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Summary
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Gardener, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Propriety, Performance, and Secrecy
Christianity and Compassion
World War I
Summary
Analysis
The story is prefaced by an excerpt from a poem written by Kipling himself that includes the lines “And God looked down from Heaven / And rolled the stone away.” The excerpt of the poem, called “The Burden,” describes Christ’s Resurrection following his Crucifixion.
The use of this excerpt foreshadows the story’s central themes of grief, mercy, and the “burden” of guilt. The poem references Christ’s death and Resurrection, which symbolize God’s mercy to mankind, and removal of the “burden” of grief, through the possibility of life after death.
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Everyone in Helen Turrell’s community believes that she has done “her duty by all the world.” Her brother, George Turrell, has always been a trouble maker, so no one is surprised to learn that he “had entangled himself” with a girl in India just before his death. After George dies from falling off a horse, Helen “most nobly [takes] charge” of the situation, despite being incapacitated in the South of France due to “lung trouble.” Although she could have “washed her hands of the whole disgraceful affair,” she has the baby and his nurse brought to France. However, the nurse turns out to be incompetent (her “carelessness” allows the baby to fall sick with dysentery), so Helen fires the nurse and restores the baby, whom she names Michael, to health herself. Once he is “wholly restored,” Helen brings him to England.
Michael is really Helen’s son, to whom she has secretly given birth in the South of France. The fact that George has died in India means that there is no one to contradict Helen’s story about her brother. Helen emphasizes the fact that she could have “washed her hands” of the affair to make her decision to raise Michael look “noble” in the eyes of the local community, who have all heard Helen’s story and who know that Michael is really her son. As far as the community are concerned it is not Helen’s decision to raise Michael which is noble, but the fact that she has lied about his parentage to maintain an image of propriety and make herself appear morally upright. This helps the community feel that they can accept Helen without compromising themselves and their morals, which are reflective of British Edwardian society.
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Helen is “open as the day” about this situation and allows all of the unsavory details to be “public property,” since “scandals are only increased by hushing them up.” Helen tells everyone in the village that she is grateful that Michael’s mother allowed Helen to take the boy and raise him herself—“it seemed that people of that class would do almost anything for money.” Helen tells everyone in the village that although she doesn’t particularly like children, she will raise Michael out of her deep love for George.
Michael grows up to be “as accepted as Helen had always been.” When he’s six years old, he asks Helen why he can’t call her “Mummy,” which is what “other boys called their mothers.” Helen explains to Michael that she is his aunt, not his mother, though he can call her “Mummy” at bedtime—and only then—as a sort of nickname, though he can’t tell anyone about it.
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Helen, “as usual,” shares these details with her friends. When Michael finds out, he’s furious, angrily asking why she told anyone that he calls her “Mummy.” She tells him that it’s important to be honest, but he tells her that the “troof’s ugly” and that he will no longer call her “Mummy.” Getting increasingly worked up, Michael declares that since Helen has “hurted” him, he will hurt her, too. He says that he’ll keep hurting her even after he dies, and that he’ll be sure to die young just to hurt her some more. Helen turns to leave, but Michael begins to cry, “Mummy! Mummy!” so she returns to his side and cries with him.
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When Michael is ten, after he has been at prep school for several months, “something or someone” at school gives him the idea that his “civil status” is “not quite regular.” Michael questions Helen about this with the “family directness.” He tries to brush off what he has heard about himself, telling Helen that he has learned about William the Conqueror, who was also “his sort,” but who “got on first-rate.” Despite Michael’s bravado, he is worried by the comments and asks Helen if his “civil status” will make any difference to how she feels about him. Helen replies that nothing could and begins to cry. Michael says that they won’t talk about it anymore if the subject makes her upset.
Michael does not bring the subject of his illegitimacy up again with Helen “of his own will.” Two years later however, Michael comes down with measles during the school holidays, when he is staying at home with Helen. As his temperature rises with the illness, Michael becomes delirious and “mutters of nothing else.” Helen stays with him and reassures him that nothing could change how she feels about him until he finally comes out of his delirium.
Michael spends his school holidays at home with Helen and the two remain close as Michael grows up. Helen “treasures” her holidays with Michael like “jewels on a string” and, although Michael develops “his own interests”, his affection for Helen remains “constant and increasing throughout” his school years. When he finishes school Michael, who is “no fool,” gets a place at Oxford University, but World War I breaks out just before Michael is about to begin his studies.
At first Michael plans to enlist directly in the army and join “the first holocaust of public-school boys who threw themselves into the Line.” He avoids this however, because of his social connections, and is made a commissioned officer in a new battalion. Helen is shocked to hear that Michael has been thinking about direct enlistment, but Michael jokes that it is “in the family” and says, “valiantly,” that he would have been in the war sooner if he had enlisted directly. Shocked that Michael seems so eager to join up, Helen asks him if he thinks the war will end “so soon” (she has been told by a friend that the war will be over by Christmas). Michael is realistic about the war, however, and says that they will have “no such luck” and that the war will be “a long job.”
Michael’s battalion are “fortunate”; they are kept in Britain for a long period at the start of World War 1 and he gets several “leaves” during this time. They are finally sent to the Western Front on a day when Michael had planned to meet Helen for several hours while on leave. When they reach the Front (starting in Normandy, France), “luck” helps the battalion again and they lead “a meritorious and unexacting life” doing maintenance on the trenches, helping build battlefields, and eventually laying telegraph poles around Ypres in Belgium. Michael writes to Helen and tells her that there is “nothing special doing” where he is. One month later, Michael is killed by a shell. His body is hidden by a barn wall which collapses when a second shell hits it.
By the time Michael is killed, the village in which Helen lives is “old in experience of war” and, “English fashion” has “evolved a ritual to meet it.” The postmistress gives her seven-year old daughter the telegram, containing the news that Michael is missing, and sends her to pass the news on to Helen. As she sends her daughter on her way, she remarks that it is “Helen’s turn now” to lose somebody and that Michael has “lasted longer than most.” Unlike her mother, who reacts coldly to Michael’s death, the child arrives at Helen’s door crying because she liked Michael and “he had often given her sweets.” Once Helen has received the telegram, she “finds herself” closing all the blinds in her house and saying to herself, as she closes each one, that “missing always means dead.”
With news of Michael’s death Helen “takes her place among the dreary procession” of grieving relatives and is “impelled to go through an inevitable series of unprofitable emotions.” The Rector encourages Helen to remain hopeful and predicts that soon she will hear that Michael is alive in a prison camp. Her friends also try to keep her spirits up and tell her stories “about other women, to whom, after months and months of silence, their missing had been miraculously restored.” Others “urge” her to write to organizations which look for missing relatives in prisoner of war camps. Helen complies passively with all these suggestions and “signs everything that is put before her.”
During this time Helen remembers one of Michael’s leaves when he took her to visit a munition factory and where they saw a shell being made: “from a blank iron to all but the finished article.” Helen remembers that the shell was under constant supervision and never left alone for one minute. She thinks that she, now, is being “manufactured into a bereaved next of kin” as she writes off to organizations asking them to search for Michael.
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None of the organizations which Helen writes to have any success looking for Michael and, as time goes on, Helen feels “something give way within her” and “all sensation—save of the thankfulness for release—come to an end in blessed passivity.” Helen now openly accepts that Michael has died, and the end of the war “broke” over her in a “blessed realization of relief.” Although she has no interest in “any aftermath, national or personal,” Helen finds herself sitting on “various relief committees” and “delivering” her views on the possible locations of the village War Memorial.
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Helen receives Michael’s watch and his army identity tag in the post, along with a letter confirming his death. From this letter she learns that his body has been interred in a war cemetery in Hagenzeele. She also receives the row number and plot number of his grave there. With this information, Helen finds herself “moved on to another process of the manufacture” and into “a world of broken and exultant relatives” who find relief in the idea that they might visit their loved ones’ graves. From these people, Helen learns how convenient it is and “how little it interferes” with one’s everyday life to visit a loved one's grave. Driven by the “agony” of grief, Helen ventures “across the Channel” to visit Michael’s grave.
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When Helen arrives in Hagenzeele, she discovers that there is a hotel near the cemetery so that relatives can stay overnight and visit the graves the next day. Helen learns this from a “Central Authority” who lives “in a board and tar-paper shed on the skirts of a razed city.” As Helen is leaving the hut, a grieving woman bursts in and cries hysterically for help finding her son’s grave. The Central Authority takes the woman inside, explaining apologetically to Helen that the relatives are “often like this.” He checks that Helen knows Michael’s grave number as, he says, “it makes such a difference.”
Helen has “tea in a crowded mauve and blue wooden structure” that carries her “still further into the nightmare.” From here she goes to the station to find out about the train that goes to the cemetery. At the station, she is joined by an English-woman, Mrs. Scarsworth, who is also travelling to the war cemeteries. Waiting for the train, the two women make small talk about their hotel arrangements, and Mrs. Scarsworth tells Helen that this is her ninth time visiting the cemetery. She does not come “on her own account,” she tells Helen, but comes to take photographs of the graves for relatives who cannot make the journey themselves and who pay her a commission for this service.
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Helen and Mrs. Scarsworth get into a train carriage together, Helen “shivering” a little at Mrs. Scarsworth’s descriptions of her commissions. Mrs. Scarsworth continues to talk cheerfully to Helen and asks her who she is visiting. Helen tells her she is visiting her nephew whom she was “very fond of.” Mrs. Scarsworth says she “sometimes wonders” what the dead experience after death and Helen replies that she does not think about this, “almost lifting her hands to keep” Mrs. Scarsworth off.
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Helen is “grateful” when they arrive at the hotel, but Mrs. Scarsworth “insists” on sitting with her at dinner and showing her photographs of her commissions. Helen tries to escape Mrs. Scarsworth by going to bed early but Mrs. Scarsworth follows Helen to her room and knocks on her door. When Helen answers, Mrs. Scarsworth corners Helen and confesses that she “cannot go on any longer” without telling someone her secret. She reveals to Helen that she uses the commissions as an excuse to visit the cemetery. In reality, she keeps returning to visit the grave of a man who meant “more than anything in the world” to her, even though he “ought to have been nothing” to her.
Shocked, Helen asks Mrs. Scarsworth why she is telling her this. Mrs. Scarsworth cries that she is exhausted from constantly lying and that she is desperate to confide in someone. Mrs. Scarsworth laments that, when she isn’t telling lies, “she has to act ‘em” and “think ‘em” and that she has had to “watch every word” she has said “for years and years.” She wants to be honest with someone, for once, about her love affair because, although she says she has always been a dishonest person, she doesn’t feel it is “worthy” of the man she has been in love with. Helen starts to say something to Mrs. Scarsworth but, without hearing her out, Mrs. Scarsworth rushes from the room crying; “Is that how you take it!”
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The next day, Mrs. Scarsworth leaves the hotel early and Helen travels to the cemetery alone. When she arrives however, she is surprised at how vast the cemetery is; “meeting the entire crowded level of the thing in one held breath.” Although she has Michael’s grave number, all she can see in the cemetery is a “merciless sea of black crosses” and she can “distinguish no order or arrangement” among them. She becomes lost among the graves, “wondering hopelessly by what guidance” she should ever be able to find Michael’s grave.
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While she is lost in the cemetery, Helen sees a man kneeling among the graves and, assuming him to be the gardener, she hurries over and asks him for help to find her “nephew’s” grave. The gardener looks at Helen with “infinite compassion” and tells her that “he will show her where her son lies.”
As Helen is leaving the cemetery she turns back for “one last look.” Again, in the distance, she sees the man she thinks is the gardener, and who has shown her to Michael’s grave. He is kneeling over the flowerbeds, “bending over” the young plants which are starting to grow there amongst the graves.
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The story closes with the full text of Kipling’s poem, “The Burden.” The poem contains four verses. The first three are written from the poet’s perspective and are addressed to Mary Magdalene. Each verse asks her a question: the first, if there is greater pain than grief, the second if there is greater pain than being forced to lie, and the third if there is greater pain than fear. The fourth stanza is from Mary Magdalene’s perspective. It tells the reader that the Lord gave Mary Magdalene one “burden,” to guard Jesus’s tomb after his Crucifixion, but that God, looking down from Heaven, saw her tears and “rolled the stone away” from the mouth of the tomb, relieving her burden.
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