The Luck of the Roses

The Luck of the Roses

Laurence Housman's "The Luck of the Roses" tells of a rose-gardener and his wife who tend an ancient rose-garden in a green valley near a great town. Though not wealthy, the couple lives in deep contentment, sharing every labor and every rest, inseparable in all things. Their garden has thrived for three hundred years, passed down through the gardener's family, and it yields blooms of a quality found nowhere else—whether from the richness of the soil, the shelter of the land, or the skill handed from father to son, none can say. The perfume and color of the roses seem to have entered the couple themselves: they are gentle, sweet-tempered, glowing with the same hues as their flowers. Each day before dawn they gather roses for market, then return to hoe, water, prune, and plant until dusk. They have no children, but do not grieve this, since the gardener reasons that God has given them the roses to love and be comforted by in old age. Every rose-tree bears a personal name, tended and spoken to as if it were a daughter—Jane Janet, Mary Maudlin, and others—and the trees seem almost to understand and answer, blossoming or weeping in response to the couple's words. Bees kept beneath the porch make honey from the roses alone, prized throughout the country for its singular flavor. The wife wonders aloud whether some good spirit, perhaps the saints for whom the roses are named, watches over their garden; the husband credits the accumulated richness of three hundred years. Speaking of their childlessness and the eventual passing of the garden out of their hands, he remarks that when they die the roses will make them a grave and watch over them—and at that instant a shower of petals falls, as though something unseen had passed by. The turning point comes one morning in the late rose season. Gathering blooms before daybreak by lantern-light, the gardener notices the roses drooping as though in grief, weeping dew even where the ground is dry. Following the sound of soft sobbing, he discovers a tiny, beautiful figure—about three feet tall, dressed in old rose and green—moving wearily from flower to flower, kissing each one in farewell. Wherever she kisses a bloom, it begins to weep. His wife joins him, and together they watch, transfixed and weeping themselves, until the little figure at last stands before them and asks to be kissed, declaring that she is dying. She reveals herself as the Luck of the Roses, who has lived and watched over the garden for three hundred years but must now perish: the first frost will kill her, and she must dwindle away as her strength and warmth fail. Moved with tenderness, the couple carries her inside and settles her by the fire, piling rose-leaves around her for comfort, though she continues to shrink hour by hour. In the light of the doorway her body becomes translucent as colored glass, and shadows like falling petals flutter behind her—the visible falling-away of her life. By evening she is smaller than a newborn child, too weak even to accept the honey they offer, and the couple abandons their day's market baskets to keep vigil over her. As night deepens she shrinks further still, becoming no bigger than a wren, then a grasshopper, until at last, in the middle of the night, she asks in a voice reduced to a chirp to be carried out and laid within the heart of one of the roses, so that she may die and pass into nothing there. They carry her into the dark garden and lose sight of her as she slips into the heart of a Jane Janet blossom. Returning indoors, the couple sits in sorrowful silence, unable to sleep, until the first grey light of dawn brings a sound of lamentation rippling through the rose-garden—soft cries like many wounded things, and the steady "drip, drip" of weeping beneath the leaves. Stepping outside to tell their bees of the fairy's death, as is proper custom, they find that overnight every rose in the garden has turned white, transformed by grief and the knowledge of her passing. In that same dawn light, the gardener and his wife discover that they themselves have turned white and grey, aged in an instant by the same sorrow. Hand in hand, the aged couple walks down into their transformed garden to gather the newly white roses for market, their youth spent as the price and echo of the fairy's death, and their lifelong bond with the garden's magic sealed in loss. The tale closes on this image of quiet transfiguration: a fairy tale of devotion, mortality, and the way beauty and grief are shown to be interwoven, as the "luck" that sustained the rose-garden for three centuries passes out of the world, leaving behind whitened blooms and a couple grown old together in a single night, still bound in tenderness to the garden and to each other.

By Laurence Housman · Genre: Fairy Tale, Fantasy, Allegory · 2,225 words

First lines

Not far from a great town, in the midst of a well-wooded valley, lived a rose-gardener and his wife. All round the old home green sleepy hollows lay girdled by silver streams, long grasses bent softly in the wind, and the half fabulous murmur of woods filled the air.

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The Luck of the Roses is listed on Textopian as a short story by Laurence Housman, dated Date unknown.

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fairy tales · fantasy · children's literature · wonder tales · magic · folklore · romance · adventure · moral lessons · enchantment · imaginary kingdoms · princes and princesses

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