"Dandy," said I, as we walked down King Street from the Garden, "when God made the world, I don't believe He meant there to be any cities, or why did he begin with a garden? Surely a city, sterile and fruitless like this, can't be an advancement on a garden?"
It occurred to me then that I was taking a very extreme point of view; a point of view without any suggestion of that logic for which I so often pride myself. Of course, there must be cities, just as there must be workshops in a world where work is to be done. But they go home from workshops. Nobody lives in a workshop. Why don't they go home, then, from cities? It is a sort of thing that Bellwattle would say, as when she asked why they could not cover up a field of corn to protect it from the rats. But I know what I mean. When once you have cast your bread upon the waters of a great city you never do go home. The workshop is your fate then as long as you live. Telephones, telegraphs, all throw out their clutching tentacles, dragging you back into the vortex whenever you try to escape. There is no escape. You steal away towards home; but these ghostly arms stretch forth and you are sucked back into the heart of it once more, back to the city where the flowers will not blossom—the city of oblivion.
I wonder how many men start their lives with a vision that one day they will win their garden of remembrance? I wonder how long it takes them before they join in that crowd of men and women whose eyes ache and whose feet are tired as they hasten to forget?
CHAPTER II
It was as I passed out of King Street that I bethought me of my club; of the hall-porter there who bears a reputation for rose-growing. He has a strange natural ugliness of features which has often drawn me to converse with him as I come in or go out of the building. Our discussions are none of them very weighty or worthy of record. I remark upon the weather while I wait for him to get my letters; in return he tells me of his troubles with the new messenger whose medals speak well for the mightiness of his chest but, as the hall-porter assures me, say nothing in recommendation of his intelligence.
How the knowledge of this amiable hobby of rose-growing came to be known of him by the members is more than I can understand. He has never mentioned it to me, and I should have thought that such an observation as "A bad time for the roses" would have been an excellent reply to some of my meteorological remarks.
He has, however, never expressed himself in that way so I took his reputation on trust, walked straight into the club and asked for my letters.
"Nothing this morning, sir," said he. He did not even look in the little pigeon-hole marked B. This threw me back at once upon my own resources.
"What sort of a spring do you think we're going to have?" I inquired.
He peered out of the tiny window of his hall-porter's house, from which he could just see two square feet of sky.