Indoors, it is another story. When I bring in the spoils of the garden I am again mistress and bend all to my will. Here I’ll have no tricks of color played on me. Sunshine and sky, perhaps, work some spell, for as soon as I get within four walls my prejudices return; scarlets and crimsons and pinks have to live in different rooms. I must have my color-schemes again, and perhaps I am as narrow as the worst. Except, indeed, for the children’s bowls; here the pink and the magenta, the lamb and the lion, may lie down together. But it takes a little child to lead them.
Out in my garden I feel myself less and less owner, more and more merely steward. I decree certain paths, and the phlox says, “Paths? Did you say paths?” and obliterates them in a season’s growth, so that children walk by faith and not by sight. I decree iris in one corner, and the primroses say, “Iris? Not at all. This is our bed. Iris indeed!” And I submit, and move the iris elsewhere.
And yet this slipping of responsibility is pleasant, too. So long as my garden will let me dig in it and weed it and pick it, so long as it entertains my friends for me, so long as it tosses up an occasional rock so that Jonathan does not lose all interest in it, so long as it plays prettily with the children and flings gay greetings to every passer-by, I can find no fault with it.
The joys of stewardship are great and I am well content.
Every year, toward the end of March, I find Jonathan poking about in my sewing-box. And, unless I am very absent-minded, I know what he is after.
“No use looking there,” I remark; “I keep my silks put away.”
“I know what you want. Here.” and I hand him a spool of red buttonhole twist.
“Ah! Just right!” And for the rest of the evening his fingers are busy.
Over what? Mending our trout-rods, of course. It is pretty work, calling for strength and precision of grasp, and as he winds and winds, adjusting all the little brass leading-rings, or supplying new ones, and staying points in the bamboo where he suspects weakness, we talk over last year’s trout-pools, and wonder what they will be like this year.
But beyond wonder we do not get, often for weeks after the trout season is, legislatively, “open.” Jonathan is “busy.” I am “busy.” We know that, if April passes, there is still May and June, and so, if at the end of April, or early May, we do at last pick up our rods,—all new-bedight with red silk windings, and shiny with fresh varnish,—it is not alone the call of the trout that decides us, but another call which is to me at least more imperious, because, if we neglect it now, there is no May and June in which to heed it. It is the call of the arbutus.