Of course I had known for a long time that Mr. Gilbert was “quite a superior man”—that was the phrase in which the Rural Dean referred to him when recommending me to apply to him for information respecting a recalcitrant orchid which had refused one year to do what it had been doing the year before. He was indeed “quite a superior man,” but being a florist he could never be superior to his business. No man can be superior to a florist, when the florist is an orchidtect as well. I went to Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Gilbert came to me, and all was right. That was long ago. We talked orchids all through that year and then, by way of lightening our theme, we began to talk of roses and such like frivolities, but everything he said was said in perfect taste. Though naturally, living his life on terms of absolute intimacy with orchids, he could not regard roses seriously, yet I never heard him say a disrespectful word about them: he gave me to understand that he regarded the majority of rosarians as quite harmless—they had their hobby, and why should they not indulge in it, he asked. “After all, rosarians are God's creatures like the rest of us,” he said, with a tolerant smile. And I must confess that, for all my knowledge of his being a superior man, he startled me a little by adding,—
“The orchid is epic and the rose lyric, sir; but every one knows how an incidental lyric lightens up the hundred pages of an epic. Oh, yes, roses have their place in a properly organised horticultural scheme.”
“I believe you are right, now that I come to look at the matter in that light,” said I. “You find a relaxation in reading poetry?” I added.
“I have made a point of reading some verses every night for the past twenty-five years, sir,” he replied. “I find that's the only way by which I can keep myself up to the mark.”
“I can quite understand that,” said I. “Flowers are the lyrics that, as you say, lighten the great epic of Creation. Where would our poets be without their flowers?”
“They make their first appeal to the poet, sir; but the worst of it is that every one who can string together a few lines about a flower believes himself to be a poet. No class of men have treated flowers worse than our poets even the best of them are so vague in their references to flowers as to irritate me.”
“In what way, Mr. Gilbert?”
“Well, you know, sir, they will never tell us plainly just what they are driving at. For instance we were speaking of roses, just now—well, we have roses and roses by the score in poems; but how seldom do we find the roses specified! There's Matthew Arnold, for example; he wrote “Strew on her roses, roses”; but he did not say whether he wanted her to be strewn With hybrid teas, Wichuraianas, or poly-anthas. He does not even suggest the colour. Now, could anything be more vague? It makes one believe that he was quite indifferent on the point, which would, of course, be doing him a great injustice: all these funeral orders are specified, down to the last violets and Stephanotis. Then we have, “It was the time of roses”—now, there's another ridiculously vague phrase. Why could the poet not have said whether he had in his mind the ordinary brier or an autumn-flowering William Allen Richardson or a Gloire de Dijon? But that is not nearly so irritating as Tennyson is in places. You remember his “Flower in the crannied wall.” There he leaves a reader in doubt as to what the plant really was. If it was Saracta Hapelioides, he should have called it a herb, or if it was simply the ordinary Scolopendrium marginatum he should have called it a fern. If it was one of theSaxifrageohe left his readers quite a bewildering choice. My own impression is that it belonged to theEvaizooniasection—probably theAizoon sempervivoides. though it really might have been thecartilaginea. Why should we be left to puzzle over the thing? But for that matter, both Shakespeare and Milton are most flagrant offenders, though I acknowledge that the former now and again specifies his roses: the musk and damask were his favourites. But why should he not say whether it wasThymus Scrpyllum or atropurpureushe alluded to on that bank? He merely says, “Whereon the wild thyme blows.” It is really that vagueness, that absence of simplicity—which has made poetry so unpopular. Then think of the trouble it must be to a foreigner when lie comes upon a line comparing a maiden to a lily, without saying what particularliliumis meant. An Indian squaw is like a lily—lilium Brownii; a Japanese may appropriately be said to be like thelilium sulphureum. Recovering from a severe attack of measles a young woman suggestslilium speciosum; but that is just the moment when she makes a poor appeal to a poet. To say that a maiden is like a lily conveys nothing definite to the mind; but that sort of neutrality is preferable to the creation of a false impression, so doing her a great injustice by suggesting it may be that her complexion is a bright orange picked out with spots of purple.”
That was what our Mr. Gilbert said to me more than a year ago; and now he comes to me before I have quite recovered from the effects of that discussion with Friswell, and after a few professional remarks respecting a new orchid acquisition, begins: “Might I take the liberty of reading you a little thing which I wrote last night as an experiment in the direction of the reform I advocated a year ago when referring to the vagueness of poets' flowers? I don't say that the verses have any poetical merit; but I claim for them a definiteness and a lucidity that should appeal to all readers who, like myself, are tired of slovenly and loose way in which poets drag flowers into their compositions.”
1 assured him that nothing would give me greater pleasure than to hear his poem; and he thanked me and said that the title was,The Florist to his Bride.This was his poem:—
Do you remember, dearest, that wild eve,
When March came blustering; o'er the land?
We stood together, hand in hand,
Watching the slate-gray waters heave—
Hearing despairing boughs behind us grieve.
It seemed as I, no forest voice was dumb.
All Nature joining in one cry;
The Ampélopsis Veitchii,
Giving gray hints of green to come,
Shrank o'er the leafless Prunus Avium.
Desolate seemed the grove of Comferia,
Evergreen as deciduous;
Hopeless the hour seemed unto us;
Helpless our beauteous Cryptomeria—
Helpless in Winter's clutch our Koelreuteria.
We stood beneath our Ulmus Gracilis,
And watched the tempest-tom Fitzroya,
And shaken than the stout Sequoia;
And yet I knew in spite of this,
Your heart was hopeful of the Springtide's kiss.
Yours was the faith of woman, dearest child.
Your eyes—Centaurea Cyavus—
Saw what I saw not nigh to us,
And that, I knew, was why you smiled,
When the Montana Pendula swung wild.
I knew you smiled, thinking of suns to come,
Seeing in snowflakes on bare trees
Solanum Jasminoïdes—
Seeing ere Winter's voice was dumb,
The peeping pink Mesembrianthium.
I knew you saw as if they flowered before us,
The sweet Rhoilora Canadensis,
The lush Wistaria Sinensis,
The Lepsosiphon Densifiorvs—
All flowers that swell the Summer's colour-chorus.
And, lightened by your smile, I saw, my Alice,
The modest Résida Odorata—
Linaria Reticulata—
I drank the sweets of Summer's chalice,
Sparkling Calendula Officinalis.
To me your smile brought sunshine that gray day,
The saddest Salex Babylonien
Became Anemone Japonica
And the whole world beneath its ray,
Bloomed one Escholtzia Californico.
Still in thy smile the summer airs caress us;
And now with thee my faith is sure:
The love that binds us shall endure—
Nay, growing day by day to bless us,
Ti'l o'er us waves Supervirens Cupressus.
“I hope I haven't bored you, sir. I don't pretend to be a poet; but you see what my aim is, I'm sure—lucidity and accuracy—strict accuracy, sir. Something that every one can understand.”
I assured him that he had convinced me that he understood his business: he was incomparable—as a florist.
Among the features of our gardens for which I am not responsible, is the grass walk alongside the Castle Wall, where it descends on one side, by the remains of the terraces of the Duke's hanging gardens, fifty feet into the original fosse, while on the other it breasts the ancient Saxon earthwork, which reduces its height to something under fifteen, so that the wall on our side is quite a low one, but happily of a breadth that allows of a growth of wild things—lilacs and veronicas and the like—in beautiful luxuriance, while the face is in itself a garden of crevices where the wallflowers last long enough to mix with the snapdragons and scores of modest hyssops and mosses and ferns that lurk in every cranny.
Was it beneath such a wall that Tennyson stood to wonder how he should fulfil the commission he had received fromGood Words—or was itOnce a Week?—for any sort of poem that would serve as an advertisement of magazine enterprise, and he wrote that gem to which Mr. Gilbert had referred?—
“Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies;
Hold you here, stem and all in my hand.
Little flower; but if I could understand
What you are, stem and all and all in all,
I should know what God and man is,”
I should like equal immortality to be conferred upon the parody which is of far greater merit than the original:—
'Terrier in my granny's hall,
I whistle you out of my granny's;
Hold you here, tail and all in my hand.
Little terrier; but if I could understand
What you are, tail and all and all in all,
I should know what black-and-tan is.”
I could understand the inspiration that should result in sermons from stones—such as the poet's forgetting that his mission was not that of the sermonising missionary, but of the singer of such creations of beauty as offer themselves to nestle to the heart of man—when walking round the gracious curve that the grass path makes till it is arrested by the break in the wall where the postern gate once hung, guarded by the sentinel whose feet must have paced this grass path until no blade of grass remained on it.
Early every summer the glory of the snapdragons and the wallflowers is overwhelmed for a time by the blossom of the pear-trees and the plums which spread themselves abroad and sprawl even over the top of the wall. By their aid the place is transformed for a whole month in a fruitful year. In 1917 it was as a terrific snowstorm had visited us. It was with us as with all our neighbours, a wonderful year for pears, apples, and plums. Pink and white and white and pink hid the world and all that appertained to it from our eyes, and when the blossoms were shed we were afraid to set a foot upon the grass path: it would have been a profanity to crush that delicate embroidery. It seemed as if Nature had flung down her copious mantle of fair white satin before our feet; but we bowed our heads conscious of our unworthiness and stood motionless in front of that exquisite carpeting.
0304
And then day after day the lovely things of the wall that had been hidden asserted themselves, and a soft wind swept the path till all the green of the new grass path flowed away at our feet, and Nature seemed less virginal. Then came the babes—revealed by the fallen blossoms—plump little cherubic faces of apples, graver little papooses of the russet Indian tint, which were pears, and smaller shy things peeping out from among the side shoots, which we could hardly recognise as plums; rather a carcanet of chrysoprase they seemed, so delicately green in their early days, before each of them became like the ripe Oriental beauty, thenigra sed formoasa, of the Song of Solomon, and for the same reason: “Because the sun hath looked upon me,” she cried. When the sun had looked upon the fruit that clustered round the clefts in our wall, he was as one of the sons of God who had become aware for the first time of the fact that the daughters of men were fair; and the whole aspect of the world was changed.
Is there any part of a garden that is more beautiful than the orchard? At every season it is lovely. I cannot understand how it is that the place for fruitgrowing is in so many gardens kept away from what is called the ornamental part. I cannot understand how it has come about that flowering shrubs are welcomed and flowering apples discouraged in the most favoured situations. When a considerable number of the former have lost their blossoms, they are for the rest of the year as commonplace as is possible for a tree to be; but when the apple-blossom has gone, the houghs that were pink take on a new lease of beauty, and the mellow glory of the season of fruitage lasts for months. The berry of the gorse which is sometimes called a gooseberry, is banished like a Northumberland cow-pincher of the romantic period, beyond the border; but a well furnished gooseberry bush is as worthy of admiration as anything that grows in the best of the borders, whether the fruit is green or red. And then look at the fruit of the white currant if you give it a place where the sun can shine through it—clusters shining with the soft light of the Pleiades or the more diffuse Cassiopea; and the red currants—well, I suppose they are like clusters of rubies; but everything that is red is said to be like a ruby; why not talk of the red currant bush as a firmament that holds a thousand round fragments of a fractured Mars?
There was a time in England when a garden meant a place of fruit rather than flowers, but by some freak of fashion it was decreed that anything that appealed to the sense of taste was “not in good taste”—that was how the warrant for the banishment of so much beauty was worded—“not in good taste.” I think that the decree is so closely in harmony with the other pronouncements of the era ofmauvaise honte—the era of affectations—when the “young lady” was languid and insipid—“of dwarf habit,” as the catalogues describe such a growth, and was never allowed to be a girl—when fainting was esteemed one of the highest accomplishments of the sex, and everything that was natural was pronounced gross—when the sampler, the sandal, and the simper wexe the outward and visible signs of an inward and affected femininity: visible? oh, no; the sandal was supposed to be invisible; if it once appeared even to the extent of a taper toe, and attention was called to its obtrusion, there was a little shriek of horror, and the “young lady” was looked at askance as demie-vierge. It was so much in keeping with the rest of the parcel to look on something that could be eaten as something too gross to be constantly in sight when growing naturally, that I think the banishment of the apple and the pear and the plum and the gooseberry to a distant part of the garden must be regarded as belonging to the same period. But now that the indelicacy of the super-delicacy of that era has passed—now that the shy sandal has given place to the well-developed calf above the “calf uppers” of utilitarian boots—now that a young man and a young woman (especially the young woman) discuss naturally the question of eugenics and marriage with that freedom which once was the sole prerogative of the prayerbook, may we not claim an enlargement of our borders to allow of the rehabilitation of the apple and the repatriation of the pear in a part of the garden where all can enjoy their decorative qualities and anticipate their gastronomic without reproach? Let us give the fruit its desserts and it will return the compliment.
The Saxon earthwork below the grass walk is given over to what is technically termed “the herbaceous border,” and over one thousand eight hundred square feet there should be such a succession of flowers growing just as they please, as should delight the heart of a democracy. The herbaceous border is the democratic section of a garden. The autocrat of the Dutch and the Formal gardens is not allowed to carry out any of his foul designs of clipping or curtailing the freedom of Flora in this province. There should be no reminiscences of the tyrant stake which in far-distant days of autocracy was a barrier to the freedom of growth, nor should the aristocracy of the hot-house or even the cool greenhouse obtrude its educated bloom among the lovers of liberty. They must be allowed to do as they damplease, which is a good step beyond the ordinary doing as they please. The government of the herbaceous border is one whose aim is the glorification of the Mass as opposed to the Individual.
It is not at all a bad principle—for a garden—this principle which can best be carried out by the unprincipled. English democracy includes princes and principles: but there is a species which will have nothing to do with principles because they reckon them corrupted by the first syllable, and hold that the aristocrat is like Hamlet's stepfather, whose offence was “rankand smells to heaven.” I have noticed, however, in the growth of my democratic border that there are invariably a few pushing and precipitate individuals who insist on having their own way—it is contrary to the spirit of Freedom to check them—and the result is that the harmony of the whole ceases to exist. But there are some people who would prefer a Bolshevist wilderness to any garden.
I have had some experience of Herbaceous Borders of mankind....
The beauty of the border is to be found in the masses, we are told in the Guides to Gardening. We should not allow the blues to mix with the buffs, and the orange element should not assert its ascendancy over the green. But what is the use of laying down hard and fast rules here when the essence of the constitution of the system is No Rule. My experience leads me to believe that without a rule of life and a firm ruler, this portion of the garden will become in the course of time allied to the prairie or the wilderness, and the hue that will prevail to the destruction of any governing scheme of colour or colourable scheme of government will be Red.
Which things are an allegory, culled from a garden of herbs, which, as we have been told, will furnish a dinner preferable to one that has for itspièce de resistancethe stalled ox, providing that it is partaken of under certain conditions rigidly defined.
We have never been able to bring our herbaceous border to the point of perfection which we are assured by some of those optimists who compile nurserymen's catalogues, it should reach. We have massed our colours and nailed them to the mast, so to speak—that is, we have not surrendered our colour schemes because we happen to fall short of victory; but still we must acknowledge that the whole border has never been the success that we hoped it would be. Perhaps we have been too exacting—expecting over much; or it may be that our standard was too Royal a one for the soil; but the facts remain and we have a sense of disappointment.
It seems to me that this very popular feature depends too greatly upon the character of the season to be truly successful as regardsensemble. Our border includes many subjects which have ideas of their own as regards the weather. A dry spring season may stunt (in its English sense) the growth of some dowers that occupy a considerable space, and are meant to play an important part in the design; whereas the same influence may develop a stunt (in the American sense) in a number of others, thereby bringing about a dislocation of the whole scheme, when some things will rush ahead and override their neighbours some that lasted in good condition up to the October of one year look shabby before the end of July the next. One season differs from another on vital points and the herbs differ in their growth had almost written their habit—in accordance with the differences of the season. We have had a fine show in one place and a shabby show next door; we have had a splendid iris season and a wretched peony season—bare patches beside luxuriant patches. The gailardias have broken out of bounds one summer, and when we left “ample verge and room enough” for them the next, they turned sulky, and the result was a wide space of soil on which a score of thosegaminsof the garden, chickweed and dandelion, promptly began operations, backed up by thoseapachesof a civilised borderland, the ragged robin, and we had to be strenuous in our surveillance of the place, fearful that a riot might ruin all that we had taken pains to bring to perfection. So it has been season after season—one part quite beautiful, a second only middling, and a third utterly unresponsive. That is why we have taken to calling it the facetious border.
Our experience leads us to look on this facetious herbaceous border as the parson's daughter looks on the Sunday School—as a place for the development of all that is tricky in Nature, with here and there a bunch of clean collars and tidy trimmings—something worth carrying on over, but not to wax enthusiastic over. So we mean to carry on, and take Flora's “buffets and awards” “with equal thanks.” We shall endeavour to make our unruly tract in some measure tractable; and, after all, where is the joy of gardening apart from the trying? It was a great philosopher who affirmed at the close of a long life, that if he were starting his career anew and the choice were off not to wax enthusiastic over. So we mean to carry on, and take Flora's “buffets and awards” “with equal thanks.” We shall endeavour to make our unruly tract in some measure tractable; and, after all, where is the joy of gardening apart from the trying? It was a great philosopher who affirmed at the close of a long life, that if he were starting his career anew and the choice were offered to him between the Truth and the Pursuit of Truth, he would certainly choose the latter. That man had the true gardening spirit.
Any one who enters a garden without feeling that he is entering a big household of children, should stay outside and make a friend of the angel who was set at the gate of the first Paradise with a flaming sword, which I take it was a gladiolus—the gladiolus is thegladiusof flowerland—to keep fools on the outside. The angel and the proper man will get on very well together at the garden gate, talking of things that are within the scope of the intelligence of angels and men Who think doormats represent Nature in that they are made of cocoa-nut fibre. We have long ago come to look on the garden as a region of living things—shouting children, riotous children, sulky children; children who are rebellious, perverse, impatient at restriction, bad-tempered, quarrelsome, but ever ready to “make it up,” and fling themselves into your arms and give you a chance of sharing with them the true joy of life which is theirs.
This is what a garden of flowers means to any one who enters it in a proper spirit of comradeship, and not in the attitude of a School Inspector. We go into the garden not to educate the flowers, but to be beloved by them—to make companions of them and, if they will allow us, to share some of the secrets they guard so jealously until they find some one whom they feel they can trust implicitly. A garden is like the object of Dryden's satire, “Not one, but all mankind's epitome,” and a knowledge of men that makes a man a sympathetic gardener. I think that Christ was as fond of gardens as God ever was. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not neither do they spin, and yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
0314
There is the glorious charter of the garden, the truth of which none can dispute—there is the revelation of the spirit of the garden delivered to men by the wisest and the most sympathetic garden-lover that ever sought a Gethsemane for communion With the Father of all, in an hour of trial.
I wonder what stores of knowledge of plant-life existed among the wise Orientals long ago. Were they aware of all that we suppose has only been revealed to us—“discovered” by us within recent years? Did they know that there is no dividing line between the various elements of life—between man, who is the head of “the brute creation,” and the creatures of what the books of my young days styled “the Vegetable Kingdom”? Did they know that it is possible for a tree to have a deeper love for its mate than a man has for the wife whom he cherishes? I made the acquaintance some years ago of an Eastern tree which was brought away from his family in the forest and, though placed in congenial sod, remained, for years making no advance in growth—living, but nothing more—until one day a thoughtful man who had spent years studying plants of the East, brought a female companion to that tree, and had the satisfaction of seeing “him” assume a growth which was maintained year by year alongside “her,” until they were both shown to me rejoicing together, the one vieing, with the other in luxuriance of foliage and fruit. Every one who has grown apples or plums has had the same experience. We all know now of the courtship and the love and the marriage of things in “the Vegetable Kingdom,” and we know that there is no difference in the process of that love which means life in “the Animal Kingdom” and “the Vegetable Kingdom.” In some directions their “human” feelings and emotions and passions have been made plain to us; how much more we shall learn it is impossible to tell; but we know enough to save us from the error of fancying that they have a different existence from ours, and every day that one spends in a garden makes us ready to echo Shelley's lyrical shout of “Beloved Brotherhood!”
That is what 1 feel when I am made the victim of some of the pranks of the gay creatures of the herbaceous border, who amuse themselves at our expense, refusing to be bound down to our restrictions, to travel the way we think good plants should go, and declining to be guided by an intelligence which they know to be inferior to their own. The story of the wilful gourd which would insist on crossing a garden path in the direction it knew to be the right one, though a human intelligence tried to make it go in another, was told by an astonished naturalist in the pages ofCountry Lifea short time ago. I hope it was widely read. The knowledge that such things can be will give many thousand readers access to a held of study and of that legitimate speculation which is the result of study and observation. It will ever tend to mitigate the disappointment some of us may be inclined to harbour when we witness our floral failures, though it is questionable if the recognition of the fact that our failures are due to our own stupid bungling, will diminish the store of that self-conceit which long ago induced us to think of ourselves as the soleraison d'êtreof all Creation.
WE, were working at the young campanulas when our friend Heywood came upon us—Heywood, for whose intelligence we have so great a respect, because he so frequently agrees with our outlook upon the world of woman and other flowers cherished by us. Heywood is a good artist; but because he believes that Womankind is a kind woman indefinitely multiplied, he paints more faithful portraits of men than of women; he also paints landscapes that live more faithfully than the human features that he depicts and receives large sums for depicting. He is a student of children, and comes to Rosamund quite seriously for her criticism. She gives it unaffectedly, I am glad to notice; and without having to make use of a word of the School-of-Art phraseology.
We have an able surgeon (retired) living close to us here, and he is still so interested in the Science he practised—he retired from the practice, not from the science—that when he is made aware of an unusual operation about to be performed in any direction—London, Paris, or (not recently) Vienna, he goes off to witness the performance, just as we go to some of the most interestingpremièresin town. In the same spirit Heywood runs off every now and again to Paris to see the latest production of his old master, or the acquisition of an old Master at one of the galleries. It lets him know what is going on in the world, he says, and I am sure he is quite right.
But, of course, Atheist Friswell has his smile—a solemn smile it is this time—while he says,—
“Old Masters? Young mississes rather, I think.”
“Young what?” cried Dorothy.
“Mysteries,” he replied. “What on earth do you think I said?”
“Another word with the same meaning,” says she.
But these artistic excursions have nothing to do with us among our campanulas to-day. Heywood has been aware of a funny thing and came to make us laugh with him.
“Campanulas!” he cried. “And that is just what I came to tell you about—the campanile at St. Katherine's.”
Yardley Parva, in common with Venice, Florence, and a number of other places, has a campanile, only it was not designed by Giotto or any other artist. Nor is it even called a campanile, but a bell-tower, and it belongs to the Church of St. Katherine-sub-Castro—a Norman church transformed by a few-adroit touches here and there into the purest Gothic of the Restoration—the Gilbert Scoti-Church-Restoration period.
But no one would complain with any measure of bitterness at the existence of the bell-tower only for the fact that there are bells within it, and these bells being eight, lend themselves to many feats of campanology, worrying the inhabitants within a large area round about the low levels of the town. The peace of every Sabbath Day is rudely broken by the violence of what the patient folk with noarrière penséeterm “them joy bells.”
“You have not heard a sound of them for some Sundays,” said Heywood.
“I have not complained,” said I. “Ask Dorothy if I have.”
“No one has, unless the bell-ringers, who are getting flabby through lack of exercise,” said he. “But the reason you have not heard them is because they have been silent.”
“The British Fleet you cannot see, for it is not in sight,” said I.
“And the reason that they have been silent was the serious illness of Mr. Livesay, whose house is close to St. Katherine's. Dr. Beecher prescribed complete repose for poor Livesay, and as the joy bells of St. Katherine's do not promote that condition, his wife sent a message to the ringers asking them to oblige by refraining from their customary uproar until the doctor should remove his ban. They did so two Sundays ago, and the Sunday before last they sent to inquire how the man was. He was a good deal worse, they were told, so they were cheated out of their exercise again. Yesterday, however, they rang merrily out—merrily.”
“We heard,” said Dorothy. “So I suppose Mr. Livesay is better.”
“On the contrary, he is dead,” said Heywood.
“He died late on Saturday night. My housekeeper, Mrs. Hartwell, had just brought me in my breakfast when the bells began. 'Listen,' she cried. 'Listen! the joy bells! Mr. Livesay must have died last night.'”
It was true. The bell-ringers had made their call at poor Livesay's house on Sunday morning, and on receiving the melancholy news, they hurried off to let their joy bells proclaim it far and wide.
But no one in Yardley Parva, lay or clerical, except Heyward and ourselves seemed to think that there was anything singular in the incident.
We had a few words to say, however, about joy bells spreading abroad the sad news of a decent man's death, and upon campanology in general.
But when Friswell heard of the affair, he said he did not think it more foolish than the usual practice of church bells.
“We all know, of course, that there is nothing frightens the devil like the ringing of bells,” said he.
“That is quite plausible,” said I. “Any one who doubts it must have lived all his life in a heathen place where there are no churches. Juan Fernandez, for example,” I added, as a couple of lines sang through my recollection. “Cowper made his Alexander Selkirk long for 'the sound of the churchgoing bell.'”
“That was a good touch of Cowper's,” said Friswell. “He knew that Alexander Selkirk was a Scotsman, and with much of the traditional sanctimoniousness of his people, when he found himself awful bad or muckle bad or whatever the right phrase is, he was ready to propitiate heaven by a pious aspiration.”
“Nothing of the sort,” cried Dorothy. “He was quite sincere. Cowper knew that there is nothing that brings back recollections of childhood, which we always think was the happiest time of our life, like the chiming of church bells.”
“I dare say you are right,” said he, after a little pause. “But like many other people, poet Cowper did not think of the church bells except in regard to their secondary function of summoning people to the sacred precincts. He probably never knew that the original use of the bells was to scare away the Evil One. It was only when they found out that he had never any temptation to enter a church, that the authorities turned their devil-scaring bells to the summoning of the worshippers, and they have kept up the foolish practice ever since.”
“Why foolish?” asked Dorothy quite affably. “You don't consider it foolish to ring a bell to go to dinner, and why should you think it so in the matter of going to church?”
“My dear creature, you don't keep ringing your dinner bell for half an hour, with an extra five minutes for the cook.”
“No,” said she quickly. “And why not? Because people don't need any urging to come to dinner, but they require a good deal to go to church, and then they don't go.”
“There's something in that,” said he. “Anyhow they've been ringing those summoning bells so long that I'm sure they will go on with them until all the churches are turned into school-houses.”
“And then there will be a passing-bell rung for the passing of the churches themselves—I suppose the origin of the passing-bell was the necessity to scare away the devil at the supreme moment,” remarked Heywood.
“Undoubtedly it was,” said Friswell. “The practice exists among many of those races that are still savage enough to believe in the devil—a good handmade tom-tom does the business quite effectually, I've heard.”
“Do you know, my dear Friswell, I think that when you sit down with us in our Garden of Peace, the conversation usually takes the form of the dialogue inMagnall's Questionsor theChild's GuideorJoyce's Science. You are so full of promiscuous information which you cannot hide?”
He roared in laughter, and we all joined in.
“You have just said what my wife says to me daily,” said he. “I'll try to repress myself in future.”
“Don't try to do anything of the sort,” cried Dorothy. “You never cease to be interesting, no matter how erudite you are.”
“What I can't understand is, how he has escaped assassination all these years,” remarked Heywood. “I think the time is coming when whoso slayeth Friswell will think that he doeth God's service. Just think all of you of the mental state of the man who fails to see that, however heathenish may be the practice of church-bell-ringing, the fact that it has brought into existence some of the most beautiful buildings in the world makes the world its debtor for evermore!”
“I take back all my words—I renounce the devil and all his work,” cried the other man. “Yes, I hold that Giotto's Campanile justifies all the clashing and banging and hammering before and since. On the same analogy I believe with equal sincerity that the Temple of Jupiter fully justifies the oblations to the Father of gods, and the Mosque of Omar the massacres of Islam.”
“Go on,” said Dorothy. “Say that the sufferings of Alexander Selkirk were justified since without them we should not haveRobinson Crusoe.”
“I will say anything you please, my Lady of the Garden,” said he heartily. “I will say that the beauty of that border beside you justifies Wakeley's lavish advertisements of Hop Mixture.”
I felt that this sort of thing had gone on long enough, so I made a hair-pin bend in the conversation by asking Dorothy if she remembered the day of our visit to Robinson Crusoe's island.
“I never knew that you had been to Juan Fernandez,” said Friswell.
And then I saw how I could score off Friswell.
“I said Robinson Crusoe's island, not Alexander Selkirk's,” I cried. “Alexander Selkirk's was Juan Fernandez, Robinson Crusoe's was Tobago in the West indies, which Dorothy and I explored some years ago.”
“Of course I should have remembered that,” said he. “I recollect now what a stumbling-block to me the geography ofRobinson Crusoewas when I first read the book. A foolish explanatory preface to the cheap copy I read gave a garbled version of the story of Selkirk and his island, and said no word about Daniel Defoe having been wise enough to change Juan Fernandez for another.”
“You were no worse than the writer of a paragraph I read in one of the leading papers a short time ago, relative to the sale of the will which Selkirk made in the year 1717—years after Captain Woodes Rodgers had picked him up at the island where he had been marooned nearly four years before,” said Dorothy, who, I remembered, had laughed over the erudition of the paragraph. “The writer affirmed that the will had been made before the man 'had sailed unwittingly for Tristan d'Acunha'—those were his exact words, and this island he seemed to identify with Bishop Keber's, for he said it was 'where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.' What was in the poor man's mind was the fact that some one had written a poem about Alexander Selkirk, and he mixed Cowper up with Heber.”
“You didn't write to the paper to put the fellow right,” said Heywood.
“Good gracious, no!” cried Dorothy. “I knew that no one in these aeroplaning days would care whether the island was Tristan d'Acunha or Juan Fernandez. Besides, there was too much astray in the paragraph for a simple woman to set about making good. Anyhow the document fetched £60 at the sale.”
“You remember the lesson that was learnt by the man who wrote to correct something a newspaper had written about him, said Heywood. The editor called me a swindler, a liar, and a politician,' said he, relating his experience, 'and like a fool 1 wrote to contradict it. I was a fool: for what did the fellow do in the very next issue but prove every statement that he had made!'”
“Oh, isn't it lucky that I didn't write to that paper?” cried Dorothy.
But when we began to talk of the imaginary sufferings of Robinson Crusoe, and to try to imagine what were the real sufferings of Selkirk, Friswell laughed, saying,—
“I'm pretty sure that what the bonnie Scots body suffered from most poignantly was the island not having any of his countrymen at hand, so that they could start a Burns Club or a Caledonian Society, as the six representatives of Scotland are about to do in our town of Yardley, which has hitherto been free from anything of that sort. Did you ever hear the story of Andrew Gareloch and Alec MacClackan?”
We assured him that we had never heard a word of it.
He told it to us, and this is what it amounted to:—Messrs. Andrew Gareloch and Alec MacClackan were merchants of Shanghai who were unfortunate enough to be wrecked on their voyage home. They were the sole survivors of the ship's company, and the desert island on which they found themselves was in the Pacific, only a few miles in circumference. In the lagoon were plenty of fish and on the ridge of the slope were plenty of cocoa-nuts. After a good meal they determined to name the place. They called it St. Andrew Lang Syne Island, and became as festive and brotherly—they pronounced it “britherly”—as was possible over cocoa-nut milk: it was a long time since either of them had tasted milk of any sort. The second day they founded a local Benevolent Society of St. Andrew, and held the inaugural dinner; the third day they founded a Burns Club, with a supper; the fourth day they starts a Scots Association, with a series of monthly reunions for the discussion of the Minstrelsy of the Border; the fifth day they laid out golf links with the finest bunkers in the world, and instituted a club lunch (strictly nonalcoholic); the sixth day they formed a Curling Club—the lagoon would make a braw rink, they said, if it only froze; and if it didn't freeze, well, they could still have an annual Curlers' Supper; the Seventh Day theykept. On the evening of the same day a vessel was sighted bearing up for the island; but of course neither of the men would hoist a signal on the Seventh Day, and they watched the craft run past the island; though they were amazed to see that she had only courses and a foresail set, in spite of the fact that the breeze was a light one. The next morning, when they were sitting at breakfast, discussing whether they should lay the foundation stone—with a commemorative lunch—of a Free Kirk, a Wee Free Kirk, a U.P. meeting-house or an Ould Licht meeting-house—they had been fiercely debating on the merits of each during the previous twenty years—they saw the vessel returning with all sail on her. To run up one of their shirts to a pole at the entrance to the lagoon was a matter of a moment, and they saw that their signal was responded to. She was steered by their signals through the entrance to the lagoon and dropped anchor.
She turned out to be theBonnie Doon, of Dundee, Douglas MacKellar, Master. He had found wreckage out at sea and had thought it possible that some survivors of the wreck might want passages “hame.”
“Nae, nae,” cried both men. “We're no in need o' passages hame just the noo. But what for did ye no mak' for the lagoon yestreen in the gloamin'?”
“Hoot awa'—hoot awa'! ye wouldna hae me come ashore on the Sawbath Day,” said Captain MacKellar.
“Ye shortened sail though,” said Mr. MacClackan. “Ay; on Saturday nicht: I never let her do more than just sail on the Sawbath. But what for did ye no run up a signal, ye loons, if ye spied me sae weel?”
“Hoot awa'—hoot awa', man, ye wouldna hae a body mak' a signal on the Sawbath Day.”
“Na—na; no a reglar signal; but ye micht hae run up a wee bittie—just eneuch tae catch me e'en on. Ay an' mebbe ye'll be steppin' aboard the noo?”
“Weil hae to hae a clash about it, Captain.”
Well, they talked it over cautiously for a few hours; for captain MacKellar was a hard man at a bargain, and he would not agree to give them a passage under two pound a head. At last, however, negotiations were concluded, the men got aboard theBonnie Doon,and piloted her through the channel. They reached the Clyde in safety, and Captain Mac-Kellar remarked,—
“Weel, ma freens, I'm in hopes that ye'll pay me ower the siller this day.”
“Ay, ye maun be in the quare swithers till ye see the siller; but we'll hand it ower, certes,” said the passengers. “In the meantime, we'd tak' the leeberty o' callin' your attention to a wee bit contra-claim that we hae japped doon on a bit slip o' paper. It's three poon nine for Harbour Dues that ye owe us, Captain MacKellar, and twa poon ten for pilotage—it's compulsory at yon island, so 'tis, so mebbe ye'll mak' it convenient to hand us ower the differs when we land. Ay, Douglas MacKellar, ma mon, ye shouldna try to get the better o' Brither-Scots!”
Captain MacKellar was a God-fearing man, but he said, “Dom!”