CHAPTER VIII

I MEET AN OLD FRIEND AND RECEIVE A LESSON IN PHILOSOPHY

It was not so easy to run down to Esher to see Miss Gold. Cowardice intervened. It requires not a little courage for a naturally diffident and sympathetic person to renew a friendship that thirty years ago was in danger of becoming the closest of all intimacies between a man and a woman.

Miss Gold--Agnes, as I called her--was then a girl of twenty-one or two, and I fancy that people were beginning to join our names. We were together a great deal; her society gave me extraordinary pleasure, for she had a natural frankness and shrewdness and was intellectually a rebel. To be a rebel then was, for a girl, very exceptional. Also she danced beautifully and so masterfully as to make me as a partner cut some kind of a figure, which no other woman could do, and she liked me enough to give me three or four dances every evening. Our last meeting was at a party in Hyde Park Street, I remember, on the last night of the year 1874--and I held her hand for a few moments longer than I should. I did not mean anything by it but affection. It was one of those sudden impulses to convince persons that you like them very much or feel for them very much; but I believe it meant more to her. I often regretted it, and never so much as when I heard of her accident.

Her accident! She was intensely fond of horses, and rode every morning. I have seen her in the Row many a time and envied the men with her their power to afford a horse. One day, when she was still a mere girl, soon after I left England, she was thrown, and has never stood upright since. She is carried from her bed to a couch and from her couch to bed. That is her life, and has been these thirty years.

I can assure you that I (who am still vigorous and last saw her dancing) dreaded the visit. To see Miss Gold again was for long an unbearable thought, for I possess little of that fortitude in bearing other persons' calamities that La Rochefoucauld attributed to the world at large.

But I made up my mind at last, and Naomi accompanied me to a flower shop to buy some flowers as an offering.

It was then that I made a discovery of my own with regard to the changes that have come upon England, for, looking round the florist's, I suddenly realised the vast increase not only in interest in flowers but in the variety of flowers that has been witnessed by the thirty years and more that I have been abroad. Where can it lead? I have wondered often since, after luxurious travels amid nursery gardens and Temple marquees? Take, for example, daffodils. In my youth there were daffodils too--but they were in two varieties only, the double and the single. That was all. To-day there must be hundreds, all beautiful and all named. In my day they were not grown among grass as now they are: there was no encouragement of wild exuberance as one now sees. No one said, "How sweet Sir Watkin looks under the trees!" How could they, for Sir Watkin had not been evolved.

I wish, by the way, that some one would call a flower after me. I should feel that indeed I had lived to some purpose could I, even from my death-bed, raise a weary head and, straining my poor, exhausted, failing auditories, catch the words, "How luxuriantly the Kent Falconers bloom this year!" Thus hearing I could die in peace.

And the anemone. That is a totally new discovery. I saw for fourpence bunches of anemones of a deep purple such as was never heard of in my time. And tulips are even more wonderful. We had tulips, of course, but they were the flaunting type. The new tulips can burn too, but also how sweet and grave they can be; and again, how cheery and courageous! But most of the new colours are wonderful. Sweet-peas we used to call merely sweet-peas and grow for scent: to-day the sweet-pea has a thousand names and colours, and every year, I am told, new and exquisite hues find expression in its butterfly bloom. The delphinium again is a magical revelation. I seem to remember something dingily like it--a larkspur we called it--but that this flower should ever adventure so gently up and down the scale of blue into the tenderest melodies--who would have expected that? The delphinium seems to me the perfect flower against or under a grey sky. It is not till the sun has left that it comes to its delicate own. I like to think of all the care and thought that the great florists have been spending during my absence to evolve this lovely apparition against my return.

Naomi tells me that gardening has become as fashionable as motoring, and England surely is very fortunate in this pretty hobby, although it hurts me a little not only to think of what I missed by being born too soon, but also to have such difficulty in finding some of my old favourites. The Sweet William, for example, eludes me in garden after garden, and mignonette I no longer smell. In our garden at home, before artistic gardening was heard of, these were grown profusely. The only flower in which I see no improvement is the rose. No doubt there are beautiful new roses; but all my favourites are the old ones, and I do not find that the new roses smell as sweet. The cabbage rose remains the most satisfying of all.

Miss Gold lives in a large and cheerful Georgian house. Her sitting-room is on the ground floor, with high French windows uniting it to the lawn. Like so many invalids, she is far less susceptible to cold than most of us, and she lies there with the windows open most of the time. On fine days she is wheeled into the garden itself or into the paddock. All the pretty apparatus for ingratiating human beings with birds is to be seen in the garden--the bath and the nest boxes and the cocoanut for the tits. This means, of course, the privation of a cat; but instead of a cat Miss Gold keeps several dogs, with a King Charles spaniel as the most privileged, and in the paddock she has a home of rest for old horses.

The garden is very full of flowers--so full that I might well have bought something else with my money--and it has also two large cedars, beneath which her wheeled couch often stands.

Very nervously did I ring Miss Gold's bell; but, as is usual in this life, I found the realisation of the visit far easier than the anticipation. The little lady was brave enough for two. "My dear Kent," she said, after a little while, "you must not come and see me if you are going to look so sad. I want you to come often: you will do me so much good. But it is quite useless if you have such a mournful expression. What is it after all? I am very happy lying here. I have many kind friends. The garden is so wonderful always, and I have a gardener who is also an invaluable companion and never wants to make a rustic fence. The birds trust me: there is a robin that comes right into the room and will do so until he is a month or so older and has been told more about man's nature. I have letters every morning, and my eyes are so good that I can read and write all day if I like. As for death, my dear Kent, we must not be so frightened of it. I have grown to think of death without any fear or shuddering. After all, if I live to be eighty, my life on my eightieth birthday will be as much behind me as a child's of five. It is only to-day that we live for--to-day and to-morrow. No one dares to look much more forward than that. The past is so completely over that in a kind of way one life may be said to be as long as another."

I did my best to be equally optimistic, and quoted an old epigram of my friend Trist's to the effect that every birth certificate is in a manner of speaking a death warrant.

Miss Gold liked that. "And another thing," she said: "considering how uncertain is life and how many fatal accidents occur every day, it is illogical to be cheerful with every one else, and pull a long face when you come to see me. Because I may be lying on this couch in ten years' time just as I am to-day; whereas one of your strong, healthy friends with whom you dine to-night may be knocked down and killed by a motor car to-morrow morning. No, Kent, with me you must be gay."

I so far fell into her humour as to tell her about one or two of Mr. Giles's Chinese heroes, whose quiet acceptance of death is perhaps their most astonishing characteristic to a Western reader--the characteristic which most differentiates them from ourselves, who cling to life more passionately with each generation. I told her of the death of Wang Ching-wên of the fifth century A.D., who one evening, as he was playing chess with a friend, received orders to commit suicide. "After having read the Imperial mandate, he finished his game and put the board away. A bowl of poison was brought to him; and then turning to his friend he remarked jestingly, 'I am afraid I cannot ask you to join me!' and quietly drained the bowl."

"That is the way," said Miss Gold; "but it certainly is not English."

I told her also of the death of Hsieh Chiu-chēng, whose was perhaps the most ludicrously ironical end on record, since it came "from poisoning himself with a compound which he fancied was the Elixir of Life."

Miss Gold asked me if any women were included in the book. There are, of course, a few, but China is not a woman's country. One is Liu Shih, the wife of an official at Court, who also had dealings with the cup. The Emperor one day sent her "a potion which he commanded her to drink, and which he said would cause instant death if she was jealous; adding that if she was not jealous she need not drink it. Without hesitation she drank it off, saying that death would be preferable to such a life."

Another Chinese lady is Li Fu-jen of the second century B.C., who was so beautiful that "one glance of hers," said a poet, "would destroy a City, two glances a State." Li Fu-jen, however, lived for pleasure; more heroic was Li Hsien, who, finding that she fascinated a student named Chêng Yüan-ho to such an extent that he began to neglect his career, she tore out her eyes: "after which," says the historian, "her lover rapidly rose to distinction." But--and here comes in the surprise to the Western reader accustomed to think of the Chinese as monsters of impassive selfishness--after he had achieved distinction he married her, all sightless as she was. Isn't that a pretty story?

To my mind, one of the most agreeable girls in the book is the sarcastic waiting-maid who rebuked the meanness of Táo Ku. "On one occasion he bade a newly purchased waiting-maid get some snow and make tea in honour of the Feast of Lanterns, asking, somewhat pompously, 'Was that the custom in your old home?' 'Oh no,' the girl replied; 'they were a rough lot. They just put up a gold-splashed awning, and had a little music and some old wine.'"

We talked also of the Wynnes, and Miss Gold made me promise to bring Naomi to see her, and she asked also if I would bring Trist, whom neither of us had seen since the early seventies, but who was in those days my inseparable friend and very attractive also to her. She was greatly amused by my discovery of her name at Bemerton's and the chance which had taken me to live over her favourite bookseller's shop. But in Mr. Dabney she was even more interested.

"How extraordinary to think he should be in the same house," she said. "There is no journalist whom I follow so closely. He has a fearless mind and a hatred of injustice. Do you like him?"

"Well, he compels attention," I said, "but he is a little too near white heat for me."

"If he were cooler," said Miss Gold, "he would probably be tolerant--like you--and then he would be no use. There is so much comfortable tolerance to-day, so little anger. I hope he will go on being angry."

"He will," I said.