Copyright, 1901, byDodd, Mead and CompanyUNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSONAND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
Copyright, 1901, byDodd, Mead and CompanyUNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSONAND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
The Crow’s-NestChapter I
The Crow’s-Nest
THERE is an attraction about carpets and curtains, chairs and sofas, and the mantelpiece which is hard to explain, and harder to resist. I feel it in all its insidious power this morning as I am bidding them farewell for a considerable time; I would not have believed that a venerable Axminster and an arm-chair on three casters could absorb and hold so much affection; verily I think, standing in the door, it was these things that made Lot’s wife turn her unlucky head. Dear me, how they enter in, how they grow to be part of us, these objects of ordinary use and comfort that we place within the four walls of the little shelters we build for ourselves on the fickle round o’ the world! I have gone back, I have sat down, I will not be deprived of them; they are necessary to thecourage with which every one must face life. I will consider nothing without a cushion, on the hither side of the window, braced by dear familiar bookshelves, and the fender. And Tiglath-Pileser has come, and has quoted certain documents, and has used gentle propulsive force, and behold, because I am a person whose contumacy cannot endure, the door is shut, and I am on the outside disconsolate.
I would not have more sympathy than I can afterwards sustain; I am only banished to the garden. But the banishment is so definite, so permanent! Its terms are plain to my unwilling glance, a long cane deck chair anchored under a tree. Overhead the sky, on the four sides the sky, without a pattern, full of wind and nothing. Abroad the landscape, consisting entirely of large mountains; about, the garden. I never regarded a garden with more disfavour. Here I am to remain—but toremain! The word expands, you will find, as you look into it. Man, and especially woman, is a restless being, madeto live in houses roaming from room to room, and always staying for the shortest time moreover, if you notice, in the one which is called the garden. The subtle and gratifying law of arrangement that makes the drawing-room the only proper place for afternoon tea operates all through. The convenience of one apartment, the quiet of another, the decoration of another regularly appeal in turn, and there is always one’s beloved bed, for retirement when the world is too much with one. All this I am compelled to resign for a single fixed fact and condition, a cane chair set in the great monotony of out-of-doors. My eye, which is a captious organ, is to find its entertainment all day long in bushes—and grass. All day long. Except for meals it is absolutely laid down that I am not to “come in.” They have not locked the doors, that might have been negotiated, they have gone and put me on my honour. From morning until night I am to sit for several months and breathe, with the grass and the bushes, the beautiful pure fresh air. Idon’t know why they have not asked me to take root and be done with it. In vain I have represented that microbes will agree with them no better than with me; it seems the common or house microbe is one of the things that I particularly mustn’t have. Some people are compelled to deny themselves oysters, others strawberries or artichokes; my fate is not harder than another’s. Yet it tastes of bitterness to sit out here in an April wind twenty paces from a door behind which they are enjoying, in customary warmth and comfort, all the microbes there are.
I have consented to this. I have been wrought upon certainly, but I have consented. For all that, it is not so simple as it looks. It is my occupation to write out with care and patience the trifles the world shows me, revolving as it does upon its axis before every intelligent eye; and I cannot be divorced from all that is upholstered and from my dear occupation by the same decree. And how, I ask you, how observe life from a cane chair under a tree in a garden! There is the beautiful pure fresh aircertainly, and there are the things coming up. But what, tell me, can you extract from air beside water; and though a purely vegetable romance would be a novelty, could I get it published? Tiglath-Pileser has contributed to my difficulty a book of reference, a volume upon the coleoptera of the neighbourhood, and I am to take care of it. I am taking the greatest care of it, but I do not like to hand it back to him with the sentiments I feel in case one fine day I should be reduced to coleoptera and thankful to get them.
Nevertheless I have no choice, I cannot go forth in the world’s ways and see what people are doing there, I must just sit under my tree and think and consider upon the current facts of a garden, the bursting buds I suppose and the following flowers, the people who happen that way and the ideas the wind brings; the changes of the seasons—there’s fashion after all in that—the behaviour of the ants and earwigs; oh, I am encouraged, in the end it will be a novel of manners!
Besides, there ought to be certain virtues, if one could find them, inplein air, for scribbling as well as for painting. One’s head always feels particularly empty in a garden, but that is no reason why one should not see what is going on there, and if one’s impressions are a trifle incoherent—the wind does blow the leaves about—they will be on that account all the more impressionistic.
Yet it isnotso simple as it looks. In such a project everything depends, it will be admitted, upon the garden; it must be a tolerably familiar, at least a conceivable spot. The garden of Paradise, for instance, who would choose it as apoint de repairefrom which to observe the breed of Adam at the beginning of the twentieth century? One would be interrupted everywhere by the necessity of describing the flora and fauna; it would be like writing a botany book with interpolations which would necessarily seem profane; and the whole thing would be rejected in the end because it was not a scientific treatise upon the origin of apples. Certainly, if one might select one’s plot, thefirst consideration should be the geographical, and I am depressed to think that my garden is only less remote than Eve’s. It is not an English garden—ah, the thought!—nor a French one where they count the seeds and the windfalls, nor an Italian one sunning down past its statues to the blue Adriatic, nor even a garden in the neighbourhood of Poughkeepsie where they grow pumpkins. Elizabeth in her German garden was three thousand miles nearer to everybody than my cane chair is at this moment. How can I possibly expect people to come three thousand miles just to sit and talk under my pencil-cedar? So “long” an invitation requires such confidence, such assurance!
Who indeed should care to hear about every day as it goes on under a conifer in a garden, when that garden—let me keep it back no longer—is a mere patch on a mountain top of the Himalayas? Not even India down below there, grilling in the sun which is not quite warm enough here—that would be easy with snakes and palm-treesand mangoes and chutneys all growing round, ready and familiar; but Simla, what is Simla? An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand feet out of the world to be cool. Who ever leaves Charing Cross for Simla? Who among the world’s multitudes ever casts an eye across the Rajputana deserts to Simla? Does Thomas Cook know where Simla is? No; Simla is a geographical expression, to be verified upon the map and never to be thought of again, and a garden in Simla is a vague and formless fancy, a possibility, no more.
Yet people have to live there, I have to live there; and certainly for the next few months I have to make the best of it from the outside. If you ask yourself what you really think of a garden you will find that you consider it a charming place to go out into. So much I gladly admit if you add the retreat and background of the house. The house is such an individual; such a friend! Even in Simla the house offers corners where may lurk the imagination,nails on which to hang a rag of fancy; but in this windy patch under the sky surrounded by Himalayas, one Himalaya behind another indefinitely, who could find two ideas to rub together?
Also my cane chair is becoming most pitiably weary; it aches in every limb. The sun was poor and pale enough; now it has gone altogether, a greyness has blown out of Thibet, my fingers are almost too numb to say how cold it is. The air is full of an apprehension of rain—if it rains do you suppose I am to come in? Indeed no, I am to have an umbrella. Uncomforted, uncomfortable fate! I wish it would rain; I could then pity myself so profoundly, so abjectly, I would lie heroic, still and stoic; and at the appointed time I would take my soaking, patient person into the house with a trail of drops, pursued by Thisbe with hot-water bottles, which I would reject, to her greater compassion and more contrition. And in the morning it would be a queer thing if I couldn’t produce rheumatism somewhere. Short of rain, however, it willbe impossible to give a correct and adequate impression of the bald inhospitality of out-of-doors. They will think I want to be pitied and admired, and Thisbe will say, “But didn’t you really enjoy it—just a little?”
Walls are necessary to human happiness—that I can asseverate. Tiglath-Pileser, in bringing me to this miserable point, argued that I should experience the joys of primitive man when he took all nature for his living-room; subtle, long-lost sensations would arise in me, he said, of such a persuasive character that in the end I should have to combat the temptation to take entirely to the woods. I expect nothing of the kind. My original nomad is too far away, I cannot sympathize with him in his embryotic preferences across so many wisest centuries. Moreover, if the poor barbarian had an intelligent idea it was to get under shelter, and that is the only one, doubtless, for which we have to thank him.
The windows are blank; they think it kindest, I suppose, not to appear to findentertainment in my situation. It is certainly wisest; if Thisbe showed but the tip of her pretty nose I should throw it up. The windows are blank, the door is shut, but hold—there is smoke coming out of the drawing-room chimney! Thisbe has lighted unto herself a fire and is now drawn up around it awaiting the tea-things. The house as an ordinary substantive is hard enough to resist, but the-house-with-a-fire! No, I cannot. Besides it is already half-past four and I was to come in at five to tea. I will obey the spirit and scorn the letter of the law—I will go in now.