Part 5

“Indeed,” returned the youth, little intent then, upon the beauties of the outer world, and gazed absently upon the tender blue peeping out of the tender green. “So, that is a periwinkle?” And he resumed the thread of his interrupted discourse.

But, later—much later on, in twilight days of his life—some one happened again to say in his hearing:

“See—a Periwinkle!”

And Rousseau, now old Jean-Jacques, amazed the company by an almost incredible exhibition of sensibility.

“_Une pervenche!_ Where—where?” he called out, throwing himself down on his knees to look for the flower, with eyes bathed in tears.

If this is not quite the exact tale, it matters, as I said above, very little. It is the story, in its essence. The age of sensibility ‹praise be to our fate!› is no longer with us; but there is something permanently true in the picture it sets forth. To the _philosophe_ of mature years the mere word _pervenche_ suddenly recalled, in a poignantly intimate manner, the first love of his spring-time. _Veteris vestigia flammae!_

And we are not to wonder that the echo from a world irremediably lost should have affected the morose, self-centred reprobate in an uncontrollable manner. I venture to think that, with the least sentimental of us, the sudden rediscovery, of some long forgotten youthful impression can hardly fail to evoke, however transiently, a certain dreamy emotion: half pleasure, half melancholy.

Now, in the case of the Master of the House—and he is thankful to realize it—early memories of delight in flowers and such things are associated, not with the troublous times of young manhood’s protean heart affairs, not with the _Sturm und Drang_ days of the dawning moustache, but rather with the quaintly fanciful inner life of boyhood. They come back borne upon the colours and odours of such early friends as Lilac and Acacia; common Wallflower—_Giroflée_, our Gillyflower; wild Violet and Primrose—_gallicé “Coucou”_; Hollyhock or rather _Rose-trémière_; Lily-of-the-Valley; _Muguet_.... It is the old French name that most readily slips from my pen.

Owing perhaps to a childhood spent almost wholly in France, and to the completeness of the break that necessarily ensued when the English born but French nurtured boy was at last allowed back to his own and proper land, all these memories seem to belong to a world utterly apart—to something rather fantastic, unconnected with later life and interests. Moreover, being of childhood and of a time when the world seemed uniformly kind, they retain an allurement all their own. One pleasant recollection of those far-off days does not hook on to others, bitter, regretful, or let it be even merely ruffling ... inevitable chain of responsible experiences!

* * * * *

Our early memories are like works of art: they have a way of perpetuating in beauty things that perhaps were not really beautiful in themselves. About them there is an unconscious selection which, having been made by a mind still essentially serene, has contrived a subtle harmony of all the elements. Upon the pictures of its store, a child’s memory lays an emphasis strangely different to that which the critical powers of later growth would set. And it is this quaint insistence on certain “odd corners of things” which ‹among other reasons› makes them so dearly personal and private to the older mind.

In my own case, as I have said, they belong to a world still more remote than the childhood of most men of “Grandpa” status—a world which has not even the link of language to connect it with the present!

Paradoxically, this is perhaps the reason why I take so much pleasure in finding these happy-hued and odorous things now rising, and living under their right English names, in a garden of my own. To the other denizens of Villino Loki they are part of the excellent general company foregathering in our garden: but to me they are in many ways my intimates. We seem “to have known things together”; things doubtless of no importance, but pleasant to recall in casual intercourse.

IX

The Lilac and Acacia, for instance, were the flower-bearers of the tree-planted playground of that jocund old school where I received the first rudiments of education: the _Institution Delescluze_, then situate in a kind of backwater of the faubourg St. Honoré at the angle facing the _Palais de l’Elysée_. It has, alas long since been swept away to make room for modern mansions. This ancient _Institution_, or preparatory school, would seem to have dated from the distant days, early Louis XV probably, when the north side of the then lengthening noble _faubourg_ must still have been occupied by meadows and orchards.

* * * * *

By the way, it has never occurred to me before to look up that little topographical matter authoritatively. I do so now. I have here a copy of a wonderful work, the “perspective” map of Paris as it stood in the ’thirties, of the eighteenth century. It is called the _Plan de Turgot_, having been surveyed, and engraved, in lavishly decorative style, by order of _Louis-le-Bien-Aimé_, under the care of the celebrated _Prévost des Marchands_. The book is quite the most fascinating of its kind I know—and I think I have handled as goodly a number of such works as any man alive. ‹The nearest approach to it, in point of what one may call picturesque perspicuity, is the wonderful bird’s-eye view of Edinburgh set down by James Gordon of Rothiemay, and engraved at Amsterdam by F. de Wit, about a century earlier.› This plan of Turgot is an elaborate affair indeed—an atlas of twenty large sheets, showing practically every individual house of any importance. Would we had such a work in existence dealing with Georgian London!

Well, to investigate.... Aye, here are the orchards and market gardens, beginning at the very back of a narrow line of houses, covering all the ground of what nowadays is a close network of stone-fronted streets! Here stands the Hôtel d’Evreux, the last, moving westward, of that array of lordly mansions: the Hôtels de Montbazon, de Guébrian, de Charost, de Duras.... A few of these patrician dwellings, each with their own formal gardens stretching southwards to the Champs Elysées, have retained to our own times their dignity unimpaired. But where are now scattered most of these grand French family names, since the tornado of the great Revolution? But, to our map.... Yes, this Hôtel d’Evreux—whilom appanage of Madame de Pompadour, now the aforesaid Palais de l’Elysée; residence, in due rotation, of the swift-changing presidents of the Republic—is here under my finger. And its position unquestionably fixes, some two hundred yards westward, that of the now vanished _Institution Delescluze_, so interesting to me. And here spread themselves the orchards, of which the existence a moment ago was, after all, only a matter of surmise!

[Sidenote: PLUM-TREE GUM]

My discovery adds particularity now to the remembrance of that mellow place.... A goodly number of antiquated fruit trees were scattered about the _cour de récréation_. I can now carve it, in fancy, out of the cultivated land shown by the engraver in the most engaging conventional manner, at the back of the northern street front—an acre or so. Perhaps a little more; likelier still, a little less: recollections of this kind have a knack of magnifying affairs. It is bounded by grey walls, tall and thick, but distinctly decrepit. The trees were, of course, long past bearing, through age and neglect; but they were pleasant company, whether snow-laden, or in summer affording their scanty shade. Plum trees they were, I should say. At any rate the rough bark of their boles distilled a kind of brown gum which was in great demand among us small boys for immediate consumption; and sedulously scooped out, as soon as discovered, with the help of the stump end of a steel-pen nib.

Interspersed among these remnants of the forgotten orchard were the odd groups of Lilacs and Acacias previously mentioned. The latter, the Acacias, were tall and above interference. But strict were the standing orders touching the bloom of the Lilac, and dire the prospect of _pensum_ or _piquet_ to the youthful scholar who should dare to pluck the fragrant bunches!

Thus came the Lilac to assume a character at once sacred—or, at least, “taboo”—and at the same time perennially tantalizing. It was long before the realization dawned that _Lilas_ were not the rare and precious blossoms that so uncompromising a prohibition appeared to proclaim. As a matter of fact, the _Lilas_, _Blanc ou Rose_, is one of the commonest of spring objects in France. Almost might it in its popularity be regarded as the national emblem of the _renouveau_, much as with us the pallid, delicate Primrose is held to herald the last of wintry days.

The old French name for the latter is _Primerole_, suggestive by its etymological connection with “prime,” of the youth of the year. We have made of it Prim_rose_, through the usual process of popular phonetic adaptation, which ever tends to make a word sound like something already familiar. So that the old _Primerole_—meaning simply an early floweret, _primula_—has become with us “the early rose”! The French dubbed it _Primevère_ a learned equivalent for the _Coucou_ of the rustic tongue, to symbolize the advent of vernal days.

The name brings at once to mind the well-known yearning lines:

“_O Primavera, gioventù dell’ anno!_

* * * * *

_O gioventù, primavera della vita!_”

In France, however, the accepted harbinger of _les beaux jours_, is not the

“Pale cowslip, fit for maiden’s early bier,”

not the faint Primula but emphatically the Lilac—the Syringa Vulgaris; the joyous _fleur des humbles_, as contrasted to the noble Rose.

“_Oh, gai! vive la rose, La rose ... et les lilas!_”

runs the refrain of olden days.

During the last century or two it has grown as common, almost, around villages as the hawthorn, the _Aubépine_ itself. But it is perhaps best appreciated in the towns. While the tender purple bloom lasts, there is scarce too modest a working home’s window-sill or mantelpiece for the display of a _branche de Lilas_ stuck in the gullet of a water-bottle. And your gay-hearted _grisette_ or _midinette_, early afoot in the streets, will always spend her first _sou_ of the day on a sprig of the sweet-breathing rosy cluster.

[Sidenote: LAYLOCKS—LILAS BLANC]

One may learn, whilst intent upon other matters, many unsuspected things about objects even as familiar as the common “Laylock.” ‹A collection of old letters of Georgian and very early Victorian days, with which we have had much to do at one time, show a preference for this phonetic rendering of the name.› Thus it appears that a valuable febrifuge “principle” is obtainable from its fruit; that its wood, veined in pleasing colours and very fine-grained, is in high request for delicate articles of turnery and in particular for inlaying; that a perfumed essence is sometimes distilled from it that is almost indistinguishable from Rhodes Balsam—and so forth.

Those, however, are not the points of interest which have made it imperative to have a plant or two of “Laylocks” in our Sentimental Garden. ‹They do fairly well, be it said, in their own specially sheltered, suntrap corner of the ground.› No, there is in life an ever-growing motive—old sake’s sake. Syringa Persica may mean much to the operative gardener, but it can never mean _Lilas blanc_ ... _Lilas rose_!

X

As for the Acacias, in that queer old courtyard—distinctly exotic creatures, aristocrats in the company of those palpable sons of the soil, the caducous orchard trees—I still wonder how they ever came there. Their rôle in the life of the small-boy school seems to have been that of a butt for cockshies, and thus passively to foster a notable precision in the use of those small river pebbles with which the playground was covered. A game, deeply favoured by the young scholars ‹but not recognized by the authorities› when Acacias were “in,” consisted in the bringing down of some selected bunch of fragrant, creamy flowers from its lofty station with the minimum number of pebbles. The feat was the subject of wager, the stakes stated and paid in steel nibs. Nibs—in the tongue of the aborigines, _becs-de-plume_—were accepted as currency and legal tender. It would be truly interesting to find out how this particular token of exchange came to be established among the youthful communities of French elementary schools. Be it as it may, the convention was hallowed by tradition “whereof the memory of boy ran not to the contrary.”

[Sidenote: GARLANDS AND ACACIAS]

When, however, the pale yellow, incense-smelling, honey-tasting racemes were “out,” the devoted Acacia became the object of other, slightly different, balistic attentions. The boys, be it stated, were regularly released from the durance of bench and desk every hour for some ten minutes ‹a commendable system with seven to ten year-olds› during which the courtyard became clamorous as any aviary. During these short intervals of recreation, too short to allow of any settled games, a favourite occupation was the adorning of the inaccessible branches with long streamers of coloured paper, previously manufactured at home—_guirlandes_ by name. These _guirlandes_, some twenty or thirty feet long, were wound with sedulous care round a suitable stone, leaving a small length as trailer; the apparatus was then cast up in a parabola over the tree-top. If the indirect fire was successful the trailer caught in the leafage, unrolling the remainder and releasing the ballasting stone. The most successful shot was, of course, that which left the streamer properly entangled on the topmost boughs. Each boy had his chosen and declared colour, or mixture of colours; and the trophy remained, flaunting his achievement “in its own tincts” as long as wind or rain permitted. It afforded the small breast a distinct satisfaction when, reaching the school of a morning, the boy could see his pennant still flying in the breeze....

Such is the strength of the association of ideas that I never could come upon a roadside plantation of Acacias in the hot plains of Hungary—where the tree is used as commonly as in France the Poplar, that inevitable feature of the great highways—without adorning it in imagination with the multi-coloured _guirlandes_ of my first school.

* * * * *

If there was no reasonable accounting for the presence of Acacias at the _Institution Delescluze_, the great Poplar, on the other hand, that raised its height in the very centre of the _cour_, had a well-authenticated history. A relic of Revolution days, it was then in its eighth decade, in the strength of its age; having been planted, at the same time as hundreds of others, as a Tree of Liberty—Populus, emblematic of _sans-culotte_ ascendancy—at the time when the royal Bastille, emblem of another form of tyranny, was laid low.

For some cryptic reason, by the way, the democratic Poplar, which had subsisted through many changes of régime, and had become undoubtedly too ornamental a mark of antiquity to be destroyed, was never honoured by the flights of our banderoles. Perhaps it was a result of political prejudice, which in France characteristically affects the views even of scholars at the hornbook stage of life. Or perhaps it was that the old _Peuplier_ was the site of the disciplinary punishment known as _piquet_—the playground equivalent of our nursery “corner.”

* * * * *

[Sidenote: GLAMOUR OF YORE]

Poplar and gummy Plum-trees, Lilac and Acacias, courtyard and indeed the whole _Institution_, had already disappeared when I bethought myself, for the first time after so many years of oblivion, to go and gaze upon the scene once more. It was quite in middle life. I had lately been reading that sad and strangely affecting work, “Peter Ibbetson,” the first, and to my mind by far the best, of the three novels written by Georges du Maurier in the late autumn of his days. By the thousands who for so many years had, week after week, enjoyed the delicate humour and pencilling of the great Punch artist, the book was received with a favour that paved the way for the greater popular success of “Trilby.” But I doubt whether it ever appealed to any denizen of our planet as intimately as to the Master of the House.

Those who have read the curiously original novel which, like so many first attempts at fiction, is autobiographical—autobiographical as to feelings, if not necessarily as to facts—may remember his description of the English boy’s early “French days;” and, later on, of the mature man’s poignant impressions on revisiting the old playground of his life. Now, there were so many points of resemblance between the surroundings of Du Maurier’s hero’s childhood and my own; so many allusions to the kind of things and the kind of people I had once been familiar with but, as time flowed on, had dismissed from mind as removed from real existence and new workaday points of view; they were presented, moreover, in so sympathetic a manner, that one need hardly wonder at the sudden resolve that rose within me, to go and look up the old place again.

Such a desire, when it comes, has something of the twist of hunger about it—it is _une fringale_, to use a word for which, oddly enough, we have no counterpart. But, alas! delight in scenes of the _beau temps jadis_ is not to be recaptured! It may but be espied in fitful, elusive glimpses. The world has moved on and the _genius loci_ has fled. Have you ever found out that the return, after many years, to a place oft dreamed of until then and with never-failing tenderness, besides leaving you blankly unsatisfied, seems to have killed the glamour, to have broken the magic spell of memory? The dream is dispelled. It will henceforth nevermore haunt your pillow. You have seen the phantom of the past with the eyes of nowadays; the new picture has replaced that of the dream—for ever.

Well, _la boite Delescluze_—as we irreverent youngsters called that respectable institution—unlike those other places, St. Cloud, for instance, which were fated to evoke but a melancholy disappointment, could not be beheld again with the carnal eye—not the least vestige of it. And it is, no doubt, for that reason that so many memories still come flitting back, smiling and clear, of that forgotten cradle of scholarship.

XI

A glowing log rolls down from its allotted place on the hearth, sending into the room a jet of wood smoke, blue at the stem, white feathering as it spreads out; and the pungent smell immediately revives a fresh set of scenes from the past.

[Sidenote: NOSTRIL MEMORIES]

That nothing brings back old memories so suddenly and so vividly as perfume is a commonplace remark. But I wonder whether the extraordinary persistency of a first impression, in the case of odours constantly met with, has been so generally noticed. Perhaps I am peculiar in this sensitiveness. Smells, pleasant, indifferent, or otherwise, which one is liable to encounter in the most varied circumstances, should, one would think, cease in time to recall any particular period of existence.

For example, the delicious smell of roasting coffee—an aroma not common in England—may well bring you back, at a jump, to some foreign, unfamiliar experience of your youth—to that early morning walk in the little Flemish town of which you have forgotten the name; where, as you sauntered down the street, you were greeted at nearly every doorstep by this pungent savour. The black cylindrical family roaster, its berries rattling musically within, was being carefully revolved over its bed of live charcoal by the boy of the house, or perhaps by the housewife herself. The delicate, diaphanous sky-blue smoke of the beans, as they reached the perfecting point of their charring, struck your eye as gratefully as the fragrance it conveyed to your nostrils. No wonder that, after a long spell, even a distant whiff of that odour of promise should bring back a definite picture. But that essences of such everyday character, say, as petrol; or that which accompanies the peeling of an orange, should still have the power of bringing me back, instantly, to the hours of my early schooling, is in truth a curious matter.

In the case of petrol, perhaps, the connexion is less extraordinary. Until the age of the motor was ushered in—and that is barely a score of years ago—the smell of “petroleum,” as it was still called, could come upon the sense as an odour out of the usual run.

Whenever I come across it now, it never fails to waft me back to the old class-room of the _Institution_, the _Etude No. 3_, where I first made acquaintance with the possibly wholesome but not otherwise attractive redolence of the _lampes à petrole_. That was during the short days of the year, when these luminaries were brought in soon after four o’clock, and suspended over our young heads—a ceremony coinciding with the last hour of _classe_—at the end of which the assembly would be dispersed for the day: the bigger boys walking back to their neighbouring homes, the smaller being fetched by their _bonnes_, or it might be the footman; or yet, in unpropitious weather, by anxious parents in carriage or _fiacre_.

Quaint place, that _Institution_—when one looks back on it from this far end of the road! I think I can breathe its peculiar atmosphere this instant—and see the queer, long, low room, with the beams across the ceiling; the whitewashed walls, covered with highly coloured elementary maps and graphic pictures of the metrical system applied to measures lineal and cubical, solid and liquid, and to the national coinage.... There they are: the six rows of benches and desks, each with its half-dozen youngsters, some elaborately drawing a steel nib, in strokes alternately swelling and slender, over a copybook of bafflingly soft paper, productive of periodical splutters; others reading ‹in earnest or in pretence› a chapter of _Epitome_; others, again, committing, with dumb mouthing, a fable of La Fontaine to memory for to-morrow’s recitation, until such moment as the cracked voice of the courtyard clock striking five should proclaim the hour of release. The usher, ensconced _in cathedra_, at his high desk; a smaller lamp for his especial benefit burning ‹and smelling› by his side; a book before him.—In his own walk he must have passed, methinks now, for something of a dandy, in the cheap line; for he remains associated more with sedulous trimming of nails, with pulling out of curly brown whiskers; with a nervous, tricky settling of collar, tie and cuffs ‹obviously false›, than with anything else.... He yawns amain. He consults his watch, and closes it with a click in the midst of the great silence of the room—the silence made more sensible, rather than disturbed, by the recurrent splutter of a pen-nib, or the turning of a leaf of _Epitome_.