CHAPTER IV

'PARADISE' AND THE BARNARDS

From Newlands we rode, one glorious afternoon, up a small, conical hill at the back of Fernwood, or the old homestead 'Boshof.' There are several ways of arriving, but we, full of enthusiasm, chose to take a stony path hedged by scented wild-geraniums and ripening blackberry hedges, along which more than a hundred years ago a big wagon had rolled, dragging up the hill, as far as the ravines and rocks would allow, two occupants--Mr. Barnard, His Excellency's secretary, and Lady Anne, his wife.

There has been a great 'Barnard' cult of late, and the people who have wondered at the romantic and witty correspondence of Lady Anne and the Secretary of State for War, Lord Melville, have perhaps gained some geographical knowledge of the Cape Peninsula one hundred years ago. I adore Anne for her sense of humour; Marinus adores her for her faithfulness to Barnard, whom for various reasons I have depicted to him as a dullish and obliging man.

Behind this overgrown hill at the top of the Newlands Avenue lies 'Paradise,' where Anne Barnard lived during the summer, and which she called her Trianon!

So Mecca-wards we rode, with the gigantic grey wall of Table Mountain towering before us.

We turned our horses round to face the Flats! We saw the great plains before us, once so bare that you could have seen a Hottentot crawling among the sandhills miles away; the Bosheuvel Hill, or 'Hen and Chickens,' standing out to the right, with its crown of silver-trees shivering and shining in the sun. To the east lay False Bay--thousands and thousands of emeralds set in cream; to the left, the dull, low, crouching Tygerberg Hills, full of propriety, sleek and smooth. Below us lay the Bishopscourt woods--the old Company's 'Forest lands' hiding the river and the squirrels and the black babies of Little Paradise, or Protea, with the branches of their enormous oak-trees--_chapeauz bas_ to Wilhelm Adrian Van der Stel.

Anne Barnard wrote other letters than those to Lord Melville; she wrote in long charming letters to her sisters at home a description of the pretty little place called 'Paradise,' halfway up the hill, which Lord Macartney wished her to have; 'how she could not drive up the hill, but had to alight,' and walk, and thought the way to Paradise the proverbial path, hard and steep, and thought less and less of His Excellency's offer the steeper the path became. She writes--all out of breath:

'On turning round, a sequestered low road appeared, over which oaks met in cordial embrace--the path which, suddenly turning, presented to us an old farmhouse, charming in no point of architecture, but charming from the mountain which reared itself three thousand feet perpendicular above its head, with such a variety of spiral and gothic forms, wooded and picturesque, as to be a complete contrast to the hill which we had ascended or the plains over which we gazed. Before the house, _which was raised a few steps from the court_, there was a row of orange-trees. A garden, well stocked with fruit-trees, was behind the house, through which ran a hasty stream of water descending from the mountain; on the left a grove of fir-trees, whose long stems, agitated by the slightest breeze of wind, knocked their heads together like angry bullocks in a most ludicrous manner.'

'Anne! What do you say to this?'

Mr. Barnard speaks in much admiration. Anne, still breathless, feeling happier, but her skirts are torn by the blackberries and low bushes:

'Why, that I like it, I am vexed to say, beyond all things.'

His Excellency's Secretary, becoming more elated (Anne having bright pink in her flushed cheeks): 'And if you do, my dear Anne, why should we not have it?' (This with all acknowledgment of the lamentable fact, which I impress upon Marinus, that Anne's approval is the only thing which will matter; Marinus always argues that in the other scale are 'Robin Gray' and that packet of letters which Lord Melville tied up with blue ribbon.)

Anne answers the adoring Barnard, not too decisively: 'Because the World's end is not so distant as this spot from the haunts of men.'

Barnard's last effort is worthy of a diplomatist; he sighed: 'It's very charming, however.'

They visited a number of other places, but Barnard's sigh won the day; and a new road was made to 'Paradise' by the slaves--a road we were presently to see, still showing the hard brick foundation, winding and hugging the mountain from the present Groote Schuur Road.

There is a delicious description of a day at 'Paradise' in the wonderful 'Lives of the Lindsays'--the mad, witty Lindsays! and Anne was one of them--and she wrote as amusingly and wittily to her sisters as she wrote to Melville, and she tied up the beautiful Cape wild flowers in gauze bags to send to 'my dearest Margaret.'

I sometimes think that the letters, which are known to be in a famous collection kept from the world, must be less philosophical, less cynical, less amusing, and more in accord with the mood in which Anne wrote 'Old Robin Gray.'

That in 1797.

This in 1909--Marinus and I asking our way of an old black woodcutter, with feathery green 'Newlands Creeper' twisted round his hat--that heirloom of the old slave descendant--a broad, passive grin crinkling over his face: 'Jaa, Missis; Missis want ole slavy-house--want get by ole "Paradise"? Yaa, vat I know ole Paradise; working by dese woods tirty years--fader, grandfader, all working by "Paradise."' So we followed him, our guide, our ponies scrambling up the slippery, moss-covered pathway, the trees growing low and thick, obscuring the sunlight, the dark figure of the woodman always running before us. Deeper and deeper we plunged into the low woods, when turning suddenly to the right and going slightly downhill, quite behind the fir-covered koppie, we came into 'Paradise.' Found! and in ruins! And I picked ferns from the walls of Anne Barnard's dining-room!

Here was the courtyard with the chief buildings facing north; on the right, the long stoep showing remains of the curved, rounded steps. On the left are the walls of lower buildings--probably the kitchens which the Barnards built.

We left our ponies with the black man and pushed our way in silence through the overgrown garden, all the terraces still banked up by small stone walls, now moss-covered, past little garden paths running along the mountain-stream, and fig-trees long since overgrown and forgetful of bearing fruit; and higher up towards the mountain we found two graves and four or five chestnut-trees--'the finest chestnuts I ever saw by many, many degrees,' says Anne.

But wherever we went the thin, twisted, fantastic oaks, like deformed gnomes reared in the dark, barred the way of 'Paradise' to intruders, and with the rustling breeze the frightened squirrels and the ghosts of this Trianon rushed away before us into the gloom.

Once, when sitting alone, only breathing a little Greek poem of praise to Pan, I thought I saw a ghost of this dead 'Paradise,' forming etheresque, vague and elusive, between the green hanging strands of creepers.... It was only the web of a wood-spider caught in a shaft of sunlight which had shot through the heavy roof of leaves. The garden which should have grown the most sensitive plants now grows weeds; only in a deserted corner we found a quaint, aromatic pink flower with a scent which suggested the East.

The light was fading; Anne in her letters remarks upon this: 'The sun sets here in "Paradise" two hours sooner than on the other side of the hill, which I am told marks its height, but with lamps and candles it makes no difference. We have nothing here to annoy us--except mosquitoes and the baboons who come down in packs to pillage our garden of the fruit with which the trees are laden.'

So we recovered our ponies from the woodcutter, who told us he had cut wood round 'Paradise' for over thirty years, and followed the red-brick slave-road which brought us to the middle of the Newlands Avenue. 'Paradise,' with its shy ghosts, its decay, its charm, and its memories of Anne, we placed at the back of our minds like little sacred hidden temples, and the essence of it all burnt like incense in their shrines.