The Secret Garden
her. “Suddenly I felt how different I was—how strong my arms and legs
were, you know—and how I could dig and stand—and I jumped up and wanted
to shout out something to anything that would listen.”
“Th’ Magic listened when tha’ sung th’ Doxology. It would ha’ listened
to anything tha’d sung. It was th’ joy that mattered. Eh! lad,
lad—what’s names to th’ Joy Maker,” and she gave his shoulders a quick
soft pat again.
She had packed a basket which held a regular feast this morning, and
when the hungry hour came and Dickon brought it out from its hiding
place, she sat down with them under their tree and watched them devour
their food, laughing and quite gloating over their appetites. She was
full of fun and made them laugh at all sorts of odd things. She told
them stories in broad Yorkshire and taught them new words. She laughed
as if she could not help it when they told her of the increasing
difficulty there was in pretending that Colin was still a fretful
invalid.
“You see we can’t help laughing nearly all the time when we are
together,” explained Colin. “And it doesn’t sound ill at all. We try to
choke it back but it will burst out and that sounds worse than ever.”
“There’s one thing that comes into my mind so often,” said Mary, “and I
can scarcely ever hold in when I think of it suddenly. I keep thinking
suppose Colin’s face should get to look like a full moon. It isn’t like
one yet but he gets a tiny bit fatter every day—and suppose some
morning it should look like one—what should we do!”
“Bless us all, I can see tha’ has a good bit o’ play actin’ to do,”
said Susan Sowerby. “But tha’ won’t have to keep it up much longer.
Mester Craven’ll come home.”
“Do you think he will?” asked Colin. “Why?”
Susan Sowerby chuckled softly.
“I suppose it ’ud nigh break thy heart if he found out before tha’ told
him in tha’ own way,” she said. “Tha’s laid awake nights plannin’ it.”
“I couldn’t bear anyone else to tell him,” said Colin. “I think about
different ways every day, I think now I just want to run into his
room.”
“That’d be a fine start for him,” said Susan Sowerby. “I’d like to see
his face, lad. I would that! He mun come back—that he mun.”
One of the things they talked of was the visit they were to make to her
cottage. They planned it all. They were to drive over the moor and
lunch out of doors among the heather. They would see all the twelve
children and Dickon’s garden and would not come back until they were
tired.
Susan Sowerby got up at last to return to the house and Mrs. Medlock.
It was time for Colin to be wheeled back also. But before he got into
his chair he stood quite close to Susan and fixed his eyes on her with
a kind of bewildered adoration and he suddenly caught hold of the fold
of her blue cloak and held it fast.
“You are just what I—what I wanted,” he said. “I wish you were my
mother—as well as Dickon’s!”
All at once Susan Sowerby bent down and drew him with her warm arms
close against the bosom under the blue cloak—as if he had been Dickon’s
brother. The quick mist swept over her eyes.
“Eh! dear lad!” she said. “Thy own mother’s in this ’ere very garden, I
do believe. She couldna’ keep out of it. Thy father mun come back to
thee—he mun!”
CHAPTER XXVII.
IN THE GARDEN
In each century since the beginning of the world wonderful things have
been discovered. In the last century more amazing things were found out
than in any century before. In this new century hundreds of things
still more astounding will be brought to light. At first people refuse
to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to
hope it can be done, then they see it can be done—then it is done and
all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago. One of the new
things people began to find out in the last century was that
thoughts—just mere thoughts—are as powerful as electric batteries—as
good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison. To let a sad
thought or a bad one get into your mind is as dangerous as letting a
scarlet fever germ get into your body. If you let it stay there after
it has got in you may never get over it as long as you live.
So long as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about
her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to
be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced,
sickly, bored and wretched child. Circumstances, however, were very
kind to her, though she was not at all aware of it. They began to push
her about for her own good. When her mind gradually filled itself with
robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed
old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime
and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor
boy and his “creatures,” there was no room left for the disagreeable
thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow
and tired.
So long as Colin shut himself up in his room and thought only of his
fears and weakness and his detestation of people who looked at him and
reflected hourly on humps and early death, he was a hysterical
half-crazy little hypochondriac who knew nothing of the sunshine and
the spring and also did not know that he could get well and could stand
upon his feet if he tried to do it. When new beautiful thoughts began
to push out the old hideous ones, life began to come back to him, his
blood ran healthily through his veins and strength poured into him like
a flood. His scientific experiment was quite practical and simple and
there was nothing weird about it at all. Much more surprising things
can happen to anyone who, when a disagreeable or discouraged thought
comes into his mind, just has the sense to remember in time and push it
out by putting in an agreeable determinedly courageous one. Two things
cannot be in one place.
“Where you tend a rose, my lad,
A thistle cannot grow.”
While the secret garden was coming alive and two children were coming
alive with it, there was a man wandering about certain far-away
beautiful places in the Norwegian fiords and the valleys and mountains
of Switzerland and he was a man who for ten years had kept his mind
filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. He had not been courageous;
he had never tried to put any other thoughts in the place of the dark
ones. He had wandered by blue lakes and thought them; he had lain on
mountain-sides with sheets of deep blue gentians blooming all about him
and flower breaths filling all the air and he had thought them. A
terrible sorrow had fallen upon him when he had been happy and he had
let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to
allow any rift of light to pierce through. He had forgotten and
deserted his home and his duties. When he traveled about, darkness so
brooded over him that the sight of him was a wrong done to other people
because it was as if he poisoned the air about him with gloom. Most
strangers thought he must be either half mad or a man with some hidden
crime on his soul. He, was a tall man with a drawn face and crooked
shoulders and the name he always entered on hotel registers was,
“Archibald Craven, Misselthwaite Manor, Yorkshire, England.”
He had traveled far and wide since the day he saw Mistress Mary in his
study and told her she might have her “bit of earth.” He had been in
the most beautiful places in Europe, though he had remained nowhere
more than a few days. He had chosen the quietest and remotest spots. He
had been on the tops of mountains whose heads were in the clouds and
had looked down on other mountains when the sun rose and touched them
with such light as made it seem as if the world were just being born.
But the light had never seemed to touch himself until one day when he
realized that for the first time in ten years a strange thing had
happened. He was in a wonderful valley in the Austrian Tyrol and he had
been walking alone through such beauty as might have lifted, any man’s
soul out of shadow. He had walked a long way and it had not lifted his.
But at last he had felt tired and had thrown himself down to rest on a
carpet of moss by a stream. It was a clear little stream which ran
quite merrily along on its narrow way through the luscious damp
greenness. Sometimes it made a sound rather like very low laughter as
it bubbled over and round stones. He saw birds come and dip their heads
to drink in it and then flick their wings and fly away. It seemed like
a thing alive and yet its tiny voice made the stillness seem deeper.
The valley was very, very still.
As he sat gazing into the clear running of the water, Archibald Craven
gradually felt his mind and body both grow quiet, as quiet as the
valley itself. He wondered if he were going to sleep, but he was not.
He sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things
growing at its edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots
growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he
found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things
years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what
wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know
that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind—filling and
filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. It was as if a
sweet clear spring had begun to rise in a stagnant pool and had risen
and risen until at last it swept the dark water away. But of course he
did not think of this himself. He only knew that the valley seemed to
grow quieter and quieter as he sat and stared at the bright delicate
blueness. He did not know how long he sat there or what was happening
to him, but at last he moved as if he were awakening and he got up
slowly and stood on the moss carpet, drawing a long, deep, soft breath
and wondering at himself. Something seemed to have been unbound and
released in him, very quietly.
“What is it?” he said, almost in a whisper, and he passed his hand over
his forehead. “I almost feel as if—I were alive!”
I do not know enough about the wonderfulness of undiscovered things to
be able to explain how this had happened to him. Neither does anyone
else yet. He did not understand at all himself—but he remembered this
strange hour months afterward when he was at Misselthwaite again and he
found out quite by accident that on this very day Colin had cried out
as he went into the secret garden:
“I am going to live forever and ever and ever!”
The singular calmness remained with him the rest of the evening and he
slept a new reposeful sleep; but it was not with him very long. He did
not know that it could be kept. By the next night he had opened the
doors wide to his dark thoughts and they had come trooping and rushing
back. He left the valley and went on his wandering way again. But,
strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes—sometimes
half-hours—when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to
lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one.
Slowly—slowly—for no reason that he knew of—he was “coming alive” with
the garden.
As the golden summer changed into the deep golden autumn he went to the
Lake of Como. There he found the loveliness of a dream. He spent his
days upon the crystal blueness of the lake or he walked back into the
soft thick verdure of the hills and tramped until he was tired so that
he might sleep. But by this time he had begun to sleep better, he knew,
and his dreams had ceased to be a terror to him.
“Perhaps,” he thought, “my body is growing stronger.”
It was growing stronger but—because of the rare peaceful hours when his
thoughts were changed—his soul was slowly growing stronger, too. He