Part 10

“O Primavera, gioventù dell’ anno!

* * * * *

O gioventù, primavera della vita!”

In France, however, the accepted harbinger of les beaux jours, is not the

“Pale cowslip, fit for maiden’s early bier,”

not the faint Primula but emphatically the Lilac—the Syringa Vulgaris; the joyous fleur des humbles, as contrasted to the noble Rose.

“Oh, gai! vive la rose, La rose ... et les lilas!”

runs the refrain of olden days.

During the last century or two it has grown as common, almost, around villages as the hawthorn, the Aubépine itself. But it is perhaps best appreciated in the towns. While the tender purple bloom lasts, there is scarce too modest a working home’s window-sill or mantelpiece for the display of a branche de Lilas stuck in the gullet of a water-bottle. And your gay-hearted grisette or midinette, early afoot in the streets, will always spend her first sou of the day on a sprig of the sweet-breathing rosy cluster.

One may learn, whilst intent upon other matters, many unsuspected things about objects even as familiar as the common “Laylock.” ‹A collection of old letters of Georgian and very early Victorian days, with which we have had much to do at one time, show a preference for this phonetic rendering of the name.› Thus it appears that a valuable febrifuge “principle” is obtainable from its fruit; that its wood, veined in pleasing colours and very fine-grained, is in high request for delicate articles of turnery and in particular for inlaying; that a perfumed essence is sometimes distilled from it that is almost indistinguishable from Rhodes Balsam—and so forth.

Those, however, are not the points of interest which have made it imperative to have a plant or two of “Laylocks” in our Sentimental Garden. ‹They do fairly well, be it said, in their own specially sheltered, suntrap corner of the ground.› No, there is in life an ever-growing motive—old sake’s sake. Syringa Persica may mean much to the operative gardener, but it can never mean Lilas blanc ... Lilas rose!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

As for the Acacias, in that queer old courtyard—distinctly exotic creatures, aristocrats in the company of those palpable sons of the soil, the caducous orchard trees—I still wonder how they ever came there. Their rôle in the life of the small-boy school seems to have been that of a butt for cockshies, and thus passively to foster a notable precision in the use of those small river pebbles with which the playground was covered. A game, deeply favoured by the young scholars ‹but not recognized by the authorities› when Acacias were “in,” consisted in the bringing down of some selected bunch of fragrant, creamy flowers from its lofty station with the minimum number of pebbles. The feat was the subject of wager, the stakes stated and paid in steel nibs. Nibs—in the tongue of the aborigines, becs-de-plume—were accepted as currency and legal tender. It would be truly interesting to find out how this particular token of exchange came to be established among the youthful communities of French elementary schools. Be it as it may, the convention was hallowed by tradition “whereof the memory of boy ran not to the contrary.”

When, however, the pale yellow, incense-smelling, honey-tasting racemes were “out,” the devoted Acacia became the object of other, slightly different, balistic attentions. The boys, be it stated, were regularly released from the durance of bench and desk every hour for some ten minutes ‹a commendable system with seven to ten year-olds› during which the courtyard became clamorous as any aviary. During these short intervals of recreation, too short to allow of any settled games, a favourite occupation was the adorning of the inaccessible branches with long streamers of coloured paper, previously manufactured at home—guirlandes by name. These guirlandes, some twenty or thirty feet long, were wound with sedulous care round a suitable stone, leaving a small length as trailer; the apparatus was then cast up in a parabola over the tree-top. If the indirect fire was successful the trailer caught in the leafage, unrolling the remainder and releasing the ballasting stone. The most successful shot was, of course, that which left the streamer properly entangled on the topmost boughs. Each boy had his chosen and declared colour, or mixture of colours; and the trophy remained, flaunting his achievement “in its own tincts” as long as wind or rain permitted. It afforded the small breast a distinct satisfaction when, reaching the school of a morning, the boy could see his pennant still flying in the breeze....

Such is the strength of the association of ideas that I never could come upon a roadside plantation of Acacias in the hot plains of Hungary—where the tree is used as commonly as in France the Poplar, that inevitable feature of the great highways—without adorning it in imagination with the multi-coloured guirlandes of my first school.

* * * * *

If there was no reasonable accounting for the presence of Acacias at the Institution Delescluze, the great Poplar, on the other hand, that raised its height in the very centre of the cour, had a well-authenticated history. A relic of Revolution days, it was then in its eighth decade, in the strength of its age; having been planted, at the same time as hundreds of others, as a Tree of Liberty—Populus, emblematic of sans-culotte ascendancy—at the time when the royal Bastille, emblem of another form of tyranny, was laid low.

For some cryptic reason, by the way, the democratic Poplar, which had subsisted through many changes of régime, and had become undoubtedly too ornamental a mark of antiquity to be destroyed, was never honoured by the flights of our banderoles. Perhaps it was a result of political prejudice, which in France characteristically affects the views even of scholars at the hornbook stage of life. Or perhaps it was that the old Peuplier was the site of the disciplinary punishment known as piquet—the playground equivalent of our nursery “corner.”

* * * * *

Poplar and gummy Plum-trees, Lilac and Acacias, courtyard and indeed the whole Institution, had already disappeared when I bethought myself, for the first time after so many years of oblivion, to go and gaze upon the scene once more. It was quite in middle life. I had lately been reading that sad and strangely affecting work, “Peter Ibbetson,” the first, and to my mind by far the best, of the three novels written by Georges du Maurier in the late autumn of his days. By the thousands who for so many years had, week after week, enjoyed the delicate humour and pencilling of the great Punch artist, the book was received with a favour that paved the way for the greater popular success of “Trilby.” But I doubt whether it ever appealed to any denizen of our planet as intimately as to the Master of the House.

Those who have read the curiously original novel which, like so many first attempts at fiction, is autobiographical—autobiographical as to feelings, if not necessarily as to facts—may remember his description of the English boy’s early “French days;” and, later on, of the mature man’s poignant impressions on revisiting the old playground of his life. Now, there were so many points of resemblance between the surroundings of Du Maurier’s hero’s childhood and my own; so many allusions to the kind of things and the kind of people I had once been familiar with but, as time flowed on, had dismissed from mind as removed from real existence and new workaday points of view; they were presented, moreover, in so sympathetic a manner, that one need hardly wonder at the sudden resolve that rose within me, to go and look up the old place again.

Such a desire, when it comes, has something of the twist of hunger about it—it is une fringale, to use a word for which, oddly enough, we have no counterpart. But, alas! delight in scenes of the beau temps jadis is not to be recaptured! It may but be espied in fitful, elusive glimpses. The world has moved on and the genius loci has fled. Have you ever found out that the return, after many years, to a place oft dreamed of until then and with never-failing tenderness, besides leaving you blankly unsatisfied, seems to have killed the glamour, to have broken the magic spell of memory? The dream is dispelled. It will henceforth nevermore haunt your pillow. You have seen the phantom of the past with the eyes of nowadays; the new picture has replaced that of the dream—for ever.

Well, la boite Delescluze—as we irreverent youngsters called that respectable institution—unlike those other places, St. Cloud, for instance, which were fated to evoke but a melancholy disappointment, could not be beheld again with the carnal eye—not the least vestige of it. And it is, no doubt, for that reason that so many memories still come flitting back, smiling and clear, of that forgotten cradle of scholarship.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

A glowing log rolls down from its allotted place on the hearth, sending into the room a jet of wood smoke, blue at the stem, white feathering as it spreads out; and the pungent smell immediately revives a fresh set of scenes from the past.

That nothing brings back old memories so suddenly and so vividly as perfume is a commonplace remark. But I wonder whether the extraordinary persistency of a first impression, in the case of odours constantly met with, has been so generally noticed. Perhaps I am peculiar in this sensitiveness. Smells, pleasant, indifferent, or otherwise, which one is liable to encounter in the most varied circumstances, should, one would think, cease in time to recall any particular period of existence.

For example, the delicious smell of roasting coffee—an aroma not common in England—may well bring you back, at a jump, to some foreign, unfamiliar experience of your youth—to that early morning walk in the little Flemish town of which you have forgotten the name; where, as you sauntered down the street, you were greeted at nearly every doorstep by this pungent savour. The black cylindrical family roaster, its berries rattling musically within, was being carefully revolved over its bed of live charcoal by the boy of the house, or perhaps by the housewife herself. The delicate, diaphanous sky-blue smoke of the beans, as they reached the perfecting point of their charring, struck your eye as gratefully as the fragrance it conveyed to your nostrils. No wonder that, after a long spell, even a distant whiff of that odour of promise should bring back a definite picture. But that essences of such everyday character, say, as petrol; or that which accompanies the peeling of an orange, should still have the power of bringing me back, instantly, to the hours of my early schooling, is in truth a curious matter.

In the case of petrol, perhaps, the connexion is less extraordinary. Until the age of the motor was ushered in—and that is barely a score of years ago—the smell of “petroleum,” as it was still called, could come upon the sense as an odour out of the usual run.