There was once a gardener. Not only was, but in all probability is, for as far as I know you may meet him to this day. There are no death-bed scenes in this book. The gardener was not the sort of person to bring a novel to a graceful climax by dying finally in an atmosphere of elevated immorality. He was extremely thin, but not in the least unhealthy. He never with his own consent ran any risk of sudden death. Nobody would ever try to introduce him into a real book, for he was in no way suitable. He was not a philosopher. Not an adventurer. Not a gay dog. Not lively: but he lived, and that at least is a great merit.
In appearance the gardener was a fairly mediocre study in black and white. He had a white and wooden face, black hair as smooth as a wet seal's back, thin arms and legs, and enormous hands and feet. He was not indispensable to any one, but he believed that he was a pillar supporting the world. It sometimes makes one nervous to reflect what very amateur pillars the world seems to employ.
He lived in a boarding-house in Penny Street, W. A boarding-house is a place full of talk, it has as many eyes as a peacock, and ears to correspond. It is lamentably little, and yet impossible to ignore. It is not a dignified foundation for a pillar.
The gardener was twenty-three. Twenty-three is said to be the prime of life by those who have reached so far and no farther. It shares this distinction with every age, from ten to three-score and ten.
On the first of June, in his twenty-fourth year, the gardener broke his boot-lace. The remains of the catastrophe dangled from his hand. String was out of the question; one cannot be decent dressed in string, he thought, with that touch of exaggeration common to victims of disasters. The world was a sordid and sardonic master, there was no heart in the breast of Fate. He was bereft even of his dignity, there is no dignity in the death of a boot-lace. The gardener's twenty-three years were stripped from him like a cloak. He felt little and naked.
He was so busy with his emotions that he had forgotten that the door of his room was open.
It was rather like the girl Courtesy to stand on the landing boldly staring in at a man sitting on his bedroom floor crushed by circumstances. She had no idea of what was fitting. Any other woman would have recognised the presence of despair, and would have passed by with head averted.
But the girl Courtesy said, "Poor lamb, has it broken its boot-lace?"
The gardener continued in silence to watch the strangling of his vanity by the corpse of the boot-lace. His chief characteristic was a whole heart in all that he did.
A tear should have appeared in Courtesy's eye at the sight of him. But it did not.
"Give me the boot," she said, advancing into the room in the most unwomanly manner. And she knotted the boot-lace with a cleverness so unexpected—considering the sort of girl she was—that the difference in its length was negligible, and the knot was hidden beneath the other lace.
"Women have their uses," thought the gardener. But the thought was short-lived, for Courtesy's next remark was:
"There, boy, run along and keep smilin'. Somebody loves you." And she patted him on the cheek.
Now it has been made clear that the gardener was a Man of Twenty-three. He turned his back violently on the woman, put on his boot, and walked downstairs bristling with dignity.
The girl Courtesy not only failed to be cut to the heart by the silent rebuke, but she failed to realise that she had offended. She was rather fat, and rather obtuse. She was half an inch taller than the gardener, and half a dozen years older.
The gardener's indignation rode him downstairs. It spurred him to force his hat down on his head at a most unbecoming angle, it supplied the impetus for a passionate slamming of the door. But on the doorstep it evaporated suddenly. It was replaced by a rosy and arresting thought.
"Poor soul, she loves me," said the gardener. He adjusted his hat, and stepped out into London, a breaker of hearts, a Don Juan, unconscious of his charm yet conscious of his unconsciousness. "Poor thing, poor thing," he thought, and remembered with regret that Courtesy had not lost her appetite. On the contrary, she had been looking even plumper of late. But then Courtesy never quite played the game.
"I begin to be appreciated," reflected the gardener. "I always knew the world would find out some day . . ."
The gardener was a dreamer of dreams, and a weaver of many theories. His theories were not even tangible enough to make a philosophy, yet against them he measured his world. And any shortcomings he placed to the world's account. He wrapped himself in theories to such an extent that facts were crowded from his view, he posed until he lost himself in a wilderness of poses. He was not the victim of consistency, that most ambiguous virtue. The dense and godly wear consistency as a flower, the imaginative fling it joyfully behind them.
Imagination seems to be a glory and a misery, a blessing and a curse. Adam, to his sorrow, lacked it. Eve, to her sorrow, possessed it. Had both been blessed—or cursed—with it, there would have been much keener competition for the apple.
The million eyes of female London pricked the gardener, or so he imagined, as he threaded the Strand. He felt as if a glance from his eye was a blessing, and he bestowed it generously. The full blaze of it fell upon one particular girl as she walked towards him. She seemed to the gardener to be almost worthy. Her yellow hair suffered from Marcelle spasms at careful intervals of an inch and a half, every possible tooth enjoyed publicity. The gardener recognised a kindred soul. A certain shade of yellow hair always at this period thatched a kindred soul for the gardener.
He followed the lady.
He followed her even into the gaping jaws of an underground station. There she bought cigarettes at a tobacco stall.
"She smokes," thought the gardener. "This is life."
He went close to her while she paid. She was not in the least miserly of a certain cheap smell of violets. The gardener was undaunted.
"Shall we take a taxi, Miss?" he suggested, his wide eager smile a trifle damped by self-consciousness. For this was his first attempt of the kind. "They say Kew is lovely just now."
It was his theory that spoke. In practice he had but threepence in his pocket.
She replied, "Bless you, kid. Run 'ome to mammy, do."
Her voice sounded like the scent she wore. It had a hard tone which somehow brought the solitary threepence to mind.
The gardener returned at great speed to Penny Street.
It was lunch-time at Number Twenty-one. The eternal hash approached its daily martyrdom. Hash is a worthy thing, but it reminds you that you are not at the Ritz. There is nothing worse calculated to make you forget a lonely threepenny bit in your pocket.
The gardener had a hundred a year. He was apparently the only person in London with a hundred a year, for wherever he went he always found himself the wealthiest person present. His friends gave his natural generosity a free rein. After various experiments in social economy, he found it cheapest to rid himself of the hundred a year immediately on its quarterly appearance, and live on his expectations for the rest of the time. There are drawbacks about this plan, as well as many advantages. But the gardener was a pillar, and he found it easier to support the world than to support himself.
It was on this occasion that his neighbour at luncheon, unaware of his pillar-hood, asked him what he was doing for a living.
"Living," replied the gardener. He was not absolutely sure that it made sense, but it sounded epigrammatic. He was, in some lights, a shameless prig. But then one often is, if one thinks, at twenty-three.
"It's all living," he continued to his neighbour. "It's all life. Being out of a job is life. Being kicked is life. Standing's life. Dying's life."
The neighbour did not reply because he was busy eating. One had to keep one's attention fixed on the food problem at 21 Penny Street. There was no time for epigrams. It was a case of the survival of the most silent. The gardener was very thin.
The girl Courtesy, however, was one who could do two things at once. She could support life and impart information at the same time.
"I do believe you talk for the sake of talking," she said; and it was true. "How can dying be living?"
It is most annoying to have the cold light of feminine logic turned on to an impromptu epigram. The gardener pushed the parsnips towards her as a hint that she was talking too much. But Courtesy had the sort of eye that sees no subtlety in parsnips. Her understanding was of the black and white type.
"Death is the door to life," remarked Miss Shakespeare, nailing down the golden opportunity with eagerness. 21 Penny Street very rarely gave Miss Shakespeare the satisfaction of such an opening. There was, however, a lamentable lack of response. The subject, which had been upheld contrary to the laws of gravitation, fell heavily to earth.
"Is this your threepenny bit or mine?" asked the girl Courtesy. For that potent symbol, the victim of its owner's absence of mind, in the course of violent exercise between the gardener's plate and hers, had fallen into her lap.
Whose idea was it to make money round? I sometimes feel certain I could control it better if it were square.
"It is mine," said the gardener, still posing as a philosopher. "A little splinter out of the brimstone lake. Feel it."
Courtesy smelt it without repulsion.
"Talk again," she said. "Where would you be without money?"
"Where would I be without money? Where would I be without any of the vices? Singing in Paradise, I suppose."
"If I pocket this threepenny bit," said Courtesy, that practical girl, "what will you say?"
"Thank you—and good-bye," replied the gardener. "It is my last link with the world."
Courtesy put it in her purse. "Good-bye," she said. "So sorry you must go. Reserve a halo for me."
The gardener rose immediately and walked upstairs with decision into his bedroom, which, by some freak of chance, was papered blue to match his soul. It was indeed the anteroom of the gardener's soul. Nightly he went through it into the palace of himself.
He took out of it now his toothbrush, a change of raiment, and Hilda. It occurs to me that I have not yet mentioned Hilda. She was a nasturtium in a small pot.
On his way downstairs he met Miss Shakespeare, who held the destinies of 21 Penny Street, and did not hold with the gardener's unexpected ways.
"Your weekly account . . ." she began.
"I have left everything I have as hostages with fate," said the gardener. "When I get tired of Paradise I'll come back."
On the door-step he exclaimed, "I will be a merry vagabond, tra-la-la . . ." and he stepped out transfigured—in theory.
As he passed the dining-room window he caught sight of the red of Courtesy's hair, as she characteristically continued eating.
"An episode," he thought. "Unscathed I pass on. And the woman, as women must, remains to weep and grow old. Courtesy, my little auburn lover, I have passed on—for ever."
But he had to return two minutes later to fetch a pocket-handkerchief from among the hostages. And Courtesy, as she met him in the hall, nodded in an unsuitably unscathed manner.
The gardener walked, with Hilda in his hand. It became night. Practically speaking, it is of course impossible for night to occur within three paragraphs of luncheon-time. But actually the day is often to me as full of holes as a Gruyère cheese.
To the gardener the beginnings of a walk which he felt sure must eventually find a place in history were torn ruthlessly out of his experience. He was thinking about red hair, and all things red.
He hoped that Hilda, when she flowered, would be the exact shade of a certain head of hair he had lately seen.
"Hoping and planning for Hilda like a mother-to-be," he thought, but that pose was impossible to sustain.
Red hair.
He did not think of the girl Courtesy at all. Only her hair flamed in his memory. The remembrance of the rest of her was as faint and lifeless as a hairdresser's dummy.
It struck him that auburn, with orange lights in the sunlight, was the colour of heat, the colour of heaven, the colour of life and love. He looked round at the characteristic London female passer-by, the thin-breasted girl, with hair the colour of wet sand, and reflected that Woman is a much rarer creature than she appears to be.
He recovered consciousness in Kensington Gardens at dusk. He remembered that he was a merry vagabond.
"Tra-la-la . . ." he sang as he passed a park-keeper.
People in authority seem as a rule to be shy of the pose. The park-keeper was not exactly shy, but he made a murmured protest against the Tra-la-la, and saw the gardener to the gate with most offensive care.
In theory the gardener spent the night at the Ritz. In practice he slept on the Embankment. He was a man of luck in little things, and the night was the first fine night for several weeks. The gardener followed the moon in its light fall across the sky. Several little stars followed it too, in and out of the small smiling clouds.
The moon threaded its way in and out of the gardener's small smiling dreams. Oh mad moon, you porthole, looking up into a fantastic Paradise!
The gardener did not dream of red hair. That subject was exhausted.
When an undecided sun blinked through smoked glasses at the Thames, and at the little steamers sleeping with their funnels down like sea-gulls on the water with their heads under their wings, the gardener rose. He had a bath and a shave—in theory—and walked southward. Tra-la-la.
He walked very fast when he got beyond the tramways, but after a while a woman who was walking behind him caught him up. Women are apt to get above themselves in these days, I think.
"I'm going to walk with you," said the woman.
"Why?" asked the gardener, who spent some ingenuity in saying the thing that was unexpected, whether possible or impossible.
"Because you're carrying that flower-pot," replied the woman. "It's such absurd sort of luggage to be taking on a journey."
"How do you know I'm going on a journey?" asked the gardener, astonished at meeting his match.
"By the expression of your heels."
The gardener could think of nothing more apt to say than "Tra-la-la . . ." so he said it, to let her know that he was a merry vagabond.
The woman was quite plain, and therefore worthy only of invisibility in the eyes of a self-respecting young man. She had the sort of hair that plays truant over the ears, but has not vitality enough to do it prettily. Her complexion was not worthy of the name. Her eyes made no attempt to redeem her plainness, which is the only point of having eyes in fiction. Her only outward virtue was that she did not attempt to dress as if she were pretty. And even this is not a very attractive virtue.
She carried a mustard-coloured portmanteau.
"I know what you are," said the gardener. "You are a suffragette, going to burn a house down."
The woman raised her eyebrows.
"How curious of you!" she said. "You are perfectly right. Votes for women!"
"Tra-la-la . . ." sang the gardener wittily.
(You need not be afraid. There is not going to be so very much about the cause in this book.)
They walked some way in silence. The gardener, of course, shared the views of all decent men on this subject. One may virtuously destroy life in a good cause, but to destroy property is a heinous crime, whatever its motive.
(Yes, I know that made you tremble, but there are not many more paragraphs of it.)
Presently they passed a car, pillowed against a grassy bank. Its attitude, which looked depressed, was not the result of a catastrophe, but of a picnic. In the meadow, among the buttercups, could be seen four female hats leaning together over a little square meal set forth in the grass.
"Look," said the suffragette, in a voice thin with scorn.
The gardener looked, but could see nothing that aroused in him a horror proportionate to his companion's tone.
"Listen," said the suffragette half an octave higher.
The gardener listened. But all he heard was, "Oh, my dear, it was too killing . . ."
Then, because the chauffeur on the bank paused in mid-sandwich, as if about to rebuke their curiosity, they walked on.
"One is born a woman," said the suffragette. "A woman in her sphere—which is the home. One starts by thinking of one's dolls, later one thinks about one's looks, and later still about one's clothes. But nobody marries one. And then one finds that one's sphere—which is the home—has been a prison all along. Has it ever struck you that the tragedy of a woman's life is that she has time to think—she can think and organise her sphere at the same time. Her work never lets her get away from herself. I tell you I have cried with disgust at the sound of my own name—I won't give it to you, but it might as well be Jane Brown. I have gasped appalled at the banality of my Sunday hat. Yet I kept house excellently. And now I have run away, I am living a wide and gorgeous life of unwomanliness. I am trying to share your simplest privilege—the privilege you were born to through no merit of your own, you silly little boy—the privilege of having interests as wide as the world if you like, and of thinking to some purpose about England's affairs. My England. Are you any Englisher than I?"
"You are becoming incoherent," said the gardener. "You are enjoying a privilege which you do not share with me—the privilege of becoming hysterical in public and yet being protected by the law. You are a woman, and goodness knows that is privilege enough. It covers everything except politics. Also you have wandered from the point, which at one time appeared to be a picnic."
(Courage. There is only a little more of this. But you must allow the woman the privilege of the last word. It is always more dignified to allow her what she is perfectly certain to take in any case.)
"The picnic was an example of that sphere of which 'Oh, my dear, too killing . . .' is the motto. You educate women—to that. I might have been under one of those four hats—only I'm not pretty enough. You have done nothing to prevent it. I might have been an 'Oh, my dear' girl, but thank heaven I'm an incendiary instead."
That was the end of that argument. The gardener could not reply as his heart prompted him, because the arguments that pressed to his lips were too obvious.
Obviousness was the eighth deadly sin in his eyes. He would have agreed with the Devil rather than use the usual arguments in favour of virtue. That was his one permanent pose.
A little way off, on a low green hill, the suffragette pointed out the home of a scion of sweated industry, the house she intended to burn down. High trees bowed to each other on either side of it, and a little chalky white road struggled up to its door through fir plantations, like you or me climbing the world for a reward we never see.
"I'm sorry," said the gardener. "I love a house that looks up as that one does. I don't like them when they sit conceitedly surveying their 'well-timbered acres' under beetle brows that hide the sky. Don't burn it. Look at it, holding up its trees like green hands full of blessings."
"In an hour or two the smoke will stand over it like a tree—like a curse . . ."
When they parted the gardener liked her a little because she was on the wrong side of the law. There is much more room for the wind to blow and the sun to shine beyond the pale—or so it seems to the gardener and me standing wistful and respectable inside. It is curious to me that one of the few remaining illusions of romance should cling to a connection with that most prosy of all institutions—the law.
I forgot to mention that the gardener borrowed a shilling from the suffragette, thus rashly forming a new link with the world in place of the one he had relinquished to the girl Courtesy. The worst of the world is that it remains so absurdly conservative, and rudely ignores our interesting changes of pose and of fantasy. I have been known to crave for a penny bun in the middle of a visit from my muse, and that is not my fault, but Nature's, who created appetites and buns for the common herd, and refused to adapt herself to my abnormal psychology.
It was interesting to the gardener to see how easily the suffragette parted with such an important thing as a shilling. Superfluity is such an incredible thing to the hungry. The suffragette gave Holloway Gaol as her permanent address.
Thus accidentally bribed, the gardener, feasting on a cut from the joint in the next village, refrained from discussing women, their rights or wrongs, or their local intentions, with the village policeman. "She won't really dare do it," he thought.
(I may here add that I was not asked by a militant society to write this book. I am writing it for your instruction and my own amusement.)
The gardener did not sleep under a hedge as all merry vagabonds do—(Tra-la-la)—but he slept in the very middle of a large field, much to the surprise of the cows. One or two of these coffee-coloured matrons awoke him at dawn by means of an unwinking examination that would have put a lesser man out of countenance. But the gardener, as becomes a man attacked by the empty impertinences of females, turned the other way and presently slept again.
He washed next morning near to where the cows drank. He had no soap and the cows had no tumblers,—nothing could have been more elemental than either performance.
"I am very near to the heart of nature—tra-la-la," trilled the gardener. But the heart of nature eludes him who tries to measure the distance. The only beat that the gardener heard was the soft thud of his own feet along the thick dust of the highway.
About the next day but one he came to a place where the scenery changed its mind abruptly, flung buttercups and beeches behind it, and drew over its shoulders the sombre cloak of heather and pines.
Under an unremarkable pine tree, listening to the impatient summons of the woodpecker (who, I think, is the feathered soul of the foolish virgin outside the bridegroom's door), sat a man. He was so fair that he might as well have been white-haired. His eyes were like two copper sequins set between white lashes, beneath white brows, in a white face. His lips were very red, and if he had seemed more detached and less friendly, he would have looked like harlequin. But he rose from his seat on the pine needles, and came towards the gardener, as though he had been waiting for him.
The gardener steeled himself against the stranger's first word, fearing lest he should say, "What a glorious day!"
But the stranger, making a spasmodic attempt to remove a hat which had been left at home, said, "My name is Samuel Rust, a hotel-keeper. Won't you come and look at my place?"
It was impossible for the gardener to do otherwise, for Mr. Samuel Rust's place framed itself in a gap in the woods to the right, and was introduced by a wave of its owner's hand.
"What a red place!" said the gardener.
"Of course. No other name is possible for it," said Mr. Rust.
The house was built of red brick that had much tangerine colour in it. The flowering heather surged to its very door-step. And thick around it the slim pine tree-trunks shot up, like flame, whispered flame.
The gardener smiled at it. If only Hilda might be the colour of those tree-trunks when she flowered.
Mr. Rust acknowledged the smile in the name of his red place. "It's an—inoffensive little hole," he said.
What he meant was of course, "It's a perfectly exquisite spot." What is becoming of our old eloquence and enthusiasm? The full-blooded conventions are dying, and we have already replaced them by a code of shadows. But whether the life beneath the code is as vivid as ever, remains to be seen. I think myself that manners are changing, but not man. In all probability we shall live to greet the day when "fairly decent" will express the most ecstatic degree of rapture.
The gardener was not intentionally modern. It is the tendency of his generation to be modern—it is difficult to believe that it has been the tendency of every generation from the prehistoric downwards. And it was the gardener's ambition to walk in the opposite direction to the tendency of his generation. He shared the common delusion that by walking apart he could be unique. This arises from the divine fallacy that man makes man, that he has the making of himself in his own hands.
I am glad that I share this pathetic illusion with my gardener.
So, as he thought the Red Place very beautiful, he said, "I think it is very beautiful."
But even so he was not sincere throughout. He posed even in his honesty. For he posed purposely as an honest man.
Of course you know that one of the most effective poses is to pose as one who never poses. A rough diamond with a heart of gold.
The first moment Mr. Samuel Rust heard the gardener say Tra-la-la he ceased to have a doubt as to the species of citadel he had invaded.
"You are one of these insouciant wanderers, what?" he suggested. "A light-hearted genius going to make a fortune grow out of the twopence in your pocket. You got yourself out of a book. I think your sort make your hearts light by blowing them up with gas."
True to his code, he then feared that he had spoken with insufficient mediocrity, and blushed. A small circular patch of red, like a rose, appeared high up on either cheek, suddenly bringing the rest of his face into competition with his vivid lips.
"You are wrong about the twopence," said the gardener, "I have three halfpence."
"Come and see my Red Place," said Mr. Rust. "That is, if you're not bored."
Boredom and the gardener were strangers. One can never be bored if one is always busy creating oneself with all the range of humanity as model.
"This is an hotel," said the owner, as they approached the door. "It is my hotel, and it promised to make my fortune. So far it has confined itself to costing a fortune. When I remind it of its promise it puts its tongue in its cheek—what?"
The northern side of the Red Place was quite different in character from the side which first smiled on the gardener. This was because one essential detail was lacking—the heather. Fire had passed over the little space at some recent date in its sleepy history, and had left it sinister. Tortured roots and branches appealed from the black ground to a blue heaven. The surrounding pine trees, with their feet charred and blistered, and their higher limbs still fiercely red, still looked like flames now turned into pillars of delight in answer to the prayer of the beseeching heather.
"Is there anybody in your hotel?" asked the gardener, smoothing his hair hopefully—the young man's invariable prelude to romance.
"Nobody, except the gods," replied the host. "We sit here waiting, the divine and I. There is a blessing on the place, and I intend to make money out of it. You can see for yourself how wonderfully good it is. If people knew of the peace and the delight. . . . The table is excellent too—I am the chef as well as the proprietor. Our terms are most moderate."
"All the same you need advertisement," said the gardener, who, in unguarded moments, was more modern than he knew. "I can imagine most sensational advertising of a place with such a pronounced blessing on it. Buy up the front page of the Daily Mail, and let's compose a series of splashes."
"I am penniless," began Mr. Rust dramatically, and interrupted himself. "A slight tendency towards financial inadequacy—what?"
"I have three halfpence," said the gardener, but not hopefully.
"Come in for the night," begged the host. "I have twelve bedrooms for you to sleep in, and three bathrooms tiled in red. Terms a halfpenny, tout compris."
"Tra-la-la . . ." trilled the gardener, for as he followed his host the heather tingled and tossed beneath his feet, and the gods came out to meet him with a red welcome.
"You have nothing to do—what?" said Mr. Samuel Rust, when they were sitting in the high russet hall.
"We-ll . . ." answered the gardener, feeling that the suggestion of failure lurked there. "I am a rover, you know. Busy roving."
"To say that shows you haven't roved sixty miles yet. When you've roved six hundred you'll see there's nothing to be got out of roving. When you've roved six thousand you'll join the Travellers' Club and be glad it's all over."
"Six thousand miles . . ." said the gardener, as if it were a prayer. His heart looked and leapt towards the long, crowded perspective that those words hinted.
"You've never been to sea," continued Mr. Samuel. And the gardener discovered with a jerk that he was a blue man born for the sea, and that he had never yet felt the swing of blue water beneath his feet.
"No," he said, "I believe I must go there now."
And he jumped to his feet.
"If you stay here for the night," said Mr. Rust, "to-morrow I'll suggest to you something that—may possibly interest you to some slight extent."
With a clumsy blood-red pottery candlestick, which was so careless in detail as to seem to be the unconscious production of a drunken master-potter, the gardener found his room.
(I know it is a shock to you to find it bedtime at this point, but the gardener and I forgot to notice those parts of the day which I have not mentioned.)
He dreamt of red hair, redder than natural, as red as a sunset, seen at close quarters from Paradise. At midnight he awoke, in the clutch of perfectly irrelevant thoughts.
The room was a velvet cube, with the window plastered at one side of it, a spangled square. And the silken moonlight was draped across the floor.
"I am myself," said the gardener. "I am my world. Nothing matters except me. I am the creator and the created."
With which happy thought he returned to sleep again.
The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red gold, and to replace it.
The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond.
"I must disappear," he thought. "No true vagabond ever says, 'Good-bye, and thank you for my pleasant visit.'"
So he prepared to disappear. From his bedroom window he could see, as he dressed, the pale head of Mr. Samuel Rust on a far fir-crowned slope, looking away over the green land towards London, waiting, side by side with the divine.
The gardener took three slices of dry bread from the breakfast which waited expectantly on a table in the hall, and went out. But under a gorse bush amongst the heather, he found some tiny scarlet flowers. He picked two or three, and returning put them on the breakfast plate of Mr. Samuel Rust. He put a halfpenny there too.
"Very vagabondish—tra-la-la . . ." he murmured tunefully, and studied the infinitesimal effect with his head on one side.
Then he disappeared. He did it straightforwardly along the open road, as the best vagabonds do, and he was pleased with his fidelity to the part.
Presently he recalled for the first time Mr. Samuel Rust's promise of a happy suggestion for that morning. For a moment he wondered, for a second he regretted, but he posed as being devoid of curiosity. This is a good pose, for in time it comes true. It eventually withers the little silly tentacles which at first it merely ignores. Curiosity needs food as much as any of us, and dies soon if denied it. And I am glad, for it seems to me that curiosity and spite are very closely akin, and that spite is very near to the bottom of the pit.
The memory of Mr. Rust's remark, however, kept the gardener for some moments busy being incurious. He was not altogether successful in his pose, for when the pallid owner of the Red Place stepped out of a thicket in front of him, he thought with a secret quiver, "Now I shall know what it was . . ."
"Taking a morning walk—what?" remarked Mr. Rust, achieving his ambition, the commonplace, for once in perfection.
"No," replied the gardener (one who never told a lie unless he was posing as a liar), "I was leaving you. I have left a smile of thanks and a halfpenny on your plate. You know I'm a rover, an incurable vagabond, and my fraternity never disappears in an ordinary way in the station fly."
It is rather tiresome to have to explain one's poses. It is far worse than having to explain one's witticisms, and that is bad enough.
"Come back to breakfast," said Samuel. "I can let you into a much more paying concern than vagabondage."
It is not in the least impressive to disappear by brute force in public, so the gardener turned back.
The gods did not run out to meet the returning vagabond, as they had run out to meet him arriving. The gardener did not look for them. He was too much occupied in thinking of small cramping things like "paying concerns." The expression sounded to him like a foggy square room papered in a drab marbled design.
"A paying concern does not interest me at all," he said, feeling rather noble.
"It won't as long as you're a merry vagabond. But your situation as such is not permanent, I think. Wouldn't you like to go and strike attitudes upon the sea?"
The gardener was intensely interested in what followed.
Mr. Samuel Rust was penniless, owing, as he frankly admitted, to propensities which he shared with the common sieve. But in other directions he was well supplied with blessings. He had, for instance, a mother. And the mother—well, you know, she managed to scrape along on nine thousand a year—what? The said mother, excellent woman though she was, had refused to finance the Red Place. She had not come within the radius of its blessing. She had no idea that it was under the direct patronage of the gods, and that it promised a fortune in every facet. Samuel had explained these facts to her, but she had somehow gathered the impression that he was not unbiassed. In her hand she held the life of the Red Place, and at present held it checked. A little money for advertisement, a few hundred pounds to set the heart of the place beating, and Samuel Rust saw himself a successful man, standing with his gods on terms of equality. But his mother had become inaccessible, she had in fact become so wearied by the conversation of Samuel upon the subject that she had made arrangements to emigrate to Trinity Islands, somewhere on the opposite side of the world.
"And what is it to do with me?" asked the gardener, who suffered from the drawbacks of his paramount virtue, enthusiasm, and never could wait for the end of anything. "Do you want me to turn into an unscrupulous rogue and dog her footsteps because——"
"You can have scruples or not as you choose," said Mr. Rust. "But rogue is a word that exasperates me. It's much the same as 'naughty-naughty,' and that is worse than wickedness. The wicked live on brimstone, which is at least honest; but the naughty-naughty play with it, which is irreverent. With or without your scruples, armed only with the blessing and the promise of this place, I want you to cross the Atlantic on the Caribbeania with my mother, and tell her what it is the gods and I are waiting for. That is—just try and talk the old lady round—don't you know. Any old twaddle would do—what?"
The gardener produced two halfpennies, one of which he placed on each knee.
"And the fare first-class is . . ." he said.
"I have a cousin whose only virtue is that he occasionally serves the purpose of coin," said Mr. Rust. "That is—I know a fellow I can bleed to a certain extent—what? He is the son of—well, a middling K-nut at the top of the shipping tree—what?"
The gardener had visions of an unscrupulous rogue, neatly packed into a crate labelled champagne, being smuggled on board the Caribbeania. Truly the pose had possibilities. The affair was, however, vague at present, and the gardener retained, whatever the rôle he was playing, an accurate mind and a profound respect for the exactness of words.
"Will he stow me away?" he asked.
"Not in the way you mean. But there'll be room for you on the Caribbeania. Come down to Southampton with me now. There's a train at noon."
"I have my own feet, and a good white road," replied the gardener in a poetic voice. "I'll join you in Southampton this evening."
"It's thirty-five miles," said Mr. Rust. "And the boat sails to-morrow morning. However . . . We haven't discussed the business side of the affair yet."
"And we never will. I'll take my payment out in miles—an excellent currency."
In spite of the distance of his destination, the gardener stood by his determination to go by road. A friendly farmer's cart may always be depended on to assist the pose of a vagabond. It would have been extremely hackneyed to approach the opening door of life by train. So he left his blessing with the Red Place, and shook the hand of its white master, and set his face towards the sea.
It was still early. The sun had set the long limbs of the tree-shadows striding about the woods; the gorse, a tamed expression of flame, danced in the yellow heat; the heather pressed like a pigmy army bathed in blood about the serene groups of pines. There was great energy abroad, which kept the air a-tingle. The gardener almost pranced along.
Presently he came to a woman seated by the roadside engrossed in a box of matches.
"You again," said the gardener to the suffragette, for he recognised her by her hat. There was a bunch of promiscuous flowers attached to her hat. They were of an unsuitable colour, and looked as though they had taken on their present situation as an after-thought, when the hat was already well advanced in years. A mariage de convenance.
"Have you any matches?" was the suffragette's characteristic reply.
"I never give away my matches to people with political opinions without making the fullest enquiries," replied the gardener. "People are not careful enough about the future morals of their innocent matches in these days."
Forgetting the thirty-five miles, he sat down on the bank beside her, and began to refresh Hilda by splashing the water into her pot out of a tiny heathery stream that explored the roadside ditch.
"I can supply you with all particulars at once," said the suffragette in a businesslike voice. "I am going to burn down a little red empty hotel that stands in the woods behind you. There is only one man in charge."
"You are not," said the gardener, descending suddenly to unfeigned sincerity.
"Certainly it is not the home of an Anti," continued the suffragette, ignoring his remark. "At least as far as I know. But you never can tell. A Cabinet Minister might want to come and stay there any time; there are good golf-links. I had hoped that the last affair, the burning of West Grove—a most successful business—would have been my last protest for the present. I meant to be arrested, and spend a month or two at the not less important work of setting the teeth of the Home Office on edge. But the police are disgracefully lax in this part of the world, and though I left several clues and flourished my portmanteau in three neighbouring villages, nothing happened. I do not like to give myself up, it is so inartistic, and people are apt to translate it as a sign of repentance. But the little hotel is a splendid opportunity."
One of the drawbacks of posing yourself is that you are apt to become a little blind to the poses of others. Also you must remember that women, and especially rebellious women, were an unexplored continent to the gardener.
"You are not going to take advantage of the opportunity," said the gardener, refreshing Hilda so violently that she stood up to her knees in water.
"I've heard the caretaker is constantly out . . ." went on the suffragette.
"Possibly," admitted the gardener. "But if the house were twenty times alone, you should not light a match within a mile of it. How dare you—you a great strong woman—to take advantage of the weak gods who can't defend themselves."
The great strong woman crinkled her eyes at him. She was absurdly small and thin.
"Well, if you won't lend me any matches, I shall have to try and do with the three I have. I am going to reconnoitre. Good-morning."
There is nothing so annoying as to have one's really impressive remarks absolutely ignored. I myself can bear a great deal of passing over. You may with advantage fail to see my complexion and the cut of my clothes; you may be unaware of the colour of my eyes without offending me; I do not care if you never take the trouble to depress your eyes to my feet to see if I take twos or sevens; you may despise my works of art—which have no value except in the eyes of my relations; you may refuse to read my writings—which have no value in any eyes but my own,—all these things you may do and still retain my respect, but when I speak you must listen to what I say. If you don't, I hate you.
The gardener felt like this, and the retreating form of the suffragette became hateful to him. Somehow delightfully hateful.
"Come back," he shouted, but incredible though it may seem, the woman shrugged one shoulder at him, and walked on towards the Red Place.