there were two kinds of gardening to employ our sunny hours—the one concerned with the vast tracts of the olympians, the other with the cultivation of those intimate patches of earth known as “the children’s gardens,” wherein was waged an endless contest between nature and our views of what a garden should be. of the joys of this nobler order of tillage i have written elsewhere, and i may not penetrate now into that mysterious world beyond the shrubbery, where plants assumed the proportions of mammoth trees, and beds of mustard-and-cress took the imaginative eye of youth as boundless prairies. but if the conventional aims of grown-up gardening set limits to our fancy, if their ideal of beauty in the garden—unfriendly as it was to cricket and the fiercer outbreaks of indians—was none p. 120of ours, we found, nevertheless, certain details in the process by which they sought to attain their illusory ends stimulating and wholly delightful. flowers might inspire in us no more than a rare and short-lived curiosity, but the watering-pot (and even better the garden-hose) were our very good friends. tidiness was no merit in the garden of our dreams, but our song of joy rose straight to heaven with the smoke of bonfires. meadows were more to our taste than the prim culture of lawns, but in our hands the lawn-mower became a flaming chariot, and we who drove it as unscorched phaetons praised for the zest with which we pursued our pleasure by all olympus.
it was one of the charms of childhood that such praise would sometimes fall from the lips of our rulers as suddenly and as mysteriously as their censure. it was pleasant, after a gorgeous afternoon spent in extinguishing imaginary conflagrations with the garden hose to be congratulated on the industry with which we had watered the flowers. it was pleasant to be rewarded with chocolates from france for burning p. 121witches on the rubbish-heap behind the greenhouse. as a matter of fact, we never “helped” the gardener unless it suited us, and we would have hidden in the shrubbery a whole day rather than be entrapped into half an hour’s weeding—an occupation which we regarded in the light of a severe punishment. and the odd confusion in the grown-up mind between right and wrong never ceased to intrigue us. when my elder brother, in a sentimental hour, flung a wreath of roses on to the stately head of the aunt of the moment, we knew that it was a pretty thought, very happily translated into action; but the olympians treated it as a crime. yet it was not his fault that the thorns tore her hair; had there been any thornless roses he would probably have used them. and, being honest, we wondered no less when we were praised for playing with the garden-hose, that coiled about our legs like wet snakes, and made our stockings wet on the warmest summer day; for in our hearts we knew that into any occupation so pleasant must surely enter the elements of crime. but the rulers of our destiny p. 122would bid us change our wet clothes with a calm brow, and would congratulate each other on our interest in the garden. we lived in a strange world.
the judgments of the gardener we could better understand, though, alas! we had to sum him up as unreliable. he was a twisted little man who had been to sea in his youth, and we knew that he had been a pirate because he had a red face, an enormous clasp-knife, and knew how to make every imaginable kind of knot. moreover, there was a small barrel in the tool-house that had manifestly held gunpowder once upon a time. such evidence as this was not to be refuted, but we had to conclude that he had been driven from the high seas in disgrace, for he was pitifully lacking in the right pirate spirit. no pirate, we felt, would have taken the tale of our petty misdeeds to the olympian courts for settlement, yet this is what esau did under cover of a duplicity that aggravated the offence. in one and the same hour he would expound to us the intricacies of the chinese knot with many friendly and sensible observations, p. 123and tell the shocked olympians that we had thrown his rose-sticks all over the garden in the manner of javelins. captain shark, of the barque rapacious, would not have acted like this, if it was conceivable that that sinister hero could have turned gardener. perhaps he would have smitten us sorely with the dutch hoe, or scalped us with his pruning-knife by means of a neat twist learnt in western america, but whatever form his revenge might have assumed he would have scorned to betray us to the people who had forgotten how to play. esau was a sad knave.
and, unlike the olympians, he had no illusions as to the value of our labours in the garden, treating our generous assistance with the scantiest gratitude, and crediting our enthusiasm with the greater part of nature’s shortcomings. whenever our horticultural efforts became at all spirited he would start up suddenly from behind a hedge and admonish us as the boy in “prunella” admonishes the birds. he would not allow us to irrigate the flower-beds by means of a system of canals; he checked, or at least p. 124attempted to check, our consumption of fruit, deliciously unripe (has any one noticed that an unripe greengage eaten fresh from the tree is a gladder thing than any ripe fruit?); he would not let us play at executions with the scythe, or at avalanches with the garden-roller. the man’s soul was a cabbage, and i fear that he regarded us as a tiresome kind of vermin that he might not destroy.
nevertheless, as the olympians liked to see us employed in the garden, he could not wholly refuse our proffered aid, and he would watch our adventures with the garden-hose and the lawn-mower, with his piratical features incarnadined, as it were, by the light of his lurid past. naturally, water being a good friend of children, to water the garden was the most popular task of all, and as i was the youngest brother it was but rarely that i was privileged to experience that rare delight. to feel the cool rush of the water through fingers hot with play and the comfortable trickle down one’s sleeve, to smite a plant with muddy destruction and to hear the cheerful sound made p. 125by the torrent in falling on to the soaked lawn—these and their fellow-emotions may not be those of adult gardeners, but they are not to be despised. but as i have said, they were not for me, and usually i had to be content with mowing the lawn, an occupation from which i drew a full measure of placid enjoyment.
age dims our realisation of the emotional significance of our own actions, and it is only by an effort of memory that i can arrive at the philosophy of the contented mower of lawns. i suppose that professional gardeners find the labour monotonous, lacking both the artistic interest of such work as pruning and the scientific subtleties of cucumber-growing; but youth has the precious faculty of finding the extraordinary in the commonplace, and i had only to drag the lawn-mower from its rugged bed among the forks and spades in the tool-house, to embark on a sea of intricate and diverse adventure.
the very appearance of the thing was cheery and companionable, with its hands outstretched to welcome mine, and its coat p. 126of green more vivid than any lawn. to seize hold of its smooth handles was like shaking hands with an old friend, and as it rattled over the gravel path it chattered to me in the gruff tones of a genial uncle. once on the smooth lawn its voice thrilled to song, tremulous and appealing, and filled with the throbbing of great wings. even now i know no sound that cries of the summer so poignantly as the intermittent song of the lawn-mower heard far off through sunny gardens. and cheered by that song i might drive my chariot, or it might be my plough, where i would. not for me the stiff brocaded pattern beloved of esau; i made curves, skirting the shadows of the tall poplars or cutting the lawn into islands and lagoons. over the grass-box—or the nose-bag, as we called it—the grass danced like a mist of green flies, and i beheaded the daisies with the zest of a caligula, pausing sometimes to marvel at those modest blossoms that survived my passage. i marvelled, too, with the cold inhumanity of youth, at the injudicious earthworms that tried to stay my progress, and perished for p. 127their pains. sometimes a stray pebble would grate unpleasantly on the blades and waken my lulled senses with a jerk; sometimes i would drive too close to a flower-bed, and munched fragments of pansies and wallflowers would glow amongst the grass in the grass-box.
no doubt a part of my enjoyment lay in the feeding of that natural spirit of destructiveness that present-day olympians satisfy with frequent gifts of clockwork toys, ingenious mechanisms very proper to be inquired into by young fingers. but there was more in it than that. i liked the smell of the newly cut grass, and i would run my fingers through it and press damp, warm handfuls of it to my face to win the full savour of it. i even liked the more pungent odour of the grass-heap where last week’s grass lay drying in the sun. and the effort necessary to drive the worker of wonders across the lawn gave me a pleasant sense of my own sturdiness.
but the fact remains that, with all these reasons, i cannot wholly fathom the true philosophy of lawn-mowing with my adult p. 128mind. i have set down all the joys that i remember, but some significant fact, some essential note of enchantment, is missing. what did i think about as i pressed to and fro with my lawn-mower? sometimes, perhaps, i was a ploughman, guiding vast horses along the crests of mountains, and pausing now and again to examine the treasures that my labour had revealed in the earth, leather bags of guineas and jewelled crowns that sparkled through their mask of clay. sometimes i might be a charioteer driving a team of mad horses round the circus for nero’s pleasure, or a fireman driving a fire-engine scatheless through bewildered streets. but with all i believe that sometimes i was no more than a little boy, mowing the lawn of a sunny garden, loving the task for its own sake, and inspired by no subtler spirit than that which led esau to cultivate cabbages with dogged enthusiasm. it would not do to condemn that dishonoured pirate because he saw heaven as a kitchen-garden and regarded flowers as the fond toys of the olympian dotage. he, too, had his illusions; he, too, while he sowed the seed had p. 129visions of an impossible harvest. his ultimate fate eludes my memory, but doubtless he has finished with his husbandry by now. i, too, no longer mow the lawn save when arrayed in fantastic knickerbockers and dream-shod as of yore i trim the grass-plats of sleep with a lawn-mower that sings as birds no longer sing. what the purpose of my youthful labours may have been i do not know. . . . parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. perhaps i was already enrolled in the employment agency of destiny as a writer of idle articles.
