The Garden Without Walls

CONTENTS

And God planted a garden and drove out man; and he placed at the east of Eden angels and the flame of a sword.

It happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.
This is my earliest recollection. If it be true that the soul is born not at the same time as the body, but at a later period with the first glimmering of memory, then this was the morning on which my soul groped its way into the world.
I have sometimes thought that I have never grown wiser than the knowledge contained in that first recollection. Nothing that I have to record in this book will carry me much further. The scene is symbolic: a little child, inarticulate, early awakened in a sunlit room, vainly striving to make life answer questions. Do we ever get beyond that? The woman is Nature. The man is God. The room is the world—for me it has always been filled with sunlight.
My mother I remember as very tall and patient, vaguely beautiful and smiling. I can recall hardly anything she said—only her atmosphere and the fragrance of violets which seemed always to cling about her. I know that she took me out beneath the stars one night; there was frost on the ground and church-bells were ringing. And I know that one summer’s day, on a holiday at Ransby, she led me through lanes far out into the country till my legs were very tired. We came to a large white house, standing in a parkland. There we hid behind a clump of trees for hours. A horseman came riding down the avenue. My mother ran out from behind the trees and tried to make him speak with her. She held me up to show me to him, and grasped his rein to make him halt. He said something angrily, set spurs to his horse, and disappeared at a gallop. She began to cry, telling me that the man was her father. I was too tired to pay much attention. She had to carry me most of the way home. It was dark when we entered Ransby.