by Edith Nesbit
Our garden ran round three sides of a big pond. Perhaps it was true that the pond did not make the house more healthy. It certainly madeit more interesting. Besides the raft (which was but a dull thing when the boys were away at school), there were nooks among the laburnums and lilacs that grew thickly round the pond, nooks where one could hide with one’s favourite books, and be secure from the insistent and irritating demands so often made on one’s time by one’s elders. For grown-up people never thought of spoiling their clothes by penetrating the shrubbery. Here, on many a sunny day, have I lounged away the morning, stifling conscience with Mrs. Ewing’s tales, and refusing to remember the tangle of untidiness in which I had left my room involved. For I had a little room of my own, a little, little room, with a long low window and a window-ledge, where bright plants in pots, encouraged by the western sun, withstood the intermittence of my attentions, and blossomed profusely. My bookcase stood by this window, an old mahogany bookcase with a deep top drawer, that let down to form a writing-table. Here I used to sit and write — verse, verse, always verse — and dream of the days when I should be a great poet, like Shakespeare, or Christina Rossetti! Ah me! that day is long in coming! But I never doubted then that it would come.
Here I wrote and dreamed, and never showed my verses or told my dreams for many a long month. But when I was fifteen I ventured to show some verses to my mother. She showed them to Mr. Japp then editor of Good Words and the Sunday Magazine and never shall I forget the rapture of delight and of gratitude with which I received the news that my verses had been accepted. By-and-by they were printed; and I got a cheque for a guinea — a whole guinea, think of it! Now the day when I should be a poet seemed almost at hand. Had I not had a poem printed ?
Besides the desk and the well-oiled key, that formed so excellent a defence against “the boys” — for what young poet could ever set down a line with the possibility of even the best-loved brothers looking over her shoulder? — my little room had another feature, by turns a terror and a charm. A little trapdoor in the ceiling led to that mysterious and delightful region between the roof and the beams, a dark passage leading all round the house, and leading to — oh, deep and abiding joy! — to a little door that opened on the roof itself. This, until the higher powers discovered it, was a safer haven even than the shrubbery. Enclosed by four pointed roofs of tiles was a central space - safe, secluded — whence one could see the world around, oneself invisible, or at least unseen. Another trap-door, from the linen-closet by the boys’ bedroom, afforded them an equal access to this same paradise. We kept a store of books and good things in the hollow of the roof, and many a pleasant picnic have we enjoyed there. Happy, vanished days, when to be on the roof and to eat tinned pineapple in secret constituted happiness!
It was an uneventful, peaceful, pleasant time. The only really exciting thing was the presence, within a stone’s throw of our house, of our landlady’s son, who lived all alone in a little cottage standing in the fields. He was reported mad by the world, eccentric by his friends; but, as we found him, perfectly harmless. His one delusion, as far as I know, was that he was the rightful owner, nay, more, the rightful tenant of our house, and about once in six months he used to terrify the whole household by appearing with a carpet bag at the front door and announcing that he had come to take possession. This used to alarm us all very much, because if a gentleman is eccentric enough to wish to “take possession” of another person’s house there is no knowing what he may be eccentric enough to do next. But he was always persuaded to go away peaceably, and I don’t think we need have been so frightened. Once while he was in the drawing-room being persuaded by my mother, I peeped into the carpet bag he had left in the hall: It contained three empty bottles that had held mixed pickles, a loaf of bread and a barrister’s wig and gown.
Poor gentleman, I am afraid he was very eccentric indeed.
Did I say that his existence was our only excitement. Is it possible that I have forgotten the dreadful day when my brother Alfred shot a fox?
He drew me mysteriously aside one morning after breakfast.
“Daisy,” he said, “can you keep a secret?”
I could, I asseverated.
He drew me into his room, locked the door, and then opening a cupboard displayed the body of a big dog-fox.
“Where did you get it?”
“I shot it.”
“Oh, poor thing.”
“Poor thing indeed,” repeated my, brother indignantly. “Don’t you know no one would ever speak to me again if they knew I had shot a fox?”
“Then why did you?” was the natural rejoinder.
“I didn’t mean to. I was out this morning after wood pigeons, and I saw something move in the bushes. I thought it was a rabbit and I fired, and it was this. What shall I do with it?”
“Bury it, we can have a splendid funeral,” I said.
“You baby!”
I was constantly forgetting that Alfred, at seventeen, was grown-up, and that our old games no longer interested him.
“Well stuff it, then.”
You will hardly believe it, but we really did try to stuff that fox. My brother skinned it, skilfully enough, and we buried the body. We bought a shilling book on taxidermy. We spent many shillings on chemicals; we nailed the fox’s skin to the inside of the cupboard door and operated on it. My interest in the process was not lessened by the fact that I felt that the fox when stuffed must be kept from all eyes but our own, hidden for ever in the depths of that cupboard, lest the world in general should find out that Alfred had shot a fox and that I had been an accessory after the fact, and should so decline “ever to speak to us again.”
But we never stuffed it. We never even succeeded in curing the skin, which after awhile cried aloud for vengeance so unmistakably that we had to take it out and bury it secretly beside the body it had covered.
Both interments were conducted in the very early morning before even the maids were stirring, when the dew was grey on the grass, and the scent of the wet earth was sweet and fresh.
When all the fox was buried I breathed more freely. Perhaps no one would ever know, and people would go on “speaking to” us.
I remember after the burial of the skin we went for a walks through the long wet grass, and came home with wet feet and happy hearts.
Oh, those dewy mornings — the resurrection of light and life in the woods and fields! Would that it were possible for all children to live in the country where they may’ drink in, consciously or unconsciously, the dear delights of green meadow and dappled woodland! The delight in green things growing, in the tender beauty of the evening light on grey pastures, the glorious splendour of the noonday sun on meadows golden with buttercups, the browns and purples of winter woodlands-this is a delight that grows with one’s growth-a delight that “age cannot wither nor custom stale,” a delight that the years who take from us so much can never take away-can but intensify and make more keen and precious.
“Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her.”
My book of memory lies open always at the page where are the pictures of Kentish cherry orchards, field and farm and gold-dim woodlands starred with primroses, light copses where the blue-bells and wind-flowers grow. Yes, blue-bells and wind-flowers to me and to all who love them. Botanists who pull the poor, pretty things to pieces may call them hyacinths and anemones.
And most plainly of all, among the dream pictures shows our old garden at home.
There is a grey-walled garden far away
From noise and smoke of cities where the hours
Pass with soft wings among the happy flowers
And lovely leisure blossoms every day.
There, tall and white, the sceptral lily blows;
There grow the pansy pink and columbine,
Brave holly-hocks and star-white jessamine
And the red glory of the royal rose.
There greeny glow-worms gem the dusky lawn
The l
ime-trees breathe their fragrance to the night,
Pink roses sleep, and dream that they are white
Until they wake to colour with the dawn.
There in the splendour of the sultry noon
The sunshine sleeps upon the garden bed,
Where the white poppy droops a drowsy head
And dreams of kisses from the white full moon.
* * * * *
And there, all day, my heart goes wandering,
Because there first my heart began to know
The glories of the summer and the snow,
The loveliness of harvest and of spring.
There may be fairer gardens — but I know
There is no other garden half so dear,
Because ’tis there, this many, many a year,
The sacred sweet white flowers of memory grow.
THE END
Nesbit’s final resting place, St. Mary in the Marsh, Kent
The site of E. Nesbit’s grave at St. Mary in the Marsh, Kent