Part 18

Now the building had always been an offence to me. It was like an incompetent servant, who, in addition to being incapable of earning his wages, is possessed of an enormous appetite. With an old-fashioned heating apparatus the amount of fuel it consumed year by year was appalling; and withal it had more than once played us false, with the result that several precious lives were lost in a winter when we looked to the greenhouse to give us some colour for indoors. With such a list of convictions against it, I was not disposed to be lenient, and the suggestion of the discipline of a Reformatory was coldly received by me.

The fact was, that in my position as judge, I resembled too closely the one in Gilbert's _Trial by Jury_ to allow of my being trusted implicitly in cases in which personal attractions are to be put in the scales of even-handed Justice; and with all its burden of guilt that greenhouse bore the reputation of unsightliness. If it had had a single redeeming feature, I might have been susceptible to its influence; but it had none. It had been born commonplace, and old age had not improved it.

Leaning against the uttermost boundary wall of the garden, it had been my achievement to hide it by the hedge of briar roses and the colonnade; but it was sometimes only with great difficulty that we could head off visitors from its doors. Heywood heaped on it his concentrated opprobrium by calling it the Crystal Palace; but Dorothy, who had been a student of _Jane Eyre_, had given it the name of “Rochester's Wife,” and we had behaved toward it pretty much as Jane's lover had behaved in his endeavour to set up a younger and more presentable object in the place of his mature demented partner: we had two other glass-houses that we could enter and see entered without misgiving; so that when we stood beside the offending one with the estimate of the cost of its reformation, I, at any rate, was not disposed to leniency.

“A case for the Reformatory,” said Dorothy, and in a moment the word brought to my mind the advice of the young lord Hamlet, and I called out,--

“Reform it altogether.”

“What do you mean?” she asked; for she sometimes gives me credit for uttering words with a meaning hidden somewhere among the meshes of verbiage.

“I have spoken the decision of the Court,” I replied. “'Reform it altogether.'”

“At a cost--a waste--of sixty odd pounds?”

“I will not try to renew its youth like the eagles,” said I, in the tone of voice of a prophet in the act of seeing a vision. “I shall make a new thing of it, and a thing of beauty into the bargain.”

She laughed pretty much as in patriarchal days Sara, laughed at the forecast of an equally unlikely occurrence.

After an interval she laughed again, but with no note of derision.

“I see it all now-all!” she cried. “You will be the Martin Luther of its Reformation: you will cut the half of it away; but will the Church stand when you have done with it?”

“Stronger than it ever was. I will hear the voice of no protestant against it,” I replied.

My scheme had become apparent to her in almost every particular as it had flashed upon me; and we began operations the very next day.

And this is what the operation amounted to--an Amputation.

When a limb has suffered such an injury as to make its recovery hopeless as well as a danger to the whole body, the saving grace of the surgeon's knife is resorted to, and the result is usually the rescue of the patient. Our resolution was to cut away the rotten parts of the roof of the greenhouse and convert the remainder, which was perfectly sound, into a peach-shelter; and within a couple of weeks the operation had been performed with what appeared to us to be complete success.

We removed the lower panes of glass without difficulty--the difficulty _was_ to induce the others to remain under their bondage of ancient putty: “They don't make putty like that nowadays,” remarked my builder, who is also, in accordance with the dictation of a job like this, a housebreaker, a carpenter, and a glazier--a sort of unity of many tools that comes to our relief (very appropriately) from the United States.

I replied to him enigmatically that putty was a very good servant, but a very bad master. The dictum had no connection with the matter in hand, but it sounded as if it had, and that it was the crystallisation of wisdom; and the good workman accepted it at its face value. He removed over two hundred panes, each four feet by ten inches, without breaking one, and he removed more than a thousand feet of the two-inch laths from the stages, the heavier ones being of oak; he braced up the seven foot depth of roof which we decreed should shelter our peaches, and “made good” the inequalities of the edges. In short, he made a thoroughly good job of the affair, and when he had finished he left us with a new and very interesting feature of the garden. A lean-to greenhouse is, as a rule, a commonplace incident in a garden landscape, and it is doubtful if it pays for its keep, though admittedly useful as a nursery; but a peach-alley is interesting because unusual. In our place of peace this element is emphasised through our having allowed the elevated, brick-built border that existed before, to remain untouched, and also the framework where the swing-glass ventilators had been hung. When our peach-trees were planted, flanked by plums and faced by apples _en espalier,_ we covered the borders with violas of various colours, and enwreathed the framework with the Cape Plumbago and the Jasmine Solanum. and both responded nobly to our demands.

Nothing remained in order to place the transformation in harmony with its surroundings but to turn the two large brick tanks which had served us well in receiving the water from the old roof, into ornamental lily ponds, and this was accomplished by the aid of some of the stone carvings which I had picked up from time to time, in view of being able to give them a place of honour some day. On the whole, we are quite satisfied with this additional feature. It creates another surprise for the entertainment of a visitor, and when the peaches and plums ripen simultaneously, following the strawberries, we shall have, if we are to believe Friswell, many more friends coming to us.

“If they are truly friends, we shall be glad,” says Dorothy.

“By your fruits ye shall know them,” says he, for like most professors of the creed of the incredulous, he is never so much at his ease as when quoting Scripture.

This morning as I was playing (indifferently) the part of Preceptress Pinkerton, trying to induce on Rosamund, Olive, Francie, Marjorie, and our dear, wise John, a firm grasp of the elements of the nature of the English People as shown by their response to the many crusades in which they have taken part since the first was proclaimed by Peter the Hermit, I came to that part of nay illuminating discourse which referred to the Nation's stolidity even in their hour of supreme triumph.

“This,” said I, “may be regarded by the more emotional peoples of Europe as showing a certain coldness of temperament, in itself suggesting a want of imagination, or perhaps, a cynical indifference--'cynical,' mind you, from _kyon_, a dog--to incidents that should quicken the beating of every human heart. But I should advise you to think of this trait of our great Nation as indicating a praiseworthy reserve of the deepest feelings. I regard with respect those good people who to-day are going about their business in the streets of our town just in the usual way, although the most important news that has reached the town since the news of the capture of Antioch in 1099, is expected this evening. And you will find that they will appear just as unconcerned if they learn that the terms of the Armistice have been accepted--they will stroll about with their hands in their pockets--not a cheer.... Is that your mother calling you, John?”

“No; I think it's somebody in the street?” said John.

“Oh, I forgot. It's Monday--market day. There's more excitement in Yardley High Street if a cow turns into Waterport Lane than there will be when Peace is proclaimed. But still, I repeat, that this difference... What was that? two cows must have turned into--Why, what's this--what's--sit down, all of you--I tell you it's only--”

“Hurrah--hurrah--hurrah--hurrah--hurrah!” comes from the five young throats of five rosy-cheeked, unchecked children, responding to the five hundred that roar through the streets.

In five minutes the front of our house is ablaze with flags, and five Union Jacks are added to the hundreds that young and old wave over their heads in the street; and amid the tumult the recent admirer of the stolid English People is risking his neck in an endeavour to fix a Crusader's well-worn helmet in an alcove above the carven lions on the perch of his home.

There, high over us, stands the Castle Keep as it stood in the days of the First Crusade.

“And ever above the topmost roof the banner of England blew.”

Going out I saw a cow stray down Waterport Lane; but no one paid any attention to its errantry.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Garden of Peace, by Frank Frankfort Moore