The Secret Garden
about herself in her life. Native servants always salaamed and
submitted to you, whatever you did. She had never thought much about
her looks, but she wondered if she was as unattractive as Ben
Weatherstaff and she also wondered if she looked as sour as he had
looked before the robin came. She actually began to wonder also if she
was “nasty tempered.” She felt uncomfortable.
Suddenly a clear rippling little sound broke out near her and she
turned round. She was standing a few feet from a young apple-tree and
the robin had flown on to one of its branches and had burst out into a
scrap of a song. Ben Weatherstaff laughed outright.
“What did he do that for?” asked Mary.
“He’s made up his mind to make friends with thee,” replied Ben. “Dang
me if he hasn’t took a fancy to thee.”
“To me?” said Mary, and she moved toward the little tree softly and
looked up.
“Would you make friends with me?” she said to the robin just as if she
was speaking to a person. “Would you?” And she did not say it either in
her hard little voice or in her imperious Indian voice, but in a tone
so soft and eager and coaxing that Ben Weatherstaff was as surprised as
she had been when she heard him whistle.
“Why,” he cried out, “tha’ said that as nice an’ human as if tha’ was a
real child instead of a sharp old woman. Tha’ said it almost like
Dickon talks to his wild things on th’ moor.”
“Do you know Dickon?” Mary asked, turning round rather in a hurry.
“Everybody knows him. Dickon’s wanderin’ about everywhere. Th’ very
blackberries an’ heather-bells knows him. I warrant th’ foxes shows him
where their cubs lies an’ th’ skylarks doesn’t hide their nests from
him.”
Mary would have liked to ask some more questions. She was almost as
curious about Dickon as she was about the deserted garden. But just
that moment the robin, who had ended his song, gave a little shake of
his wings, spread them and flew away. He had made his visit and had
other things to do.
“He has flown over the wall!” Mary cried out, watching him. “He has
flown into the orchard—he has flown across the other wall—into the
garden where there is no door!”
“He lives there,” said old Ben. “He came out o’ th’ egg there. If he’s
courtin’, he’s makin’ up to some young madam of a robin that lives
among th’ old rose-trees there.”
“Rose-trees,” said Mary. “Are there rose-trees?”
Ben Weatherstaff took up his spade again and began to dig.
“There was ten year’ ago,” he mumbled.
“I should like to see them,” said Mary. “Where is the green door? There
must be a door somewhere.”
Ben drove his spade deep and looked as uncompanionable as he had looked
when she first saw him.
“There was ten year’ ago, but there isn’t now,” he said.
“No door!” cried Mary. “There must be.”
“None as anyone can find, an’ none as is anyone’s business. Don’t you
be a meddlesome wench an’ poke your nose where it’s no cause to go.
Here, I must go on with my work. Get you gone an’ play you. I’ve no
more time.”
And he actually stopped digging, threw his spade over his shoulder and
walked off, without even glancing at her or saying good-by.
CHAPTER V
THE CRY IN THE CORRIDOR
At first each day which passed by for Mary Lennox was exactly like the
others. Every morning she awoke in her tapestried room and found Martha
kneeling upon the hearth building her fire; every morning she ate her
breakfast in the nursery which had nothing amusing in it; and after
each breakfast she gazed out of the window across to the huge moor
which seemed to spread out on all sides and climb up to the sky, and
after she had stared for a while she realized that if she did not go
out she would have to stay in and do nothing—and so she went out. She
did not know that this was the best thing she could have done, and she
did not know that, when she began to walk quickly or even run along the
paths and down the avenue, she was stirring her slow blood and making
herself stronger by fighting with the wind which swept down from the
moor. She ran only to make herself warm, and she hated the wind which
rushed at her face and roared and held her back as if it were some
giant she could not see. But the big breaths of rough fresh air blown
over the heather filled her lungs with something which was good for her
whole thin body and whipped some red color into her cheeks and
brightened her dull eyes when she did not know anything about it.
But after a few days spent almost entirely out of doors she wakened one
morning knowing what it was to be hungry, and when she sat down to her
breakfast she did not glance disdainfully at her porridge and push it
away, but took up her spoon and began to eat it and went on eating it
until her bowl was empty.
“Tha’ got on well enough with that this mornin’, didn’t tha’?” said
Martha.
“It tastes nice today,” said Mary, feeling a little surprised herself.
“It’s th’ air of th’ moor that’s givin’ thee stomach for tha’
victuals,” answered Martha. “It’s lucky for thee that tha’s got
victuals as well as appetite. There’s been twelve in our cottage as had
th’ stomach an’ nothin’ to put in it. You go on playin’ you out o’
doors every day an’ you’ll get some flesh on your bones an’ you won’t
be so yeller.”
“I don’t play,” said Mary. “I have nothing to play with.”
“Nothin’ to play with!” exclaimed Martha. “Our children plays with
sticks and stones. They just runs about an’ shouts an’ looks at
things.” Mary did not shout, but she looked at things. There was
nothing else to do. She walked round and round the gardens and wandered
about the paths in the park. Sometimes she looked for Ben Weatherstaff,
but though several times she saw him at work he was too busy to look at
her or was too surly. Once when she was walking toward him he picked up
his spade and turned away as if he did it on purpose.
One place she went to oftener than to any other. It was the long walk
outside the gardens with the walls round them. There were bare
flower-beds on either side of it and against the walls ivy grew
thickly. There was one part of the wall where the creeping dark green
leaves were more bushy than elsewhere. It seemed as if for a long time
that part had been neglected. The rest of it had been clipped and made
to look neat, but at this lower end of the walk it had not been trimmed
at all.
A few days after she had talked to Ben Weatherstaff, Mary stopped to
notice this and wondered why it was so. She had just paused and was
looking up at a long spray of ivy swinging in the wind when she saw a
gleam of scarlet and heard a brilliant chirp, and there, on the top of
the wall, perched Ben Weatherstaff’s robin redbreast, tilting forward
to look at her with his small head on one side.
“Oh!” she cried out, “is it you—is it you?” And it did not seem at all
queer to her that she spoke to him as if she were sure that he would
understand and answer her.
He did answer. He twittered and chirped and hopped along the wall as if
he were telling her all sorts of things. It seemed to Mistress Mary as
if she understood him, too, though he was not speaking in words. It was
as if he said:
“Good morning! Isn’t the wind nice? Isn’t the sun nice? Isn’t
everything nice? Let us both chirp and hop and twitter. Come on! Come
on!”
Mary began to laugh, and as he hopped and took little flights along the
wall she ran after him. Poor little thin, sallow, ugly Mary—she
actually looked almost pretty for a moment.
“I like you! I like you!” she cried out, pattering down the walk; and
she chirped and tried to whistle, which last she did not know how to do
in the least. But the robin seemed to be quite satisfied and chirped
and whistled back at her. At last he spread his wings and made a
darting flight to the top of a tree, where he perched and sang loudly.
That reminded Mary of the first time she had seen him. He had been
swinging on a tree-top then and she had been standing in the orchard.
Now she was on the other side of the orchard and standing in the path
outside a wall—much lower down—and there was the same tree inside.
“It’s in the garden no one can go into,” she said to herself. “It’s the
garden without a door. He lives in there. How I wish I could see what
it is like!”
She ran up the walk to the green door she had entered the first
morning. Then she ran down the path through the other door and then
into the orchard, and when she stood and looked up there was the tree
on the other side of the wall, and there was the robin just finishing
his song and beginning to preen his feathers with his beak.
“It is the garden,” she said. “I am sure it is.”
She walked round and looked closely at that side of the orchard wall,
but she only found what she had found before—that there was no door in
it. Then she ran through the kitchen-gardens again and out into the
walk outside the long ivy-covered wall, and she walked to the end of it
and looked at it, but there was no door; and then she walked to the
other end, looking again, but there was no door.
“It’s very queer,” she said. “Ben Weatherstaff said there was no door
and there is no door. But there must have been one ten years ago,
because Mr. Craven buried the key.”
This gave her so much to think of that she began to be quite interested
and feel that she was not sorry that she had come to Misselthwaite
Manor. In India she had always felt hot and too languid to care much
about anything. The fact was that the fresh wind from the moor had
begun to blow the cobwebs out of her young brain and to waken her up a
little.
She stayed out of doors nearly all day, and when she sat down to her
supper at night she felt hungry and drowsy and comfortable. She did not
feel cross when Martha chattered away. She felt as if she rather liked
to hear her, and at last she thought she would ask her a question. She
asked it after she had finished her supper and had sat down on the
hearth-rug before the fire.
“Why did Mr. Craven hate the garden?” she said.
She had made Martha stay with her and Martha had not objected at all.
She was very young, and used to a crowded cottage full of brothers and
sisters, and she found it dull in the great servants’ hall downstairs
where the footman and upper-housemaids made fun of her Yorkshire speech
and looked upon her as a common little thing, and sat and whispered
among themselves. Martha liked to talk, and the strange child who had
lived in India, and been waited upon by “blacks,” was novelty enough to
attract her.
She sat down on the hearth herself without waiting to be asked.
“Art tha’ thinkin’ about that garden yet?” she said. “I knew tha’
would. That was just the way with me when I first heard about it.”
“Why did he hate it?” Mary persisted.
Martha tucked her feet under her and made herself quite comfortable.
“Listen to th’ wind wutherin’ round the house,” she said. “You could
bare stand up on the moor if you was out on it tonight.”
Mary did not know what “wutherin’” meant until she listened, and then
she understood. It must mean that hollow shuddering sort of roar which
rushed round and round the house as if the giant no one could see were
buffeting it and beating at the walls and windows to try to break in.
But one knew he could not get in, and somehow it made one feel very
safe and warm inside a room with a red coal fire.
“But why did he hate it so?” she asked, after she had listened. She
intended to know if Martha did.
Then Martha gave up her store of knowledge.
“Mind,” she said, “Mrs. Medlock said it’s not to be talked about.
There’s lots o’ things in this place that’s not to be talked over.
That’s Mr. Craven’s orders. His troubles are none servants’ business,
he says. But for th’ garden he wouldn’t be like he is. It was Mrs.
Craven’s garden that she had made when first they were married an’ she