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Major Brown was, I have said, a successful soldier, but by no
means an enthusiastic one. So far from regretting his retirement
on half-pay, it was with delight that he took a small neat villa,
very like a doll's house, and devoted the rest of his life to
pansies and weak tea. The thought that battles were over when he
had once hung up his sword in the little front hall (along with
two patent stew-pots and a bad water-colour), and betaken himself
instead to wielding the rake in his little sunlit garden, was to
him like having come into a harbour in heaven. He was Dutch-like
and precise in his taste in gardening, and had, perhaps, some
tendency to drill his flowers like soldiers. He was one of those
men who are capable of putting four umbrellas in the stand rather
than three, so that two may lean one way and two another; he saw
life like a pattern in a freehand drawing-book. And assuredly he
would not have believed, or even understood, any one who had told
him that within a few yards of his brick paradise he was destined
to be caught in a whirlpool of incredible adventure, such as he
had never seen or dreamed of in the horrible jungle, or the heat
of battle.
One certain bright and windy afternoon, the Major, attired in his
usual faultless manner, had set out for his usual constitutional.
In crossing from one great residential thoroughfare to another, he
happened to pass along one of those aimless-looking lanes which lie
along the back-garden walls of a row of mansions, and which in
their empty and discoloured appearance give one an odd sensation as
of being behind the scenes of a theatre. But mean and sulky as the
scene might be in the eyes of most of us, it was not altogether so
in the Major's, for along the coarse gravel footway was coming a
thing which was to him what the passing of a religious procession
is to a devout person. A large, heavy man, with fish-blue eyes and
a ring of irradiating red beard, was pushing before him a barrow,
which was ablaze with incomparable flowers. There were splendid
specimens of almost every order, but the Major's own favourite
pansies predominated. The Major stopped and fell into conversation,
and then into bargaining. He treated the man after the manner of
collectors and other mad men, that is to say, he carefully and with
a sort of anguish selected the best roots from the less excellent,
praised some, disparaged others, made a subtle scale ranging from a
thrilling worth and rarity to a degraded insignificance, and then
bought them all. The man was just pushing off his barrow when he
stopped and came close to the Major.
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