“That’s just the point,” I cried. “I don’t know. I want you to help me.”
“After Mrs. Bert’s warning, I shouldn’t dare advise you,” she smiled.
“Well, let’s ask Hiroshige,” said I. “Come on.”
“Is he your gardener? The name sounds quite un-Hibernian.”
I scorned a reply, and we went around to the shed where all my belongings were stored, still unpacked. I got a hammer and opened the box containing pictures, drawing forth my two precious Japanese prints. Then I led Miss Goodwin through the kitchen in spite of her protests of propriety, through the fragrance of new flooring, into the big south room, where Hard had nearly completed his main work and was getting in the new door frames while his assistants were patching up the floor. She sat down on the new settle, while I climbed on a box and hung the pictures, one over each mantel. Instantly the room assumed to my imagination something of its coming charm. Those two spots of colour against the dingy wood panels dressed up the desolation wonderfully. I hastily kicked some shavings and chips into the fireplaces and applied a match.
“The first fires on the twin hearths!” I cried. “In your honour!”
The girl smiled into my face, and did not joke. “That is very nice,” she said. Then she rose and put out her hand. “Let me wish Twin Fires always plenty of wood and the happiness which goes with it.”
We shook hands, while the fire crackled, and already the spot seemed to me like home. Then she looked up at the prints. “Now,” she cried, “how is honourable Hiroshige going to advise you? Here is a blue canal and a lavender sky in the west, and bright scarlet temple doors–and all the rest snow. Lavender and bright scarlet is rather a daring colour scheme, isn’t it?”
“Not if it’s the right scarlet,” I replied. “But it’s not the colour I’m going to copy. Neither is it the moon bridges in this other temple garden. It’s the simplicity. Out here south of this room is my lawn and garden. Now I want it to be a real garden, but I don’t want it to dwarf the landscape. I don’t want it to look as if I’d bought a half acre of Italy and deposited it in the middle of Massachusetts, either. I’ve never seen a picture of a real Japanese garden yet that didn’t look as much like a natural Japanese landscape as a garden. I want my garden to be an extension of my south room which will somehow frame the real landscape beyond.”
We went through the glass door, and I showed her where the grape arbour was to be, at the western side of the lawn, and how a lane of hollyhocks would lead to it from the pergola end, screening the kitchen windows and the yet-to-be-built hotbeds.