Secret Garden (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (35 page)

“How does he look?” was the next question.

“If he took his food natural, sir, you’d think he was putting on flesh—but we’re afraid it may be a sort of bloat. He laughs sometimes in a queer way when he’s alone with Miss Mary. He never used to laugh at all. Dr. Craven is coming to see you at once, if you’ll allow him. He never was as puzzled in his life.”

“Where is Master Colin now?” Mr. Craven asked.

“In the garden, sir. He’s always in the garden—though not a human creature is allowed to go near for fear they’ll look at him.”

Mr. Craven scarcely heard her last words.

“In the garden,” he said, and after he had sent Mrs. Medlock away he stood and repeated it again and again. “In the garden!”

He had to make an effort to bring himself back to the place he was standing in and when he felt he was on earth again he turned and went out of the room. He took his way, as Mary had done, through the door in the shrubbery and among the laurels and the fountain beds. The fountain was playing now and was encircled by beds of brilliant autumn flowers. He crossed the lawn and turned into the Long Walk by the ivied walls. He did not walk quickly, but slowly, and his eyes were on the path. He felt as if he were being drawn back to the place he had so long forsaken, and he did not know why. As he drew near to it his step became still more slow. He knew where the door was even though the ivy hung thick over it—but he did not know exactly where it lay—that buried key.

So he stopped and stood still, looking about him, and almost the moment after he had paused he started and listened—asking himself if he were walking in a dream.

The ivy hung thick over the door, the key was buried under the shrubs, no human being had passed that portal for ten lonely years—and yet inside the garden there were sounds. They were the sounds of running scuffling feet seeming to chase round and round under the trees, they were strange sounds of lowered suppressed voices—excla—mations and smothered joyous cries. It seemed actually like the laughter of young things, the uncontrollable laughter of children who were trying not to be heard, but who in a moment or so—as their excitement mounted—would burst forth. What in heaven’s name was he dreaming of—what in heaven’s name did he hear? Was he losing his reason and thinking he heard things which were not for human ears? Was it that the far clear voice had meant?

And then the moment came, the uncontrollable moment when the sounds forgot to hush themselves. The feet ran faster and faster—they were nearing the garden door—there was quick strong young breathing and a wild outbreak of laughing shouts which could not be contained—and the door in the wall was flung wide open, the sheet of ivy swinging back, and a boy burst through it at full speed and, without seeing the outsider, dashed almost into his arms.

Mr. Craven had extended them just in time to save him from falling as a result of his unseeing dash against him, and when he held him away to look at him in amazement at his being there he truly gasped for breath.

He was a tall boy and a handsome one. He was glowing with life and his running had sent splendid color leaping to his face. He threw the thick hair back from his forehead and lifted a pair of strange gray eyes—eyes full of boyish laughter and rimmed with black lashes like a fringe. It was the eyes which made Mr. Craven gasp for breath.

 

“Who—What? Who!” he stammered.

This was not what Colin had expected—this was not what he had planned. He had never thought of such a meeting. And yet to come dashing out—winning a race—perhaps it was even better. He drew himself up to his very tallest. Mary, who had been running with him and had dashed through the door too, believed that he managed to make himself look taller than he had ever looked before.

“Father,” he said, “I’m Colin. You can’t believe it. I scarcely can myself. I’m Colin.”

Like Mrs. Medlock, he did not understand what his father meant when he said hurriedly:

“In the garden! In the garden!”

“Yes,” hurried on Colin. “It was the garden that did it—and Mary and Dickon and the creatures—and the Magic. No one knows. We kept it to tell you when you came. I’m well, I can beat Mary in a race. I’m going to be an athlete.”

He said it all so like a healthy boy—his face flushed, his words tumbling over each other in his eagerness—that Mr. Craven’s soul shook with unbelieving joy.

Colin put out his hand and laid it on his father’s arm.

“Aren’t you glad, Father?” he ended. “Aren’t you glad? I’m going to live forever and ever and ever!”

Mr. Craven put his hands on both the boy’s shoulders and held him still. He knew he dared not even try to speak for a moment.

“Take me into the garden, my boy,” he said at last. “And tell me all about it.”

And so they led him in.

The place was a wilderness of autumn gold and purple and violet blue and flaming scarlet and on every side were sheaves of late lilies standing together—lilies which were white or white and ruby. He remembered well when the first of them had been planted that just at this season of the year their late glories should reveal themselves. Late roses climbed and hung and clustered and the sunshine deepening the hue of the yellowing trees made one feel that one stood in an embowered temple of gold. The newcomer stood silent just as the children had done when they came into its grayness. He looked round and round.

“I thought it would be dead,” he said.

“Mary thought so at first,” said Colin. “But it came alive.”

Then they sat down under their tree—all but Colin, who wanted to stand while he told the story.

It was the strangest thing he had ever heard, Archibald Craven thought, as it was poured forth in headlong boy fashion. Mystery and Magic and wild creatures, the weird midnight meeting—the coming of the spring—the passion of insulted pride which had dragged the young Rajah to his feet to defy old Ben Weatherstaff to his face. The odd companionship, the play acting, the great secret so carefully kept. The listener laughed until tears came into his eyes and sometimes tears came into his eyes when he was not laughing. The Athlete, the Lecturer, the Scientific Discoverer was a laughable, lovable, healthy young human thing.

“Now,” he said at the end of the story, “it need not be a secret any more. I dare say it will frighten them nearly into fits when they see me—but I am never going to get into the chair again. I shall walk back with you, Father—to the house.”

Ben Weatherstaff’s duties rarely took him away from the gardens, but on this occasion he made an excuse to carry some vegetables to the kitchen and being invited into the servants’ hall by Mrs. Medlock to drink a glass of beer he was on the spot—as he had hoped to be—when the most dramatic event Misselthwaite Manor had seen during the present generation actually took place.

One of the windows looking upon the courtyard gave also a glimpse of the lawn. Mrs. Medlock, knowing Ben had come from the gardens, hoped that he might have caught sight of his master and even by chance of his meeting with Master Colin.

“Did you see either of them, Weatherstaff?” she asked.

Ben took his beer-mug from his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “Aye, that I did,” he answered with a shrewdly significant air.

“Both of them?” suggested Mrs. Medlock.

“Both of ’em,” returned Ben Weatherstaff. “Thank ye kindly, ma’ am, I could sup up another mug of it.”

“Together?” said Mrs. Medlock, hastily overfilling his beer-mug in her excitement.

“Together, ma’am,” and Ben gulped down half of his new mug at one gulp.

“Where was Master Colin? How did he look? What did they say to each other?”

“I didna’ hear that,” said Ben, “along o’ only bein’ on th’ stepladder lookin’ over th’ wall. But I’ll tell thee this. There’s been things goin’ on outside as you house people knows nowt about. An’ what tha’ll find out tha’ll find out soon.”

And it was not two minutes before he swallowed the last of his beer and waved his mug solemnly toward the window which took in through the shrubbery a piece of the lawn.

“Look there,” he said, “if tha’s curious. Look what’s comin’ across th’ grass.”

When Mrs. Medlock looked she threw up her hands and gave a little shriek and every man and woman servant within hearing bolted across the servants’ hall and stood looking through the window with their eyes almost staring out of their heads.

Across the lawn came the Master of Misselthwaite and he looked as many of them had never seen him. And by his side with his head up in the air and his eyes full of laughter walked as strongly and steadily as any boy in Yorkshire—

Master Colin!

1
(p. 7)
When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor ... everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen:
Misselthwaite Manor is the ancestral home of the Craven family and site of the secret garden. The carefully chosen name “Misselthwaite” affirms the novel’s setting in the northern English county of Yorkshire and hints at the story’s concern with rebirth and rejuvenation. “Thwaite,” an ancient word meaning forest land cleared and converted to tillage, is part of many northern English place names. “Missel” is an old word for mistletoe, a shrub that puts out leaves and berries in the dead of winter and is associated with love and fertility.

2
(p. 7)
Her father had held a position under the English government:
Mary’s father was a member of the British colonial administration in India. Beginning with the merchants of the East India Company, the British were a presence in India from the early 1600s. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Indian subcontinent fell under British rule and remained Britain’s largest colonial possession (the so-called jewel in the imperial crown) until India gained independence in 1948. In 1911, the year in which
The Secret Garden
was published, newly crowned King George V and Queen Mary paid a much-publicized royal visit to India.

3
. (p. 9)
The cholera had broken out:
Cholera is an acute and often fatal bacterial infection of the small intestine. The disease can kill its victims rapidly, often within a matter of hours. Cholera epidemics frequently swept through nineteenth-century India, striking colonizers and colonized alike. Between 1898 and 1907 (the period before Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote The Secret Garden) cholera was responsible for at least 370,000 deaths in the Indian subcontinent.

4
. (p. 17) “
Riquet
à
la Houppe
”: “Little Ricky with the Topknot” (1697) is a French fairytale by Charles Perrault, imitated by Gabrielle de Villeneuve in her “Beauty and the Beast” (1740). The ugly Riquet has the power to endow the person he loves with wit and intelligence. He falls in love with a beautiful but stupid woman who can make the one she loves beautiful. The two marry and exchange gifts.

 

Soon after the publication of
The Secret Garden
(1911), Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote a spin-off story featuring the garden’s robin as its central character. Titled simply My
Robin
( 1912) , the short story runs forty-two pages and includes illustrations by Alfred Brennan. On October 2 3 , 1912 , the New York
Times
reported, “It is as pretty a bird story as any ever told, and if it be a bit self-conscious, that is merely because Mrs. Burnett cannot help posing picturesquely in whatever she writes. It is a charming little story, for all that.”

 

 

 

The first
film of The Secret Garden,
a silent, black-and-white version, appeared in 1919, eight years after the novel’s initial publication. Better known is director Fred Wilcox’s 1949 version. The magnificent, stylized sets bring the magic of Burnett’s novel to life, while the actors, including Margaret O’Brien as Mary Lennox, play their roles with tenderness and emotion. The evocative cinematography and lighting capture the scariness of the dark hallways of Misselthwaite Manor, making the large house seem as if it really is haunted. In a dramatic point-counterpoint evocative of 1939’s
The Wizard of Oz
, the film bursts from drab black and white to blazing Technicolor upon the discovery of the secret garden.

After several BBC television adaptations, the novel made it to the big screen again in 1993 at the hands of Agnieszka Holland, the Polish director known for
Europa Europa
(1990) and
Washington Square
(1997). Holland’s film triumphs with its simultaneous lushness and understatement. The elegant production features graceful music by Zbigniew Preisner and suggestive visual effects that richly convey the garden’s transformative powers. A dour but pretty Kate Maberly portrays Mary Lennox, Andrew Knott plays a delightful Dickon, and screen legend Maggie Smith purses her lips tightly in the role of watchful Mrs. Medlock. The child actors in particular do an excellent job depicting the complexity of the emotions represented in the book. Caroline Thompson’s nimble, precise script lends all the right touches in this pitch-perfect adaptation of Burnett’s well-loved novel.