Rubble and Roseleaves, and Things of That Kind

by Frank Boreham

'I've been reading aboot the knife, d'ye ken?' he explained. 'It's a bonny passage!' He took the open Bible from the table beside the bed and pointed me to the fifteenth of John. 'Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, he cutteth away; and every branch that beareth fruit, he pruneth it that it may bring forth more fruit.'

'It brought me a power o' comfort,' Gregor explained. 'For it says, ye ken, that there are only two sorts o' wood on the tree—the dead wood and the live wood. He cuts away the dead wood for the sake of the live wood that he leaves; and he cuts the live wood that bears fruit so that it may bear still more and still better fruit. Well, I thocht o' all the losses I've had lately. I dinna ken whether the things that have been taken were dead things or live things, but it doesna matter. If they were dead things, I'm better without them. And, if they were live things, they were only cut away because my life is like a tree that bears fruit and that may yet bear more. And, in either case, the best remains. The tree is the richer and not the poorer for the pruning. The pruning only shows that the gardener cares. Ay, it's a bonny passage that!' and Gregor laid the open Bible lovingly on the pillow beside him. 'After you've gone,' he said, 'I shall go over it again!'

And, from the frequency with which he quoted the words to buffeted spirits in the days that followed, I could see that, on that further inspection, Gregor had kissed the husbandman's knife even more reverently and rapturously than before.

IV—OLD PHOTOGRAPHS

We badly need an Asylum for Antiquated Portraiture—a pleasant and hospitable refuge in which all our old photographs could be carefully preserved and reverently handled. For lack of such an institution we are all in difficulties. People come into our lives; we become attached to them and value their friendship; we exchange photographs; and, as soon as we have done so, the inevitable happens. The photographs get hopelessly out of date. Friends come and go; we come and go; but the photographs remain. Or, if the friends themselves abide, they change; fashions change; and, in a few years, the photographs look singularly archaic if not positively ridiculous. They go away into a drawer or a box. Once or twice a year a spring-cleaning or other volcanic upheaval reminds us of their existence. 'We must really sort these out and destroy a lot of them!' we say; but we never do it. Everybody knows why. It seems a betrayal of old confidences, an outrage upon sentiment, a heartless sacrilege. There should be an asylum for obsolete portraiture, or, if that is out of the question, we should do with the photographs what Nansen and Johansen, the Polar explorers, did with their dogs. Neither had the heart to shoot his own; so, amid the ice and snow of the far north, they exchanged their canine companions, and each went sadly and silently away and shot the other's!

Such a course must, however, be regarded as a makeshift and a subterfuge. The asylum is the thing. I am opposed, tooth and nail, to the destruction of old photographs under any conditions. I spent an hour yesterday afternoon down by the lake reading some of the love-letters that Mozart wrote to his wife nearly two centuries ago. Poor Johann and poor Stanzerl! They were so pitifully penniless that when, one bitter winter's morning, a kindly neighbor fought his way through the deep snow to see how the young couple were getting on, he found them dancing a waltz on the bare boards of their narrow room. They could not afford a fire, and this was their device for keeping warm. And now Johann is away on a business trip. In our time a husband so situated would send his wife a telegram to say that he had arrived safely, or, perhaps, buy her a picture-postcard of the view from his hotel window. But Mozart wrote the prettiest love-letters. 'Dear little wife,' he says, 'if I only had a letter from you! If I were to tell you all that I do with your dear likeness, how you would laugh! For instance, when I take it out of its case, I say "God greet thee, Stanzerl, God greet thee, thou rascal, shuttlecock, pointy-nose, nicknack, bit and sup!" And, when I put it back, I let it slip in very slowly, saying, with each little push, "Now—now—now!" and at the last, quickly—"Good-night, little mouse, sleep well!"' Where is that portrait now? I dread to hazard a conjecture! There was, alas, no asylum to which it could be fondly and reverently entrusted. Photographs, like fashions, are capable of strange revivals. One never knows when crinolines or hobble skirts will reappear; and in the same way, one never knows the moment at which some quaint old faded photograph will acquire new and absorbing interest.

'Why, bless me,' you exclaim, as you lay down the newspaper, 'here's Charlie Brown become famous! You remember Charlie; he was the second son of the Browns who lived opposite us at Kensington! Why, I have a photograph of him, taken when he was a little boy; I'll run and get it!' But alas, it has been destroyed. Or the regret may be even more poignant.

'Dear me,' you say, 'poor old Mary Smith is dead!' The announcement brings with it, as such announcements have a way of doing, a rush of reminiscence. A simple old soul was Mary Smith. She was very good to us, five and twenty years ago, when the children were all small and sicknesses were frequent. Mary always knew exactly what to do. But we moved away, and the years went by. Letter-writing was not in Mary's line. With the obituary notice still before us, we talk of Mary and the old days for awhile, and then we suddenly remember that, when we came away, Mary gave us her photograph. It was a quaint, old-fashioned picture; it had been taken some years earlier; but we were glad to have it, and we put it with the others. We must slip up and get it! But it, too, has vanished! Somehow, Mary living did not seem quite so pathetic and lovable a figure as Mary dead. At some spring-cleaning we must have glanced at the creased and faded portrait, and, without pausing to allow memory to do such vivid work as she has done to-day, we must have tossed it out. We feel horribly ashamed. If only we could recover the old photograph we would stand it on the mantelpiece and do it signal honor. And to think that, in the confusion of cleaning-up, we threw it out, perhaps tore it up, perhaps even burned it. We shudder at the thought, and half hope that, in her new and larger life, Mary—who seems nearer to us now than she did before we read of her passing—does not know that we were guilty of treachery so base.

Thus there come into our lives moments when photographs assert their worth and insist on being appraised at their true value. In the stirring chapter in which Sir Ernest Shackleton tells of the loss of his ship among the ice-floes, he describes an incident that must have set all his readers thinking. In the grip of the ice, the Endurance had been smashed to splinters; and the entire party were out on a frozen sea at the mercy of the pitiless elements. Shackleton came to the conclusion that their best chance of eventually sighting land lay in marching to the opposite extremity of the floe; at any rate, it would give them something to do, and there is always solace in activity. He thereupon ordered his men to reduce their personal baggage to two pounds weight each. For the next few hours every man was busy in sorting out his belongings—the treasures that he had saved from the ship. It was a heart-breaking business. Men stole gloomily and silently away and dug little graves in the snow, to which they committed books, letters, and various nicknacks of sentimental value. And, when the final decisions had to be made, they threw away their little hoards of golden sovereigns and kept the photographs of their sweethearts and wives!

The same perplexity arises, sooner or later, in relation to the portraits and pictures on our walls. They become obsolete; but we find it difficult to order their removal. I had intended, long before this, devoting an essay to the whole subject of Pictures. Why must we smother our walls with pictures? To begin with, the pattern of the paper is often a series of pictures in itself, while the dado and the border simply add to the collection. Then, over these, we carefully arrange a multitude of others. Paintings, engravings, and photographs hang everywhere. Why do we cover the walls in this way? The answer is that we cover the walls in order to cover the walls. The walls represent an imprisonment; the pictures represent an escape. On the wall in front of me, for example, there hangs a water-color sketch of Piripiki Gorge, our New Zealand holiday resort. On a winter's night, when the rain is lashing against the windows and the wind shrieking round the house, I glance up at it, and, by some magic transition, I am roaming on a summer's evening over the old familiar hills with my gun in my hand and John Broadbanks by my side. Through the medium of those landscapes, how many tireless excursions have I taken, by copse and beach and riverbank, without so much as rising from my chair? The photographs hanging here and there around the room transport my mind to other days and other places. The apartment in which I sit may be extremely small, just as the space that I occupy on the summit of a mountain may be extremely small. But, occupying that small space upon that lofty eminence, I command a view that loses itself in infinity; and, lounging in my comfortable chair in this little snuggery of mine, the pictures transform it into an observatory, and I am able to survey the entire universe. You do not hang pictures in the cells of a jail; the reason is obvious; you do not wish the prisoners to escape; you think it good that they should feel the stern tyranny of those four uncompromising walls. Conversely, you deck the dining-room with pictures because, there, you do not desire to feel imprisoned; you do not wish the walls to seem tyrannical. As Mr. Stirling Bowen sings: