Next morning the gardener found his garden. He saw it under varied aspects and at varied angles, for a gold and silver alternation of sun and shower chequered the Atlantic, and inspired the Caribbeania to a slow but undignified dance, like the activities of a merry cow. The high waves came laughing down from the high horizon, and curtseyed mockingly at her feet.
There was a bay tree in a tub on either side of the entrance to the garden, and the gardener, as he stood between them, surveying his territory, slid involuntarily from one to the other and back again, as the world wallowed. The garden was conventionally conceived, by a carpenter rather than a gardener. Grass-green trellis-work, which should belong essentially to the background, here usurped undue prominence. Arches in the trellis-work, looking to the sea, gave bizarre views, now of the heavy hurried sky, now of the panting sea. Hanging drunkenly from the apex of each arch was a chained wicker basket, from which sea-sick canariensis waved weak protesting hands. A few creepers, lacking sufficient initiative for the task set before them, clawed incompetently at the lowest rungs of the trellis. A row of geraniums in pots shouted in loud brick-red at the farther and more sheltered end of the garden. It was impossible to tolerate the thought of Hilda associating with those geraniums. She was a very vulnerable and emotional soul, was Hilda. Deep orange is a colour beyond the comprehension of the vermilion and vulgar. A few sodden-looking deck-chairs occupied the gardener’s territory, and repelled advances. But on the farthest sat the suffragette. She was crying.
If you have ever crossed the Bay of Biscay while weakened by emotion, you will not ask why she was crying.
The gardener dropped his pose between the bay trees, and did something extraordinarily pretty, considering the man he was. He sat on the next deck-chair to hers, and patted her knee.
“My fault ...” he said. “My fault....”
Of course he did not really believe that it was his fault, but it was unusually gracious of him to tell the lie.
The suffragette turned her face from him. She had cried away all her vanity. Her hair was lamentable, her small plain eyes were smaller than ever, and her nose was the only pink thing in her face.
“I’m very morbid,” she said. “And that at any rate is not your fault.”
“Don’t let’s think either about you or me,” said the gardener, and it would have been wise had he meant it. “We have all our lives to do that in, and it is a pity to do it in the Bay. When one’s feeling weak, it’s easier to fight the world than to fight oneself.”
The suffragette was a grey thing, a snake-soul. To the eye of a grey soul there is something forbidding about the many colours of the universe, and you will always know snake-people by their defensive attitude. It is an immensely lonely thing to be a snake, to have that tortuous spirit, with no limbs for contact with the earth. And yet the compensation is most generous, for there are few joys like the joy of knowing yourself alone.