fact was, I knew what I wanted the garden to look like when it was
done, but my ideas began and ended there. I was as ignorant as Mullins
himself; the difference between us was that I was not nearly so stupid.
That is why we could not get on; if his wits had been equal to mine we
should have devised something between us in spite of our ignorance--I
was going to say, with the help of our ignorance--because we should
have done something entirely original. Being unhampered by foregone
conclusions born of knowledge, we should not have had our inspirations
blighted, as so many people have who understand the possibilities of
an art. And we might have revolutionised the laws of Nature; one never
knows! But Mullins was a fool; he did not understand when I said that I
wanted the garden to look as if the things grew there by themselves.
“You’ll want some nice beddin’-out plants, mum, if that’s so,” he
observed.
“But, Mullins,” I said feverishly, “surely--do pull yourself
together--isn’t bedding out that horrid thing you do with a plumb-line?”
“No, mum, no,” he replied, “pardon me, I don’t think you quite
understand. Beddin’ out is nice young ’ardy plants that comes to their
prime durin’ the summer months; gives far more effect they do than
anything else.”
I remained doubtful, but weakened; he smiled in such a kindly,
authoritative way.
“I used to be gardener with your ’usband’s pa, mum,” he ventured, just
at the critical moment. “What a nice gentleman ’e was! and what a fine
garden they always ’ad! We used to commence beddin’ out just about now,
mum.”
I fell headlong into the gin. Mullins was utterly stupid and never took
a point, but he made them sometimes and scored.
“He must know,” I thought, “why James’s father had acres and acres of
hot-houses!” Then I remembered something; I clutched at a memory of my
mother walking round the gardens at home. “The herbaceous border is
getting rather thin, Ptarmigan,” I seemed to hear her say; “there won’t
be enough flowers for the house. I can’t bear your stiff hot-house
things.”
“Ah, yes, Mullins,” I said, upon this dim vision, “but I must have a
good herbaceous border, or else we shall not have enough flowers for
the house.”
“Make you a nice ’erbaceous border along that ’ere wall, mum,” he
replied obligingly.
So we set to work. I bought catalogues and books of instructions; I
also took in the _Amateur Gardener_. But this is the kind of way one
gets let in. The book says:
“Pyrox gypsomanica (poor man’s rose). A very free flowering perennial;
deep bright purple, standard growth; May to October; suits any soil.”
“Mopincosa juicyflorum. (English hibiscus); orange, scarlet, and blue;
very prolific; suitable for damp waste places where soil occurs rarely;
flowers all the year round.”
All this is just the cookery-book trick in another form. The people
who write these books evidently form a ring, like oil magnates and
deceivers of that sort; they monopolise the cooking and gardening that
is done, and then they send out misleading literature telling us how
simple it all is and getting us to buy their wares. I bought what the
seedsmen’s lists called “strong hardy plants” of all sorts of beautiful
things that were guaranteed to flower freely in damp waste places.
Mullins and I planted them, and that was the last we heard of them.
The places we chose were quite damp enough; I am sure about that. Of
course Mullins made it a point of honour to disapprove of everything I
planted--one must expect that of any gardener--but in fact his were not
any more successful than mine, and they cost more to buy. My private
opinion is that on the night after I sowed any seeds Mullins came out
with a small lantern, collected the soil, sifted it, and made Quaker
oats for his breakfast next morning out of my godetia and poppy. I have
read that mandragora or poppy is a powerful drug, and I suspect that is
partly what is the matter with Mullins.
We put in bulbs, too, which no doubt he stuffs with some savoury
compound and finds an excellent substitute for onions, and more
digestible; either that, or else the entire gardening trade is riddled
with the direct descendants of Ananias, and that seems almost too
sweeping a statement to be credible. I prefer the Mullins’ meals
hypothesis.
At present I have quite a bright little garden, and this is the plan
on which I have achieved it. I have a border of stuffed cats down
one side; they are of various sizes, and their glass eyes make a
bright spot of colour amongst the misty duns and greys of their outer
coatings; they are perennial, and not easily dashed by rain. Down the
other side I have spread a wide border of coarse red flannel, and on
this I contrive to raise quite a number of little evergreens. In the
round beds (where the efficient female tells me there is nothing to
prevent my having a capital show of roses) I have planted a nice lot
of aspidistras. James has a friend who owned an aspidistra which he
sent to a cold-storage place with a van-load of furniture when he went
abroad for five years. The aspidistra was not valuable, and he did not
much care if he never saw it again. But it was all right when he came
back, and had put out a number of green shoots.
My third contrivance in the greenhouse where I have some plants is to
put up wire netting to keep off Mullins. He used to go in there two
or three times a day “just to give a look round,” as he called it, and
after his visits it was impossible to keep anything alive except large
families of green fly, which he seemed to bring with him. I had quite a
promising collection there one week--some geraniums, a fuchsia or two,
a hardy palm, and the remains of a good rose: it was nothing like dead
when I left it that morning at ten o’clock. At twelve Mullins humped up
the iron stair which leads to the greenhouse, spat once on the floor,
exclaimed “Hum! ha! ho!” in a loud voice, and sent a message by Clara
asking me for four-and-sixpence. By the afternoon there was not a
living plant in the place, and the air was thick with green fly.
I once counted the number of pests (exclusive of Mullins) which I
collected from the greenhouse and garden. I used to scrape balls of
animated grey fluff off the staging and bottle different specimens of
the attenuated orange and black works of the Almighty which I caught
skating in and out of the soil, either on their stomachs, or with a
pianola-like flexibility of touch on an unnecessary number of legs. I
sent all these specimens to a friend at the University, and some of
them turned out to be very rare and quite unusually destructive. There
were forms of fungus, too, in the greenhouse that were quite pretty but
very infectious, and were really animals--at least I think that was
what he said--and I am absolutely certain that they were all brought
by Mullins. He still comes, and I still pay him four-and-sixpence a
week, because he keeps out other Mullinses. And I have learned now,
as I said, to stop him from doing any active harm; I let him trundle
the mowing machine when I am out, and talk to the cook, and at
Christmas-time he dirties the house with large bunches of sooty holly,
but it all makes for what the servants call “nice feeling.”
_CHAPTER VII_: THE DOCTOR
James had often said that we must get to know of a good doctor whom we
could call in if either of us was ill; but neither of us was ill, and
we put off our inquiries until it was too late. Mrs. Beehive called one
day, boasting that she had just recovered from influenza and really had
no business to be out. Within forty-eight hours I wished she had never
been born, and James brought a captive gentleman in spectacles to my
bedside.
He held counsel with my inner works through the usual formulæ and
then rang for hot water. While Clara was bringing it he adjusted his
spectacles, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the
mantelpiece.
“Fond of Alpine climbing?” he asked.
“No,” I gasped, coughing.
“Ah, it’s a grand sport!” he said. “Does your husband climb?”
I shook my head.
“What a wonderful woman his aunt, Miss Molyneux, is! I remember meeting
her at a whist-drive ten years ago, and she must be now--let me
see--what is her age?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered, weary after his pommelling and longing for
sleep.
“Pardon?”
I felt myself growing hot. “Ninety-eight,” I said hoarsely, at a
venture. I did not know how old James’s aunt was, nor whether she
climbed.
“Ah, is she so much?” he reflected, swaying on his toes. “That’s a nice
little fellow” (pointing to a photograph on the mantelpiece). “Puts me
in mind of Prince Olaf. It has a great look of him; don’t you think so?
What?”
I nodded and shook my head at the same time, and kicked the bedclothes.
My temperature was rising rapidly.
“Ah, thank you,” he said, as Clara came in with the hot water, and
then he began washing his hands. I never knew a man use so much soap;
it was my special kind at two-and-sixpence a tablet, and he left it
in the water while he lathered and messed and went on with the Alpine
business. He told me the names of all the mountains he had been up,
and the routes by which he had unfortunately come down. He described
how splendidly fit one felt tearing down the snow slopes on a toboggan
(“I wish you would slide downstairs on what is left of my soap, and
have done with it,” I thought). He said that he used to have a touch
of bronchitis himself every winter, but it completely left him after
a week at Mürren. After we had been all round Switzerland with the
soap we came back to one of my favourite towels, which he reduced to
something like a bread poultice during a ten minutes’ inquiry as to how
many Wagner operas I had heard in my life, and whether my grandmother
was the wife of a famous fisherman.
I lay panting and exhausted on the bed, feeling as one does after a
long afternoon spent with a garrulous and deaf old lady. Finally the
wretch came back to me, fiddled with the books at my side, criticised
them all, gave me a list of those he had read during the past forty
years, and then got as far as the door.
“Now keep quiet,” he remarked, looking down his nose at me with a
judicial air, “don’t have people in here chattering.”
Ill as I was, I could not take this lying down. I sat up and croaked,
“What about you?”
“Oh, I’ll come round to-morrow morning,” he replied, unscathed by my
sarcasm.
When James came home I said I was a little better and would get up.
“What did you think of Smithson?” he asked. “I am told he is a clever
chap.”
“He’s a first-rate musician,” I said.
“What?”
“And Alpine climber.”
“How the deuce do you know?” asked James.
“He has been up the Markhorn, the Rotterham, the Bungleberg, the
Sloshwald, all over Borenpest range; then in Wales, the Greater and
smaller Bosh, the Gwaddear, the----”
James felt my pulse and passed his hand over my forehead.
“I wonder if I had better ask him to come round this evening?” he
suggested.
“No,” I said, “don’t do that; in fact I was going to ask you to ring
up and say I am so much better, that I think he had better not call
to-morrow. He is fearfully busy, and if I am as well as this I want to
go into town and get some soap--and a hatchet----”
James thought me extremely silly, and said the man was a deuced clever
chap. I bided my time and had my reward later.
James got a bad chill, and I sent at once for Dr. Smithson. I provided
him with a bag of the ordinary Castile soap, four thick towels, and my
clinical thermometer, and left the room.
From the study downstairs I could hear the gentle monotonous flow of
sound, and the hands of the clock moved peacefully on. Presently
the stream of sound became fuller as it was joined by another and
more familiar current. There was a prolonged duet. I thought of the
Zonophone Opera Company in the last part of “Home to our Mountains”;
the clock struck another hour, and I heard the door open. The first
single stream of sound flowed down the stairs alone, and died away as
the front door banged. I left James five minutes to get his breath, and
then I went up.
“Well, dear,” I said, “I hope he is going to do you good. I suppose he
does not want you to have many visitors, no talking----”
“The man’s a damn fool!” said James. “I couldn’t get a word in
edgewise.”
“Did he take your temperature?” I asked.
“Yes,” replied James. “I wanted to put the thing under my arm--it’s the
proper way to take a temperature--but he stuck it in my mouth and left
it there an hour while he talked.”
“Did he? Then how did you manage to tell him what the treatment ought
to be?”
“I told him what he didn’t seem to know--that in cases of inflammation
what you want to do is----”
“To set up counter-irritation. I know. And so you each talked one
against----”
“I want some soup,” interrupted James.
“Did you say soup or soap?” I asked.
“Soup, and as hot as possible.”
“Did he say you were to have hot things?”
“No; but it is obviously the thing to do.”
I turned, just as I was leaving the room, to say: “By the way, that’s a
nice little water-colour sketch; do you----”
A leather slipper whizzed past my head and struck the door.
We have been in many parts of the world since then, and I have come
across a great number of doctors. Many of them are amongst the dearest
creatures on earth, but, like all our other loved ones, they have
their little ways. Clara was ill once, and Dr. Smithson’s partner
came. He explained everything to me with the greatest care.
“What I should get, Mrs. Molyneux, if I were you,” he said with great
emphasis, “is a piece of bread. Get your cook to give you some nice
bread, not new you know, stale--stale bread a couple of days old--and
steep it in a little milk. Heat the milk (you have a saucepan I expect?
that’s capital!)--get a nice saucepan, then, and I should wash it
first--get it washed for you--your maid can do that--get it well washed
with soap and hot water, that’s right, wash it, and then pour the milk
in. You have the milk, say, in a jug--a china jug--quite so--no doubt
it stands in the larder, precisely--well, you get your cook to give you
that jug of milk, and pour a little into the saucepan and heat it; I
shouldn’t boil it--no, I shouldn’t indeed. I should heat it and pour it
very gently on the bread. Cut the bread, you know--get a knife and cut
it; don’t crumb it--that would be too small--cut it into nice pieces
and pour the milk over it--you’ll find the girl will do capitally on
it.”
We all hear from doctors about the tendency of women to be faddy about
their health. The truth of the matter is that every one likes to feel
that something about them is of importance to some one, and not only to
some one in their own family, but to the outside world. I used to feel
that James was an interesting personality to many people; he expounded
his views to them, his remarks were received with sympathy, and he got
a great deal of patting on the back. I didn’t. Clara and Ruth thought
me an eccentric, amiable creature of another breed from themselves,
a sort of finish to the house in a way, an ultimate cat on whom to
lay responsibility for failure and domestic sin; but they were not
interested in me. My women friends were more interested in my habits
than in my personal psychology; James was mainly interested in my
interest in him. It was sometimes a sore temptation to have a disease,
something that would make at least three men shake their heads and
wonder what I was doing. They would find out then what an exceptional
character I had--what courage, what wit under trying circumstances,
what intelligence in household management (the vacant chair, the cold
bacon, that would bring it all home to them). James would hurry home in
the evening and read letters to me from people who were all interested;
he would chat--not quite so long as I wanted, so that I could have the
pleasant qualm of missing him--then he would be dispatched downstairs
to horrid discomfort where his darling was not, and I should not have
to change into a cold evening dress. At last I should fall asleep,
comfortable, warm, and washed, knowing that I need not get up next
morning and slave and worry in unrecognised monotony. Can anyone wonder
that we do it?
But anyone will do as well as a doctor; a clergyman or a lover if they
will take an interest in one’s soul. I believe that a chiropodist who
was really concerned for one’s toes would fill a long-felt want. It is
a curious fact that no one goes to a lawyer for sympathy, and yet why
we suppose that abnormalities in our liver will make us interesting in
the eyes of a doctor to whom livers are no treat, while we neglect our
lawyers who will investigate disorders in our conduct for the moderate
sum of six-and-eightpence, must remain a mystery.
Suppose that one of us went to a solicitor’s office and said: “Do you
know, such a queer thing has happened to me! I went and burgled a poor
old gentleman the other day--stole his watch and a lot of valuable
plate--and outside I met a policeman, whom I drugged with chloroform
on a handkerchief.” One imagines the solicitor gravely investigating
the matter, finding no old gentleman, no watch, no stolen plate, and no
policeman. He charges the usual fee, puts a pair of handcuffs on the
lady, and tells her to come back in a fortnight and have them altered.
A doctor whom I love very much once made this startling remark to me:
“You lead a very nice life for a lady.”
The words brought to my mind such pictures as I have never forgotten.
Such vistas of flat, dull landscape stretched before me; such dead
seas of sensible conversation; such mountains made of interminable
molehills; such continents of golf links and tennis lawns. All the
shores were strewn with correctly balanced account books and the
_débris_ of tea parties; the trees were hung with carefully selected
and well-boiled legs of mutton; first-rate parlourmaids with slight
moustaches who understood the telephone peeped from behind every bush,
and family butchers mated on St. Valentine’s Day in the place of
nightingales. The sky was made of chill-proof Jaeger, and the stars
were all turned so that their light fell from behind and on the left
side of the book. My thoughts took the form of a parody on Lear’s poem
about the Jumblies:
_Far from new, far from new, is the land where the ladies live;
Their tongues are long, and their thoughts are few, and their morals
are like a sieve._
The last line will not bear analysis, but I think that the word
“ladies” as he used it gave me an impression of something that lets the
juice of life escape and retains only a few husks and skins. A very
nice life for a lady seemed to me little more than a very nice tissue
of habits, but then, no words mean quite the same thing to any two
people.
_CHAPTER VIII_: CHILDREN
To anyone who has read the foregoing pages it will be evident that in
starting housekeeping I was obsessed by two main ideas: one, that I
was not to be a parasite; two, that I was to have the house to myself
during certain portions of the day. Towards the end of my second year
of marriage I began to pat myself on the back. But alas! It is this
harmless exercise that seems to be more irritating to the gods than a
thousand crimes.
Congratulate yourself upon anything, from the affection of a
millionaire uncle down to a recent immunity from colds, and you are
lost. I had won a position of--I won’t say mistress, but comparative
director of my cook; the fish came at my call. Clara never finished one
room at a time, though we had established as one rule of the game that,
if I got to my sitting-room first, she could not begin dusting until
she found all the things I had lost during the past twenty-four hours.
While she did this I sat in another room and got on with my work, which
had such an exasperating effect upon her nerves that after a time she
forbore to follow me, however slowly and aggressively I walked upstairs.
As regards Mullins, the job gardener, I had got him into the habit of
keeping entirely off the beds. He remained almost exclusively in the
kitchen, where he did very little harm except to Ruth’s window-boxes,
but she always said it was not much trouble to plant them again. She
also said he was very useful in giving a hand with the knives, and in
cleaning up. Asking Mullins to clean up anything seemed to me like
inviting a baboon to tidy one’s wardrobe. In fact, the efficient female
has scarcely spoken to me since she heard I allowed it. But then her
life is a perpetual warfare. Leisure, self-indulgence, expense, moral
latitude, wilfulness, tact, all these bright spirits, which are the
making of any reasonable person’s day, fly before her as butterflies
before a bird with a hungry family; it is a pretty sight.
But to return to my boast. I reviewed these achievements with my mind’s
eye. I was proud, and there was an end of it. Within a few months I no
longer knew the meaning of leisure, and I had become a parasite, living
on the habits of my son Tom and his nurse. All the other people in
the house preserved their independence. When it became a question who
should make the barley-water, it was my time, not Ruth’s nor Clara’s
nor the nurse’s, that was wasted. Ruth, without taking her eyes off
the range, said it would be better for anything of the sort to be made
in the nursery for fear there should be any mistake. Nurse, without
interrupting her work, wanted to know who was to watch the pan while
she was folding the things in the night-nursery. It cost me a valuable
summer’s morning to find a place in the domestic machinery where that
pan might sit and boil without disorganising the day’s work.
Suppose a railway company, having completed all their arrangements and
got everything into working order, were to be suddenly informed that
the Government had decided to run a picture palace in the middle of
their head office! I thought of this, and decided that the difficulties
of such a situation would be a mere _Tit-Bits_ problem compared to my
task of fitting in a nursery amongst Ruth, Clara, and Mullins.
I awoke regularly at three in the morning, to find my brain already up
and about, sorting and rejecting answers to such questions as these:
“Who is to wash the kitchen tea-things while Clara is amusing the baby
when some one calls on nurse’s day out?” or “What about methylated
spirits for boiling in the nursery? One cannot be always running to and
fro from the kitchen.”
All day long I was pursued by this ceaseless boiling. “What about
boiling the milk?” “The milk has boiled over.” “How shall we manage
about boiling the clothes?” “I couldn’t get the water to boil.” “You
couldn’t boil vegetables in that pan.” “It has to be brought to the
boil before you can do anything.” “Boiled beef would come less in the
long run.” When Ruth made this statement I suggested that beef could
hardly come less than Jones’s mutton did, as that always made a point
of never coming at all whenever it could, and if there was going to be
a longer run than usual before we got it we had better order something
else at once. She replied that in that case a nice piece of boiled fish
would be as nice as anything, at which, being a little over-wrought,
I wept, and Ruth was extremely kind, and said she would just pop
the kettle on to boil. And all this time Tom lay like a log and did
nothing. I was dependent upon him for everything. My engagements and
my peace of mind hung upon how he felt, and what his Dr. Boswell of a
nurse alleged that he thought. The first thing he did was to put an
end to my letter-writing, the second was to break up my quiet evenings
with games, his third enterprise, his masterpiece of iniquity, was
to affiance Ruth to Mullins. At first I had been dense enough not to
trace his hand in this calamity, but by and by it dawned upon me, and I
questioned Ruth.
“Yes, m’m,” she replied, “things is not the same where there is
children. You don’t seem to have the place to yourself in the same way
as where there is only a lady.”
“I beg your pardon, Ruth,” I interrupted, “I didn’t quite catch what
you said just then. Did you mean that master Tom takes too much upon
himself? I don’t leave much to him, really.”
“Oh, no, m’m,” said Ruth, “not at all. It wasn’t that. But where there
is children there is so much that has _got_ to be done.”
“Yes,” I said thoughtfully, “I see your point. The same thing has
occurred to me. He gives orders, doesn’t he? Is rather emphatic--is
that what you meant?”
“Oh, well, m’m,” she replied, “of course you would give the orders just
the same in the nursery as elsewhere. It’s your place, and I like
to have you do it. I’m sure I should be the last to wish to direct.
Indeed, I shouldn’t care to take any responsibility. But where there
is children you can’t pick and choose what is to be done in the same
way as where there is only a lady, can you, m’m? They have to be
considered, don’t they?”
“Yes, Ruth,” I said, “I quite see your idea, and I think you are right
to marry, you will feel much freer.”