[Illustration: dog looking at grave]
And did we say that one could ever in any circumstances wish Susan into
the dogstar? Alas! poor dear little Susan, she reposes in a raw,
ostentatious grave in the Oak Tree Glade with six bulb spikes at the top
of the mound. We should like to put a granite stone there with the
words: “Here lies Susan, a good dog.” All that was possible was done to
save her, and she was the most pathetic, gentle, patient creature; at
the very end, seeking blindly with one small paw for her master.
[Sidenote: FORBIDDEN TERRITORY]
Poor Juvenal was so disconsolate that we did not know what to do. We
hit, however, on the happy thought of purchasing a small white Highland
Terrier puppy from a litter on sale in the neighbourhood. Bettine ‹thus
she has been christened with a fine disregard of local colour› arrived,
a dirty, cringing, abject little wretch; but the atmosphere of Villino
Loki has wrought so great a change that she is now a perfect imp of
mischief and general cheekiness. The Master of the House says she is
like a Paris gamin, and that Gavroche is the only name that befits her.
The days of cringing are certainly over. Her long ears cocked, her wide
mouth derisively open, she defies authority, with attitudes and
expressions that can only be transcribed by such remarks as “Pip, Pip,”
or the gesture which the French know as _Pied-de-nez_.
[Illustration: dog walking down stairs]
The other dogs at first protested fiercely against this substitute for
their beloved Susan even Arabella curling a ferocious lip, and striking
out with her fringed paw. But now they have accepted the new comrade
with all the generosity of their fine characters. Loki himself makes no
objection, except when she ventures upon territory which he regards as
peculiarly his own; such as the grand-maternal bedroom.
The month that has taken away the harmless humble life of Juvenal’s
fox-terrier, has also brought the news of England’s loss in one of her
most gallant sons. He was a friend of the household, and Loki, I am
sure, does not forget—for a long memory is one of the Pekinese
characteristics—how the South Pole hero played hide-and-seek with him in
his puppyhood for a whole hour, one summer’s day, like a very child
himself. The family of Villino Loki have memories, too, of that
friendship which they valued so highly; and they will always carry the
vivid picture of the strong brown face, with the blue eyes that were at
once as guileless as a child’s and full of a far-away vision, as if they
never ceased to contemplate their high and distant goal. The world is
crowded with bumptious people who do nothing at all that is useful, if
they do not do harm. Here was a man who had already accomplished mighty
achievement and was set on mightier still, and there never was anyone so
modest, so anxious to push others forward and keep himself in the
background. He was asked by one of us to write a line in an autograph
book, and he set down characteristically a tribute to another:
“The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel....”
We laughed ‹after that futile fashion that becomes a kind of habit
nowadays› and said, “We always think that sounds so uncomfortable!”
He raised those blue eyes, half humorously, half deprecatingly. “You
make me feel ashamed of being incorrigibly romantic.”
It was we who felt ashamed.
“We are sure,” we answered, “you have a good friend somewhere.”
“Yes,” he said, “the best ever a man had.”
We are glad to think that friendship was with him all through and at the
end. In one of the last letters ever received from the doomed Antarctic
Expedition the tribute is paid again: “No words of mine,” writes he,
“can describe what he is.”
* * * * *
[Illustration: bird on branch]
[Sidenote: TOM’S GRAND MANNERS]
The birds have eaten every single bud on our baby almond trees—the first
year that they have had any flower buds at all. Ungrateful little
wretches! the Master of the Villino sees personally to the replenishing
of the numerous bird-baths and drinking-pans; and Juvenal provides them
with cocoa-nuts filled with lard and baskets full of crumbs—aided by
Gold-Else, the cook, who loves little creatures in fur and feather as
much as the rest of the household. Tom, the old cat, is very happy under
this lady’s kind rule, and, to show his appreciation, accompanies her in
stately fashion every night up the kitchen stairs to her bedroom door.
The act of courtesy accomplished, she as solemnly reconducts him
downstairs again to spread his couch for him—a sheet of brown paper, by
his request.
The Hyacinths are breaking out of their green hoods, shaking blue bells;
but our Scillas seem to be going to disappoint us. This sandy soil on
our Surrey heights is not at all appreciated by bulbs. Snowdrops will
have nothing to say to us, unless in a prepared bed. Narcissus Poeticus
disappeared altogether after one year’s blooming. We are trying to
naturalize Bluebells in a glade which we have cleared—and in which this
year has been planted an avenue of pink May trees, to end at the bottom
of the dell in a group of white Azaleas—but we are not at all sure that
we shall succeed. However, we have our compensations: Azaleas thrive,
and so do Rhododendrons. We are year by year adding more of the former
to the wild slopes.
Below the terrace, yclept the “Hemicycle,” a path bordered with Azalea
Mollis was a perfect glory last May, although it had only been planted
the preceding autumn. The “Hemicycle” was a little fairy glade of Crocus
a week ago, the second in February; and we have still hope of the
Scillas which surround our bereft almond trees. A rough wall rises from
it to the Upper Terrace, over which Dorothy Rambler will fling its
lovely blooms in immense trails by and by; and its stones themselves
hold a never-ending succession of delight in the shape of Arabis,
Aubretia, Cerastium, Thrift, and the like. Yellow roses climb up to meet
the Dorothy, and the dear little pink China Rose grows in bushes all
along the front between the Lavender plants which we are trying to
acclimatise, but which, year after year, are blighted by the frost
before they have had time to grow strong.
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[Illustration: garden path]
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[Illustration: two ladies working in garden]
Satisfactory as our wall-garden is, there is a wall-garden at a cottage
in a neighbouring village which never fails to fill us with envy every
time we see it. It belongs to two maiden ladies, whom we have christened
Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza. They are so extraordinarily like each
other that even they themselves ‹we have heard› hardly know which is
which. They have the same rotundity of figure, the same uncertain
obliquity in one eye, the same cheerful rosy visage, the same sleek
bands of grey hair.
When the Master of the House was a young man, an Irish servant was heard
to observe to him, gazing rapturously at him as he walked away from her
vision, all unconsciously, in his shooting-garb: “And indeed he’s a
lovely gentleman. Them jars of legs!” ‹As a matter of fact, Loki’s
Grandfather has very nice legs.› But Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza, in
short, sensible grey tweed skirts, bending their portly forms over their
wall garden, have more than often presented to the passer-by a
vision....
The Japanese say that reticence is the very soul of art. Our aspirations
are always towards the artistic, but there is something touching in four
... exactly similar ... side by side...!
[Sidenote: A TERRIFYING GOOD WISH]
To digress once more: Loki’s Grandfather is no doubt a man of fine
proportions; though he is not at all plump, he has all the athlete’s
dread of becoming so. Once when we were stranded at a small wayside
station in Ireland, without even a bench to sit upon, he began to while
away the time by testing his weight on the automatic machine. The
indicating needle travelled considerably further than he expected! He
was standing, transfixed, staring at the pointing finger, when a very
old woman with a shawl over her head, holding a very small boy by the
hand, suddenly broke into loud paeans beside him:
“God bless your honour!—Isn’t it the grand gentleman you are! Glory be
to God, may you grow larger, and larger, and larger!”
“For heaven’s sake,” cried Loki’s Grandfather, wheeling round in horror,
“don’t say such a thing!”
“And indeed I do, yer honour.—Look at him now,” she went on, shaking the
little creature she held by the hand, “you’ll never see a finer
gentleman. Don’t you wish you had a Dada like that?”
Then she burst out again and continued to wish him increase in Sybilline
tones. They were both so extraordinarily serious, she in her benisons,
he in his terror of the curse, that as Loki’s Grandmother sat on her
trunk she was weak with laughter.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: A LOCAL POET]
The Master of the Villino had a charming little experience last spring.
Some time before, in the winter, he fell into conversation with an old
sweep, who was tramping up the hill, the evidence of his life-work thick
upon him. They discoursed of many things, for the sweep had a wide range
of interests. They spoke of the moorland place as it was in bygone days;
and of the learned Professor whose eulogies first put it into fashion;
of the lectures on Science delivered by this latter; and of the way in
which the spring first shows itself in the lower copses while it is
still winter on our heights. The sweep knew a dell where the primroses
were always a month in advance of any other spot. He had a soul for
primroses, unlike Wordsworth’s horrible Peter—which reminds me of the
delicious remark made to Loki’s young mistress by an old pensioner in
Chelsea Gardens. He led her to the plot he cultivated for himself, with
all the childish eagerness of the aged, and pointed to a single yellow
crocus, blown this way and that by the wind, for it was a shrewish day.
“Look at it, Missie!” he cried. “It’s as playful as a kitten.”
[Illustration: house exterior]
We do not know at what hour in the bleak late February morning the
little box was left in the porch. It was found there by the earliest
maid, and brought to the Master of the House with his letters in due
course; a box that obviously had lately contained carbolic soap. Inside
in a nest of moss, carefully covered with red bramble leaves, was a
bunch of primroses tied with red wool, and the following “verses”:
“Beneath the moss and the mast,
Though the weather has been wet and cold,
I manage to raise my head
Down in the Sussex wold.”
Thus it began, speaking in the name of the Primrose, to enter, rapidly
and boldly into the sweep’s personality:
“To-day I passed by the way,
So I stayed and picked you a few,
To show I do not forget
The chat I had with you.”
Here the muse got a little tired; but it ended up with unimpaired
cheerfulness:
“I hope you are hale and well
And now I must say Addue,
Yours respectfully,
STAR.”
Over the page there was a charming P.S.:
“Perhaps you have younger fingers
The flowers to unfold,
Mine are rather clumsy
Being big and old.
Pleasant Hours,
Live long.”
It is the kind of little incident that seems to happen at Villino Loki,
where animals and human beings are queer and unexpected, and live
together in simplicity and cheerfulness.
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V
Travelling along the pleasant path of life, on the reverse side of the
hill, the downward course ‹how graphic is the French of it for the later
and “smaller half” of our allotted span: _sur le retour_›, there is a
tendency to dwell more upon memories and proportionately less on
ambitions. The prospect now ahead, placid and mellowed as it may be,
naturally dwindles to narrower margins. Its interest is more of the
immediate order; deals mostly with hopes and doings of the coming
season. And, the circle of recollection widening, things distant in the
past appeal with proportionate insistency to the mind’s eye.
[Sidenote: “DREAMING BACKWARDS”]
I believe this is the case with all thinking creatures ‹says Loki’s
Grandpa—who has fallen into a reminiscent mood›. With one whose lazy and
musing propensities, whose delight in day-dreams has proved his
paramount weakness, the habit of “dreaming backwards” and hunting for
old impressions has become as haunting, in these years of the sixth
decade, as was, in salad days, the “dreaming forward” and the straining
for a sight of things still below the horizon.
For instance: in a life which has always been one of constant
book-companionship, the printed passages which most delight me are those
which, having been first read in another age and re-discovered in this
one, bring back a pulse of some long forgotten impression. The
impression may be one that sober and critical memory does not record as
having been so particularly enthralling at the time—yet it now comes
back with a subtle fragrance all its own.
The long darkness of winter provides the richest reading hours. And if
the page-turning is by the side of a wood fire—as happens on this, the
coldest day of the year—if it is in a deep armchair with the lamp
throwing its quiet rays over one’s shoulder, why, it is apt to become
interspersed with long spells of wide-eyed dreaming. The fire burns with
that special clearness, that kind of conscious eagerness which one
observes inside the hearth upon a keen frosty night. In the town a
frosty night is but a cold night. But here, on our country hill-side,
when winter, albeit officially over, is in reality still with us, a
frosty night inevitably turns our thoughts to the threatened hopes of
the garden.
[Illustration: view of garden]
Now, as one who knows practically nought of the gardener’s “Arte and
Mysterie,” my interest in the matter is of the irresponsible kind. I
look forward, of course, and keenly, to the satisfying display, first of
our sappy, turgid fragrant Hyacinth beds in the Dutch Garden ‹somehow,
the Dutch Garden seems to belong more particularly to my own side of the
Villino—to be a precinct of my study in fact› than to the proud-pied
array of the subsequent Tulips, nodding in the breeze over their bed of
close clustering Forget-me-Nots. This is the annual treat provided in
the spring—for Grandpa’s especial behoof at Villino Loki—by the
industrious care of the knowledgeable ladies. Nevertheless, as I say, my
interest is of the general order; not of details; not of ways and means.
I expect, in the maturity of every season, delightful achievements, and
find them; but I take little part in their planning. I am of no use for
device and not called upon in council. I thankfully enjoy the results;
and this is perhaps not the worst part the Master of the House could
play in the year’s transaction.
Only on two occasions have I volunteered a suggestion with regard to
planting—and both are related to early, very early, reminiscences.
Creepers of all sorts we have in profusion. Ivy, of course, and
Jessamine and Honeysuckle, and the gorgeous, if short-lived,
Virginia-Ampilopsis its name, I believe. But there is one thing, I
pointed out, I must have also, and that is the blue clustering, the
incomparably fragrant _Glycine_ of my early childhood’s days. Wisteria
is its proper English name.
Odoriferous bushes, again, we have, of every description. Ribes, Cassia,
Gummy Cistus, what not?—lurk in ambuscade at the turning of paths to
waylay you with their gush of essence, not to speak of the Azaleas in
their banks; but all these perfumes, in their subtleness, belong to the
middle years. No memories of the complete freshness of time cleave to
them such as belong to the simple Sweet Briar.
[Illustration: outside entrance to house]
So, now, the two rooted creatures of the Villino, which may be said to
exist there more specially for the behoof of Loki’s Grandpa, are the
Briar bushes at the end of the Lily Walk and by the _Schöne Aussicht_,
and the still tender but promising Wisteria climbers in the re-entering
and most sheltered corner of his study walls.
[Sidenote: FLOWER LOVES OF CHILDHOOD]
And it is for those young hopeful Wisterias that on this frosty night I
feel a concern. Last year we had a score or so of purple clusters; we
look to a goodly increase during the coming _Renouveau_.—‹You perceive
the old, obsolete French word for Spring comes back of itself!› The
anticipation of the near future, within the shrinking vista of coming
pleasures, elicits as usual a return to the widening past. In this case
the past that is recalled is that of a childhood spent in France.
The book lies forgotten on my knee. The brown Meerschaum grows cold in
my hand. My eyes, lost in musings among the flame-fringed logs, now peer
beyond the past half-century—at a time which seems verily as far distant
and as little related to the present as that year 1636 stamped and still
faintly discernible on the antique cast-iron backplate of the
fireplace.... I see a farm-house in a village of that province which in
ancient days was known as Ile-de-France ‹I hate your modern régime
_départements_›, by name Mesnil-le-Roy; not far distant from Mantes, the
natty little town on the upper and green-watered Seine, generally
adverted to as _Mantes-la-Jolie_.
[Sidenote: GLYCINE!]
Therein, during nearly a whole year, for reasons of delicate health,
resided a certain very small English boy—French enough in those tender
years. In this delectable old place, so full of good-smelling things in
their seasons: hay, and grain, and fruit, and at all times the
health-restoring cow, the house was in the spring-time covered with
Glycine. And with the adorable Glycine the small boy, who loved flowers
as much as milk and fruits and beasts, fell forthwith in love.
How that coquettish Jappy plant came originally to find a footing in so
rustic a corner as Mesnil-le-Roy is more than I can account for. Your
French peasant is not, as a rule, addicted to the delights of flower
raising; and, in those distant days, Wisteria was still something of a
rarity anywhere. But there it was, already in the sturdiest strength of
its age, embracing the old walls, forcing its fibrous wood into every
cranny of the greystone, framing every window, striving up the chimney
stacks—and filling the air with honey sweetness. It must have taken at
least two score years to reach such a size.
With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. He feasted
on it with his every sense. From morning till eve he would be sucking
the base of some blue corolla plucked from its calyx, for the sake of
that intense sweetness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of
_Glycine_; he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his eyes
with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in the scent, and
listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz of honey-seekers in the
sunshine. And, in the morning, his first thought, as he crept out of his
small truckle-bed, was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that
glittered upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side at the
mansarde window.
Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I remember
how, for months after he was removed back into the Paris house, the
small boy would ply his mother with the yearning question, infantilely
incorrect but vernacular: “_Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines,
Maman?_” always to receive the non-committal but consoling:
“_Tantôt ... tantôt._”
This “tantôt” is the wonderful “by-and-by” which never comes to be!
And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in later
years—to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of age. For years a
many, a purple Wisteria spreading about the eaves of a south-country
house, was to me only a purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was
nothing more. It was not a “_Glycine_” until I had a creepered wall of
my own. Then it surged before imagination’s eye with all the glamour of
_les premières amours_, to which, in accordance with the old French saw,
“_on en revient toujours_.”
Now, therefore, at Villino Loki, nothing will serve but a _Glycine_ to
creep along those walls which are more especially my own; to embrace my
south windows and nod in at the casement. And the suave-breathed Eastern
beauty, first brought over to the West and god-fathered by Professor
Wister, will privily remain Glycine for me; although I may draw the
indulgent visitor’s attention to her under the better-known name of
Wisteria Sinensis.—I have, by the way, an ever-ready pretext; for I
learn from “The Language of Flowers” that the special significance of
this blossom is “Welcome, fair stranger!” I mean to have a profusion of
it, for old sake’s sake. Besides, is it not meet that Loki should not be
deprived, during his villeggiatura, of the company of some Chinese
living thing?
------------------------------------------------------------------------