“I’ve often sat on my bench,” he said, “and looked out at the sun in the dusty street and wondered if I should ever be able to sit out in it on the grass and have nothing to do. We used to go for a day in the country, I and my sister, whenever I could spare the money, and it was a holiday. You wouldn’t believe what the sight of green fields and trees meant to me and my sister: you see the hedgerows were the only garden we could afford, and we could ill-afford that. My sister used to talk about the Roses she’d have, and the Carnations, and the Sunflowers and Asters, when our ship came home. It came home—think of that.” He stretched his limbs luxuriously. “And here we are with everything, and more.”
“And more?” I asked.
“Well, you see, it is more, somehow. I’m ‘me’ now—do you follow the idea? I never knew what it was to be on my own: just ‘me.’ I can lie abed now as long as I want to, I can wear what I like, do what I like. And I’ve a garden of my own.”
“But you don’t stop there,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “I wonder if you’d know what I meant if I said that a garden and sitting about is a bit too much for me for the present. I want to walk and walk in the open air, and see things, and stretch my legs a bit to get rid of twenty odd years of the bench. I want to run up the top of hills and shout because—well, because I feel as if I had a right to shout when the sun is shining.”
“I quite understand that,” I said.
“And then,” he went on, and his face showed the joy he felt, “everything is so wonderful. Look at that village we came through: those people there feel the same as you and me. They’ve got to express themselves somehow, so they grow flowers right out into the road, just as a gift to you and me. A sort of something comes to them that they must have flowers at the front door. Whenever I see a good garden, full of Pinks and Roses and Larkspur, I get a bed at that cottage, if I can. I’ve slept all over the place, all over England, you might say; and cheap, too.”
“That was a beautiful village, below there,” I said.
He nodded wisely. “Seems as if they’d decorated the street on purpose to make the cottages look as if they grew like the flowers. All the porches covered with Honeysuckle and Roses, and everlasting Peas, and flowers up against the windows. I’ve a perfect craze for flowers—can’t think where I get it from.”
“You are the real gardener,” said I.