XIV
FROM MY PORTFOLIO

He has just reached his eightieth year. Eighty times—not conscious perhaps of them all—he has seen the wall-flowers blossom in his old garden; well-nigh eighty times has he thinned out his lettuces and his spring onions, pruned his few rose trees, weeded his gravel paths.

Now he is bent with rheumatism; his rounded back and stooping head, his tremulous knees in their old corduroy breeches, are but sorry promises of what he was. Yet with what I have been told and what I can easily imagine, it is plainly that I can see the fine stalwart fellow he has been. Until the age of seventy-two he was the carrier for our village. How many journeys he made, fair weather or foul, always up to the stroke of time, never forgetting the message for this person, the purchase for that, they will all tell you here in the village. I know nothing of his life as a carrier. It is of an old man I give you my picture—an old man awaiting the coming of death with a clear eye and a sturdy heart, enjoying the last moments of life while he may, and facing those sorrows and deprivations which come with old age in a way that many a younger man might learn and profit from.

Only a short time since, his wife departed upon her last journey. The winter came and snatched her from him just as the first frost nips the last of the autumn flowers. Her frail white petals drooped and then they fell. He was left to press them between the leaves of that book of Life which, with trembling fingers, he still clutched within his hand.

He was too ill to follow her body to its quiet little bed in that corner of God’s acre where it was made; but I can feel the loneliness in the heart of him when he turned and turned with wakeful eyes that night, stretching out his knotted fingers to the empty place beside him—the place in that bed which had been hers for so many happy years and was hers no longer.

They thought he would never pull through that winter after his loss; and indeed he must have fought manfully with that undaunted courage of a man who clings to life, no matter what misfortune, because it is his right—his heritage. For imagine the long, sleepless nights which must have followed the departure of his gentle bed-fellow! Think of those weary, endless silences which once had been filled by the whisperings of their voices! For in bed and at night-time, the old people always whisper. It is as though they were deeply conscious of the invisible presence of God and His angels. They talk in hushed voices as though they were in church.

I can hear her saying—

“John.”

“Yes,” I can hear him reply.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes—are you?”

“I am. Isn’t it a windy night?”

“’Tis a fine storm—and I never put in they pea-sticks. I was going to do ’en to-morrow.”

And then I can hear her little whisper of consolation—

“Maybe they’ll be safe till then. They’re sturdy plants.” At which I can see him turning over in his bed and passing into one of those short hours of sleep into which Nature so gently divides the night for the old people.

Then think of the long and weary silences through which he must have endured before he grew accustomed to the absence of his bed-fellow. For there seem to me few things more pathetic yet more beautiful than two old people who have long passed the passions of youth, sharing their bed together, with the simplicity and innocence of little children. I can, too, so readily conceive how dread the terror of the night becomes when one of them is taken and the other left. I can hear the sounds at night that frighten, the storms that rattle the tiles on the old roof making the one who is left behind stretch out his groping hand for the trembling touch of another hand in vain.

Yet through all this he survived. Cruelly though his heart had been dealt with, he still retained the whole spirit of courage in his soul. With all its chill winds and bitter frosts, he braved out that winter and two years have passed now since his wife died.

I see him nearly every day in his garden, walking up and down the paths, picking out a weed here, a weed there. Two walking-sticks he has to help him on his journeys. They are called simply, number one and number two. And when it is a fine morning, with the sun riding fiercely in a cloudless sky, his daughter will say to him—

“You need only take number one to-day.”

So he takes number one and a look comes into those child’s eyes of his as though he would say—

“Ah—you see I’m not done for yet. There’s many an old fellow of eighty can’t get along without two sticks to help him.”

One day, too, this summer, I found him working with a bill-hook in his garden. The grass had grown up high under the quick-set hedge on one of the paths. He was clearing it all away.

“Must keep the little place tidy, sir,” he said, with a bright twinkle in his eye. “They grasses do grow up so quick there’d be no seeing the path at all.” Then with little suppressed grunts of his breath to every swing of the bill-hook, he went on steadily with his work, leaning heavily upon number one with the other hand.

Rather strenuous labour you would think for an old man of eighty to be doing. But as he worked, I saw that all the stems of the grass had been cut for him beforehand with a scythe. He was only sweeping it together into heaps with the aid of a bill-hook. So long as it was a bill-hook it seemed man’s labour to him.

I try sometimes to find out what he thinks about life and its swiftly approaching end. But he is very reticent to speak of it—so unlike our little serving-maid, who takes her evenings out alone, and when I asked her why she did not prefer company, replied—

“I like to think, sir.”

“What of?” said I.

“Of life and the night,” said she.

But if he thinks of life and the night, as indeed I am sure he must, he tells his thoughts to no one. It was only once, when I was praising the scent and the show of his glorious wall-flowers, that he said to me—

“I like to think they’re the best this year that I’ve ever had. I grow them all from our own seed, sir. I save it up myself every year. And I like to think this year that they’re the very best, because you know, sir, I may not see them again.”

I tried to imagine what would be the state of my own mind, if I thought I should never see wall-flowers again. I wondered could I say it with such courage, such resignation as he.

To never see wall-flowers again! It seems in a nonsensical, childish way to me to sum up the whole tragedy—if tragedy there really be—in Death. It seems, moreover, to give just that little stroke of the brush, that little line of the pen in completion of this thumb-nail portrait of mine. An old man in an old garden that he loves, telling himself that his wall-flowers are the best that year of all—telling himself bravely night after night when he goes to bed, morning after morning when he rises to the new day—which is one more day nearer the end—telling himself that they are the best this year of all, because he may not see them any more.

To never see wall-flowers again!