The Rosery Folk Part 35

"Certainly not," said the doctor. "And besides, you give the plant back, about those wonderful imbibers--its roots--the concentrated essence of all that it has lost, in the shape of slug."

"Is this meant for a joke, Doctor Scales?"

"Not in the least, my dear madam. By the way, though, our friend Mr Arthur Prayle would give us a lecture on cruelty, if he saw us rejoicing over the death of our molluscous enemies here."

"Mr Arthur Prayle had better mind his accounts," said the lady shortly; "he knows nothing about gardening."

"No; I do not think he does," said the doctor, as the old lady routed out another slug, cut it in three, and buried it viciously--just as if she were operating on Arthur Prayle.

"It seems to amuse you," said Aunt Sophia.

"Amuse me? Well, it does look rather droll," replied the doctor; "but it can't be pleasant for the slugs."

"Then the slugs had better emigrate," said Aunt Sophia sharply. "I don't want to see my poor nephew's garden go to rack and ruin."

Doctor Scales went off as Aunt Sophia resumed her task, and, as was often his habit, began to work out a discourse upon what he had seen.

Starting with the text, "Is it cruel to kill slugs," and it was somewhat after this fashion that he mused: "Is it cruel to kill slugs? Just stand with upraised foot before one of those slimy, moist, elongated bags of concentrated cabbage, cauliflower, choice plant, and tender cuc.u.mber, and answer that question if you can.

"Now, letting slimy slugs alone, and speaking as a humble-minded individual whose profession it is to save life, I want to know whether it is cruel to kill the myriad of teeming creatures that throng this earth. With sportsmen I have nothing to do. I speak from a simple horticultural point of view, and want to know whether I am justified in destroying life. To begin with, I am a teeming creature on the surface of the earth and I don't want anybody to kill me. It would be far from pleasant to my feelings to be cut in two with a spade; to be crushed into an unpleasant ma.s.s by a broad foot; to be salted till I writhed and melted away; to be shot at with guns; caught in traps; killed with lime besprinkled upon me quick: or poisoned with deadly drugs. Yet I openly confess that I have been guilty of all these crimes. I might, in fact, have called this 'The Recollections of a Murderer,' so bestained are my hands in innocent blood of red and green and other colours. Certainly I might do the dirty work in a vicarious way by bringing into the garden a very serious-looking young drake, who makes no more ado about swallowing great earthworms by the yard than he does of devouring slugs by the quart, but that is a sneaking, underhanded way that I do not approve. I should feel like a Venetian n.o.ble who has hired a bravo to use his stiletto upon some obnoxious friend; and besides, if I did, the shadow of those murders would come like Banquo's ghost to sit at my table when the aforesaid serious-looking young drake and a brother graced the board in company with a goodly dish of green peas, and seemed to murmur of the slugs and worms he had slain at my command. And there it is again-- wholesale murder. I was guilty vicariously of the death of those ducks; I slew the sparrows who came to eat the peas; and, to go further, did I not kill the peas?

"Who says no? The peas were alive. I plucked their pods, tearing the graceful vines to pieces limb by limb, and the pea plants died--killed-- murdered. Certainly I planted them and saved their lives when they were tender, sprouting, infantile pea-lings by killing the invading slugs with salt and soot, but, though I murdered that they might live, there was no reason why I should slay them when mature. But it is so all through man's career, he walks his ground--his little Eden--a very Cain.

Say he conquers that terrible disinclination to follow the example of the old man Adam, and till the ground with a spade, a genial kind of toil that opens the pores of the skin, increases the appet.i.te with the smell of the newly-turned earth, and gives such an awful aching pain in the back that a quarter of an hour's usance is quite sufficient digging for any but an extremely greedy man who possesses an enormous digestion.

I repeat, say he conquers his aversion to manual toil, he has not inserted the deadly blade eight inches, and turned up the 'spit,' as the gardeners call it, before he finds that he has chopped some wretched wriggling worm in two. The worm had no business to be there when he was digging. Why not? What does the worm know about human rights? His name is not Macgregor, and he has no feet to be upon his native heath, but he was in his native soil. He was born there, and had gone on pleasantly boring his way through life, coming up to the surface as soon as it was dark, and lying out on the cool, dewy, fragrant earth, and then you, because you want potatoes, or peas, or some other vegetable for your gluttonous maw, come and cut him in two. A judge in a court of law would go against the worm, and call it justifiable vermicide, as he was a trespa.s.ser, you legally holding the land, but that worm's blood would still be upon your--spade.

"There is no begging the question; if you garden you must kill wholesale. There is only one alternative. You can throw the big nuisances over into your neighbour's plot, but it is only a temporary palliation, for he is sure not to like it, and certain to throw them back. Besides, you may have some compunction in the matter, and as the small nuisances cannot be thrown over, one kills and slays wholesale.

It is terrible to think of! Intentionally and unintentionally one slays millions of creatures a year, beginning with one's beef, and going down to the tiniest aphis that one treads upon in one's daily walk, so that if it is wicked to kill slugs, it must be equally unjust to slay the tiniest fly. Why it is quite appalling, this reckoning up of crime.

Those calceolarias were covered with lovely little green-flies right up the blossom stalks, and without compunction there was a ma.s.sacre of the insects with tobacco water. That croquet lawn was infested with great worms, and they were watered with solution of copperas to crawl out and die. The great sh.e.l.led snails that made a raid by regiments upon the strawberry beds were supplied with pillars of salt. The birds after much forbearance, were condemned to death for stealing cherries and black and red currants and gooseberries; so were the rabbits for nibbling off the tops of the tender broccoli and Brussels sprout plants.

As a romantic young lady would say, this garden has been literally stained with gore, but the gore does not show, and the garden is the more abundant and green for the removal of its plagues.

"Yes, there is the creephole left that the killing may be looked upon as in defence of one's own. The worm may be indigenous, but the birds and flies invade the place, while the slugs, snails, and rodents come in through fence and wall. They attack one's cherished plants, and, granting that those plants have life, why should they not be protected, as one's poultry is from foxes, and their young from predatory cats?

Naturalists grant plants to possess life, circulation, sleep, functions, and nerves; they grow, they blossom, they have young; they have endless contrivances for sending those young emigrating to a distance where they can get a living for themselves, and not bother and eat the nutriment of the old folks, who are, perhaps, in pinched circ.u.mstances. Some send their offspring flying upon little parachutes of their own; some artfully stick them upon the backs or sides of any animal who pa.s.ses by; there is one great balsam which sits on a sunny day apparently taking aim with its little seeds, and shooting them out with a loud pop to a considerable distance; some youngsters really possess locomotion, and contract and expand in quite a crawling way till they get to some distance from the parent stem; others, again, take advantage of the first rain flood, and these little ones are off to sea, merrily sailing along hundreds of yards from where they were born. Why, even in the wood, at the bottom of the garden, there is one umbelliferous plant, a kind of wild parsnip--'hog weed,' as it is locally called--which grows up in a summer nine and ten feet high, carrying a host of children upon its head like a Covent Garden porter with a basket, till it thinks they are big enough to take care of themselves, when it calmly lies down, and tilts the little seeds off three or four yards away from its roots to form an independent nursery.

"I cannot solve the problem whether it is cruel to slay slugs, but take refuge in the protection theory, and so, as in duty bound, we go on killing and slaying, setting traps of sugared water for the wasps that love the plums, picking off the crawling caterpillars, before they have time to bloom into b.u.t.terflies, drowning aphides with syringe storms, enlisting toads to kill the wood-lice and beetles, and full of remorse for what we do, go on in our wicked ways. To take a step outside one's garden, though, and gaze in thought around this teeming earth, what a vast scheme of preying destruction and bursting forth into new life is always going on. Those words, _destruction_ and _cruelty_, might almost be expunged as being absurd in their broadest sense, for, in spite of the sore problem, it seems that from man downward to the tiniest microscopic organism, the great aim of existence is an exemplification of the verb 'to prey.'"

Jack Scales in his musings had been pretty well round the garden, and had returned to where Aunt Sophia was still killing slugs.

She looked up as he approached and seemed about to speak, so he resolved to give her the opportunity, and going up he said with a smile, "Do you know Miss Raleigh, I have been musing on killing slugs, and I think yours is a very notable employment."

"Humph!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the old lady, stopping short, and looking the doctor full in the face.--"And now, doctor, a word with you as a gentleman.

You are here in constant attendance upon my nephew. He has a good deal of property and that sort of thing, but I don't think it ought to be wasted."

"Of course not, my dear madam."

"Are you doing James any good?"

The doctor opened his eyes a little more widely at this, and then said: "Well, that is a very plain question, Miss Raleigh; but I'll give you a plain answer--So far, none."

"Then why do you stay, putting him to expense? You know the other doctors say it is a case for years of patient waiting."

"Hang the other doctors, ma'am!" cried Scales. "I do not go by what they say. I think differently, and have faith in being able to alter the condition of things."

Miss Raleigh shook her head.

"Ah, but I have, madam; and I shall go on trying till my poor friend sends me away.--And now, Miss Raleigh, before I go any further, I want to apologise to you."

"Apologise! To me?"

"Yes, to you. I made use of a very common but unkindly expression towards you, yesterday. Perhaps you have forgotten it."

Aunt Sophia looked at him searchingly; and there he saw the look of pain that had softened her countenance on the previous day come back, and her eyes filled with tears, as she said quietly: "I never forget these things."

"But you will forgive them. Believe me, I am very sorry, and I regret it extremely. I was worried and disappointed at the time."

"You only called me an old maid," said Aunt Sophia, with a smile full of sadness softening the harsh lines of her face.

"And I ought to have been ashamed of myself. It was the act of some thoughtless boy. Forgive me;" and he held out his hand.

Aunt Sophia gazed at him thoughtfully for a few moments, and then placed her hand in his. "Let it go," she said softly. "I shall never think of it again."

Jack Scales raised the hand to his lips, and had just let it fail, when he became aware of the fact that Arthur Prayle was walking along one of the neighbouring paths, apparently deep in the study of some book.

"Confound him! he'll misinterpret that," said the doctor to himself; and then he saw that his companion's eyes were fixed upon him inquiringly.

"You were thinking that Mr Prayle will make remarks," she said softly.

"Let him. What is it to me what he thinks?"

"No; it does not matter," said Aunt Sophia. "Let us go down here." She led the way along the walk to where the iron gate opened upon the meadows, across which lay the lane leading to the little ivy-grown church; and, wondering at her action, Jack Scales walked by her side.

"Surely," he thought, "she does not imagine that--Oh, absurd!" He glanced sidewise, and then, man of the world as he was, he could not help a slight sensation of uneasy confusion coming over him as he noticed that Aunt Sophia seemed to have divined his thoughts, and to be reading him through and through.

"This is a pretty place," she said, breaking a rather awkward silence.

"As pretty a place as I ever saw," replied the doctor, jumping at the opportunity of speaking on a fresh subject.

"It is much altered since I knew it as a child. James has done so much to improve it since he has been master."

"You knew it well, when you were young, then?"

"O yes; we lived at the next house, higher up the river," said Aunt Sophia softly; and there was a dreamy look in her eyes, while a pleasant smile, rarely enough seen, played about her lips as she spoke. "I was child, girl, and grew to middle age down here, Doctor Scales; I come back to the place, the grey, withered, old woman you see."

"What an idiot I am!" thought the doctor. "I shall never understand her."

They were walking on across the meadows, at the end of which was a gate, at which Aunt Sophia paused. "Will you give me your hand?" she said quietly. "I am not so active as I was."

"I really don't understand her!" muttered the doctor, climbing the gate, which was nailed up, and then a.s.sisting the old lady over. It was an easy task, for in spite of her self-disparagement, Aunt Sophia's spareness made her very active, and, just holding by the doctor's hands for steadiness, she jumped lightly down and stood beside him in the lane.

"Shall we go down to the river and round back to the house by the path?"

"No," said Aunt Sophia quietly. "I want to go as far as the church."