THE GARDEN IN ASIA
“Come to the land where men grind their wheat in the sky!”
It had come on to rain. Night was approaching, and I was lost. I had been a guest of the Marquis de Brie at the hunt in the southeast of Belgium. The meet at the château had been in the afternoon for the convenience of the guests of the Marquis, who came out from Brussels. It was late before the hounds picked up a fox, and then there had been a mad run.
I was unfamiliar with the country, and by one of those accidents common in the field, I had got separated from the hunt.
There had been a high timber jump. In the take-off my horse slipped, and I feared that he had received a strained tendon. I got down to look, for I valued the horse, and in my concern the field passed. The horse seemed all right. But I was unable again to come up with the hunt, and I was lost.
I set out to return to the château, following that instinct of direction which every man imagines himself to possess. But it was an unfortunate undertaking as is usually the case with these vaunted instincts.
I had the feeling that I passed more than one time through fields that I remembered. At any rate, night was coming on, and a worse thing presented itself. The hunter had been injured in that unfortunate timber jump. He began to save his leg a bit—everybody knows the indications.
Of course I was not in a deserted country. There were peasant houses about, and the great windmills—that primitive institution of the flat country, serving the peasant farmer as the mountain torrent served to turn the grist mill of the Virginia settler. Our fathers had big conceptions of the uses of the elemental forces. They harnessed the water and the winds.
But I could get no direction from the Belgian peasant.
The Fleming and the Walloon spoke no language that I could understand; and, of course, English was a simian jabber to them.
I have no idea in what direction I traveled, nor precisely how I came into the road I determined to follow. It was not a highway. It was a sort of lane running along by an immense wood, carpeted with grass and unkempt, for occasionally there was the branch of a forest tree in it.
I had gotten down out of the saddle. It was all the horse could do to limp along, and I at least had two good legs under me.
I walked by the horse’s bridle.
The road continued; and presently, in the dim light, I observed that it followed a great fence: a fence of iron spikes as high as a man could reach sitting in the saddle. It was fastened into cement pillars, and it seemed to enclose all the lands off to my right.
I took it to be a great parked estate. The wood beyond the fence was cleared of brush, and I could sometimes see the extension of a meadow. It was beyond question some great estate.
And I took courage from that observation.
There would perhaps be some friend of the Marquis, or at least someone with a knowledge of the hunt, and if I were not put up for the night, I would at least get some direction that would set me intelligently on the road.
I followed along the great spiked fence, expecting to find an entrance. There would be some way to go in at no inconsiderable distance. But the hope dwindled. We went on—the unused road paralleling the great parked estate, but shut out by this immense, forbidding fence.
I must have traveled for several miles along that fence enclosing this estate, but I never found a place that a fox could go through or a mark that indicated that any human creature had ever endeavored to pass.
And there was no gate.
I began to wonder what the accursed thing could be that this immense wall of spearheads enclosed, and I felt myself confronted by one of two discouraging alternatives: to sit down on a fallen log by my horse until the day arrived or walk on in the rain.
I walked on.
Discomforts do not seem to be so acute when they accompany us in action. I could not sit in a Belgian drizzle with a miserable horse. And that wall of spikes went on, as though it were a sort of wall of the world, as though I had come by some door through the hill to the boundary of a forbidden country.
Finally I did find a light off to the left, and I turned out toward it. I could not have gone on, at any rate, for the road turned that way. The tangled wood that I feared to find, in fact, appeared here as the outside border of the great spiked wall that went straight on as though it had been surveyed from the French border to the North Sea.
I supposed I followed the road for a mile at right angles to the estate. I was now able to see the light. It was like a gleam of a candle in a window; sometimes the brush, or a turn in the road, shut it out. But it seemed always before me at the end of the road; and there was, in fact, nothing to do but go on. It was now so dark that I was hardly able to keep in the road—I with the miserable, lame horse. I was wet to the skin and a rather ugly human creature when I finally came to the light. It was a house sitting on the rise of a hill.
I had a strange feeling as I pounded on the door with my riding crop. The house was lighted, and the angles of it had shut off from the road all but one light in the window by the door. My impression of it was that I had wandered out of modern reality into some romance. The thing did not seem real. I felt as though by some turn I had got out of the world as I knew it.
It was a tavern with the setting of Dumas. The door was opened by a little Walloon, dressed like a miller, except that his cap was off and he wore an apron. Behind him, seated by a big oak table that stood out in the room from a peat fire, was the strangest human creature I have ever met. He was a big, old man with an immense head; a head as bald as a gravestone—there was not a fringe of hair on it. He had a heavy face, a big crooked nose, and sharp eyes. The eyes were heavy-lidded; but there was no mistaking the alert intelligence that they indicated.
The man was waiting for his dinner. I don’t think he was pleased to see a stranger enter. For a moment he looked surprised, I thought, or disconcerted: put out in some manner. Perhaps it was only annoyance. And then, when he had a better look at me, he got up.
I had given my horse to the Walloon. He said he had stabling and fodder for it. I seemed to be able to understand the sort of French he gabbled in. In dreams and in the countries of romance we always understand in any dialect that is spoken. At any rate, I understood the Walloon, and I trusted the horse to him. And then I stood in the door, my riding boots spattered with mud and the rain running in tiny rivulets from my top hat and the creases of my riding coat.
The old man leaned on the table and looked at me.
“Come in,” he said. “There will be dinner for two and a fire to dry you. It will be better to be wet inside than out on a night like this.”
I thought he was going to laugh, but it was only the shadow of a laugh. It began along the border of his great thin-lipped mouth. It was a firm mouth, for all the heavy face.
The mouth and the eyes determined me. I began to explain what had happened; how I had managed to arrive here.
“Can you tell me into what part of the world I have wandered?” I said.
He did laugh then: a laugh that did not disturb the massive features; a laugh like a shadow passing over a wall.
“You have wandered into Asia,” he said.
I thought the man was mad, but not entirely mad. You will have to try to understand the state of mind I was in. You see, that feeling of unreality had very nearly dominated the whole of my intelligence. You will have to think about that to get any conception of how this reply impressed me, I did not wholly reject it. I had explained pretty fully all that had happened to me and the way I had come. I put another query before I asked him to amend his answer. “What is the great estate to the right of the road: the one with the huge spiked fence along it?”
The smile repassed over his face. To be accurate, it came back over it.
“That is not an estate,” he said: “that is a garden.”
“A garden,” I echoed.
“Yes,” he said, “the Garden of Eden.… You are in Asia.”
I took off my wet top hat;
I put my riding crop down beside it and went over to the fire. The old man sat down in his chair before the table. He continued to regard me sharply through the corners of his heavy-lidded eyes, but he did not say anything. He gave some directions to the Walloon, who came in just then. And that creature of romance placed a second chair beyond the table and put out his plates for another guest for the dinner he was roasting in his kitchen. The odors of it came through the door. The dinner would compensate for any sort of madness.
I think the big old man had been waiting a long time for that dinner to be prepared. And the Walloon had taken a lot of care with it, as for an imperial guest. Fortunately, it was abundant, for it served two—a hungry man who had ridden to hounds and this other.
My host was courteous.
“I know the Marquis de Brie,” he said, “and the hunt, but it does not belong here. It is in the world. It is on the Continent of Europe.… It is in Belgium.”
He made a gesture, as of one indicating something beyond the land he was standing in.
“I am glad to be host to a guest of the Marquis,” he said, “even when he wanders into Asia.”
He paused. “Do you believe the Bible story of the Garden of Eden?”
I had a sudden flare of annoyance.
“I am not young enough to believe it,” I said.
He looked at me a moment through his heavy-lidded eyes.
“You mean you are not old enough.”
He beckoned me to the table, and we sat down. The wonderful roast fowl, the old wine, the incomparable salad put me in a better humor. The host permitted me to eat. I thought he was highly amused with me, but he did not take his amusement with a hungry man.
It was some time before he began to talk.
“There is a man and a woman in that garden,” he said, when I had the comfort of that dinner and the warmth of a fire to put me in a better mood.
“Not the first man and the first woman … but it is the same garden.”
Then he put a sharp query: “Do you believe in any of our mysterious religions?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
He passed his hand over his face at that.
“You don’t know; you are too young. One has to be old to know. Perhaps one never gets old enough to know precisely.”
He smiled again.
“Our greatest religion begins with a Garden in Asia. That is the base of it; that is the point it starts from, and it carries a warning that the young forget, but the old remember.… There was the witch of Endor, and there were the creatures with familiar spirits; there was the magic of Pharaoh’s magicians.
“You think it is not true? Have you ever considered the evidence to support it—the testimony of the Scriptures and the witness of every other early race?
“You know what the Akkadian Magi said about it: that all these formulas of magic—formulas by which the natural world was changed; by which the forms of men and beasts were changed, such as the magicians of Pharaoh assembled—were all written down in gold characters on six thousand ox hides and stored in the palace of Darius at Persepolis.… But they were lost!”
He made a gesture with his hand over the table.
“I quote the Magi. ‘The barbarian Alexander, penetrating into Asia, burned the palace at Persepolis with its contents, thereby wiping out in a day the sum of all human knowledge.’”
He removed his hand. It was hidden by the cloth. There was a cheap cloth on the table with an Oriental design.
“I wonder why we assume that all the early historians were liars. Are we so truthful ourselves?
“There is the testimony of every one of them to the things I say: the Scriptures, legends of early races; Arabian stories that have come down to us and the writings of every wise man.
“Take Herodotus if you like, or take the greatest modern legal mind in England … I mean Sir Matthew Hale. He said in his most famous opinion that there was nothing so thoroughly established in the world as witchcraft, for three reasons, which he named in their order. First, that it was so stated in the Scriptures; second, that all nations had made laws against it; and third, that the human testimony in its favor was overwhelming.”
That shadow of a smile returned for an instant across his face.
“Do you know who I am?” he said.
I had been thinking all the while that I knew, but I could not precisely place this extraordinary personality. I remembered instantly when he said the name.
Sir Godfrey Simon! Of course I knew him! Everybody knew him. He was the greatest alienist in England.
I regarded him now with a sort of wonder. What did he mean by all this Delphic discourse: witches, magic, a Garden in Asia?
Here was one of the cleverest men in the world; one of the shrewdest men; one of the hardest men to mislead in the world. He was at the head of one of the most difficult professions in the world: a profession that had to weigh and consider all kinds of delusions, all kinds of fairy belief, all kinds of imagined wizardry; a profession that must discover it and reject it; a profession that must discriminate, clean-cut and accurately, between the conceptions of sanity and the vast, shadowy realm of madness.
And he sat here in this fantastic place commending me to a belief in the most impossible legends; commending me to a belief in magic, in witches, in familiar spirits, in the properties that belong to the stories coming down to us from the baked earth in Arabia.
And he laid it all in our modern life, in our age of trams and spindles!
I tell you the story as he told me the story. You can believe what you please about it. But it was true. I am able to write my signature under that assurance. When you get on to the end you will believe me.…
You have all heard of the Countess of Heatherstone—that unusual romance reversing the order of such adventures—an American girl who married an English title and a lot of money with it.
It is the only case I ever heard of.
The thing is usually the other way about, so you may remember it for that conspicuous element. But the Countess is not in this story. It is her brother, Arthur Letington, the American, that we are concerned with. Some of you may have met Letington about. He was not a usual person. He belonged with his sister to one of our old Southern families, a family with a queer streak in it—neurotic and not always normal.
I think it was his outdoor life that kept Letington fit. He went in for sports. He was keen after hounds, and he was one of the best polo players in the country; one of the best in England.
He was usually in England with his sister.
The Earl of Heatherstone was a canny Scotchman about his money. He did not like to see it get away from him, and usually it did not get away. He was one of the best men of business in England, for all of his being an earl.
And that is one of the causes, the inciting causes, as one might say it, of the extraordinary adventures I am coming to.
You see, Letington had no money and he had no profession. I suppose he had a bit of an income from somewhere, but nothing to speak of. I imagine his sister kept him going; mounted him in the hunts and backed the polo at Roehampton and Ranelagh. It might have gone on like that, but the earl had a notion that everybody should be useful, and so I suppose the thing in a manner adjusted itself, as such things have a way of doing.
At any rate, Letington found himself presently included in a business venture.
Heatherstone had every sort of iron in the fire all over the British Empire; among other things, a little railway in a section of timber land in Canada. It was a short line, built primarily to bring out hemlock from lands over which the white pine had been removed. It was not very much of a railway, but it had one value: it was a link in one of the great transcontinental lines across Canada to the Pacific.
I don’t think the English stockholders realized very handsomely from the manufacture of hemlock lumber. They could not compete with the mills of the Americans.
Still, that was not the thing that got Heatherstone and his stock
holders going.
It was the big economic situation in England. I mean the lack of employment for labor. English labor was out of work. It was the business of great commercial adventurers like Heatherstone to find employment for it.
The government called him in.
They began to “put it up,” as we would say. to the business men of England like Heatherstone. The government had an inventory, a sort of list of every English enterprise in the world, especially the ones which employed foreign labor, and Heatherstone’s little railway was on the list. It was operated entirely by Italians. There was not an English laborer on the plant.
It seemed queer to think of a lumber plant and a bit of a railway, in a cold waste of Canada, operated by Italians. But there is a point about this race that one must always consider. It will go any place if it goes as a colony. And that is precisely how it got into this sector of Canada. It had gone as a colony.
It was a portion of southern Italy laid down in a section of the north.
I don’t know how the thing came about. I think the early advance of the war was perhaps behind it; England and her dominions had no man power to spare, and so the Italian colony came in. At any rate, it was there, attached to the soil, a fixture in that wilderness, as permanent as the villages of Salerno.
And it manned the whole plant, manufactured the lumber, stripped the bark, operated the railway, and moved the great transcontinental train that went over this line once in every twenty-four hours. I mentioned that a moment ago.
It was the one industrial fact that made this piece of railway important. It was a short cut on one of the big transcontinental lines. It was not a permanent part of the line. It was never designed to be a permanent part of it; but the main line through was being rebuilt and in the meantime their fast passenger train went over this connecting link. Heatherstone’s road coupled the line together.
They were paid handsomely for the use of the road, but there was a condition. They had to guarantee the safety of the train and its equipment while it was on their line.
That gave Heatherstone and his stockholders some concern. But they never had any trouble about it.
The Bradmoor Murder Page 13
