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Page 38

Of course Austin had to give his aunt an account, at breakfast-time
next morning, of the pageant of the previous night; and as he confined
himself to saying that the scenery and dresses were very fine, and
that Mr Buskin was quite unrecognisable, and that all the performers
knew their parts, and that he had walked part of the way home with
Roger St Aubyn afterwards, the impression left on the good lady's mind
was that he had enjoyed himself very much. This inevitable duty
accomplished, Austin straightway banished the whole subject from his
memory and gave himself up more unreservedly than ever to his garden
and his thoughts. How fresh and sweet and welcoming the garden looked
on that calm, lovely summer day! How brightly the morning dewdrops
twinkled on the leaves, like a sprinkling of liquid diamonds! Every
flower seemed to greet him with silent laughter: "Aha, you've been
playing truant, have you? Straying into alien precincts, roving in
search of something newer and gaudier than anything you have here?
Sunlight palls on you; gas is so much more festive! The scents of the
fields are vulgar; finer the hot smells of the playhouse, more meet
for a cultured nostril!" Of course Austin made all this nonsense up
himself, but he felt so happy that it amused him to attribute the
words to the dear flower-friends who were all around him, and to whom
he could never be really faithless. Faugh! that playhouse! He would
never enter one again. Be an actor! Lubin was a cleaner gentleman than
any painted Buskin on the stage. Here, in the clear, pure splendour of
the sunlit air, the place where he had been last night loomed up in
his consciousness as something meretricious and unwholesome. Yet he
was glad he had been, for it made everything so much purer and sweeter
by contrast. Never had the garden looked more meetly set, never had
the sun shone more genially, and the air impelled the blood and sent
it coursing more joyously through his veins, than on that morning of
the rejuvenescence of all his high ideals.

Then he drew a small blue volume out of his pocket, and lay down on
the grass with his back against the trunk of an apple-tree. Austin's
theory--or one of his theories, for he had hundreds--was that one's
literature should always be in harmony with one's surroundings; and
so, intending to pass his morning in the garden, he had chosen 'The
Garden of Cyrus' as an appropriate study. He opened it reverently, for
it was compact of jewelled thoughts that had been set to words by one
of the princes of prose. He, the young garden-lover, sat at the feet
of the great garden-mystic, and began to pore wonderingly over the
inscrutable secrets of the quincunx. His fine ear was charmed by the
rhythm of the sumptuous and stately sentences, and his pulses throbbed
in response to every measured phrase in which the lore of garden
symmetry and the principles of garden science were set forth. He read
of the hanging gardens of Babylon, first made by Queen Semiramis,
third or fourth from Nimrod, and magnificently renewed by
Nabuchodonosor, according to Josephus: "_from whence, overlooking
Babylon, and all the region about it, he found no circumscription to
the eye of his ambition; till, over-delighted with the bravery of this
Paradise, in his melancholy metamorphosis he found the folly of that
delight, and a proper punishment in the contrary habitation--in wild
plantations and wanderings of the fields_." Austin shook his head over
this; he did not think it possible to love a garden too much, and
demurred to the idea that such a love deserved any punishment at all.
But that was theology, and he had no taste for theological
dissertations. So he dipped into the pages where the quincunx is
"naturally" considered, and here he admired the encyclop�dic learning
of the author, which appeared to have been as wide as that attributed
to Solomon; then glanced at the "mystic" part, which he reserved for
later study. But one paragraph riveted his attention, as he turned
over the leaves. Here was a mine of gold, a treasure-house of
suggestiveness and wisdom.

_"Light, that makes things seen, makes some things invisible; were it
not for darkness and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the
creation had remained unseen, and the stars in heaven as invisible as
on the fourth day, when they were created above the horizon with the
sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of
religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of
Jewish types, we find the cherubim shadowing the mercy-seat. Life
itself is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows
of the living. All things fall under this name. The sun itself is but
the dark simulacrum, and light but the shadow of God."_

Austin delighted in symbolism, and these apparent paradoxes fascinated
him. But was it all true? He loved to think that life was the shadow,
and death--what we call death--the substance; he had always felt that
the reality of everything was to be sought for on the other side. But
he could not see why departed souls should be regarded as the shadows
of living men. Rather it was we who lived in a vain show, and would
continue to do so until the spirit, the true substance of us, should
be set free. Well, whatever the truth of it might be, it was all a
charming puzzle, and we should learn all about it some day, and
meantime he had been furnished with an entirely new idea--the
revealing power of darkness. He loved the light because it was
beautiful, and now he loved the darkness because it was mysterious,
and held such wondrous secrets in its folds. He had never been afraid
of the dark even when a child. It had always been associated in his
mind with sleep and dreams, and he was very fond of both.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Mon 22nd Dec 2025, 10:45

Austin and His Friends by Frederic H. Balfour