Chapter 2
recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by T.R. Love of Pleasant Hill, California. Letters from a Prairie Garden by Edna W. Underwood. Section 2. When you called me up on the phone this morning, I heard sleep upon your voice. I knew just how heavily it was lying in your eyes.
I wondered if you had dreamed of that deserted Korean palace by the sea, whose sand is black as powdered jet. You would be surprised, and greatly, if you knew the places you have visited with me. With me and my dreams, you have been a greater traveler than was Marco Polo the Venetian. I must procure another copy of my picture of Herodias to send you.
I am surprised that you do not know it. Constant drew her. I keep her always near to make me remember the antique world of splendid calm. I like pictures, drawings, units of decoration better than books. One cannot understand a picture at a glance any better than a book.
Time and silence are needed. Lines that are seemingly unimportant have much to say. It is in Eastern art that I am especially interested. The Chinese have color terms that delight me. They have a blue they call the blue of the sky after the rain
and the blue of the sky after the snow. Then there is another they designate degradation of the rose. What a weary and regretful red that must be. It is the black-eyed races that have understood and loved color best. If the great colorists of the world could be listed, I think a majority of them would be found to have dark eyes.
Old Chinese virtuosos of precious porcelains possess a surprising collection of information, which they declare authentic, about these beautiful objects they have loved. There is a story told by Sutung Po that in the year 1100 A.D. there was in existence a pair of vases that gave the combined music of the flute and the organ whenever their owner was happy in giving a banquet. As soon as the banquet was over and the lights out and the guests departed,
the music ceased. In no other way could it be lured forth. Wan Yen Che writes an essay about an earthenware basin which he once owned. In the winter, ice pictures formed in it daily, and no two pictures were repeated. Some days he looked within and saw peach blossoms and peonies. On other days, wild geese, bamboo thickets and mountains, pink-legged herons, and flying cranes.
He writes, I afterward had it mounted with silver and preserved in a silk-lined case. When the cold weather comes, I invite guests to enjoy the sight. And there were censers that gave the sweet, refreshing sound of the voices of wild birds hidden in thickets.
Especially, beloved, was one which was nicknamed the Pee-Wit Censor. Who would think those dull-looking, pigtailed Chinamen had thoughts like these? I should like to have one of those numerous honeymoons which you declare you are desirous of spending with me in southeastern China by a little lake called Biwa because it is the shape of the two-stringed lute in a toy house of bamboo buried in wisteria.
At night, the wisteria by the lake of the lute is the color of silver smoke. Perhaps it would not be bad to have as many honeymoons as there are yellow suns in those fabulous prints of old China. E. I have a picture by Fragonard of a French lady holding a billet de daintily between two fingers, a round-eyed poodle beside her, and painted in front of a leaded glass window in a blonde satin boudoir.
The first time I looked at that picture, I longed to be in the old France, Fragonard Nuit. How merrily and happily did they live then, with what wit, with what grace, with what freedom. They did not spend their time in reforming and remaking the world. They looked out upon it with clear Greek eyes and saw that it was good and let it alone. One entire afternoon I had the painting in front of me,
fancying that I was making merry at the expense of the Lady of the Beads. I should like the France of Fragonard. I should like to live there in a great gray chateau in which there was a hidden room known only to two people. Sometime when we were in that hidden room,
gaily and frivolously dressed and radiant with life, we could not find the spring to let us out. We never find it. And there we die together in our gay clothes, our folly, and our laughter. Some decades later, Balzac, say, finds us and writes a story about us, a persuasive little book of old French love, of life in the great free century. What a merry gentleman of old France you would have made with your grace of storytelling
and your Irish laughter. E. I am busy today. I am giving a dealer in Dreamland the order to bind my Greek and Latin books. They are little books, all of them, and printed on parchment or paper that is old and fine. They are to be bound in rough leather and white pigskin. My Tacitus, I think, is an Elsevier. The covers and front pages are gone. It is not larger than two inches by four. The Terence was printed in London, Typus F. Collins, in 1708.
Virgil is of a delightful size, about three inches wide by five in length. It is decorated with a line engraving and bears the stamp of London, 1688. The Horace is even smaller and older. It was made in Holland, and it is of a charming format. Rotterdame, Edibus, Novembri, 1667, the last page informs us plainly. Some are from Amsterdam,
others from Paris. One or two are distinguished by the notes of Casoban, but unfortunately the covers are missing, hence you understand my haste. I do not wish them to perish in their old age for lack of a protecting overcoat. A few covers are to be colored purple flecked with crimson, which is the color of a Siberian amethyst, and a few of these covers are to be set with unpolished gems and dull gold, after the manner of the sacred books of old Russia. But for my own personal
pleasure, I care only that a book be small in size and clear of print. On top of the cases, where these pagan writers are, I shall in spring, and is it not always spring when the heart is happy. Place jars filled with pale crocuses and slender iris. These are the flowers they loved best in life. My tiger on the floor is talkative today and reminiscent. He has promised to tell me lots of things of love in the jungle and life under tropic stars. I'm going to have him tell me
how the black rain falls on those sultry tropic nights with the fitful wind between. And when he tells me, I shall recall how blue the water is where the lotus flower was born. I have placed him facing my picture of Herodias. They look alike, you know, and they used to know each other long ago, long, long before she became a woman when she lived in the jungle with him.
It promises well, does it not? And he is going to tell me how once when she was sleeping beside her lord, the tetrak, upon a bed of cedar wood and gold, upon the palace roof. She heard him calling in the desert, calling to her across the night. That was the way he met his death, my tiger, and became just a rug upon my floor. When he tells it all to me, I will write it down in detail for
you to read. E. What made you take it into your head all of the sudden, my good unknown, that you wish to read Madame Bovary. To be sure, I will send you my copy. That, in my opinion, and Turgonoff's Smoke are among the most perfectly constructed books that have been written. And a good month's work for Flaubert was 20 pages. The French are still writing of Salambo and Madame Bovary, and the French know what art is. I saw in a magazine just the other day an article entitled
Bovaryism in the Mercure de France. I did not read it. I did not have time just then, so I did not know whether it was flesh or good red herring, but Madame Bovary was very much flesh. You will enjoy that book, and you may like her. I fear I shall be jealous of these women of the world of books whom you are sure to like and to see so often. There is Tess of the Dubervilles with the lips so red a man remembered them always, and they sent him to destruction.
Dear unknown, look not upon lips like hers when they are red. And there is a woman in an old Italian garden who has a throat such as the pre-Raphaelites painted. She is very white. She is frail. She has eyes as deeply blue as the sea by Sicily and hands such as only women of race have, and a voice sweet with the singing vowels of Italy.
D'Annunzio has shown her to us in La Vergine della Roce, the maidens of the rock. Dear unknown, I pray you never go near her. She is more dangerous than Circe, and you must not look upon Foscarina,
which is the name D'Annunzio gives to Duce in El Fuaco, the flame, and you must keep away from Anna Karenina, that subtle slug. The dangerous Kalmuk and the treacherous Oriental are both in her just underneath the surface. There is Sonica, too, the hetera in her seductive Greco-Roman garden by Saint-Guntham, as Vlasco Abinez portrays her. When swarthy, black-browed Hannibal waited with his angry legions outside the gate,
Go not near those old gardens of Greece, and I should be afraid of Beatrice and Fiametta and Francesca. But if I were a man, I should be guilty of no infidelities, not even of the brain and of art. I should love only Tias. For me, no other woman would exist. E. End of section two.
