[Illustration: _The Blue Border._]
The warm weather has come with a burst in this last week of April. We
have torn ourselves away from Villino Loki to London pavements. The
Floribunda trees are covered with red buds. We expect a glory when we
return. Loki’s Great Aunt has presented his family with twenty-five
shillings worth of purple Aubretia, with which ‹much to Adam’s
annoyance› we have decided to carpet the blue border. The Blue Border,
we think, is under some evil bewitchment. Our late gardener assured us
that no “human gardener” could find room for another plant. Yet it was
the only border in the garden that “came up bald,” if one can use such
an expression. Perhaps we had too much initiative and he too little; a
combination bound to result in failure sometimes, if it is accompanied
on one side by plunging ignorance, and on the other by “slowness of
intellect, Birdie, my dear.”
* * * * *
To come back to one’s garden in April after ten days of strenuous London
is a wonderful little experience for people who care for the pure joys
of the young green and the spring flowers.—There is an indescribable
panorama of woodland beauty on the hills opposite Villino Loki. A great
marching regiment of pines, straggling upwards, emphasize the tints of
birch and larch—tints which no pen, hardly any brush, could portray. The
very sunlight seems caught and sent forth again from the pale yet vivid
sheen. The White Broom is pearled with bud; in a few days it will burst
into bloom and toss plumes as of some fantastic, fairy knighthood above
the yew hedges that enclose the Dutch Garden.
* * * * *
The dogs’ welcome to their lost masters and to Loki ‹who, of course,
always accompanies his family wherever it goes› is very genuine, and
rather obstreperous. Bettine runs in and out of the room, up and down
the furniture, as if in joyful pursuit of imaginary rats. Arabella, fond
and foolish as ever, tries to crawl into everybody’s lap. Being about
the size of a young calf, these blandishments are not encouraged. Loki,
little Fur-man, as we call him, has a different way of expressing his
feelings. True, he runs about and yelps rapture to the other dogs; but
he sobs and cries like a child on reunion with any of his own, and half
swoons with rapture in our arms. Sometimes it seems as if the love in
his heart were too big for his little flame-coloured body, and must
burst it in the endeavour to express his joy!
[Sidenote: MISUNDERSTOOD CANDOUR]
Loki is always very bumptious and pleased with himself in London—being
Only-dog there—but he cannot bear visitors beyond a certain limit.
Friends who come to tea are very much touched and charmed at the sight
of the “dear little dog” going from one to the other, sitting up and
waving his paws with frantically imploring gesture.
[Illustration: dog waving paws at seated visitor]
“Sweet little fellow—what can he want?” they say, and vainly offer
tit-bits from the tea-table. Loki’s Grandparents of course cannot
answer, “He begs you to go away”—but such unfortunately is the true
explanation. He sneezes with rapture when the door is closed on the last
departing guest: he then is able to lead his Grandmother upstairs for
the evening romp. His Grandmamma has weak health, which is no doubt the
reason why he has fixed on her as the only person who understands the
true inwardness of his games. They are very exhausting to mere humans,
and he has a great deal of cat perversity in his composition. He spent
the whole time of a recent dinner-party sitting upon a chair in full
view of the company, ceaselessly begging with prayerful paws; “Oh do, do
go away!” As usual he evoked a great deal of undeserved
sympathy—meanwhile his tactful family held their peace.
Bettine is growing into the hobbledehoy stage. A few weeks ago it was an
entrancing spectacle to see her playing with a butterfly on the moor. It
was a yellow butterfly, and we think it must have understood the rules
of catch-who-catch-can, for it fluttered along just ahead of the white
puppy’s nose. It was a little vision of youth and spring to snapshot for
the gallery of mental memories. Loki’s female relations, who are given
to transcendental discussions, sometimes wonder whether in the next
world they will be vouchsafed these dear small pleasures which make up
the best of life down here. Unless we find our animals there, there will
certainly be something missing. Surely there are flowers in Heaven, and
birds—why not those faithful creatures in which a soul seems so often
struggling into birth?
[Sidenote: HEAVEN, AND OUR BEASTS]
“My little god, my little god!” Maeterlinck makes the dog say to his
master. It is certain that man, in making the dog his companion, has in
some sort endowed him with spiritual faculties. And it is this piteously
loving, confiding, blindly adoring, dumb creature that has been selected
by the “master minds” of the day as the chief victim for the horrors of
scientific research!
Indeed, that humanity should thus use its God-given dominion over the
helpless lower order of creation is an idea so hideous that it can only
have emanated from the Powers of Darkness. All the glib arguments that
this animal torture benefits suffering man seem to us as much beside the
mark as they are immoral. Almost every crime can be justified by some
such theory, from the century-old customs of child exposure in China to
the modern Suffragette outrages. And already the boundaries on this
speculative field have been extended so as to include members of the
community whose defencelessness or unimportance preclude unpleasant
reprisals. How many unfortunate patients, for instance, are quite
unnecessarily operated upon in our great hospitals? Within our narrow
personal experience we have known cases where life has been absolutely
sacrificed to the “knife mania.”
Loki’s Grandmother, who feels very strongly on this subject, has always
wanted to write an article giving chapter and verse of the facts. She
would have headed her instructive pages with the title “Killing no
Murder;” but she knows no magazine would publish them because of the
storm it would raise.
During a recent severe illness of hers, one of her nurses, whom she used
to call her “ministering devil,” was very fond of entertaining her—at
moments when the patient was too weak for speech—with the hopes which
many eminent men of science now entertain of being able, some day, to
get a bill passed permitting vivisection on the condemned criminal!
Why speak of such abominations in these pages dedicated to kind, happy
days and sweet garden thoughts? Only for this reason—that it is the
policy of ignoring, of cowardly turning away from unpleasant subjects,
on the part of the great majority of the world that makes the thing
possible at all.
* * * * *
[Illustration: bird flying outside house]
One of the first orders we give a new gardener is that nothing is to be
slain at Villino Loki except the Green Fly and the Rose-Beetle. The
birds may devour all our buds, strip up our crocuses, and denude our
raspberry canes ‹if they get a chance›. The mole may tunnel and burrow
and raise his convulsive mounds in our most cherished lawn—and that is
certainly a test of garden endurance—we will have no traps! As for the
squirrels, we are afraid we have cleared too much in our wilderness to
tempt them now. But one of the family actually bought little green
tables in order to spread repasts for them near their favourite haunt.
In certain wild corners of Dorsetshire squirrels become almost familiars
in such households as are kindly enough to set forth a dainty, now and
again, for the frolicsome company. One understanding person of our
acquaintance was given to spreading nuts on a certain window-sill, where
every day the squirrels used to come and fetch them. One morning she was
a little later than usual in this attention; on coming into the room,
she was startled by a knocking on the window, and there on the sill sat
a thing, all fur and bright eyes, knocking with its fairy paw! We think
Loki has a good deal of the squirrel in him. There are no end of nice
little beasts that Loki resembles. Sometimes we declare that he is least
of all dog.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: THE WILD PATCH]
[Illustration: flowering plant]
It is a wonder that people do not make more use of Broom in their Wild
Gardens. We have seen a woodland path where great bushes of alternate
white and yellow Plantagenista made riot in the sunshine; but it was too
regular an arrangement to harmonize with scene. A wild garden, however
cultivated secret, should grow as naturally as possible. It is a rather
interesting experiment to fling the contents of a packet of wild flower
seeds about one’s banks and unkept spaces. One forgets all about it;
and, behold! after the second year, there are all kinds of engaging
discoveries to be made: patches of grey-blue Campanulas, bold Foxgloves,
Loose-strife, white Campions, all the more delightful because forgotten
and unexpected and fitting into their surroundings as no amount of
planting in can make them do. A giant Mullein has just made itself a
home under the fir-trees and stands as if it had always been there,
boldly and defiantly established in its proper place and determined to
maintain it.
We caress the project of planting tall Ericas and Mediterranean Heaths
on the borders of a certain rough path; and in between the Heather we
shall make drifts of Colchicum, so that it may look lovely in all
seasons. We do not consider that Colchicum is properly placed in the
garden. Its summer leaf is too coarse, and it is hideous when it dies
off. Mrs. Earle has made the same remark in one of her delightful books.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: VISCOUNTESS, AND OTHERS]
It will be very interesting to see how the new Roses turn out. A good
many were ordered on the strength of the catalogue description, from
three different rose growers. Hybrid Perpetuals do not do with us;
neither do pure Teas stand our cold, otherwise we should riot in “Lady
Hillingdon.”
“You never can go wrong with a Viscountess,” said his gardener to a
friend of ours.
He was a man of lightning wit—as all lovers of “Savoy” operas know.
“That is a very interesting statement of yours,” he said in that brief,
unsmiling manner that added zest to his quaintness. “I have been given
to understand the contrary.”
We can go wrong with a Viscountess, unfortunately, and do. As we have
said, Hybrid Perpetuals do not behave well with us, except, perhaps,
that model of excellence, Ulrich Brunner.—Morals are a question of
climate even with roses.
Loki’s Ma-Ma ‹to be discursive—and we are afraid that this chronicle is
nothing if not discursive› was a great favourite with this genius of
mirth above mentioned, who made the world ring with honest laughter and
whose heroic death brought many tears, at least to Villino Loki. He used
to call her “his little Lemur” because she had a way of clinging to her
mother, in her first debutante days.
Never was there a man so tender-hearted. On his estate no wild thing was
to be robbed of its life: not even a rabbit. Loki’s Grandmother used to
be a little timid in his company, because of this gift of swift humour.
She never felt able to meet him on his own ground—except once when in a
windy June he told her that he had begun to take his daily swim in the
lake, and she shuddered at the thought.
“Cold!” he cried, “not a bit of it! Delightful! You shall take a dip
with me when next you come to us.”
“No,” she retorted—and it was the only time in all their pleasant
intercourse that she was ever brave enough to make a pass with him—“No,
I had rather get into hot water with you.”
Alas, alas! That lake! We felt the menace of it even then. It was there,
trying to save another, he found his death.
It has often been said that real wit is a thing of the past. Certainly
the younger generation’s idea of pleasantry is a kind of
rough-and-tumble fight as compared to the neat, delicate thrust-play of
an older world. But this friend of ours had a gift quite apart, a
mixture of humour, wit and satire, something dry, comic, quaint,
peculiarly his own.
“It reminds me,” said a clever relation of his once in our hearing, “of
an old wood carving.”
We understood what he meant; the odd angles, the sharp turns, the
simplicity, the brusque sincerity—and withal how richly genial!
In a single instance one of us beheld him almost meet his match, and
that in a most unexpected manner. The pretty fairy lady, his wife,
happened to comment with surprise upon the fact that a woman who had
been very rude to her should have attempted to greet her upon a recent
occasion as if nothing had happened.
“She actually held out her hand!” she concluded.
“Well, my dear,” observed her lord, in his serious way, “that is the
member most usually extended.”
To the surprise of the whole table, a shy lady on his left, who had not
yet uttered a word, said in a small meek voice: “She might have put out
her tongue!”
We never met that shy woman again. We should like to. “Please will you
keep your Pickle out of my preserves,” he wrote to a neighbour whose dog
was given to roving. The neighbour bore a name well known in grocers’
lists.
* * * * *
For two days the wind has been blowing over the moors from the east. The
sound of it through the trees on the hill-side is like the roar of a
torrent; and now and again it is like the wash of waves upon the beach.
A very unseasonable wind, but it makes a grave and beautiful music.
Fortunately the Dutch Garden with its wealth of Tulips is sheltered, or
there would scarce be left an unbruised petal.
People are very much struck by our beds of Myosotis, surmounted by the
swaying chalices of the Darwins. The simple plan of the blue carpet for
these slender May Queens seems to them very wonderful and new.
[Sidenote: OAKS AND BLUE GLADES]
“Oh, look! What’s happened? Is it real? It’s like fairyland!” cried a
visitor yesterday to a sympathetic sister.—Such kind people to walk
about the garden with! They have themselves a mysterious Oak wood,
falling away beneath their lawns, that is now carpeted with Bluebells: a
place to sit and dream in. Oaks are trees full of romance, we think.
They tell long stories out of the past, and speak of Shakespeare and the
glories of England, and their glades are for ever peopled with brave
figures of history or fiction.
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[Illustration: THE BEECH]
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