A FOUNTAIN OF GARDENS
Indeed, to have remembered that morning at Miss Deborah Ware’s was enough to bring back to us the very youth of which the morning was a part. It seems to Pelleas and me that most of the beautiful things that have come to us have been a part of our old age, as if in a kind of tender compensation. But that beautiful happening of our youth we love to remember, the more because it befell in the very week of our betrothal. And though our betrothal was more than fifty years ago, I suppose to be quite truthful that there is very little about those days that I do not recall; or if there be any forgotten moments I grieve to confess them. There are, however, I find to my amazement, many excellent people who conscientiously remember the dates of the Norman Conquest and the fall of Constantinople, and who are yet obliged to stop to think on what day their betrothal fell. As for me I would far rather offend my conscience in a matter of Turks than in a matter of love-knots.
On a delicate day in May, Eighteen Hundred and Forty-five, Pelleas and I were quite other people. And I do protest that the lane where we were walking was different, too. I have never seen it since that summer; but I cannot believe that it now wears anything like the same fabric of shadow, the same curve of hedgerow or that season’s pattern of flowers. The lane ran between the Low Grounds and the property of the Governor, on one side the thatched cots of the mill folk and the woodsmen, and on the other the Governor’s great mansion, a treasure-house of rare canvas and curio. That morning the lane was a kind of causeway between two worlds, and there was no sterner boundary than a hedge of early wild roses. I remember how, stepping with Pelleas along that way of sun, I loved him for his young strength and his blue eyes and his splendid shoulders and for the way he looked down at me, but I think that he must have loved me chiefly for my gown of roses and for the roses in my hat. For I took very little account of life save its roses and I must believe that a sense of roses was my most lovable quality. We were I recall occupied chiefly in gathering roses from the hedgerow to fill my reticule.
“Now, suppose,” Pelleas said, busy in a corner of green where the bloom was thickest, “suppose we were to find that the hedges go on and never stop, and that all there is to the world is this lane, and that we could walk here forever?”
I nodded. That was very like my conception of the world, and the speculation of Pelleas did not impress me as far wrong.
“Do you wish this morning could last forever, Etarre, do you?” asked Pelleas, looking down at me.
“Yes,” said I truthfully, “I do.” I hope that there is no one in the world who could not from his soul say that at least once of some hour of Spring and youth. In such a moment, it is my belief, the spirit is very near entering upon its own immortality—for I have always held that immortality must begin at some beautiful moment in this life. Though as for me, at that moment, I confess myself to have been thinking of nothing more immortal than the adorable way that Pelleas had of saying my name.
“But by and by,” Pelleas went on, “I think we would come to a garden. Who ever heard of a love story without a garden? And it will be a ‘different’ garden from all the rest—the trees will be higher and the shadows will be made differently and instead of echoes there will be music. And there will be fountains—fountains everywhere; and when one has gone in the garden a fountain will spring up at the gate and no one can get out—ever. What do you think of that for a garden?” asked Pelleas.
“I think,” said I, “that the garden we will come to will be Miss Deborah Ware’s.”
For in fact I was carrying a message to Miss Deborah Ware, a kinswoman of my mother’s, and I had met Pelleas only by some heavenly chance as he crossed the common.
“And who is Miss Deborah Ware?” asked Pelleas, doubtfully, as if weighing the matter of entering her garden.
“She owns a gold thimble,” I explained, “that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. She prefers wooden sabots to all other shoes. And she paints most beautiful pictures.”
“Ah,” said Pelleas, enlightened, “so that is who she is. And how does she look, pray?”
“I am certain that she looks like the Queen of Sheba,” I told him. “And, moreover, all her caps are crown-shaped.”
“Now I know how the Queen of Sheba looked,” cried Pelleas, triumphantly. “She looked like the crowns of Miss Deborah’s caps. Do you happen to know what the toll is to leave this lane?”
As I did not know—did anybody ever know?—and as we were even then at the end of the lane, my ignorance was rebuked and I paid the toll and I fancy repeated the lesson—it was a matter of honour to the sun and the wild roses not to let it be otherwise. And we crossed the West Meadow by the long way and at the last—at the very last, and nearly noon!—we reached the cottage where Miss Deborah Ware had come to spend the Summer and engage in the unmaidenly pursuit of painting pictures.
To tell the truth our Summer community of good Knickerbocker folk were inclined to question Miss Deborah’s good taste. Not that they objected to the paint, but the lack of virtue seemed to lie in the canvas. If Miss Deborah had painted candle-shades or china porringers or watered silk panels or flowerpots, no one, I think, would have murmured. But when they learned that she painted pictures they spread and lifted their fans.
“Miss Deborah Ware would ape the men,” they said sternly. And when they saw her studio apron made of ticking and having a bib they tried to remonstrate with my mother, her kinswoman.
“She is a great beauty, for her age,” said the women. “But Beauty is as Beauty does,” they reminded her.
“Deborah does as Deborah is,” my mother answered, smiling.
Miss Deborah was wearing the apron of ticking that morning that we went to see her—Pelleas and I, who were rather basely making her an excuse for the joy of our morning together. But Miss Deborah would have been the last to condemn that. She was in a room overlooking the valley, and a flood of north light poured on her easel and her idle palette. Miss Deborah was breakfasting; and she explained that she had had a great fit for working very early; and she gave us some delicious tea and crumpets.
“This is the tea,” she told us, “that Cupid and Psyche always drank. At least I suppose that is what the Japanese label says. Or perhaps it says Aucassin and Nicolette.... I am a bit back in my Japanese.” And immediately Miss Deborah nodded at me a little and murmured that I crimsoned as prettily as either of these ladies.
Then: “They tell me that you two are betrothed,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Why is that?”
At that I blushed again and so I have no doubt did Pelleas, for we had not so much as said that word in each other’s presence and to hear it pronounced aloud was the most heavenly torture.
“I suppose you are very much in love,” she answered her question meditatively. “Well, I believe you. I believe you so thoroughly that I would like to paint you. What barbarism it is,” she went on, “that they don’t allow young lovers to have their portraits painted together while they are betrothed! Could there be a more delicious bit of history added to any portrait gallery? And what if the marriage never did come off—saving your presence? The history might be all the more delicious for the separation, and the canvas would be quite as valuable. I am at this moment painting two dear little peasant folk whose people flatter me by being delighted. I think that I must really speak to your mother, child, about painting you,” she said.
At that I stole a glance at Pelleas and surprised him at the same pastime. And in that moment I do not think that either the history or the taste of the portrait greatly occupied us; for neither of us could pass with serenity the idea of the sittings. Together, mornings, in that still, sun-flooded studio. What joy for those other lovers. In those days one had only to mention an impossibly romantic situation for Pelleas and me to live it out in imagination to its minutest joy.
“Of course she will not consent,” Miss Deborah added philosophically, “so if I were you I would have another crumpet. My crumpets are considerably better than my portraits. And my cook does the crumpets.”
She leaned forward in her low chair, and Pelleas and I looked at her in a kind of awe. She was like mother’s Sweet-william that never would blossom in the seed-book colours but came out unexpectedly in the most amazing variegations. She sat with one long, slim hand propping her face, a face attenuated, whimsical in line, with full red mouth and eyes that never bothered with what went on before them so long as this did not obstruct their view.
“What do you think of that picture above your heads?” she asked.
We looked, glad to be set at our ease. Then Pelleas and I turned to each other in delicious trepidation. For there on the wall of Miss Deborah’s studio was a picture of the very garden that we two had meant to find. We recognized it at once—our garden, where Pelleas had said the Spring lane would lead between the hedgerows and where the shadows would fall differently and the echoes be long drawn to music.
I cannot tell what there may have been about that picture so to move us, and to this day I do not know what place it strove to show. But, O, I remember the green of it, the tender, early green, the half-evident boughs of indeterminate bloom, the sense of freshness, of sweet surprise at some meaning of the year, the well, the shrine, the shepherd with his pipes, the incommunicable spirit of rhythm and of echo....
“Do you like it?” asked Miss Deborah smiling, and I was abashed to find my eyes filled with tears.
“I think that this,” Pelleas answered quaintly, “will be the soul of Spring, Miss Deborah; and the outdoors this morning will be the body.”
“I dare say,” said Miss Deborah, nodding; “though I fancy more things are souls than we give them credit for,” she added.
Miss Deborah looked at us, her chin in her hand. And after a moment to our great amazement she said:—
“I shall give you this picture for a wedding gift, I think. And I tell you now so that if you are tempted to break the engagement you will think twice. Is it a picture that you want to live with?”
It was not only a picture that we wanted to live with; it was a picture whose spell would be eternal. And “Did you paint it, Miss Deborah?” we asked in our simplicity.
Miss Deborah shook her head and named a great name, then just beginning to be reverenced.
“He paints pictures better than his cook makes crumpets,” she said, “and the quality is not usual. Spend the day with me,” she added abruptly. “I would like you to see the little lovers who are sitting for my ‘Betrothed.’ I will send a message to your mother, Etarre. Sit there while I work. I like to think of you there.”
Whereupon she went off to her easel before the north light, and Pelleas and I sat in the quiet room with our Wonderful Picture and talked of it.
“There must be such a place,” said Pelleas simply, “or he wouldn’t have painted it. He couldn’t, you know. There must be a place a little like it.”
“Yes, a little like it,” I assented, “with the fountain at the gate the way you said.”
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find it?” Pelleas went on. “To come upon it quite suddenly when we didn’t know. In Etruria, or Tuscany, or Tempe.”
Yes, it would be wonderful and before all things wonderful.
“We would know it at once,” he added. “We would have to know it, whatever way we came, by the well or by the path or by the shrine.”
Yes, we agreed, we would have to know it. What wonder to step together over that green with the rhythm and echo of the pipes to lure us to the way. If once we found it we would never leave it, we settled that, too. For this was the week of our betrothal, and it did not occur to us that one must seek more than gardens. So we talked, and in the mists of our happy fancy Pelleas suddenly set a reality that made our hearts beat more joyously than for their dreams.
“Think, dear,” he said, “this picture will hang in our home.”
It would—it would. We looked at it with new eyes. In our home.
Eventually Miss Deborah Ware came back, one hand in the pocket of her ticking apron.
“You two make me think of that picture,” she said. “That is why I have given it to you, I believe. It is such a kind of heaven-and-earth place, with the upper air to breathe, and what little ballast there is would be flowers and pipes of Pan. But I don’t find fault with that. Personally I believe that is the only air there is, and I’m certain it’s the only proper ballast. You recognize the place in the picture, don’t you?”
We looked at each other in some alarm at the idea of being told; but we ought to have trusted Miss Deborah.
“‘A fountain of gardens,’” she quoted, “‘a well of living waters and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices may flow out.’ I don’t know if that is what he meant,” she added, “but that is what he painted. ‘Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south,’ is undoubtedly what that shepherd is piping. Come to luncheon. Perhaps we shall find goat’s-milk cheese and Bibline wine and pure white honey. In case we do not, would steamed clams do?”
“Miss Deborah,” said Pelleas, as we followed her down the studio, “we mean to go to that garden, the real garden, you know. We’ve been saying so now.”
In the studio door she turned and faced us, nodding her understanding.
“Go there,” she said. “But whether you ever go to the real garden or not, mind you live in this one. And one thing more: Mind you pay your entrance fee,” she said.
At this, remembering as I do how our world was stuff of dreams, I think that we both must have looked a bit bewildered. Entrance fee. What had our fountain of gardens to do with an entrance fee?
“You don’t know what that means?” she said. “I thought as much. Then I think I must ask you to promise me something.”
She went across the hall to the dining-room, and we followed wondering.
“Just you keep the picture,” said Miss Deborah Ware, “until it will make some one else happier than it makes you. And then give it away. Will you remember? Do you get the idea of the entrance fee to the garden? And you promise? It’s just as I thought—we’ve steamed clams instead of ambrosia. Are you sorry you stopped?”
It was a very merry luncheon. I remember chiefly the epergne of clematis, and the border of the wall paper done in crocuses, and the sun flooding through leaded glass. Those were the days when an epergne of clematis and a border of crocuses and the like seemed to me to be inclusive of the law and the prophets, and I felt a luxury of pity for every one who had not this special grace of understanding. I think that I even felt a little stir of pity for Miss Deborah Ware. Yes, I decided, Miss Deborah was like mother’s Sweet-william that would not blossom in the colours of the seed catalogue but showed forth amazing hues of its own. Such as that entrance fee to Arcady.
We lingered at table until Miss Deborah’s two models were announced—the two who were sitting for her “Betrothed.”
“They are adorable little people,” she said. “You must see them before you go. They make me think of ripe apples and robin redbreasts and mornings in the country. Even if it were not so I would like them for their shyness. The little maid—her name is Mitty Greaves—is in the prettiest panic every time I look at her; and Joel, the young lover, actually blushes when the clock strikes.”
She went away to the studio and Pelleas and I looked at each other in sudden abashment to find ourselves together, taking our coffee alone. It might have been our own table in a land of clematis, beside our very fountain of gardens itself. Pelleas stretched his hand across the table for mine, and we lingered there in magnificent disregard of coffee until the sun slanted away and the sweet drowsiness of the afternoon was in the garden. Then we wandered back to the studio and sat in the window-seat opposite our Wonderful Picture and in murmurs disposed for all time, as we thought, of that extraordinary promise which Miss Deborah had demanded.
“This picture,” Pelleas said solemnly, “never could make anybody so happy as it makes us. For it is our garden that we planned in the lane this morning.... The picture will always bring back this morning to us, Etarre. It is our garden. It couldn’t be the same to any one else.”
“If we were to give it to any one, Pelleas,” I recall saying, “it must be to some one who would understand what the garden means better than we.”
“Yes,” he assented; “some one who walks there all day long. Some one who ‘walks in beauty’ all the time.”
Thereafter we fancied ourselves standing by the shrine and looking in the well, and we saw our dreams take shape in the nebulous fall of the fountain. Of our betrothal week it seems to me that that hour is sweetest to recall when I sat throned in the window-seat in my gown of roses, and Pelleas at my feet talked of our life to be. I think that there came to us from the wall the sound of the piping in our garden. Perhaps, although we had not then seen their faces, the mere presence of those other lovers was a part of our delight.
Presently Miss Deborah Ware pushed aside the curtain in the far end of the studio.
“Now they are going to rest for a little,” she said, “and I must go down to the kitchen. But you may go about, anywhere you like.”
It fell so silent in the studio that Pelleas and I fancied those other lovers to have gone out through the glass doors into the garden. And when Pelleas proposed that we go to the north window and look away over the valley I think that we must have believed ourselves to be alone in the studio. At all events I recall that as we went up the room, lingering before a cast or a sketch or a bit of brass, Pelleas had slipped his arm about me; and his arm was still about me when we stood before the north window and he said:—
“Etarre—have you thought of something? Have you thought that some day we shall stand before the picture of our garden when we are old?”
This was a surprising reflection and we stood looking in each other’s eyes trying to fathom the mystery which we have not fathomed yet, for even now we go wondering how it can be that we, who were we, are yet not we; and still the love, the love persists. I know of nothing more wonderful in the world than that.
But to youth this thought brings an inevitable question:—
“Will you love me then as much as you love me now?” I asked inevitably; and when Pelleas had answered with the unavoidable “More,” I dare say that I promptly rebuked him with youth’s “But could you love me more?” And I am certain that he must have answered with the usual divine logic of “No, sweetheart.”
By which it will be seen that a May day in Eighteen Hundred and Forty-five was as modern as love itself.
Then for no reason at all we looked toward the west window; and there in the embrasure across the width of the great room were standing Mitty Greaves and Joel, Miss Deborah’s little lover-models, and both Mitty’s hands were crushed in Joel’s hands and he was looking into her lifted eyes as if he were settling for all time some such question as had just been gladdening us.
They did not see us. And as swiftly as if we had been the guilty ones, as indeed we were, we stole back to the other end of the studio, breathless with our secret. We felt such fellowship with all the world and particularly the world of lovers that so to have surprised them was, in a manner, a kind of delicious justification of ourselves. It was like having met ourselves in another world where the heavenly principle which we already knew maintained with a heavenly persistence.
“I dare say,” murmured Pelleas joyously, “I dare say that they think they love each other as much as we do.”
We were sitting in the window-seat, a little awed by our sudden sense of being sharers in such a universal secret, when Miss Deborah came back and forthwith summoned us all before the open fire. She had brought a great plate of home-made candy, thick with nuts.
“Mitty and Joel,” she said leisurely, “shall I tell you a secret? You are not the only ones who are in love. For these two friends here are like to be married before you are.”
Dear little Mitty in her starched white muslin frock—I can see her now, how she blushed and lifted her shy eyes. Mitty was the daughter of a laundress in the Low Grounds and I remember the scrupulous purity of her white, threadbare gown. Miss Deborah had told us that her very hair looked ironed and that it had long been her opinion that her mother starched her flaxen braids. And Joel, in his open-throated blue blouse, could no more have kept the adoration from his eyes when he looked at Mitty than he could have kept his shifting brown hands quiet on his knees. They belonged to the little wild-bird people, a variety that I have since come to love and to seek out.
“And why,” Pelleas asked then, “are we likely to be married first? For I’m afraid we have a whole year to wait.”
I recall that Miss Deborah tried to turn aside that question by asking us quickly how we had been amusing ourselves; and when Pelleas told her that we had been sitting before our Wonderful Picture she talked about the picture almost as if she wished to keep us silent.
“Up at the Governor’s house,” said Miss Deborah, “they have wanted for years to buy it. The Governor saw it when I had it in town. But the picture is yours now, for all that. Don’t you think that is a pretty picture, Mitty?” she asked.
At this little Mitty looked up, proud and pleased to be appealed to, and turned shyly to our Wonderful Picture—the picture that gave Pelleas and me a new sense of happiness whenever we looked at it; and she said with an hesitation that was like another grace:—
“Yes’m. It’s the loveliest green, all over it. It’s the colour of the moss on the roof of our woodshed.”
Ah, poor little Mitty, I remember thinking almost passionately. Why was it that she was shut out from the kind of joy that came to Pelleas and me in our picture? It was as if their love were indeed of another world, in another sense than we had thought. For this picture that had opened a kind of paradise to us was to these other lovers merely suggestive of Mitty’s woodshed roof down in the Low Grounds.
“Shall you be married by the autumn?” Pelleas asked of them then somewhat hurriedly.
And at that Miss Deborah fell silent as if she had done her best to make us understand; and Mitty answered him.
“Oh, no, sir,” she said hesitatingly. “You see, it’s Joel’s father—he’s hurt in the woods—a tree fell on him—he can’t ever work no more, they think. And so Joel’s got the family for a while.”
“Joel’s got the family for a while.” We knew what that meant, even before Pelleas’ sympathetic questioning brought out the fact that six were dependent on him, boy that he was, with his own right to toil. He talked bravely, even buoyantly, of his prospects on his pittance at the mill. And little Mitty listened and looked up at him adoringly and faced with perfect courage the prospect of those years of loneliness and waiting. As I heard them talk and as their plans unfolded shyly in the warmth of our eager interest, I think there came to me for the first time the sad wondering that must come upon us all: How should it be that Pelleas and I had so much and they so little? how should it be that to us there were the Spring lanes, the May roses, the fountain of gardens—and to them the burden of the day?
To us the fountain of gardens. The thought was as poignant as a summons. Ay, to us the joy of the garden, the possession of its beauty; and why then, since we possessed its spirit, should the mere magic of the canvas be ours? We could part with that and by no means lose our garden, for the garden would be ours always. But the value that the world would set upon the picture itself, the value that they would set upon it at the Governor’s house where were walls of rare canvas and curio—was this what Miss Deborah had meant, I wondered? Here on the day that we had received it were there come two to whom Miss Deborah’s gift would give greater happiness than to us?
I looked at Pelleas and I think that in that moment was worked our first miracle of understanding, and to this day we do not know to whom the wish came first. But Pelleas smiled and I nodded a little and he knew and he turned to Miss Deborah; and I leaned toward Mitty and spoke most incoherently I fear, to keep her attention from what Miss Deborah should say. But for all that I heard perfectly:—
“Would it be enough?” Miss Deborah repeated. “Dear boy, the picture would keep the whole family like kings for a year. Since you ask me, you know.”
And Pelleas turned to me with a barely perceptible—
“Shall we, Etarre?”
And I made him know that it was what I would have above all other things, if Miss Deborah was willing. And as for Miss Deborah, she leaned back in her low chair, her eyes shining and a little pink spot on either cheek, and she said only:—
“I told you! I tell everybody! It’s you heaven-and-earth kind of people with a ballast of flowers that know more about your entrance fee to the garden than anybody else.”
We wondered afterward what she could have meant; for of course there could be no question of our having paid an entrance fee to our garden in the sense that she had intended, since what we were proposing to do was to us no payment of a debt or a fee, but instead a great happiness to us both.
“Are you sure, Miss Deborah, that they want it for the Governor’s house now?” Pelleas asked in sudden anxiety.
“They were here again yesterday to ask me,” Miss Deborah assured us; and I think there was a certain radiance in her face.
So Miss Deborah told Mitty and Joel—dear little maid, dear honest young lover; shall I ever forget the look in their eyes when they knew? And, remembering, I am smitten with a kind of wonderment at the immortality of the look of happiness in another’s eyes. For many and many a time when Pelleas and I have been stepping through some way of shadow we have, I know, recalled the look on those luminous young faces; and we have said to each other that life can never be wholly shadowed or wholly barren while there remain in the world wistful faces to whom one may bring that look. It is so easy to make eyes brighten, as I hope every one in the world knows.
And so our fountain of gardens tossed up such a rainbow as the happiness of Mitty and Joel—Mitty with the starched flaxen braids and Joel with the brown shining face to whom the picture had suggested only the green of a woodshed roof. Pelleas and I had quite forgotten that we had meant to give the picture to some one who should understand the garden better than we—one who should “walk in beauty.” Something of the significance of this stirred vaguely in our thought even then; but I think that we have since come to regard this change of purpose as holding one of the meanings of life.
Mitty and Joel left Miss Deborah’s house just before us, and Pelleas and I lingered for a moment in her doorway.
“That young artist,” said Miss Deborah, “who paints pictures better than his cook makes crumpets—I shall write to him to-night. I shall tell him that even if he never paints another picture he will not have been an artist in vain.” She leaned toward us, smiling and nodding a little. “There will be other entrance fees,” she said; “watch for them.”
We went up the twilight lane that led between the Governor’s treasure-house of canvas and curio and the thatched cots of the Low Grounds. Save for the shadowy figures of Mitty and Joel walking before us, and waving their hands at the lane’s turning, nothing was changed since the morning. Yet now the spirit of the place lived not only in its spell of bloom but it lived also in us. Some door had been opened and we had entered.
When we reached the upper meadow, Pelleas suddenly caught my hand.
“Ah, look—look, Etarre!” he cried.
In the dimness the meadow lay, all of tender, early green, like that of our Wonderful Picture, with half-evident boughs of indeterminate bloom pleasant with freshness and with sweet surprise at some meaning of the year.
“Pelleas,” I said, “I think, if we look, the well and the shepherd with his pipes will be over there.”
“And the shrine,” Pelleas said.
We stood at the stile, and it seemed to us that the dusk had shaped itself to be our garden at whose gate, when one has entered, a fountain will spring so that, as Pelleas had said, “no one can get out—ever.” At the last we looked long in each other’s eyes. And I think that we read there the secret of the garden that lies not in Etruria, or Tuscany, or Tempe; and we knew its living waters and its spices and its incommunicable spirit of rhythm and of echo.