One of the advantages of being “little people in a little place” is the
pleasure small things can give one. The Duke of Devonshire has seventy
men in his garden. Is it possible to imagine taking an interest in
anything conducted on so enormous a scale? It is not gardening, it is
horticultural government! There can be no individual knowledge of any
“beloved flower,” as our Dutch friend has it. Outside a millionaire’s
greenhouse we once beheld regiment after regiment of Begonia pots. It
made one’s brain reel. How insupportable anything so repeated would
become!
Even in small gardens there is too much of a tendency nowadays to overdo
garden effects. The flagged-path effect can certainly be overdone. We
were tempted to visit a farmhouse the other day, adorably placed on a
high Sussex down just where a stretch of table-land dominates an immense
panorama of undulating country, and a vast half-circle of horizon. With
a few more trees no situation could have been more beautiful.
“It was a party of the name of Mosensohn” who had taken the old
farmhouse, we are told, and they were transmogrifying it according to
the most modern principles of how the plutocrat’s farmhouse should look.
In some ways it was very well done. The fine old lines of wall and roof
were carefully preserved; the high brick wall with its arched doorway
and door with the grille in it, were quite in keeping, and gave one a
sense of comfortable seclusion as one stepped in off the high road.
But the square court, once the farmyard, divided by two different
levels, was completely flagged. Only a few beds against the wall, and a
strip of turf on the lower level under the house, afforded any relief to
the eye. There was a sunk garden beyond which was turfed, and the sense
of rest it instantly afforded made one realize what the incoming family
will suffer on a scorching August day from the glare and refractions of
the flags in a space so hemmed in. In the right spirit of garden mania,
we were not above taking what hints we could. And some were very good.
All the beds on that first level were planted with cool-looking blue and
purple flowers—a happy thought where there was so much hot stone. And
the old cow stables had been very cleverly converted into a most
Italian-looking brick pergola which ran the length of the sunk Rose
Garden, and ended in a round summer-house with a window. From there, as
well as from the Rose Garden, the wide view over the Downs met the gaze.
Vividly coloured herbaceous borders ran along the side nearest to the
sudden slope of the hill. There is something very pleasing to the senses
when the glance passes from such an ordered kaleidoscope of colour to
the misty vastness of a far-reaching view.
In the middle of the Rose Garden was a sunk fountain in a long narrow
basin.
A batch of pinewood, dark and shady, would have saved the situation; one
sought everywhere for the comfort of real shadows.
We went into the house, which was in the act of being papered and
painted for the millionaires. Delightful in theory as such old buildings
are, we were seized with doubt from the moment of crossing the threshold
whether any sense of quaint antiquity would compensate one for beams on
top of one’s head, for bedrooms the size of a bath-towel, and a general
feeling of having one foot on the hearth and another in the passage. We
thought the newcomers had shown more taste outside, and came to the
conclusion that some one else’s taste ruled in the garden, but that they
had allowed their own ideas free scope indoors. These ideas were
monotonous. The parlour that gave on the little orchard had a paper all
over green parrots; the best bedroom upstairs had a paper all over blue
parrots; and the second best bedroom was adorned with terra-cotta
parrots. The only chance for a conglomeration of rooms so hopelessly low
and contracted, would have been a plain distemper of no tint deeper than
cream, or at the outside butter colour. Then the old beams would have
had a chance, and one might have felt able to draw one’s breath.
‹Fancy waking in the morning to the dance of all the little parrots on
top of one’s eyelids!›
Then, out of a small space, the shapes of trees and flower-beds beyond
come upon the vision with no sense of effect if the space within is
tormented. Neither can anyone have any proper appreciation of the joy of
a bunch of flowers, or a vase of spreading boughs, who has not set them
against plain walls where their shadows have play.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: CONVERTING A COTTAGE]
Another little house near here—set down in the valley this, on the edge
of a hamlet, overlooking a wide pond—has been to our thinking more
successfully dealt with. Three very old cottages have been knocked into
one, and the whole little rambling up-and-down dwelling-place thus
produced has been boldly distempered white within from roof to kitchen.
The round black oak beams are delightful in these little white rooms,
and the pretty, blue-eyed, still youthful spinster who owns them has
been content with a short pair of clear white muslin curtains in every
window; not, be it understood, the London bedroom kind that cuts across
the pane ‹an abomination difficult to avoid in towns›, but proper
curtains hanging over the recess. Nothing more suitable could be
devised, and it took a “real lady,” in the sense of Hans Andersen’s
“Real Princess,” to be content with such fresh simplicity. But
attractive as her furnishing is, and full of genuinely beautiful things,
there our tastes slightly diverged.
[Sidenote: COTTAGE FURNITURE]
[Illustration: landscape]
The largest sitting-room has a set of black lacquer furniture inlaid
with vivid mother-of-pearl; it is deliciously gay in this gay cottage
parlour, and certainly no one who possessed these early Victorian
treasures could bear to put them on one side. We think if we had been
the lucky owner, however, we would have eschewed coupling them with
velvet—or, indeed, brought velvet at all under those weather beaten
tiles. The mistress of the Villino had a vision—a daring vision—of
printed linen with scarlet cherries and impossible birds pecking at
them; something with a true Jacobean angularity in it, to link the
centuries together, and an uncompromising vividness of tint. That for
cushions and sofa-covers. On the floor then, no bright carpet would be
admitted. We should have enamelled that floor white, and cast a few rugs
down on it, with no more colours in them than faint lemons and greys or
creams.
To complete this discursion on cottages, some of us visited the other
day a tiny house, where all the downstairs rooms, except the kitchen,
had been thrown together, making a charming, long, low living-room with
one great black beam across the ceiling. On the walls was a perfect
cottage paper, with isolated pink rose-buds well-distanced from each
other: a pink rosebud chintz and black carpet dotted with faint stiff
roses, made quaint and unusual but very satisfying arrangement. The
windows looked out on a pine wood across a hedge of rampant pink Dorothy
Roses. Gazing out on the dim, dark green grey aisles of the fir trees
one would want the gay note within; and the little Rose-strewn paper was
perfection.
* * * * *
Yesterday the Grandfather of Loki dragged the Grandmother in her
bath-chair out into the heart of the moors. It’s a sporting bath-chair
this. It has been over as much rough ground as a horse artillery
gun-carriage, and nothing in the matter of obstacles stops it unless it
is barbed wire; it was chosen as light in make as possible, and now it
has a rakish, weather-beaten appearance, like an old mountain mule.
The rare strangers we meet on our wild career regard us with varied
sentiments. Some are obviously filled with compassion over the joggling
the occupant of the bath-chair must be enduring. “What can that fool of
a man be about to expose that wretchedly delicate woman to such
suffering?” their expression says to us as they pass. Others, on the
other hand, are horror-stricken at the spectacle of the wifely brutality
that condemns this weakly, good-natured man to the task of lugging her
about. There is a good deal of uphill work, of course, about us, and he
goes a good pace. “You ought to get a donkey, Madam,” is their
conclusion.
On two or three occasions good Samaritans have rushed to assist him,
with glances of scathing rebuke at this new embodiment of woman’s
tyranny.
But they are some of our best days, in spite of outside disapproval.
And, to go back to yesterday, we started off with all the dogs in a
state of “high cockalorum”—Arabella in her most obsequious mood ‹having
been scolded the day before for running away›; Loki, the Chinaman,
trotting on in determined and splendid isolation as usual, it being
quite against Chinese etiquette to speak to any fur-brother _outside_
the garden gates; Betty, and her father Laddie, secretly determined to
go hunting, no matter what execrations should be hurled after them.
Laddie comes from a neighbouring house, and insists on adopting us as
his family. It is very hard to be brutal and say that we won’t be
adopted when a pair of the most beautiful cairngorm eyes in all the
world are looking up at us out of the dear long, wise, pathetic dog
face. In fact, we are not brutal; and Laddie comes and goes as he likes.
Only he is occasionally carried back to his cook ‹who, it seems, duly
loves him› by Juvenal the tender-hearted.
It is very difficult to reach the moors, with this discursiveness! But,
in a sunshine as blazing as that which ever fell from any Italian sky,
we did get into the hollow of the heather hills, and there spend an
afternoon of perfect dreaminess and pleasure.
[Sidenote: BATH CHAIR AND HEATHER]
Loki’s Grandfather took off his coat and marched up the slippery paths,
the bath-chair bumping merrily after him. It is one of his male
prerogatives to scorn the idea of sunstroke, and Loki’s Grandmother is
filled with apprehensions half the time. But when she saw him stretched
on a rug over the heather, smoking his pipe, and the four dogs cast
themselves down in attitudes expressive of their different natures, the
mental horizon became cloudless. The material skies—if such an adjective
can be used in such connexion—the unplumbed dome of mystery above us,
were by no means cloudless, and that was part of their wonderful beauty.
Huge lazy white clouds, so luminous as to be dazzling, sailed over the
rim of the moor and cast shadows of indescribable mauve and purple into
the hollows. A day of such intense light it was that every tree in the
thick of the woods flung its patch of shadow, purple-dark against the
vivid green. And, oh, the colour of the Ling, mixed with Hill Heather,
set with islands of Bracken—Bracken in its proper place—silver under the
sun rays, against the blue! And the scent of the Heath and the Whin!
One doesn’t know if it is exactly one’s soul that the beauty touches,
the appeal is so strongly to the senses. But the soul is of it; for no
mere physical joy can give such a serenity, such an airiness as of wings
to the spirit. Mr. A. C. Benson says, in some early book of his, that
one of the great proofs to him of the existence of God is the feeling
which comes at the sight of a very beautiful prospect. We want to give
ourselves to it—he says—to be absorbed into it; and that is a movement
of the soul, for everything earthly is possessive.
* * * * *
Arabella, who is a very affectionate dog, flung herself down beside her
master, taking up a large share of the rug, and pensively chewed gorse
half the time, the other half being absorbed in extracting its prickles
from her chest. Laddie, of course, slipped off to the chase. The two
little dogs, russet brother and little white sister, whiled away a
period of inaction: Betty, by circling round the bath-chair, jumping in
to assure its occupant that she loved her very much and out again to
show that she was a dog of tact; and Loki, panting in his great fur coat
‹in which condition he grins like a Chinese dragon with his roseleaf
tongue bent back in the oddest little loop between his white teeth› by
seeking cool spots wherein to repose—preferably under the very wheel of
the chair, to his Grandmother’s distraction.
An afternoon to remember, when nothing happened but the greatest
happenings of all: God’s good gifts of sun and wild moor and balmy air!
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