Aunt Jane of Kentucky Part 13

"They said the gyirls stopped laughin' and jest looked at each other, and one of 'em said:

"'Well, did you ever?' And that was the last time they tried to tease Elbert. But Elbert's brother he turns to somebody standin' near him, and says he, 'Unless Elbert gets that "right-woman" foolishness out of his head and marries and settles down like other men, I believe he'll end his days in a lunatic asylum.'

"But it all turned out the way Elbert said it would. The minute he saw Mary Andrews, he whispered to his sister-in-law, and says he, 'Sister Mary, do you see that dark-eyed woman over there by the door? Well, that's the woman I've been lookin' for all my life.'

"He walked across the room and got introduced to her, and they said when him and Mary shook hands they looked each other in the eyes and laughed like two old friends that hadn't met for years.

"Harvey hadn't been dead much over a year and Mary wanted to put off the weddin'. But Elbert said, 'No; I've waited for you a lifetime and I'm not goin' to wait any longer.' So they got married as soon as Mary could have her weddin' clothes made, and a happier couple you never saw. Elbert used to look at her and say:

"'G.o.d made Eve for Adam, and he made you for me.'

"And he didn't only love Mary, but he loved her children the same as if they'd been his own. A woman that's been another man's wife can easy enough find a man to love her, but to find one that'll love the other man's children, that's a different matter."

One! two! three! four! chimed the old clock; and at the same moment out came the sun, sending long rays across the room. The rain had subsided to a gentle mist, and the clouds were rolling away before a south-west wind that carried with it fragrance from wet flowers and leaves and a world cleansed and renewed by a summer storm. We moved our chairs out on the porch to enjoy the clearing-off. There were health and strength in every breath of the cool, moist air, and for every sense but one a pleasure--odor, light, coolness, and the faint music of falling water from the roof and from the trees that sent down miniature showers whenever the wind stirred their branches.

Aunt Jane drew a deep breath of satisfaction, and looked upward at the blue sky.

"I don't mind how much it rains durin' the day," she said, "if it'll jest stop off before night and let the sun set clear. And that's the way with life, child. If everything ends right, we can forget all about the troubles we've had before. I reckon if Mary Andrews could 'a' seen a few years ahead while she was havin' her trials with pore Harvey, she would 'a' borne 'em all with a better grace. But lookin'

ahead is somethin' we ain't permitted to do. We've jest got to stand up under the present and trust for the time we can't see. And whether we trust or not, child, no matter how dark it is nor how long it stays dark, the sun's goin' to come out some time, and it's all goin' to be right at the last. You know what the Scripture says, 'At evening time it shall be light!'"

Her faded eyes were turned reverently toward the glory of the western sky, but the light on her face was not all of the setting sun.

"At evening time it shall be light!"

Not of the day but of human life were these words spoken, and with Aunt Jane the prophecy had been fulfilled.

IX

THE GARDENS OF MEMORY

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Each of us has his own way of cla.s.sifying humanity. To me, as a child, men and women fell naturally into two great divisions: those who had gardens and those who had only houses.

Brick walls and pavements hemmed me in and robbed me of one of my birthrights; and to the fancy of childhood a garden was a paradise, and the people who had gardens were happy Adams and Eves walking in a golden mist of suns.h.i.+ne and showers, with green leaves and blue sky overhead, and blossoms springing at their feet; while those others, dispossessed of life's springs, summers, and autumns, appeared darkly entombed in shops and parlors where the year might as well have been a perpetual winter.

As I grew older I learned that there was a small subcla.s.s composed of people who not only possessed gardens, but whose gardens possessed them, and it is the spots sown and tended by these that blossom eternally in one's remembrance as veritable vailimas--"gardens of dreams."

In every one's mind there is a lonely s.p.a.ce, almost abandoned of consciousness, the time between infancy and childhood. It is like that period when the earth was "without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." Here, like lost stars floating in the firmament of mind, will be found two or three faint memories, remote and disconnected. With me one of these memories is of a garden. I was riding with my father along a pleasant country road. There were suns.h.i.+ne and a gentle wind, and white clouds in a blue sky. We stopped at a gate. My father opened it, and I walked up a gra.s.sy path to the ruins of a house. The chimney was still standing, but all the rest was a heap of blackened, half-burned rubbish which spring and summer were covering with wild vines and weeds, and around the ruins of the house lay the ruins of the garden. The honeysuckle, bereft of its trellis, wandered helplessly over the ground, and amid a rank growth of weeds sprang a host of yellow snapdragons. I remember the feeling of rapture that was mine at the thought that I had found a garden where flowers could be gathered without asking permission of any one. And as long as I live, the sight of a yellow snapdragon on a sunny day will bring back my father from his grave and make me a little child again gathering flowers in that deserted garden, which is seemingly in another world than this.

A later memory than this is of a place that was scarcely more than a paved court lying between high brick walls. But because we children wanted a garden so much, we called it by that name; and here and there a little of Mother Earth's bosom, left uncovered, gave us some warrant for the misnomer. Yet the spot was not without its beauties, and a less exacting child might have found content within its boundaries.

Here was the Indian peach tree, whose pink blossoms told us that spring had come. Its fruit in the late summer was like the pomegranate in its rich color, "blood-tinctured with a veined humanity;" and its friendly limbs held a swing in which we cleft the air like the birds.

Yet even now the sight of an Indian peach brings melancholy thoughts.

A yellow honeysuckle clambered over a wall. But this flower has no perfume, and a honeysuckle without perfume is a base pretender, to be cast out of the family of the real sweet-scented honeysuckle. There were two roses of similar quality, one that detestable mockery known as the burr-rose. I have for this flower the feeling of repulsion that one has for certain disagreeable human beings,--people with cold, clammy hands, for instance. I hated its feeble pink color, its rough calyx, and its odor always made me think of vast fields of snow, and icicles hanging from snow-covered roofs under leaden wintry skies.

Unhappy mistake to call such a thing a rose, and plant it in a child's garden! The only place where it might fitly grow is by the side of the road that led Childe Roland to the Dark Tower: between the bit of "stubbed ground" and the marsh near to the "palsied oak," with its roots set in the "bog, clay and rubble, sand and stark black dearth."

The other rose I recall with the same dislike, though it was pleasing to the eye. The bush was tall, and had the nature of a climber; for it drooped in a lackadaisical way, and had to be tied to a stout post. I think it could have stood upright, had it chosen to do so; and its drooping seemed only an ugly habit, without grace. The cream-white flowers grew in cl.u.s.ters, and the buds were really beautiful, but color and form are only the body of the rose; the soul, the real self, is the rose odor, and no rose-soul was incarnated in its petals. Again and again, deceived by its beauty, I would hold it close to my face to breathe its fragrance, and always its faint sickening-sweet odor brought me only disappointment and disgust. It was a Lamia among roses. Another peculiarity was that it had very few thorns, and those few were small and weak. Yet the thorn is as much a part of the true rose as its sweetness; and lacking the rose thorn and the rose perfume, what claim had it to the rose name? I never saw this false rose elsewhere than in the false garden, and because it grew there, and because it dishonored its royal family, I would not willingly meet it face to face again.

We children cultivated sweet-scented geraniums in pots, but a flower in a pot was to me like a bird in a cage, and the fragrant geraniums gave me no more pleasure than did the scentless many-hued lady's-slippers that we planted in tiny borders, and the purple flowering beans and white blossoms of the madeira vines that grew on a tall trellis by the cistern's gra.s.sy mound. There was nothing here to satisfy my longing, and I turned hungrily to other gardens whose gates were open to me in those early days. In one of these was a vast bed of purple heartsease, flower of the beautiful name. Year after year they had blossomed and gone to seed till the harvest of flowers in their season was past gathering, and any child in the neighborhood was at liberty to pluck them by handfuls, while the wicked ones played at "chicken fighting" and littered the ground with decapitated bodies.

There is no heartsease nowadays, only the magnificent pansy of which it was the modest forerunner. But one little cl.u.s.ter of dark, spicy blooms like those I used to gather in that old garden would be more to me than the most splendid pansy created by the florist's art.

The lily of the valley calls to mind a garden, almost in the heart of town, where this flower went forth to possess the land and spread itself in so reckless a growth that at intervals it had to be uprooted to protect the landed rights of the rest of the community. Never were there such beds of lilies! And when they pierced the black loam with their long sheath-like leaves, and broke their alabaster boxes of perfume on the feet of spring, the most careless pa.s.ser-by was forced to stay his steps for one ecstatic moment to look and to breathe, to forget and to remember. The shadow of the owner's house lay on this garden at the morning hour, and a tall brick building intercepted its share of the afternoon suns.h.i.+ne; but the love and care of the wrinkled old woman who tended it took the place of real suns.h.i.+ne, and everything planted here grew with a luxuriance not seen in sunnier and more favored spots. The mistress of the garden, when questioned as to this, would say it was because she gave her flowers to all who asked, and the G.o.d of gardens loved the cheerful giver and blessed her with an abundance of bud and blossom. The highest philosophy of human life she used in her management of this little plant world; for, burying the weeds at the roots of the flowers, the evil was made to minister to the good; and the nettle, the plantain and all their kind were trans.m.u.ted by nature's fine chemistry into pinks, lilies, and roses.

The purple splendor of the wisteria recalls the garden that I always entered with a fearful joy, for here a French gardener reigned absolute, and the flowers might be looked at, but not pulled. How different from those wild gardens of the neighboring woods where we children roamed at will, shouting rapturously over the finding of a bed of scentless blue violets or delicate anemones that withered and were thrown away before we reached home,--an allegory, alas! of our later lives.

There was one garden that I coveted in those days as Ahab coveted his neighbor's vineyard. After many years, so many that my childish longing was almost forgotten, I had it, I and my children. Together we played under the bee-haunted lindens, and looked at the sunset through the scarlet and yellow leaves of the sugar maples, and I learned that "every desire is the prophecy of its own fulfilment;" and if the fulfilment is long delayed, it is only that it may be richer and deeper when it does come.

All these were gardens of the South; but before childhood was over I watched the quick, luxuriant growth of flowers through the brief summer of a northern clime. The Canterbury-bell, so like a prim, pretty maiden, the dahlia, that stately dame always in court costume of gorgeous velvet, remind me of those well-kept beds where not a leaf or flower was allowed to grow awry; and in one ancient garden the imagination of a child found wings for many an airy flight. The town itself bore the name of the English n.o.bleman, well known in Revolutionary days. Not far away his mansion st.u.r.dily defied the touch of time and decay, and admonished the men of a degenerate present to remember their glorious past. The house that sheltered me that summer was known in colonial days as the Black-Horse Tavern. Its walls had echoed to the tread of patriot and tory, who gathered here to drink a health to General Was.h.i.+ngton or to King George; and patriot, and tory, too, had trod the paths of the garden and plucked its flowers and its fruit in the times that tried men's souls. By the back gate grew a strawberry apple tree, and every morning the dewy gra.s.s held a night's windfall of the tiny red apples that were the reward of the child who rose earliest. A wonderful grafted tree that bore two kinds of fruit gave the place a touch of fairyland's magic, and no explanation of the process of grafting ever diminished the awe I felt when I stood under this tree and saw ripe spice apples growing on one limb and green winter pearmains on all the others. The pound sweeting, the spitzenberg, and many sister apples were there; and I stayed long enough to see them ripen into perfection. While they ripened I gathered the jewel-like cl.u.s.ters of red and white currants and a certain rare English gooseberry which English hands had brought from beyond the seas and planted here when the sign of the Black-Horse swung over the tavern door. The ordinary gooseberry is a plebeian fruit, but this one was more patrician than its name, and its name was "the King George." Twice as large as the common kind, translucent and yellowish white when fully ripe, and of an incomparable sweetness and flavor, it could have graced a king's table and held its own with the delicate strawberry or the regal grape. And then, best of all, it was a forbidden fruit, whereof we children ate by stealth, and solemnly declared that we had not eaten. Could the Garden of the Hesperides have held more charms?

At the end of the long Dutch "stoop" I found the wands of the s...o...b..rry, whose tiny flowers have the odor and color of the trailing arbutus, and whose waxen berries reminded me of the crimson "buckberry" of Southern fields. Fuchsias and dark-red clove pinks grew in a peculiarly rich and sunny spot by the back fence, and over a pot of the musk-plant I used to hang as Isabella hung over her pot of basil. I had never seen it before, and have never seen it since, but by the witchery of perfume one of its yellow flowers, one of its soft pale green leaves could place me again in that garden of the old inn, a child walking among the ghosts and memories of a past century.

In all these flowery closes there are rich aftermaths; but when Memory goes a-gleaning, she dwells longest on the evenings and mornings once spent in Aunt Jane's garden.

"I don't reckon Solomon was thinkin' about flower gyardens when he said there was a time for all things," Aunt Jane was wont to say, "but anyhow it's so. You know the Bible says that the Lord G.o.d walked in the gyarden of Eden in 'the cool of the day,' and that's the best time for seein' flowers,--the cool of the mornin' and the cool of the evenin'. There's jest as much difference between a flower with the dew on it at sun-up and a flower in the middle o' the day as there is between a woman when she's fresh from a good night's sleep and when she's cookin' a twelve-o'clock dinner in a hot kitchen. You think them poppies are mighty pretty with the sun s.h.i.+nin' on 'em, but the poppy ain't a sun flower; it's a sunrise flower."

And so I found them when I saw them in the faint light of a summer dawn, delicate and tremulous, like lovely apparitions of the night that an hour of sun will dispel. With other flowers the miracle of blossoming is performed so slowly that we have not time to watch its every stage. There is no precise moment when the rose leaves become a bud, or when the bud turns to a full-blown flower. But at dawn by a bed of poppies you may watch the birth of a flower as it slips from the calyx, casting it to the ground as a soul casts aside its outgrown body, and smoothing the wrinkles from its silken petals, it faces the day in serene beauty, though the night of death be but a few hours away.

"And some evenin' when the moon's full and there's a dew fallin',"

continued Aunt Jane, "that's the time to see roses, and to smell roses, too. And chrysanthemums, they're sundown flowers. You come into my gyarden about the first o' next November, child, some evenin' when the sun's goin' down, and you'll see the white ones lookin' like stars, and the yeller ones s.h.i.+nin' like big gold lamps in the dusk; and when the last light o' the sun strikes the red ones, they look like cups o' wine, and some of 'em turn to colors that there ain't any names for. Chrysanthemums jest match the red and yeller leaves on the trees, and the colors you see in the sky after the first frosts when the cold weather begins to set in. Yes, honey, there's a time and a season for everything; flowers, too, jest as Solomon said."

An old garden is like an old life. Who plants from youth to age writes a record of the years in leaf and blossom, and the spot becomes as sacred as old wine, old books, and old friends. Here in the garden of Aunt Jane's planting I found that flowers were also memories; that reminiscences were folded in the petals of roses and lilies; that a rose's perfume might be a voice from a vanished summer; and even the snake gliding across our path might prove a messenger bearing a story of other days. Aunt Jane made a pa.s.s at it with her hoe, and laughed as the little creature disappeared on the other side of the fence.

"I never see a striped snake," she said, "that I don't think o' Sam Amos and the time he saw snakes. It wasn't often we got a joke on Sam, but his t'u'nament and his snake kept us laughin' for many a day.

"Sam was one o' them big, blunderin' men, always givin' Milly trouble, and havin' trouble himself, jest through pure keerlessness. He meant well; and Milly used to say that if what Sam did was even half as good as what Sam intended to do, there'd be one perfect man on G.o.d's earth. One of his keerless ways was scatterin' his clothes all over the house. Milly'd scold and fuss about it, but Sam got worse instead o' better up to the day he saw the snake, and after that Milly said there wasn't a more orderly man in the state. The way of it was this: Sam was raisin' an embankment 'round one of his ponds, and Uncle Jim Matthews and Amos Crawford was helpin' him. It was one Monday mornin', about the first of April, and the weather was warm and sunny, jest the kind to bring out snakes. I reckon there never was anybody hated a snake as much as Sam did. He'd been skeered by one when he was a child, and never got over it. He used to say there was jest two things he was afraid of: Milly and a snake. That mornin' Uncle Jim and Amos got to the pond before Sam did, and Uncle Jim hollered out, 'Well, Sam, we beat you this time.' Uncle Jim never got tired tellin' what happened next. He said Sam run up the embankment with his spade, and set it in the ground and put his foot on it to push it down. The next minute he give a yell that you could 'a' heard half a mile, slung the spade over in the middle o' the pond, jumped three feet in the air, and run down the embankment yellin' and kickin' and throwin' his arms about in every direction, and at last he fell down on the ground a good distance from the pond.

"Amos and Uncle Jim was so taken by surprise at first that they jest stood still and looked. Amos says, says he: 'The man's gone crazy all at once.' Uncle Jim says: 'He's havin' a spell. His father and grandfather before him used to have them spells.'

"They run up to him and found him shakin' like a leaf, the cold sweat streamin' out of every pore, and gaspin' and sayin', 'Take it away!

Take it away!' and all the time he was throwin' out his left foot in every direction. Finally Uncle Jim grabbed hold of his foot and there was a red and black necktie stickin' out o' the leg of his pants. He pulled it out and says he: 'Why, Sam, what's your Sunday necktie doin'

up your pants leg?'

"They said Sam looked at it in a foolish sort o' way and then he fell back laughin' and cryin' at the same time, jest like a woman, and it was five minutes or more before they could stop him. Uncle Jim brought water and put on his head, and Amos fanned him with his hat, and at last they got him in such a fix that he could sit up and talk, and says he:

"'I took off my necktie last night and slung it down on a chair where my everyday pants was layin'. When I put my foot in my pants this mornin' I must 'a' carried the necktie inside, and by the time I got to the pond it'd worked down, and I thought it was a black snake with red stripes.'

"He started to git up, but his ankle was sprained, and Uncle Jim says: 'No wonder, Sam; you jumped about six feet when you saw that snake crawlin' out o' your pants leg.'

"And Sam says: 'Six feet? I know I jumped six hundred feet, Uncle Jim.'

"Well, they got him to the house and told Milly about it, and she says: 'Well, Sam, I'm too sorry for you to laugh at you like Uncle Jim, but I must say this wouldn't 'a' happened if you'd folded up that necktie and put it away in the top drawer.'

"Sam was settin' on the side of the bed rubbin' his ankle, and he give a groan and says he: 'Things has come to a fine pa.s.s in Kentucky when a sober, G.o.d-fearin' man like me has to put his necktie in the top drawer to keep from seein' snakes.'