The Voice
The phrase in the garden appears twelve times, and the first time it comes from a voice in a dream. This is the ending explained, so it spoils everything. If you haven’t finished the book, stop here.
Here is the short answer. Colin has recovered. Mr. Craven comes home, and Colin runs out of the garden door and into his arms. Then they walk back to the house together while the servants watch from a window. The book ends there, and it never says whose voice that was.
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred and thirteen, and I read the last chapter closely. Chapter twenty-seven is about five thousand words, and the first half of it belongs to the father, not the children.
Two Moments, One Day
To follow the ending, go back to chapter twenty. Colin is wheeled through the door for the first time and shouts that he will live forever and ever and ever. Remember that day.
Because in chapter twenty-seven, the narrator tells us where his father was. Mr. Craven has spent ten years wandering Europe with his mind full of dark thoughts. In a valley in the Tyrol he lies down by a stream and finds himself looking tenderly at a patch of blue forget-me-nots. For the first time in ten years he feels quiet. He says he almost feels as if he were alive.
The calm does not last. By the next night he has let the dark thoughts back in. But the narrator says he worked out, months later at Misselthwaite, that this was the very day Colin cried out in the garden. And the book never claims to explain it. The narrator says nobody knows enough about undiscovered things to say how it happened.
The Dream
Summer turns to autumn, and he is at Lake Como. He is sleeping better, and starting to wonder about his boy. One moonlit night he falls asleep on a terrace by the water and dreams he hears a voice calling, Archie, Archie. He answers, Lilias, where are you? The voice says, in the garden.
When he wakes, a servant brings letters. One is from Susan Sowerby, the woman who stopped him on the moor. She writes that she would come home if she were him, and that she thinks his lady would ask him to come if she were here. She says nothing about Colin getting well. She keeps the secret. He tells Pitcher to pack.
So who was the voice? The dream is his, and he calls out his wife’s name, Lilias. But the book never says it was her. What we have are hints from other people. In chapter twenty-one, Dickon says his mother thinks Mrs. Craven may be about Misselthwaite looking after her son. In chapter twenty-five, Mary tells Colin that sometimes he looks like his mother’s ghost made into a boy. In chapter twenty-six, Susan says Colin’s mother is in this garden, she believes. The book lets you decide.
Why He Stayed Away
The narrator spends a few paragraphs on the train explaining his guilt. Mr. Craven remembers raving like a madman because the baby lived and his wife did not. He had not meant to be a bad father, the narrator says, but he had not felt like a father at all. He paid for doctors, nurses and luxuries, and could not bear to look at the boy, because the great gray eyes with black lashes were so like and so unlike the happy eyes he had adored.
That is the wound the ending has to heal. And it heals through the eyes. When Colin bursts out of the door, the same gray eyes are full of laughter.
Sounds Behind the Wall
Mr. Craven travels home thinking about his son in a way he has not for ten years. He admits he buried himself in his own misery, and for a moment he says it may be too late, which the narrator calls the wrong Magic. On the way, he stops at the Sowerby cottage, finds seven or eight sturdy children, and gives the oldest a gold sovereign to divide between them.
At the Manor, Mrs. Medlock says Colin is peculiar now. He eats enormously, laughs in odd ways, and spends every day in the garden. Mr. Craven repeats it, in the garden. He walks to the Long Walk, and behind the door that has been shut for ten years he hears running feet and smothered laughing.
Colin’s plan was different. In chapter twenty-three he said he would walk into his father’s study and announce he was like any other boy. Instead the door flies open, and a tall boy bursts out, winning a race, and runs straight into his father’s arms. He has strange gray eyes rimmed with black lashes, and Mr. Craven gasps. Colin says, Father, I’m Colin.
Inside the Garden
Colin tells him it was the garden that did it, and Mary and Dickon and the creatures, and the Magic. No one knows, he says. They kept it to tell him when he came. He is well, he can beat Mary in a race, and he is going to be an athlete. Aren’t you glad? he asks. Mr. Craven can’t speak for a moment. Then he says, take me into the garden, my boy, and tell me all about it.
Inside, it is autumn gold and purple, with late lilies and late roses. I thought it would be dead, he says. Colin tells him the whole story standing up: the midnight crying, the robin, the key, the play acting and the great secret so carefully kept. Mr. Craven laughs until he cries, and sometimes cries when he is not laughing. Colin says he will never get into the chair again, and he will walk back with his father.
Ben Weatherstaff watches over the wall from a ladder. Then he goes to the kitchen, and Mrs. Medlock, hungry for news, gives him a beer. He tells her to look out of the window. The last paragraph is every servant at that window, seeing the Master of Misselthwaite cross the lawn with a boy beside him who walks as strongly as any in Yorkshire. The last word of the book is Colin’s name.
What Was the Magic?
Colin’s Magic is the big question of the ending. He starts calling it that in chapter twenty-three: something pushes the sun up and pushes buds out, and he is going to get some into himself. The others sit in a circle while he chants. Afterward he says that even if it is not real Magic, they can pretend it is.
Susan Sowerby calls it the Big Good Thing, and says names don’t matter. Her idea is that the same thing that makes seeds swell made Colin well. And the narrator opens the last chapter by saying thoughts are as powerful as electric batteries, as good as sunshine or as bad as poison.
In my reading, which is opinion, the book is saying that care, fresh air and hope are real, and it calls them Magic. It also shows the work. They dig, weed, eat, exercise and laugh.
Loose Ends
Let me tie off the rest. The crying was Colin, in chapter thirteen. The mystery of who pruned the roses is Ben, who came over the wall once a year until his rheumatism stopped him. The dead tree with the broken branch is where Mrs. Craven fell, and Mary and Dickon try to hide that from Colin. The book does not say whether he ever learns it.
Colin’s back was never crooked. In chapter seventeen, Mary checks it and finds no lump, and the narrator says most of his fright and illness was created by himself. Later he says nothing really ails his legs, only that they were thin and weak.
The key is more open. Mr. Craven thinks it is buried deep, but Mary found it, and the book never says what happens to it. And Dr. Craven, who would have inherited the house, is left a puzzled man. Colin is sorry for him, in a satisfied way.
Where It Began
Look at the first chapter again. Mary wakes in a silent bungalow, and the last thing she hears is that there is nobody left to come. In the last chapter, a whole household is crowded at a window to watch two people walk across a lawn.
The book also skips a lot. There is no epilogue. We never see the trip to the Sowerby cottage that the children plan in chapter twenty-six, with lunch among the heather. We never see the servants talk to Colin, or Dr. Craven told the truth. The story stops at the lawn, with the whole household finally looking at the boy they were told to look away from.
And Mary? She runs through the door behind Colin, but once he says his name, her name appears only in his dialogue. The book gives her no ending of its own. In my reading, it had already given her the garden.
My Take
So, does anyone die? No. Does Colin get better? Yes. Does Mr. Craven? The narrator calls him a man who is coming alive. In my reading, the ending works because it is the father, not the children, who needed saving last.
I give the book four and a half out of five. If this helped, subscribe, and tell me in the comments who you think was calling Archie.
