Chapter 6

The paths were now visible. One of them, in front of the house, made an oval round a lawn, which looked, at the moment, like a patch of weeds, with all sorts of flowers in the uneven grass—buttercups, moon-daisies, cranes-bill and centaury; there were rushes, too, and nettles, hemlock and plants of lingwort that looked like long thin girls in white hats.

Encoignard, the gardener from Valognes, was contemplating this wildness with a melancholy eye:

“It will have to be ploughed, M. Des Boys, or at least well hoed. Then we’ll sift the earth we’ve broken up, level it down and sow ray-grass. In two years it will be like a carpet of green velvet.”

Eyeing the landscape, he went on:

“Lime trees! You ought to have a segoya here and over there an araucaria. And what’s that? An apple-tree. That’s quite wrong. We’ll have that up and put a magnolia grandiflora there. You want an English garden, don’t you? An English garden oughtn’t to contain anything but exotic plants. Lilacs and roses ... Why not snow-ball trees? Ah, there’s a nice spotted holly. We might use that perhaps.”

“I don’t want anyone to touch my trees,” said Rose, who had drawn near.

“She’s right,” said M. Des Boys.

“Think of pulling up lilacs,” Rose went on, “pulling up rose-trees.”

“But I mean to put prettier flowers in their place, Mademoiselle.”

“The prettiest flowers are the ones I like best.”

She picked a red rose and put it to her lips, kissing it as though it were something sacred and adored.

M. Des Boys looked at his daughter with astonishment.

“Well, M. Encoignard, we must do what she wants. Hervart, what do you think about it?”

“I think that one ought to leave nature as unkempt as possible. I also think that one ought to love the plants of the country where one lives. They are the only ones that harmonise with the sky and the crops, with the colour of the rivers and roads and roofs.”

“Quite right,” said M. Des Boys.

“Xavier, I love you,” Rose whispered, taking M. Hervart’s arm.

The inspection of the garden was continued, and it was decided that M. Encoignard’s collaboration should be reduced to the ordinary functions of a plain docile gardener. One or two new plants were admitted on condition that the old should be respected.

M. Hervart had got up early and had been strolling about the garden for some time past. He had spent half the night in thought. All the women he had loved or known had visited his memory with their customary gestures and the attitudes they affected. There was that other one who seemed always to have come merely to pay a friendly call; it needed real diplomacy to obtain from her what, at the bottom of her heart, she really desired. Between these two extremes there were many gradations. Most of them liked to give themselves little by little, playing their desire against their sense of shame M. Hervart flattered himself that he knew all about women; he knew that who let herself be touched will let herself be wholly possessed.

“A woman,” he said to himself, “who has been as familiar as Rose has been, or even much less familiar, ought to be one who has surrendered herself. Perhaps she might make me wait a few days more, but she would belong to me, she would let her eyes confess it and her lips would speak it out. Such a woman would even be disposed to hasten the coming of the delightful moment, if I had not the wit to prepare it myself. Rose, being a young girl and having only the dimmest presentiments of the truth, does not know how to hasten our happiness; otherwise she most certainly would hasten it. She belongs, then, to me. The question to be answered is this: shall I go on smelling the rose on the tree, or shall I pluck it?”