I HAD pointed out, quite nicely and kindly, to Virginia, that she was
not clipping the top of the square box-tree table straight and even;
and she had pointed out, quite witheringly, to me that she was cutting
it by perspective, adding that if I had only been privileged to learn
perspective when I was young, I should have known that for a thing to
be correct in its outlines and proportions it must necessarily run
askew and aslant and out-at-corners, just as the top of the box-tree
table was now doing. She assured me, however, that it would appear
all right, she thought, if I looked at it from an airship above, with
half-closed eyes.
And then she advised me to do a little hoeing.
I ignored her sarcasm, knowing full well that a pair of shears, applied
by amateur hands to tough overgrown greenstuff, is apt to provoke
cutting remarks when the wielder has got to the moist stage and the
hedge is looking like a ploughed field.
You see, there was an inwardness in her last remark; for hoeing looks
an easy, graceful, carefree occupation—till you try it. My own
method is distinctive; I didn’t invent it, it came to me as a natural
inspiration. I find I invariably start to hoe with my back, doubling up
more and more, and aching more and more, as I proceed with the hacking.
Then, as I warm to the work (and it’s very much warm as a rule), I
likewise hoe with my teeth. By the time I have set and ground these
nearly to nothing—my hands all the while getting lower and lower down
the handle of my tool—I find myself beginning to hoe quite viciously
with my head.
When I have extracted all the motive power I can from this part of
me, and have projected it so far in front of the rest of me—hoe
included—that I almost lose my balance, the only thing left for me to
do, by way of piling up yet more energy and effort, appears to be to
go down on all fours, seeing that by this time I am clasping the hoe
handle at about a foot from the ground.
Fortunately, it is just here that I usually realize what I am doing,
and I straighten my rounded back, and undo my teeth (that doesn’t
sound polite, but you know what I mean), and return my head to its
proper place. I then remind myself that I am not hoeing at all
scientifically, that most of the energy I have been putting forth has
been waste—because misdirected—force.
Whereupon I stand at ease, and other things like that. Maintaining the
upright as far as I can, I take hold of the top end of the long handle
of my weapon, and, still keeping quite in the perpendicular, I merely
hoe with my arms, thus saving the rest of me quite a considerable
number of unclassified aches. So long as I can remember to keep my
vertebræ like this, all is well, and I really get through a fair amount
of work. But, alas, I soon forget.
One thing I have never yet managed to do is to keep cool and collected,
my misfortune being that I boil up so soon. My hat gets out of angle,
my hair flattens out where it ought to be wavy, and waves around where
it ought to lie flat; and—worst of all—it ceases to worry me that these
things are so.
And then I open a periodical wherein some unknown celebrity has
been photographed “at home”; and she is sure to be shown “in the
garden,” where, behold! you see her in the airiest of fashionable
nothings in the way of a white frock, accompanied by a ten-guinea
hat, a twenty-guinea dog, and a sixpence-halfpenny trowel—all worn
with consummate photographic grace, as she artlessly sets to work to
transplant a hoary wistaria that has smothered the (photographer’s)
verandah for fifty years, explaining to the interviewer, meanwhile, how
she simply adores gardening, how she gets all her ideas for the dresses
she wears in the third act from her pet bed of marigolds, and how she
never dreams of taking part in a first night performance without having
previously run the lawn-mower twice round the gravel paths.
Clever creature; you don’t wonder she is labelled a celebrity;
any woman who can keep that hat on while using that trowel, has
accomplished something!
* * * * *
I didn’t feel like hoeing just then, no matter what the cost of
my gardening outfit. The moment seemed to call for non-strenuous
occupation that would admit of leisurely movement and unlimited pauses
with nothing doing—which is what I find a mind like mine requires.
Of course there was plenty of hoeing waiting to be done, there always
is; I never knew a soil so chock-full of weed-seeds as ours seems to
be, and I never knew a place where folks are so little worried by them.
Where things grow as easily as they do about our hills and valleys (and
where the angle of the garden is just what ours is), you will find that
the native reduces land-labour to the minimum, and nothing is disturbed
unless absolutely necessary. Reasonably, if you have left the hoe at
the top of the garden, and the top is a hundred feet above the bottom
of the garden where you are standing, you think twice before you climb
up and fetch it.
As one result of this universal conservation of energy, our local
nettle crop is one of the finest in the kingdom, I verily believe.
“Why are those things left standing in every field corner?” I asked a
farmer on one occasion, pointing to the usual grey-green waving jungle
of weeds.
“They nettles?” he questioned, in surprise; “well, what’s the good of
wasting attention on ’em? They don’t hurt no one!”
Incidentally I may say it is always well to criticize the methods
employed on other people’s land rather than those practised on your
own, since most right-minded employés resent any implication, no matter
how politely you wrap it up, that improvement is possible; and if you
question the why and wherefore of anything, it may be mistaken for
fault-finding in this imaginative age. Hence, unless the handy man
chances to be one of exceptional make up, I go farther afield when
gleaning information.
One day I watched a man very leisurely inspecting a thistle in a meadow
by the weir, and then, with a deliberation that was most restful to
a harried, hustled, war-time Londoner, he tenderly and carefully cut
it off near the ground with a scythe. After he had decapitated about
twenty thistles in this way, he naturally needed a little time for
recuperation, and sat down on the river bank to meditate. I hadn’t
liked to interrupt him when he was working, because so far as I
could roughly estimate, there were thirteen thousand four hundred and
fifty-three thistles in the meadow—approximately, you understand—and
we don’t work according to trade union hours here; sometimes we start
an hour later and leave off an hour earlier, and miss out several
in between. But since he had evidently reached his rest-hour—and
remembering that one of my own fields was plentifully dotted with
thistles at the moment, and feeling quite equal myself to that gentle
picturesque swish of the scythe—I asked him whether that process killed
the thistle right out? (My business instinct forbade my wasting time on
the job if it would all have to be done over again later on.)
No, he said, he didn’t think as how it would kill the thistles right
out.
Then why did he do it that way? I asked, instead of spudding the thing
right up by the root?
“Well”—and he scratched his head thoughtfully—“doing it like this
jest diskerridges of ’em a bit, and isn’t sech a deluge o’ trouble as
mooting ’em right out would be.” And with that he promptly dropped
thistles, and proceeded to discuss the fiendishness of the Germans.
He had a long talk (there wasn’t room for me to say anything), and gave
recipes for annihilating completely everything connected with them
(excepting thistles; I presume they have some; they deserve a good
crop, anyhow), finishing up with—
“But thur—what I says about ’em I won’t exackly repeat in yer presence,
m’m; for my wife often says to me, ‘It won’t do nobody no pertickler
good,’ she says, ‘if you gets yerself shut out o’ Heaven by yer
langidge,’ she says, ‘just to spite they Huns, what don’t even _hear_
it!’”
For a full two minutes he worked that scythe with real zest, as though
onslaughting the enemy.
Perhaps his method is right (in regard to thistles, I mean), perhaps
it is wrong; I’ve never gone sufficiently deep into the subject to be
competent to pass an opinion. But I do know that the larger proportion
of handy men who have honoured me with their patronage (though there
are conspicuous exceptions) invariably weed on these lines of least
resistance, and “jest diskerridge ’em”—though I own it takes a lot to
discourage _our_ weeds!
* * * * *
Not feeling like diskerridging weeds at the moment, I asked Ursula
to suggest some occupation for my idle hands, though I didn’t put it
like that; I inquired which of the many jobs needing urgent attention
I had better tackle next. (It came to the same thing in the end; but
instead of advertising my natural indolence, I hoped it would convey an
impression that I was rushing pell-mell through an endless succession
of tasks.)
Ursula was sitting on a pile of logs under a big fir tree inside the
orchard gate—oh yes, there are firs in the orchard, and lilacs, and
daffodils, and snowdrops, and a huge Wellingtonia, and a trickle of
water with forget-me-nots and mint on its brink; we’re not at all
particular about classification. She was darning a stocking, and it
seemed a lengthy job. Not that there was any large, vulgar gash in the
stocking; it was merely suffering from general war-time debility, and
was one of those that you can go on and on darning, and still find more
thin places to run up and down.
Have you ever noticed what a snare a stocking of this description can
be? You can sit at it for an hour or so, until it seems easier to go
on darning it than to bestir yourself to do anything else. In the end,
you haven’t accomplished much, considering the time you’ve been about
it, but you have acquired a large dose of the virtuous and exemplary
feeling that is always the outcome of stocking-darning.
Ursula had got like that, though I wouldn’t have you think I
under-estimated her efforts, for it was my apparel she was darning.
“I often think that a garden embodies all the philosophy of life,” she
replied to my query, in a detached way, as she closely inspected the
stocking foot drawn over her hand, in order to pounce upon any further
signs of impending dissolution.
“I seem to fancy I’ve heard that——”
“Oh, I’ve no doubt someone has said it before me. I’ve noticed over and
over again that people plagiarize my really cleverest remarks before
I’ve actually had time to say them myself; and I think something ought
to be done to prevent the infringement of copyright in this barefaced
way. But all the same, whether anyone has, or has not, already helped
themselves to this unique creation of my brain, the fact remains that I
thought it out for myself, alone and unaided. And the more I meditate
upon it, the more I notice what heaps of things in the garden resemble
life.”
“As for example——?”
“Well, slugs, for instance, and the bindweed, and the rabbits, and
the broad beans. They all seem to typify that here we have no abiding
anything.”
I agreed mournfully, as I thought of the succulent, hopeful-looking
scarlet runners that the slugs had eaten right through the tender main
stems close to the ground. It was a sad awakening for us the day we
found a few score of limp and dying remains, where over-night we had
watered as promising a row of youngsters as one could have wished to
see. To our grieving spirits, it seemed as though it wouldn’t have
been nearly so bad if they had eaten the leaves and left us the stems,
at least more leaves might have grown, whereas now——!
And the bindweed—where could you find a more striking analogy to
original sin? Flaunting beautiful flowers (which I greatly love), yet
all the while spreading wicked roots out of sight, choking everything
it lays hold of, turning up in the most unlooked-for places—but there
is no need to write more under this heading; a healthy crop of bindweed
(and I never knew one that wasn’t most irritatingly healthy) could give
points to a preacher every Sunday in the year, and then have enough to
spare for the week-night services. And when he had done with bindweed,
he could start afresh on mint.
Rabbits, again, are dear things, with an appeal that is quite different
from that of any other of the wild things. Sometimes in the past,
when I have been doomed to sit for an hour or so in the airlessness
and weariness of crowded hall or place of entertainment, or in the
loneliness of a congested social function, where everybody is too
buzzingly busy with “being social” to have time to say a word to
anyone, I just switch my mind right off the glare and the heat and
the stuffiness and the superficiality and the heartlessness, and take
a look at the little orchard adjoining the cottage garden, and for
just a minute I watch the rabbits, nibbling the grass, sitting up on
their hind legs to get a better view of any possible enemy-approach,
and scampering back to cover in the coppice with a bobbing of white
tails, at the least suspicion of danger. To a woman there is something
very touching about the timidity of these little brown things. I always
wish I could make them understand that I am their friend and not their
enemy—but this is a difficult matter, because there is the small white
dog to be considered in the compact, and there is no sentimentality
about him where rabbits are concerned!
I wouldn’t be without these little furry families in the coppice, but
oh, I do wish they would leave the young cabbages alone, or at any rate
spare the tenderest of the green leaves! It is a bit damping even to
ardour like ours to be greeted, when we arrive from town, by a gardener
waving a deprecating hand over rows of hardy cabbage stumps bereft of
leaves. At such times it seems as though it wouldn’t have been nearly
so bad if they had eaten the stems and left us the leaves, at least we
could have cooked them, whereas now——!
Rabbits certainly emphasize the fact that life grows thistles as well
as figs.
* * * * *
With regard to the beans, it is difficult to be philosophical. I can
be to some extent resigned when my misfortunes are handed out to me by
Nature, but it is a different thing when they are manufactured for me
(at my expense, too) by my fellow-creatures.
On the whole, I cannot speak too highly of the men who have worked for
me about the Flower-patch; I have been exceedingly well served, but
now and again one comes upon misfortune, and on one occasion I found I
had engaged an Ananias of the most proficient type. During his brief
_régime_ the weeds thrived apace, while the choicest bulbs and flowers
took on a world of diskerridgement. When the black pansies, and the
heliotrope Spanish iris feathered with white and yellow, and the rare
delphiniums, and the yellow arum lily disappeared at one fell swoop,
Ananias shook his head sadly and put their defalcation down to the rush
of the rain and the angle of the earth.
“Everything do simply run off this soil!” he explained.
Quite true; it certainly did. And two legs invariably ran with it.
And the vegetables seemed as subject to diskerridgement as the flowers,
though it was always referred to as “blight.”
There were the broad beans, for instance; I had given him two quarts
of seed, and indicated where I would like them planted. They were a
special prize strain that had been sent to me by a famous firm of
seedsmen, who had been moved to this generous deed on reading some of
the chronicles of the Flower-patch when they were first published in
_The Woman’s Magazine_. The head of the firm wrote me that they were a
new mammoth variety, and they would be pleased if I would try them in
my cottage garden.
We planned great things when those broad beans should be ready.
Two quarts would make about ten rows, we reckoned, quite a goodly
plantation for us; and we decided that as we should have plenty,
considering our small household, we would be extravagant and gather our
first dishful when they were quite young and in that deliciously tender
state that is unknown to the town dweller, who seldom sees a broad bean
till it is a tough old patriarch, and in such a condition considers it
a coarse vegetable.
It was a cold day in February when I handed the seed to Ananias; we
were returning to London the same day, so we beguiled part of the long
journey discussing whether that first dish should be accompanied by
parsley sauce and boiled ham, or whether to fry the ham and have the
broad beans given one turn in the frying-pan after they were boiled.
The subject seemed more and more vital the further we got along the
road, for we couldn’t get luncheon baskets (no, not the War; it was
before that event, and due to one of the many cheerful strikes with
which our pre-war existence was punctuated), and the bananas and
Banbury cakes we purchased _en route_ seemed woefully unsatisfying.
Hence, it was pleasant, but very tantalizing, to contemplate that dish
of beans, and we finally agreed that the ham should be fried, and that
we would dig some new potatoes specially for the occasion. We sat and
meditated on that meal, as the winter landscape flew past us, and the
more we meditated the more violently hungry we got.
You see, the beans really assumed more than ordinary importance.
But alas, when bean time came, all that decorated the bean plot was one
miserable row of wretched-looking stalks.
“It’s that thur blight agin,” remarked Ananias; “I watched it a-comin’
up the valley.”
“But why didn’t you pinch off the tops, if they were showing blight?” I
inquired; “then they would have made fresh shoots lower down.”
He shook his head and looked at me pityingly: “We don’t do our beans
like that a-here.”
“And where are all the other rows,” I asked; “I suppose blight didn’t
carry off roots and all of the remainder?”
“No, ’twere slugs, I warrant, or birds, or else the seed were stale,
maybe.”
Ursula carefully turned over the rest of the ground later on, but
never a glimmer of a benighted bean did she find.
Still, Ananias was, as usual, quite willing to be obliging. “My
beans has done uncommon well this year,” he continued. “It’s jest
all accordin’ how it takes ’em; sometimes mine does well and t’other
people’s doesn’t; and then agin t’other people’ll have a fine crop
and I won’t have a bean. I can let you have some o’ mine if you like.
I know you’re powerful fond o’ broad beans. I allus say you’re jest
like my missus.” (I’m sorry I haven’t a portrait of stout, unwashed,
sixty-five-year-old Sapphira to reproduce; without it you cannot
possibly understand how pleased I was!)
He brought over half a bushel, explaining that he had to charge
twopence a pound more than other people, as these were specially large
and good yielders, that were expensive in the first place.
They were remarkably fine beans, indeed as fine as I have ever seen;
and I wrote to the firm of seedsmen and told them their mammoth variety
had proved all they claimed for it.
I conclude the miserable row in my garden was a twopenny packet bought
from the travelling huckster who peddles seeds around the villages at
suitable seasons.
* * * * *
These instances are sufficient to indicate the trend of Ursula’s
thoughts when she started to philosophize on the garden. She
interrupted her valuable remarks, however, to exclaim: “Do look at that
wench!” And Virginia might well be looked at! Her exertions had turned
her the colour of a peony; down her face streamed copious “extract of
forehead.” The clipping mania had got thorough hold of her, and she
was trying to trim every hedge about the place, leaving in her wake a
trail of clippings for someone else to clear up—as is the way with all
first-class amateurs.
The next task pointed out itself. Ursula got a birch broom, while I
trundled the wheelbarrow out of the tool barn; and seeing that there
was already a pile of greenstuff waiting disposal, I started a bonfire,
while Ursula swept up and supplied extra fuel.
I feel sorry for the town dweller; he knows nothing of the real charm
of a bonfire. All too often the word stands to him for nothing more
than a mass of damp and decaying leaves that simply won’t burn. He
can only attend to it after his return from business, unless he be
one of the favoured few in town who have gardens sufficiently large
to allow of their keeping regular gardeners. And unfortunately the
lighting restrictions of the present day give no real scope to the
bonfire maker—even if he has anything worth burning. His dank mass
smoulders to death, or he adds paraffin to encourage it, and the
neighbours close their windows with meaning violence, while the parish
reeks of the obnoxious odour. Seldom has he air enough to fan anything
like a good fire; and at length, after burning the dozenth newspaper,
and listening to minute statistical particularization on the part of
his wife regarding the present price of matches, collectively and
individually (with deviations _re_ sultanas, lemon soles, kitchen tea,
coal-cards, sugar for the charwoman, ½_d._ per lb. for delivery,
soda, a financial comparison of pre-war sirloin with modern soup-bones,
and the antiquity of the new-laid hen), he flings himself disgustedly
indoors again, depositing a layer of greasy town-garden soil and
dead leaves on the door-mat, and perchance trailing it up to his
dressing-room.
The town bonfire is usually an abomination; the country bonfire is
often sheer delight; and the reason for this difference is due to the
fact that the shut-in nature of the average town back-plot seldom
supplies the good current of air that a bonfire needs to get it going
full-swing; and more than this, the refuse that collects in a town
garden is often sooty, unsanitary and malodorous. Whereas in the
country there is a great diversity of stuff to be burnt, and much of
it is delightfully aromatic. Also, the wind that sweeps continually
over our hills, for instance, dries up the rubbish pile—unless it be
actually raining; we seldom get that dank sodden stuff that is the
bane of the town gardener. We can always get a current of air, if
not a stiff breeze, to fan the first stages; and being unhampered by
the claims of city offices, we can start it in the morning, and keep
it going the whole day long. Our only trouble is to get the red-hot
mass to slumber through the night; it has such a trick of suddenly
bursting out again about 2 A.M., lighting up the cottage in the dark,
and flaming forth a vivid beacon worthy of the men of Harlech, and
recalling stirring scenes in old romance—only the local constabulary
have no poetic leanings, and merely see in it a case for a £10 fine
under the Defence of the Realm Act.
I started the bonfire—not with newspapers, these are far too few and
precious; why, our very paper bags are smoothed out and treasured in
a dresser drawer; some done-with straw and dry leaves make a good
beginning, with some of the dead twigs from the larches. If there are
laurel clippings to put on next, and there usually are, then success is
assured.
Soon the flames were licking up my initial work, and I proceeded to
pile on hedge trimmings, the sweepings-up of an apple-tree that had
blown down and been sawn up—and how sweet they made the air! Thistles,
nettles, brambles, surplus raspberry canes that spring up everywhere, a
holly-bush that had lately been cut down, worthless gooseberry bushes,
piles of ivy that had been cut from the walls, more barrow-loads of
stuff tipped on by Ursula—how the laurel flared and the yew crackled,
and one’s eyes smarted as the smoke swept round like a whirlwind
and enveloped one at times! I am a great believer in the burning of
all refuse vegetation; it does away with so much blight and vermin
and plant disease, and clears out mosquito haunts, and is generally
sanitary.
Virginia had betaken herself to cooler climes, but Ursula and I worked
at that heap, forking on new stuff to stop up flame bursts, till we too
were shedding dew from our foreheads, and our hands were almost sore
with wielding the heavy forks.
Yet a fascination keeps you at it, till you are smoke-dried and
fire-toasted and arm-aching to the last degree. When the shades of
evening finally call you in (as a rule, meals are most perfunctory when
a bonfire is in progress) you are saturated from head to foot with the
bonfire, your very hair has absorbed the time-old pungent odour of the
smoke of forest fires.
And maybe months and months afterwards you open a seldom used wardrobe,
where old gardening gear and shabby mackintoshes are kept, and suddenly
you are overwhelmed with the scent of burning pear and birch leaves and
yew; the lure of the woods calls aloud to you; you feel the sweep of
the winds on the hills alternating with the great swirls of grey-blue
bonfire smoke; the cramped town vanishes, and you are in free open
spaces once more——
And all because a certain tweed skirt, or light gardening coat is
hanging in the corner of the wardrobe.
* * * * *
If you want a bonfire with a delicious scent that will haunt you with a
poignant memory long after its ashes have gone the way of all things,
pile up dead apple leaves and twigs, pine needles, beech leaves, the
trimmings of the sweet bay bushes, brambles, rose-stalks and larch—and
the incense of the forest will be yours, bringing with it a mystic
sense of nearness to primæval things that no perfume sold in cut-glass
bottles has yet been able to conjure up.
* * * * *
We didn’t wait till sun-down, however, that day; for we were in the
most thrilling part of the afternoon forking-up, and our complexions
were at their very, _very_ worst, when Abigail tripped out and
announced:
“The Rector. . . . Oh, you needn’t worry about your appearance, ma’am.
Miss Virginia’s talking to him. . . . Yes, she’s changed _her_ dress,
and is telling him just what you look like.”