“I will not,” said Dorothy, with one of her perplexing smiles.
And then she became interesting; for she was ready to affirm that every garden is a battlefield, even when it is not run by a husband and his wife—a dual system which led to the most notorious horticultural fiasco on record. War, according to Milton, originated in heaven, but it has been carried on with great energy ever since on earth, and the first garden of which there is a literary record maintained the heavenly tradition. So does the last, which has brought forth fruit and flowers in abundance through the slaughter of slugs, the crushing of snails, the immolation of leather-jackets, the annihilation of 'earwigs, and is now to be alluded to as a Garden of Peace, if you please.
Dorothy con be very provoking when she pleases and is wearing the right sort of dress; and when she has done proving that the most ancient tradition of a garden points to a dispute not yet settled, between the man and his wife who were running it, she begins to talk about the awful scenes that have taken place in gardens. We have been together in a number of gardens in various parts of the world: from those of the Borgias, where, in the cool of the evening, Lucrezia and her relations communed on the strides that the science and art of toxicology was making, on to the little Trianon where the diamond necklace sparkled in the moonlight on the eve of the rising of the people against such folk as Queens and Cardinals—on to the gardens of the Temple, where the roses were plucked before the worst of the Civil Wars of England devastated the country—on to Cherry' Orchard, near Kingston in the island of Jamaica, where the half-breed Gordon concocted his patriotic treason which would have meant the letting loose of a jungle of savages upon a community of civilisation, and was only stamped out by the firm foot of the white man on whose shoulders the white man's burden was laid, and who snatched his fellow-countrymen from massacre at the sacrifice of his own career; for party government, which has been the curse of England, was not to be defrauded of its prey because Governor Eyre had saved a colony from annihilation. These are only a few of the gardens in which we have stood together, and Dorothy's memory for their associations is really disconcerting. I am disconcerted; but I wait, for the wisdom of the serpent of the Garden comes to me at times—I wait, and when I have the chance of that edgeways word which sometimes I can't get in, I say,—
“Oh, yes, those were pleasant days in Italy among the cypresses and myrtles, and in Jamaica with its palms. I think we must soon have another ramble together.”
“If it weren't for those children—but where should we go?” she cried.
“I'm not sure,” I said, as if revolving many memories, “but I think some part of the Pacific Slope——”
“Gracious, why the Pacific Slope, my man?”
“Because a Pacific Garden must surely be a Garden of Peace; and that's where we are going now with the title-page of a book that is to catch the pennies of the public, and resemble as nearly as I can make it—consistent with my natural propensity to quarrel with things that do not matter in the least—one of the shadiest of the slopes of the Island Valley of Avilion—
Where falls not hall, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly, for it lies