One night an idea came to him, at first vaguely, then with startling precision. He would leave the south, the lush, soft Mediterranean world where women ripened in the sun like oranges hanging over a whitewashed wall, and he would travel north. Don Juan was a child of Seville, who had always loved the cities of southern Spain and France and Italy; he had never been farther north than Paris. He would go farther than that— he would go all the way to England. England! — that legendary land composed entirely of fog, through which glimmered the crowns of stern kings. It was a land of blond-haired seamen in their high-prowed ships — or was he confusing it with Norway? But precisely what he liked about England was that he didn’t know how to imagine the place; it was an insubstantial land, a cloudland in which he seemed to see pale-haired queens walking in dim gardens. In fact he had met a number of Englishmen on his travels and enjoyed several of their wives, but somehow those very substantial creatures — the broad-shouldered wine merchant traveling in Verona, the hawk-nosed viscount with disdainful eyes who had proved to have a passion for Roman ruins and thirteen-year-old boys, the buxom, lusty wife of an apothecary who had sung him an old song of which he’d understood only the word “never” but which had disturbed him with its melancholy beauty — all these flesh-and-blood emissaries of England seemed to have nothing to do with that mythical northern land of kings and castles and pale princesses gazing down from high towers.
He had forgotten the invitation, but it came back to him now: the odd, likable traveler he had met one night at the beginning of his stay in Venice. Don Juan had been gliding along in his gondola at three in the morning, when he’d seen a strange sight: a man standing in a gondola staring up at the sky through a telescope mounted on a three-legged support. Don Juan had drawn up alongside him and addressed him in Italian, which he knew perfectly, and the man had replied in an equally fluent Italian colored by a faint accent impossible to place. He had, he said, been looking at the moon. Don Juan’s interest was aroused; the man proved amicable, and soon the two were drifting about in Don Juan’s gondola, while the man showed him the wonders of the universe. His name was Augustus Hood. He was traveling through Italy with his wife and her sister. He was one of those round-faced, plump-cheeked Englishmen who seem boyish at thirty, with a small mouth and very wide eyes, as if life for him were a perpetual surprise. Within ten minutes he had impressed Don Juan with his flow of easy erudition, his knowledge of a hundred curious subjects such as the manufacture of cannon and the methods of irrigation under the pharaohs, his travels to China, Egypt, and Constantinople, his modesty, his energy, his unlikely mixture of man-of-the-world and earnest schoolboy. He asked Don Juan questions he had never been asked before — about the manufacture of Seville lace, the shearing of merino sheep, the arrangement of rooms in his childhood home. He was leaving Venice the next day, on his way to Rome and perhaps Sicily. He would return to England in a month or so; he invited Don Juan to visit him at Swan Park in Somerset. His most recent passion was landscape gardening, and he would like to show his new friend a few little things he had accomplished in that line. The Englishman had stayed with him in the gondola until dawn, betraying no sign of tiredness, and though Don Juan had quickly forgotten Augustus Hood and his telescope, he remembered everything now in immense detail. He would go to England. He would visit Swan Park, in the mist-filled shadowy North. He might stay a week or a century. He would keep his rented palazzo on the Grand Canal, leaving behind all his servants but one. It was crucial that he take with him as little as possible of his former life.
That night Don Juan dreamed that he and Augustus Hood were walking in his father’s orchard on the bank of the Guadalquivir. Hood was pointing up at an orange tree with his walking stick, which he handed to Juan, who raised it to his eye like a telescope and looked at an orange that suddenly leered at him and stuck out its tongue, and when he swung the telescope at it he saw that he was holding in his hand a gondolier’s oar, he was rowing through the watery spaces between trees hung with jewels, and the next day he left Venice and headed north.
II
“Adam was the first gardener,” Augustus Hood remarked, stepping from a cypress grove onto a grass path that led to a distant grotto.
“And this, then, is a second Eden,” Juan gallantly replied, sweeping out an arm. They were speaking Italian; Juan held in one hand a small English grammar bound in buckram.
“In English—” Mary Hood began, in English.
“Before or after the Fall, Sir?” her sister Georgiana remarked in French, and Juan, turning to look at her, again had the irritating sense that he couldn’t tell whether her remark was in earnest or whether she was being mischievous in some elusive English way.
“In inglese,” Mary Hood said, and then returned to English, “we say ‘Eden.’ ‘Eeeee-den.’ You see: ’tis the same word. La stessa parola.”
The sisters, each wearing a flat straw hat with a low crown tied round with silk ribbons, stepped onto the path rippling with sunlight and leafshade. The front and back of the wide hat-brims were turned up, and the edges of the lace undercaps showed beneath.
“That, Georgiana, depends entirely on the divine plan,” Augustus Hood mysteriously remarked. “Why, here’s a jolly fellow. Look! An usignuolo.”
“Nightingale,” Mary Hood said. “Night. In. Gale.”
“Pouring forth its melodious song,” Georgiana said.
And indeed a nightingale was pouring forth its song from a low branch at the shady border of the grove. Hood walked quietly up to the bird and, to Juan’s surprise, took it gently in his hand. The squire of Swan Park was continually surprising him.
“Here,” Hood said, handing the bird to Juan. The nightingale sat very still in his hand — was this a habit of English birds? “I made it myself,” Hood continued. The bird was covered with real feathers; under one wing was a small pin that operated a spring.
“Your husband is a man of many surprises,” Don Juan remarked to Mary Hood, who smiled pleasantly at him and lowered her hat-shaded eyes, while Georgiana Reynolds looked at him with a faint smile that might have meant “And you, Sir, are a great fool” or “What an amusing thing to say” or anything else or nothing at all. Juan examined the bird and returned it to Augustus Hood, who replaced it carefully on the branch and led them up the path.
But Swan Park was in truth a surprising place, a realm of wonders, an artful Eden, of which Augustus Hood was the presiding genius. He had designed every feature of his two hundred acres of gardens, including the grottoes, the cascades, the mounts, the serpentine streams, the sudden openings onto distant prospects, the seats under shady trees, the ruined priory, the Temple of Flora, the scenes arranged to remind the wanderer of paintings by Salvator Rosa, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. Beyond the gardens lay four thousand acres of parkland, which Hood had also designed and which he had promised to show his guest in the coming days. The brilliant art of English landscape gardening had swiftly replaced the dreary old rigidities of the continental style, but in Hood’s view the revolution had barely begun, and in any case was not sufficiently understood even by those in the vanguard of the movement. It was all very well to turn away from artifice in the direction of the natural and wild, but those wild prospects, those tumbling cascades and rugged grottoes, were all the work of ingenious artificers. You might say that the wilder the prospect, the more cunning the hand of the maker. If the movement toward the natural were taken to its logical conclusion, there would be no distinction whatever between Nature and the English garden. No, the true way was to assert artifice even in the act of paying homage to Nature.