_May_ 7_th_.—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late
afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the
temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed
half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are
carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of
nightingales. The gentleman owl says [Music], and she answers from her
tree a little way off, [Music], beautifully assenting to and completing
her lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think
it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be
frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.
This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house,
much less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty
old place that the people who might have lived here and did not,
deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must have
belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the
world seems chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does not sound
pretty; but the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent
of the wet earth and young leaves.
I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are
servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring
happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though
it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced
for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and
children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the
decencies.
There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches
sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white
blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I
never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place. Even
across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in
the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture
of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.
My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great
stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave
off the bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their
lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest
gray-green, and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and
everywhere the breathless silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful
too, for one can see across them into eternity almost, and to go out on
to them with one’s face towards the setting sun is like going into the
very presence of God.
In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery
where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray
stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The
house is very old, and has been added to at various times. It was a
convent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the vaulted chapel, with its
brick floor worn by pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall.
Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more than once, as is
duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what was then
the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion
of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to
his convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who
were not without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the
wide, empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of
silence here.
From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the
plain, with no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue
line of distant forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the
setting sun—nothing but a green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge
against the sunset. I love those west windows better than any others,
and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the house so that even times
of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and the young woman who
attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties about a
mistress recumbent in an easy-chair before an open window, and not to
profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved
at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the
sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad
muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that
I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the
news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and
that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when
you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will
hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all forms of
needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for
keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.
We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as
well make use of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five
years were spent in a flat in a town, and during their whole
interminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy,
which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that
my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear place
with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and
completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind
taking the least notice of it, and in May—in all those five lovely
Mays—no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the
virginia creeper madder every year, until at last, in October, the very
roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels
and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and not a living
creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, which got
into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall
into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the
windows. All that was here,—peace, and happiness, and a reasonable
life,—and yet it never struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I
am astonished, and can in no way account for the tardiness of my
discovery that here, in this far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven.
Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even use the place in summer,
that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every
year; until at last, in the early spring of last year, having come down
for the opening of the village school, and wandering out afterwards
into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wet earth
or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the
happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It
was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and
entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown,
quiet earth; leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp
and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight
in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child, and the five
wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and the world was full of hope,
and I vowed myself then and there to nature, and have been happy ever
since.
My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that
it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at
any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks
from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone,
supposed to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a
matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone out
of it.
How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the
days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar
on my eleven o’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with
dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its
charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now
than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were
not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little
faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a
world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three
lawns,—they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into
meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,—and under and among the
groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white
anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in
particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so
beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the
painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few
stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the bird-cherries
blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the
joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs—masses and masses
of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the
side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long
right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could
see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time
came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and
four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the
south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and
grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away
in a dream of pink and purple peace.
There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house, so
that on the plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my
other half calls my _fantaisie déréglée_ as regards meals—that is to
say, meals so simple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a
tray; and I lived, I remember, on salad and bread and tea the whole
time, sometimes a very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as
the old lady thought, from starvation. Who but a woman could have stood
salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and scent of
the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew in grace every day,
though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressed by the
necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of which
are conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper
maintenance of the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded by
joints of meat, how often do I think of my salad days, forty in number,
and of the blessedness of being alone as I was then alone!
And then the evenings, when the workmen had all gone and the house was
left to emptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up
her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another
part of the house had been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave
the friendly frogs and owls, and with my heart somewhere down in my
shoes lock the door to the garden behind me, and pass through the long
series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly
pails of painters’ mess, and humming a tune to make myself believe I
liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up the
creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final
rush of panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!
There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great
dinner-bell to bed with me so that at least I might be able to make a
noise if frightened in the night, though what good it would have been I
don’t know, as there was no one to hear. The housemaid slept in another
little cell opening out of mine, and we two were the only living
creatures in the great empty west wing. She evidently did not believe
in ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep immediately after
getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, “_mais je les redoute_,” as
a French lady said, who from her books appears to have been
strongminded.
The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted
me to see it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but
placid, it was all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and
other noises. I used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light
sleep by the cracking of some board, and listen to the indifferent
snores of the girl in the next room. In the morning, of course, I was
as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold perspirations of the
night before; but even the nights seem to me now to have been
delightful, and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in
every wind and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through
them all over again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house,
empty of servants and upholstery.
How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful
new papers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and
build all sorts of castles in the air about their future and their
past. Would the nuns who had lived in them know their little
white-washed cells again, all gay with delicate flower papers and clean
white paint? And how astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned
into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a cleanliness of body
equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as a snare of
the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked
at the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first
whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish
organist, or rather with the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and
fiery moustache which was all I ever saw of him, and which I loved to
distraction for at least six months; at the end of which time, going
out with my governess one day, I passed him in the street, and
discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined with a
turn-down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any more.
The first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect, for I
had not a thought of anything but the peace and beauty all round me.
Then he appeared suddenly who has a right to appear when and how he
will and rebuked me for never having written, and when I told him that
I had been literally too happy to think of writing, he seemed to take
it as a reflection on himself that I could be happy alone. I took him
round the garden along the new paths I had had made, and showed him the
acacia and lilac glories, and he said that it was the purest
selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were with
me, and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease
him by offering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood
ready at the foot of the little verandah steps when we came back, but
nothing appeased that Man of Wrath, and he said he would go straight
back to the neglected family. So he went; and the remainder of the
precious time was disturbed by twinges of conscience (to which I am
much subject) whenever I found myself wanting to jump for joy. I went
to look at the painters every time my feet were for taking me to look
at the garden; I trotted diligently up and down the passages; I
criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done
in all the rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I
could not manage to fret and yearn. What are you to do if your
conscience is clear and your liver in order and the sun is shining?
_May_ 10_th_.—I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening and
this year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be
done, and have at least made one great stride—from ipomæa to tea-roses.
The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is all round the house, but
the principal part is on the south side and has evidently always been
so. The south front is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one
into the other, and the walls are covered with virginia creeper. There
is a little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight of rickety
wooden steps down into what seems to have been the only spot in the
whole place that was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into the
lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of
different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and
the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by
me. These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be
seen (except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring
in the grass, not because it wanted to, but because it could not help
it), and these I had sown with ipomæa, the whole eleven, having found a
German gardening book, according to which ipomæa in vast quantities was
the one thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise.
Nothing else in that book was recommended with anything like the same
warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary,
I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the eleven beds
but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for the
promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.
Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet-peas which made me very
happy all the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few
hollyhocks under the south windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But
the lilies, after being transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay,
for how was I to know it was the way of lilies? And the hollyhocks
turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was
decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At present we are only
just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and
borders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round
the sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made
mistakes with some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold
communion on this or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is
by making mistakes. All eleven were to have been carpeted with purple
pansies, but finding that I had not enough and that nobody had any to
sell me, only six have got their pansies, the others being sown with
dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte
roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one
with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two with
Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with
three sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt
Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and
several of the others are, I think, but of course I must wait and see,
being such an ignorant person. Then I have had two long beds made in
the grass on either side of the semicircle, each sown with mignonette,
and one filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with Jules Finger
and the Bride; and in a warm corner under the drawing-room windows is a
bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc;
while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a
group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing Rubens,
Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All these roses are
dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George
Bruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when
the tea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to
anything; and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little
things have achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or
increase of lovely red shoot.
The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south
windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of
which I have sown two long borders of sweet-peas facing the rose beds,
so that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to
look at until the autumn, when everything is to make place for more
tea-roses. The path leading away from this semicircle down the garden
is bordered with China roses, white and pink, with here and there a
Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I have
misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas,
for the Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows
look as though they intended to be big bushes.
There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the
least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the
flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not
relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and
depriving them for ever of the breath of God. It was no doubt because I
was so ignorant that I rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread
and made my tea-roses face a northern winter; but they did face it
under fir branches and leaves, and not one has suffered, and they are
looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy themselves as any
roses, I am sure, in Europe.
_May_ 14_th_.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the three
babies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already
several of the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners
consoled when duty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent
and drooping sunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores
and nimble black legs.
These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the
gardener’s assistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden,
but then neither are we ever out of it. The gardener has been here a
year and has given me notice regularly on the first of every month, but
up to now has been induced to stay on. On the first of this month he
came as usual, and with determination written on every feature told me
he intended to go in June, and that nothing should alter his decision.
I don’t think he knows much about gardening, but he can at least dig
and water, and some of the things he sows come up, and some of the
plants he plants grow, besides which he is the most unflaggingly
industrious person I ever saw, and has the great merit of never
appearing to take the faintest interest in what we do in the garden. So
I have tried to keep him on, not knowing what the next one may be like,
and when I asked him what he had to complain of and he replied
“Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has a personal objection to me
because of my eccentric preference for plants in groups rather than
plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts from
gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing
something new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead
of explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have
wisdom at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I
quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to
lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage
to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and
wish we could be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty
years’ time, when the garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in
all its ways, of my first happy struggles and failures.
All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the
autumn into their permanent places, and all through April he went about
with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of
beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a
review. Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when
I explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and
not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare
spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than
usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had
planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little
lines of five plants in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five
rockets, and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to
the end. When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders
and had known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining
borders were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have
patience and see how they look this summer, before digging them up
again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.
If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put
in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can
only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid
down by that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a
garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste
places blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April
during the servants’ dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by
the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and
feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow
surreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house,
and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to
save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one
hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in
Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that
sad business of the apple.
What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds,
and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town
acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don’t
know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if
condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all
my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I
should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself
very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in
the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm
evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the
verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the
May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made
only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and
hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud
hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of
past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair.
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be
killed. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer
and not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of
all the fun.
This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in
April, is five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so
that the discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the
remaining middle or May baby. While I was stooping over a group of
hollyhocks planted on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill
the garden possesses, the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a
tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror. I
stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole
army of young cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got
through the hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and
most precious belongings. The nurse and I managed to chase them away,
but not before they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in
the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses, and
even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying to
persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be
ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany calls
afternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the holes as
well as she could with mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses,
cheated for ever of their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking
on dejectedly. The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond
her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and went
after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen. She planted
herself in front of them brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row
and stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept them off until
one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and having found the
cowherd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating. The
cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat
him, but he took his punishment as part of the day’s work and made no
remark of any sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather
breeches, and I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work
for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with
less imagination than a poet ought to take it up as a profession.
After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with
as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I
happened to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite
close to my head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught
it easily, for it could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at
all is a mystery. It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the
quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go,
but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a
journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often said how
much he would like to have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it
into a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near where it had been
sitting, and which cannot be far from its nest and its mother. We had
hardly subsided again to our tea when I saw two more balls of fluff on
the ground in the long grass and scarcely distinguishable at a little
distance from small mole-hills. These were promptly united to their
relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath comes home, not
only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,
but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take
them from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again some
day—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I
put a small pot of water in the cage, though they never could have
tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves.
I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of the mice
and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents. But the
raindrop idea is prettier.
_May_ 15_th_.—How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owls into
a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never
pander to the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morning I got up early
to see how they were getting on, and I found the door of the cage wide
open and no owls to be seen. I thought of course that somebody had
stolen them—some boy from the village, or perhaps the chastised
cowherd. But looking about I saw one perched high up in the branches of
the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead on the ground. The
third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in its nest. The
parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance they got
the door open, and then dragged the little ones out and up into the
tree. The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch, as it
was a windy night and its neck is broken. There is one happy life less
in the garden to-day through my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm
day—just the sort of weather for young soft things to enjoy and grow
in. The babies are greatly distressed, and are digging a grave, and
preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.
Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival, and running out I
breathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give
him the owls he has so often said he would like to have, and how sorry
I was they were gone, and how grievous the death of one, and so on
after the voluble manner of women.
He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, “I am surprised
at such cruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so? She had
never done you any harm.”
Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced than
ever that he sang true who sang—
Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone.
_May_ 16_th_.—The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,
not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to
exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings
crowd round me at every step—it is there that I am sorry for the
unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse
than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are
forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and
weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I run
out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause,
it is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many
friends? And always the same, always ready to welcome me and fill me
with cheerful thoughts. Happy children of a common Father, why should
I, their own sister, be less content and joyous than they? Even in a
thunder storm, when other people are running into the house, I run out
of it. I do not like thunder storms—they frighten me for hours before
they come, because I always feel them on the way; but it is odd that I
should go for shelter to the garden. I feel better there, more taken
care of, more petted. When it thunders, the April baby says, “There’s
_lieber Gott_ scolding those angels again.” And once, when there was a
storm in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know why
_lieber Gott_ didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so
_tight_ asleep. They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and
English, adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in
English words in the middle of a German sentence. It always reminds me
of Justice tempered by Mercy.
We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by the name
of the Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground of
innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings, calling each
other out to combat with bayings that ring through the silence and send
agreeable shivers through the lonely listener. I often walk there in
September, late in the evening, and sitting on a fallen tree listen
fascinated to their angry cries.
We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had never seen
such things nor had imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirschwald is
a little open wood of silver birches and springy turf starred with
flowers, and there is a tiny stream meandering amiably about it and
decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have dreams of having a
little cottage built there, with the daisies up to the door, and no
path of any sort—just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside and
a purple clematis outside. Two rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen. How
scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day! I know
the exact spot where it should stand, facing south-east, so that we
should get all the cheerfulness of the morning, and close to the
stream, so that we might wash our plates among the flags. Sometimes,
when in the mood for society, we would invite the remaining babies to
tea and entertain them with wild strawberries on plates of
horse-chestnut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily pleased than
a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny
cottage—indeed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would care to come.
Wise people want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy
themselves, and I feel perpetually apologetic when with them, for only
being able to offer them that which I love best myself—apologetic, and
ashamed of being so easily contented.
The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town (it took us the
whole afternoon to get there) the women after dinner were curious to
know how I had endured the winter, cut off from everybody and snowed up
sometimes for weeks.
“Ah, these husbands!” sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking her
head; “they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don’t care
what their sufferings are.”
Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady
was a great local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful
husband had brought his young wife into the country and had kept her
there, concealing her beauty and accomplishments from the public in a
most cruel manner, and how, after spending a certain number of years in
alternately weeping and producing progeny, she had quite lately run
away with somebody unspeakable—I think it was the footman, or the
baker, or some one of that sort.
“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I could put in a word.
“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” and the female
potentate patted my hand, but continued gloomily to shake her head.
“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,” asserted
another lady, the wife of a high military authority and not accustomed
to be contradicted.
“But I am.”
“But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible.”
“But I _am_.”
“Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter.”
“But I don’t want to be brought to town.”
“And not let you waste your best years buried.”
“But I like being buried.”
“Such solitude is not right.”
“But I’m not solitary.”
“And can come to no good.” She was getting quite angry.
There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark, and renewed
shaking of heads.
“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little
quieter; “I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and
shelves and shelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped.
Reading is an occupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste
of time. And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the
sun shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days?
“It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,” I proceeded,
“and my husband only did it to please me.”
“Such a good little wife,” repeated the patronising potentate, again
patting my hand with an air of understanding all about it, “really an
excellent little wife. But you must not let your husband have his own
way too much, my dear, and take my advice and insist on his bringing
you to town next winter.” And then they fell to talking about their
cooks, having settled to their entire satisfaction that my fate was
probably lying in wait for me too, lurking perhaps at that very moment
behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of the man in the hall
with my cloak.
I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction
when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the
pretty old house; and when I went into the library, with its four
windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the
familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and
knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with
never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate
that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own
blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen—a
life spent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils,
and the noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, and parties
and tattle for all amusement.
But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some
grand person, examining the details of my home through her eyeglass,
and coolly dissecting all that I so much prize from the convenient
distance of the open window, has finished up by expressing sympathy
with my loneliness, and on my protesting that I like it, has murmured,
“_sehr anspruchslos_.” Then indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness
of my wants; but only for a moment, and only under the withering
influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, the owner’s spirit is the
same spirit as that which dwells in my servants—girls whose one idea of
happiness is to live in a town where there are others of their sort
with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion for
being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a few
hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself
quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading
peace, that I have been alone at all. Not but what I like to have
people staying with me for a few days, or even for a few weeks, should
they be as _anspruchslos_ as I am myself, and content with simple joys;
only, any one who comes here and would be happy must have something in
him; if he be a mere blank creature, empty of head and heart, he will
very probably find it dull. I should like my house to be often full if
I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. They should be
welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to
confess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just
as much to see them go.
On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed
for some one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There has
been rain in the night, and the whole garden seems to be singing—not
the untiring birds only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass and
trees, the lilac bushes—oh, those lilac bushes! They are all out
to-day, and the garden is drenched with the scent. I have brought in
armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every pot and bowl and tub
in the house is filled with purple glory, and the servants think there
is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and I go from room to room
gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to
join the scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually
discover that there is no party, and wonder why the house should be
filled with flowers for one woman by herself, and I long more and more
for a kindred spirit—it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to
oneself—but kindred spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost as
well cry for the moon. It is true that my garden is full of friends,
only they are—dumb.
_June_ 3_rd_.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that
it requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus
delivered from casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love,
or people who love me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to
be deterred from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long
drive at the end. Not the least of my many blessings is that we have
only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at
least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping
in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with
your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your
dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certainty
that either you or the dropper-in will say something that would have
been better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and
mischief-making. A woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most
difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and things slip off it
with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very moment when it
ought to be most quiet. In such cases the only safe course is to talk
steadily about cooks and children, and to pray that the visit may not
be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found to be
the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at the
mere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are
experiences common to us all.
Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a
whole troop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied,
besides the business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged
on lines of the most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year,
and she returns the call a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in
the summer, and we ask them to dinner in the winter. By strictly
keeping to this, we avoid all danger of that closer friendship which is
only another name for frequent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a
German country lady should be, and is not only a pretty woman but an
energetic and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least,
effective. She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the
stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a
thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before
lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the
other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are
called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans,
count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless
dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal
punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste
to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to
enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I
would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the
dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on
tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat
her.
The making of cheese and butter and sausages _excellently_ well is a
work which requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable
form of activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the
intelligent. That my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident
by the bright alertness of her eyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that
only gain in prettiness by being used to some good purpose. She is a
recognised authority for miles around on the mysteries of
sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine; and
with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home,
her children are patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear
little German children, with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick
legs, should be. Who shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and
unworthy of a high order of intelligence? I protest that to me it is a
beautiful life, full of wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for
those listless moments of depression and boredom, and of wondering what
you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty woman’s eyes, and
are not unknown even to the most brilliant. But while admiring my
neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my
talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather
of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take
up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and,
sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very
existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the
glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields. And it would make me
perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so refractory as to require
boxing.
Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on
these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is,
and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally
about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the
vast and impassable distance that separates one’s own soul from the
soul of the person sitting in the next chair. I am speaking of
comparative strangers, people who are forced to stay a certain time by
the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you grope about
after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding that
you have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each
minute more benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in
the air and look vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of
wondering who they most take after, generally settling the question by
saying that the May baby, who is the beauty, is like her father, and
that the two more or less plain ones are the image of me, and this
decision, though I know it of old and am sure it is coming, never fails
to depress me as much as though I heard it for the first time. The
babies are very little and inoffensive and good, and it is hard that
they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation, and
their features pulled to pieces one by one, and all their weak points
noted and criticised, while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s
face, their very smile drawing forth comments on the shape of their
mouths; but, after all, it does not occur very often, and they are one
of those few interests one has in common with other people, as
everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I have discovered, is by no
means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few persons really love
theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very tone of
their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest
is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and
roses; but on reflection I don’t know a single person within twenty
miles who really cares for his garden, or has discovered the treasures
of happiness that are buried in it, and are to be found if sought for
diligently, and if needs be with tears. It is after these rare calls
that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever
suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for
allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoilt by anything
so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed
enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably
desire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy
by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach
to your neighbour’s soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the
probability being that he hasn’t got one.
The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put
them right along the very front of two borders, and I don’t know what
his feelings can be now that they are all flowering and the plants
behind are completely hidden; but I have learned another lesson, and no
future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite
so reckless a fashion. They are charming things, as delicate in colour
as in scent, and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the room with
fragrance. Single rows, however, are a mistake; I had masses of them
planted in the grass, and these show how lovely they can be. A border
full of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, must be beautiful;
but I don’t know how long they last nor what they look like when they
have done flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose.
Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No
doubt it would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to
learn solely by my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me
when to do things. At present the only flowers in the garden are the
rockets, the pansies in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis
and pontica. The azaleas have been and still are gorgeous; I only
planted them this spring and they almost at once began to flower, and
the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it were filled with
imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate
shade—what they will be next year and in succeeding years when the
bushes are bigger, I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On
gray, dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall
make a great bank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a
gloomy nook. My tea-roses are covered with buds which will not open for
at least another week, so I conclude this is not the sort of climate
where they will flower from the very beginning of June to November, as
they are said to do.
_July_ 11_th_.—There has been no rain since the day before Whitsunday,
five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for the
disappointment my beds have been. The dejected gardener went mad soon
after Whitsuntide, and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going
about with a spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining
that he felt safer that way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes
civilised beings who respect each other’s prejudices, until one day,
when I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen creeper—and after he bought
the revolver my tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and I
quite left off reading to him aloud—he turned round, looked me straight
in the face for the first time since he has been here, and said, “Do I
look like Graf X———— (a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?”
After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as
expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his
place, and I have only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with
the drought, and the neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my
blunders, the garden is in a sad condition; but even in a sad condition
it is the dearest place in the world, and all my mistakes only make me
more determined to persevere.
The long borders, where the rockets were, are looking dreadful. The
rockets have done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other
walks of life, have degenerated into sticks; and nothing else in those
borders intends to bloom this summer. The giant poppies I had planted
out in them in April have either died off or remained quite small, and
so have the columbines; here and there a delphinium droops unwillingly,
and that is all. I suppose poppies cannot stand being moved, or perhaps
they were not watered enough at the time of transplanting; anyhow,
those borders are going to be sown to-morrow with more poppies for next
year; for poppies I will have, whether they like it or not, and they
shall not be touched, only thinned out.
Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, directly I come out
and sit under the trees, and look at the dappled sky, and see the
sunshine on the cornfields away on the plain, all the disappointment
smooths itself out, and it seems impossible to be sad and discontented
when everything about me is so radiant and kind.
To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, that, sitting here in
this shady corner watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves
across the grass, and listening to the rooks quarrelling in the
treetops, I almost expect to hear English church bells ringing for the
afternoon service. But the church is three miles off, has no bells, and
no afternoon service. Once a fortnight we go to morning prayer at
eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with a room behind, whither
we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long or our flesh too
weak, and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson. In
winter the church is bitterly cold; it is not heated, and we sit
muffled up in more furs than ever we wear out of doors; but it would of
course be very wicked for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may
be, so he puts on a great many extra coats under his gown, and, as the
winter progresses, swells to a prodigious size. We know when spring is
coming by the reduction in his figure. The congregation sit at ease
while the parson does the praying for them, and while they are droning
the long-drawn-out chorales, he retires into a little wooden box just
big enough to hold him. He does not come out until he thinks we have
sung enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives us the signal. I
have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his box
and left us to go on singing. I am sure we should never dare to stop,
unauthorised by the Church. I asked him once what he did in there; he
looked very shocked at such a profane question, and made an evasive
reply.
If it were not for the garden, a German Sunday would be a terrible day;
but in the garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more
profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or fidgeting; only the little
flowers themselves and the whispering trees.
I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors—not stray callers
to be got rid of after a due administration of tea and things you are
sorry afterwards that you said, but people staying in the house and not
to be got rid of at all. All June was lost to me in this way, and it
was from first to last a radiant month of heat and beauty; but a garden
where you meet the people you saw at breakfast, and will see again at
lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy in. Besides, they had a
knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in them just when
I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of the library with
them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to get well
drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat for
roses is poison for books; and they gave me to understand that if they
had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long
ago—whereas I don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They have all
gone now, thank heaven, except one, so that I have a little breathing
space before others begin to arrive. It seems that the place interests
people, and that there is a sort of novelty in staying in such a
deserted corner of the world, for they were in a perpetual state of
mild amusement at being here at all.
Irais is the only one left. She is a young woman with a beautiful,
refined face, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly
lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit
off, and repeats the process, although providence (taking my shape) has
caused salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals down the table.
She lunched to-day on beer, _Schweinekoteletten_, and cabbage-salad
with caraway seeds in it, and now I hear her through the open window,
extemporising touching melodies in her charming, cooing voice. She is
thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. What
better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton
than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music? Cabbage
salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its utility as a means
of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it
results so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that
results in roses, and I give it to Irais every day to make her sing.
She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a charming trick
of making up songs as she goes along. When she begins, I go and lean
out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the
borders while listening to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness
and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad
about.
The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others
hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my
admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was
carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless in
the woodshed.
“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much!”
I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before
this afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on
the grass at my feet, to ask about the _lieber Gott_, it being Sunday
and her pious little nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, on
heaven and angels.
Her questions about the _lieber Gott_ are better left unrecorded, and I
was relieved when she began about the angels.
“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked in her German-English.
“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I answered, “in beautiful, long
dresses, and with big, white wings.”
“Feathers?” she asked.
“I suppose so,—and long dresses, all white and beautiful.”
“Are they girlies?”
“Girls? Ye—es.”
“Don’t boys go into the _Himmel?_”
“Yes, of course, if they’re good.”
“And then what do _they_ wear?”
“Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose.”
“_Dwesses?_”
She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me
of making jokes. “What a funny Mummy!” she said, evidently much amused.
She has a fat little laugh that is very infectious.
“I think,” said I, gravely, “you had better go and play with the other
babies.”
She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began
writing again.
“Mummy,” she said presently.
“Well?”
“Where do the angels get their dwesses?”