The garden of resurrection

_Partly because you have a love of gardens, partly because together we have seen Ballysheen when the gorse was in its full blast of yellow, but most of all because I feel I owe you a debt of gratitude for a great friendship, I am asking you to accept this book of mine. It was after a talk with you one night that I went straight home and wrote Chapter I on a clean sheet of paper, therefore the book is doubly yours and I ask you to accept it in proof of the fact that, not only am I grateful, but also that I am_

Your sincere friend, E. Temple Thurston.

Adelphi, 1911.

The Garden of Resurrection

CHAPTER I

It was the first, the very first, day of spring. A man walked by me with a narcissus in his coat and he was humming a tune.

By the looks of him--the tail-coat, the bowler hat, the little leather hand-bag--he was an artisan. You know that game of placing people. I put him down as an electrician. He had been attending to a job up West. He was returning to the premises of his firm in Bond Street. All this, of course, was surmise. But of one thing I was certain. He had no business to be walking through the Park. He ought to have been on a 'bus, or in the Underground Railway, speeding back to save his firm's most precious time, ready to start forth once more upon his firm's most urgent errands. Instead of this--it was the first day of spring--he was walking through the Park and I was envying him. I envied the narcissus in his coat. Even the very tune he was humming touched a sense of covetousness in my heart.

"Nor his ox," thought I, "nor his ass, nor anything that is his." A very stern Commandment that; for even as I took off my silk hat and brushed the rim of it once with my sleeve, I envied him for his tail-coat and his billy-cock.

It was little enough to want of any man, his tail-coat or his billy-cock, his narcissus or the tune set humming from his heart. I did not want his leather bag at all. He could keep that. Yet it seemed that I was to break the tenth decree of Moses to its last letter, or, since I was going backwards, to its first; for after he had gone by some thirty yards or so, I was envying him for something else altogether.

A few moments before he came, a little nursemaid had wheeled her pram down the path where I was sitting. She was one of those rosy-cheeked creatures who come up from the country to grow pale in London, just as the flowers come up of a morning to Covent Garden and wither perhaps before the night is out. She must have been very new to it all, for she had all the country freshness about her still. Her cheeks glowed in the quick, bright air. Her hair blew loosely over her forehead--through the stray, fine threads of it her eyes danced, glittering with youth. I remember now of what it must have reminded me. You have seen those spiders' webs, caught on the points of furze which, early on a crisp May morning, glisten with drops of dew? Those eyes of hers through her hair reminded me of that. And as she passed me by, leaning forward again and again to whisper to that fat, round baby in the pram, she chanced to look at me.

You must take my word for it that it was not from any thwarted desire to draw her into conversation that the expression in those eyes of hers chilled me. I have never had the courage or, which again I envy so much in others, the presence of mind which brings knowledge to a man, that a woman would answer if he addressed her in the street. I believe there are many women, the most virtuous in the world, who have had little adventures of this kind. God knows, life would be dull without such interludes. But as yet no such woman has come my way. It were better put if I said that I have never come hers. Therefore, there was no desire on my part to say a word to this little nursery maid; yet the swift look in her eyes made a thrill of coldness quiver through me. That a woman looks her disapproval of you can be borne. But it is hard to bear, that look in a woman's eyes which sees you not at all; when in one woman's face you read the disapproval of her whole sex.

I don't know why it should have struck me so strangely that morning, for I am used to it by now. I have known it so long. In any case, it is not a thing to talk about. You have it there in that nursery maid's eyes. I am an ugly devil, not even with that ugliness which pleads a charm to many a woman's heart. I am an ugly devil, and that is all there is about it. The only creatures who have ever gazed at me as though I were the image of God were my mother and my dog. The one is dead. I have only to stretch down my hand from my chair and the other will gaze at me in such fashion now. He sat upon a chair next to me that morning and, as I paid his penny to the collector, he gave me a glance from his brown eyes which I chose to take for gratitude. He thanked me--why not? He had not got any pennies with him. There are times when I am that way myself.