How We Came Into The Garden

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Title:     How We Came Into The Garden
Author: Mildred Aldrich [More Titles by Aldrich]

It was by a strange irony of Fate that we found ourselves reunited for a summer's outing, in a French garden, in July, 1914.

With the exception of the Youngster, we had hardly met since the days of our youth.

We were a party of unattached people, six men, two women, your humble servant, and the Youngster, who was an outsider.

With the exception of the latter, we had all gone to school or college or dancing class together, and kept up a sort of superficial acquaintance ever since--that sort of relation in which people know something of one another's opinions and absolutely nothing of one another's real lives.

There was the Doctor, who had studied long in Germany, and become an authority on mental diseases, developed a distaste for therapeutics, and a passion for research and the laboratory. There was the Lawyer, who knew international law as he knew his Greek alphabet, and hated a court room. There was the Violinist, who was known the world over in musical sets,--everywhere, except in the concert room. There was the Journalist, who had travelled into almost as many queer places as Richard Burton, seen more wars, and followed more callings. There was the Sculptor, the fame of whose greater father had almost paralyzed a pair of good modeller's hands. There was the Critic, whose friends believed that in him the world had lost a great romancer, but whom a combination of hunger and laziness, and a proneness to think that nothing not genius was worth while, had condemned to be a mere breadwinner, but a breadwinner who squeezed a lot out of life, and who fervently believed that in his next incarnation he would really be "it." Then there was "Me," and of the other two women--one was a Trained Nurse, and the other a Divorcee, and--well, none of us really knew just what she had become, but we knew that she was very rich, and very handsome, and had a leaning toward some sort of new religion. As for the Youngster--he was the son of an old chum of the Doctor--his ward, in fact--and his hobby was flying.

Our reunion, after so many years, was a rather pretty story.

In the summer of 1913, the Doctor and the Divorcee, who had lost sight of one another for twenty years, met by chance in Paris. Her ex-husband had been a college friend of the Doctor. They saw a great deal of one another in the lazy way that people who really love France, and are done sightseeing, can do.

One day it occurred to them to take a day's trip into the country, as unattached people now and then can do. They might have gone out in a car--but they chose the railroad, with a walk at the end--on the principle that no one can know and love a country who does not press its earth beneath his feet,--the Doctor would probably have said, "lay his head upon its bosom." By an accident--they missed a train--they found themselves at sunset of a beautiful day in a small village, and with no possible way of getting back to Paris that night unless they chose to walk fifteen miles to the nearest railway junction. After a long day's tramp that seemed too much of a good thing.

So they looked about to find a shelter for the night. The village--it was only a hamlet--had no hotel, no cafe, even. Finally an old peasant said that old Mother Servin--a widow--living a mile up the road--had a big house, lived alone, and could take them in,--if she wanted to,--he could not say that she would.

It seemed to them worth trying, so they started off in high spirits to tramp another mile, deciding that, if worse became worst--well--the night was warm--they could sleep by the roadside under the stars.

It was near the hour when it should have been dark--but in France at that season one can almost read out of doors until nine--when they found the place. With some delay the gate in the stone wall was opened, and they were face to face with the old widow.

It was a long argument, but the Doctor had a winning way, and at the end they were taken in,--more, they were fed in the big clean kitchen, and then each was sheltered in a huge room, with cement floor, scrupulously clean, with the quaint old furniture and the queer appointments of a French farmhouse.

The next morning, when the Doctor threw open the heavy wooden shutters to his window, he gave a whistle of delight to find himself looking out into what seemed to be a French Paradise--and better than that he had never asked.

It was a wilderness. Way off in the distance he got glimpses of broken walls with all kinds of green things creeping and climbing, and hanging on for life. Inside the walls there was a riot of flowers--hollyhocks and giroflees, dahlias and phlox, poppies and huge daisies, and roses everywhere, even climbing old tree trunks, and sprawling all over the garden front of the rambling house. The edges of the paths had green borders that told of Corbeil d'Argent in Midwinter, and violets in early spring. He leaned out and looked along the house. It was just a jumble of all sorts of buildings which had evidently been added at different times. It seemed to be on half a dozen elevations, and no two windows were of the same size, while here and there an outside staircase led up into a loft.

Once he had taken it in he dressed like a flash--he could not get out into that garden quickly enough, to pray the Widow to serve coffee under a huge tree in the centre of the garden, about the trunk of which a rude table had been built, and it was there that the Divorcee found him when she came out, simply glowing with enthusiasm--the house, the garden, the Widow, the day--everything was perfect.

While they were taking their coffee, poured from the earthen jug, in the thick old Rouen cups, the Divorcee said:

"How I'd love to own a place like this. No one would ever dream of building such a house. It has taken centuries of accumulated needs to expand it into being. If one tried to do the thing all at once it would look too on-purpose. This place looks like a happy combination of circumstances which could not help itself."

"Well, why not? It might be possible to have just this. Let's ask the Widow."

So, when they were sitting over their cigarettes, and the old woman was clearing the table, the Doctor looked her over, and considered the road of approach.

She was a rugged old woman, well on toward eighty, with a bronzed, weather-worn face, abundant coarse gray hair, a heavy shapeless figure, but a firm bearing, in spite of her rounded back. As far as they could see, they were alone on the place with her. The Doctor decided to jump right into the subject.

"Mother," he said, "I suppose you don't want to sell this place?"

The old woman eyed him a moment with her sharp dark eyes.

"But, yes, Monsieur," she replied. "I should like it very well, only it is not possible. No one would be willing to pay my price. Oh, no, no one. No, indeed."

"Well," said the Doctor, "how do you know that? What is the price?--Is it permitted to ask?"

The old woman hesitated,--started to speak--changed her mind, and turned away, muttering. "Oh, no, Monsieur,--it is not worth the trouble--no one will ever pay my price."

The Doctor jumped up, laughing, ran after her, took her by the arm, and led her back to the table.

"Now, come, come, Mother," he remarked, "let us hear the price at any rate. I am so curious."

"Well," said the Widow, "it is like this. I would like to get for it what my brother paid for it, when he bought it at the death of my father--it was to settle with the rest of the heirs--we were eight then. They are all dead but me. But no, no one will ever pay that price, so I may as well let it go to my niece. She is the last. She doesn't need it. She has land enough. The cultivator has a hard time these days. It is as much as I can do to make the old place feed me and pay the taxes, and I am getting old. But no one will ever pay the price, and what will my brother think of me when the bon Dieu calls me, if I sell it for less than he paid? As for that, I don't know what he'll say to me for selling it at all. But I am getting old to live here alone--all alone. But no one will ever pay the price. So I may as well die here, and then my brother can't blame me. But it is lonely now, and I am growing too old. Besides, I don't suppose you want to buy it. What would a gentleman do with this?"

"Well," said the Doctor, "I don't really know what a gentleman would do with it," and he added, under his breath, in English, "but I know mighty well what this fellow could do with it, if he could get it," and he lighted a fresh cigarette.

The keen old eyes had watched his face.

"I don't suppose you want to buy it?" she persisted.

"Well," responded the Doctor, "how can a poor man like me say, if you don't care to name your price, and unless that price is within reason?"

After some minutes of hesitation the old woman drew a deep breath. "Well," she said, with the determination of one who expected to be scoffed at, "I won't take a sou less than my brother paid."

"Come on, Mother," said the Doctor, "what did your brother pay? No nonsense, you know."

"Well, if you must know--it was FIVE THOUSAND FRANCS, and I can't and won't sell it for less. There, now!"

There was a long silence.

The Doctor and his companion avoided one another's eyes. After a while, he said in an undertone, in English: "By Jove, I'm going to buy it."

"No, no," remonstrated his companion, her eyes gazing down the garden vista to where the wistaria and clematis and flaming trumpet flower flaunted on the old wall. "I am going to have it--I thought of it first. I want it."

"So do I," laughed the Doctor. "Never wanted anything more in all my life."

"For how long," she asked, "would a rover like you want this?"

"Rover yourself! And you? Besides what difference does it make how long I want it--since I want it now? I want to give a party--haven't given a party since--since Class Day."

The Divorcee sighed. Still gazing down the garden she said quietly: "How well I remember--ninety-two!"

Then there was another silence before she turned to him suddenly: "See here--all this is very irregular-so, that being the case--why shouldn't we buy it together? We know each other. Neither of us will ever stay here long. One summer apiece will satisfy us, though it is lovely. Be a sport. We'll draw lots as to who is to have the first party."

The Doctor waved the old woman away. Her keen eyes watched too sharply. Then, with their elbows on the table, they had a long and heated argument. Probably there were more things touched on than the garden. Who knows? At the end of it the Divorcee walked away down that garden vista, and the old woman was called and the Doctor took her at her word. And out of that arrangement emerged the scheme which resulted in our finding ourselves, a year later, within the old walls of that French garden.

Of course a year's work had been done on the interior, and Doctor and Divorcee had scoured the department for old furniture. Water had been brought a great distance, a garage had been built with servants' quarters over it--there were no servants in the house,--but the look of the place, we were assured, had not been changed, and both Doctor and Divorcee declared that they had had the year of their lives. Well, if they had, the place showed it.

But, as Fate would have it, the second night we sat down to dinner in that garden, news had come of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand-Charles-Louis Joseph-Marie d'Autriche-Este, whom the tragic death of Prince Rudolphe, almost exactly twenty-four years and six months earlier to a day, had made Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary--and the tone of our gathering was changed. From that day the party threatened to become a little Bedlam, and the garden a rostrum.

In the earlier days it did not make so much difference. The talk was good. We were a travelled group, and what with reminiscences of people and places, and the scandal of courts, it was far from being dull. But as the days went on, and the war clouds began to gather, the overcharged air seemed to get on the nerves of the entire group, and instead of the peaceful summer we had counted upon, every one of us seemed to live in his own particular kind of fever. Every one of us, down to the Youngster, had fixed ideas, deep-set theories, and convictions as different as our characters, our lives, our callings, and our faiths. We were all Cosmopolitan Americans, but ready to spread the Eagle, if necessary, and all of us, except the Violinist, of New England extraction, which means really of English blood, and that will show when the screws are put on. We had never thought of the Violinist as not one of us, but he was really of Polish origin. His great-grandfather had been a companion of Adam Czartoriski in the uprising of 1830, and had gone to the States when the amnesty was not extended to his chief after that rebellion, Poland's last, had been stamped out.

As well as I can remember it was the night of August 6th that the first serious dispute arose. England had declared war. All our male servants had left us except two American chauffeurs, and a couple of old outside men. Two of our four cars, and all our horses but one had been requisitioned. That did not upset us. We had taken on the wives of some of the men, among them Angele, the pretty wife of one of the French chauffeurs, and her two-months-old baby into the bargain. We still had two cars, that, at a pinch, would carry the party, and we still had one mount in case of necessity.

The question arose as to whether we should break up and make for the nearest port while we could, or "stick it out." It had been finally agreed not to evacuate--yet. One does not often get such a chance to see a country at war, and we were all ardent spectators, and all unattached. I imagine not one of us had at that time any idea of being useful--the stupendousness of it all had not dawned on any of us--unless it was the Doctor.

But after the decision of "stick" had been passed unanimously, the Critic, who was a bit of a sentimentalist, and if he were anything else was a Norman Angel-lite, stuck his hands in his pockets, and remarked: "After all, it is perfectly safe to stay, especially now that England is coming in."

"You think so?" said the Doctor.

"Sure," smiled the Critic. "The Germans will never cross the French frontier this time. This is not 1870."

"Won't they, and isn't it?" replied the Doctor sharply.

"They never can get by Verdun and Belfort."

"Never said they could," remarked the Doctor, with a tone as near to a sneer as a good-natured host can allow himself. "But they'll invade fast enough. I know what I am talking about."

"You don't mean to tell me," said the Critic, "that a nation like Germany--I'm talking now about the people, the country that has been the hot bed of Socialism,--will stand for a war of invasion?"

That started the Doctor off. He flayed the theorists, the people who reasoned with their emotions and not their brains, the mob that looked at externals, and never saw the fires beneath, the throng that was unable to understand anything outside its own horizon, the mass that pretended to read the history of the world, and because it changed its clothes imagined that it had changed its spirit.

"Why, I've lived in Germany," he cried. "I was educated there. I know them. I have the misfortune to understand them. They'll stick together and Socialism go hang--as long as there is a hope of victory. The Confederation was cemented in the blood of victory. It can only be dissolved in the blood of defeat. They are a great, a well-disciplined, and an obedient people."

"One would think you admired them and their military system," remarked the Critic, a bit crest-fallen at the attack.

"I may not, but I'll tell you one sure thing if you want a good circus you've got to train your animals. The Kaiser has been a corking ringmaster."

Of course this got a laugh, and though both Critic and Journalist tried to strike fire again with words like "democracy" and "civilization," the Doctor had cooled down, and nothing could stir him again that night.

Still the discord had been sown. I suppose the dinner-table talk was only a sample of what was going on, in that month, all over the world. It did not help matters that as the days went on we all realized that the Doctor had been right--that France was to be invaded, not across her own proper frontier, but across unprotected Belgium. This seemed so atrocious to most of us that indignation could only express itself in abuse. There was not a night that the dinner-table talk was not bitter. You see the Doctor did not expect the world ever to be perfect--did not know that he wanted it to be--believed in the struggle. On the other hand the Critic, and in a certain sense the Journalist, in spite of their experiences, were more or less Utopian, and the Sculptor and the Violinist purely spectators.

No need to go into the details of the heated arguments. They were only the echo of what all the world,--that had cradled itself into the belief that a great war among the great nations had become, for economic as well as humanitarian reasons, impossible,--were, I imagine, at this time saying.

As nearly as I can remember it was on August 20th that the climax came. Liege had fallen. The English Expedition had landed, and was marching on Belgium. A victorious German army had goose-stepped into defenseless Brussels, and was sweeping out toward the French frontier. The French advance into Alsace had been a blunder.

The Doctor remarked that "the English had landed twelve days too late," and the Journalist drew a graphic, and purely imaginary, picture of the pathos of the Belgians straining their eyes in vain to the West for the coming of the men in khaki, and unfortunately he let himself expatiate a bit on German methods.

The spark touched the Doctor off.

"By Jove," he said, "all you sentimentalists read the History of the World with your intellects in your breeches pockets. War is not a game for babies. It is war--it is not sport. You chaps think war can be prevented. All I ask you is--why hasn't it been prevented? In every generation that we know anything about there have been some pretty fine men who have been of your opinion--Erasmus for one, and how many others? But since the generations have contented themselves with talking, and not talked war out of the problem, why, I can't see, for my part, that Germany's way is not as good as any. She is in to win, and so are all the rest of them. Schools of War are like the Schools of Art you chaps talk so much about--it does not make much difference what school one belongs to--the only important thing is making good."

"One would think," said the Journalist, "that you liked such a war."

"Well, I don't even know that I can deny that. I would not deliberately choose it. But I am willing to accept it, and I am not a bit sentimental about it. I am not even sure that it was not needed. The world has let the Kaiser sit twenty-five years on a throne announcing himself as 'God's anointed.' His pretensions have been treated seriously by all the democracies of the world. What for? Purely for personal gain. We have come to a pass where there is little a man won't do--for personal gain. The business of the world, and its diplomacy, have all become so complicated and corrupt that a large percentage of the brains of honest mankind are little willing to touch either. We need shaking up--all of us. If nothing can make man realize that he was not born to be merely happy and get rich, or to have a fine old time, why, such a complete upheaval as this seems to me to be necessary, and for me--if this war can rip off, with its shrapnel, the selfishness with which prosperity has encrusted the lucky: if it can explode our false values with its bombs: if it can break down our absurd pretensions with its cannon,--all I can say is that Germany will have done missionary work for the whole world--herself included."

Before he had done, we were all on our feet shouting at him, all but the Lawyer, who smiled into his coffee cup.

"Why," cried the Critic, in anger, "one would think you held a brief for them!"

"I do NOT," snapped the Doctor, "but I don't dislike them any more than I do--well," catching himself up with a laugh, "lots of other people."

"And you mean to tell me," said the gentle voice of the Divorcee at his elbow, "that you calmly face the idea of the hundreds of thousands of men,--well and strong to-day--dead to-morrow,--the thought of the mothers who have borne their sons in pain, and bred them in love, only to fling them before the cannon?"

"For what, after all, are we born?" said the Doctor. "Where we die, or when is a trifle, since die we must. But why we die and how is vital. It is not only vital to the man that goes--it is vital to the race. It is the struggle, it is the fight, which, no matter what form it takes, makes life worth living. Men struggle for money. Financiers strangle one another at the Bourse. People look on and applaud, in spite of themselves. That is exciting. It is not uplifting. But for men just like you and me to march out to face death for an idea, for honor, for duty, that very fact ennobles the race."

"Ah," said the Lawyer, "I see. The Doctor enjoys the drama of life, but he does not enjoy the purely domestic drama."

"And out of all this," said the Trained Nurse, in her level voice, "you are leaving the Almighty. He gave us a world full of beauty, full of work, full of interest, and he gave us capacities to enjoy it, and endowed us with emotions which make it worth while to live and to die. He gave us simple laws--they are clear enough--they mark sharply the line between good and evil. He left us absolutely free to choose. And behold what man has made of it!"

"I deny the statement," said the Doctor.

"That's easy," laughed the Journalist.

"I believe," said the Doctor, impatiently, "that no good comes but through evil. Read your Bible."

"I don't want to read it with your eyes," replied the Journalist, and marched testily down the path toward the house.

"Well," snapped the Doctor, "if I read it with yours, I should call on the Almighty to smite this planet with his fires and send us spinning, a flaming brand through space, to annihilation--the great scheme would seem to me a failure--but I don't believe it is." And off he marched in the other direction.

The Lawyer shrugged his shoulders, and suppressed, as well as he could, a smile. The Youngster, leaning his elbows on his knees, recited under his breath:

"And as he sat, all suddenly there rolled,
From where the woman wept upon the sod,
Satan's deep voice, 'Oh Thou unhappy God.'"

"Exactly," said the Lawyer.

"What's that?" asked the Violinist.

"Only the last three lines of a great little poem by a little great Irishman named Stephens--entitled 'What Satan Said.'"

"After all," said the Lawyer, "the Doctor is probably right. It all depends on one's point of view."

"And one's temperament," said the Violinist.

"And one's education," said the Critic.

Just here the Doctor came back,--and he came back his smiling self. He made a dash down the path to where the Journalist was evidently sulking, went up behind him, threw an arm over his shoulder, and led him back into the circle.

"See here," he said, "you are all my guests. I am unreasonably fond of you, even if we can't see Life from the same point of view. Man as an individual, and Man as a part of the Scheme are two different things. I asked you down here to enjoy yourselves, not to argue. I apologize--all my fault--unpardonable of me. Come now--we have decided to stay as long as we can--we are all interested. It is not every generation that has the honor to sit by, and watch two systems meet at the crossroads and dispute the passage to the Future. We'll agree not to discuss the ethics of the matter again. If the men marching out there to the frontier can agree to face the cannon--and there are as many opinions there as here--surely we can look on in silence."

And on that agreement we all went to bed.

But on the following day, as we sat in the garden after dinner, our attempts to "keep off the grass" were miserably visible. They cast a constraint on the party. Every topic seemed to lead to the forbidden enclosure. It was at a very critical moment that the Sculptor, sitting cross-legged on a bench, in a real Alma Tadema attitude, filled the dangerous pause with:

"It was in the days of our Lord 1348 that there happened in Florence, the finest city in Italy--"

And the Violinist, who was leaning against a tree, touched an imaginary mandolin, concluding: "A most terrible plague."

The Critic leaped to his feet.

"A corking idea," he cried.

"Mine, mine own," replied the Sculptor. "I propose that what those who, in the days of the terrible plague, took refuge at the Villa Palmieri, did to pass away the time, we, who are watching the war approach--as our host says it will--do here. Let us, instead of disputing, each tell a story after dinner--to calm our nerves,--or otherwise."

At first every one hooted.

"I could never tell a story," objected the Divorcee.

"Of course you can," declared the Journalist. "Everybody in the world has one story to tell."

"Sure," exclaimed the Lawyer. "No embargo on subjects?"

"I don't know," smiled the Doctor. "There is always the Youngster."

"You go to blazes," was the Youngster's response, and he added: "No war stories. Draw that line."

"Then," laughed the Doctor, "let's make it tales of our own, our native land." And there the matter rested. Only, when we separated that night, each of us carried a sealed envelope containing a numbered slip, which decided the question of precedence, and it was agreed that no one but the story-teller should know who was to be the evening's entertainer, until story-telling hour arrived with the coffee and cigarettes.

[The end]
Mildred Aldrich's short story: How We Came Into The Garden

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