DISCONTENT IN A GARDEN

OUR literature has recently been enriched by a fragrant phrase, 'Content in a Garden.' The words breathe of boxwood and of roses, but observation leads me to the opinion that the phrase, 'Content in a Garden,' is as fallacious as it is fragrant.

I write as one who has for unnumbered years lived with gardeners without becoming one. I have never planted or transplanted anything, or weeded anything, but I have been torn from many a book, wrenched away from performing many a charitable deed, caught back to earth when I was walking the sky on many a country ramble, by people who demanded that I stop, look, and listen to the doings of the dirt. Gardeners among my kinsfolk and acquaintance have grasped me by the inoffensive nape of my neck and incontinently thrust my nose into the mud in order that I might see therein an indiscernible green line of lettuce.

Now, unlike other germs, the horticultural bacillus is increasing in virulence. More people garden to-day than ever before in history. Against the spread of the epidemic I have exerted my personal influence and private eloquence, but so far with small effect. I have therefore resolved to appeal to a larger public and to raise in print my warning voice, pointing out the perils to poise and to peace inherent in any intimacy with the soil.

Theoretically, I should expect as much disquietude among gardeners as I have practically observed. They voluntarily expose themselves to disillu

sion. Much may be said in favor of hitching your hopes to a star, but what about burying your hopes in sixty square feet of spring mud? The wise ancients always represented the devious ways of deviltry as taking place in the hidden bowels of the earth, yet the modern horticulturist is always expecting archangelic behavior from the blackest bit of mould into which he dares to delve. In the fifth act of The Bluebird, where the little unborn mortals are exhibiting their transcendent inventions, portentous with future disappointment, the preponderance of disillusion is given to the gardeners. The gardeners who are going to be born and the gardeners who have been born long enough to know better are alike in expecting their daisies to be big as cartwheels, their peas to be larger than grapes, their apples to rival melons, their melons to outstrip the pumpkin. Should an intelligent investor of his life's happiness bank all on the uncertain behavior of the weather and the weevil?

Intelligence, however, is not a quality to be looked for a priori in a gardener. What clearness of view could you expect from people who are continually curled into a ball tending sordid seedlings? Does one not shudder to mention the mental and moral disintegration risked by association with vegetables, - instance the gross irregularities of cucumbers and cantaloupes when they neighbor each other! Is there anything in the nature of the case that should make intimacy with cabbage-heads and beet-tops contribute to spiritual uplift? Yet such is the popular fallacy.

Passing from theory to experience, one finds the gardener of all men most dissatisfied. Live with a gardener, and then prove him-her (in a discussion of horticulture, I may be excused for Burbanking my pronouns) contented if you can! Often have I welcomed a roomful of visitors and launched them into spirit-warming talk, only to have them, at some unguarded allusion, make for the open, demanding the titles of the lady-roses at the windows, and pressing on into the private life of the spinach and the cucumber - conversation that leaves me out in the cold, for not even appendicitis can produce the clacking congeniality of comparing flower-beds. After the guests are gone, I am called upon to comfort my household horticulturists for envy implanted by boastful visitors; I am told that our peas and our pansies are not so large as we supposed — and yet they tell me they are contented folk, these gardeners!

To me the gardening mania is but one more example of the modern unrest, so extensively advertised. True, there might be content in gardens if owners were ever satisfied with them as they are; but they are haunted by new combinations, new experiments. They are always wanting to paw their parterres to pieces and set them out anew. You no sooner get used to a garden than it is n't there. You try to follow a primrose path and you become entangled in blackberry bushes. You put forth your hand to pluck a violet and you prod up a radish.

Another form of restlessness exhibited by gardeners is their fret after fertilizer. They can never get enough, and they can never get the right kind. If only they could, their dreams might come true. Fertilizer becomes an obsession from which they never escape. If you take a gardener with you on a country ramble, he-she will be want

ing to dig up the woodland loam to enrich the back yard. He-she will never see the white-dotting loveliness of old farms, without wanting to scoop whole barnyards into the picnic lunchbasket. If you are caught up to the sky on the wings of the sunset, you will be hauled down with the Whitmanesque appeal for your sympathy,

'Behold this compost ! behold it well !'

I have noted with pain the subtle disintegration of mind and character which awaits those addicted to horticulture. The utter uncertainty of the material with which they deal causes the sanest people to become superstitious, so that you will have them solemnly declaring that certain seeds must be planted at the waning of the moon. Sweet peas have some mysterious association with St. Patrick's Day. I am not sure whether some of my friends would not go the length of an incantation, or of a pact with Satan, to achieve a perfect cantaloupe.

You might expect the winter solstice, by its absence of stimulus, to repair the moral ravages of the summer, with its demoralizing sowing and reaping. On the contrary, when the winds of January whip the windows, out come the flower catalogues, those glowing monuments of false promise. Forgetful of last season's failures, the gardener's eyes, feasting on pictured roses, grow bright with delirium. In hectic rhapsody he whispers enchanted names - Fiery Cross, Phantom Blue, Sunnybrook Earliana, Arabis Alpina, Beauty of Hebron (this last a potato). By means of the flower catalogue is the gardener rendered perpetually credulous, only to be perpetually disillusioned — a hardy perennial of discontent. These same ornate annuals corrupt honest minds, so that you will discover gardeners practicing deception, concealing their bright flower-books in laps that

appear to be reading the war news, and you are constantly intercepting clandestine trips to the mail-box and the dropping therein of surreptitious mailorders.

A love of gardening is the root of still another evil: misanthropy. Gardeners become suspicious of even their nearest and dearest; they bring monstrous accusations, charging them with rolling upon the asparagus bed, with blighting the strawberry blossoms, with devouring a ten-foot row of young onions. Cynicism extends even to the birds of the blue, so that for all their singing throats they are looked upon as marauders only, and cheery red breast is despised for his delinquencies in regard to ripe cherries. Thus does the gardener, his soul buried fast in furrow and flower-bed, look askance at both man and nature. I ask, do any of the qualities he exhibits justify his pride in that gentle phrase, 'Content in a Garden'?

WHISKERS IN PEACE

WAR and whiskers have always alliterated; no defense or explanation need be offered for the poilus. Heroes and fighting men have been bearded since the beginning; in war the razor rusts.

But in peace the beard should be carefully appraised. Why do men wear beards? And in offering the question for sober thought I am revealing an important index of human nature. In running over the names of men whom I have known personally, the bearded and the shaven separate themselves easily. All the bearded have traits in common; the shaven show greater variety of characters, yet they are essentially different from the bearded, despite shaven chins.

It is not easy to express what I feel to be true of bearded men whose traits are so cleverly hidden, or betrayed, by the whisker as almost to defy words.

With or without the 'watery smile,' the educated whisker is of first importance. The educated whisker is not an unconscious growth; it is willfully cultivated and shows attention. Marks of distinction, upon examination, are sometimes found to reside wholly in the educated whisker; one often feels that the distinguished man, shorn of his beard, would be as commonplace as the rest of us.

A difficulty arises when one puts the very personal question: Is the whisker a sign of irrepressible manliness, or is it merely a decoration, an ornament? Is it, to change Shakespeare slightly, an excrescence of strength? An increment of valor? Judicious observation and experience lead me to think that this is far from being the case. My bearded friends are no braver than the shaven. Indeed - and here one goes deeper into the subject I have noticed signs of extreme caution, of nervous withdrawal from difficulty, of actual timidity, among bearded men. Not always separable from the beard, however, I have also noticed signs of self-importance, assertion, even pomposity qualities that not only do not preclude timidity, but are apt to arise from a constitutional sense of fear.

The most terrifying bearded man that I ever knew was an atheist and anarchist. His beard radiated with the violence of his ideas. The safe and sane avoided him, mothers forbade their daughters to receive him at the house. He rebuked church-goers by passing them in jacket and breeches, averting his gaze in contempt for silk hats and the conventional observance of the Sabbath day. He was a dangerous man; no man with such a beard could be persuaded or controlled. I never shared the common opinion, for his uncomfortable doctrines seemed to me to be merely sentimental. Years afterwards I found him married to a gentle

Catholic lady, content with a small salary, and wearing two waistcoats, although the day was warm.

I have rather sadly to record the conviction that in so far as beards are supposed to reveal valor, learning, professional ability, wisdom, or virtue, they are far from reliable. So fallacious are they that the more luxuriant and cultivated the beard, the fewer of these prime qualities do I expect to find. This is a hard saying; yet a bit of psychology may justify the contention.

Let us consider the man with retreating chin. He may grow a beard and hide it, or he may frankly shave the exiguous offender, careless whether it recedes or not. The utmost candor may be seen in a shaven chin; and of all the manly, valorous qualities that of candor, downrightness, may be ranked first. The weakness attributed to a retreating chin may be canceled by shaving it. The man who accepts his face as nature gave it to him, braving it to the world without concealment or decoration, must be classed among those with the manly quality. Cartoonists and novelists have waved the weak chin to the limbo of the inefficient and inept. Let the man without the masterful jaw take heart; he has but to shave to show the qualities desired.

Or, with whatever degree of pain, let us contemplate the mobile or protrusive Adam's apple. Shall a man allow it to divulge its movements up and down, or conceal it with a beard? Upon the decision of this question, essentially a social one, hangs the character of a man. The shaven throat asks no quarter; it bares its incongruities to the irresponsibilities of débutantes, to the ridicule of eager girls. It may disappear in the comfort of a cigarette; it may rise to the exigencies of the misunderstood Filipinos. Meanwhile the bearded man across the mahogany does not betray himself; his girl listens in proud content

ment, secretly exulting over the profile of a well-kept beard.

If the beard is cultivated for decoration rather than concealment or disguise, less should be said. The mirror is a woman's refuge and retreat; only actors and the bridegroom may employ it self-consciously. Yet a mirror is necessary for decoration. The round head requires contrasting contour of beard; the long face will instinctively select one of compensatory nature. Most men recoil from whiskers obviously grown for beauty. Yet few men have been so dull as not to respond to the inspiration of Simon de Vos's portrait of himself. No man may study that picture, blessing a room where it is hung, without craving some likeness to the painter. The beard seems the distinguishing feature, but the charm lies in the wide sympathy of the eyes, the refinement and sensitiveness of the lips. The eyes would betray the character, were there no beard; but men have grown whiskers from that picture.

With America at peace the warriorbeard, the Continental mark of masculine élan, invites special note. I have in mind two Continental scholars whose beards are Homeric. But upon careful analysis neither shows the initiative of his Yankee congeners. Behind the learning, the dogmatism, the intellectual system, there lurk suspicion and envy. They are at heart afraid afraid of human nature, of representative government, of the majority, of the crude world outside of books. What a sorry figure is that of the shaven Philistine in the presence of a Homeric beard! Still, discounting face-values, what indurated fibre, as it were, what finely tempered quality of manhood one may find in the unadorned and undisguised producers of the Commonwealth, fearlessly displaying irregularities, blemishes, and wrinkles of visage in large unconsciousness!

THE SATURDAY-NIGHT BATH

CERTAIN aspirations are so deeply rooted in the souls of men that they persist through generations in spite of every obstacle. I write in defense of one of these a time-honored ceremonial, the Saturday-night bath.

If you are city-bred, and accustomed from childhood to step from a warm bed to a warm bathroom and thrill to an every-morning scrub, you are probably scornful of me and my theme. Let me ask you a question. Did you ever, on a freezing winter day, stand precariously in one slippery wash-basin while you sponged your shivering self with about a quart of water from another china bowl? If you think you would have persisted in this, morning after morning, in an unheated bedroom, through zero weather, I salute you! You belong to the elect. I know there are such people; my sister Frances was one of them. I remember that mother called in the family doctor to see if he did n't think it was this peculiar habit that made Frances so thin.

My own childhood, as it stretches out behind me, is punctuated at regular intervals by furiously busy Saturdays and shining, immaculate Sundays. The weekly bath was a fixed institution no one ever went to church without it; but the problem of bathing eleven boisterous (and occasionally rebellious) children, and getting everybody finished and out of the way by nine o'clock at night, made Saturday an interesting day for mother. Considering the difficulties we had to contend with, I think we were a very industrious family about bathing. In the first place, the reservoir on the kitchen range had to be filled thirteen separate times. It was the unvarying rule that each member of the family old enough to carry a pail must bring water from the cistern in the wood-shed for the one

next in turn. It was a sad day for the wretch who used all the water and forgot to fill the reservoir. Then the tub had to be emptied each time, by dipping out the water until it was light enough to carry. Gerald and Charlie got around this once by using the same water; but mother strongly discouraged them from ever trying it again.

We bathed according to age. The baby, whoever he was, had his bath right after breakfast, while such members of the family as were not otherwise occupied stood around in an adoring circle, ready to hand the safety-pins, to warm blankets, or fly upstairs for some forgotten accessory. (I must not give the impression that the baby was washed only on Saturday. He had his bath every morning until there was a newer one.) After he was tucked away for his nap the younger children, one at a time, engaged mother's attention until dinner. She did n't superintend any but the very smallest; but she rigidly inspected each child before he was allowed to step from the tub and woe to the culprit who had failed to wash behind his ears! We older ones took turns during the afternoon, and we had to be ready promptly and be swift in action, for getting thirteen baths out of an ordinary range-reservoir requires a high grade of efficiency. Six o'clock found us gathered around the supper table, radiantly clean and ravenously hungry. But the crowning ceremonial of the whole day occurred at nine in the evening, when mother filled the tub for father and laid out his clean things. Mother always encouraged father in bathing, and made it as easy for him as she could. In fact, as I look back upon it, I think it was mother's deep yearning for the bath that kept us all in the paths of virtue. Her own ablutions occurred late at night, after the rest of the family were sound asleep.