There are two or three reasons why the part of Traveller's Joy suited
me very well. In the first place it required a good deal of trouble,
and I like taking trouble. Then John was willing to let me do many
things he would not have allowed the others to do, because he could
trust me to be careful and to mind what he said.
On each side of the long walk in the kitchen garden there are flowers
between you and the vegetables, herbaceous borders, with nice big
clumps of things that have suckers, and off-shoots and seedlings at
their feet.
"The Long Walk's the place to steal from if I wasn't an _honest_
Root-gatherer," said Harry.
John had lovely poppies there that summer. When I read about the
poppies Alphonse Karr sowed in the wild nooks of his native country,
it made me think of John's French poppies, and paeony poppies, and
ranunculus poppies, and carnation poppies, some very large, some quite
small, some round and neat, some full and ragged like Japanese
chrysanthemums, but all of such beautiful shades of red, rose,
crimson, pink, pale blush, and white, that if they had but smelt like
carnations instead of smelling like laudanum when you have the
toothache, they would have been quite perfect.
In one way they are nicer than carnations. They have such lots of
seed, and it is so easy to get. I asked John to let me have some of
the heads. He could not possibly want them all, for each head has
enough in it to sow two or three yards of a border. He said I might
have what seeds I liked, if I used scissors, and did not drag things
out of the ground by pulling. But I was not to let the young gentlemen
go seed gathering. "Boys be so destructive," John said.
After a time, however, I persuaded him to let Harry transplant
seedlings of the things that sow themselves and come up in the autumn,
if they came up a certain distance from the parent plants. Harry got a
lot of things for our Paradise in this way; indeed he would not have
got much otherwise, except wild flowers; and, as he said, "How can I
be your Honest Root-gatherer if I mayn't gather anything up by the
roots?"
I can't help laughing sometimes to think of the morning when he left
off being our Honest Root-gatherer. He did look so funny, and so like
Chris.
A day or two before, the Scotch Gardener had brought Saxon to see us,
and a new kind of mouldiness that had got into his grape vines to show
to John.
He was very cross with Saxon for walking on my garden. (And I am sure
I quite forgave him, for I am so fond of him, and he knew no better,
poor dear!) But though he kicked Saxon, the Scotch Gardener was kind
to us. He told us that the reason our gardens do not do so well as the
big garden, and that my _Jules Margottin_ has not such big roses as
John's _Jules Margottin_ is because we have never renewed the soil.
Arthur and Harry got very much excited about this. They made the
Scotch Gardener tell them what good soil ought to be made of, and all
the rest of the day they talked of nothing but _compost_. Indeed
Arthur would come into my room and talk about compost after I had gone
to bed.
Father's farming man was always much more good-natured to us than John
ever was. He would give us anything we wanted. Warm milk when the cows
were milked, or sweet-pea sticks, or bran to stuff the dolls' pillows.
I've known him take his hedging bill, in his dinner hour, and cut fuel
for our beacon-fire, when we were playing at a French Invasion.
Nothing could be kinder.
Perhaps we do not tease him so much as we tease John. But when I say
that, Arthur says, "Now, Mary, that's just how you explain away
things. The real difference between John and Michael is, that Michael
is good-natured and John is not. Catch John showing me the duck's nest
by the pond, or letting you into the cow-house to kiss the new calf
between the eyes--if he were farm man instead of gardener!"
And the night Arthur sat in my room, talking about compost, he said,
"I shall get some good stuff out of Michael, I know; and Harry and I
see our way to road scrapings if we can't get sand; and we mean to
take precious good care John doesn't have all the old leaves to
himself. It's the top spit that puzzles us, and loam is the most
important thing of all."
"What is top spit?" I asked.
"It's the earth you get when you dig up squares of grass out of a
field like the paddock. The new earth that's just underneath. I expect
John got a lot when he turfed that new piece by the pond, but I don't
believe he'd spare us a flower-pot full to save his life."
"Don't quarrel with John, Arthur. It's no good."
"I won't quarrel with him if he behaves himself," said Arthur, "but we
mean to have some top spit, somehow."
"If you aggravate him he'll only complain of us to Father."
"I know," said Arthur hotly, "and beastly mean of him, too, when he
knows what Father is about this sort of thing."
"I know it's mean. But what's the good of fighting when you'll only
get the worst of it?"
"Why to show that you're in the right, and that you know you are,"
said Arthur. "Good night, Mary. We'll have a compost heap of our own
this autumn, mark my words."
Next day, in spite of my remonstrances, Arthur and Harry came to open
war with John, and loudly and long did they rehearse their
grievances, when we were out of Father's hearing.
"Have we ever swept our own walks, except that once, long ago, when
the German women came round with threepenny brooms?" asked Arthur,
throwing out his right arm, as if he were making a speech. "And think
of all the years John has been getting leaf mould for himself out of
our copper beech leaves and now refuses us a barrow load of loam!"
The next morning but one Harry was late for breakfast, and then it
seemed that he was not dressing; he had gone out,--very early, one of
the servants said. It frightened me, and I went out to look for him.
When I came upon him in our gardens, it was he who was frightened.
"Oh, dear," he exclaimed, "I thought you were John."
I have often seen Harry dirty--very dirty,--but from the mud on his
boots to the marks on his face where he had pushed the hair out of his
eyes with earthy fingers, I never saw him quite so grubby before. And
if there had been a clean place left in any part of his clothes well
away from the ground, that spot must have been soiled by a huge and
very dirty sack, under the weight of which his poor little shoulders
were bent nearly to his knees.
"What are you doing, Honest Root-gatherer?" I asked; "are you turning
yourself into a hump-backed dwarf?"
"I'm not honest, and I'm not a root-gatherer just now," said Harry,
when he had got breath after setting down his load. He spoke shyly and
a little surlily like Chris when he is in mischief.
"Harry, what's that?"
"It's a sack I borrowed from Michael. It won't hurt it, it's had
mangel-wurzels in already."
"What have you got in it now? It looks dreadfully heavy."
"It _is_ heavy, I can tell you," said Harry, with one more rub of his
dirty fingers over his face.
"You look half dead. What is it?"
"It's top spit;" and Harry began to discharge his load on to the walk.
"Oh, Harry, where did you get it?"
"Out of the paddock. I've been digging up turfs and getting this out,
and putting the turfs back, and stamping them down not to show, ever
since six o'clock. It _was_ hard work; and I was so afraid of John
coming. Mary, you won't tell tales?"
"No, Harry. But I don't think you ought to have taken it without
Mother's leave."
"I don't think you can call it stealing," said Harry. "Fields are a
kind of wild places anyhow, and the paddock belongs to Father, and it
certainly doesn't belong to John."
"No," said I, doubtfully.
"I won't get any more; it's dreadfully hard work," said Harry, but as
he shook the sack out and folded it up, he added (in rather a
satisfied tone), "I've got a good deal."
I helped him to wash himself for breakfast, and half way through he
suddenly smiled and said, "John Parkinson will be glad when he sees
_you-know-what_, Mary, whatever the other John thinks of it."
But Harry did not cut any more turfs without leave, for he told me
that he had a horrid dream that night of waking up in prison with a
warder looking at him through a hole in the door of his cell, and
finding out that he was in penal servitude for stealing top spit from
the bottom of the paddock, and Father would not take him out of
prison, and that Mother did not know about it.
However, he and Arthur made a lot of compost. They said we couldn't
possibly have a Paradise without it.
It made them very impatient. We always want the spring and summer and
autumn and winter to get along faster than they do. But this year
Arthur and Harry were very impatient with summer.
They were nearly caught one day by Father coming home just as they had
got through the gates with Michael's old sack full of road-scrapings,
instead of sand (we have not any sand growing near us, and silver
sand is rather dear), but we did get leaves together and stacked them
to rot into leaf mould.
Leaf mould is splendid stuff, but it takes a long time for the leaves
to get mouldy, and it takes a great many, too. Arthur is rather
impatient, and he used to say--"I never saw leaves stick on to
branches in such a way. I mean to get into some of these old trees and
give them a good shaking to remind them what time of year it is. If I
don't we shan't have anything like enough leaves for our compost."