The crow's-nest

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

“Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade,”

and I am ashamed to look it in the face—I have positively worked it to death.

Apply within for lofty sentiments or profound conclusions, the result is the same: these things fly the ardent seeker and only appear when you are not looking for them. Instead you find shreds of likes and dislikes, the ghost of an opinion you held last week, a desire to know what time it is. My regrettable experience is that you can explore the recesses of your soul out-of-doors in much less than a week if you put your mind to it, with surprise and indignation that you should find so little there.

“You beat your pate and fancy wit will come;

Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.”

Dear me, there’s Mr. Pope, and very much, as usual, to the point! No, resources are things you can lay your hands upon, and I have come to believe that they are all in the house.

Everything is up and showing, the garden is green with promise, but very few things are quite ready for my kind advances; very few things are out. What a pretty idea, by the way, in that common little word as the flowers use it! Out of the damp earth and the green sheath, out into the sun with the others, out to meet the bees and to snub the beetles,—oh, out! When young girls emerge into the world they too are “out”—the word was borrowed, of course, from the garden; its propriety is plain. Thisbe, I remember, is out this season; but I do not see anything in the borders exactly like Thisbe. Doubtless later on her prototype will come, in June I think, unfolding a pink petal-coat. There is no hurry; it is yet only the second week in April and these grey mountains are still delicate and dim under the ideal touch of the wild apricot and plum. The borders may be empty, but there is sweet vision to be had by looking up, and just a hint of nature’s possible purposes with a khud. It now occurs to me that there ought to be clouds and clouds of this pink and white blossoming all about the house, behind as well as before, on each of our several declivities,—there ought to be and there is not. I remember now why there is not. One crisp morning last autumn Tiglath-Pileser, who is a practical person, was struck by the fact, though it is not a new one, that wild fruit trees may be made to cultivate fruit by the process of grafting, and announced his intention to graft largely. “Think,” said he, “of the satisfaction of being able to write home to England that you are gathering from your own trees quantities of the greengages which they pay tenpence a pound for and place carefully in tarts!”

The proceeding had not my approval. It seemed to me that it would be a good deal of trouble and care and thought and anxiety to grow greengages on a khud, and we had none of these things to spare. Neither would there be any satisfaction in gathering quantities of them when one could buy a convenient number in the bazaar. We could not eat them all, and it was not our walk in life to sell such things; we might certainly expect to be cheated. We should be reduced to making indiscriminate presents of them and receiving grateful notes from people we probably couldn’t bear. Or possibly I, like the enterprising heroine of improving modern fiction, would feel compelled to start a jam factory, and did I strike him, Tiglath-Pileser, as a person to bring a jam factory to a successful issue? At the moment, I remember, an accumulation of greengages seemed the one thing I precisely couldn’t and wouldn’t tolerate, but I didn’t say very much, hardly more than I have mentioned, as the supreme argument failed to occur to me at the time. The supreme argument, which only visits you after watching the pink and white petals drop among the deodars for hours together, is, of course, that if you can afford to grow fruit to look at it is utilitarian folly to turn it into fruit to eat. So I have no doubt he had his way.... I have been to see; it is the case. Where there should be masses of delicate bloom there are stumps, bare attenuated stumps, tied up in poultices with fingers sticking out of them, which I suppose are the precious grafts. Well, the devil enters into each of us in his own guise; I shall warn Tiglath-Pileser particularly to beware of him in the form of a market gardener.

I cannot conscientiously pass over the rhododendrons, which are all aloft and ablaze just now. It would be unkind and ungrateful when they have come of their own accord to grow on my khud and make it in places really magnificent, though they arouse in me no sentiment at all and I had just as soon they went somewhere else. At home the rhododendron is a bush on a lawn; here it grows into a forest tree, and when you come upon it far out in the wilds with the sun shining through its red clusters against the vivid blue it stands like candelabra lighted to the glory of the Lord. I will consent to admire it in that office, but for common human garden uses I find it a little over-superb and very disconcerting to the apricots and plums. Also Thisbe will put it about in bowls, and will not see that its very fitness for sanctuary purposes makes it worse than useless on the end of a piano. To begin with, its name is against it. Philologically speaking you might as well put a hippopotamus in a vase as a rhododendron. Apart from that it sulks in the house and huddles into bunches of red cotton. It misses the sun in its veins, I suppose, and its spiky cup of leaves, and its proper place in the world at the end of a branch. The peony, which it is a little like, is much better behaved in a drawing-room, but then it has a leg to stand on; we all want that. Besides, a peony is a peony, which reminds me that I have never seen one in Simla. It seems to have been left at home by design in the general emigration of English flowers, like an unattractive old maid whom it was not worth while to bring. But taste and fashion change, and I see a spot where a large bunch of peonies would be both comfortable and delectable. It is not, after all, only slim young things that are to be desired in society or in a garden. Firm, fine high-coloured madames with ample skirts and ripe experience are often much more worth cultivating.