THE PERFUME OF AN EVENING PRIMROSE
I Sometimes walk
in a large garden where the evening primrose is permitted to grow, but
only at the extreme end of the ground, thrust away, as it were, back
against the unkept edge with its pretty tangle of thorn, briar, and
woodbine, to keep company there with a few straggling poppies, with
hollyhock, red and white foxglove, and other coarse and weed-like
plants, all together forming a kind of horizon, dappled with colour, to
the garden on that side, a suitable background, to the delicate more
valued blooms. It has a neglected appearance, its tall straggling stems
insufficiently clothed with leaves, leaning away from contact with the
hedge; a plant of somewhat melancholy aspect, suggesting to a fanciful
mind the image of a maiden originally intended by Nature to be her most
perfect type of grace and ethereal loveliness, but who soon out-grew her
strength with all beauty of form, and who now wanders abroad, careless
of appearances, in a faded flimsy garment, her fair yellow hair
dishevelled, her mournful eyes fixed ever on the earth where she will
shortly be.
I never pass this weedy, pale-flowered alien without
stooping to thrust my nose into first one blossom then another, and
still another, until that organ, like some industrious bee, is thickly
poweredwith the golden dust. If, after an interval, I find myself once more at
the same spot, I repeat this performance with as much care as if it was a
kind of religious ceremony it would not be safe to omit;
and at all times I am as reluctant to pass without approaching my nose
to it, as the great Dr. Johnson was to pass a street-post without
touching it with his hand. Mymotive, however,is not a superstitious one,
nor is it merely one of those meaningless habits which men sometimes
contract, and of which they are scarcely conscious. When I first knew
the evening primrose, where it is both a wild and a garden flower and
very common, I did not often smell at it, but was satisfied to inhale
its subtle fragrance from the air. And
this reminds me that in England it does not perfume the air as it
certainly does on the pampas of La Plata, in the early morning in places
where it is abundant; here its fragrance, while
unchanged in character, has either become less volatile or so
diminished in quantity that one is not sensible that the flower
possesses a perfume until he approaches his nose to it.
My sole motive in smelling
the evening primrose is the pleasure it gives me. This pleasure greatly
surpasses that which I receive from other flowers far more famous for
their fragrance, for it is in a great
degree mental, and is due to association. Why is this pleasure so vivid,
so immeasurably greater than the mental pleasure afforded by the sight
of the flower? The books tell us that sight, the most important of our
senses, is the most intellectual; while smell, the least important, is
in man the most emotional sense. This is a very brief statement of the
fact;
I will now restate it another way and more fully.
I am now holding an
evening primrose in my hand. As a fact at this moment I am holding
nothing but the pen with which I am writing this chapter; but I am
supposing myself kback in the garden, and
holding the flower that first suggested this train of thought. I turn
it about this way and that, and although it pleases it does not delight,
does not move me: certainly I do not think very highly of its beauty,
although it is beautiful; placed beside the rose, the fuchsia, the
azalea, or the lily, it would not attract the eye. But it is a link with
the past, it summons vanished scenes to my mind. I recognize that the
plant I plucked it from possesses a good deal of adaptiveness, a quality
one would scarcely suspect from seeing it only in an English garden.
Thus I remember that I first knew it as a garden flower, that it grew
large, on a large plant, as here; that on summer evenings I was
accustomed to watch its slim, pale, yellow buds unfold, and called it,
when speaking in Spanish, by its quaint native name of James of the night, and,
in English, primrose simply. I recall with a smile that it was a shock
to my childish mind to learn that our primrose was not the primrose.
Then, I remember, came the time when I could ride out over the plain;
and it surprised me to discover that this primrose, unlike the
four-o'clock and morningglory, and other evening flowers in our garden,
was also a wild flower. I knew it by its unmistakable
perfume, but on those plains, where the grass was cropped close, the
plant was small, only a few inches high, and the flowers no bigger than
buttercups. Afterwards I met with it again in the swampy woods and
everglades along the Plata River; and there it grew tall and rank, five
or six feet high in some cases, with large flowers that had only a faint
perfume. Still later, going on longer expeditions, sometimes with
cattle, I found it in extraordinary abundance on the level pampas south
of the Salado River; there it was a tall slender plant, grass-like among
the tall grasses, with wide open flowers about an inch in diameter, and
not more than two or three on each plant. Finally, I remember that on
first landing in Patagonia, on a desert
part of the coast, the time being a little after daybreak, I became
conscious of the familiar perfume in the air, and, looking about me,
discovered a plant growing on the barren sand not many yards from the
sea; there it grew, low and bush-like in form, with stiff horizontal
stems and a profusion of small symmetrical flowers.
All this about the plant,
and much more, with many scenes and events of the past, are suggested to
my mind by the flower in my hand; but while these scenes and events are
recalled with pleasure, it is a kind of mental pleasure that we
frequently experience, and very slight in degree. But when I approach
the flower to my face and inhale its perfume, then a shock of keen
pleasure is experienced, and a mental change so great that it is like a
miracle. For a space of time so short that if it could be measured it
would probably be found to occupy no more than a fraction of a second, I
am no longer in an English garden recalling and consciously thinking
about that vanished past, but during that brief moment time and space
seem annihilated and the past is now. I am again on the grassy pampas,
where I have been sleeping
very soundly under the stars,—would that I could
now sleep as soundly under a roof! It is the moment of wakening, when my
eyes are just opening to the pure over-arching sky, flushed in its
eastern half with tender colour'; and at the moment that nature thus
reveals itself to my vision in its exquisite morning beauty and
freshness, I am sensible of the subtle primrose perfume in the air. The
blossoms are all about me, for miles and for leagues on that great level
expanse, as if the morning wind had blown them out of that eastern sky,
and scattered their pale yellow stars in millions over the surface of
the tall sere grass.
I do not say that this
shock of pleasure I have described, this vivid reproduction of a long
past scene, is experienced each time I smell the flower; it is
experienced fully only at long intervals, after weeks and months, when
the fragrance is, so to speak, new to me,
and afterwards in a lesser degree on each repetition, until the feeling
is exhausted. If I continue to smell again and again at the flower, I
do it only as a spur to memory; or in a mechanical way, just as a.
person might always walk along a certain path with his eyes fixed on the
ground, remembering that he once on a time dropped some valuable
article there, and although he knows that it. was lost irrecoverably, he
still searches the ground for it.
Other vegetable odours affect me in a similar way,
but in a very much fainter degree, except in one or two cases. Thus, the
Lombardy poplar was one of the trees I first became acquainted with in
childhood, and it has ever since been a pleasure to me to see it; but in
spring, when its newly opened leaves give out their peculiar aroma, for
a moment, when I first smell it, I am actually a boy again, among the
tall poplar trees, their myriads of heartshaped leaves rustling to the
hot November windand sparkling like silver in the brilliant sunshine.
