The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys

‘My dear Allingham,’ he wrote, ‘it is very charming of you to think of venturing into this remote corner of the world for no other reason than to renew our friendship, and I must beg of you to let as little time as possible elapse between your promise and its fulfilment. Not only do I consider your idea a delightful one, but also I venture to find it really courageous, since to look me up again, after so many years, must be to take something remarkably like a leap in the dark. Well! at all events I hope—perhaps I should say fear—that you may not discover in me any extraordinary change. Indeed, from this moment I throw myself entirely upon your mercy, plead guilty to all the charges you bring against me in your letter. It is perfectly true that in living here the life of a hermit—a hermit, I hasten to add, with a taste for the philosophy of Epicurus and Anatole France—I have not in the least fulfilled my duties as a good citizen. Doubtless I am not a good citizen. Doubtless, as you so kindly hint, I ought to have married; but I suppose even you will admit that it is now too late—too late for me to think of following your excellent example. I cannot, alas! even pretend that I want to follow it, want to forsake my wilderness. Ah, my dear fellow, I am incorrigible, and you need not expect to find in the middle-aged Graham Iddesleigh an any more satisfactory person than him you found so unsatisfactory at Oxford. Do you remember all that I used to be in the old days?—unreasonable, impractical, quite a worthless fellow! Do you ever remember the old days at all? But of course you must, or you would not have desired to renew them. For myself, you know, it is the one great privilege, the one great occupation of my life—I mean remembering. You will scarce be pleased to learn this, I suppose;—that is, unless you are, with increasing years, grown more tolerant of idleness—a weakness which I confess I do not exactly gather from your letter. But you must forgive me for this and countless other faults. Yes—I remember! Sometimes I remember too much!—remember, in other words, what never really was; what, alas! only might have been. You see, the dividing line is so apt to shift a little, grow dimmer, as the years pass.... And after all, it is only a kind of feline habit that was born in me, and that keeps me, like a cat, quiet in the sun, or before my fire, dreaming, wandering in the endless woods of Persephone. Over those woods a gentle twilight broods, and the soft shady paths wind about, meet and cross one another, and lose themselves again in cool leafy distances.

‘Nevertheless, there have been times—moments of dreadful egotism let me call them—when I have told myself, as you so flatteringly tell me, that had I been born the son of a poor man I might have done something in the world, though exactly what, I am as careful as you yourself are to leave undefined. No! I’m afraid all my gifts may be reduced to this single capacity for sitting in the sun—a capacity that is not of immense value to other people, whatever pleasure it may give to myself. I have an idea, however, that had I lived in the days of Plato, he would have employed me to sweep the walks of the Academe, or mow the grass, or do something of that kind. Possibly, even to make myself useful by illustrating the doctrine of reminiscence, like the boy in the Meno; or I might have taken care of the books.

‘This last, certainly; for I have a sneaking fondness for the very cobwebs that gather in the corners of a library. Last night I spent two or three delicious hours in looking over my own volumes, taking down one after another from the shelf, and slowly turning their leaves. Many of them, most of them in fact—for my tastes have not greatly changed—I had loved in my boyhood, and these were, I confess, the ones I lingered over longest. And, in a sense, turning their pages again in the light of this darker-risen day was like holding up a lamp to the past; and the soft, gentle dust of the dead years fell all about me, floated in the air I breathed, delicate, sweet, and sad.

‘O wondrous seed of poetry! Happy the child into whose tender soul you have dropped at his birth! May he keep until his death the innocence and the heart of a boy, and may the burden of years and the cares of the world fall lightly upon him!...’

He laid down his pen and turned toward the window, while a smile, a little sad, but singularly sweet and gentle, passed across his face.

After all!... Well, he supposed the years had fallen lightly upon him. If he took the trouble to look in the glass he must see that his hair was turning grey, that his shoulders were a little stooped, that there were lines about his mouth and eyes.... And his life?—that too, perhaps, had taken a greyish tinge.... Monotonous?... ah yes, monotonous in truth: but even now he had only to close his eyes to bring up the light—the light....

The view of the years that opened up behind him was in fact tranquil and pleasant enough; uneventful; like a broad, shady garden, an old-world, sleepy garden full of flowers still sweet and fresh. He had done little. As Allingham had pointed out (with something of the air of a man who has made a wonderful discovery), the years of his life had simply floated away from him—floated away just as in autumn dead leaves float down a river.

But there had been many things that had given him pleasure. On the whole he had been happy—happy after his fashion: and he had known, had felt, the most beautiful thing of all, ‘the ecstasy and sorrow of love....’

He looked out into the quiet evening. The garden lay before him, stretching from the window in the pale half-light. A fine misty rain had begun to fall and was slowly shutting out the world. Presently his gaze wandered back again to the room wherein he sat. It rested on dark oak carvings; on the sheen and sombreness of fine bindings; on a chipped and broken statue of a boy, in yellowish marble; and, lastly, on a modern portrait hanging above the great fireplace.

This was the only picture in the room, and the fading light had drawn most of the colour out of it, but his memory held up a lamp—a lamp of soft flame—by which he beheld the full length figure of a boy—a boy of fifteen, sixteen, slight, dark-complexioned, with delicately oval face, and long silky hair falling in a single great wave over his forehead. The features were very finely moulded; the mouth especially being quite perfect. A somewhat exotic looking youngster, extraordinarily aristocratic one imagined, even a little disdainful,—yes, that too, perhaps, despite the wonderful charm of expression.

Harold, youngest son of Aubrey Stewart Brocklehurst, Esquire. He remembered the name as he had seen it in a catalogue of the Royal Academy—how long ago? He remembered the strange conversation he had had later on with his father, when he must have laid bare his soul a little; he remembered the morning when, on coming downstairs, he had found the picture there, awaiting him.

Twenty—thirty years ago!—it seemed like yesterday. Surely his father had been very good to him! The picture, from what he had since heard of the character of Mr. Brocklehurst, had not been bought for nothing.... And Harold!...

Thus he had been when he had first met him; thus he was now; thus he would be for ever! For he would never grow old—he would be a boy always. Summer would follow summer and the fields would grow white to harvest, but Time would thread no silver in the dusk of his dark hair, nor dim his smile, nor make unshapely his shapely body.

Graham lay back in his chair and closed his eyes. He had already forgotten his unfinished letter to Allingham; he had forgotten everything—everything save the curious fantastic dream that had filled up the first part of his life—the great light—the light beyond....

How had it begun?... Had it always been?... He tried to remember....

Presently he made a movement to light a cigar. Nothing now was visible in the room save, very faintly, the broken statue, an antique version of the famous Spinario, which his father had come by, he knew not how, long ago, in one of his many wanderings through Greece. And it came suddenly into Graham’s mind that this statue was the centre from which everything had radiated; the touchstone around which his whole life had revolved. It was the beginning, then—the starting point. And yet—had it only begun with his life here? Had it not been before?... Two thousand years ago?... But the veil had descended—he could not see.

This Greek boy, at all events, had been his secret playmate throughout his childhood, the companion who had shared his numerous adventures, the companion of his dreams—day-dreams and sleeping-dreams. And his mind leapt back to the dawn of his life. He had been brought up by his father (his mother had died in giving him birth), brought up here, in this house; and until he had gone to school he had had no friend of his own age. His father had himself undertaken his education, had taught him to read Greek at an age when most boys are stumbling through the first page of their grammar, and before Graham had ever heard of either Shakespeare or Milton, he had read again and again many of the writings of Sophocles and Plato.

Given such influences—his unconventional upbringing, his ignorance of the world, his beautiful surroundings—was it a wonder that that strange faculty for dreaming with which he had been born should have been perfected—perfected until in broad daylight he would slip unconsciously from one world to the other, and gravely tell his father of marvellous happenings, fantastic adventures, which never could have taken place? Yes, there had been magic influences at work in that sleepy garden, in those broad, soft lawns and quiet trees,—a magic, above all, in the dim rich music of the sea.

For through all his childhood a subtle music had whispered like an undersong—the music of water, the music of running water, of sighing water—seeming to shape his very soul, making it pliant, graceful, gentle and pure, giving to it that gift or malady of reverie, which was itself like the endless flowing away of a stream. The noise of water had been ever in his ears. At night, if he had chanced to awaken, he had heard the low sad wash of the waves; in the daytime he had often lain for hours on the bank of a stream that flowed among the roots of water-willows by the foot of the apple-orchard,—lain there and let his thoughts run on and on with the running water, so fresh! so clear! so pure! And in the rose-garden there was an old moss-stained fountain, a fountain that sang in the sunshine, and wept in the twilight, and sobbed in the night—a fountain that murmured through the noontide to a lazy boy, whispering of the wanderings of Odysseus, and of Jason and the golden fleece—a fountain that curved up against the blue and splashed back into a basin of broad green leaves—a fountain coloured by the rainbow of romance, and brushed by the outstretched wings of Love.

Sometimes in the evenings he would sit for a while with his father on the lawn before the house, or play a game of croquet with him; and sometimes in the mornings he did his lessons there, or in the side-garden, while the scent of roses, and the low booming whisper of the bees, drifted slowly past. And whenever he looked up he would see, stretching away from him, trim dark walks, and soft green turf, and brilliant flower-beds, all very still and quiet under a yellow summer sun—he would see arches of climbing roses, dahlias with their petals opened wide to the heat, the sunlight itself, like a stream of daffodils, falling from the deep blue sky. A place to dream the sleepy hours away! a place suggestive of, leading to, that inner contemplative life, to the boy, even then, so precious! And looking at it now, in retrospect, he was conscious of a drowsy calm that had hung everywhere and over everything, hardly stirring with the faint wind; an absolute freedom from all troublous things, from all the tumult and discord of the world. Attuned to such surroundings he had grown up; on hot afternoons lying in the dark, cool, fragrant shadow of a great beech tree that grew close to the house—not reading, feeling rather than thinking, letting the impression of everything about him sink into his soul, to be afterwards an ever-present picture there, a picture of perfect beauty, of that ideal or spiritual beauty which, according to Plato, must lift one’s spirit to God—willing to live and die just there, never wandering quite so far afield even, as those dark blue hills one could see, from the upper windows, melting into the sky.

A rather sensuous boy perhaps! One, certainly, for whom the actual colour, the physical charm of life, of the visible world, meant much. A gentle boy too; warm-hearted, loving and happy, innocent and pure....

The visible world!—was it not almost sentient? From the trees and the sky, from the restless sea and the wind had emerged, at any rate, that imaginary playmate who had made his life beautiful; the messenger of Eros; the fair boy who had come to him from his strange garden, his meadow of asphodel.

And then—he had gone to school.

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