disease has spread over England in a terrifying manner. We may call it
Turbamania, or the passion for crowds, and, like the influenza, it
attacks the upper classes more, it would appear, than the lower. No cure
for it has yet been found, and it has not received, as a specific
disease, the attention it deserves. This is curious: for in this
inquisitive age, though it was a disease that only manifested itself in,
let us say, slight redness of the little finger, and was perfectly
harmless, we should probably by this time be possessed of a hospital for
treatment of the cases, and dozens of savants squinting themselves
purblind in the hope of discovering its bacillus. Many daily, and
especially weekly, papers have columns devoted to its symptoms, though
they apparently do not know that they are speaking of it. But whenever I
see that the Marquis of ---- entertained the following distinguished
company to dinner, I recognise Turbamania. For whom (except the
sufferers from this distressing malady) can such an announcement
concern? Not the diners, surely, for they were aware of it before. Nor,
as far as I can see, those who were not asked, for the simple reason
that they were not asked. Or who (except Turbamaniacs) care to hear how
Lady ---- was dressed? She herself, those who saw her, or those who did
not see her? For the life of me I cannot tell. Yet how great must be the
demand for such information, if we consider in what enormous quantities
it is supplied! It must be read and looked for by thousands who do not
know Lady ---- by sight. Her mother, her sister, her daughter perhaps, if
in India, might have gentle emotions raised by the knowledge of how she
was dressed. But who else?
The theme is not worth consideration, except from my own standpoint, my
own private view of it, which at this moment occupies me enormously.
Six months ago I decided to leave London, that most jealous of all
mistresses, who exacts from us not merely our conscious thoughts, but
pervades us in a way that no Cleopatra ever did yet. To anyone who has
not known London the idea is unintelligible; to anyone who has, all
explanations fall short of what he knows.
Think of it! Five million people, awake or asleep, round one--five
million, each of whom is as important to himself as I to me, stealing
about like thoughts in the brain of this busy city, intent, alert, as
are no other five million people in the world. My God! how I love the
sense of it! how each street is to me a room, a passage, in a great
house to which I have but lately succeeded, and is crammed with
treasures, some few of which I know by sight, but of which as yet I do
not know the thousandth part. What are they? Men and women, that is all;
and is that not enough?
What is it? What is it, I vainly ask myself, that stirs me so? Me, who
know unconsciously the drone of the four-wheeler as it passes up this
huge beating artery of life, and, without distraction of thought, can
distinguish it from the quick cloop-cloop of the hansom, and can
recognise the boom of the omnibus, and divine the meaning of a hundred
noises in the street without raising my eyes or losing the thread of
what I am doing. Life, jostling, vulgar, crowded, commonplace (God
forgive me!) life. Oh, how excellent! I do not look at the placards of
the latest news; I look at the seedy man who carries them about like a
plaster on his usually weak chest. How can I convey it all? The wet
asphalt of the roadway, the streaked mud of the roadway, the smell of
the Twopenny Tube, the reek from the restaurant next door, the reprints
of Cosway in the shop-window adjoining, my own door with a circling
lock, which is always upside down to my key. What does it all mean to
the person who does not know what it means? and what can that which I
say mean to the person who does know?
Yet, drunk as I am with crowds (here indeed is Turbamania), I propose
to-morrow to go forth to a house in a sleepy county town, where no one
is ever in a hurry, though many have the impression that they are, and
there are oiled wheels of existence continually gently turning, which,
as far as I know at present, find no particular grist, instead of these
grating, roaring, spinning fly-wheels of the world. There is a hotel bus
there, and no hansoms; no vomiting of crowds from embowelled stations,
no--no anything, as it seems to me this moment, except--and this is in
the main the reason for which I go--there is as much time there as in
London (all the time there is, in fact), and less to do in it. I want,
in fact, to arrive at a greater simplicity of life than seems to me
possible in London, to get into what I believe to be more normal and
healthy conditions, instead of living an existence which, however
delightful and absorbing, is yet slightly feverish. I want to get out of
the habit of thinking of the next delightful thing I am going to do in
the course of the one which I am doing, and so largely missing its
point--not to be in a hurry, not to clutch so much at pleasures.
Also, in spite of my passion for crowds, I have desired all this last
year, with a haunting intensity which I cannot hope to convey, to watch
the bursting of the spring, to see it mix into the great triumph of the
summer, to follow step by step the fruition of the sun, and, to round
the perfect circle, see the accomplished and completed year fall to
sleep again in the arms of winter--the year which, since the beginning
of time, has been waiting among the crowds of the uncounted centuries
for its turn to give to the sons of men sweet and bitter, ecstasy, and
life and death, as God has ordained.
APRIL
I have been here nearly a month without spending a single night
away--that in itself is a sign of improvement, for I suppose (to my
shame I own it) that it must be years since I have slept thirty
consecutive nights in the same bed. And what I believe is a greater sign
of improvement is that I have not wanted to go away, and I do not want
to go away. I like these level, uneventful days: these mornings of work,
followed by a few hours of out-of-doors, and in the evening ‘the face of
a friend,’ in this house or another. How dull I should have thought it,
not long ago; how antipodal to dull I find it!
I said ‘uneventful’ just now--that was a mistake. I have been through
fiery trials, in the shape of a cook, who could not only not cook
decently, but could not cook at all. In any case, she didn’t, and I have
eaten raw flesh on the altar of rusticity. Then there was a personage
who represented herself as a charwoman. Though I cannot say she was a
housebreaker, she was certainly nearer that than anything else; for
though she did not actually break the house, she broke everything inside
it. She began ‘cleaning,’ as she called it, before it was yet day, and
till nightfall the house was resonant with fracture. When there was
nothing left to break, she upset her washpail over anything that came
handy, brocade for choice. She upset, also, permanganate of potash, with
which I was staining a floor, over a green carpet, and one evening I
found her eating asparagus (my asparagus, too!) in the scullery.
Thereupon I said ‘Board-wages,’ and it is my belief that she simply
added board-wages to her ordinary diet, which she ate at my expense.
Otherwise, there is no possible way of accounting for the fact that a
sirloin of beef, which had come in in the morning---- Enough! She is
gone.
Stevenson recommends weeding and cacao-seed planting as a suitable
pursuit for anyone who thinks he can make his living out of writing
‘measly yarns.’ But now I have one advantage over that divine author: I
know a far better employment. It is to paint floors with permanganate
of potash (otherwise known as Condy’s fluid; but you can get much more
of it for your money, though it is cheap anyhow, if you buy it in the
raw). For a shilling you get enough to stain all the floors in your
house (unless you live in an exceptionally large one) the most beautiful
brown. The very process reminds one of the scene of the powder-mixing in
‘Jekyll and Hyde.’ It is laid on dark purple; before your eyes it
changes to a livid angry green, and while yet it is wet it becomes a
dark brown. You lay it on with a large paste-brush, and feel you are
saving money. Incidentally you get a quantity on to your hands, and it
is apparently indelible. Then you rub it with beeswax, and your deal
floor becomes positively ancestral. A few Persian rugs on the top bring
you back from a villa to the gorgeous East.
But even before I stained the floors I bought seeds, and planted
sweet-peas and nasturtiums broadcast, also (these in seedlings)
Jackmanni,[A] and tropæolum and tobacco-plant, and two Crimson Ramblers.
Then, on a day to be marked with red in the annals of scarification, I
took a trowel and a pocket-knife, and went into the highways and hedges
to cut standards for rose-trees. But I took no gloves. _Hinc illæ
lacrimæ._ Anyhow, I cut seven standards. This is the way _not_ to do it.
[A] Purple clematis.
I started cheerfully along an unfrequented lane. Larks hovered trilling:
spring was bursting in numberless buds, and the green mist of leaves
hung round the hedgerows. Before long I saw in the hedge by which I went
a suitable standard. It was rather inaccessible, but the lust of the
gardener burned in me, and I took a sort of header into the hedge. A
shoot from the coveted standard playfully retained my cap, another took
one arm in keeping, a third gently fixed itself to my left hand. That
had to be very carefully disengaged, since the thorns were encompassing
it, and in disengaging it I dropped the trowel. An incautious recovery
of the trowel drew the first blood. Then I began.
It is necessary in cutting a standard to get a piece of real root. This
particular standard, however, seemed to have no particular roots. It
went on and on below ground without object, so far as I could judge;
infirm of purpose, it could not begin. When it did begin, it was
already mixed up with a bramble, the thorns of which were set on the
parent stem on a perfectly different principle, and I did not want the
bramble. But, with a totally undeserved popularity on my part, the
bramble wanted me. It got me--in pieces which I hope were no use to it;
and I began to see that, under certain circumstances and to a certain
extent, as Mr. Gladstone might have said, gloves were, if not necessary
to human life, at any rate a protective agent against possibly fatal
hæmorrhage. Just then the root began.
I destroyed the bramble, root and branch; I destroyed a hazel (branch),
and I destroyed the standard (root). That was all at present.
Clearly this would not do: I was as far from standards as ever, but I
was bleeding like a pig. So I went home, got some gloves, and became
successful. But to be successful in a tale of adventure is to become
dull, and with a view to avoiding this as much as is possible, short of
not writing at all, I will merely say that I cut seven standards on that
divine afternoon, and--but that I can’t sing--went home singing.
The cat next door, so it appeared, had observed the planting of the
Jackmanni with a disapproving eye, and even as I went into the garden
with my seven standards (like a Roman Emperor) I saw a stealthy form
moving slowly away from the corner where I had put one of them. Now, I
know something about cats, though nothing, it appears, about standards,
and, without the least hurry, I walked into the garden and said ‘Poor
puss,’ and saw, out of the corner of my eye (I dared not look honestly
round for fear ‘Poor puss’ should see), that my Jackmanni was entirely
disinterred, and a scurry of freshly-dug earth lay round it. There were
therefore two courses open to me: either the direct, which lay in taking
the cat, which (with the shallow diplomacy of its species) had advanced
towards me, straight to the disinterred Jackmanni and there slapping it,
or the subtle course. I chose the subtle. The cat was a knave--I knew
that perfectly well--I chose to be the knave set to catch it. So I said
‘Poor puss’ again, and went to the uprooted Jackmanni and planted it
again in the sight of ‘Poor puss.’ Then I went slowly indoors, a very
Bismarck. Once arrived inside, I flew to the lumber-room, and with
feverish hands unearthed a large garden squirt, and, filling it with
cold water (I wish it had been iced), flew to what we may call the wing
of the house--it consists merely of a bootroom, which commands,
strategically speaking, the Jackmanni. The window was open, and with
great caution I advanced to it and looked out. Already, once more that
very stupid knave of a cat was busy in the bed. I took careful aim, and
the cold water drenched the knave. I will teach it--at least, I think I
have taught it--that I do _not_ plant Jackmanni merely to give it a few
moments’ senseless amusement. Besides, to-morrow I shall have a
fox-terrier; so the garden squirt was the kindest sort of cruelty.
I am afraid that, in talking thus vaguely of ‘the house’ and ‘the
garden,’ the reader may have formed a totally erroneous impression of
scale, and I must inform him at once that ‘the house’ is the kind of
house which is called The Cedars, because, apparently, it has one
withered furze-bush in the garden. It is semi-detached, stands on the
outskirts of the town, and is of an external appearance which is better
forgotten. Inside, however, the rooms are good, high and airy, and,
anyhow, it suits me. There is a small strip of garden in front, in which
at present I take no interest, and a square of garden behind measuring
some sixty or seventy feet by thirty, encompassed by a wall of old and
very large brick. A strip of border, sown from end to end with
sweet-peas, runs up one side. At the far end is a small raised terrace
of grass, on which grow an apple-tree and a plum-tree, by which I have
planted the Crimson Ramblers. The seven standards, to be budded in June,
stand in a formal row below the terrace, and parallel to the border of
sweet-peas stand half a dozen tubs, in which are sown nasturtiums of the
large climbing kind. This leaves a space of grass, twenty feet by forty,
and on this is being now erected ‘the shelter,’ a wooden room with
trellis on two sides, match-boarding on one, and entirely open on the
other. Felt will be laid down over the grass, and over the felt rugs.
There will be a couple of basket-chairs there, an old French mattress
covered with rugs, a writing-table, and a small dining-table, with four
chairs. There I propose to live as soon as the summer comes. Over one
side the nasturtiums in the tubs will trail their green and ruddy arms,
and I shall look towards the seven standards and the Scarlet Ramblers.
In the evening an Arab lamp with electric light, brought on a long cord
from the house, will illuminate it.
The very planning of ‘the shelter’ was an absorbing joy; absorbing, too,
is it to see it rise, smelling clean of freshly-chiselled wood. Then it
will be painted green, and ready for habitation. In front of it, towards
the terrace, will stand a sundial, which will not get, as far as I can
see, any sun at all, since the stately shelter will entirely shade it.
However, I dare say it will do better in the shade, like lilies of the
valley. Besides, one never uses a sundial in order to tell the time.
I often wonder how large an area of house and garden it is possible to
get really fond of. The fact of broad acres and limitless corridors may
be, and often is, delightful to the possessor, especially if they are of
long-standing possession; but to be fond of a place in the way that I
mean implies to be intimate with every square inch of it. Your own
niche, your own particular _angulus terræ_, must, I think, be small; the
great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you
will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to
work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste,
some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and
brought within the scope of his invention. The great lawns and
shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of
them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own
garden corner. And it is the personal aroma, the definite impress of an
individual taste on rooms and gardens, that makes them alive with their
own individual entity: they are parasitic, like mistletoe, drawing their
life from a parent stem. The large rooms, the rows of marbles, the acres
of signed canvas, are beautiful and wonderful things; but no one man can
appropriate them and fashion them to himself, or himself to them, for
they are too large, and are the setting not for one person, but for the
brilliant crowd. But his own ‘den,’ where he has the books he wants,
the chair he likes, the few pictures he loves, it is there that he is
_chez lui_--at home. That is the good part; to have the other is
enviable, no doubt, but one does not envy it with the sense of need. Of
course, no two people may have the same idea of a _chez lui_; and it is
always with a certain anxiety that one awaits the arrival of a friend
who has not seen one’s own. He may easily not like it at all (as I have
said, the appearance of the house outside is among the things to be
forgotten), and if he does not, it is part of me he does not like. But
it takes all sorts to make a world; if it were not so, the world would
be infinitely less entertaining than it is and infinitely less lovable.
Almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in
which are for the most part mossed and gray. A gravel path winds in and
out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a
half-dozen of fine elms. It borders on the road, and is separated from
it by only a low paling. And looking out of my window this morning, I
saw here one of those very simple little common things that give the
lie to cynics. It was a fine sunshiny morning and the road was populous,
and among others there came down it two big, strapping privates out of
the regiment that is stationed here, all trappings and scarlet, while
between them, with a hand in the arm of each, walked a little old lady
dressed in black. Each of the two men carried a cross of white flowers,
and they walked very slowly, hanging on their steps, and suiting their
pace to the woman. All three passed in at the cemetery gate, and went
across the grass to a tomb which lay underneath the elms, and had an old
weatherworn stone to mark it. On it the two soldiers laid down their
crosses, and took off their forage-caps, and all three knelt side by
side for a couple of minutes, it may be, at the foot of the grave, close
by the road. Then they rose, and the old lady kissed her tall sons very
tenderly, and stood with them there a minute more, a hand clasped by
each, while they talked together, I suppose of the dead. Then they
passed out of the cemetery gate again, and, for aught I know, out of my
life. But a little later I went across the road, and to the grave where
the crosses of lilies lay. The stone, as I had seen, was of old
standing, and I read that it was in memory of a man who had died in the
year 1880, on April 17, so that to-day was the twenty-second anniversary
of his death. Two days afterwards I happened to ask the Colonel of that
regiment whether there were two privates of a certain name among the
men.
‘Yes,’ said he, ‘excellent steady fellows; they look after their old
mother, who lives here.’
So the reconstruction was simple enough. The father must have died while
the two sons were still boys of five or six; yet on the anniversary of
his death, so it seems, they still go to the grave with their mother,
quite simply and naturally, and say a prayer there with her. The grass,
too, on the grave itself was, I noticed, kept short and carefully
tended, so I suppose they go there not infrequently. I think the man who
lies there must have been a good husband. God keep all our memories as
green in loving hearts!
Meantime April is here, and it is good to be in England, for in no other
country that I have ever seen is the rush of colour more jubilant.
Flowers you may get in plenty on the Grecian hills when ‘blossom by
blossom the spring begins,’ but nowhere do you get such green as that in
which here April hangs the trees and hedgerows. Star-like the pink
petalled daisies shine in the grass of the water-meadows, and soon the
yellow shower of buttercups will make Danaë of the earth. In lonely
places the daffodils dance together for the joy of their renewed life,
and the warm wind shakes the snow of almond and apple-blossom on to the
thick-bladed turf. Morning by morning fresh spears of living stuff have
pierced the earth, rising upwards in obedience to the great law that
moves all life, to look on the kingdom of the sun; and every day the sap
of growth hums and tingles to the end of twig and tree, bursting forth
through pink-sheathed bud into stars and crescents of leaf and blossom.
On the great downs the grass of last year already shows gray and
withered by the newness of the excellent emerald, soon to be wrought
with tapestries of thyme, where the bee scrambles heavy-legged with the
pollen of its fragrant labour, and the chimes of the harebells, to
which, so the legend of the countryside has it, the fairies dance,
leaving a deeper green where their feet have trod.
Brimful from bank to grassy bank the chalk-streams drawn from the cool
deep brain of the downs hurry steadfastly through the meadows, setting
the reeds quivering and jerking. Here their courses lie over beds of
white chalk and gravel, each pebble shining lucently, jewel-like; here
the water-weeds, growing thickly from bank to bank, are combed and waved
by the passage of the water; here the stream is set on a more
industrious and earnest purpose, as it twirls itself together in the
bricked and narrowed passage that leads to the melodious thunder of a
mill, from which, having accomplished its work without any loss or
fatigue, it emerges in a soda-water of bubble from the dripping sides of
the sluice and the mist of its own outpouring. There in the pool below
lie its great mysterious citizens, the aldermen of the river, for whom
on many days I shall, with my heart in my mouth, cast flies upon the
water. Think, if I should catch the Lord Mayor himself--an eight-pounder
at least, so the miller tells me, who has broken as many lines, it
appears, as there are bubbles in the stream, or heads of racing
thistledown in a windy meadow. And if, as is highly probable, the lord
of the stream defends his own, and will put such slight wisdom into the
heads of his fish that not even the least cautious stripling among them
is lured by me, yet he cannot wean me from that fond hope that this cast
or this will meet its reward, or when evening comes, and the creel is
still unburdened, take away from me the benefit of those waterside
hours, the combing of the water-weeds, the translucency of sun-smitten
ripples, the infinite refreshment of companionship with things that are
quiet and alive. Nor at the end of the day will my machinations against
his citizens debar me from becoming for a moment one of them, and
dividing the frothy waters of his deepest pool.
MAY
May has come in with gleams of sunshine and gusty fits of tears: half
the time that one is out-of-doors, one is being soaked; the other half,
being dried by the sun and the boisterousness of west wind. The heavens,
indeed, are like some wayward woman, scolding and stormy, then suddenly
showing the divinest tenderness. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ say the sun and the
west wind. ‘I only wet you for fun. Oh, don’t go indoors and change; I
will make you quite dry in a minute.’
But for as long as I live, I think, every May that comes round in the
circle of months will be to me, not the May of the year whose course is
now running, but the May of three years ago. So, too, when we come to
June, you will find the June of two years ago. For to me now, and to me
always, as I think, May will mean the things that happened then, and
June will mean the things that happened thirteen months later. I will
tell you that story. It concerns three people only, and two of them are
dead.