Summer in a Garden by Charles Dudley Warner (top non fiction books of all time .TXT) 📖

The chances are, that he would have escaped away with his pockets full, and jibed at me from a safe distance. And, if I had got my hands on him, I should have been still more embarrassed. If I had flogged him, he would have got over it a good deal sooner than I should. That sort of boy does not mind castigation any more than he does tearing his trousers in the briers. If I had treated him with kindness, and conciliated him with grapes, showing him the enormity of his offense, I suppose he would have come the next night, and taken the remainder of the grapes. The truth is, that the public morality is lax on the subject of fruit. If anybody puts arsenic or gunpowder into his watermelons, he is universally denounced as a stingy old murderer by the community. A great many people regard growing fruit as lawful prey, who would not think of breaking into your cellar to take it. I found a man once in my raspberry-bushes, early in the season, when we were waiting for a dishful to ripen. Upon inquiring what he was about, he said he was only eating some; and the operation seemed to be so natural and simple, that I disliked to disturb him. And I am not very sure that one has a right to the whole of an abundant crop of fruit until he has gathered it. At least, in a city garden, one might as well conform his theory to the practice of the community.

As for children (and it sometimes looks as if the chief products of my garden were small boys and hens), it is admitted that they are barbarians. There is no exception among them to this condition of barbarism. This is not to say that they are not attractive; for they have the virtues as well as the vices of a primitive people. It is held by some naturalists that the child is only a zoophyte, with a stomach, and feelers radiating from it in search of something to fill it. It is true that a child is always hungry all over: but he is also curious all over; and his curiosity is excited about as early as his hunger. He immediately begins to put out his moral feelers into the unknown and the infinite to discover what sort of an existence this is into which he has come. His imagination is quite as hungry as his stomach. And again and again it is stronger than his other appetites. You can easily engage his imagination in a story which will make him forget his dinner. He is credulous and superstitious, and open to all wonder. In this, he is exactly like the savage races. Both gorge themselves on the marvelous; and all the unknown is marvelous to them. I know the general impression is that children must be governed through their stomachs. I think they can be controlled quite as well through their curiosity; that being the more craving and imperious of the two. I have seen children follow about a person who told them stories, and interested them with his charming talk, as greedily as if his pockets had been full of bon-bons.

Perhaps this fact has no practical relation to gardening; but it occurs to me that, if I should paper the outside of my high board fence with the leaves of "The Arabian Nights," it would afford me a good deal of protection,--more, in fact, than spikes in the top, which tear trousers and encourage profanity, but do not save much fruit. A spiked fence is a challenge to any boy of spirit. But if the fence were papered with fairy-tales, would he not stop to read them until it was too late for him to climb into the garden? I don't know. Human nature is vicious. The boy might regard the picture of the garden of the Hesperides only as an advertisement of what was over the fence. I begin to find that the problem of raising fruit is nothing to that of getting it after it has matured. So long as the law, just in many respects, is in force against shooting birds and small boys, the gardener may sow in tears and reap in vain.

The power of a boy is, to me, something fearful. Consider what he can do. You buy and set out a choice pear-tree; you enrich the earth for it; you train and trim it, and vanquish the borer, and watch its slow growth. At length it rewards your care by producing two or three pears, which you cut up and divide in the family, declaring the flavor of the bit you eat to be something extraordinary. The next year, the little tree blossoms full, and sets well; and in the autumn has on its slender, drooping limbs half a bushel of fruit, daily growing more delicious in the sun. You show it to your friends, reading to them the French name, which you can never remember, on the label; and you take an honest pride in the successful fruit of long care. That night your pears shall be required of you by a boy! Along comes an irresponsible urchin, who has not been growing much longer than the tree, with not twenty-five cents worth of clothing on him, and in five minutes takes off every pear, and retires into safe obscurity. In five minutes the remorseless boy has undone your work of years, and with the easy nonchalance, I doubt not, of any agent of fate, in whose path nothing is sacred or safe.

And it is not of much consequence. The boy goes on his way,--to Congress, or to State Prison: in either place he will be accused of stealing, perhaps wrongfully. You learn, in time, that it is better to have had pears and lost them than not to have had pears at all. You come to know that the least (and rarest) part of the pleasure of raising fruit is the vulgar eating it. You recall your delight in conversing with the nurseryman, and looking at his illustrated catalogues, where all the pears are drawn perfect in form, and of extra size, and at that exact moment between ripeness and decay which it is so impossible to hit in practice. Fruit cannot be raised on this earth to taste as you imagine those pears would taste. For years you have this pleasure, unalloyed by any disenchanting reality. How you watch the tender twigs in spring, and the freshly forming bark, hovering about the healthy growing tree with your pruning-knife many a sunny morning! That is happiness. Then, if you know it, you are drinking the very wine of life; and when the sweet juices of the earth mount the limbs, and flow down the tender stem, ripening and reddening the pendent fruit, you feel that you somehow stand at the source of things, and have no unimportant share in the processes of Nature. Enter at this moment boy the destroyer, whose office is that of preserver as well; for, though he removes the fruit from your sight, it remains in your memory immortally ripe and desirable. The gardener needs all these consolations of a high philosophy.


EIGHTEENTH WEEK

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently! If Ravaillac had not been imprisoned for debt, he would not have stabbed Henry of Navarre. If William of Orange had escaped assassination by Philip's emissaries; if France had followed the French Calvin, and embraced Protestant Calvinism, as it came very near doing towards the end of the sixteenth century; if the Continental ammunition had not given out at Bunker's Hill; if Blucher had not "come up" at Waterloo,--the lesson is, that things do not come up unless they are planted. When you go behind the historical scenery, you find there is a rope and pulley to effect every transformation which has astonished you. It was the rascality of a minister and a contractor five years before that lost the battle; and the cause of the defeat was worthless ammunition. I should like to know how many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man. It is only because we are ill informed that anything surprises us; and we are disappointed because we expect that for which we have not provided.

I had too vague expectations of what my garden would do of itself. A garden ought to produce one everything,--just as a business ought to support a man, and a house ought to keep itself. We had a convention lately to resolve that the house should keep itself; but it won't. There has been a lively time in our garden this summer; but it seems to me there is very little to show for it. It has been a terrible campaign; but where is the indemnity? Where are all "sass" and Lorraine? It is true that we have lived on the country; but we desire, besides, the fruits of the war. There are no onions, for one thing. I am quite ashamed to take people into my garden, and have them notice the absence of onions. It is very marked. In onion is strength; and a garden without it lacks flavor. The onion in its satin wrappings is among the most beautiful of vegetables; and it is the only one that represents the essence of things. It can almost be said to have a soul. You take off coat after coat, and the onion is still there; and, when the last one is removed, who dare say that the onion itself is destroyed, though you can weep over its departed spirit? If there is any one thing on this fallen earth that the angels in heaven weep over--more than another, it is the onion.

I know that there is supposed to be a prejudice against the onion; but I think there is rather a cowardice in regard to it. I doubt not that all men and women love the onion; but few confess their love. Affection for it is concealed. Good New-Englanders are as shy of owning it as they are of talking about religion. Some people have days on which they eat onions,--what you might call "retreats," or their "Thursdays." The act is in the nature of a religious ceremony, an Eleusinian mystery; not a breath of it must get abroad. On that day they see no company; they deny the kiss of greeting to the dearest friend; they retire within themselves, and hold communion with one of the most pungent and penetrating manifestations of the moral vegetable world. Happy is said to be the family which can eat onions together. They are, for the time being, separate from the world, and have a harmony of aspiration. There is a hint here for the reformers. Let them become apostles of the onion; let them eat, and preach it to their fellows, and circulate tracts of it in the form of seeds. In the onion is the hope of universal brotherhood. If all men will eat onions at all times, they will come into a universal sympathy. Look at Italy. I hope I am not mistaken as to the cause of her unity. It was the Reds who preached the gospel which made it possible. All the Reds of Europe, all the sworn devotees of the mystic Mary Ann, eat of the common vegetable. Their oaths are strong with it. It is the food, also, of the common people of Italy. All the social atmosphere of that delicious land is laden with it. Its odor is a practical democracy. In the churches all are alike: there is one faith, one smell. The entrance of