Chapter II: Part I: HIS (1)

I

The letter was still there when he came down....

He had known that it would be there, of course,--had, indeed, lain awake half the night, thinking about it,--but he was surprised to see it, nevertheless. More and more, as he thought, it had taken upon itself the quality of a dream; so that, when he saw it again, a white shape set upon an expanse of red-clothed kitchen table, it met him with a shock.

He put it away from him, however, at once. After that first glance, which was not so much a glance as an actual physical encounter thrust upon him as he came in, he did not look at it again. But he was aware of it even while he refused to recognise it. He ignored it, indeed, with something of the self-conscious effort with which one ignores a vivid human presence, going about his tasks as if under actual human eyes. That he was oppressed by it was evident from the way in which he flung the window wide and the door wider, as if in an attempt to get rid of something which threatened to take up its permanent abode.

For this morning he was not quite so sure that he was glad....

Lighting the fire, he set the kettle to boil, afterwards going into the shadowy little larder to look for milk. His wife would be awake before long, and he would take her up a cup of tea as soon as the kettle permitted. Both he and Mattie were getting on in years,--he seventy and she sixty-nine--but they were able to do for themselves yet. It was a good thing, he said to himself, considering all that lay before them, that they were able to do for themselves yet.... He said it to himself more than once as he found a cup and saucer and the sugar that Mattie loved; passing about the house with the careless precision of practice, as well as with something more,--the delicate, kindly step of one accustomed to move in narrow and crowded places, and among fragile things like flowers.

And never once did he look at the letter.

The kettle was slow in boiling, for the fire burnt lazily, this morning. Fires were sensitive things, people said, which knew when those who lighted them were in trouble.... He checked himself guiltily when he found himself thinking that, because of course there was no trouble. On the contrary, there was a great deal of happiness ahead, as well as excitement and adventure and reunion and new life. The last especially appealed to him, because, as head gardener at Ings Hall, he was continually bringing new life into existence. It was surely always a wonderful thing to be about to greet new life!

Mattie would think it wonderful, at all events, in spite of her wordlessness last night. She had continued to keep silence even when he had joined her upstairs, and as he had refrained from looking at her, in his delicate, sensitive way, he would never know now whether or not she had cried. But while he had lain awake she had slept peacefully,--peacefully, silently, graciously,--slept as he had hardly ever known her to sleep, for she was too active a woman, both in body and mind, to sleep very well. Indeed, for months before the letter came to be written, she had hardly slept at all.... But last night she had slept as those sleep who for years have felt themselves to be behind bars, until the time comes at last when they lie down with relaxed limbs and smooth brows, knowing themselves free.

It was a great thing, of course, to be free. Mattie had said it so often that he supposed it must be true. He supposed it, just as he supposed that he himself was not free, because she had said that so often, too. He had never been able really to understand what she meant, because he could not think of a freer life than one spent among trees and fruit and flowers. But she must know better than he did what freedom meant, because she had thought about it so much. Talked about it so much, too, year in and year out.... Yes, it was a great thing to be free.

The day coming in at the door was going to be a fine one, he saw, although he had known that, indeed, as soon as he opened his eyes. But it was a shrouded day as yet, with the mist still high above the river, and threaded in and out among the woods which surrounded the gardens. In any case, he could not have seen either the river or the Hall, for they were a hundred feet below, but even his usual glimpse of the fells across the valley, beautifully vignetted by the stems of larch and beech, was hidden from him by the mist.

It was very quiet in his special domain on its steep little hill,--very quiet and very shut-in. There were the walls round it, first, the big, mellow, kitchen-garden walls, and then there were the mist and the trees, and then there was more mist again. The men had not yet come to work, and there was not even the sound of an approaching footstep. The sun had not yet broken through, bringing with it that sense of movement which is largely the play of light and shade. Only the birds were awake and beginning the day in their usual rushing way; and the river, which never slept at all, but ran and talked all night.

It was quiet in the house, too, except for the lazy crackle of the idle fire, and the loud, determined strokes of the tactless clock. Mattie, he knew, must be still asleep, for if she had stirred he would have heard the bed creak in the room above. Even if she had not stirred he would have known if she was awake, for her vitality would have flowed down through the house and touched him as if with an actual hand.

He loved the quietness. He loved being shut in on the top of his hill, and would have been only the better pleased if there had been thirty barriers about him instead of three. This was the time when the place was wholly his, before his staff stirred in the bothy or climbed the hill from the park. The men, when they came, had an air of possession even in their tread, and in the way they handled things and struck spades into the soil. It was natural, of course, but he felt that it robbed him a little. He had to share the gardens with them. His employers had the possessive air, too, although not so much as the men, both because they knew their place better and because they did not strike tools into the ground. But he had to share the gardens with them, all the same. They said: “What are you going to grow just here, Kirkby?” Or: “Don’t you think we might have so-and-so, this year, instead of this-and-that?” So they robbed him, too.

Not that he was one of those jealous gardeners who grudge the stuff they grow even to the people for whom they grow it. He was not foolish about the gardens, or greedy in any way. He grew things for a purpose, and he liked them to fulfil that purpose. Only he _was_ the gardens, so to speak, after all these years, and when anything was taken from them it was part of him that was taken away.

He was certainly _like_ a garden, as he stood at his house-door, looking out. When most people open their doors and stare, the things outside come awake, but they took no notice of Kirkby. The gardens, as it were, did not even look up. They were no more disturbed by his appearance than by one of their own shadows lying under the bushes, or by the long, ghostly lines of the green and crystal hoar-frost.

He was old and gentle, like an English garden, but he was hale, too, and not by any means run to seed. His clothes, good clothes, now pleasantly shabby, had a mellow tone which blended softly with their setting. His fresh complexion and faded but clear eyes had the pale tints of some of his own blossoms. The very droop of his shoulders was less like the slow curve which comes with age than the gentle stoop of a flower.

Especially he loved the quietness because it was at this hour that he had a vision of the gardens as he planned them for the year. This was his creative time, these few moments before the men came and broke and scattered his thoughts. It was then that he saw the long succession of colours and kinds with which the gardens would sum up their rich total before the winter came again. He would lose some of it later, of course, owing to other people’s follies and fancies, and the stolid frustration of concrete facts. But some of it would persist, even through worries and contradictions and the hard blows of the northern weather; so that, by the time the resting-months for the gardens came round once more, he would always in some measure have fulfilled his dream.

He was not always able to snatch these god-like moments in which he controlled the future. Often enough, Mattie was downstairs first, and he could not call up his pictures while she was working and talking. Husbands and wives were so near to each other that they got in each other’s way over things like those,--things that had to have you all to themselves, or they would not come. But he always took his moments when he could get them, because he needed them. His days were poorer without them and the assurance they brought him, as days are poorer without a prayer.

And just now was the time when the vision was strongest and clearest, when there was promise of new life all around, and still it was only promise. Like all artists, he saw his creation best when there was still nothing but a blank page in front of him. It had then a clarity, a sweep, a combined passion and restraint which it never achieved again after he had once begun to work upon it. It altered, no matter how he tried to preserve it. Alien ideas crept in, upsetting the balance of his scheme. Beautiful ideas they were, too, sometimes, but they were alien, nevertheless. Often he had tried to convince himself that the altered plan was all for the best; but as soon as the springtime both of the gardens and of his inspiration came round again, he knew that the thing which he saw then was the finer and purer.

The whole panorama of the seasons passed in colour and shape before his inward eye, running at the same time through his brain like a well-known piece of music. Familiar as it was, however, it was also highly intricate, with its many different parts overlapping and intertwining. Not only was there the kitchen garden to think of, but there were the glass-houses as well, fruit grown inside and out, tomatoes, orchids, carnations, violets. Then down at the Hall there were the rose-gardens and lawns, tennis-courts and flower-borders, and the long yew and beech-hedges to be kept trim and close. And besides all these there was the big rock-garden across the river, full of plants which, however much you might suppress them, grew as giants grow in a single night.

He saw the vegetables he would grow with the warm, homely thrill with which the farmer sees his crops, and the housewife her stores of linen and jam. The fruit he saw as an artist sees his finished task,--as gleaming jewels of price which you can hold and weigh in your hand. But the flowers he saw as the mystic and the dreamer see Heaven,--not in concrete form, but as sheer colour and light, and an ecstasy of shaded tones.

He had, too, the knowledge which enabled him to see under the soil, as the geologist sees the strata under his feet, and the drainer sees where the streams run under the apparently dry surface. Beneath the quiet beds and the still grass he saw the forces of life already waking to work, sending the spring-urge through the seeds which had slept there during the winter, or conserving their energies for those which should be given into their charge later.

But for that insight and knowledge there would have seemed little enough encouragement from the brown waste lying before him, and curving away behind potting-sheds and glass to come back to him again along empty borders. The gardens were not actually empty, of course, for there were evergreen climbers and shrubs, patches of colour made by the remains of the winter greens, jasmine in flower, and the wing-like flashes of snowdrops and crocuses. But by comparison with his vision it was altogether desolate and barren, for in that he saw all the miracle of each season at once, smiled upon by a cloudless heaven.

First--and this he always saw first, and indeed it was already hard upon the heels of his vision--he saw the crimson _ribes_ glowing over the countryside, that precious pink flame which appears so suddenly and amazingly among the pale yellows of the spring. Then--a quieter beauty, but equally as thrilling--the infinitely pure green that comes creeping over the brown thorn. He saw the purples of lilac and iris, the cool white and green of lily-of-the-valley, the vivid yet delicate spirit-stains of the azalea. He saw red and white jewels hung by the thousand on raspberry canes and currant bushes, and the creamy ovals of new potatoes. He saw roses, not singly, but in arches and flung handfuls, and a cloud of sweet peas like pinioned butterflies. Backing it all he saw green again, the young live green of the early spring, and the deep, sap-running green of the flush of summer. But above all he saw blue, that colour so precious in a northern county which is kept short of blue skies. Lupins and forget-me-not and delphiniums and periwinkle, and the blue that is never quite blue of the hydrangea. When he looked across the gardens it was chiefly blue that he saw,--blue against the brown of the soil and the green of the shrubs and the mist-wrapped sepia of the wet tree-trunks.

Not every other gardener, he found, had the passion for blue to anything like the extent that he had. All of them grew blue flowers, of course, filling their borders with them, and flinging them profusely about their rockeries. But they did not worship them, as he did,--did not wait and watch for them, feeling, as they looked at them, that what they looked at was pure spirit. Mostly they preferred deep-coloured roses and rich carnations, the tawny hues of chrysanthemums or the flaming shades of rhododendrons and dahlias. They did not seem to see the wistfulness of blue against a northern landscape, and how it was answered by the smoke-blue of far-off mountains and the steel-blue of frozen tarns.

This year, however, they were to have a new blue flower which had attracted quite a lot of attention at a northern show, last summer. It had been brought into being by a north-country horticulturist, and so naturally the northern papers had made a great to-do about it. One of them had said that the new “dawnbell,” as it was called, had a certain quality which only a northern mind could have infused into it; and another said that it seemed to contain all the fundamental blues of the world, as the rose seemed to contain all the fundamental pinks. Kirkby had not quite understood what either of the papers was talking about, but it did not matter. All that he knew, as he paid his homage to the dawnbell in its airless tent, was that, set against the background of his fells at home, it would have the exquisiteness and the appeal of a little child.

But not only did he see the glory of the garden unrolled before him; he saw the daily work, the infinite pains which led to the production of it. He saw the trenching, the sowing, the thinning, the potting and pruning, the staking and tying, the watering and weeding. He saw the daily fight with the myriad living creatures which strive to share the results of man’s labours with him. And when he had finished with the growing, there was still the cropping, the gathering for the Hall, the London house, the shooting-box, the market. And when the heaviest work in that way was beginning to get over, there was the layering and manuring and dividing; and always the continual battle for order with the leaf-storms flung upon him by the autumn gales.

Not that he saw this side of his vision as mere drudgery, or in any way secondary to the rest. It was all one to him, indeed, and of equal interest and beauty, for to the artist the craft is as fascinating as the dream. _He_ knew, who had done every job in a garden in his time, the contentment that may wait upon a man when he is working out even the smallest detail of a great conception. Long ago he had learned that the whole is implicit in the part; so that, while he broke his way through stiff soil, or toiled patiently with the knife, he felt his material quiver with the message of all that was yet to come, and saw, not the apparently trivial task upon which he was engaged, but the beauty that should be.

He was so still during the few minutes in which his vision passed before him that the very bushes and trees, chained and weighted with heavy drops, seemed by comparison to be full of animation. It was as if the actual life were being drained out of him in order to supply vitality to the temporarily vivid picture. The light had brightened a little, and the mist was lifting. Far below, from the direction of the park, a sweet-whistled snatch swam up to him through the mist as the faint chimes of sunk church-bells are said to swim up through the sea. The men were coming to work. Behind him the kettle boiled over with a sudden angry hiss, and at the same moment he heard the bed creak in the room above.

Turning, he saw the letter....

II

Once again, however, he shut it out, firmly refusing to look at it as he stepped across to the kettle. Yet again his awareness of it was apparent in his every movement. His hand shook as he made the tea; and when the bed upstairs creaked again, with that sharp, emphatic creak which he had come to regard as actually emanating from his wife rather than as the mere protest of a piece of furniture, he hurried out of the room as if thankful to get away from it.

Cup in hand, he went upstairs, and entered the low bedroom, with its window looking out on to the little plot of ground which was private to the house, separated from the rest of the gardens by a privet hedge which he had planted forty years ago, and which had now grown thick and high. He had never ceased to feel surprised when he looked at that hedge, not because it had done so well, but because it was there at all. He would never have thought of planting it but for his wife, because it would never have occurred to him to feel the need of it. Either the whole place was his, or else none of it was,--that was how he looked at it. Nevertheless, he had planted the hedge to please her, because she wanted a spot where she could “get away.” In the same way she had chosen the bedroom which looked out on that particular side, because it made her feel that she “wasn’t there.” He had had some difficulty in understanding either of these rather puzzling statements, but he had made no bones about them. He himself had never wanted either to get away or to feel that he wasn’t there; but of course it wasn’t to be expected that he and Mattie should always feel the same.

She was sitting up in bed when he went in, and leaning forward a little, as if some eagerness in her had sent her spirit before her to unburden itself to him. The paralysis which had seemed to afflict her on the previous night,--the result, perhaps, of over-emotion or fatigue--had completely dropped from her. This morning, indeed, she looked alive to her very finger-tips. Her strong, buxom figure looked hale and wholesome in its good longcloth nightgown. Her plaited hair, run through with silver, was still silky and thick. Her eyes were shining and her cheeks flushed. She took the cup from him in a grasp that was as firm and capable as when he had first known her.

“Eh, but I’ve slept sound!” she announced, yawning and smiling in a breath, while the vibrant tones of her voice, running through the room, seemed to stir up the atmosphere of the house, and even to assist at the awakening of the world outside. “I don’t know that I ever remember sleeping like that before.”

He nodded, looking at her affectionately as he stood beside the bed in one of those still attitudes of his which suggested the poise of a flower on a windless day.

“Yes. You’ve slept grand. You were tired, likely, with all that settling and such-like.”

She laughed at that, showing teeth that were still fine, and stirring her tea with a steady hand.

“Nay, not I!” she said in the same voice, the very strength of which was an added denial. “It’d take a deal more than that to knock me out.” Then suddenly she sobered, staring thoughtfully at the cup before her. “I was just sort of--satisfied--I suppose.”

He said: “That’s right! That’ll be it,” in his quiet tones, nodding at her again, although this time she wasn’t looking at him; the little action and the repeated phrase seeming to warn off something inside him that was making him feel guilty.

“I was dreaming a deal, although I was so sound....” She lifted her eyes to him once more in their shining eagerness. “I dreamt I was There!”

He grew, if possible, a trifle more still. So far, he had evaded the letter successfully, but he could not evade this. In another minute, and in spite of himself, he, too, would be There....

“I saw the whole spot as plain as plain!” Mattie went on rapidly. “There was Luke’s house, first of all, and then Joe’s, and then Maggie’s and her husband’s,--all nearabouts together, just as they’ve always said.”

He murmured, “Yes, yes! Yes, yes!” trying to hold himself back, but feeling that he was going, all the same.

“Ellen was there, too, though she lives a good bit off....” She ruminated a little, as if trying to work out in her mind how Ellen had managed it. “It was all just as they said, only a deal bigger. All of ’em together, just as they used to be, and things as snug as snug!”

“Yes, yes! Yes, yes!”

She paused a moment, contentedly sipping her tea, and staring at the knitted quilt on the bed as though she saw the whole pattern of her dream laid out there before her.

“There was another house as well,” she said presently, still staring,--“a house you and me know of, as isn’t built yet, but will be, before long....”

“Yes, yes! Yes, yes!”

“And between the houses there was that garden they talk so much about,--a great big stretch of a place as seemed to go on for ever and ever.”

He did not say anything to that, for the simple reason that he was no longer present to say it. He was There now, just as she had been There, all during those night-hours when he had lain awake and she had slept so sweetly. The garden had taken him, as he had known it would take him, if she began to speak of it. He could fight against all the rest,--the houses and their occupants, even that other house which was going to be so important, although it was not yet even built; but he could not fight the garden. The very mention of it was sufficient to drag him out of the safe place in which he had lived so long, and to carry him overseas.

“It was all just as we thought,” Mattie was saying again,--“only a deal bigger.” She had forgotten her tea, for the time being, and her gaze at the quilt seemed not so much to be seeing pictures upon it as to pierce through it and beyond. “There was that much room,--more room than I’d ever thought there was in the whole world! Even the sky seemed bigger and higher than our sky over here.” She drew a deep breath, as if even in imagination it was a delight to fill her lungs under that higher and wider sky.... “The children were there and all,” she went on, after a pause, her voice softening. “You’ll hardly believe it, but I knew ’em as well as well, even though I’ve never seen no more of ’em than just their photos! There was Luke’s Joe, and Joe’s Luke, and little Sally, and Daisy May; little Eric, too ... and Maggie’s last, as hasn’t done as well as it should.... I couldn’t have known them better if I’d brought them up myself! And the queerest thing of all was that they knew _me_!... Just before I woke up I told ’em I’d got to go, and they set to and cried fit to break their hearts.”

“It was only a dream,” he tried to console her, speaking with an effort as if from a great distance.

“Yes, but it wasn’t like dreaming; it was like _being_!” she said quickly, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. “It was _that_ real!”

He came back then from his leap across the ocean, and, reaching out his hand, patted her on the shoulder.

“It’ll be real enough soon,” he reminded her gently. “It’s only a matter of being patient a few weeks more.”

“Only a few weeks, that’s all,” she repeated after him in a curiously childlike fashion, heartening herself both with the words and with a sip of the cooling tea. “But it’s a long while, all the same.... Seems strange, doesn’t it, you should feel as if you couldn’t wait a few more weeks, when you’ve waited for years and years?”

“You won’t notice you’re waiting,” he pointed out. “You’ll be too busy. There’ll be a deal to do.”

She brightened at that, her vitality mounting at the very thought of the approaching period of activity. “Ay, and I’m keen to be at it!” she retorted briskly. “I shan’t feel it’s really real until I begin to pack!”

She was launched now upon a subject of which the possibilities were endless, and was already deep in its details when the same whistled snatch reached them which Kirkby had heard earlier from the park. He moved automatically. “There’s the men. I must be off,” he said, turning towards the door.

Mattie nodded, her mind still full of delightful problems.

“It’s time we were both moving,” she agreed, though vaguely. “I’m late this morning.... It’s that dream, I suppose,” she added, passing her hand over her eyes as if to remove something which still lingered before them, “but I don’t rightly feel as if I was back!”

“Oh, you’re back, right enough!” he smiled at her from the door; and at the words the thing which had stayed in front of her eyes fled, and she looked across at him.

“Ay, I’m back,” she said in a curious tone, and looked away from him and about her. “Back!”--and her glance went to the privet hedge beyond the window.... He waited a moment, staring at her uncertainly and rather uncomfortably, and then slipped quietly from the room. Half-way down the stairs, he heard her say “Back!” again, and hesitated in his step as if meaning to return to her; only to hurry on afterwards more rapidly than ever.

III

As he entered the kitchen he was met by the letter with the now familiar shock, but this time he did not attempt to evade it. On the contrary, he went deliberately across to it, and stood by the table, looking at it. A glance at the clock had shown him that he was earlier than he had imagined, and he was in no mood to meet his staff before he was obliged. That whistling first-comer would be Len Machell, a skilled gardener and his right-hand man. Len was always early, and he had always liked him for it; but he was not so sure that he liked him for it, this morning. Deep down in his mind lurked an uncomfortable suspicion that Len had a reason for coming early to-day....

The letter, addressed in his small but flowing handwriting, was directed to his employer at the Hall. He was always slightly ashamed of his pale, delicate script, especially when he happened to see it beside his wife’s black and sturdy hand. The scant imprint of the one seemed almost a purposed reproach to the brave intensity of the other. It was true that Mattie, in helping to draft the letter, had used so much of the ink, writing and re-writing, and underlining and exclaiming, that there had been very little of it left by the time he came to it; but of course that was no excuse. _She_ would have got her effect, he knew, even with a dried-up bottle and a broken nib!... He felt unhappily that his effort looked even feebler this morning than it had done last night, as if it had faded for lack of volition on the part of the writer.

Yet, after all, he said to himself, straightening himself as he stood, it was his weak pen which had altered their destinies. Mattie’s handwriting, superior though it was, could not in this case have had the weight of his. The ink that was left had been more than sufficient for the few, colourless words in which, after forty years’ service, he had sent in his notice.

It had seemed so impossible a thing before it was done, and, now that it _was_ done, it seemed so easy. Simple and easy, as death seemed, when you saw it close.... But it was wrong of him to keep on thinking of the change that was coming in terms of trouble or death. Once already that morning he had had to remind himself that what it really stood for was new life.

Yet it was only in terms of death, he said to himself obstinately, that he could think of the actual break. It seemed absurd that the snapping of a tie like that could be brought about by the mere scraping of a rusty pen. It should be accomplished, he thought, in some more dramatic way, like the call to attention of clean shot, and the lowering of something into a grave.

Forty years’ service was in that letter, but there was so much more besides. He had been bred on the estate, like his parents before him, and he had never left it. All that was in it, too. Old customs and ways of thought, closer and closer growth to human beings and to the soil,--links that had loosened and even broken, but had always welded again,--all these were there. Not in the actual wording of the letter, of course, but in its very texture; so that it seemed as if one man alone could never carry its weight of association and memory, and its long tale of the years.

And more besides.... Not only was there forty years’ service in the letter, but there was forty years’ struggle ... all that long contest between himself and his wife, which had begun in the first year of their marriage and never stopped,--never, that is, until last night with the writing of the letter, when it had stopped as a clock stops in a house where somebody dies.

Even this morning he had that same feeling as of a clock stopped somewhere in the house, followed as it always was by a silence that could be heard....

Well, it was all over,--the talks, the disputes, the discussions as to ways and means. She had always wanted to go, and he had never been able to go; first, because he hadn’t the money and, second, because he hadn’t the heart. He had grown to believe that the discussions would go on for ever, and now they were at an end. It almost seemed as if they would have nothing to talk about any more.

She had never liked the place from the very start; never settled or learned to look upon it as home. He had waited for the years to work their magic upon her, and they had never worked it. She had never settled.... Always she had gone on longing and reaching out for something that wasn’t there, something that in the very nature of things couldn’t possibly be there.

It had taken him a long time to understand, and he was not sure that he understood, even yet. All that he had definitely learned from the clash of wills was that the heart must face its own way; that one man’s meat may be another man’s poison, and that the holy, inhabited place wherein one soul can find its peace may be nothing but an airless vacuum to another.

Yet it was not, he sometimes argued with himself, as if he had taken her from such a very different existence. She was a gardener’s daughter, as he was a gardener’s son, and had been born to the same tranquil round and lovely isolation. He had thought her happy enough when he saw her at home, cheerful and busy and making her own interests; but that, as he knew now, was merely because of her youth. The soul can lay out its own pleasure-grounds when it is young. Later, when it ceases to do so, it sees the little ring-fence surrounding it only too plainly.

Right up to the time of her wedding, indeed, Mattie had been so busy, one way and another, that she had never realised her own requirements. Even if she had thought about them, she would have taken it for granted that marriage would mean a wider life, and instead she had found life narrow down upon her. Existence in her native place had been narrow, too, as she was ready to admit, but not _so_ narrow; for in the home of one’s youth there is always a way of escape through the magic door of childhood.

It was tragic that she had not known that she needed a wider scope,--tragic for both of them. But she had not known, and there had been nobody--apparently--to tell her. It was the gardens which told her eventually,--his dear, charmed circle of the gardens,--when it was too late.

He had found her, one evening,--as very soon after their marriage he had come to look for her,--sitting beside an upstairs window. The window was open, and by putting out her head she could see between the trunks of the trees to the coloured canvases of the fells. It was a circumscribed view at the best, with only a section of the hills visible when the weather permitted, together with a strip of sky laid nun-wise across their foreheads; but it was better than nothing. He had called up to her laughingly to ask her “what she was at,” and she had told him in reply that she was “shoving the walls away.”

“Shoving what walls? And whatever for?” he had enquired, puzzled, and she had flung out her hands with a thrusting movement towards the walls surrounding the gardens.

“_Them_ walls!” she had said vehemently. “They make me feel sort of choked. There’s times I feel I could hag ’em down with my own hands, brick by brick!”

He had been so surprised by that that he had stayed under the window, staring, and wondering whether she wasn’t well, or whether something had happened to upset her. It seemed incredible to him that people should think of garden walls as shutting them in, when everybody knew that what they were really there for was to shut things and people out.

“What, there was walls at home, wasn’t there?” he reminded her, at last. “Ay, and a deal higher than ours, too, now I come to think of it!”

It had been her turn to stare, then, turning the problem over in her mind.

“I never thought of ’em as high,” she returned slowly, pondering. “Anyway, I never felt shut in. Likely it was just because things seem that much bigger and wider to a child, but I remember thinking the garden was nearabouts as big as the whole world!”

“Well, I’m not saying this here’s quite as big as that!” he had tried to laugh her out of her brooding. “But it’s a fairish size. You’ll not find a better kitchen-spot anywhere in the North.”

“It’s terribly shut-in, all the same,” she persisted obstinately. “And terribly small. _That_ small,” she added suddenly, with a characteristic flash which might have stood equally for bitterness or humour, “I could happen put it inside my wedding-ring!”

It had grown no bigger for her, either, as time went on. She had never ceased to find it small and shut-in, never ceased to rebel against its limitations. Many a day she had sat by the upstairs window during the years that followed, but she had never succeeded in pushing the walls away. It was he who had done it in the end by writing the letter, laying them flat with his pen as effectively as with any Jericho trumpet.

Still, it was her will that ran behind the pen, even though it was his hand that held it. He knew that well enough, even while his loyalty had no intention of admitting it. The disputes and discussions had seemed futile enough at the time, but they had done their work in the end. Her hours of silent revolt, equally with her passionate clamourings to be free, had accumulated at last into a dynamic force which seemed able to move mountains.

Once, before, indeed, she had almost succeeded in getting her way, only to find, just as she was on the point of turning into it, that it led to a dead end. The affair was so long ago now that he had practically forgotten it, but it came back to him, this morning. Contemplating it to-day, he was struck by one curious fact,--that what he had nearly done then seemed to him now far more incredible than what he had actually done, last night. The sudden reassertion of that distant point of view showed him how much he had altered since that date; how far he had travelled, although unknowingly, along the road to Mattie’s desire.

It was at a local flower-show that the opportunity had come, tumbled from Heaven, as it seemed, in answer to Mattie’s pleading. He had been present at the show in the capacity of judge, and a visiting landowner had taken a fancy to him. At the end of the afternoon, his new friend, without actually offering him the post, had yet managed to convey to him that his own head gardener’s situation, which happened to be vacant at the moment, could be Kirkby’s for the mere formality of asking.

He had forgotten the incident, as has been said, but at least he had no difficulty in remembering how his wife had taken the news. It had acted upon her like a charm, turning her, even at the mere prospect of escape, into a different creature, so that already she moved and spoke as if breathing a freer air. All evening they had debated the question, and had gone up to bed resolved upon accepting the unspoken invitation. He recalled Mattie’s elation over their luck, her gratitude to Providence, her almost childlike happiness. Yet it was he who had slept, that night, even under the sword of impending change; while she, for all that her prayer was about to be granted, had lain awake.

And in the morning the whole of her evening dream had fallen to pieces.... She had come downstairs silent and apathetic, dimmed as a candle is dimmed by the coming of daylight. She ignored any reference on his part to the decision of the night before, and when he definitely tried to reopen the subject, she pushed it away. Later, when he insisted that the matter should be settled, one way or the other, she told him that she had given up all idea of leaving.

“It’d make no difference, even if we did go,” she had said dully. “I didn’t see it, first thing, but I do now. It’d be the same thing over again, that’s all, and happen worse.”

His heart had leaped in spite of him at the unexpected reprieve, but he had tried to encourage her, nevertheless.

“What, it’ll be a fresh spot, anyhow!” he reminded her bravely. “That’s something, surely? Fresh folks and a fresh house, as well as a different sort of air, as’ll likely suit you better.”

She shook her head.

“It’d only look fresh on the outside. It wouldn’t _be_ fresh in any way as really mattered.”

“If it’s the walls as is still bothering you, they’ve no call to, as I’ve told you already. The house at the new spot is outside the gardens altogether. I asked Colonel Brangwyn special.”

But she refused to be heartened.

“It’d be the same thing over again,” was all she would say, repeating herself endlessly. “Just exactly the same. You and me and the gardens, and me choking myself to death.”

“What is it you _do_ want, d’you think?” he had asked her at last patiently, and she had shaken her head again, looking away from him almost shyly.

“Nay, I don’t know. I’m daft, I suppose. It’s just _room_.... Ay, well, it’s no use talking about it any more. But you needn’t apply for Colonel Brangwyn’s.”

Much the same situation had recurred at intervals, later on, but it had always ended in the same way. Always she had drawn back again at the last moment. Always it had seemed to her that she had found the right road at last, only to realise that it led nowhere. Always she had seen in time that, no matter where she went, to this country-house or that, she would always have the little ring of an English garden round her.

Things had been better for her after the children began to come, but they had also been worse. The gardens had grown fuller for her, after their arrival, but they had grown no larger. Moreover, the increasing family had put a stop to any chance of retirement as well as to the occasionally-discussed project of “setting up for ourselves.” Money had continually grown tighter. With each fresh child that appeared, they were forced to “plough a furrow nearer the fence.”

Yet if it was the children who in the first instance had closed the door to escape, it was the children who in the long run had thrown it open. One by one, as they grew up, they had all of them left the gardens. They had loved them,--all, perhaps, except Ellen,--just as they loved their parents; but they had left them, nevertheless. Something of their mother’s longing for space must have entered into them at birth, making it impossible for them to remain. And not only had they found the gardens too small, but England itself, so that they had allowed Canada to swallow them up, as it swallowed so many.

It was not long, however, before they began to regret this wholesale snapping of ties. Not only did they get together as soon as possible on the other side, but, the moment they were on their feet, they wrote, urging their parents to join them. Sometimes it was Luke who wrote, and sometimes Joe; Maggie, sometimes, and sometimes Ellen. Later on, when they were all married, the boys’ wives wrote, too, and the girls’ husbands; and, later still, it was the grandchildren who, with their first handling of a pen, added their unsteady scrawls to the general petition.

It was really the grandchildren who had beaten him in the end....

IV

All the same, a long time had elapsed before he had finally given in. He was middle-aged and over even when the letters first began to come, and he had not felt able to face the venture. Mattie was all agog for it, of course, seeing it as the chance for which she had waited all her life, but he refused to consider it. He had said “no” so often, indeed, that it had seemed as if he could go on saying it for ever. But he had not gone on saying it for ever, or anything like it. Quite suddenly he had blotted out all those accumulated “noes” with a single “yes.”

Yet, perhaps, now that he came to think of it, it had not been as sudden as he imagined. It seemed to him now, looking back, that the “noes” had had no significance at all; that, in point of fact, he had been defeated from the very start. Right from that first occasion upon which he had found his wife upstairs, pushing the walls away, he had known that he would go....

Nevertheless, for ten years at least he had successfully resisted both Mattie’s persuasions and the calls from over the sea. It seemed extraordinary to him now that he should have been able to hold out so long. But then it was not he himself that had been able to hold out, but something outside him,--something that would not break, that never _could_ have broken, so he had firmly believed, until it had given way on the previous evening.

Still, it had not been an easy matter, keeping his ears and his heart shut, all those years. Not only were there Mattie’s arguments to contend with, and of course the letters, but there was a constant succession of photographs as well. Snapshots of the party across the ocean were always arriving,--pictures of his children, of their wives and husbands, their homes, their families. And besides all these there were photographs of the nursery garden which they ran among them, and which they were rapidly turning into a big business. For in this one thing at least they had remained true to type. Without hesitation they had turned naturally and successfully to gardening.

At first he had felt little more for their far-off efforts than the aloof if kindly contempt of the finished workman for the crude beginner. He was glad, of course, that the children had kept to the old trade, but conditions were different “out there,” and at first he found them difficult to follow. As time went on, however, and the photographs showed the garden to be increasing in size and scope, his interest began to quicken. He had it fixed in his mind now what they were planting and when, and what they were growing for the different markets. Presently he was even trying some of their new-fangled ideas on his own account, although he was careful not to say very much about them. Thinking about that distant garden while he worked in his own, he came at last to that point where the mind passes so easily between place and place that the body might equally well be in either.

Mattie, of course, had reached that particular state long since. Her dream of last night had been only a vivid extension of it. Often, for instance, she would talk of the grandchildren as if they were no further away than round the corner. “Little Joe’s first day at school to-day,” she would say, bending over her sewing. “I hope they got him off in good time.” Or-- “Maggie’s May’s not so grand with that cough of hers. I must see about getting her a bottle of something from the chemist’s.”

He had done his best to conceal from her his growing absorption in the Canadian enterprise, but it was not long before she discovered it. Dropping her talk of the grandchildren to some extent, she concentrated upon the business, surprising him, times without number, by her intimate knowledge of it. She, who had never shown even the faintest enthusiasm for his particular job, seemed to know every seed that was sown in that nursery across the Atlantic.

“Potatoes have done well for them, this year,” she would inform him, glibly reeling off a list of varieties. “‘Grand Elephant’s’ the best, though, they say. I’d like to try ’em. That sort we had ourselves wasn’t worth the planting.”

“Main crop _was_ ‘Grand Elephants,’” he would remind her mildly, but without arousing her to any excitement.

“Eh, now! Fancy that!” she would answer, in a tone of polite wonder. “And I never knew!... Likely it’s the soil or something as makes the difference. Anyhow, all I can say is I thought ’em right poor.”

For some time she had contented herself with merely stimulating his increasing interest, but after a while she came out into the open with it as a weapon.

“You’d settle sharp enough, you’d see,” she was saying presently, when the eternal subject came cropping up again. “It’s the same job, when all’s said. ’Tisn’t as if you’d be going to something different.”

“It’d _be_ different, though, in lots of ways,” he had replied firmly, much in the same hopeless but obstinate tone in which she had so often asserted that “it would be just the same.” “Come to that,” he had added with spirit, “I wonder you’re so keen on it yourself if it’s not to be fresh, seeing you’ve always been so set against gardening and such-like?”

She had laughed without resentment at his mild attack, too enchanted with her happy project to be stirred to anger.

“It’d be different in _my_ way,” she admitted,--“I give you that--but I don’t know as it’d be that much different in yours. It’d be bigger-freer--nay, I can’t explain! But sticking things into the ground and taking them out again seems to me much the same job all the world over.”

He had said nothing to that, partly because it did not seem worth while, but also because his mind instinctively retreated when she mentioned size. She liked to think of the Canadian garden as prairie-wide, a great, untrammelled stretch of a place under an arching sky,--but that view of it repelled him. The photographs, of course, had shown him something of what it was like, but he chose to ignore them. Hidden away in his imagination was his own impression of the place, as a time-mellowed, sheltered circle of anciently-tilled soil....

It was perhaps because he had been dwelling upon the garden in that particular guise that yesterday he had given in. Also he had had an annoying day, spoilt by several of those tiresome little incidents able even to take the glamour out of the work which is nearest to one’s heart. But it was chiefly the weather which had overset his mind, hard and clear as it was with that sinister hardness and clearness which scarifies the soul. It was the only weather that ever made him feel really old, stripping as it did the veils from his various shrines. He had gone indoors for his evening meal, feeling that his life, under its present conditions, had nothing further to offer him.

The mail was in, he found, as he sat down,--it had seemed to him, of late years, that the mail was always in,--and a letter from Canada was lying on the table. Mattie had opened it, apparently, and presumably read it, but she made no attempt to force it upon his notice. She neither mentioned it, indeed, nor even as much as pushed it towards him, and perhaps because of this lack of coercion, he found himself eyeing it longingly. In his momentary state of depression it seemed to offer him the exact stimulant which he needed, and after resisting the impulse for a short time, he reached out and drew it towards him.

The atmosphere changed around him almost as soon as he opened the letter. Canada leaped out of the pages at him as he read,--Canada, live and free, and with red blood rushing in its veins. It had always seemed to him a country where everybody was young, and to-day more than ever it seemed peopled with radiant youth. The letter was full of vitality, of hope, of healthy happiness and success. He forgot his annoyances as he read, and his depression vanished. By the time he had finished the letter he, too, felt young, breathing the air of that land which seemed to know nothing of growing old....