'Yes,' she proceeded to explain; 'I like you, because you are reasonable, and don't sit down and cry, as, of course, you could if you liked. I have as much heart as another; but it irritates me, and does not touch me one bit, to see some of the pupils here, the big ones too, crying and crying, and why? because they have come back to school, and would rather be at home! Evidently that is the case with all of us. And evidently, what is more, it's going to be the case for ten months. But for some insignificant holidays at the New Year, from now until August, thus it will be with us. We shall be all of us in this school, and we would all of us prefer to be in our homes. But why cry, then? or if one begins to cry, why leave off? Is one, then, to cry for ten months? And what eyes will one have at the end? And what good is it?'
I laughed, not only because she seemed to me to put it humorously, but because I was full of happiness that I had found a friend.
'Yes,' she said, 'you laugh, and that is well, too. It's the thing to do. Now, if you cried there might be an excuse; you are farther away from your people than we are. But you ask yourself, What is the good? And you say to yourself, No, I won't discourage the others. And that is English. And that is why I like the English; they are at least reasonable.'
This was balm to me. The sense of desolation had vanished. Here was the proof that I had been a good witness, and served to uphold the good name of England, and also that I had conquered a friend.
I think it was the same afternoon, because there were Catechism classes, from which, as a Protestant, I was exempted, that I was sent out into the garden, for the first time, at an hour when no other pupils were there. Later on this privilege was very often accorded me, for the same reason; so that, in my own day at any rate, no one else in the school had the opportunity I had given me, and that I used, of taking possession of the enchanted place and making it my very own. And this was so because there was no knowledge in my mind at the time that Some One had been beforehand with me here; and that although for my inner self it became (and must always be for me exclusively) my own beautiful, well-enclosed, flower-scented, turf-carpeted, Eden where the spirit of my youth had its home before any worldly influences, or any knowledge of evil, had come between it and the poetry of its aspirations and its dreams, yet for every one but myself, it is Charlotte Brontë's Garden of Imagination, where she used to 'stray down the pleasant alleys and hear the bells of St. Jean Baptiste peal out with their sweet, soft, exalted sound.[1]
And although no angel with a flaming sword—no, nor yet any Belgian architects and masons, who have broken down the walls and uprooted the old trees, and made the old historical garden in the Rue d'Isabelle a place of stones—can drive me out of my garden of memories where still (and more often than before as the day darkens) I walk 'in the cool of the evening' with the spirit of my youth; yet, for English readers, it is not I, but Charlotte Brontë who must describe, what I could never dare nor desire to paint after her, the famous Allée défendue that holds such a romantic place in her novel of Lucy Snowe, and that was also the scene of my second meeting with M. Heger.
'In the garden there was a large berceau,' wrote the author of Villette, 'above which spread the shade of an acacia; there was a smaller, more sequestered bower, nestled in the vines which ran along a high and grey wall and gathered their tendrils in a knot of beauty; and hung their clusters in loving profusion about the favoured spot, where jasmine and ivy met and married them ... this alley, which ran parallel with the very high wall on that side of the garden, was forbidden to be entered by the pupils; it was called indeed l'Allée défendue.'
In my day there was no prohibition of the Allée défendue, although the name survived. It was only forbidden to play noisy or disturbing games there; as it was to be reserved for studious pupils, or for the mistresses who wished to read or converse there in quietude.
