August

August 5th.--August has come, and has clothed the hills with golden

lupins, and filled the grassy banks with harebells. The yellow fields of

lupins are so gorgeous on cloudless days that I have neglected the

forests lately and drive in the open, so that I may revel in their scent

while feasting my eyes on their beauty. The slope of a hill clothed with

this orange wonder and seen against the sky is one of those sights which

make me so happy that it verges on pain. The straight, vigorous flower-

spikes are something like hyacinths, but all aglow with a divine

intensity of brightness that a yellow hyacinth never yet possessed and

never will; and then they are not waxy, but velvety, and their leaves

are not futile drooping things, but delicate, strong sprays of an

exquisite grey-green, with a bloom on them that throws a mist over the

whole field; and as for the perfume, it surely is the perfume of

Paradise. The plant is altogether lovely--shape, growth, flower, and

leaf, and the horses have to wait very patiently once we get among them,

for I can never have enough of sitting quite still in those fair fields

of glory. Not far from here there is a low series of hills running north

and south, absolutely without trees, and at the foot of them, on the

east side, is a sort of road, chiefly stones, but yet with patience to

be driven over, and on the other side of this road a plain stretches

away towards the east and south; and hills and plain are now one sheet

of gold. I have driven there at all hours of the day--I cannot keep

away--and I have seen them early in the morning, and at mid-day, and in

the afternoon, and I have seen them in the evening by moonlight, when

all the intensity was washed out of the colour and into the scent; but

just as the sun drops behind the little hills is the supreme moment,

when the splendour is so dazzling that you feel as though you must have

reached the very gates of heaven. So strong was this feeling the other

day that I actually got out of the carriage, being impulsive, and began

almost involuntarily to climb the hill, half expecting to see the

glories of the New Jerusalem all spread out before me when I should

reach the top; and it came with quite a shock of disappointment to find

there was nothing there but the prose of potato-fields, and a sandy road

with home-going calves kicking up its dust, and in the distance our

neighbour's _Schloss_, and the New Jerusalem just as far off as ever.

It is a relief to me to write about these things that I so much love,

for I do not talk of them lest I should be regarded as a person who

rhapsodizes, and there is no nuisance more intolerable than having

somebody's rhapsodies thrust upon you when you have no enthusiasm of

your own that at all corresponds. I know this so well that I generally

succeed in keeping quiet; but sometimes even now, after years of study

in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does

occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my

senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the

look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not

in the least understood. How is it that you should feel so vastly

superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your

neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to

do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness

in yourself? I am quite sure that if I were to take most or any of my

friends to those pleasant yellow fields they would notice nothing except

the exceeding joltiness of the road; and if I were so ill-advised as to

lift up a corner of my heart, and let them see how full it was of wonder

and delight, they would first look blank, and then decide mentally that

they were in the unpleasant situation of driving over a stony road with

that worst form of idiot, a bore, and so fall into the mood of self-

commiseration which is such a solace to us in our troubles. Yet it is

painful being suppressed for ever and ever, and I believe the torments

of such a state, when unduly prolonged, are more keenly felt by a woman

than a man, she having, in spite of her protestations, a good deal of

the ivy nature still left in her, and an unhealthy craving for sympathy

and support. When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out as

far as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed in

the mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come and

look at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in the

pleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find one

who would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness in

which we each of us live. I have, it is true, a great many friends--

people with whom it is pleasant to spend an afternoon if such afternoons

are not repeated often, and if you are careful not to stir more than the

surface of things, but among them all there is only one who has,

roughly, the same tastes that I have; and even her sympathies have

limitations, and she declares for instance with emphasis that she would

not at all like to be a goose-girl. I wonder why. Our friendship nearly

came to an end over the goose-girl, so unexpectedly inflaming did the

subject turn out to be. Of all professions, if I had liberty of choice,

I would choose to be a gardener, and if nobody would have me in that

capacity I would like to be a goose-girl, and sit in the greenest of

fields minding those delightfully plump, placid geese, whiter and more

leisurely than the clouds on a calm summer morning, their very waddle in

its lazy deliberation soothing and salutary to a fretted spirit that has

been too long on the stretch. The fields geese feed in are so specially

charming, so green and low-lying, with little clumps of trees and

bushes, and a pond or boggy bit of ground somewhere near, and a

profusion of those delicate field flowers that look so lovely growing

and are so unsatisfactory and fade so quickly if you try to arrange them

in your rooms. For six months of the year I would be happier than any

queen I ever heard of, minding the fat white things. I would begin in

April with the king-cups, and leave off in September with the

blackberries, and I would keep one eye on the geese, and one on the

volume of Wordsworth I should have with me, and I would be present in

this way at the procession of the months, the first three all white and

yellow, and the last three gorgeous with the lupin fields and the blues

and purples and crimsons that clothe the hedges and ditches in a

wonderful variety of shades, and dye the grass near the water in great

patches. Then in October I would shut up my Wordsworth, go back to

civilised life, and probably assist at the eating of the geese one after

the other, with a proper thankfulness for the amount of edification I

had from first to last extracted from them.

I believe in England goose eating is held to be of doubtful refinement,

and is left to one's servants. Here roast goose stuffed with apples is a

dish loved quite openly and simply by people who would consider that the

number of their quarterings raises them above any suspicion as to the

refinement of their tastes, however many geese they may eat, and however

much they may enjoy them; and I remember one lady, whose ancestors,

probably all having loved goose, reached back up to a quite giddy

antiquity, casting a gloom over a dinner table by removing as much of

the skin or crackling of the goose as she could when it came to her,

remarking, amidst a mournful silence, that it was her favourite part. No

doubt it was. The misfortune was that it happened also to be the

favourite part of the line of guests who came after her, and who saw

themselves forced by the hard laws of propriety to affect an indifferent

dignity of bearing at the very moment when their one feeling was a

fierce desire to rise up and defend at all costs their right to a share

of skin. She had, I remember, very pretty little white hands like tiny

claws, and wore beautiful rings, and sitting opposite her, and free

myself from any undue passion for goose, I had leisure to watch the

rapid way in which she disposed of the skin, her rings and the whiteness

of her hands flashing up and down as she used her knife and fork with

the awful dexterity only seen in perfection in the Fatherland. I am

afraid that as a nation we think rather more of our eating and drinking

than is reasonable, and this no doubt explains why so many of us, by the

time we are thirty, have lost the original classicality of our contour.

Walking in the streets of a town you are almost sure to catch the word

_essen_ in the talk of the passers-by; and _das Essen_, combined, of

course, with the drinking made necessary by its exaggerated indulgence,

constitutes the chief happiness of the middle and lower classes. Any

story-book or novel you take up is full of feeling descriptions of what

everybody ate and drank, and there are a great many more meals than

kisses; so that the novel-reader who expects a love-tale, finds with

disgust that he is put off with _menus_. The upper classes have so many

other amusements that _das Essen_ ceases to be one, and they are as

thin as all the rest of the world; but if the curious wish to see how

very largely it fills the lives, or that part of their lives that they

reserve for pleasure, of the middle classes, it is a good plan to go to

seaside places during the months of July and August, when the schools

close, and the _bourgeoisie_ realises the dream in which it has been

indulging the whole year, of hotel life with a tremendous dinner every

day at one o'clock.

The April baby was a weak little creature in her first years, and the

doctor ordered as specially bracing a seaside resort frequented solely

by the middle classes, and there for three succeeding years I took her;

and while she rolled on the sands and grew brown and lusty, I was dull,

and fell to watching the other tourists. Their time, it appeared, was

spent in ruminating over the delights of the meal that was eaten, and in

preparing their bodies by gentlest exercise for the delights of the meal

that was to come. They passed their mornings on the sands, the women

doing fancy work in order that they might look busy, and the men

strolling aimlessly about near them with field-glasses, and nautical

caps, and long cloaks of a very dreadful pattern reaching to their heels

and making them look like large women, called Havelocks,--all of them

waiting with more or less open eagerness for one o'clock, the great

moment to which they had been looking forward ever since the day before,

to arrive. They used to file in when the bell rang with a sort of silent

solemnity, a contemplative collectedness, which is best described by the

word _recueillement_, and ate all the courses, however many there were,

in a hot room full of flies and sunlight.

The dinner lasted a good hour and a half, and at the end of that time

they would begin to straggle out again, flushed and using toothpicks as

they strolled to the tables under the trees, where the exhausted waiters

would presently bring them breakfast-cups of coffee and cakes. They

lingered about an hour over this, and then gradually disappeared to

their rooms, where they slept, I suppose, for from then till about six a

death-like stillness reigned in the place and April and I had it all to

ourselves. Towards six, slow couples would be seen crawling along the

path by the shore and panting up into the woods, this being the only

exercise of the day, and necessary if they would eat their suppers with

appreciation; and April and I, peering through the bracken out of the

nests of moss we used to make in the afternoons, could see them coming

up through the trees after the climb up the cliff, the husband with his

Havelock over his arm, a little in front, wiping his face and gasping,

the wife in her tight silk dress, her bonnet strings undone, a cloak and

an umbrella, and very often a small mysterious basket as well to carry,

besides holding up her dress, very stout and very uncomfortable and very

breathless, panting along behind; and however much she had to carry, and

however fat and helpless she was, and however steep the hill, and

however much dinner she had eaten, the idea that her husband might have

taken her cloak and her umbrella and her basket and carried them for her

would never have struck either of them. If it had by some strange chance

entered his head, he would have reasoned that he was as stout as she

was, that he had eaten as much dinner, that he was several years older,

and that it was her cloak. Logic is so irresistible.

To go on eating long after you have ceased to be hungry has

fascinations, apparently, that are difficult to withstand, and if it

gives you so much pleasure that the resulting inability to move without

gasping is accepted with the meekness of martyrs, who shall say that you

are wrong? My not myself liking a large dinner at one o'clock is not a

reason for my thinking I am superior to those who do. Their excesses, it

is true, are not my excesses, but then neither are mine theirs; and what

about the days of idleness I spend, doing nothing from early till late

but lie on the grass watching clouds? If I were to murmur gluttons,

could not they, from their point of view, retort with conviction fool?

All those maxims about judging others by yourself, and putting yourself

in another person's place, are not, I am afraid, reliable. I had them

dinned into me constantly as a child, and I was constantly trying to

obey them, and constantly was astonished at the unexpected results I

arrived at; and now I know that it is a proof of artlessness to suppose

that other people will think and feel and hope and enjoy what you do and

in the same way that you do. If an officious friend had stood in that

breathless couple's path and told them in glowing terms how much happier

they would be if they lived their life a little more fully and from its

other sides, how much more delightful to stride along gaily together in

their walks, with wind enough for talk and laughter, how pleasant if the

man were muscular and in good condition and the woman brisk and wiry,

and that they only had to do as he did and live on cold meat and toast,

and drink nothing, to be as blithe as birds, do you think they would

have so much as understood him? Cold meat and toast? Instead of what

they had just been enjoying so intensely? Miss that soup made of the

inner mysteries of geese, those eels stewed in beer, the roast pig with

red cabbage, the venison basted with sour cream and served with beans in

vinegar and cranberry jam, the piled-up masses of vanilla ice, the

pumpernickel and cheese, the apples and pears on the top of that, and

the big cups of coffee and cakes on the top of the apples and pears?

Really a quick walk over the heather with a wiry wife would hardly make

up for the loss of such a dinner; and besides, might not a wiry wife

turn out to be a questionable blessing? And so they would pity the

nimble friend who wasted his life in taking exercise and missed all its

pleasures, and the man of toast and early rising would regard them with

profound disgust if simple enough to think himself better than they,

and, if he possessed an open mind, would merely return their pity with

more of his own; so that, I suppose, everybody would be pleased, for the

charm of pitying one's neighbour, though subtle, is undeniable.

I remember when I was at the age when people began to call me

_Backfisch_, and my mother dressed me in a little scarlet coat with big

pearl buttons, and my eyes turned down because I was shy, and my nose

turned up because I was impudent, one summer at the seaside with my

governess we noticed in our walks a solitary lady of dignified

appearance, who spoke to no one, and seemed for ever wrapped in distant

and lofty philosophic speculations. "She's thinking about Kant and the

nebular hypothesis," I decided to myself, having once heard some men

with long beards talking of both those things, and they all had had that

same far-away look in their eyes. "_Qu'est-ce que c'est une_

_hypothese nebuleuse_, _Mademoiselle_?" I said aloud.

"_Tenez-vous bien_, _et marchez d'une facon convenable_," she

replied sharply.

"_Qu'est-ce que c'est une hypothese_--"

"_Vous etes trap jeune pour comprendre ces choses_."

"_Oh alors vous ne savez pas vous-meme_!" I cried

triumphantly, "_Sans cela vous me diriez_."

"_Elisabeth_, _vous ecrirez_, _des que nous rentrons_, _leverbe_

_Prier le bon Dieu de m'Aider a ne plus Etre si_

_Impertinente_."

She was an ingenious young woman, and the verbs I had to write as

punishments were of the most elaborate and complicated nature--

_Demander pardon pour Avoir Siffle comme un Gamin_

_quelconque_, _Vouloir ne plus Oublier de Nettoyer mes_

_Ongles_, _Essayer de ne pas tant Aimer les Poudings_, are

but a few examples of her achievements in this particular branch of

discipline.

That very day at the _table d'hote_ the abstracted lady sat next to

me. A _ragout_ of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken some

she asked me, before helping herself, what it was.

"Snails," I replied promptly, wholly unchastened by the prayers I had

just been writing out in every tense.

"Snails! _Ekelig_." And she waved the waiter loftily away, and looked on

with much superciliousness at the rest of us enjoying ourselves.

"What! You do not eat this excellent _ragout_?" asked her other

neighbour, a hot man, as he finished clearing his plate and had time to

observe the emptiness of hers. "You do not like calves' tongues and

mushrooms? _Sonderbar._"

I still can see the poor lady's face as she turned on me more like a

tigress than the impassive person she had been a moment before. "_Sie_

_unverschamter Backfisch_!" she hissed. "My favourite dish--I have you

to thank for spoiling my repast--my day!" And in a frenzy of rage she

gripped my arm as though she would have shaken me then and there in the

face of the multitude, while I sat appalled at the consequences of

indulging a playful fancy at the wrong time.

Which story, now I come to think of it, illustrates less the tremendous

importance of food in our country than the exceeding odiousness of

_Backfisch_ in scarlet coats.

August 10th.--My idea of a garden is that it should be beautiful from

end to end, and not start off in front of the house with fireworks,

going off at its farthest limit into sheer sticks. The standard reached

beneath the windows should at least be kept up, if it cannot be

surpassed, right away through, and the German popular plan in this

matter quite discarded of concentrating all the available splendour of

the establishment into the supreme effort of carpet-bedding and glass

balls on pedestals in front of the house, in the hope that the stranger,

carefully kept in that part, and on no account allowed to wander, will

infer an equal magnificence throughout the entire domain; whereas he

knows very well all the time that the landscape round the corner

consists of fowls and dust-bins. Disliking this method, I have tried to

make my garden increase in loveliness, if not in tidiness, the farther

you get into it; and the visitor who thinks in his innocence as he

emerges from the shade of the verandah that he sees the best before him,

is artfully conducted from beauty to beauty till he beholds what I think

is the most charming bit, the silver birch and azalea plantation down at

the very end. This is the boundary of my kingdom on the south side, a

blaze of colour in May and June, across which you see the placid meadows

stretching away to a distant wood; and from its contemplation the ideal

visitor returns to the house a refreshed and better man. That is the

sort of person one enjoys taking round--the man (or woman) who, loving

gardens, would go any distance to see one; who comes to appreciate, and

compare, and admire; who has a garden of his own that he lives in and

loves; and whose talk and criticisms are as dew to the thirsty gardening

soul, all too accustomed in this respect to droughts. He knows as well

as I do what work, what patience, what study and watching, what laughter

at failures, what fresh starts with undiminished zeal, and what bright,

unalterable faith are represented by the flowers in my garden. He knows

what I have done for it, and he knows what it has done for me, and how

it has been and will be more and more a place of joys, a place of

lessons, a place of health, a place of miracles, and a place of sure and

never-changing peace.

Living face to face with nature makes it difficult for one to be

discouraged. Moles and late frosts, both of which are here in abundance,

have often grieved and disappointed me, but even these, my worst

enemies, have not succeeded in making me feel discouraged. Not once till

now have I got farther in that direction than the purely negative state

of not being encouraged; and whenever I reach that state I go for a

brisk walk in the sunshine and come back cured. It makes one so healthy

to live in a garden, so healthy in mind as well as body, and when I say

moles and late frosts are my worst enemies, it only shows how I could

not now if I tried sit down and brood over my own or my neighbour's

sins, and how the breezes in my garden have blown away all those worries

and vexations and bitternesses that are the lot of those who live in a

crowd. The most severe frost that ever nipped the hopes of a year is

better to my thinking than having to listen to one malignant truth or

lie, and I would rather have a mole busy burrowing tunnels under each of

my rose trees and letting the air get at their roots than face a single

greeting where no kindness is. How can you help being happy if you are

healthy and in the place you want to be? A man once made it a reproach

that I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and that

we live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, and

pointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated the

tennis-court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not be

shaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, with

everything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and diet

ourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come,

and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could be

borne perhaps with cheerfulness. "And have not even such things their

sunny side?" I exclaimed. "When I am steeped to the lips in diseases and

doctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests my

women friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall say

next and wishing they would go." He replied that all around me lay

misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded

by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and

tragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable and

discontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he said

that we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrink

from mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered that

it was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shaking

head, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwards

that a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dying

had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him

and to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into my

garden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, "It is the Will of

God." He was a missionary.

But of what use is it telling a woman with a garden that she ought

really to be ashamed of herself for being happy? The fresh air is so

buoyant that it lifts all remarks of that sort away off you and leaves

you laughing. They get wafted away on the scent of the stocks, and you

stand in the sun looking round at your cheerful flowers, and more than

ever persuaded that it is a good and blessed thing to be thankful. Oh a

garden is a sweet, sane refuge to have! Whether I am tired because I

have enjoyed myself too much, or tired because I have lectured the

servants too much, or tired because I have talked to missionaries too

much, I have only to come down the verandah steps into the garden to be

at once restored to quiet, and serenity, and my real and natural self. I

could almost fancy sometimes that as I come down the steps, gentle hands

of blessing have been laid on my head. I suppose I feel so because of

the hush that descends on my soul when I get out of the close, restless

house into that silent purity. Sometimes I sit for hours in the south

walk by the verandah just listening and watching. It is so private

there, though directly beneath the windows, that it is one of my

favourite places. There are no bedrooms on that side of the house, only

the Man of Wrath's and my day-rooms, so that servants cannot see me as I

stand there enjoying myself. If they did or could, I should simply never

go there, for nothing is so utterly destructive to meditation as to know

that probably somebody inquisitive is eyeing you from behind a curtain.

The loveliest garden I know is spoilt to my thinking by the

impossibility of getting out of sight of the house, which stares down at

you, Argus-eyed and unblinking, into whatever corner you may shuffle.

Perfect house and perfect garden, lying in that land of lovely gardens,

England, the garden just the right size for perfection, not a weed ever

admitted, every dandelion and daisy--those friends of the unaspiring--

routed out years ago, the borders exquisite examples of taste, the turf

so faultless that you hardly like to walk on it for fear of making it

dusty, and the whole quite uninhabitable for people of my solitary

tendencies because, go where you will, you are overlooked. Since I have

lived in this big straggling place, full of paths and copses where I am

sure of being left alone, with wide fields and heath and forests beyond,

and so much room to move and breathe in, I feel choked, oppressed,

suffocated, in anything small and perfect. I spent a very happy

afternoon in that little English paradise, but I came away quite

joyfully, and with many a loving thought of my own dear ragged garden,

and all the corners in it where the anemones twinkle in the spring like

stars, and where there is so much nature and so little art. It will grow

I know sweeter every year, but it is too big ever to be perfect and to

get to look so immaculate that the diseased imagination conjures up

visions of housemaids issuing forth each morning in troops and dusting

every separate flower with feather brushes. Nature herself is untidy,

and in a garden she ought to come first, and Art with her brooms and

clipping-shears follow humbly behind. Art has such a good time in the

house, where she spreads herself over the walls, and hangs herself up

gorgeously at the windows, and lurks in the sofa cushions, and breaks

out in an eruption of pots wherever pots are possible, that really she

should be content to take the second place out of doors. And how

dreadful to meet a gardener and a wheelbarrow at every turn--which is

precisely what happens to one in the perfect garden. My gardener, whose

deafness is more than compensated for by the keenness of his eyesight,

very soon remarked the scowl that distorted my features whenever I met

one of his assistants in my favourite walks, and I never meet them now.

I think he must keep them chained up to the cucumber-frames, so

completely have they disappeared, and he only lets them loose when he

knows I am driving, or at meals, or in bed. But is it not irritating to

be sitting under your favourite tree, pencil in hand, and eyes turned

skywards expectant of the spark from heaven that never falls, and then

to have a man appear suddenly round the corner who immediately begins

quite close to you to tear up the earth with his fangs? No one will ever

know the number of what I believe are technically known as winged words

that I have missed bringing down through interruptions of this kind.

Indeed, as I look through these pages I see I must have missed them all,

for I can find nothing anywhere with even a rudimentary approach to

wings.

Sometimes when I am in a critical mood and need all my faith to keep me

patient, I shake my head at the unshornness of the garden as gravely as

the missionary shook his head at me. The bushes stretch across the

paths, and, catching at me as I go by, remind me that they have not been

pruned; the teeming plant life rejoices on the lawns free from all

interference from men and hoes; the pinks are closely nibbled off at the

beginning of each summer by selfish hares intent on their own

gratification; most of the beds bear the marks of nocturnal foxes; and

the squirrels spend their days wantonly biting off and flinging down the

tender young shoots of the firs. Then there is the boy who drives the

donkey and water-cart round the garden, and who has an altogether

reprehensible habit of whisking round corners and slicing off bits of

the lawn as he whisks. "But you can't alter these things, my good soul,"

I say to myself. "If you want to get rid of the hares and foxes, you

must consent to have wire-netting, which is odious, right round your

garden. And you are always saying you like weeds, so why grumble at your

lawns? And it doesn't hurt you much if the squirrels do break bits off

your firs--the firs must have had that happening to them years and years

before you were born, yet they still flourish. As for boys, they

certainly are revolting creatures. Can't you catch this one when he

isn't looking and pop him in his own water-barrel and put the lid on?"

I asked the June baby, who had several times noticed with indignation

the culpable indifference of this boy in regard to corners, whether she

did not think that would be a good way of disposing of him. She is a

great disciplinarian, and was loud in her praise of the plan; but the

other two demurred. "He might go dead in there," said the May baby,

apprehensively. "And he is such a naughty boy," said April, who had

watched his reckless conduct with special disgust, "that if he once went

dead he'd go straight to the _Holle_ and stay all the time with the

_diable_."

That was the first French word I have heard them say: strange and

sulphureous first-fruits of Seraphine's teaching!

We were going round the garden in a procession, I with a big pair of

scissors, and the Three with baskets, into one of which I put fresh

flowers, and into the others flowers that were beginning to seed, dead

flowers, and seed-pods. The garden was quivering in heat and light; rain

in the morning had brought out all the snails and all the sweetness, and

we were very happy, as we always are, I when I am knee-deep in flowers,

and the babies when they can find new sorts of snails to add to their

collections. These collections are carried about in cardboard boxes all

day, and at night each baby has hers on the chair beside her bed.

Sometimes the snails get out and crawl over the beds, but the babies do

not mind. Once when April woke in the morning she was overjoyed by

finding a friendly little one on her cheek. Clearly babies of iron

nerves and pellucid consciences.

"So you do know some French," I said as I snipped off poppy-heads; "you

have always pretended you don't."

"Oh, keep the poppies, mummy," cried April, as she saw them tumbling

into her basket; "if you picks them and just leaves them, then they

ripes and is good for such a many things."

"Tell me about the _diable_" I said, "and you shall keep the poppies."

"He isn't nice, that _diable_," she said, starting off at once with

breathless eloquence. "Seraphine says there was one time a girl and a

boy who went for a walk, and there were two ways, and one way goes where

stones is, but it goes to the _lieber Gott_; and the girl went that

way till she came to a door, and the _lieber Gott_ made the door

opened and she went in, and that's the _Himmel_."

"And the boy?"

"Oh, he was a naughty boy and went the other way where there is a tree,

and on the tree is written, 'Don't go this way or you'll be dead,' and

he said, 'That is one _betise_,' and did go in the way and got to the

_Holle_, and there he gets whippings when he doesn't make what the

_diable_ says."

"That's because he was so naughty," explained the May baby, holding up

an impressive finger, "and didn't want to go to the _Himmel_ and didn't

love glory."

"All boys are naughty," said June, "and I don't love them."

"_Nous allons parler Francais_" I announced, desirous of finding

out whether their whole stock was represented by _diable_ and _betise_;

"I believe you can all speak it quite well."

There was no answer. I snipped off sweet-pea pods and began to talk

French at a great rate, asking questions as I snipped, and trying to

extract answers, and getting none. The silence behind me grew ominous.

Presently I heard a faint sniff, and the basket being held up to me

began to shake. I bent down quickly and looked under April's sun-bonnet.

She was crying great dreadful tears, and rubbing her eyes hard with her

one free hand.

"Why, you most blessed of babies," I exclaimed, kneeling down and

putting my arms round her, "what in the world is the matter?"

She looked at me with grieved and doubting eyes. "Such a mother to talk

French to her child!" she sobbed.

I threw down the scissors, picked her up, and carried her up and down

the path, comforting her with all the soft words I knew and suppressing

my desire to smile. "That's not French, is it?" I whispered at the end

of a long string of endearments, beginning, I believe, with such flights

of rhetoric as priceless blessing and angel baby, and ending with a

great many kisses.

"No, no," she answered, patting my face and looking infinitely relieved,

"that is pretty, and how mummies always talks. Proper mummies never

speak French--only Seraphines." And she gave me a very tight hug, and a

kiss that transferred all her tears to my face; and I set her down and,

taking out my handkerchief, tried to wipe off the traces of my attempt

at governessing from her cheeks. I wonder how it is that whenever babies

cry, streaks of mud immediately appear on their faces. I believe I could

cry for a week, and yet produce no mud.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, babies," I said, anxious to restore

complete serenity on such a lovely day, and feeling slightly ashamed of

my uncalled-for zeal--indeed, April was right, and proper mothers leave

lessons and torments to somebody else, and devote all their energies to

petting--"I'll give a ball after tea."

"_Yes_!" shouted three exultant voices, "and invite all the babies!"

"So now you must arrange what you are going to wear. I suppose you'd

like the same supper as usual? Run away to Seraphine and tell her to get

you ready."

They seized their baskets and their boxes of snails and rushed off into

the bushes, calling for Seraphine with nothing but rapture in their

voices, and French and the _diable_ quite forgotten.

These balls are given with great ceremony two or three times a year.

They last about an hour, during which I sit at the piano in the library

playing cheerful tunes, and the babies dance passionately round the

pillar. They refuse to waltz together, which is perhaps a good thing,

for if they did there would always be one left over to be a wallflower

and gnash her teeth; and when they want to dance squares they are forced

by the stubbornness of numbers to dance triangles. At the appointed hour

they knock at the door, and come in attired in the garments they have

selected as appropriate (at this last ball the April baby wore my

shooting coat, the May baby had a muff, and the June baby carried

Seraphine's umbrella), and, curtseying to me, each one makes some remark

she thinks suitable to the occasion.

"How's your husband?" June asked me last time, in the defiant tones she

seems to think proper at a ball.

"Very well, thank you."

"Oh, that is nice."

"Mine isn't vely well," remarked April, cheerfully.

"Indeed?"

"No, he has got some tummy-aches."

"Dear me!"

"He was coming else, and had such fine twowsers to wear--pink ones with

wibbons."

After a little more graceful conversation of this kind the ball begins,

and at the end of an hour's dancing, supper, consisting of radishes and

lemonade, is served on footstools; and when they have cleared it up even

to the leaves and stalks of the radishes, they rise with much dignity,

express in proper terms their sense of gratitude for the entertainment,

curtsey, and depart to bed, where they spend a night of horror, the prey

of the awful dreams naturally resulting from so unusual a combination as

radishes and babies. That is why my balls are rare festivals--the babies

will insist on having radishes for the supper, and I, as a decent parent

with a proper sense of my responsibilities, am forced accordingly to

restrict my invitations to two, at the most three, in a year.

When this last one was over I felt considerably exhausted, and had

hardly sufficient strength to receive their thanks with civility. An

hour's jig-playing with the thermometer at 90 leaves its marks on the

most robust; and when they were in bed, and the supper beginning to do

its work, I ordered the carriage and the kettle with a view to seeking

repose in the forest, taking the opportunity of escaping before the Man

of Wrath should come in to dinner. The weather has been very hot for a

long time, but the rain in the morning had had a wonderful effect on my

flowers, and as I drove away I could not help noticing how charming the

borders in front of the house were looking, with their white hollyhocks,

and white snapdragons, and fringe of feathery marigolds. This gardener

has already changed the whole aspect of the place, and I believe I have

found the right man at last. He is very young for a head gardener, but

on that account all the more anxious to please me and keep his

situation; and it is a great comfort to have to do with somebody who

watches and interprets rightly every expression of one's face and does

not need much talking to. He makes mistakes sometimes in the men he

engages, just as I used to when I did the engaging, and he had one poor

young man as apprentice who very soon, like the first of my three meek

gardeners, went mad. His madness was of a harmless nature and took a

literary form; indeed, that was all they had against him, that he would

write books. He used to sit in the early morning on my special seats in

the garden, and strictly meditate the thankless muse when he ought to

have been carting manure; and he made his fellow-apprentices unspeakably

wretched by shouting extracts from Schiller at them across the

intervening gooseberry bushes. Let me hasten to say that I had never

spoken to him, and should not even have known what he was like if he had

not worn eyeglasses, so that the Man of Wrath's insinuation that I

affect the sanity of my gardeners is entirely without justification. The

eyeglasses struck me as so odd on a gardener that I asked who he was,

and was told that he had been studying for the Bar, but could not pass

the examinations, and had taken up gardening in the hope of getting back

his health and spirits. I thought this a very sensible plan, and was

beginning to feel interested in him when one day the post brought me a

registered packet containing a manuscript play he had written called

"The Lawyer as Gardener," dedicated to me. The Man of Wrath and I were

both in it, the Man of Wrath, however, only in the list of characters,

so that he should not feel hurt, I suppose, for he never appeared on the

scenes at all. As for me, I was represented as going about quoting

Tolstoi in season and out of season to the gardeners--a thing I protest

I never did. The young man was sent home to his people, and I have been

asking myself ever since what there is about this place that it should

so persistently produce books and lunacy?

On the outskirts of the forest, where shafts of dusty sunlight slanted

through the trees, children were picking wortleberries for market as I

passed last night, with hands and faces and aprons smudged into one blue

stain. I had decided to go to a water-mill belonging to the Man of Wrath

which lies far away in a clearing, so far away and so lonely and so

quiet that the very spirit of peace seems to brood over it for ever; and

all the way the wortleberry carpet was thick and unbroken. Never were

the pines more pungent than after the long heat, and their rosy stems

flushed pinker as I passed. Presently I got beyond the region of

wortleberry-pickers, the children not caring to wander too far into the

forest so late, and I jolted over the roots into the gathering shadows

more and more pervaded by that feeling that so refreshes me, the feeling

of being absolutely alone.

A very ancient man lives in the mill and takes care of it, for it has

long been unused, a deaf old man with a clean, toothless face, and no

wife to worry him. He informed me once that all women are mistakes,

especially that aggravated form called wives, and that he was thankful

he had never married. I felt a certain delicacy after that about

intruding on his solitude with the burden of my sex and wifehood heavy

upon me, but he always seems very glad to see me, and runs at once to

his fowlhouse to look for fresh eggs for my tea; so perhaps he regards

me as a pleasing exception to the rule. On this last occasion he brought

a table out to the elm-tree by the mill stream, that I might get what

air there was while I ate my supper; and I sat in great peace waiting

for the kettle to boil and watching the sun dropping behind the sharp

forest me, and all the little pools and currents into which the stream

just there breaks as it flows over mud banks, ablaze with the red

reflection of the sky. The pools are clothed with water-lilies and

inhabited by eels, and I generally take a netful of writhing eels back

with me to the Man of Wrath to pacify him after my prolonged absence. In

the lily time I get into the miller's punt and make them an excuse for

paddling about among the mud islands, and even adventurously exploring

the river as it winds into the forest, and the old man watches me

anxiously from under the elm. He regards my feminine desire to pick

water-lilies with indulgence, but is clearly uneasy at my affection for

mud banks, and once, after I had stuck on one, and he had run up and

down in great agitation for half an hour shouting instructions as to

getting off again, he said when I was safely back on shore that people

with petticoats (his way of expressing woman) were never intended for

punts, and their only chance of safety lay in dry land and keeping

quiet. I did not this time attempt the punt, for I was tired, and it was

half full of water, probably poured into it by a miller weary of the

ways of women; and I drank my tea quietly, going on at the same time

with my interrupted afternoon reading of the _Sorrows of Werther_,

in which I had reached a part that has a special fascination for me

every time I read it--that part where Werther first meets Lotte, and

where, after a thunderstorm; they both go to the window, and she is so

touched by the beauties of nature that she lays her hand on his and

murmurs "Klopstock,"--to the complete dismay of the reader, though not

of Werther, for he, we find, was so carried away by the magic word that

he flung himself on to her hand and kissed it with tears of rapture.

I looked up from the book at the quiet pools and the black line of

trees, above which stars were beginning to twinkle, my ears soothed by

the splashing of the mill stream and the hooting somewhere near of a

solitary owl, and I wondered whether, if the Man of Wrath were by my

side, it would be a relief to my pleasurable feelings to murmur

"Klopstock," and whether if I did he would immediately shed tears of joy

over my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, and

Goethe's putting it into his heroine's mouth just when she was most

enraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursing

to the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I am

talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no woman

should. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained and

uneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? All

we can do is to jump at conclusions, and, when we have jumped, receive

with meekness the information that we have jumped wrong. Sitting there

long after it was too dark to read, I thought of the old miller's words,

and agreed with him that the best thing a woman can do in this world is

to keep quiet. He came out once and asked whether he should bring a

lamp, and seemed uneasy at my choosing to sit there in the dark. I could

see the stars in the black pools, and a line of faint light far away

above the pines where the sun had set. Every now and then the hot air

from the ground struck up in my face, and afterwards would come a cooler

breath from the water. Of what use is it to fight for things and make a

noise? Nature is so clear in her teaching that he who has lived with her

for any time can be in little doubt as to the "better way." Keep quiet

and say one's prayers--certainly not merely the best, but the only

things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I

have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a

form of thanksgiving.