THERE were two kinds of gardening to employ our sunny hours—the one
concerned with the vast tracts of the Olympians, the other with the
cultivation of those intimate patches of earth known as “the children’s
gardens,” wherein was waged an endless contest between Nature and our
views of what a garden should be. Of the joys of this nobler order of
tillage I have written elsewhere, and I may not penetrate now into that
mysterious world beyond the shrubbery, where plants assumed the
proportions of mammoth trees, and beds of mustard-and-cress took the
imaginative eye of youth as boundless prairies. But if the conventional
aims of grown-up gardening set limits to our fancy, if their ideal of
beauty in the garden—unfriendly as it was to cricket and the fiercer
outbreaks of Indians—was none of ours, we found, nevertheless, certain
details in the process by which they sought to attain their illusory ends
stimulating and wholly delightful. Flowers might inspire in us no more
than a rare and short-lived curiosity, but the watering-pot (and even
better the garden-hose) were our very good friends. Tidiness was no
merit in the garden of our dreams, but our song of joy rose straight to
heaven with the smoke of bonfires. Meadows were more to our taste than
the prim culture of lawns, but in our hands the lawn-mower became a
flaming chariot, and we who drove it as unscorched Phaetons praised for
the zest with which we pursued our pleasure by all Olympus.
It was one of the charms of childhood that such praise would sometimes
fall from the lips of our rulers as suddenly and as mysteriously as their
censure. It was pleasant, after a gorgeous afternoon spent in
extinguishing imaginary conflagrations with the garden hose to be
congratulated on the industry with which we had watered the flowers. It
was pleasant to be rewarded with chocolates from France for burning
witches on the rubbish-heap behind the greenhouse. As a matter of fact,
we never “helped” the gardener unless it suited us, and we would have
hidden in the shrubbery a whole day rather than be entrapped into half an
hour’s weeding—an occupation which we regarded in the light of a severe
punishment. And the odd confusion in the grown-up mind between right and
wrong never ceased to intrigue us. When my elder brother, in a
sentimental hour, flung a wreath of roses on to the stately head of the
aunt of the moment, we knew that it was a pretty thought, very happily
translated into action; but the Olympians treated it as a crime. Yet it
was not his fault that the thorns tore her hair; had there been any
thornless roses he would probably have used them. And, being honest, we
wondered no less when we were praised for playing with the garden-hose,
that coiled about our legs like wet snakes, and made our stockings wet on
the warmest summer day; for in our hearts we knew that into any
occupation so pleasant must surely enter the elements of crime. But the
rulers of our destiny would bid us change our wet clothes with a calm
brow, and would congratulate each other on our interest in the garden.
We lived in a strange world.
The judgments of the gardener we could better understand, though, alas!
we had to sum him up as unreliable. He was a twisted little man who had
been to sea in his youth, and we knew that he had been a pirate because
he had a red face, an enormous clasp-knife, and knew how to make every
imaginable kind of knot. Moreover, there was a small barrel in the
tool-house that had manifestly held gunpowder once upon a time. Such
evidence as this was not to be refuted, but we had to conclude that he
had been driven from the High Seas in disgrace, for he was pitifully
lacking in the right pirate spirit. No pirate, we felt, would have taken
the tale of our petty misdeeds to the Olympian courts for settlement, yet
this is what Esau did under cover of a duplicity that aggravated the
offence. In one and the same hour he would expound to us the intricacies
of the Chinese knot with many friendly and sensible observations, and
tell the shocked Olympians that we had thrown his rose-sticks all over
the garden in the manner of javelins. Captain Shark, of the barque
_Rapacious_, would not have acted like this, if it was conceivable that
that sinister hero could have turned gardener. Perhaps he would have
smitten us sorely with the Dutch hoe, or scalped us with his
pruning-knife by means of a neat twist learnt in Western America, but
whatever form his revenge might have assumed he would have scorned to
betray us to the people who had forgotten how to play. Esau was a sad
knave.
And, unlike the Olympians, he had no illusions as to the value of our
labours in the garden, treating our generous assistance with the
scantiest gratitude, and crediting our enthusiasm with the greater part
of Nature’s shortcomings. Whenever our horticultural efforts became at
all spirited he would start up suddenly from behind a hedge and admonish
us as the boy in “Prunella” admonishes the birds. He would not allow us
to irrigate the flower-beds by means of a system of canals; he checked,
or at least attempted to check, our consumption of fruit, deliciously
unripe (has any one noticed that an unripe greengage eaten fresh from the
tree is a gladder thing than any ripe fruit?); he would not let us play
at executions with the scythe, or at avalanches with the garden-roller.
The man’s soul was a cabbage, and I fear that he regarded us as a
tiresome kind of vermin that he might not destroy.
Nevertheless, as the Olympians liked to see us employed in the garden, he
could not wholly refuse our proffered aid, and he would watch our
adventures with the garden-hose and the lawn-mower, with his piratical
features incarnadined, as it were, by the light of his lurid past.
Naturally, water being a good friend of children, to water the garden was
the most popular task of all, and as I was the youngest brother it was
but rarely that I was privileged to experience that rare delight. To
feel the cool rush of the water through fingers hot with play and the
comfortable trickle down one’s sleeve, to smite a plant with muddy
destruction and to hear the cheerful sound made by the torrent in falling
on to the soaked lawn—these and their fellow-emotions may not be those of
adult gardeners, but they are not to be despised. But as I have said,
they were not for me, and usually I had to be content with mowing the
lawn, an occupation from which I drew a full measure of placid enjoyment.
Age dims our realisation of the emotional significance of our own
actions, and it is only by an effort of memory that I can arrive at the
philosophy of the contented mower of lawns. I suppose that professional
gardeners find the labour monotonous, lacking both the artistic interest
of such work as pruning and the scientific subtleties of
cucumber-growing; but youth has the precious faculty of finding the
extraordinary in the commonplace, and I had only to drag the lawn-mower
from its rugged bed among the forks and spades in the tool-house, to
embark on a sea of intricate and diverse adventure.
The very appearance of the thing was cheery and companionable, with its
hands outstretched to welcome mine, and its coat of green more vivid than
any lawn. To seize hold of its smooth handles was like shaking hands
with an old friend, and as it rattled over the gravel path it chattered
to me in the gruff tones of a genial uncle. Once on the smooth lawn its
voice thrilled to song, tremulous and appealing, and filled with the
throbbing of great wings. Even now I know no sound that cries of the
summer so poignantly as the intermittent song of the lawn-mower heard far
off through sunny gardens. And cheered by that song I might drive my
chariot, or it might be my plough, where I would. Not for me the stiff
brocaded pattern beloved of Esau; I made curves, skirting the shadows of
the tall poplars or cutting the lawn into islands and lagoons. Over the
grass-box—or the nose-bag, as we called it—the grass danced like a mist
of green flies, and I beheaded the daisies with the zest of a Caligula,
pausing sometimes to marvel at those modest blossoms that survived my
passage. I marvelled, too, with the cold inhumanity of youth, at the
injudicious earthworms that tried to stay my progress, and perished for
their pains. Sometimes a stray pebble would grate unpleasantly on the
blades and waken my lulled senses with a jerk; sometimes I would drive
too close to a flower-bed, and munched fragments of pansies and
wallflowers would glow amongst the grass in the grass-box.
No doubt a part of my enjoyment lay in the feeding of that natural spirit
of destructiveness that present-day Olympians satisfy with frequent gifts
of clockwork toys, ingenious mechanisms very proper to be inquired into
by young fingers. But there was more in it than that. I liked the smell
of the newly cut grass, and I would run my fingers through it and press
damp, warm handfuls of it to my face to win the full savour of it. I
even liked the more pungent odour of the grass-heap where last week’s
grass lay drying in the sun. And the effort necessary to drive the
worker of wonders across the lawn gave me a pleasant sense of my own
sturdiness.
But the fact remains that, with all these reasons, I cannot wholly fathom
the true philosophy of lawn-mowing with my adult mind. I have set down
all the joys that I remember, but some significant fact, some essential
note of enchantment, is missing. What did I think about as I pressed to
and fro with my lawn-mower? Sometimes, perhaps, I was a ploughman,
guiding vast horses along the crests of mountains, and pausing now and
again to examine the treasures that my labour had revealed in the earth,
leather bags of guineas and jewelled crowns that sparkled through their
mask of clay. Sometimes I might be a charioteer driving a team of mad
horses round the circus for Nero’s pleasure, or a fireman driving a
fire-engine scatheless through bewildered streets. But with all I
believe that sometimes I was no more than a little boy, mowing the lawn
of a sunny garden, loving the task for its own sake, and inspired by no
subtler spirit than that which led Esau to cultivate cabbages with dogged
enthusiasm. It would not do to condemn that dishonoured pirate because
he saw heaven as a kitchen-garden and regarded flowers as the fond toys
of the Olympian dotage. He, too, had his illusions; he, too, while he
sowed the seed had visions of an impossible harvest. His ultimate fate
eludes my memory, but doubtless he has finished with his husbandry by
now. I, too, no longer mow the lawn save when arrayed in fantastic
knickerbockers and dream-shod as of yore I trim the grass-plats of sleep
with a lawn-mower that sings as birds no longer sing. What the purpose
of my youthful labours may have been I do not know. . . . _Parturiunt
montes, nascetur ridiculus mus_. Perhaps I was already enrolled in the
employment agency of destiny as a writer of idle articles.