I
THE letter was still there when he came down....
He had known that it would be there, of course,—had, indeed, lain awake half the night, thinking about it,—but he was surprised to see it, nevertheless. More and more, as he thought, it had taken upon itself the quality of a dream; so that, when he saw it again, a white shape set upon an expanse of red-clothed kitchen table, it met him with a shock.
He put it away from him, however, at once. After that first glance, which was not so much a glance as an actual physical encounter thrust upon him as he came in, he did not look at it again. But he was aware of it even while he refused to recognise it. He ignored it, indeed, with something of the self-conscious effort with which one ignores a vivid human presence, going about his tasks as if under actual human eyes. That he was oppressed by it was evident from the way in which he flung the window wide and the door wider, as if in an attempt to get rid of something which threatened to take up its permanent abode.
For this morning he was not quite so sure that he was glad....
Lighting the fire, he set the kettle to boil, afterwards going into the shadowy little larder to look for milk. His wife would be awake before long, and he would take her up a cup of tea as soon as the kettle permitted. Both he and Mattie were getting on in years,—he seventy and she sixty-nine—but they were able to do for themselves yet. It was a good thing, he said to himself, considering all that lay before them, that they were able to do for themselves yet.... He said it to himself more than once as he found a cup and saucer and the sugar that Mattie loved; passing about the house with the careless precision of practice, as well as with something more,—the delicate, kindly step of one accustomed to move in narrow and crowded places, and among fragile things like flowers.
And never once did he look at the letter.
The kettle was slow in boiling, for the fire burnt lazily, this morning. Fires were sensitive things, people said, which knew when those who lighted them were in trouble.... He checked himself guiltily when he found himself thinking that, because of course there was no trouble. On the contrary, there was a great deal of happiness ahead, as well as excitement and adventure and reunion and new life. The last especially appealed to him, because, as head gardener at Ings Hall, he was continually bringing new life into existence. It was surely always a wonderful thing to be about to greet new life!
Mattie would think it wonderful, at all events, in spite of her wordlessness last night. She had continued to keep silence even when he had joined her upstairs, and as he had refrained from looking at her, in his delicate, sensitive way, he would never know now whether or not she had cried. But while he had lain awake she had slept peacefully,—peacefully, silently, graciously,—slept as he had hardly ever known her to sleep, for she was too active a woman, both in body and mind, to sleep very well. Indeed, for months before the letter came to be written, she had hardly slept at all.... But last night she had slept as those sleep who for years have felt themselves to be behind bars, until the time comes at last when they lie down with relaxed limbs and smooth brows, knowing themselves free.
It was a great thing, of course, to be free. Mattie had said it so often that he supposed it must be true. He supposed it, just as he supposed that he himself was not free, because she had said that so often, too. He had never been able really to understand what she meant, because he could not think of a freer life than one spent among trees and fruit and flowers. But she must know better than he did what freedom meant, because she had thought about it so much. Talked about it so much, too, year in and year out.... Yes, it was a great thing to be free.
The day coming in at the door was going to be a fine one, he saw, although he had known that, indeed, as soon as he opened his eyes. But it was a shrouded day as yet, with the mist still high above the river, and threaded in and out among the woods which surrounded the gardens. In any case, he could not have seen either the river or the Hall, for they were a hundred feet below, but even his usual glimpse of the fells across the valley, beautifully vignetted by the stems of larch and beech, was hidden from him by the mist.
It was very quiet in his special domain on its steep little hill,—very quiet and very shut-in. There were the walls round it, first, the big, mellow, kitchen-garden walls, and then there were the mist and the trees, and then there was more mist again. The men had not yet come to work, and there was not even the sound of an approaching footstep. The sun had not yet broken through, bringing with it that sense of movement which is largely the play of light and shade. Only the birds were awake and beginning the day in their usual rushing way; and the river, which never slept at all, but ran and talked all night.
It was quiet in the house, too, except for the lazy crackle of the idle fire, and the loud, determined strokes of the tactless clock. Mattie, he knew, must be still asleep, for if she had stirred he would have heard the bed creak in the room above. Even if she had not stirred he would have known if she was awake, for her vitality would have flowed down through the house and touched him as if with an actual hand.
He loved the quietness. He loved being shut in on the top of his hill, and would have been only the better pleased if there had been thirty barriers about him instead of three. This was the time when the place was wholly his, before his staff stirred in the bothy or climbed the hill from the park. The men, when they came, had an air of possession even in their tread, and in the way they handled things and struck spades into the soil. It was natural, of course, but he felt that it robbed him a little. He had to share the gardens with them. His employers had the possessive air, too, although not so much as the men, both because they knew their place better and because they did not strike tools into the ground. But he had to share the gardens with them, all the same. They said: “What are you going to grow just here, Kirkby?” Or: “Don’t you think we might have so-and-so, this year, instead of this-and-that?” So they robbed him, too.
Not that he was one of those jealous gardeners who grudge the stuff they grow even to the people for whom they grow it. He was not foolish about the gardens, or greedy in any way. He grew things for a purpose, and he liked them to fulfil that purpose. Only he was the gardens, so to speak, after all these years, and when anything was taken from them it was part of him that was taken away.
He was certainly like a garden, as he stood at his house-door, looking out. When most people open their doors and stare, the things outside come awake, but they took no notice of Kirkby. The gardens, as it were, did not even look up. They were no more disturbed by his appearance than by one of their own shadows lying under the bushes, or by the long, ghostly lines of the green and crystal hoar-frost.
He was old and gentle, like an English garden, but he was hale, too, and not by any means run to seed. His clothes, good clothes, now pleasantly shabby, had a mellow tone which blended softly with their setting. His fresh complexion and faded but clear eyes had the pale tints of some of his own blossoms. The very droop of his shoulders was less like the slow curve which comes with age than the gentle stoop of a flower.
Especially he loved the quietness because it was at this hour that he had a vision of the gardens as he planned them for the year. This was his creative time, these few moments before the men came and broke and scattered his thoughts. It was then that he saw the long succession of colours and kinds with which the gardens would sum up their rich total before the winter came again. He would lose some of it later, of course, owing to other people’s follies and fancies, and the stolid frustration of concrete facts. But some of it would persist, even through worries and contradictions and the hard blows of the northern weather; so that, by the time the resting-months for the gardens came round once more, he would always in some measure have fulfilled his dream.
He was not always able to snatch these god-like moments in which he controlled the future. Often enough, Mattie was downstairs first, and he could not call up his pictures while she was working and talking. Husbands and wives were so near to each other that they got in each other’s way over things like those,—things that had to have you all to themselves, or they would not come. But he always took his moments when he could get them, because he needed them. His days were poorer without them and the assurance they brought him, as days are poorer without a prayer.
And just now was the time when the vision was strongest and clearest, when there was promise of new life all around, and still it was only promise. Like all artists, he saw his creation best when there was still nothing but a blank page in front of him. It had then a clarity, a sweep, a combined passion and restraint which it never achieved again after he had once begun to work upon it. It altered, no matter how he tried to preserve it. Alien ideas crept in, upsetting the balance of his scheme. Beautiful ideas they were, too, sometimes, but they were alien, nevertheless. Often he had tried to convince himself that the altered plan was all for the best; but as soon as the springtime both of the gardens and of his inspiration came round again, he knew that the thing which he saw then was the finer and purer.
The whole panorama of the seasons passed in colour and shape before his inward eye, running at the same time through his brain like a well-known piece of music. Familiar as it was, however, it was also highly intricate, with its many different parts overlapping and intertwining. Not only was there the kitchen garden to think of, but there were the glass-houses as well, fruit grown inside and out, tomatoes, orchids, carnations, violets. Then down at the Hall there were the rose-gardens and lawns, tennis-courts and flower-borders, and the long yew and beech-hedges to be kept trim and close. And besides all these there was the big rock-garden across the river, full of plants which, however much you might suppress them, grew as giants grow in a single night.
He saw the vegetables he would grow with the warm, homely thrill with which the farmer sees his crops, and the housewife her stores of linen and jam. The fruit he saw as an artist sees his finished task,—as gleaming jewels of price which you can hold and weigh in your hand. But the flowers he saw as the mystic and the dreamer see Heaven,—not in concrete form, but as sheer colour and light, and an ecstasy of shaded tones.
He had, too, the knowledge which enabled him to see under the soil, as the geologist sees the strata under his feet, and the drainer sees where the streams run under the apparently dry surface. Beneath the quiet beds and the still grass he saw the forces of life already waking to work, sending the spring-urge through the seeds which had slept there during the winter, or conserving their energies for those which should be given into their charge later.
But for that insight and knowledge there would have seemed little enough encouragement from the brown waste lying before him, and curving away behind potting-sheds and glass to come back to him again along empty borders. The gardens were not actually empty, of course, for there were evergreen climbers and shrubs, patches of colour made by the remains of the winter greens, jasmine in flower, and the wing-like flashes of snowdrops and crocuses. But by comparison with his vision it was altogether desolate and barren, for in that he saw all the miracle of each season at once, smiled upon by a cloudless heaven.
First—and this he always saw first, and indeed it was already hard upon the heels of his vision—he saw the crimson ribes glowing over the countryside, that precious pink flame which appears so suddenly and amazingly among the pale yellows of the spring. Then—a quieter beauty, but equally as thrilling—the infinitely pure green that comes creeping over the brown thorn. He saw the purples of lilac and iris, the cool white and green of lily-of-the-valley, the vivid yet delicate spirit-stains of the azalea. He saw red and white jewels hung by the thousand on raspberry canes and currant bushes, and the creamy ovals of new potatoes. He saw roses, not singly, but in arches and flung handfuls, and a cloud of sweet peas like pinioned butterflies. Backing it all he saw green again, the young live green of the early spring, and the deep, sap-running green of the flush of summer. But above all he saw blue, that colour so precious in a northern county which is kept short of blue skies. Lupins and forget-me-not and delphiniums and periwinkle, and the blue that is never quite blue of the hydrangea. When he looked across the gardens it was chiefly blue that he saw,—blue against the brown of the soil and the green of the shrubs and the mist-wrapped sepia of the wet tree-trunks.
Not every other gardener, he found, had the passion for blue to anything like the extent that he had. All of them grew blue flowers, of course, filling their borders with them, and flinging them profusely about their rockeries. But they did not worship them, as he did,—did not wait and watch for them, feeling, as they looked at them, that what they looked at was pure spirit. Mostly they preferred deep-coloured roses and rich carnations, the tawny hues of chrysanthemums or the flaming shades of rhododendrons and dahlias. They did not seem to see the wistfulness of blue against a northern landscape, and how it was answered by the smoke-blue of far-off mountains and the steel-blue of frozen tarns.
This year, however, they were to have a new blue flower which had attracted quite a lot of attention at a northern show, last summer. It had been brought into being by a north-country horticulturist, and so naturally the northern papers had made a great to-do about it. One of them had said that the new “dawnbell,” as it was called, had a certain quality which only a northern mind could have infused into it; and another said that it seemed to contain all the fundamental blues of the world, as the rose seemed to contain all the fundamental pinks. Kirkby had not quite understood what either of the papers was talking about, but it did not matter. All that he knew, as he paid his homage to the dawnbell in its airless tent, was that, set against the background of his fells at home, it would have the exquisiteness and the appeal of a little child.
But not only did he see the glory of the garden unrolled before him; he saw the daily work, the infinite pains which led to the production of it. He saw the trenching, the sowing, the thinning, the potting and pruning, the staking and tying, the watering and weeding. He saw the daily fight with the myriad living creatures which strive to share the results of man’s labours with him. And when he had finished with the growing, there was still the cropping, the gathering for the Hall, the London house, the shooting-box, the market. And when the heaviest work in that way was beginning to get over, there was the layering and manuring and dividing; and always the continual battle for order with the leaf-storms flung upon him by the autumn gales.
Not that he saw this side of his vision as mere drudgery, or in any way secondary to the rest. It was all one to him, indeed, and of equal interest and beauty, for to the artist the craft is as fascinating as the dream. He knew, who had done every job in a garden in his time, the contentment that may wait upon a man when he is working out even the smallest detail of a great conception. Long ago he had learned that the whole is implicit in the part; so that, while he broke his way through stiff soil, or toiled patiently with the knife, he felt his material quiver with the message of all that was yet to come, and saw, not the apparently trivial task upon which he was engaged, but the beauty that should be.
He was so still during the few minutes in which his vision passed before him that the very bushes and trees, chained and weighted with heavy drops, seemed by comparison to be full of animation. It was as if the actual life were being drained out of him in order to supply vitality to the temporarily vivid picture. The light had brightened a little, and the mist was lifting. Far below, from the direction of the park, a sweet-whistled snatch swam up to him through the mist as the faint chimes of sunk church-bells are said to swim up through the sea. The men were coming to work. Behind him the kettle boiled over with a sudden angry hiss, and at the same moment he heard the bed creak in the room above.
Turning, he saw the letter....