IV
ALL the same, a long time had elapsed before he had finally given in. He was middle-aged and over even when the letters first began to come, and he had not felt able to face the venture. Mattie was all agog for it, of course, seeing it as the chance for which she had waited all her life, but he refused to consider it. He had said “no” so often, indeed, that it had seemed as if he could go on saying it for ever. But he had not gone on saying it for ever, or anything like it. Quite suddenly he had blotted out all those accumulated “noes” with a single “yes.”
Yet, perhaps, now that he came to think of it, it had not been as sudden as he imagined. It seemed to him now, looking back, that the “noes” had had no significance at all; that, in point of fact, he had been defeated from the very start. Right from that first occasion upon which he had found his wife upstairs, pushing the walls away, he had known that he would go....
Nevertheless, for ten years at least he had successfully resisted both Mattie’s persuasions and the calls from over the sea. It seemed extraordinary to him now that he should have been able to hold out so long. But then it was not he himself that had been able to hold out, but something outside him,—something that would not break, that never could have broken, so he had firmly believed, until it had given way on the previous evening.
Still, it had not been an easy matter, keeping his ears and his heart shut, all those years. Not only were there Mattie’s arguments to contend with, and of course the letters, but there was a constant succession of photographs as well. Snapshots of the party across the ocean were always arriving,—pictures of his children, of their wives and husbands, their homes, their families. And besides all these there were photographs of the nursery garden which they ran among them, and which they were rapidly turning into a big business. For in this one thing at least they had remained true to type. Without hesitation they had turned naturally and successfully to gardening.
At first he had felt little more for their far-off efforts than the aloof if kindly contempt of the finished workman for the crude beginner. He was glad, of course, that the children had kept to the old trade, but conditions were different “out there,” and at first he found them difficult to follow. As time went on, however, and the photographs showed the garden to be increasing in size and scope, his interest began to quicken. He had it fixed in his mind now what they were planting and when, and what they were growing for the different markets. Presently he was even trying some of their new-fangled ideas on his own account, although he was careful not to say very much about them. Thinking about that distant garden while he worked in his own, he came at last to that point where the mind passes so easily between place and place that the body might equally well be in either.
Mattie, of course, had reached that particular state long since. Her dream of last night had been only a vivid extension of it. Often, for instance, she would talk of the grandchildren as if they were no further away than round the corner. “Little Joe’s first day at school to-day,” she would say, bending over her sewing. “I hope they got him off in good time.” Or— “Maggie’s May’s not so grand with that cough of hers. I must see about getting her a bottle of something from the chemist’s.”
He had done his best to conceal from her his growing absorption in the Canadian enterprise, but it was not long before she discovered it. Dropping her talk of the grandchildren to some extent, she concentrated upon the business, surprising him, times without number, by her intimate knowledge of it. She, who had never shown even the faintest enthusiasm for his particular job, seemed to know every seed that was sown in that nursery across the Atlantic.
“Potatoes have done well for them, this year,” she would inform him, glibly reeling off a list of varieties. “‘Grand Elephant’s’ the best, though, they say. I’d like to try ’em. That sort we had ourselves wasn’t worth the planting.”
“Main crop was ‘Grand Elephants,’” he would remind her mildly, but without arousing her to any excitement.
“Eh, now! Fancy that!” she would answer, in a tone of polite wonder. “And I never knew!... Likely it’s the soil or something as makes the difference. Anyhow, all I can say is I thought ’em right poor.”
For some time she had contented herself with merely stimulating his increasing interest, but after a while she came out into the open with it as a weapon.
“You’d settle sharp enough, you’d see,” she was saying presently, when the eternal subject came cropping up again. “It’s the same job, when all’s said. ’Tisn’t as if you’d be going to something different.”
“It’d be different, though, in lots of ways,” he had replied firmly, much in the same hopeless but obstinate tone in which she had so often asserted that “it would be just the same.” “Come to that,” he had added with spirit, “I wonder you’re so keen on it yourself if it’s not to be fresh, seeing you’ve always been so set against gardening and such-like?”
She had laughed without resentment at his mild attack, too enchanted with her happy project to be stirred to anger.
“It’d be different in my way,” she admitted,—“I give you that—but I don’t know as it’d be that much different in yours. It’d be bigger-freer—nay, I can’t explain! But sticking things into the ground and taking them out again seems to me much the same job all the world over.”
He had said nothing to that, partly because it did not seem worth while, but also because his mind instinctively retreated when she mentioned size. She liked to think of the Canadian garden as prairie-wide, a great, untrammelled stretch of a place under an arching sky,—but that view of it repelled him. The photographs, of course, had shown him something of what it was like, but he chose to ignore them. Hidden away in his imagination was his own impression of the place, as a time-mellowed, sheltered circle of anciently-tilled soil....
It was perhaps because he had been dwelling upon the garden in that particular guise that yesterday he had given in. Also he had had an annoying day, spoilt by several of those tiresome little incidents able even to take the glamour out of the work which is nearest to one’s heart. But it was chiefly the weather which had overset his mind, hard and clear as it was with that sinister hardness and clearness which scarifies the soul. It was the only weather that ever made him feel really old, stripping as it did the veils from his various shrines. He had gone indoors for his evening meal, feeling that his life, under its present conditions, had nothing further to offer him.
The mail was in, he found, as he sat down,—it had seemed to him, of late years, that the mail was always in,—and a letter from Canada was lying on the table. Mattie had opened it, apparently, and presumably read it, but she made no attempt to force it upon his notice. She neither mentioned it, indeed, nor even as much as pushed it towards him, and perhaps because of this lack of coercion, he found himself eyeing it longingly. In his momentary state of depression it seemed to offer him the exact stimulant which he needed, and after resisting the impulse for a short time, he reached out and drew it towards him.
The atmosphere changed around him almost as soon as he opened the letter. Canada leaped out of the pages at him as he read,—Canada, live and free, and with red blood rushing in its veins. It had always seemed to him a country where everybody was young, and to-day more than ever it seemed peopled with radiant youth. The letter was full of vitality, of hope, of healthy happiness and success. He forgot his annoyances as he read, and his depression vanished. By the time he had finished the letter he, too, felt young, breathing the air of that land which seemed to know nothing of growing old....
The garden was in the letter, too, needless to say; in fact, it might almost be said that it was more garden than letter. It was almost as if the writer had posted a piece of the actual soil.... Kirkby, holding it in his earth-sensitive hand, found it an amulet transporting him so far that he lost all sense of his present surroundings.
He looked up after a time to find his wife’s gaze fixed upon him, and the teapot suspended in her hand. Apparently she had been about to speak, and then had been checked by a realisation of the importance of the moment. He stared at her as if he found some difficulty in focussing her, and she lowered the teapot slowly to the table.... He tapped the letter.
“Mattie,” he said. “We’d likely best go....”
It was really the garden which had beaten him in the end.