Chapter 10
There is alas, too often a tempering of sadness in the joy of taking the covers off the garden. One removes them, especially after a cold open winter, with much the same anxious excitement that one opens a long-delayed letter from a dear friend who has been in danger. What signs of life will the peonies show under their four inches of rotted manure, and the Japanese irises by the pool, and the beds of Darwins, so confidently relied upon to ring the sundial in late May and early June, before the succeeding annuals are ready? How will the hollyhocks, so stately in midsummer all down the garden wall, have withstood the alternate thaws and freezes which characterized our abominable January and February? Then there are those two long rows of foxgloves and Canterbury bells, across the rear of the vegetable garden, where they were set in the fall to make strong plants before being put in their permanent places--or rather their season's places, for these lovely flowers are perversely biennials, and at least seven times every spring I vow I will never bother with them again, and then make an even larger sowing when their stately stalks and sky-blue bells are abloom in summer! Tenderly you lift the pine boughs from them on a balmy April day (it was not until almost mid-April last year), when snow still lingers, perhaps, in dirty patches on the north side of the evergreens. Will they show frozen, flabby, withered leaves, or will their centers be bright with new promise? It is a moment to try the soul of the gardener, and no joy is quite like that of finding them all alive, nor any sorrow like that of finding them dead. At first I used to give up gardening forever when the perennials and biennials were winter-killed, just as a beginner at golf gives up the game forever each time he makes a vile score. Then I began to compromise on a garden of annuals. Now I have learned philosophy--and also better methods of winter protection. Likewise, I have learned that a good many of the perennials which were stone-dead when the covers were removed have a trick of coming to life under the kiss of May, and struggling up to some sort of bloom, even if heroically spindly like lean soldiers after a hard campaign. The hollyhocks, especially, have a way of seeding themselves undetected, and presenting you in spring with a whole unsuspected family of children, some of whom wander far from the parent stem and suddenly begin to shoot up in the most unexpected places. An exquisite yellow hollyhock last summer sprouted unnoted beneath our dinning-room window, and we were not aware of it till one July morning when it poked up above the sill. A few days later, when we came down to breakfast, there it was abloom, nodding in at the open window.
Another spring excitement in the garden is the pea planting, both the sweet peas and what our country folk sometimes call "eatin' peas." No rivalry is so keen as that between pea-growers. My neighbors and I struggle for supremacy in sweet peas at the flower show in July, and great glory goes to him who gets the first mess of green peas on his table. We have tried sweet-pea sowing in the fall, and it does not work. So now I prepare a trench in October, partially fill it with manure, and cover it with leaves, which I remove at the first hint of warm weather in March. The earth-piles on either side thaw out quickly, and I get an early sowing, putting in as many varieties as I can afford (my wife says twice as many as I can afford), jealously guarding the secret of their number. The vegetable peas are planted later, usually about the first or second day of April, as soon as the top soil of the garden can be worked with a fork, and long before the plowing. We put in first a row of Daniel O'Rourke's, not because they are good for much, but because they will beat any other variety we have discovered by two days at least. Then we put in a row of a better standard early variety. How we watch those rows for the first sprouts! How we coddle and cultivate them! How eagerly we inspect our neighbors' rows, trying to appear nonchalant! And doubtless how silly this sounds to anyone who is not a gardener. Last summer we got our first mess of peas on June twenty-first, and after eating a spoonful, we rushed to the telephone, and were about to ring, when somebody called us. "Hello," we said into the transmitter. A voice on the other end of the wire, curiously choked and munchy, cried, "We are eating our first peas! My mouth's full of 'em now!"
"That's nothing," we answered, "we've got our first mouthful all swallowed."
"Well, anyhow," said our disappointed neighbor, "I called up first! Good-bye."
How is that for a neck-and-neck finish at the tape?
As April waxes into May, the garden beds are a perpetual adventure in the expected, each morning bringing some new revelation of old friends come back, and as you dig deep and prepare the beds for the annuals, or spade manure around the perennials, or set your last year's plantings of hollyhocks, larkspur, foxgloves and campanulas into their places, you move tenderly amid the aspiring red stalks of the peonies, the Jason's crop of green iris spears, the leaves of tulips and narcissuses and daffodils, the fresh green of tiny sweet William plants clustered 'round the mother plant like a brood of chicks around the hen. You must be at setting them into borders, too, or putting the surplus into flats and then telephoning your less fortunate friends. One of the joys of a garden is in giving away your extra plants and seedlings.
One morning the asparagus bed, already brown again after the April showers have driven the salt into the ground, is pricked with short tips. That is a luscious sight! Inch by inch they push up, and thick and fast they come at last, and more and more and more. My diary shows me that we ate our first bunch last year on May ninth. On that day, also, I learn from the same source, the daffodils were out, the Darwin tulips were budding, and we spent the afternoon burning caterpillars' nests in the orchard--one spring crop which is never welcome, and never winter-killed. At this date, too, we are hard at work spraying, and sowing the annuals out-of-doors in the seed beds, and planting corn (the potatoes are all in by now), immediately following the plowing, which was delayed till the first of May by a belated snowstorm. Winter with us is like a clumsy person who tries over and over to make his exit from a room but does not know how to accomplish it. It is a busy time, for no sooner are the annuals planted, and the vegetables, than some of the seedlings from the hotbeds have to be set out (such as early cosmos), and the perennial beds already have begun to bloom, and require cultivation and admiration, and the flowers in the wild garden--hepaticas and trilliums and bloodroot and violets--are crying to be noticed, and, confound it all, here is the lawn getting rank under the influence of its spring dressing, and demands to be mowed! Yes, and we forget to get the mower sharpened before we put it away in the fall.
"May fifteen"--it is my diary for last year--"apple blossoms showing pink, and the rhubarb leaves peeping over the tops of their barrels this morning, like Ali Baba and the forty thieves."
Well, well; straight, juicy red stalks the length of a barrel, fit for a pie and the market! It is our second commercial product, the asparagus slightly preceding it. The garden is getting into shape now, indeed; the wheel-hoe is traveling up and down the green rows; the hotbed glasses are entirely removed by day; and the early cauliflower plants are put into the open ground at the first promise of a shower. The annuals are up in the seed beds; the pool has been cleaned and filled, the goldfish are once more swimming in it, the Cape Cod water-lily, brought from its winter quarters in the dark cellar, has begun to make a leaf, and we have begun to hope that maybe _this_ year it will also make a blossom, for we are nothing in mid-May if not optimistic.
The earlier Darwins are already in bloom. The German irises follow rapidly. June comes, and we work amid the splendors of the Japanese irises and the flame-line of Oriental poppies, setting the annuals into their beds, from the tender, droopy schyzanthus plants to the various asters and the now sturdy snapdragons. The color scheme had been carefully planned last winter, and is as cheerfully disregarded now, as some new inspiration strikes us, such as a border of purple asters against salvia, with white dahlias behind--a strip of daring fall color which would delight the soul of Gari Melcher, which delighted me--and which my wife said was horrible.
So spring comes and goes in the garden, busy and beautiful, ceaseless work and ceaseless wonder. But there is a moment in its passage, as yet unmentioned, which I have kept for the close because to me it is the subtle climax of the resurrection season. It usually comes in April for us, though sometimes earlier. The time is evening, always evening, just after supper, when a frail memory of sunset still lingers in the west and the air is warm. I go out hatless upon the veranda, thinking of other things, and suddenly I am aware of the song of the frogs! There are laughing voices in the street, the tinkle of a far-off piano, the pleasant sounds of village life come outdoors with the return of spring; and buoying up, permeating these other sounds comes the ceaseless, shrill chorus of the frogs, seemingly from out of the air and distance, beating in waves on the ear. Why this first frog chorus so thrills me I cannot explain, nor what dim memories it wakes. But the peace of it steals over all my senses, and I walk down into the dusk and seclusion of my garden, amid the sweet odors of new earth and growing things, where the song comes up to me from the distant meadow making the garden-close sweeter still, the air yet more warm and fragrant, the promise of spring more magical. The garden then is very intimate and dear, it brings me into closer touch with the awakening earth about me, and all the years I dwelt a prisoner in cities are but as the shadow of a dream.
_The Bubble, Reputation_
A great dramatist is authority for the statement that--
The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.
That is no doubt in a measure true; yet it would be grossly unfair to blame personally certain great ones of the past for the evil that has lived after them and borne their names. For instance, it may be doubted whether Louis XIV of France was all that he should have been. His private life would hardly have escaped censure in Upper Montclair, N. J., or West Newton, Mass., and his public acts were not always calculated to promote social justice and universal brotherhood. But to blame him for all the gilt furniture which has ever since stood around the walls of hotel ballrooms and borne his name is a libel even on that lax and luxurious monarch. Yet such is his fate. You who are familiar with history, I who know next to nothing about it, are alike in this--when we hear the words _Louis XIV_ we do not think of a great monarch with a powdered wig and a powdered mistress, of magnificent fountains and courtiers and ladies dancing the gavotte, of a brilliant court and striking epoch. Not at all. We think, both of us, of a gilt chair with a brocaded seat (slightly worn), and maybe a sofa to match. If you say that you don't, I must politely but firmly--well, differ with you.
Alas! poor Louis XIV was not the only worthy (or unworthy) of the past who has come down to the present, not as a personality but as a piece of furniture, a dog, a boot, or some other equally ignominious thing. Speaking of furniture, there's the Morris chair. The man who made the Morris chair was a great and good man--not because he made the Morris chair, but in spite of it! He composed haunting poems, he wrote lovely prose romances of the far-off days of knights and ladyes and magic spells, such as that hight _The Water of the Wondrous Isles_, a right brave book mayhap you have not perused, to your exceeding great loss, for beautiful it is and fair to read and full of the mighty desire of a man for a maid. Beside all this, he printed lovely books by other writers, and designed wall-paper, and painted pictures, and thundered against the deadening effect on men of mechanical toil, and in social theories was far in advance of his age. Such a man was William Morris--known to-day to the mass of mankind for one of the most accursed articles of furniture ever devised by human ingenuity gone astray! Every day, in a million homes, men and women sit in Morris chairs (made by machinery) and read Robert W. Chambers and Florence Barclay. Such, alas, is fame!
Then there was Queen Anne--in many respects an estimable woman, though leaving much to be desired as a monarch. She had her Rooseveltian virtues, being the mother of seventeen children (none of whom lived to grow beyond infancy, to be sure); and she had what the world just now has come to regard as the monarchical vice of autocracy. In her reign science and literature flourished, though without much aid from her, and the English court buzzed with intrigue and politics. But speak the name _Queen Anne_ aloud, and then tell me the picture you get. Is it a picture of the lady or her period? Is it a picture of Pope and Dryden sitting in a London coffee-house? No, it is not--that is, unless you are a very learned, or a very young, person. It is a picture of a horrible architectural monstrosity built about thirty or forty years ago in any American city or suburb, and bearing certain vague resemblances to a home for human beings. Whatever else Queen Anne was, she was not an architect, and she wasn't to blame for those houses, any more than she was to blame for Pope's "Essay on Man." But that doesn't count. She gets the blame, just the same. She is known forever now by those gables and that gingerbread, those shingles and stains.
She had a predecessor on the English throne by the name of Charles. Like Louis in France, he wasn't all he should have been, and there were those in his own day who didn't entirely approve of him. But it wasn't because of his dogs. However, if you mention King Charles now, it is a dog you think of--a small, eary dog, with somewhat splay feet and a seventeenth-century monarchical preference for the society of ladies and the softest cushion. Maybe the royal gentleman didn't deserve anything better of posterity; but, anyhow, that's what he got.
St. Bernhard fared better. If one had to be remembered by a dog, what better dog could he select, save possibly an Airedale? Big, strong, faithful, wise, true to type for centuries, the most reliable of God's creatures (including Man by courtesy in that category), the St. Bernhard is a monument for--well, not for a king, and a king didn't get him; for a saint, rather. It is doubtful if the old monk is playing any lamentations on his harp.
But I'm not so sure about that peerless military leader, General A. E. Burnside. When you have risen to lead an army corps against your country's foes, when you have commanded men and sat your horse for a statue on the grounds of the state capitol or the intersection of Main and State Streets, it really is rather rough to be remembered for your whiskers. Of course, as a wit remarked of Shaw, no man is responsible for his relatives, but his whiskers are his own fault. Nevertheless, how is a great general to know that his military exploits will be forgotten, while his whiskers thunder down the ages, as it were, progressing in the course of time with the changing fashions from bank presidents to Presbyterian elders, and finally to stage butlers? At last even the stage butlers are shaving clean, and a stroke of the razor wipes out a military reputation, blasts a general's immortality! Fame is a fickle jade.
An artistic reputation lasts longer, and resists the barber, proving the superiority of the arts to militarism. "Van Dyke" is still a generally familiar appellation and sounds the same, no matter which way you spell it. Of course, there's no rhyme nor reason in it--artist and whiskers should be spelled the same way. Only they're not. "Something ought to be done about it." However, to resume.... If you tell me John Jones has a Vandyke, I don't visualize John as an art-collector standing in his gallery in rapt contemplation of a masterpiece by the great Flemish painter. I visualize him as a man with a certain type of beard. I may later think of the master who put these beards upon his portraits. Then again, I may not. Exactly the same would be true if I told you John Jones had a Vandyke, instead of the other way about. Don't contradict me--you know it's so. It is nearly as difficult to-day to own a Van Dyke canvas as it is to paint one, but anybody can raise a Vandyke beard. In fact, many still do, and thus keep the master's memory green. "By their whiskers ye shall know them."
A military reputation, as we have already proved by the case of General Burnside, is a precarious thing. How many patrons of Atlantic City, I wonder, know the hero of the wars in the Low Countries and his greatest triumph by a certain hotel on the Board Walk, and would be hard put to say which half of the hyphenated name was the general and which the battle? Then there was Wellington, who at one time threatened to be remembered for his boots, and Blucher who still is remembered for his. A certain Massachusetts statesman (anybody elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives is a statesman) once said that the greatest triumph of Napoleon was when Theodore Roosevelt stood silent at his tomb. This is witty, but like most witty sayings, not quite true. It was a great triumph, of course, but rather spectacular. The greatest triumphs are not showy. What actually proves Napoleon's greatness is the fact that he is still remembered as a commander after generations have selected from the tray of French pastry the detectable and indigestible morsel of sugar, flour and lard that bears his name. To have a toothsome article of food named after you, and then to be still remembered for your actual achievements, is the ultimate test of human greatness. Only a Napoleon can meet it. Even Washington might not now be known as the father of his country if his pie had been a better one.
Who was King, for instance? Was he the cook, or the man cooked for? I fancy I knew once, but I have forgotten. But chicken-a-la-king will live to perpetuate his name as long as there are chickens to be eaten and men to eat them. Even Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all his _Toscas_ and _Fedoras_ (and ten to one you think of Fedora as a hat!), lives for me, a dramatic critic, by virtue of eggs Victorien Sardou, a never-to-be-too-much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old Brevoort House in New York. He may actually have invented this recipe himself, for he was a great lover of the pleasures of the table. If so, it was his masterpiece. An egg is poached on the tender heart of an artichoke, and garnished with a peculiar yellow sauce, topped with a truffle. Around all four sides are laid little bunches of fresh asparagus tips. What is _Tosca_ compared to this?
Then, of course, there was Mr. Baldwin. Who was Mr. Baldwin? The people of Wilmington, Mass., know, because there is a monument to the original tree in that town. But we don't know, any more than we know who Mr. Bartlett was, when we eat one of his pears, or Mr. Logan, father of the wine-red berry. In this case the Scripture is indeed verified, that by their fruits shall ye know them.
Two or three times a year my wife gets certain clothes of mine from the closet and combs them for moths, hangs them flapping in the breeze for a while, and puts them back. Among the lot is a garment once much worn by congressmen, church ushers and wedding guests, known to the fashion editors as "frock coats", and to normal human beings as Prince Alberts. Doubtless, in the flux of styles (like a pendulum, styles swing forth and back again), the Prince Albert will once more be correct, and my wife's labor will not have been in vain, while the estimable consort of England's haircloth sofa and black-walnut bureau queen will continue to be remembered of posterity by this outlandish garment. Poor man, after all, he achieved little else to be remembered by!
And as for the queen herself, she will be remembered by a state of mind. Already "mid-Victorian" has little or nothing to do with Victoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period. It is coming to stand for a mental and moral attitude--in fact, for priggishness and moral timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and good lady, and her home life was, as the two women so clearly pointed out when they left the theatre, totally different from that of Cleopatra. But she is going to give her name to a mental attitude, just the same, even as the Philistines and the Puritans. It pays to pick the period you queen it over rather carefully. Elizabeth had better luck. To be Elizabethan is to be everything gay and dashing and out-doory and adventuresome, with insatiable curiosity and the gift of song. Of course, Shakespeare, Drake, Raleigh, ought to have the credit--but they don't get it, any more than Tennyson comes in on the Victorian discredit. The head that wears a crown may well lie uneasy.
The memory of many a man has been perpetuated, all unwittingly, by the manufacturers and advertising agencies. Here I tread on dangerous ground, but surely I shall not be accused of commercial collusion if I point out that so "generously good" a philanthropist as George W. Childs became a name literally in the mouth of thousands. He became a cigar. Then there was Lord Lister. He, too, has become a name in the mouths of thousands--as a mouth wash. And how about the only daughter of the Prophet? Fatima was her name.
Who was Lord Raglan, or was he a lord? He is a kind of overcoat sleeve now. Who was Mr. Mackintosh? Was it Lord Brougham, too? Gasolene has extinguished his immortality. Gladstone has become a bag, Gainsborough is a hat. The beautiful Madame Pompadour, beloved of kings, is a kind of hair-cut now. The Mikado of Japan is a joke, set to music, heavenly music, to be sure, but with its tongue in its angelic cheek. An operetta did that. You cannot think of the Mikado of Japan in terms of royal dignity. I defy you to try. Ko-ko and Katisha keep getting in the way, and you hear the pitty-pat of Yum-Yum's little feet, and the bounce of those elliptical billiard balls. Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta is perhaps the most potent document for democracy since the Communist Manifesto!