Over My Fence

‘How big is your garden?’ asked the friendly traveler.

‘Oh, about so big,’ I replied, spreading out a handkerchief; ‘this hem is a retaining wall over which little boys let themselves down on ropes; this hem is a close, high board fence along the top of which cats perambulate, sketching their unwelcome profiles against the sky; this hem is of old-fashioned pickets wreathed with vines, across which I serve and return snatches of conversation; and this hem is an ugly iron fence over which the world and I exchange prunes and prisms. I stand four-square; but the talk over the pickets is as different from the talk over the stone wall as the conversation over the iron fence is from remarks over the tight palings.’

The friendly traveler laughed and would know more; but, indeed, I knew no more myself. All four hems were born of the moment, and though, like other new-born things, they had the germ of growth, they were speechless. Even now they are only green adolescents, but proportionately irrepressible.

My earliest drawings showed no craving for variety. Always there was

a gabled house, with wings, over which spread the boughs of a tree, from which swung a swing, in which sat a child. Around the whole was a parallelogram done with pencil well wetted and fingers bearing on. The fence was the finishing touch, the frame. Over the fence was out. With the years, my microcosm has been circumscribed again and again as Emerson early told me it would be; but for myself microcosm and macrocosm keep identical centres, and travelers of the larger circumference turn many a friendly eye upon the old hemmed-in garden. For this the fence is responsible to a degree. Its few inches of width definitely separate street customs, costumes, manners, from those of private life. It is a physical hint to such characters as do not sufficiently recognize the existence of bells and knockers; and it bespeaks a touch of courtesy like the ‘ Miss ’ in front of one’s name. Behind the stronghold of my pickets I can be incisive with my milkman, and accumulate courage to refuse to uproot herbaceous treasures for beggars quite as able as I to buy them; and I am less dragooned by imitators who come with pencil and pad to copy working plans which I had lovingly evolved. A pet grievance! Why should people copy my flower-borders any more than my clothes or my wall-papers? On the other hand, the slight barrier of the fence invites a confidence and familiarity which would not otherwise be ventured. I can hardly imagine that the exclamation, ‘You are the most ambitionest gal I ever saw!’ or that other grateful, ‘You’re a leddy!' would have been addressed to me on the sidewalk.

My fences are not much to see, but they give me a great deal to think about. To relate their history is to spread out the map of several generations. Their bodily frames have changed, but the spirit of the individual remains the same. To these identical pickets our childish fingers clung for support as we walked. Through the horizontal bars of that fence’s predecessor we thrust long boards, teetering away summer days, through neighborhood sieges of whooping-cough and mumps. Sitting on the roomy top of one of the white gateposts, I made my first conscious excursion into the field of ethics, as gallantly and conclusively as ever did Plato or Pascal. If fences could talk, what tales they would tell! One of the bordering streets might aptly paraphrase the rue du Puits qui Parle and become the Street of the Talking Fence.

A workman recently going by touched post after post, àla Doctor Johnson down Fleet Street. Catching my smile, he said, ‘I was setting these posts the day your father came running home to say that Garfield had been shot.’ Instantly I saw the dear faces, the man with his post-digger, heard the startled talk, even laughed over the memory of a later incident of the day— an old darky stumbling in to say, ‘Garfield’s shot: I got to go back to slavery!’

The gates, too — for every post, and picket of a fence escorts the qualified straight to the gate: the gate one has swung on; the gates consecrated by many a mortal touch; the fadeless picture of the figure waiting there to draw you in; the click of the latch which announced some beloved presence; the processions grave and gay which have passed through — the old gates are trite and commonplace enough, but gilded with memory and association. With age even a fence gets more conformable. A new fence must be seasoned a little, and socialized, to be of use. Over my old picket-fence every kind of weather has passed and been passed upon. Vines hug its every foot, so that Time only adds to the perfect joy of it a crown of tendrils. With every morn it wreathes a flowery band to bind me to this earth of my forefathers.

I was weeding in the garden one hot morning, when a voice called over the pickets and I saw an old lawyer toying with a rose-spray. His face was crimson as the flower, his coat swung from over one shoulder, his collar had coyly slipped a button. My garden togs were drenched with hose-water, shoes and gloves caked with clay. ‘A thing of beauty,’ he began, taking in with one gesture the bright garden and its precious pair of beholders, ‘is a joy forever. Its loveliness increaseth. It shall never—’ down to the full stop. Another day I was training the rampant honeysuckle when a wordful acquaintance stopped to ask, ‘And what are you doing now?’ ‘Doing? Why, fencing, of course!’ And the phrase continues to fit. ‘ Why do not my daffodils bloom?’ ‘Starved, I suppose.’ — ‘ What is the time to prune my lilacs?’ ‘The time to give away great bunches of bloom.’ — ‘My rhododendrons do nothing but die.’ ‘Then let them die and plant peonies instead.’

Sometimes, however, when I consider my time more important than the questioner’s, it is, ‘If you know too much you will grow old too soon’; and I return to my Dutch hoe.

My fences have taught me a thing or two — for instance, the futility of most of our pity. Factory girls scan my flapping skirts and disheveled hair with curious eyes. I can see that they condole and would not take my job — I who am at that moment as radiantly happy as I ever get in this world. Girls from stores and offices regard me with more lenient eye. Some I know by name, but more by face and voice. We need no introduction. Why, as Kim asked, should I lose Delhi for the sake of a fish? They mail my letters for me, they send back the baker’s cart, they tell me where the fire was, or the news just posted on the bulletin board. Then, ‘requiting guerdon, cake for cake receive,’ they smile gratefully over flowers and fruit, four-leaf clovers or bird feathers, which I pass over the fence. More than one has told me that, after a trying, fatiguing morning, she has gone out of her way to look over my picketfence into the peace and shade of the garden. I recall one fat, rather commonplace little woman, whose brave sorrow and gallant misery I knew of, saying, ‘I look and I look and I look; I go by and I go by.’

I often ponder the inexplicable ways of life: why I should be on this side of the fence and those girls, so brave, so bright, so pretty, on that; going so patiently to their work of wrapping bundles or showing buttons or crossing hands in telephone exchanges. It takes any occasional ‘kick’ out of me.

I have grown less afraid with the years of offering a bit of experience to these fence-friends. My own lesson in that came over these very pickets. I had been reading The Riddle of the Universe, amazed at its learning and stunned by its conclusions. It had upset me. One day along came an old family friend, a visitor in town. We gossiped gayly over the fence; and then in answer to his question as to what I had been reading, ‘Well, Haeckel.’ — ‘Oh, very interesting, brilliant, but of course he is rather discredited now.’

I wish that wise old student of books and men might know what a load his casual ‘of course’ rolled off my young shoulders. Anne Ritchie said that George Eliot told her that we ought to respect our influence. We know by experience how much others affect our lives, and we must remember that we in turn have the same effect upon others; that the least interference may at times avert a great calamity.

I often think of myself as a trout in a stream snapping up the queer morsels of fun that drift by. ‘What a lovely day! ’ I ventured to a little blonde creature who looked at me like a timid bird. ‘You bet!’ came in basso-profundo tones that made me jump. ‘Ancient Pistol, I do partly understand your meaning,’ I murmured, aloud evidently, for ‘Why then, rejoice therefor,’ came back to start me flushing apology. One beshawled old lady, to whom a French phrase had slipped unwittingly out, repeated it, only with more subtly correct diction.

In addition to over the fence, some of these remarks are under the rose. When I gave a tramp-worker a new broom with which to sweep the sidewalk he looked at it admiringly. ‘I always tries to do what ladies want. If they give me an old stub I take it and sweep. It takes longer and does a poorer job, but it’s all one to me.’

I have noticed that any fence gives a feeling of protection to the speaker who talks over it, prompting him to frankness which he would not venture without that slight barrier, much as a child outside the lion’s cage addresses it with bravado. Especially is this true in respect to the close back fence over which only the elevated passer-by can spy the worker in the garden. With horseback riders, truck-women, expressmen, farmers on hayracks, and bespurred linemen, — those the Welsh call ’ffolks,’— I am on terms of familiarity which is never abused when we meet in other localities. A fat vegetable woman stopped her horse and wagon one day to look over the fence. Me she acknowledged with a smile and a murmur about the pretty garden. Then, lifting her voice, ‘I have great respect for you, great respect!’ Eager to rise to the situation I begged her to come in sometime and see the garden. ‘I will do that.’

Next to family affection, health, and the love of work, does anything contribute so much to the pleasantness of life, restoring and raising our self-esteem, as the traffic in kind speeches? I often wonder why we are so chary of them. I have been guilty in dark hours of deliberately seeking the vicinity of the back fence, where incense rises with more or less regularity. ‘There is no yard like yours in town,’ a drayman called out one day after I had toiled with the hoe; ‘I say no yard like it in town.’ Another drayman who delivered a sack of wood-ashes lingered to ask what I was going to do with it; and the talk passed from potash for fruit trees and bulb-beds to the parks in the city from which the young fellow had come and where his mother lived — ‘Such a good mother — she would love this garden — those pinies.’ I glowed with her vicarious approval.

Often when I quote something heard over the fence my family smile, knowing that the fence is my ‘Mrs. Harris’; but it is true that some of the most useful suggestions for my garden have come via the alley. I received a dissertation on the folly of ‘just black earth,’ from a great loose-jointed farmer whom I knew by reputation as one of the most profane of men; while how to prune grapes to cover the arbor was demonstrated by one who stepped from his wagon on to my fence and so over. Few topics go untouched. ‘There are two kinds of pride, my mother says,’ floated down from a lineman untangling wires from my Napoleon willow: ‘the kind of pride that everybody ought to have and — well, just stinking pride.’ I trust I felt none of the latter when the ancient and honorable garbage-man, referring to his understudy, a youth of little wit, asked, ‘ Is the gentleman that gets your swill satisfactory?’

Chesterton says that in the phrase ‘the common mind’ we collide with a current error. Most of the gossips at the elongated Dutch door of my high back fence are at first sight common; but the better I know them the more odd and interesting things come out. Sydney Smith said that Lansdowne looked for talents and qualities among all ranks of men, and added them to his stock of society as a botanist does his plants; and while other aristocrats were yawning among stars and garters, Lansdowne was refreshing his soul with the fancy and genius he had found in odd places and gathered to the marbles and pictures of his palace. I want to keep my perceptions alive enough to react swiftly and cannily to the stimulus of these gentlemen of the alley whose talk is so declarative of themselves.

Does a wall reveal, consciously or unconsciously, the owner’s mind? This eastern boundary of my yard is almost as autochthonous as myself. Unlike the fences, it has the primordial gift of care of itself; yet my own hands have laid and relaid and embroidered its worn old hem, seeking to add to its interest of association an absolute charm. The mountain people of Italy have a pretty phrase glorifying their own corner of the earth, — ‘the patriotism of the campanile,’ — and I adapt it to my own uplifted little bailiwick. ‘O Wall,’ I cry with the immortal players, ‘O sweet and lovely Wall!’ As one frank parent in Rostand’s Romancers told the other, the wall flatters its owner; my personality would lose much without the wall; its removal would melt the glamour from the garden. ‘There would be no more Pyrenees.’ Its length is topped with summer brightness and winter evergreen. Down its face tumble sprays of roses and cascades of nasturtiums; ivies clamber up from below; and its farther end trails off into a dry wall tufted with happy alpines, ferns, and sempervivums.

The dictionary defines a fence as a structure of rails, boards, wooden or metal openwork; a hedge, stone wall, or ditch; any means of defence. Over the spelling of that last word I used to haggle, but since I visualize ‘fence’ aphæresis for ‘defence,’ I scorn a permissible s. Show me the fence you left, and I will tell you the sort of man or nation you were. Cherubini drew a chalk-line on the floor between the side of the room where he wrote his lovely music and the side where his children played noisily. So long as they obeyed the line of demarcation, Cherubini worked on undisturbed. Could any one confound this gentle soul with Beckford, author of the most brilliant Oriental romance in the English language, who built seven miles of wall, twelve feet high, round his estate? Dangerous as the heresy of fence may have been fifty years ago, I hold that the socialistic heresy of no fence is more dangerous still. It is good and healthful sometimes to be inclosed alone with trees and flowers, the sky, sun, stars, memories, dreams, and know that one’s walls keep out the world. With the best will in the world to be a part of one’s kind, the thoughtful appreciates the maxim, Il faut se borner, and limits himself accordingly. ‘Thanks, courteous Wall, Jove shield thee well for this!’

If occasionally a person passes with ‘ fromness ’ in her eye, it is on the avenue alongside the iron fence. The give and take of verbal tennis over side and rear fences is here supplemented by a more conventional game. Men who go down the alley in khaki and toss a quip over the high fence, presently come up the avenue in fine garments and silently lift their hats.

I am myself infected, and sitting properly clad, shod, and coiffed on my front porch, am content, like Goethe, to see something going by; to ruminate rather than talk. My corner affords ample scope for a second Comédie Humaine; and my older eyes are wider open to society as it is mirrored en passant. Behind my iron fence I decide that I prefer many things to what one calls her fellow creatures. Persons are fine things, but as Emerson says, ‘They cost so much: for thee I must pay me.’ Why are bores at one’s service night and day, and people of initiative always in a hurry? Ruskin knew how to save himself. The conversation got to ants. ‘Ants, I like that, touching heads instead of talking.’ The power to silence should be a weapon of de-fence, however, not of of-fence. I suppose that is fence which gives a feeling of fence. Just as a person walking round my square would perhaps look and act differently according to the fence over which I observe him, so I myself stand revealed or imagined, modified by the fence between — not mere fence, but iron fence or tight fence or vine-wreathed fence. This might be called the moral influence of fence. The fence itself has its variable climate; sees both sides of the question; is a happy fusion of opposites, wrong side and right side, inside and outside. Like Emerson’s two rivers, it keeps one course on the surface and another, more perennial, in the minds of men. As I look at my fences they are never the same fences, because there is always something different on the other side of them. Perhaps under such circumstances Spencer developed his profound exposition of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations to outer relations: the more complex and expansive the response to environing influences, the richer the life.

One of my amusements in driving through the country is to note the variety of fences that the ingenuity of man has fashioned; and a ride through a book adds an occasional item. The old Schuyler house above Albany was, according to Mrs. Grant, surrounded one hundred years ago by simple deal fence, on the posts of which were skeleton heads of horses and cattle in great numbers, used as bird-houses. ‘Wrens enter by the orifice of the jaws, line the pericranium with small twigs, and lay their eggs in full security.’ Conrad, in his Heart of Darkness, goes one further. ‘About the agent’s shanty in the jungle a dozen slim posts in a row bespoke a former fence, having their upper ends ornamented with round carved balls. On nearer approach the balls proved not ornamental but symbolic, striking, and disturbing. They would have been more expressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house, the shrunken, dry lips smiling at some jocose dream of endless slumber — those rebellious heads looked very subdued on their stakes.’

The railings of iron with which Buffon surrounded ‘my eldest son,’ the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris, were forged in his own foundry. He often stayed in his beloved garden all night, going back to his chateau at dawn, scaling the flight of fourteen terraces, shutting the fourteen iron gates with a sonorous clang. Before Buffon, however, fences enclosed French gardens. There is a charming print of Henri Quatre in a formal plat surrounded by a latticed fence, holding a nice large daisy at which he gazes attentively, while a group of women admire from without.

The fence has from its very nature rooted itself in the vernacular. Lowell laughed slyly at politicians, —

Congressmen still go home to ‘mend their fences,’ and in these exciting times of war endless persons have thrown their caps over the fence. Kent, the father of modern landscape-gardening, dissatisfied with the formal style in vogue, ‘leaped a fence and saw that all nature was a garden.’ We might paraphrase Franklin by saying, —

For me, then, fence-wise! To perceive what to fence out of this perplexing, fascinating thing we call daily life and what to fence in; to discriminate among our inherited fences which to conserve, adorn, and bequeath, and which to demolish; to discern that any situation may be stated in terms of fence (what is lack of time, for instance, but the fence we choose to establish); to play the game of fence — initiative and response— full-bloodedly; to be canny on material — wood, hay, stubble; on foundations—rock or sand; on gates padlocked or ajar or off their hinges; to know when to seek the fence for society and when for solitude; when it should be treated mystically and when mythically; when to bury out of sight half of its prescribed height as did the executors of Stephen Girard, or when to take it full leap like a trained hunter: only some working knowledge of these and of other things akin entitle Life’s pupil to the degrees of Bachelor or Doctor of the Fence in this our Garden.