[Sidenote: END OF SPRING, SUMMER PLANS]
The last day of May. After the usual “contrariness” of life we have
spent the hot span in London, and returned here to find that ungenial
nor’west wind blowing in upon us apparently over the same icebergs as a
month ago. We think with wails of regret of the long, golden, balmy
garden-days we missed; of the full glory of the Azaleas; of those
splendours of Rose Tulips which we should have enjoyed, radiant in the
sunshine, instead of seeing them yawn their lives away in a hot town
drawing-room. And the Florentina Alba Irises, those delicate, fragrant,
stately things that look as if they were compounded of cobweb and spun
crystal and moonlit snow—it takes but a day to show them in their beauty
and another to wilt them—we have missed their lovely hour too, of
course. On long, long stems, the Iris Siberica are congregating a little
grove of buds in the Blue Border; only two curving purple darlings
having outrun the rest. We shall miss them, for the fates have decreed
that we are to leave the Earthly Paradise in a day or two once more, and
that for the flat horizons of Lancashire. Well, the best of the Spring,
early and late, is over, and we do not grudge these intermediary days so
much, though we wonder how the bedding out will get on without our
stimulating presence. We shall not even have a finger in the
“Cherry-Pie.” Lengthy plans will have to be made. The “Miss Wilmott”
Verbena must replace, by their delicate rose, the blue of the Myosotis
carpet as well as the wonders of the many-hued Darwins, in the two
centre beds of the Dutch Garden. And in the border beds we project a
fine gathering of Antirrhinums shading from crimson, through Firefly and
Rose-Dorée, to palest pink.
The terrace immediately under the house runs, according to our
invariable summer programme, to cool colours and sweet scents. Under the
dining-room and drawing-room windows, besides the transient prospect of
the White Lilies, there are to bloom ‹until the frost lays waste›
Heliotrope and Nicotiana, with pale pink Ivy-leaf Geranium to contrast
with the mauve and purple, and blue Lobelia to rim the outer border of
White Pinks. Against the terrace wall, between the tall Madonna Lilies,
which show good promise, and the Polyantha Roses, red and white, with
the thick edging of “Mrs. Sinkins,” Lobelia and Petunia shall spread.
The pots will bear their customary summer burthen of rose Ivy-leaf
Geraniums, with Lobelia too, and the Zonals. We like them to flaunt
against the moor.
Below, in the Blue Border, the Delphiniums and the Anchusas, the great
old-established White Rose bushes, the steel blue Thistle, must make
what show they can over the annuals—Nigella, Gypsophila and
Nemophila—not forgetting the kind Campanulas, so dear, so faithful, so
hardy! In fine contrast, on the other side of the grass walk, the
Dorothy Perkins hedge will spread its vivid masses, and fling out its
irrepressible garlands over the border of bright blue Nemophila we have
had the audacity to sow.
[Illustration: trees]
And below, in the Hemicycle, the colours are to grow cool again, with
Heliotrope between the Lilies, the Lavenders, and the Monthly Roses, and
Fortune’s Yellow and Rêve d’Or running up the supporting wall.
The beauty of the ancient woods in that Lancashire home from which we
have just returned lingers in our memory. Outside the park walls, the
flat fields lie that would have a charm of their own if the encroachment
of the peculiarly unlovely brick and mortar prosperity of the district
did not catch the eye on almost every side; but within there is a sense
of wonderful peace and mystery, in the old, old woods with their
Rhododendron glades. The astonishing height of the trees seems to keep
modernity at bay, and tells stories still of the simple, proud,
God-fearing race which has become so associated with the very spot of
earth that has borne and nurtured them for many centuries, that, like
one or two other families in England, their name in absolute legality is
not complete without the territorial appendage.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: THE DISAPPEARING SQUIRE]
We hear every day that “the Squire” is a being of the past. We know that
every effort of present-day legislation is to abolish what was once the
strength of England; what might still be its strength, if the restless
and destructive spirit of the age would permit it.
The young owner of those old lands ‹who has just been our host› is one
who will, we hope, keep up the traditions—so fast dying out, or being
stamped out—a little longer. He is, as his grandfather was, the centre
of his own people, the shepherd of his flock. Not quite to the same
extent, perhaps: we do not suppose, for instance, that he is both maker
and depository of their wills, or that he is summoned to every tenant’s
deathbed as was that kindly, sturdy old Lancastrian his grandsire.
“Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!” the afflicted wife and mother would say. “Run oop
to the Hall and tell Squoire to coom along quick, for feyther’s at his
last!”
Neither would he undertake to mend the broken leg; or patch up the
conjugal quarrel. But the young Squire will still hear such a phrase as
this at election time: “What _we_ wants to know is which way Squoire’s
voting? Squoire’s man is the man for we!”
He will let his cottages at eighteen pence a week; and the larger the
family is the smaller will be the rent. And the claims of the tenant
will be attended to before his own. He seems as much part of them as
they are part of him. Has anyone ever heard of a labourer on a large
estate being in destitution? We never have. Our great landowners do more
to provide for their own dependents and keep down pauperism than any
frantic legislator or wholesale philanthropist. But the system is to go;
we have the best authority for it, the authority of those in power. God
help England and England’s poor peasants, say we, when they have their
way!
[Illustration: woman in front of landscape]
We can speak with examples under our eyes. Every time a bit of an estate
is sold, hereabouts, the cottages thereon are purchased by the local
grocer or butcher: and up goes the rent that had been three and six or
four shillings a week to seven and six and ten shillings. Here, where we
live, there are practically no important landowners, and what is the
result? Not the most miserable cottage to be had under seven and six a
week, a rent liable to be raised at a moment’s notice. The butcher, the
baker, these are the “landlords,” and the rent they exact is exactly
what they know they can extract out of the unfortunate tenant, in the
present state of cottage scarcity. We ourselves have spent weeks in
striving to secure a roof for a wretched woman with three little
children, whose husband had attempted to murder her and after her escape
had danced upon all her furniture, and burnt the remnants. We had to
engage a cottage three months in advance, and then the rent was eight
and six a week! She was a stupid poor goose of a woman, who couldn’t do
anything for her living except an occasional day’s charing or rough
washing. Of course we ought to have let her go to the workhouse; but we
didn’t. We guaranteed the rent instead and took in the eldest boy as an
unneeded garden assistant. ‹He is rather like a garden slug, so we
thought he ought to be at home in the borders›! The other day a local
tradesman raised the rent of a cottage sixpence a week upon the
hard-working mother of a large family, who occasionally comes in “to
oblige” at Villino Loki; and when she remonstrated he humorously
remarked that Mr. Lloyd George was “driving him to it!”
[Sidenote: THE REFRESHING FRUIT]
There is a proverb that “good wine needs no bush.” The Chancellor’s
efforts to convince his victims of the comfort of the plaster which is
blistering them are almost pathetic. But surely it is another proof, if
one were needed, of the weakness of his cause. A local laundry owner has
been receiving six pounds a week, lecturing, in Devonshire of all
places, on the blessedness of the Act as experienced by himself and
staff. One of our district nurses, a delightful sturdy North Country
woman, was “approached” as to whether she would undertake, for a
consideration, to use her persuasiveness with her patients and make them
see how much they were benefited by the stamp tax. She declined with a
heat that may have astonished the emissary.
It must indeed be a little difficult to make, say, a struggling
greengrocer understand the debt of gratitude he owes to the law which
constrains him to pay fourpence a week for the assistant he can so ill
afford as it is and mulct that discontented youth of threepence! More
especially when baker and grocer charge him more to cover their own
losses.
The obvious remedy, says Mr. Lloyd George, is for the greengrocer to
raise the prices in his town! He does; and somehow it doesn’t work.
Being in a poor district and all his patrons being poor, they buy less
from him, and he buys less from them.
“But look at the comfort in sickness!” It is tiresome, it almost seems
like putting bad will into it, that the greengrocer’s wife should
develop consumption before the first stone of any sanatorium is ready!
* * * * *
Now, that prosperous, contented class, the labourer on the great estate,
a man who lives on his lord’s lands, if not rent free, very nearly so,
with wood and garden produce, potatoes, milk and what not, and steady
employment all the year round, he is to be benefited—save the mark! A
“minimum wage,” cheap housing, the fixed hours, the sacred half-holiday,
it sounds so plausible! The propagandist is volubly at work. “No
wonder,” as the young Squire we have recently visited once ruefully said
to us, “my decent, contented, God-fearing villagers were turned in a
couple of hours into shrieking, blaspheming lunatics by such a gospel,
preached with forcible arguments in the public-house.”
Of course they will get their demands. Striking, with “peaceful
picketing,” generally gets its way, even if not backed up by Government
emissaries and the glorious visions flash-lighted by the Chancellor of
the Exchequer. But what will be the result? Half the amount of
employment on the estates of those who can still afford to keep them,
and no all-the-year-round engagements. When the work is slack the
over-paid and inimical labourer will naturally be discharged. We say
inimical, for how can friendly relations be maintained if the old
solidarity is destroyed? This, of course, is what is aimed at; and the
quack remedy, the patent pill alluringly held aloft, is—State ownership
of land! The land is to be managed like the Workhouse, the Prison, and
the Reformatory, of which, we are all aware, the British State makes
such a brilliant success. We know how the poor love the Workhouse, and
how happy they are in it; yet one can scarcely take up a police report
without finding some desperate pauper sentenced for revolt. Oh, no doubt
it will be a Merry England when these disinterested and dashing tinkers
get their way.
[Sidenote: A HAVEN OF REST]
We have known, in parenthesis, a pauper establishment, run by voluntary
effort, in which a hundred and fifty old men and ninety old women were
kept happy and contented by a handful of soft-voiced nuns. No need to
call in the policeman, in Portobello Road; for there old age is
reverenced at once and pitied, and the double aspect of the most natural
of all the commandments is put into every-day practice, so unobtrusively
and simply that no one can guess how heroically.
But the religious question will soon be treated in the same way as the
land question; so no invidious comparisons need be drawn. Little boys
and little girls are to be taught that the State is henceforth to take
the place of God in their infant minds. How comfortable and warm a
creed! How it will strengthen their character for living, and ease the
thoughts of the dying. There is no God: but there is a Chancellor of the
Exchequer and a dashing gentleman at the Home Office. You have not been
created or redeemed, little boy! We have no prayers to teach you. There
are no divine commandments which you need obey—naturally, since there is
no Divine Father. There are no sacraments to sustain and elevate your
soul—for little boys and girls have no souls! But cheer ye: you were
evolved by a natural process, and the State is here to cradle and
instruct you and to make life beautiful for you. Behold, dear children,
the Book of the Laws. These laws which you are bound to keep—unless, of
course, you go on strike, become a Suffragette, or organize political
vote catching. And this is a picture of a Jail for people who are so
blind as to refuse Insurance blessings; behold that inspired
countenance. That is the head of the Government! And for Sunday
amusements there is the Cinema—the Crippen case, dear children; the
Houndsditch Burglary and the Train Smash.... And when the new theories
have developed and matured, there will be no such thing as private
property in anything to constrain the free mind of emancipated man—A
house of your own, a wife to yourself!—fie!
“Surely, surely,” said a young Liberal M.P., “no sanely thinking person
would continue to advise religious education in the schools. What is the
inevitable result—see the case in your own Church” ‹he was speaking to a
Catholic› “the law commands one thing, and the Church another! Take
divorce, for instance. Surely, surely—”
“Dear me,” said the Catholic. “We had not looked at it in that light.
The laws man made are, then, above the laws God made?”
“Surely, surely you would not teach little children to disobey a law of
the land made for their benefit?”