The garden of resurrection

by E. Temple Thurston

To that she made no reply. She walked straight down to the herbaceous border where the patches of arabis are just beginning to put forth their snow and, without looking round again at me, she began to work at those little things which women always do in a garden—those things, in fact, which God and Nature combine to leave undone for that very purpose. It is only women who are thoughtful of the little things in this world. That is why it is they who are given babies to bear.

I watched her, smiling to myself, as she gently uncoiled the tendrilled fingers of a plant of sweet pea that was growing up the trunk of an old apple tree. In the back of my mind I could hear her saying: "Let go—you must let go—it won't hurt you. I want you to grow up here."

Whereupon she began to train it in such direction as neither Nature nor its own inclination ever intended it to go.

"I don't know why Bellwattle is a good name," said I to myself, "but it is." Then with that I called to Dandy and we set off.

Whenever you may be engaged in any adventure, it comes easily to you to notice how wonderful a place the world can be. If the sky is clear and the sun is shining on that morning when you set forth to make mark in the insignificant history of your life, then, indeed, it seems as though the heavens were never so blue or the sun so bright. If there be clouds or rain, if everything is grey in a moving mist, then you button the collar of your coat tight round you and swear to yourself that never was there such a day for doing things before. You remember, as Bellwattle would say, you remember everything. The hedgerows look more beautiful; there is a thousand times more of mystery in the dim forests of the long grasses. A wren hops, piping, in the budding hawthorn, and you tell yourself how everything is alive that day. But everything is always alive. It is only you sometimes who are dead.

So I felt that morning as Dandy and I set out to meet Clarissa. There seemed an added touch of spring in the turf beneath my feet. Dandy felt it as well. No obstacle that came in his way did he climb. He jumped every single thing. If I had not been forty-three, I should have jumped them all with him. There was no forgetting between Dandy and me that we were alive. If his expression of it was more strenuous than mine, it was none the less real for that.

In the breaking buds of gorse, in the clustering sea-pinks ready to bloom upon the unapproachable pinnacles of rock, in the great broad surface of that glittering mirror of the sea, in the gentle sound of its breathing and the clear, bright light of air that filled into my lungs like a draught of snow water, I felt the wonder of the day as I have never felt it before.

All the apprehensions of what Clarissa might say had gone from me—all the fear of what she might think when first she saw me in the broad light of day, seemed caught away into the breeze that freshened round those headlands. I had utterly gone from me. I forgot that I was ugly. I forgot that pitted horror which has disfigured me since I was a little child and my mother clutched me to her breast when I returned from the isolation ward. For that—since it is better that you should understand it—is why the young nursery maid turned her eyes to Dandy that day in the Park.

But I had forgotten it all. I might have been the Apollo Belvedere—a god, with all those physical qualities of perfection that a god should have. My heart was as light as the air I breathed and when, in the distance, silhouetted against the glowing white line of the horizon, I saw the fragile figure of Clarissa bent slightly as she leaned against the wind, I felt that I had accomplished what no god, with all the aids and instruments of Olympus at his hand, had ever done before.

The moment he discovered we were not the only people on the cliffs Dandy raced off to meet her. He is always my harbinger, carrying messages of welcome to friends and enemies alike. I cannot cure him of it. Times out of number he has tried to force me to associate with men whom I detest, and he says such things to women about me as makes me feel absolutely ill at ease. By jumping from one to the other of us, he endeavors to set up a current of mutual adoration which, while at times it may not be distasteful to me, is very embarrassing to the few ladies of my acquaintance. He would have had me married a thousand times over if he could—but the lady has usually said, "Lie down, little dog," just at that very moment when he has thought he was within a tail's wag of success. It is, I know, because he does not realize my physical disqualifications and, no matter how often I tell him that I am an ugly devil, he has never learnt to believe it yet.