
I nudged the wild thyme, and we both smiled secretly.
"I can't afford, just at this moment, to have anything distracting me."
He said this in an anxious, almost appealing, way.
"Very well," I answered. "I won't go early walks for the next--how many
days am I to be cooped up when the morning is at its best?"
"Oh, not long." Then with that impatience of his, if you were doing
other things while he was there: "How much more of that stuff are you
going to put in?"
"All there is," I said provokingly. And I did not hurry.
"Why must you have wild thyme there?" he grumbled.
"So as not to disappoint the blue butterflies," I said gravely. "They
'know a bank' and this is it. They've had an understanding with my
mother about it for years. If they don't find thyme here they're
annoyed. They go on dying out. My mother says a world without blue
butterflies would be a poor sort of place."
We talked irrelevancies for a moment more--the passion of the
convolvulus moth for petunias, and the other flowers the different sorts
of moths and butterflies preferred.
He was surprised to hear that for years my mother had taken all that
trouble to please even the ordinary red admirals and spotted footmen and
painted ladies. I explained that I was re-planting this thyme only to
please my mother. "Personally," I had never bothered much about the
butterfly-garden, I said, in what he promptly called a superior tone.
I maintained that the pampered creatures were dreadful "slackers" and
sybarites--all for colour and sweet scents.
He stood listening a moment to the bees' band playing in the
rhododendron concert, and then he defended the butterflies. Butterflies
were much misunderstood. "In their way--and a very good way, too--they
answer to the call."
"What call?"
"The call to serve the ends of life."
I looked up, surprised, from my fresh thyme patch, for general
moralisings were not much in Eric's way. "What are the ends of life?"
"More life." There was a moment's pause. Then he said butterflies were
no more "idle" than bees and birds. Besides attending to their more
immediate affairs they were pollen-bringers.
It was such solemn talk for butterflies. I told him the two sulphur
yellows reeling in the sunshine were laughing at him. "'Ends of life'
indeed! They simply _love_ bright colour and things that smell
sweet...."
"Of course they love them!" Then he said something that sank deeper than
any single sentence I ever heard: "Hating never created anything; all
life comes from lovers."
At the moment that great saying only frightened me. And the strange
thing was it seemed to frighten him.
We were very still for a moment. I thought even the little music of the
honey bees had slackened. I and all the world waited--holding breath.
Then a gust of wind veered round the corner, and Eric turned up his
collar. He asked if I wasn't cold. I was anything but cold. But I had
noticed that after his long hours of motionless concentration indoors,
Eric was very sensitive to chill. So I put off planting the rest of the
thyme, and I took Eric up to the morning-room.
"What is he going to tell me?" I asked myself on the way. And though I
asked, I thought I knew.