THE TWO PAVILIONS.
Captain Barker and Captain Runacles had been friends from boyhood.
They had been swished together at Dr. Huskisson's school, hard by the
Water Gate; had been packed off to sea in the same ship, and
afterwards had more than once smelt powder together. Admiral Blake
and Sir Christopher Mings had turned them into tough fighters by sea;
and Margaret Tellworthy had completed their education ashore, and
made them better friends by rejecting both. In an access of misogyny
they had planned and built their blue pavilions, beside the London
road, vowing to shut themselves up and look on no woman again.
This happened but a short time before the first Dutch War, in which
the one served under Captain Jonings in the _Ruby_ and the other had
the honour to be cast ashore with Prince Rupert himself, aboard the
_Galloper_. Upon the declaration of peace, in the autumn of 1667,
they had returned, and, forgetting their vow, laid siege again to
their mistress, who regretted the necessity of refusing them thrice
apiece.
Upon his third rejection, Jeremy Runacles was driven by indignation
to offer his hand at once to Mistress Isabel Seaman, sister of that
same Robert Seaman who, as Mayor of Harwich, admitted Sir Anthony
Deane to the freedom of the Corporation, and had the honour to
receive, in exchange, twelve fire-buckets for the new town-hall.
As Mistress Isabel inherited a third of the profits amassed by her
father in the rope-making trade, she was considered a good match.
Captain Barker, however, resented the marriage on the ground that she
was out of place in a pavilion expressly designed for a confirmed
bachelor. When, after a few months, her husband also began to hold
this view, Mrs. Runacles, instead of reminding him that he, and he
alone, was to blame for her intrusion, did her best to make matters
easy by quitting this world altogether on St. Bartholomew's Eve,
1670, leaving behind her the smallest possible daughter. But as this
daughter at once required a nurse, the alleviation proved to be
inconsiderable--as Mr. Runacles would have delighted to point out to
his wife, had she remained within earshot. As it was, he took
infinite pains to select a suitable nurse, and forthwith neglected
the child entirely--a course of conduct which was not so culpable as
might be supposed, since (with the sole exception of Mrs. Runacles)
he had never been known to err in choosing a subordinate. In times
of peace he gave himself up to studying the mathematics, in which he
was a proficient, and to the designing of such curious toys as
sundials, water-clocks, pumps, and the like; which he so multiplied
about the premises, out of pure joy in constructing them, that
Simeon, his body-servant, had much ado to live among the many
contrivances for making his life easier.
Although the two pavilions were exactly similar in shape and
colour, their gardens differed in some important respects.
On Captain Runacles' side of the hedge all was order--trim turf
and yews accurately clipped, though stunted by the sea winds.
Captain Barker's factotum, Narcissus Swiggs by name, was a slow man
with but a single eye. His orbit in gardening was that of the four
seasons, but he had the misfortune to lag behind them by the space of
three months; while the two sides of the gravel path, though each
would be harmonious in itself, could only be enjoyed by shutting one
eye as you advanced from the blue gate to the blue front-door.
The particular pride of Captain Barker's garden, however, was a
collection of figure-heads set up like statues at regular intervals
around the hedge. The like of it could be found nowhere.
Here, against a background of green, and hanging forward over a green
lawn, were an Indian Chief, a Golden Hind, a Triton, a Centaur, an
effigy of King Charles I., another of Britannia, a third of the god
Pan, and a fourth of Mr. John Phillipson, sometime alderman and
shipowner of Harwich. Though rudely modelled, the majority received
an extremely lifelike appearance from their colouring, which was
renewed every now and then under the Captain's own supervision.
He asserted them to be beautiful, and his acquaintances were content
with the qualification that to an unwarned visitor, in an uncertain
light, they might be disconcerting.
To this paradise Captain Barker introduced his newly adopted son,
with the wet-nurse that the Doctor had found for him: and after
explaining matters to Narcissus--who had heard of the _Wasp's_
arrival in port and had been vaguely troubled by a long conversation
with Simeon, next door--installed the new-comers in the two rooms
under the roof of the pavilion and sat down to meditate and wait for
the child's development.
On the fourth morning after the installation, Narcissus appeared and
demanded a higher wage. This was granted.
On the sixth morning, Narcissus appeared again.
"That there nurse--" he began.
"What of her?"
"As touching that there nurse, your instructions were to feed her
up."
"Well?"
"I've fed her up."
"Well?"
"She's ate till she's sick."
The Captain sent post-haste for Dr. Beckerleg.
"That woman's green with bile," the Doctor announced. "You've been
over-feeding her."
"I did it to strengthen the child."
"No doubt; but this sort of woman will eat all that's put before her.
Lower her diet."
This was done. The woman recovered in a couple of days and resigned
her place at once, declaring she was starved.
A second wet-nurse was sought for and found. The child thrived, was
weaned, and began to cut his teeth without any trouble to mention.
Twice a day Captain Barker visited his nursery and studied him
attentively.
"I'll own that I'm boggled," he confessed to Dr. Beckerleg.
"You see, a child is the offspring of his parents."
"That is undeniable!" the Doctor answered.
"And science now asserts that he inherits his parents' aptitudes:
therefore, to train him _secundum naturam_, I must discover these
aptitudes and educate or check them."
"Decidedly."
"Well, but his mother was an angel, and his father the dirtiest scamp
that ever cheated the halter."
"I should advise you to strike a mean. What of the child himself?"
"He does nothing but eat."
"It appears to me that, striking a mean between the two extremes you
mention, we arrive at mere man. I perceive a great opportunity.
Suppose you teach him exactly what Adam was taught."
"Gardening?"
"Precisely. He will start with some advantage over Adam, there being
no Eve to complicate matters."
"He shall be taught gardening," the little Captain decided.
"The pursuit will accord well with his temperament, which is notably
pacific. The child seldom or never cries. At the same time we
cannot quite revert to the Garden of Eden. His life will, almost
certainly, bring him more or less into contact with his fellow-men."
"We must expect that."
"Therefore, as a mere measure of precaution, it might be as well to
instruct him in the use of the small-sword."
"I will look after that. There is nothing I shall enjoy more
than teaching him--precaution. We have now, I think, settled
everything--"
"By no means." The Doctor put a hand into his tail-pocket, and after
some difficulty with the lining pulled out a small book bound in
green leather and tied with a green ribbon. "Here," he announced,
"is the first volume of a treatise on education."
"Plague take your books! You're as bad as Jemmy, yonder. I tell you
I'll not addle the boy's head with books."
"But this treatise has the advantage to be unwritten."
Dr. Beckerleg untied the ribbon, and holding out the book, turned
over a score of pages. They were all blank.
"Undoubtedly that is an advantage. But then, it hardly seems to me
to be a treatise."
"No: but it will be when you have written it."
"I?"
"Certainly, you intend to train Tristram in accordance with nature.
On what do we base our knowledge of nature? On experiment and
observation. For many reasons your experiments with the child must
be limited; but you can observe him daily--hourly, if you like.
In this volume you shall record your observations from day to day,
_nulla dies sine linea_. It is the first present I make to him, as
his godfather: and in doing so I set you down to write the most
valuable book in the world, a complete History of a Human Creature."
Captain Barker took the volume.
"But I shall never live to finish it."
"We hope not. The beauty, however, of this history will be that at
any point in its progress we may consult it for Tristram's good, and
learn all that, up to that point, God has given us eyes to see.
It may be that in deciding to make him a gardener we have been
mistaken. That book will enlighten us."
"There's one blessing," said Captain Barker, tucking the book under
his arm; "whatever pursuit the boy may follow, he'll want to follow
it unmolested. And therefore, in any case, I must teach him to use
the small-sword."
During the first few months, almost every entry in the Captain's
green volume dealt with Tristram's appetite. Nor did this fluctuate
enough to make the record exciting. He was a slow, phlegmatic
infant, with red cheeks and an exuberant crop of yellow curls.
He slept all night and a good third of the day, and, beyond cutting
ten teeth in as many months, exhibited no precocity. Nothing
troubled him, if we except an insatiable hunger. He was weaned with
extreme difficulty, and even when promoted to bread and biscuits and
milk puddings, continued to recognise his nurse's past service and
reward it with so sincere an affection that the woman accepted an
increase of wage and cheerfully consented to stay on and take care of
him.
Captain Barker saw nothing in all this to shake his first resolution
of making the boy a gardener, but rather found in each successive day
a reason the more for making haste to learn something about
horticulture himself, in order that when the time came he might be
able to teach it. At length he took counsel with Narcissus Swiggs
and unfolded his desire.
Mr. Swiggs listened sleepily, and as soon as his master had done gave
him a month's notice.
"What the devil's the use of that?" Captain Barker asked.
"I thought you weren't satisfied, that's all."
"If I weren't, I should kick you out without half these words.
You've been thinking of yourself all this while."
"I mostly does."
"Then don't, while I'm talking." And Captain Barker explained his
scheme a second time.
"No use," pronounced Mr. Swiggs at the close, shaking his head
ponderously.
"Why not?"
Mr. Swiggs swept his hand before him, summing up the whole landscape
with one majestic semicircle.
"Where is your soil?" he asked. "And where is your water?
Springs?"--he paused a couple of seconds--"There ain't none. All
that mortal man can do, I does."
"And what is that?"
"I does without."
"But the marsh behind us--"
"Salt."
"Narcissus Swiggs, you have been in my service twenty years."
"Twenty-three."
"During that time you have once or twice argued with me. I ask you,
as a Christian man, to tell me truly what you got by it."
"Naught."
"Just so. On this occasion, however, I've listened with great
patience to all your objections--"
"Not a tithe of 'em."
"They're all you'll have a chance of making, at any rate. And I
answer them thus: If the worst comes to the worst, I'll cover the
whole of this property with a couple of tubs, one to catch rain-water
and t'other filled with garden mould. If the sea rots 'em, I'll have
the whole estate careened, and its bottom pitched and its seams
stopped with oakum. I'll rig up a battery here, and if the
water-butt runs dry you shall blaze away at the guns till you fetch
the rain down, as I've seen it fetched down before now by a
cannonade. But I mean to have a garden here, and a garden I'll
have."
Faithful to this resolve, Captain Barker set to work to study the art
in which Tristram was to be instructed, and, being by nature a hater
of superficiality, determined to begin by acquainting himself with
everything that had been written about the nature and habits of
plants from the earliest ages to that present day. He engaged a
young demy of Magdalen College, Oxford--son of Mr. Lucas, saddler, of
the High Street, Harwich--who was much pinched to continue his
studies at the University, to extract and translate for him whatever
Aristotle, Theophrastus and others of the Peripatetic school had
written on the subject; to search the college libraries for
information concerning the horticulture of China and Persia, the
hanging gardens of Babylon, those planted by the learned Abdullatif
at Bagdad, and the European paradises of Naples, Florence, Monza,
Mannheim and Leyden to draw up plans and a particular description of
the Oxford Physic Garden, by Magdalen College, as well as the
plantations of Worcester, Trinity and St. John's Colleges; and to
ransack the bookshops of that seat of learning for such works as
might be procurable in no more difficult tongue than the Latin.
In this way Captain Barker became possessed of a vast number of
monkish herbals, Pliny's _Historia Naturalis_, the _Herbarum Vivas
Eicones_ of Brunsfels, the treatises of Tragus, Fuchsius, Matthiolus,
Ebn Beithar and Conrad Gesner, the _Stirpium Adversaria Nova_ and
_Plantarum seu Stirpium Historia_ of Matthew Lobel, with the works
of such living botanists as Henshaw, Hook, Grew and Malpighi.
As the Captain had no thought of resuming a seafaring life,
he felt confident of digesting in time these masses of learning,
though it annoyed him at first to find himself capable of
understanding but a tenth of what he read. On summer evenings he
would sit out on the lawn, with a folio balanced on his knee, and do
violence to Mr. Swiggs's ears with such learned terms as
"Boraginiae," "Cucurbitaceae," "Leguminosae," and as winter drew in,
master and man would hold long consultations indoors over certain
plants, the portraits of which in the herbals seemed familiar enough,
though their habitats often proved, on further reading, to lie no
nearer than Arabia Felix or the Spice Islands. Nevertheless, they
took some practical steps. To begin with, the soil of the garden
before the Blue Pavilion was entirely changed--Captain Barker
importing from The Hague no less than thirty tons of the mould most
approved by the Dutch tulip-growers. A tank, too, was sunk at the
back of the building towards the marsh, as a receptacle and reservoir
for rain-water; and by Tristram's fourth birthday his adoptive father
began to build, on the south side of the house, a hibernatory, or
greenhouse, differing in size only from that which Solomon de Caus
had the honour to erect for the Elector Palatine in his gardens at
Heidelberg.
Meanwhile Captain Runacles, who watched these operations from
the other side of the privet hedge and picked up many scraps of
rumour from the antique Simeon, was consumed with scorn and envy.
The two friends no longer spoke. At the back of the Fish and Anchor,
across the road, there stretched at this time the largest and fairest
bowling-green in the east of England--two good acres of smooth turf,
stretching almost to the edge of the sea-cliff, on which side the
wall was cut down to within a foot of the ground, so that the gossips
as they played, or sat and smoked on the benches about the green,
might have a clear view of the ships entering or leaving the harbour,
or of others that, hull-down on the horizon, took the sunset on their
sails. Hither it had always been the custom of the two captains to
repair at the closing in of the day, and drink their beer together as
they watched this or that vessel more or less narrowly avoiding the
shoals below. Nor would they commonly retire, unless the weather was
dirty, until the sea-coal fire was lit above the town-gate and the
lesser lighthouse upon the town-green answered with its six candles.
Now, however, though they met here as usual, no salutation was
exchanged. On benches as far apart as possible they drank their beer
in silence and watched the players. The situation was understood by
everybody at the inn; and at first some awkward attempts were made to
heal the breach. But Captain Jeremy's scowl and the light in Captain
John's green eyes soon convinced the busybodies that they were
playing with fire, and likely to burn their fingers.
In his home Captain Runacles grew restless. To cure this, he set to
work and finished a large dial which he had long intended to present
to the Corporation of Harwich, to set up over the town-gate.
The Corporation accepted the gift and employed their clerk to write a
letter of thanks. The language of this letter was so flattering that
Captain Runacles made another dial for the Exchange. Being thanked
for this also, he presented an excellent pendulum clock of his own
making, to be placed over his Majesty's arms upon the principal gate
of the dockyard, with a bell above the clock to strike the hours of
the day, as well as to summon the men to their work; and two more
dials, the one for the new town-hall, the other for the almshouses
near St. Helen's Port. Again the Corporation thanked him as
profusely as before, but asked him to be at the expense of affixing
these dials, which, both by their beauty and number, were rapidly
making Harwich unique among towns of its size. Upon this Captain
Runacles, in a huff, forswore all further munificence, and applied
himself to the construction of a pair of compasses capable of
dividing an inch into a thousand parts, and to the sinking of a well
in the marsh behind his pavilion. The design of this well was
extremely ingenious. It was worked by means of a wheel, nine feet in
diameter, with steps in its circumference like those of a treadmill,
and so weighted that by walking upon it, as if up a flight of stairs,
a person of eleven or twelve stone would draw up a bucket--two
buckets being so hung, at the ends of a rope surrounding the wheel,
that while one ascended, full of water, the other, which was empty,
sank down and was refilled. These buckets being too heavy for a man
to overturn to pour out the water, he bored a hole in each, and
contrived to plug the holes so that the weight of the bucket as it
bumped upon the trough prepared for it at the well's edge jogged out
the plug and sent the water running down the trough into whatever
pail or vessel stood ready to catch it. Nor is it astonishing that
he lost his temper when, after these preparations, he found the well
was not deep enough, and the water as much infected with brine as if
he had gathered it from the surface of the marsh.
It was on the day following this disappointment that, while walking
to and fro the length of his turfed garden, between three and four in
the afternoon (for his habits were methodical), he heard a child's
voice lifted on the far side of the party hedge:
"Dad!"
"Eh? What is it?" answered the voice of Captain Barker, from his new
tulip-bed, across the garden.
"What thing is this?"
"A nymph." Captain Runacles guessed by this that the four-year-old's
question had reference to one of the figure-heads disposed along the
hedge.
"What is a nymph?"
"A sort of girl."
"I don't like this sort of girl. She's got no legs."
"Come over here and look at this tulip."
"There's a much better sort of girl next door," Tristram continued,
unheeding.
"What do you know about her?" sharply inquired his guardian.
"Oh, I see her often at the top window, and sometimes out walking.
Nurse says we're not to speak, so we put out our tongues at each
other."
"Tristram, come over here and look--"
"She's got funny curls, and puts her doll to bed in the window-seat
every night. I like that sort of girl. When I grow up," the young
bashaw proceeded, "I shall have lots of that sort of girl all over
the garden, instead of these wooden things."
Captain Barker treated this Oriental day-dream with silence.
"Dad--why am I worth more than all the girls in the world?"
"Who said you were?"
"Nurse. She says you think so. She says the big man next door would
give his eyes to have a boy like me; but he can't make nothing of a
girl, and don't try. Narcissus--"
"Hallo!" replied the heavy voice of Mr. Swiggs.
"Have you got a boy?"
"No, sir: 'nmarried."
"What did you give your eye for, then?"
"Losh!" ejaculated Narcissus, as Captain Barker pounced on the
youngster and haled him off to the tulip-bed. The interrogatory was
stayed for a while.
Captain Runacles, who had caught every word, strode half a dozen
times up and down his grass-plot: then summoned Simeon.
"Tell nurse to send Miss Sophia down to me."
Five minutes later a small child of seven appeared in the doorway,
and, after hesitating there for a moment, stepped timidly across the
turf. Her figure and movements were ungainly and her complexion
appeared unnaturally sallow against a dark grey frock. A wet brush,
applied two minutes before with inconsiderate zeal, had taken all the
curl out of her dark hair and smoothed it in preposterous bands on
either side of her brow. Her arms hung stiff and perpendicular, and
she fidgeted with her short skirt as she advanced.
Captain Runacles stopped short in his walk and surveyed her.
"H'm," he said. "Don't shuffle."
The little girl looked up, dropped her eyes again quickly, and let
her hands hang limp beside her. She was shaking from head to foot.
"You are a girl."
"Pardon, father," she mumbled in a low whisper.
"Next door there lives a small boy. You are in the habit of putting
out your tongue at him. Why?"
"I--I--"
Her voice wavered and she broke into a fit of sobbing.
"Tut, tut! Stop that noise; I haven't scolded you. On the contrary,
I sent for you in the hope that you might always be able to put out
your tongue at that boy. Sophia, dry your eyes and attend, please.
Would you like to be an accomplished woman?"
"If it please you, father."
"Now may the devil fly away with the whole sex! If they _do_ happen
to desire anything good in itself, it's always to please some man or
another. Sophia, I ask you if, for your own sake, and for the sake
of knowledge, you will be my pupil; if you care to pursue--" Captain
Runacles checked himself, not because he had any idea that he was
talking over the head of a girl of seven, but because a general
proposition had occurred to him.
"Woman's notion of a pursuit," he said, clasping his hands behind him
and regarding his daughter's tear-stained face with severity--
"woman's notion of a pursuit is entirely passive. Her only idea is
to be pursued, and even so her mind runs on ultimate capture.
Sophia," he continued, himself forgetting for the moment his view of
knowledge as _sui causa optandum_, "would you like to please me by
licking that boy across the hedge into a cocked-hat?"
"But--oh, father!"
"What is it?"
She could not answer for a moment. Nor did he know that she besought
God every night to change her into a boy that she might find some
grace in his sight.
"You have one advantage," said her father coldly, as she struggled to
keep down her tears. "Your rival across the hedge is in a fair way to
be turned into a fool. We will begin to-morrow. In a week or so I
shall be able to pronounce some opinion on your capacity. Now run
indoors to your nurse--why, bless my soul!"
The child had trotted forward, and, taking his hand, kissed it
passionately. He looked into her face, and, finding it white as a
sheet, lifted her in his arms and carried her into the pavilion.