“And where is your garden?”
“I have two. This is one”—and he held up Hilda, who was looking rather round-shouldered owing to the exertions and emotions of the day—“and the world is the other. It also happens that I have had three months’ training in a horticultural college.”
The gardener did not talk like this naturally, any more than you or I do. But in addition to his many other poses he posed as being unique. Unfortunately there is nothing entirely unique except insanity. Of course there are better things than insanity. On the other hand, it is rather vulgar to be perfectly sane.
The suffragette went to an hotel, and the gardener went to meet Mr. Samuel Rust at their appointed meeting-place.
Mr. Rust looked even more colourless against the brownness of the town than he had seemed against the redness of his place. He wore town clothes, too, and one noticed them, which is what one does not do with a well-dressed man. The ideal, of course, is to look as if the Almighty made you to fit your clothes. There are a great many unfortunates whose appearance persists in confessing the truth—that the tailor made their clothes to fit them.
Mr. Samuel Rust, however, was not self-conscious. He escaped that pitfall, but left other people to be conscious of his appearance for him.
“Come along,” he said, skipping up to the gardener like a goat, or like a little hill. “I’ve sounded my cousin on the telephone, and the outlook is not otherwise than middling hopeful. He’s promised, in fact, to ship you on board the Caribbeania. The question is—what as? What can you do?”
“I am a gardener—in theory.”
“Unfortunately only facts are shipped on Abel’s line.”
“Then all is over. For I am just a sheaf of theories held together by a cage of bones. There is no fact in me at all.”