The Garden Page 2

  Bessie pulled him gently forward.

  “Paddy-monkey! Paddy-monkey !”

  At the croon of her voice a chain rattled, and a handsome black monkey bounded out from the kennel. A second bound took him to the roof. Seeing Dermot, he pulled himself up stiffly, and stared.

  “Paddy-monkey! Here’s Master Dermot come back to see you, dear Master Dermot. Sure, you mind him well !”

  The monkey made a soft chattering sound. His eyes were fixed on Dermot.

  “Go to him now, Master Dermot. Speak to him.”

  Pushed forward, Dermot advanced to the monkey, with outstretched hand. Very gently, the monkey took hold of it in both his own hands. He looked down at it closely, smelt it, looked up with quick enquiry in Dermot’s face: then smelt his hand again, and made a little pleased noise.

  “There, you see, Master Dermot! he knows you, sure he knows you.”

  Emboldened, Dermot reached out his other hand, and began to stroke the monkey. Paddy jumped, and looked up at him sharply again. Dermot smiled, his misgiving quite gone, and went on stroking. The monkey wrinkled his nose, swung down from the apex of the roof, and lay on his back to be tickled. Dermot fell on his knees beside him, and tickled him all over his soft tummy, and under his. long arms. The monkey leaned back his head, chuckling and making ecstatic noises.

  “There now, Paddy-monkey. Your little friend come back again to play with ye. Isn’t that grand?”

  Bessie beamed down upon them. She was devoted to the monkey, and all the more delighted by his good behaviour, in that there had been much discussion before the visitors came, and wonder if the monkey’s temper could be trusted. Now, her advocacy was triumphantly justified.

  “Come on, Master Dermot, and see Pucker. Then you must go in to your tea.”

  Up the orchard they went, to a little outhouse above the second tiny cottage which served as a lair for Katie, the seamstress. Calling softly, Bessie opened the door, and out of the darkness came the pretty young cat, mewing, glad of a visit.

  “Look, till you see now, how she pucks her head, the way she always did.”

  Pucker’s name was due to the ardour of her affectionate nature. Unable to wait till the caressing hand could reach her head, she “pucked” or butted up against it, “for all the world like a little goat,” as Bessie had it.

  “Look now for the little kitten. Here—there now, Pucker, there now. Sure, we wouldn’t hurt it.”

  Dermot stooped in the gloom, and saw the tiny creature, its dark eyes open, shivering in the straw. He wanted to touch its head, but feared to frighten it. As he watched, it opened its tiny pink mouth in a soundless mew.

  “There now, Pucker, there now.”

  The young mother rubbed anxiously against Bessie’s fat arm, which was barring her way to the basket. The moment it was removed, she leaped in.

  Bessie straightened up with a maternal grunt.

  “Now then, Master Dermot. Your tea.”

  Dermot turned thankfully. He was hungry enough. The dining-room was reached with one interruption, Munny pouncing out from the nursery and insisting on washing his hands again after “that dirty animal.” He was too happy to demur.

  Once he caught sight of the big loaded table, his happiness increased. Nothing could so well express the difference between Granny’s house and his own. Not only was the china all different, the tea-pot, the jugs, the sugar-basin, the pattern on the plates: but the actual food was different. There were things one never had for tea at home. There was cream, for instance, in a little fat jug with a sky-blue rim. There was brown sugar, as well as white. And, marvel of marvels, there was Grandpapa’s place, laid for a mixture of meals so unlike anything Dermot had ever heard of, that it emphasised more than anything else the separateness and the mystery of Grandpapa, confirming his place as a legendary character. Grandpapa took his last meal of the day at six. He would start, as a rule, just after they had finished tea, for he liked to be alone and to have no fuss about him. For some reason, he would be in a state of nervousness when his meal was due, sitting down at the table, getting up again, pretending to read his newspaper, fingering his napkin, till Bessie came in. with one of his favourite hot dishes—some stewed thing, to lie light on his stomach—and set it before him, comforting and admonishing him, as though he were a child. Bessie was always very outspoken with “the Master.” She would often be heard in goodhumoured altercation with him. He grumbled, and rated her for an ignorant, superstitious woman: but he did as she told him.

  To partake of this meal, Grandpapa needed an equipment which seemed portentous. Dermot’s world was small. Anomalies on a large scale did not worry him. Either he did not notice them, or they passed easily into the land of wonder, not yet clearly separated from the land of fact: but to see knife and fork laid at a tea-table, with spoons for helping vegetables, was like the overturning of a kingdom. Even more wonderful still was Grandpapa’s moustachecup. Huge, patterned, thick, standing up solid in its wide saucer: so heavy Dermot needed his two hands to lift it: with its great bar of china at the top cutting it nearly in half, and the small hole for the drink to trickle through: it was as marvellous as any elf-king’s goblet. If he had been told that it had magic properties, and that with its aid Grandpapa could fly to the moon, he would not have been surprised.

  There it stood, the most vivid, the most magnificent of his memories, and there, in profusion upon the table, were the other pieces he so well remembered. One or two—a squat, heavy salt-cellar, for instance—he had forgotten, till this moment of seeing them again. Then, as he sat up on to his chair, he was bidden look, there, in his own place, under his nose. A tiny woollen cosy was whipped off, and there, in a fat egg-cup, stood the brownest of brown eggs, and a bone spoon to eat it with. The bone spoon was almost flat. It made an egg last beautifully long, for you could not get much on it at a time ; and, when you came to the white, fearful skill was needed, breathless feats of balancing. It was Dermot’s secret ambition to get all the white on his spoon, in a single unbroken roll. This, he saw, would be impossible in Ireland ; but he did not mind a bit. The bone spoons were enough in themselves to compensate for anything. He sat looking down, in pure happiness.

  “Is it the spoon, son? Would you like one of the other kind?”

  “No, no—please, Granny.” He coloured crimson. “I love this sort best.”

  “We have the others. (He’s not used to them, the son.) Sure, I could get you one in a second.”

  “No—please.”

  “Very well then, son.”

  Hastily he began to eat, lest the change be made. The egg was lovely, with the fingers of soft, cool bread and butter. It took ages to eat, with the beautiful bone spoon.

  Chapter III

  When Dermot heard the story of the Garden of Eden, he decided at once that it must have been just like Granny’s garden. Indeed, the two were soon confused in his mind. It was necessary for him to identify any place of which he heard with a place he actually knew. Thus his home at Plymouth and the neighbourhood round Kingstown (as it then was) became the country of Moses, Elijah, Joseph, Jack the Giant Killer, Apollyon, Eric and Russell—for Dermot had encountered Dean Farrar’s masterpiece at an earlier age than most small boys.

  Granny’s garden began with a small orchard. Just outside the back door, under the kitchen window, was a gigantic tub, full of water. Dermot sailed boats on the tub: he slipped, and got his sleeve wet, was scolded, had to come in and be changed, subjected all the while to a running fire of rebuke, which Bessie, fetched out by the commotion, would try to mitigate. Bessie, round and amiable, could be relied upon to sympathise in every misfortune. Beyond the tub, a little stone path on the right led past Paddy’s kennel and the out-of-doors lavatory to the scullery door. The main path proceeded up the orchard, past Katie’s hut, and a couple of outhouses, to the orchard wall. In the wall was a door, carefully (and quite uselessly) locked each night, which led to the garden proper.

  This garden Dermot did not know so well.
He spent much of his time this summer learning his way about it. It was very big, and there seemed no end to the marvels it contained. Flowers of every kind grew there, and vegetables. There were innumerable arches, nooks, and seats. There was a greenhouse, a sundial stand, a vast manure heap screened by sycamores and a yew hedge, and an unkept croquet lawn. By this lawn stood two antiquated and long-disused iron posts for holding a tennis net ; a swing: and a summer-house. The whole garden was a thin, uneven oblong. It sloped gently downhill, and ended in a small flat meadow. Across the top, outside the hedge enclosing the orchard, ran a wide path, part paved, part cobbled, and mostly nothing. Then came frames for cucumbers, tomatoes, and vegetable marrows. From here, four paths ran down, till you came to a wide belt of currant and gooseberry bushes. Two-thirds of the space between these paths were devoted to flowers, the rest to vegetables, with a narrow strip of grass supporting a clothes-line. On the left of the garden, level with the currant bushes, was a short yew hedge, with a rustic seat under it, and a heavy metal table, where, on very fine days, they would sit and have tea. Below this level, each of the two middle paths turned sharply off outwards, and ran into the long paths on either side, so that the whole width of the garden could be given to potatoes. Below the potatoes, a last path completed the rectangle, and then there was the lawn and meadow, with its yield of four haycocks. A thick hedge of sycamores marked off the end of the meadow from the big common field beyond, which stretched for a quarter of a mile to the red houses of Glenageary.

  Even in daylight Dermot had to get over a certain fear of the garden. If he confused it with the Garden of Eden, it was certainly after the Fall: for the beasts which roamed it were not on idyllic relations with mankind. Into the garden, from the poor districts around, from the fields and the woods, came numbers of cats, semi-wild, offspring of neglected house cats which had taken to the country in despair of getting a living. Fierce, marauding beasts they were, many of them, standing their ground and growling when they encountered the garden’s lawful owners: though they had never been known to attack anyone. Dermot had shuddered to hear of these animals, which his imagination at once promoted to be monsters of the jungle, stealthy and terrible, with glaring eyes. To make matters worse, a temporary nursemaid had the year before played a thoughtless trick upon him. One evening, he had been up with her to the top of the orchard, getting the air before he went to bed. She opened the door, and as he peeped out into the perilous land, all huge and golden in the westering sunlight, suddenly, with a laugh, she pushed him through. The great door slammed behind him, and was held fast. He was alone, shut out, in the garden of terrors. At once his horrified eyes peopled the flower beds and bushes with dark prowling forms. He set up scream after scream of terror, but from the other side of the door came only mocking laughter. Then, when his screams sharpened to too wild a note, the girl opened it hastily, and let him in. For days afterwards she and Bessie laboured to reassure him: but they had hard work. His relations, of course, never heard of the incident.

  Left to himself, therefore, Dermot did not care to go far from the house. When Mr. Caggen was working, it was different. Mr. Caggen was the gardener. He was lame—“by dint of a blow on the hip,” as Bessie explained, “and he a young man.” His handsome, saturnine face was covered, from the eyes down, in a long black beard ; he wore a battered straw hat, which age and dirt had brought to the colour of brown paper. It was very reassuring to have him in the garden. For one thing, he did not in the least mind company, and was very communicative: for another, he was master of the cats. When one of them had the hardihood to appear, he stooped, and flung a stone at it. The sight of this, and the instant flight of the cat, its quick crouching run through the potatoes, helped mightily to banish Dermot’s bogey.

  “Them animals,” said Mr. Caggen, rubbing the side of his nose with his knuckle, for his hands were all over mould, “I wanted to put down poison for them, but yeer Grandda wouldn’t suffer me.”

  “Grandpapa,” asked Dermot, later on in the same day ; “why wouldn’t you let Mr. Caggen put down poison for the cats?”

  Grandpapa turned in the path, and gravely regarded his small grandson.

  “Because, me child,” he pronounced, in his slow, precise voice, “that would be a very cruel thing to go do.”

  “Oh.”

  “The Lord” continued Grandpapa, “has in His wisdom put these animals on the earth with us. As long as they do us no injury, it is our duty to live peaceably alongside with them, as with our neighbours.”

  “Mr. Caggen”—the voice was very soft, little more than a whisper, for Dermot was in great awe of Grandpapa—“Mr. Caggen says they have the beds destroyed on him.”

  “Mr. Caggen,” replied Grandpapa, “is an ignorant poor man, and I don’t wish for you to be copying his ways of speech.”

  All the same, there was a secret understanding between Dermot and Mr. Caggen on the subject of cats, confirmed with a wink from the gardener, when one evening, as Grandpapa was giving him directions, a cat went by unmolested in full view of them.

  The little greenhouse at the top of the garden was not attractive. It was scorchingly hot, and smelled of the dried onions which lay about the shelves. But the summer-house! No words could express the delights of this place. To begin with, it was very seldom used. Its porch was stone paved with a roof of creepers, through which, here and there, one could see a tiny chink of sky. This porch was dark, rather damp, and smelt a little musty. The summer-house proper, a room with tables, chairs, and a bench round the wall, was opened in very fine weather when there were visitors to tea. Sometimes, on a wet afternoon, they would come down themselves in mackintoshes from the house, and have tea there, just for variety. It had a bulging, sagging roof of painted canvas, held up by straps of sailcloth, and thin boards, and was festooned with legends, “Welcome to Ireland,” “Cead Mil Failté,” “No Place Like Home,” duplicates of those which Bessie put up in the house for the first day of their coming. Dermot had once heard a lady visitor whisper shudderingly to her escort something about earwigs. This he took as a vile aspersion, a horrible example of adult wickedness: the sort of thing the grown-ups who didn’t go to church said in Probable Sons and in the stories Munny read him from the Sunday Magazine. He had come within an ace of repeating it indignantly to Granny, but a recent experience made him hesitate. Sitting in Granny’s little drawing-room, and suddenly realising that the cottage was far, far smaller than Mummy and Daddy’s house at home, he had informed Granny of the fact.

  “Our house is much bigger than yours, Granny. We have lots of rooms, and big stairs. Our drawing-room is twice as big as this one, Granny.”

  He had said it, not boasting, but as the giver of interesting information. Granny smiled sadly.

  “Is it, son?” she said.

  Later, in the garden, Dermot’s mother had come to him, and told him he had done a very wrong thing.

  “But I didn’t mean it that way at all,” he cried, aware of pitfalls he had never suspected. “I didn’t mean to hurt Granny’s feelings.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t, darling. Granny understands, really. You needn’t say a word——”

  But it was no use. To her private dismay, he broke away from her, rushed in wailing, and hid his face in Granny’s ample skirts.

  “Granny—I didn’t mean . . .”

  Perhaps, in the light of this dreadful experience, it might be as well to say nothing to Granny about the wicked lady’s observation.

  Chapter IV

  There were at Granny’s house a minimum of the unpleasant things which, in Dermot’s experience, had always to be done, no matter where one found oneself. One, very definitely, was a walk along the East Pier in the wind. The East Pier was perhaps three quarters of a mile long. Wide, with two roads, on different levels, it ran out at an austere right angle from the Marine Parade, past the dark wooden mailboat pier, out and out, till even it began to lose its assurance, looked for its larger brother the West Pier, saw it, and ran to mee
t it. Thus thrust out from the shore, which sloped gently upwards for a quarter of a mile or so, it was exposed to every sort of wind: and the more boisterous gusts, which it kept from the vessels in its lee, took their revenge by whooping down its promenades and harrying the luckless promenaders. They howled round the bandstand, invaded the shelters, eddied beneath the seats, and, wherever there might be a gap in the rough coping of uncut stone, they squirted through at an angle, flinging skirts into disarray, whisking unguarded boaters into the harbour. Dermot hated such winds anywhere. On the pier, they made his walk a misery. To tag along slowly beside the pram, cold and cross, with the added anguish of grit continually blown against his bare knees, whipping and stinging them: he grew to hate the pier, even though, on warm still days, it afforded so much entertainment.

  First, at the foot of it, was Mr. Hogan, a great red-faced man in a jersey, who hired out boats. Then, parallel with it, ran the mailboat pier, with the outgoing vessel at its side, one of that slender, graceful quartette, all black and dazzling white, which looked so beautiful, and were such villainous sailors. When one tired of looking at her (having deciphered her name—they were named after the four green fields of Ireland), there were scores and scores of little boats to look at, by the life-boat slip. That took one out as far as the bandstand. Beyond that was moored, almost always, an old ship of war ; not grey, like the new ones, but black and white and yellow ; the Melampus, or sometimes—a hard one to pronounce—the Call-i-o-pe. Dermot could say her name now, thanks to Grandpapa. He read it off, by the way carelessly, to Munny, every time she was in. In Horse Show Week, the harbour was full of rich men’s yachts, elegant, slender vessels all in white, with a yellow funnel and golden scroll-work on the stern. For the most part, these were drawn up on the other side of the harbour: but the biggest and loveliest of them all, the Erin, which Grandpapa declared to be “the property of Sir Thomas Lipton,” was moored near the Melampus. The only trouble was that Munny would not stop long enough for him to look at this wonderful ship, nor allow him to wait by himself, while she pushed the pram on to the walk’s end, and came back.