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A GARDEN OF PEACE

A Medley In Quietude

New York: George H. Doran Company

DOROTHY

ROSAMUND, FRANCIE, OLIVE, MARJORIE, URSULA

A GARDEN OF PEACE

Dorothy frowns slightly, but slightingly, at the title; but when challenged to put her frown into words she has nothing worse to say about it than that it has a certain catchpenny click--the world is talking about The Peace and she has an impression that to introduce the word even without the very definite article is an attempt to derive profit from a topic of the hour--something like backing a horse with a trusty friend for a race which you have secret information it has won five minutes earlier--a method of amassing wealth resorted to every day, I am told by some one who has tried it more than once, but always just five minutes too late.

But Dorothy's reply comes pat: If Mr. Blackmore did that, all she can say is that she doesn't think any the better of him for it; just what the Sabbatarian Scotswoman said when the act of Christ in plucking the ears of corn on the Sabbath Day was brought under her ken.

"Your own what?" cried Dorothy.

"Oh, that one? Well?"

"Only then it would have been a Garden of War, but now it suits you--your fancy, to make it a Garden of Peace."

"It's not too late yet; if you go on like this, I think I could manage to introduce a note of warfare into it and to make people see the appropriateness of it as well; so don't provoke me."

"I will not," said Dorothy, with one of her perplexing smiles.

And then she became interesting; for she was ready to affirm that every garden is a battlefield, even when it is not run by a husband and his wife--a dual system which led to the most notorious horticultural fiasco on record. War, according to Milton, originated in heaven, but it has been carried on with great energy ever since on earth, and the first garden of which there is a literary record maintained the heavenly tradition. So does the last, which has brought forth fruit and flowers in abundance through the slaughter of slugs, the crushing of snails, the immolation of leather-jackets, the annihilation of 'earwigs, and is now to be alluded to as a Garden of Peace, if you please.

Dorothy con be very provoking when she pleases and is wearing the right sort of dress; and when she has done proving that the most ancient tradition of a garden points to a dispute not yet settled, between the man and his wife who were running it, she begins to talk about the awful scenes that have taken place in gardens. We have been together in a number of gardens in various parts of the world: from those of the Borgias, where, in the cool of the evening, Lucrezia and her relations communed on the strides that the science and art of toxicology was making, on to the little Trianon where the diamond necklace sparkled in the moonlight on the eve of the rising of the people against such folk as Queens and Cardinals--on to the gardens of the Temple, where the roses were plucked before the worst of the Civil Wars of England devastated the country--on to Cherry' Orchard, near Kingston in the island of Jamaica, where the half-breed Gordon concocted his patriotic treason which would have meant the letting loose of a jungle of savages upon a community of civilisation, and was only stamped out by the firm foot of the white man on whose shoulders the white man's burden was laid, and who snatched his fellow-countrymen from massacre at the sacrifice of his own career; for party government, which has been the curse of England, was not to be defrauded of its prey because Governor Eyre had saved a colony from annihilation. These are only a few of the gardens in which we have stood together, and Dorothy's memory for their associations is really disconcerting. I am disconcerted; but I wait, for the wisdom of the serpent of the Garden comes to me at times--I wait, and when I have the chance of that edgeways word which sometimes I can't get in, I say,--

"Oh, yes, those were pleasant days in Italy among the cypresses and myrtles, and in Jamaica with its palms. I think we must soon have another ramble together."

"If it weren't for those children--but where should we go?" she cried.

"Gracious, why the Pacific Slope, my man?"

"Because a Pacific Garden must surely be a Garden of Peace; and that's where we are going now with the title-page of a book that is to catch the pennies of the public, and resemble as nearly as I can make it--consistent with my natural propensity to quarrel with things that do not matter in the least--one of the shadiest of the slopes of the Island Valley of Avilion--

Where falls not hall, or rain, or any snow,

Nor ever wind blows loudly, for it lies

Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard-lawns

And bowery hollows, crown'd with summer sea."

Luckily I recollected the quotation, for I had not been letter-perfect I should have had a poor chance of a bright future with Dorothy.

As it was, however, she only felt if the big tomato was as ripe as it seemed, and said,--

"'Orchard-lawns.' H'm, I wonder if Tennyson, with all his 'careful-robin' observation of the little things of Nature was aware that you should never let grass grow in an apple orchard."

"I wonder, indeed," I said, with what I considered a graceful acquiescence. "But at the same time I think I should tell you that there are no little things in Nature."

"I suppose there are not," said she. "Anyhow, you will have the biggest tomato in Nature in your salad with the cold lamb. Is that the bell?"

"It is the ghost-tinkle of the bell of the bell-wedder who was the father of the lamb," said I poetically.

"So long as you do not mention the mother of the lamb when you come to the underdone stratum, I shall be satisfied," said she.

The houses on each side of the High Street are many of them just as they were four or five hundred years ago. Some of them are shops with bow fronts that were once the windows of parlours in the days when honest householders drank small ale for breakfast and the industrious apprentices took down the shutters from their masters' shops and began their day's work somewhere about five o'clock in midsummer, graduating to seven in midwinter. There are now some noble plate-glass fronts to the shops, but there are no apprentices, and certainly no masters. Scores of old, red-tiled roofs remain, but they are no more red than the red man of America is red. The roofs and the red man are of the same hue. Sixty years ago, when slate roofs became popular, they found their way to Yardley Parva, and were reckoned a guarantee of a certain social standing. If you saw a slate roof and a cemented brick front you might be sure that there was a gig in the stable at the back. You can now tell what houses had once been tiled by the pitch of the roofs. This was not altered on the introduction of the slates.

But with the innovations of plate-glass shop-fronts and slate roofs there has happily been no change in the gardens at the back of the two rows of the houses of the High Street. Almost every house has still its garden, and they remain gay with what were called in my young days "old-fashioned flowers," through the summer, and the pear-trees that sprawl across the high dividing walls in Laocoon writhings--the quinces that point derisive, gnarled fingers at the old crabs that give way to soundless snarls against the trained branches of the Orange Pippins--the mulberries that are isolated on a patch of grass--all are to-day what they were meant to be when they were planted in the chalk which may have supplied Roman children with marbles when they had civilized themselves beyond the knuckle-bones of their ancestors' games.

I cannot imagine that much about these gardens has changed during the changes of a thousand years, except perhaps their shape. When the Anglo-Saxon epidemic of church-building was running its course, the three-quarters-of-a-mile of the High Street did not escape. There was a church every hundred yards or so, and some of them were spacious enough to hold a congregation of fifty or sixty; and every church had its church-yard--that is, as we have seen--its garden, equal to the emergencies of a death-rate of perhaps two every five years; but when the churches became dwelling-houses, as several did, the church-yard became the back-yard in the American sense: fruit-trees were planted, and beneath their boughs the burgesses discussed the merits of ale and the passing away of the mead bowl, and shook their heads when some simpleton suggested that the arrow that killed Rufus a few months before was an accidental one. There are those gardens to-day, and the burgesses smoke their pipes over the six-thirty edition of the evening paper that left London at five-fifteen, and listen to stories of Dick, who lost a foot at the ford of the Somme, or of Tom, who got the M.C. after Mons, and went through the four years without a scratch, or of Bob, who had his own opinion about the taking of Jerusalem, outside which two fingers of his left hand are still lying, unless a thieving Arab appropriated them.

There the chat goes on from century to century on the self-same subject--War, war, war. It is certain that men left Yardley Parva for the First Crusade; one of the streets that ran from the Roman road to the Abbey which was founded by a Crusading Norman Earl, returns the name that was given to it to commemorate the capture of Antioch when the news reached England a year or so after the event; and it is equally certain that Yardley men were at Bosworth Field, and Yardley men at Tournai in 1709 as well as in 1918--at the Nile in 1798 as well as in 1915; and it is equally certain that such of them as came back talked of what they had seen and of what their comrades had done. The tears that the mothers proudly shed when they talked of those who had not come home in 1918 were shed where the mothers of the Crusaders of 1099 had knelt to pray for the repose of the souls of their dear ones whose bones were picked by the jackals of the Lebanon. On the site of one of the churches of the market-place there is now built a hall of moving pictures--Moving Pictures--that is the whole sum of the bustle of the thousand years--Moving Pictures. The same old story. Life has not even got the instinct of the film-maker: it does not take the trouble to change the scenes of the exploits of a thousand--ten thousand--years ago, and those of to-day. Egypt, the Nile, Gaza, Jerusalem, Damascus, Mesopotamia. Moving pictures--walking shadows--walking about for a while but all having the one goal--the Garden of Peace; those gardens that surrounded the churches, where now the apple-trees bloom and fruit and shed their leaves.

But it is in these wide gardens that the earliest strawberries are grown, and to them the reporter of the local newspaper goes in search of the gigantic gooseberry or the potato weighing four pounds and three ounces; and that is what the good ladies with the abhorred shears and the baskets--the Atropussiies, in whose hands lie the fates of the fruits as well as of the flowers--consider the sum of high gardening: the growth of the abnormal is their aim and they are as proud of their achievement as the townsman who took to poultry was of his when he exhibited a bantam weighing six pounds.

When I made, some years ago, a tour of Wessex, I went to Casterbridge on a July day, and the first person I met in the street was an immense bee, and I watched him hum away into the distance just as Mr. Hardy had described him. He seemed to be boasting that he was Mr. Hardy's bee, just as a Presbyterian Minister, who had paid a visit to the Holy Land to verify his quotations, boasted of the reference made to himself in another Book.

But there are two or three gardens--now that I come to think of it there are not so many as three--governed by the houses of the "better-class people" , which are everything that a garden should he. Their trees have not been cut down as they used to be forty years ago, to allow the flowers to have undisputed possession. In each there are groups of sycamore, elm, and silver birch, and their position makes one feel that one is on the border of a woodland through which one might wander for hours. There are tulip-trees, and a fine arbutus on an irregular, slightly-sloping lawn, and a couple of enormous drooping ashes--twenty people can sit in the green shade of either. In graceful groups there are laburnums and lilacs. Farther down the slope is a well-conceived arrangement of flower-beds cut out of the grass. Nearly everything in the second of these gardens is herbaceous; but its roses are invariably superb, and its lawn with a small lily pond beside it, is ideal. The specimen shrubs on a lower lawn are perfect as regards both form and flower, and while one is aware of the repose that is due to a thoughtful scheme of colour, one is conscious only of the effect, never being compelled to make use of the word artistic. As soon as people begin to talk of a garden being artistic you know that it has failed in its purpose, just as a portrait-painter has failed if you are impressed with the artistic side of what he has done. The garden is not to illustrate the gardener's art any more than the portrait is to make manifest the painter's. The garden should be full of art, but so artfully introduced that you do not know that it is there. I have heard a man say as if he had just made a unique discovery,--

"How extraordinary it is that the arrangements of colour in Nature are always harmonious!"

Extraordinary!

Equally extraordinary it is that

"Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?

For if it prospers none dare call it treason."

All our impressions of harmony in colour are derived from Nature's arrangements of colour, and when there is no longer harmony there is no longer Nature. Is it marvellous that Nature should be harmonious when all our ideas of harmony are acquired from Nature? A book might be written on this text--I am not sure that several books have not been written on it. It is the foundation of the analysis of what may be called without cant, "artistic impression." It is because it is so trite that I touch upon it in my survey of a Garden of Peace. We love the green of the woodland because it still conveys to us the picture of our happy home of some hundreds of thousands of years ago. We find beauty in an oval outline because our ancestors of the woodland spent some happy hours bird-nesting. Hogarth's line of beauty is beautiful because it is the line of human life--the line that Nature has ever before her eyes--the line of human love. The colours of countless fruits are a delight to us because we have associated those colours for tens of thousands of years with the delight of eating those fruits, and taking pleasure in the tints of the fruits; we take pleasure in the tints of flowers because they suggest the joys of the fruits. The impression of awe and fear that one of Salvator Rosa's "Rocky Landscapes" engenders is due to our very distant ancestors' experience of the frequent earthquakes that caused these mighty rocks to be flung about when the surface of our old mother Earth was not so cool as it is to-day, as well as to the recollection of the very, fearsome moments of a much less remote ancestor spent in evading his carnivorous enemies who had their dens among these awful rocks. From a comparatively recent pastoral parent we have inherited our love for the lawn. There were the sheep feeding in quiet on the grass of the oasis in the days when man had made the discovery that he could tame certain animals and keep them to eat at his leisure instead of having to spend hours hunting them down.

But so deep an impression have the thousands of years of hunting made upon the race, that even among the most highly civilised people hunting is the most popular of all enjoyments, and the hunter is a hero while the shepherd is looked on as a poor sort.

Yes, there are harmonies in Nature, though all makers of gardens do not appreciate them; the discordant notes that occasionally assail a lover of Nature in a garden that has been made by a nurseryman are due to the untiring exertions of the hybridiser. It is quite possible to produce "freaks" and "sports" both as regards form and colour--"Prodigious mixtures and confusion strange." I believe that some professional men spend all their time over experiments in this direction, and I have no doubt that some of them, having perpetrated a "novelty," make money out of it. Equally sure I am that the more conscientious, when they bit upon a novelty that they feel to be offensive, destroy the product without exhibiting it. They have not all the hideous unscrupulousness of Dr. Moreau--the nearest approach to a devil trying to copy the Creator who made man in His own image. Dr. Moreau made things after his own likeness. He was a great hybridiser.

But I must be careful in my condemnations of such possibilities. There is a young woman named Rosamund, who is Dorothy's first-born, and she is ready at all seasonable times to give me the benefit of her fourteen years' experiences of the world and its ways, and she has her own views of Nature as the mother of the Arts. After listening to my old-fashioned railings against such chromatic innovations as I have abused, she maintained a thoughtful silence that suggested an absence of conviction.

"Don't you see the awfulness of re-dying a flower--the unnaturalness of such an operation?" I cried.

"Why, you old thing, can't you see that if it's done by aniline dyes it's all right--true to Nature and all that?"

"Good heavens! that a child of mine--Dorothy, did you hear her? How can you sit there and smile as if nothing had happened? Have you brought her up as an atheist or what?"

"Every one who doesn't agree with all you say isn't a confirmed atheist," replied Dorothy calmly. "As for Rosamund, what I'm afraid of is that, so far from being an atheist, she is rather too much in the other direction--like 'Lo, the poor Indian.' She'll explain what's in her mind if you give her a chance What do you mean, my dear, by laying the emphasis on aniline dyes? Don't you know that most of them are awful?"

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