I am not getting on at all; it is days since Delia was here and I wrote
about her. There is certainly this advantage in the walls of a house,
they make a fold for your mind, which must browse inside, picking up
what it can. But existence in a garden was not meant to be interfered
with by a pen; we have the best reason for believing that Adam never
wrote for publication, much less Eve, who of course, when one thinks of
it, was absorbed at that time in the first principles of dress-making.
I envy her that original seam; sewing is an ideal occupation in a
garden. You can be for ever looking up and the hand goes on of itself;
everything rhymes with your needle, and your mind seems stimulated by
its perfunctory superintendence to spin and weave other things, often
lovely and interesting things which it is a pain to have forgotten by
dinner-time. I should very much prefer fine stitching to composition
out here if I could choose. One might then look at the sun on the
leaves without the itch and necessity to explain just what it is like.
Moreover, there is always this worry: you cannot make a whole chapter
out of the sun on the leaves, even at different angles, and yet before
that happy circumstance what else is there to say? But how little
use there is in crying for what one was not meant to have. The fairy
godmother who put this unwilling instrument into my hand and denied
me a needle will have something to answer for if ever I meet her.
Meanwhile I might as well confess that my finest stitching only makes
mirth for Thisbe, and “lay a violence,” as Stevenson advises, upon my
will to other ends.
It is the very height of the season in the garden. The roses have held
several drawing-rooms and practically everybody is here. Sweet-peas
flutter up two of the verandah pillars, the rest are dark with
honeysuckle and heavy with Maréchal Niels. The pansies are thicker
than ever, and a very elegant double wisteria, a lady from Japan,
trails her purple skirts over the trellis under which the rickshaws go
to their abode. The corn-bottles have come up exactly where I asked
them to, scattered thick among the leaves of the chrysanthemums which
are already tall and bushy. They are exactly the right blue in exactly
the right green and they give a little air, not at all a disagreeable
little air, of discernment and sophistication to their corner of the
garden. I would like to venture to say that they resemble blue stars
in a green sky, if I were sure of offending nobody’s sense of humour.
It is natural enough to observe this and pass on, but why should one
find a subtle pleasure in the comparison, and linger over it? It must
be the same throb of joyful activity with which the evolved human
intelligence first detected a likeness between any two of the phenomena
about it, and triumphed in the perception, attracted to wisdom and
stirred to art. Those indeed were days to live in, when everything was
mysteriously to copy and inherit and nothing was exploited, explained,
laid bare, when the great sweet thoughts were all to think and heroism
had not yet received its molecular analysis, and babies equipped with
an instinctive perception of the fundamental weakness of socialistic
communism were neither born nor thought of. These seem violent
reflections to make in a garden, and they may well be obscured behind
the long bed of poppies and field-daisies and more bluets that runs
along the side of the house under the windows that support the roses.
If you can tell me for what primitive reason poppies and field-daisies
and corn-flowers go well together I had rather you didn’t.
I have clumps and clumps of hollyhocks, and a balustrade of them,
pink and white ones, on each side of the steps that run down from the
verandah in front of the drawing-room door. It is an unsophisticated
thing, the single hollyhock, like a bashful school child in a
sun-bonnet. Do what you will you cannot make it feel at home among the
beaux and belles of high life in the garden; it never looks really
happy except just inside a cottage paling with a bunch of rhubarb on
one side and a tangle of “old man” on the other. Still it is a good
and grateful flower in whatever station it pleases the sun to call it.
It gets along on the merest necessities of life when times are bad and
water scarce, and flowers, with anything like a chance, twice in the
season. One cannot, after all, encourage class feeling in the garden;
there every one must stand on his own roots, and take his share of
salts and carbon dioxide without precedence, and the hollyhocks in my
garden receive as much consideration as anybody.
Petunias are up all over the place, purple and white and striped. I
knew by experience that we could have too many petunias on this shelf,
so whenever a vague, young pushing thing disclosed itself to be a
petunia, as it nearly always did, I requested Atma to pull it up.
Nevertheless they survive surprisingly everywhere, looking out among
the feet of the roses, flaunting over the forget-me-nots, unexpected
in a box of seedling asters. Now if I were going to recognize
social distinctions in the garden, which I am not, I should call the
good petunia a person unmistakably middle-class. Whether it is this
incapacity of hers to see a snub, or her very full skirt, or her very
high colour, the petunia always seems to me a bourgeoise little lady
in her Sunday best, with her hair smooth and her temper well kept
under for the occasion. I think she leads her family a nagging life,
and goes to church regularly. One should always mass them; a single
petunia here and there among the community of flowers is more desolate
and ineffective than most maiden ladies. Rather late this spring we
discovered a corner of the bed in front of the dining-room window
to be quite empty, and what to put in we couldn’t think, and were
considering, when Atma told us that he knew of a thousand petunias
homeless and roaming the shelf. I quite believed him, and bade him
gather them in, with such a resultant blaze of purple as I shall never
in future be without. The border just beyond them is simply shouting
with yellow coreopsis, and behind that rise the dark branches of the
firs on the khud-side, and between these, very often in broken pictures
sharp against the blue, the jagged points and peaks of the far snows.
All this every morning the person has with her eggs and bacon who
sits opposite the dining-room window. I am glad to say that the other
members of my family object to the glare.
Atma has a liberal and progressive mind toward the garden; he is always
trying to smuggle some new thing into it. In out-of-the-way corners I
constantly come upon perfect strangers, well-rooted and entirely at
home, and when I ask him by whose order they were admitted, he smiles
apologetically and says that without doubt they will be very beautiful,
and that his brother gave them to him. He can never tell me the name.
“It will be so high,” he shows me with his hand, stooping, “and the
flower will be red, simply red it will arrive.” I look at it without
enthusiasm, and weakly let it stay. Generally it “arrives” a common
little disappointment, but once a great leggy thing turned out an
evening primrose, and I knew, before it was too late, that I had been
entertaining an angel unawares.
“To grow a little catholic,” writes Stevenson, “is the compensation of
years.” Dear shade, is it so? In the spiritual outlook, perhaps, in the
moral retrospect,--but in matters of taste, in likes and dislikes? You
who wrote nothing lightly must have proved this dispensation, poorer
spirits can only wish it more general. I remember youth as curious and
enterprising, hospitable to everything, and I begin to find the middle
years jealously content with what they have. Who, when he has reached
the age of all the world, looks with instinctive favour upon anything
new? An acquaintance, who may create the common debt of friendship;
you are long since heavily involved. An author, who may insist upon
intimately engaging your intelligence,--a thing you feel, after a
time, to be a liberty in a new-comer. Or even a flower, offering
another sentiment to the little store that holds some pain already.
Now this godetia. I suppose it argues a depth of ignorance, but until
Mr. Johnson recommended it to me in the spring, I had never heard of
godetia. Mr. Johnson is the source of seeds and bulbs for Simla, we
all go to him; but I, for one, always come away a little ruffled by
his habit of referring to everything by its Latin name, and plainly
showing that his respect for you depends upon your understanding him. I
have wished to preserve Mr. Johnson’s respect, and things have come up
afterward that I did not think I had ordered. However, this is by the
way. Mr. Johnson assured me that godetia had a fine fleshy flower of
variegated colours, would be an abundant bloomer, and with reasonable
care should make a good appearance. I planted it with misgivings, and
watched its advent with aloofness, I knew I shouldn’t recognize it, and
I didn’t. I had never seen it before, I very nearly said so; and at my
time of life, with so many old claims pressing, I could not attempt a
new affection. And I have taken the present opportunity, when Atma’s
back is turned, and pulled it all up. Besides it may have been fleshy,
but it wasn’t pretty, and the slugs ate it till its appearance was
disgraceful.
I suppose our love of flowers is impregnated with our love of life and
our immense appreciation of each other. We hand our characteristics
up to God to figure in; we look for them in animals with delight and
laughter, and it is even our pleasure to find them out here in the
garden. Who cares much for lupins, for example; they are dull fellows,
they have no faces; yet who does not care for every flower with a heart
and eyes, that gives back your glance to you and holds up its head
bravely to any day’s luck, as you would like to do.
But it is growing late. I can still see a splendid crimson cactus
glooming at me from his tub in the verandah; the rest of the garden has
drawn away into the twilight. Only the honeysuckle, that nobody notices
when the sun is bright and the flowers all talk at once, sends out a
timid sweetness to the night and murmurs, “I am here.” If I might have
had a seam to do, it would have been finished; but instead there has
been this vexatious chapter, which only announces, when all is said
and done, that another human being has spent a day in the garden. I
intended to write about the applied affections.
But it is too late even for the misapplied affections, generally
thought, I believe, the more interesting presentment. Happy Thisbe on
the verandah, conscious of another bud to her tapestry, glances at the
fading west and makes ready to put all away. I will lay down my pen, as
she does her needle, and gather up my sheets and scraps, as she does
her silks and wools; and humbly, if I can get no one else to do it for
me, carry my poor pattern into the house.