“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.