GLYCINE!
Therein, during nearly a whole year, for reasons of delicate health, resided a certain very small English boy—French enough in those tender years. In this delectable old place, so full of good-smelling things in their seasons: hay, and grain, and fruit, and at all times the health-restoring cow, the house was in the spring-time covered with Glycine. And with the adorable Glycine the small boy, who loved flowers as much as milk and fruits and beasts, fell forthwith in love.
How that coquettish Jappy plant came originally to find a footing in so rustic a corner as Mesnil-le-Roy is more than I can account for. Your French peasant is not, as a rule, addicted to the delights of flower raising; and, in those distant days, Wisteria was still something of a rarity anywhere. But there it was, already in the sturdiest strength of its age, embracing the old walls, forcing its fibrous wood into every cranny of the greystone, framing every window, striving up the chimney stacks—and filling the air with honey sweetness. It must have taken at least two score years to reach such a size.
With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. He feasted on it with his every sense. From morning till eve he would be sucking the base of some blue corolla plucked from its calyx, for the sake of that intense sweetness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of Glycine; he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his eyes with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in the scent, and listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz of honey-seekers in the sunshine. And, in the morning, his first thought, as he crept out of his small truckle-bed, was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that glittered upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side at the mansarde window.
Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I remember how, for months after he was removed back into the Paris house, the small boy would ply his mother with the yearning question, infantilely incorrect but vernacular: “Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines, Maman?” always to receive the non-committal but consoling:
“Tantôt ... tantôt.”
This “tantôt” is the wonderful “by-and-by” which never comes to be!
And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in later years—to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of age. For years a many, a purple Wisteria spreading about the eaves of a south-country house, was to me only a purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was nothing more. It was not a “Glycine” until I had a creepered wall of my own. Then it surged before imagination’s eye with all the glamour of les premières amours, to which, in accordance with the old French saw, “on en revient toujours.”
Now, therefore, at Villino Loki, nothing will serve but a Glycine to creep along those walls which are more especially my own; to embrace my south windows and nod in at the casement. And the suave-breathed Eastern beauty, first brought over to the West and god-fathered by Professor Wister, will privily remain Glycine for me; although I may draw the indulgent visitor’s attention to her under the better-known name of Wisteria Sinensis.—I have, by the way, an ever-ready pretext; for I learn from “The Language of Flowers” that the special significance of this blossom is “Welcome, fair stranger!” I mean to have a profusion of it, for old sake’s sake. Besides, is it not meet that Loki should not be deprived, during his villeggiatura, of the company of some Chinese living thing?