the fernhill breakfast table was very characteristic of the canterton ménage.
gertrude canterton came down ten minutes after the gong had sounded, bustling into the room with every sign of starting the day in a rush. her hair looked messy, with untidy strands at the back of her neck. she wore any old dress that happened to come to hand, and as often as not she had a piece of tape hanging out, or a hook and eye unfastened. breakfast time was not her hour. she looked yellow, and thin, and voracious, and her hands began fidgeting at once with the pile of letters and circulars beside her plate.
canterton had half finished breakfast. he and his wife were as detached from each other at table as they were in all their other relationships. gertrude was quite incapable of pouring out his tea, and never remembered whether the sugar was in or not. she always plunged straight into her chaotic correspondence, slitting the envelopes and wrappers with a table knife, and littering the whole of her end of the table with paper. she complained of the number of letters she received, but her restless egoism took offence if she was not pestered each morning.
canterton had something to tell her, something that a curious sense of the fitness of things made him feel that she ought to know. it did not concern her in the least, but he always classed gertrude and formalism together.
“i have arranged with miss carfax to paint the illustrations for my book.”
gertrude was reading a hospital report, her bacon half cold upon her plate.
“one moment, james.”
he smiled tolerantly, and passed her his cup by way of protest.
“anyhow, i should like some more tea.”
“tea?”
she took the cup, and proceeded to attempt two things at once.
“you might empty the dregs out.”
she humoured his fussiness.
“i have something supremely interesting here.”
“meanwhile, the teapot is taking liberties. inside the cup, my dear gertrude!”
he had often seen her try to read a letter and fill a cup at the same moment. sometimes she emptied the contents of the milk jug into the teapot, mistaking it for the hot water.
“dear, dear!”
“it is rather difficult to concentrate on two things at once.”
she passed him the cup standing in a sloppy saucer.
“i take sugar!”
“do help yourself, james. i never can remember.”
gertrude finished glancing through the hospital report, and picked up a second letter.
“i wanted to tell you that i have engaged miss carfax to paint the pictures for my book.”
“what book, james?”
“the book on english gardens.”
“oh, yes.”
he saw her preparing to get lost in a long letter.
“miss carfax has quite extraordinary ability. i think i may find her useful in other ways. each year we have more people coming to us, wanting us to plan their gardens. she could take some of that work and save me time.”
“that will be very nice for you, james.”
“i need a second brain here, a brain that has an instinct for colour and effect.”
“yes, i think you do.”
he sat and gazed at her with grave and half cynical amusement. such a piece of news might have seemed of some importance to the average married woman, touching as it did, the edge of her own empire, and canterton, as he watched her wrinkling up her forehead over those sheets of paper, realised how utterly unessential he had become to this woman whom he had married. he was not visible on her horizon. she included him among the familiar fixtures of fernhill, and was not sufficiently interested even to suspect that any other woman might come into his life.
from that time eve carfax came daily to fernhill, and made pictures of roses and flowering shrubs, rock walls and lily pools, formal borders and wild corners where art had abetted nature. canterton had given her a list of the subjects he needed, a kind of floral calendar for her guidance. and from painting the mere portraits of plants and flowers she was lured on towards a desire to peer into the intricate inner life of all this world of growth and colour. canterton lent her books. she began to read hard in the evenings, and to spend additional hours in the fernhill nurseries, wandering about with a catalogue, learning the names and habits of plants and trees. she was absorbed into the life of the place. the spirit of thoroughness that dominated everything appealed to her very forcibly. she, too, wanted to be thorough, to know the life-stories of the flowers she painted, to be able to say, “such and such flowers will give such and such combinations of colours at a certain particular time.” the great gardens were full of individualities, moods, whims, aspirations. she began to understand canterton’s immense sympathy with everything that grew, for sympathy was essential in such a world as this. plants had to be watched, studied, encouraged, humoured, protected, understood. and the more she learnt, the more fascinated she became, understanding how a man or a woman might love all these growing things as one loves children.
she was very happy. and though absorbed into the life of the place, she kept enough individuality to be able to stand apart and store personal impressions. life moved before her as she sat in some corner painting. she began to know something of lavender, something of the men, something of the skill and foresight needed in the production and marketing of such vital merchandise.
one of the first things that eve discovered was the extent of canterton’s popularity. he was a big man with big views. he treated his men generously, but never overlooked either impertinence or slackness. “mr. canterton don’t stand no nonsense,” was a saying that rallied the men who uttered it. they were proud of him, proud of the great nurseries, proud of his work. the fernhill men had their cricket field, their club house, their own gardens. canterton financed these concerns, but left the management to the men’s committee. he never interfered with them outside their working hours, never preached, never condescended. the respect they bore him was phenomenal. he was a big figure in all their lives—a figure that counted.
as for gertrude canterton, they detested her wholeheartedly. her unpopularity was easily explained, for her whole idea of philanthropy was of an attitude of restless intrusion into the private lives of the people. she visited, harangued, scolded, and was mortally disliked for her multifarious interferences. the mothers were lectured on the feeding of infants, and the cooking of food. she entered cottages as though she were some sort of state inspector, and behaved as though she always remembered the fact that the cottages belonged to her husband.
the men called her “mother fussabout,” and by the women she was referred to as “she.” they had agreed to recognise the fact that gertrude canterton had a very busy bee in her bonnet, and, with all the mordant shrewdness of their class, suffered her importunities and never gave a second thought to any of her suggestions.
visitors came almost daily to the fernhill nurseries, and were taken round by lavender, the foreman, or by canterton himself. sometimes they passed eve while she was painting, and she could tell by the expression of canterton’s eyes whether he was dealing with rich dilettanti or with people who knew. humour was to be got out of some of these tours of inspection, and canterton would come back smiling over the “buy-the-whole-place” attitude of some rich and indiscriminate fool.
“i have just had a gentleman who thought the japanese garden was for sale.”
“oh!”
“a canadian who has made a fortune in land and wood-pulp and has bought a place over here. when i showed him the japanese garden, he said, ‘i’ll take this in the lump, stones, and fish, and trees, and the summer-house, and the little joss house. see?’”
“was he very disappointed when you told him?”
“oh, no. he asked me to name a price for fixing him up with an identical garden, including a god. ‘seems sort of original to have a god in your garden.’ i said we were too busy for the moment, and that gods are expensive, and are not to be caught every day of the week.”
they laughed, looking into each other’s eyes.
“what queer things humans are!”
“a madman turned up here once whose mania was water lilies. he had an idea he was a lotus eater, and he stripped and got into the big lily tank and made a terrible mess of the flowers. it took us an hour to catch him and get him out, and we had him on our hands for a week, till his people tracked him down and took him home. he seemed quite sane on most things, and was a fine botanist, but he had this one mad idea.”
“perhaps it was some enthusiasm gone wrong. one can sympathise with some kinds of madmen.”
“when one looks at things dispassionately one might be tempted to swear that half our civilisation is absolutely mad.”
he stood beside her for a while and watched her painting.
“you are getting quite a lot of technical knowledge.”
“i want to be thorough. and fernhill has aroused an extraordinary curiosity in me. i want to know the why and the wherefore.”
he found that it gave him peculiar satisfaction to watch her fingers moving the brush. she was doing her own work and his at the same moment, and the suggestion of comradeship delighted him.
“it wouldn’t do you any harm to go through a course of practical gardening. it all helps. gives one the real grip on a subject.”
“i should like it.”
“i could arrange it for you with lavender. it has struck me, too, that if you care to keep to this sort of work——”
she looked up at him with eyes that asked, “why not?”
“you may want to do bigger things.”
“but if the present work fills one’s life?”
“i could find you plenty of chances for self-expression. every year i have more people coming to me wanting plans for gardens, wild gardens, rose gardens, formal gardens. i could start a new profession in design alone. i am pretty sure you could paint people fine, prophetic pictures, and then turn your pictures into the reality.”
“could i?”
she flushed, and he noticed it, and the soft red tinge that spread to her throat.
“of course you could, with your colour sense and your vision. you only want the technical knowledge.”
“i am trying to get that.”
“do you know, it would interest me immensely, as an artist, to see what you would create.”
“you seem to believe——”
“i believe you would have very fine visions which it would be delightful for me to plant into life.”
she turned and looked at him with something in her eyes that he had never seen before.
“i believe i could do it, if you believe i can do it.”
he had a sudden desire to stretch out his hand and to touch her hair, even as he touched lynette’s hair, with a certain playful tenderness.
meanwhile eve’s friendship with lynette became a thing of unforeseen responsibilities. lynette would come running out into the gardens directly her lessons were over, search for eve, and seat herself at her feet with all the devotedness of childhood that sets up idols. sometimes lynette brought a story-book or her paint-box, but these were mere superfluities. it was the companionship that mattered.
it appeared that lynette was getting behind miss vance and her scripture lessons, and she began to ask eve a child’s questions—questions that she found it impossible to answer. miss vance, who was a solid and orthodox young woman, had no difficulty at all in providing lynette with a proper explanation of everything. but lynette had inherited her father’s intense and sensitive curiosity, and she was beginning to walk behind miss vance’s machine-made figures of finality and to discover phenomena that miss vance’s dogmas did not explain.
“who made the bible, miss eve?”
“a number of wise and good men, dear.”
“miss vance says god made it.”
“well, he made everything, so i suppose miss vance is right.”
“has miss vance ever seen god?”
“i don’t think so.”
“but she seems to know all about him, just as though she’d met him at a party. have you seen him?”
“no.”
“has anyone?”
“no one whom i know.”
“then how do we know that god is god?”
“because he must be god. because everything he has made is so wonderful.”
“but miss vance seems to know all about him, and when i ask her how she knows she gets stiff and funny, and says there are things that little girls can’t understand. isn’t god very fond of children, miss eve, dear?”
“very.”
“doesn’t it seem funny, then, that he shouldn’t come and play with me as daddy does?”
“god’s ever so busy.”
“is he busy like mother?”
“no; not quite like that.”
all this was rather a breathless business, and eve felt as though she were up before the inquisition, and likely to be found out. lynette’s eyes were always watching her face.
“oh, miss eve, where do all the little children come from?”
“god sends them, dear.”
“bogey, our cat, had kittens this morning. i found them all snuggling up in the cupboard under the back stairs. isn’t it funny! yesterday there weren’t any kittens, and this morning there are five.”
“that’s how lots of things happen, dear. everything is wonderful. you see a piece of bare ground, and two or three weeks afterwards it is full of little green plants.”
“do kittens come like that?”
“in a way.”
“did they grow out of the cupboard floor? they couldn’t have done, miss eve.”
“they grew out of little eggs, dear, like chickens out of their eggs.”
“but i’ve never seen kittens’ eggs, have you?”
“no, little beech leaf, i haven’t.”
eve felt troubled and perplexed, and she appealed to canterton.
“what is one to tell her? it’s so difficult. i wouldn’t hurt her for worlds. i remember i had all the old solemn make-believes given me, and when i found them out it hurt, rather badly.”
he smiled with his grave eyes—eyes that saw so much.
“do you believe in anything?”
“you mean——”
“do you think with the nineteenth-century materialists that life is a mere piece of mechanism?”
“oh, no.”
“something or someone is responsible. we have just as much right to postulate god as we postulate ether.”
“yes.”
“could you conscientiously swear that you don’t believe in some sort of prime cause?”
“of course i couldn’t.”
“well, there you are. we are not so very illogical when we use the word god.”
she looked into the distance, thinking.
“after all, life’s a marvellous fairy tale.”
“exactly.”
“and sometimes we get glimmerings of the ‘how,’ if we do not know the ‘why.’”
“let a child go on believing in fairy tales—let us all keep our wonder and our humility. all that should happen is that our wonder and our humility should widen and deepen as we grow older, and fairy tales become more fascinating. i must ask miss vance to put all that old testament stuff of hers on the shelf. when you don’t know, tell the child so. but tell her there is someone who does know.”
her eyes lifted to his.
“thank you, so much.”
“we can only use words, even when we feel that we could get beyond words. music goes farther, and colour, and growth. i don’t think you will ever hurt the child if you are the child with her.”
“yes, i understand.”
