A GARDEN GLIMPSE OF EDEN
It was mid-August, however, before I reached that part of America that
was destined to mean so much to me. A visit to Mrs. Upgrove, my
mother's old friend, extended itself beyond my plans, largely because
of the pleasant acquaintance I formed there with her son, then
Captain, now Major Upgrove, one of the most charming men I have ever
encountered. Next to Roger he has become my best friend, incidentally
disproving a theory of mine that warm friendships between men are not
likely to be formed after thirty. Even as I write this chapter I am
looking forward to his visit, and the slim Hawaiian girls are looking
forward, too, I promise you, with wonderful, special garlands, and
smiles that many a handsome young sailor may jingle his pockets in
vain to win!
What is it, that strange, lasting charm that wins every woman-thing of
every age and colour? His mother told me that he had it in the cradle,
that the nurses were jealous over him and the sweet-shop women put his
pennies back into his pockets! Yes, Lona, and yes, Maiti, the
silver-haired Major is coming surely, and you shall surely dance!
Never mind the wreaths for me, dear hypocrites--they were never woven
for bald heads!
It was warm, almost as warm as this languid, creamy beach, the day I
clambered, none too agile, over the thwarts of Caliban's boat and made
my way up the sandy path to the cottage.
"I'm afraid the fever took it out of you, Jerry," Roger said, looking
hard at me, and I nodded briefly and he gripped my hands a little
harder.
"I'm glad you're here," he said.
Through the dear old room we stepped and out the further door, and
here a surprise met me. The straggling grass stretch was now a
rolling, green-hedged lawn, quartered by homelike brick paths. Two
long ells had been added to the house, running at right angles
straight out from it at either end, making a charming court of the
door yard and doubling the size of the building; the fruit trees had
been pruned and tended; an old grape arbour raised and trained into a
quaint sort of _pergola_, a strange sight, then, in America; a
beautiful old sun-dial drowsed in a tangle of nasturtiums. A delicate,
dreamy humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me
because of the _Miel du Chamounix_ and our happy, sweet-toothed
boyhood!) and near a border of poppies, marigold and hardy mignonette
a great hound lay, vigilant beside a large, shallow basket, shaded by
a gnarled wistaria clump. The basket was filled with something white,
and as we stood in the door, a woman dressed in trailing white, with
knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the
side hedge and moved with a rich, swooping step toward the basket.
Behind her through the open gate I saw a further lawn white with
drying linen, and a quick, pleasant glimpse of a brown, broad woman in
an old-world cap, paring fruit under an apple tree, a yellow cat
basking at her feet.
The white-clad figure leaned over the basket, her deep-brimmed garden
hat completely shading her face, lifted from it a struggling, tiny
doll-creature, with a reddish-gold aureole above its rosy face,
dandled it a moment in her arms, then sank like a settling gull into
the hollow of a low seat-shaped boulder near the wistaria, fumbled a
moment at the bosom of her lacy gown, and while I held my breath,
before I could turn my eyes, gave it her breast. It pressed its
wandering, blind hands into that miraculous, ivory globe (that
pattern of the living world) and through the dense, warm stillness of
that garden spot, where the bees' hum was the very music of silence,
there sounded, so gradually that I could not tell when the first notes
stirred the soundlessness, a curious cooing and gurgling, a sort of
fluty chuckle, a rippling, greedy symphony. It was not one voice, for
below the cheeping treble of the suckling mite ran a lowing undertone,
a murmurous, organ-like music, a sort of maternal fugue, that imitated
and dictated at once that formless, elemental melody. Even as we stood
riveted to the threshold, the sounds echoed in the air above us,
seemed to descend mystically from the very heavens themselves, and as
my heart swelled in me, a flock of pigeons swept down from some
barnyard eyrie and dropped musically, in a cloud of grey and amethyst,
beneath the pear tree. They crooned together there, the woman, the
child and the birds, and truly it was not altogether human, that
harmony, but like the notes of the pure and healthy animals (or the
angels, may be?) that guard this living world from the fate of the
frozen and exhausted moon.
"I--I can't get used to it," said Roger abruptly, "it--it seems too
much, somehow," and we turned back into the room.
"It's not a bit too much for you, Roger!" I answered heartily (thank
God, how heartily!) and we drew deep breaths and welcomed Miss Jencks,
in irreproachable white duck--I had almost written white ducks--and
talked about my momentous health.
Miss Jencks had abandoned her seaman's comforters for a cooler form of
handiwork, suspiciously tiny in shape, but she pursued it relentlessly
while we discussed the changes in the cottage; the gardens, the corn
and asparagus planned for another season; the ducks quartered near the
fresh-water brook; the tiny dairy built for her over the spring; the
brick-wall for Roger's pet wall fruit; the piano dragged by oxen from
the village; the sail-boat, manned now and then by our enthusiastic
telegrapher: the wondrous size and health of the tiny Mary.
She was called, as one who knew Roger might have expected, for his
mother, after the old tradition, too, that gave every eldest daughter
of the Bradleys that lovely name. No bitter obstinacy, no unyielding
pride of Madam Bradley's could alter in his calm mind the course of
his duty, and I never heard a harsh word from him concerning the
matter. Margarita cared absolutely nothing about it and never, he told
me, expressed the faintest curiosity as to his family or their
relations with her.
Soon she was with us, dear and beautiful, with only a tiny lavender
shadow under those cloudy eyes--misty just now and a little empty,
with that placid emptiness of the nursing mother--to mark the change
that my not-to-be-deceived scrutiny soon discovered. We left the
sleepy Mary slowly patrolling the brick walks in a pompous
perambulator propelled by a motherly English nurse under Miss Jencks's
watchful eye, and strolled, in our customary hand-in-hand, to the
boat-house, a low, artfully concealed structure, all but hidden under
a jagged cliff, and faced wherever necessary with rough cobbled
sea-stones sunk in wet cement and hardened there. The right wing of
the cottage stood out unavoidably at one point against the skyline,
and Roger, who had developed a surprising gift of architecture and a
sort of rough landscape gardening, was planning an extension of the
artificial sea-wall to cover this.
He worked at this himself, drenched with sweat, tugging at the stones,
while Caliban and a mason from the village set them and threw sand
over the wet plaster (the method which we decided must have been
adopted by the builder of the cottage), and I, too weak yet to help in
this giant's play, criticised the effect from a rowboat outside the
lagoon, telegraphing messages by means of a handkerchief code. Often
Margarita would come with me, embroidering placidly in the bow of the
boat, under her wide hat. She detested sewing, and refused utterly to
learn any form of it, to Miss Jencks's sorrow, but had invented a
charming fashion of embroidery for herself and worked fitfully at tiny
white butterflies in the corner of my cambric handkerchiefs--the one
and only form this art of hers ever took. It became a sort of emblem
and insignia of her, and Whistler, who began coming to them, I think,
the year after that, or the next, made much of this fanciful bond
between them. It was she who worked the black butterfly upon the lapel
of his evening coat which created such a sensation in Paris one
season.
Once while shooting in the Rockies with Upgrove, six or eight years
ago, I pulled out an old buckskin tobacco pouch, turned it hopefully
inside out in the search for a stray thimbleful, and discovered in a
corner of the lining a faded yellow silk butterfly, all unknown to me
till then! She must have worked it surreptitiously, like a
mischievous, affectionate child; and as I held it in my hands, and
stared at the graceful absurd thing, the lonely camp faded before me;
the sizzling bacon, the rough shelter, the whistling guide, slipped
back into some inconsequential past, and I lay again on the sun-warmed
rocks, watching a yellow-headed toddler prying damp pebbles from the
beach, to pile them later in her tolerant lap. Oh, Margarita! Oh, the
happy days!