three-thousand-pounder of the Riviera, and the three-pounder of Clapham.
If people will only keep their eyes open for posts suitable for the
pillars of a pergola, they will be able to collect a sufficient number
to make a start with inside a year. The remainder of the woodwork I
should recommend being brought already shaped and creosoted from some of
those large sawmills where such work is made a speciality of. But there
is no use getting anything that is not strong and durable, and every
upright pillar should be embedded in concrete or cement. For one of
my own pergolas--I do not call them pergolas but colonnades--I found a
disused telegraph pole and sawed it into lengths of thirty inches each.
These I sank eighteen inches in the ground at regular intervals and on
each I doweled two oak poles six inches in diameter. They are standing
well; for telegraph posts which have been properly treated are nearly as
durable as iron. All the woodwork for this I got ready sawn and “dipped”
from a well-known factory at Croydon. It is eighty feet long and paved
throughout. One man was able to put it up inside a fine fortnight in the
month of January.
A second colonnade that I have is under forty feet in length. I made
one side of it against a screen of sweetbrier roses which had grown to
a height of twenty feet in five years. The making of it was suggested
to me by the chance I had of buying at housebreaker's price a number
of little columns taken from a shop that was being pulled down to give
place, as usual, to a new cinema palace.
An amusing sidelight upon the imperiousness of fashion was afforded us
when the painter set to work upon these. They had once been treated in
that form of decoration known as “oak grained”--that pale yellow colour
touched with an implement technically called a comb, professing to give
to ordinary deal the appearance of British oak, and possibly deceiving a
person here and there who had never seen oak. But when my painter began
to burn off this stuff he discovered that the column had actually been
papered and then painted and grained. This made his work easy, for he
was able to tear the paper away in strips. But when he had done this he
made the further discovery that the wood underneath was good oak with a
natural grain showing!
Could anything be more ridiculous than the fashion of sixty or seventy
years ago, when the art of graining had reached its highest level? Here
were beautiful oak columns which only required to be waxed to display
to full advantage the graceful natural “feathering” of the wood, papered
over and then put into the hands of the artist to make it by his process
of “oak-graining” as unlike oak as the basilica of St. Mark is unlike
Westminster Abbey!
But for a large garden where everything is on a heroic scale, the only
suitable pergola is one made up of high brick or stone piers, with
massive oak beams for the roof. Such a structure will last for a century
or two, improving year by year. The only question to consider is the
proper proportions that it should assume--the relations of the length
to the breadth and to the height. On such points I dare not speak. The
architect who has had experience of such structures must be consulted.
I have seen some that have been carried out without reference to the
profession, and to my mind their proportions were not right. One had the
semblance of being stunted, another was certainly not sufficiently broad
by at least two feet.
In this connection I may be pardoned if I give it as my opinion that
most pergolas suffer from lack of breadth. Six feet is the narrowest
breadth possible for one that is eight feet high to the cross beams.
I think that a pergola in England should be paved, not in that
contemptible fashion, properly termed “crazy,” but with either stone
slabs or paving tiles; if one can afford to have the work done in
panels, so much the better. In this way nothing looks better than small
bricks set in herring-bone patterns. If one can afford a course of
coloured bricks, so much the better. The riotous gaiety of colour
overhead should be responded to in some measure underfoot.
There is no reason against, but many strong reasons for, interrupting
the lines of a long pergola by making a dome of open woodwork between
the four middle columns of support--assuming that all the rest of the
woodwork is straight---and creating a curved alcove with a seat between
the two back supports, thus forming at very little extra expense, an
additional bower to the others which will come into existence year by
year in a garden that is properly looked after.
When I was a schoolboy I was brought by my desk-mate to his father's
place, and escorted round the grounds by his sister, for whom I
cherished a passion that I hoped was not hopeless. This was while my
friend was busy looking after the nets for the lawn tennis. There were
three summer-houses in various parts of the somewhat extensive grounds,
and in every one of them we came quite too suddenly upon a pair of quite
too obvious lovers.
The sister cicerone hurried past each with averted eyes--after the first
glance--and looked at me and smiled.
We were turning into another avenue after passing the third of these
love-birds, when she stopped abruptly.
“We had better not go on any farther,” said she.
“Oh, why not?” I cried.
“Well, there's another summer-house down there among the lilacs,” she
replied.
We stood there while she looked around, plainly in search of a route
that should be less distracting. It was at this moment of indecision
that I gazed at her. I thought that I had never seen her look so
lovely. 1 felt myself trembling. I know that my eyes were fixed upon the
ground--I could not have spoken the words if I had looked up to her--she
was a good head and shoulder taller than I was:--
“Look here, Miss Fanny, there may be no one in the last of the
summer-houses. Let us go there and sit--sit--the same as the others.”
“Oh, no; I should be afraid,” said she.
“Oh, I swear to you that you shall have no cause, Miss Fanny; I know
what is due to the one you love; you will be quite safe--sacred.”
“What do you know about the one I love?” she asked--and there was a
smile in her voice.
“I know the one who loves you,” I said warmly.
“I'm so glad,” she cried. “I know that he is looking for me everywhere,
and if he found us together in a summer-house he would be sure to kill
you. Captain Tyson is a frightfully jealous man, and you are too nice
a boy to be killed. Do you mind running round by the rhododendrons and
telling Bob that he may wear my tennis shoes to-day? I got a new pair
yesterday.”
I went slowly toward the rhododendrons. When I got beyond their shelter
I looked back.
I did not see her, but I saw the sprightly figure of a naval man
crossing the grass toward where I had left her, and I knew him to be
Commander Tyson, R.N.
Their second son is Commander Tyson, R. N., today.
But from that hour I made up my mind that a properly designed garden
should have at least five summer-houses.
I have just made my fifth.
CHAPTER THE TWENTIETH
I am sure that the most peaceful part of our Garden of Peace is the
Place of Roses. The place of roses in the time of roses is one bower.
It grew out of the orchard ground which I had turned into a lawn in
exchange for the grassy space which I had turned into the House Garden.
The grass came very rapidly when I had grubbed up the roots of the old
plums and cherries. But then we found that the stone-edged beds and the
central fountain had not really taken possession, so to speak, of
the House Garden. This had still the character of a lawn for all its
bedding, and could not be mown in less than two hours.
And just as I was becoming impressed with this fact, a gentle general
dealer came to me with the inquiry f a tall wooden pillar would be of
any use to me. I could not tell him until I had seen it, and when I had
seen it and bought it and had it conveyed home I could not tell him.
It was a fluted column of wood, nearly twenty feet high and two in
diameter, with a base and a carved Corinthian capital--quite an imposing
object, but, as usual, the people at the auction were so startled by
having brought before them something to which they were unaccustomed,
they would not make a bid for it, and my dealer, who has brought me many
an embarrassing treasure, got it fur the ten shillings at which he had
started it.
It lay on the grass where it had been left by the carters, giving to the
landscape for a whole week the semblance of the place of the Parthenon
or the Acropolis; but on the seventh day I clearly saw that one cannot
possess a white elephant without making some sacrifices for that
distinction, and I resolved to sacrifice the new lawn to my hasty
purchase. There are few things in the world dearer than a bargain, and
none more irresistible. Rut, as it turned out, this was altogether an
exceptional thing--as a matter of fact, all my bargains are. I made it
stand in the centre of the lawn and I saw the place transformed.
It occupied no more than a patch less than a yard 'n diameter; but it
dominated the whole neighbourhood. On one side of the place there is
a range of shrubs on a small mound, making people who stand by the new
pend of water-lilies believe that they have come to the bottom of the
garden; on another side is the old Saxon earthwork, now turned into an
expanse of things herbaceous, with a long curved grass path under the
ancient castle walls; down the full length of the third side runs a
pergola, giving no one a glimpse of a great breadth of rose-beds or of
the colonnade beyond, where the sweet-briers have their own way.
There was no reason that I could see (now that I had set my heart on the
scheme) why I should not set up a gigantic rose pillar in the centre of
the lawn and see what would happen.
[Illustration: 0278]
What actually did happen before another year had passed was the erecting
of a tall pillar which looked so lonely in the midst of the grass--a
lighthouse marking a shoal in a green sea--that I made four large
round beds about it, at a distance of about twenty feet, and set up
a nine-foot pillar in the centre of each, planting climbing roses of
various sorts around it, hoping that in due time the whole should be
incorporated and form a ring of roses about the towering centre column.
It really took no more than two years to bring to fruition my most
sanguine hopes, and now there are four rose-tents with hundreds of
prolific shoots above the apex of each, clinging with eager fingers
to the wires which I have brought to them from the top of the central
pillar, and threatening in time to form a complete canopy between forty
and fifty feet in diameter.
In the shade of these ambitious things one sits in what I say is the
most peaceful part of the whole place of peace. Even “winter and rough
weather” may be regarded with complacency from the well-sheltered seats;
and every year toward the end of November Rosamund brings into the house
some big sprays of ramblers and asks her mother if there is any boracic
lint handy. He jests at scars who never felt an Ards Rover scrape down
his arm in resisting lawful arrest. But in July and August, looking
down upon the growing canopy from the grass walk above the herbaceous
terrace, is like realising Byron's awful longing for all the rosy lips
of all the rosy girls in the world to “become one mouth” in order that
he might “kiss them all at once from North to South.” There they are,
thousands and tens of thousands of rosy mouths; but not for kisses, even
separately. Heywood, who, being a painter, is a thoroughly trustworthy
consultant on all artistic matters, assures me that Byron was a fool,
and that his longing for a unification of a million moments of æsthetic
delight was unworthy of his reputation. There may be something in this.
I am content to look down upon our eager roses with no more of a longing
than that September were as far off as Christmas.
It was our antiquarian neighbour who, walking on the terrace one day
in mid-July, told us of a beautiful poem which he had just seen in the
customary corner of the _Gazette_--the full name of the paper is _The
Yardley Gazette, East Longuorth Chronicle, and Nethershire Observer_,
but one would no more think of giving it all its titles in ordinary
conversation than of giving the Duke of Wellington all his. It is with
us as much the _Gazette_ as if no other Gazette had ever been published.
But it prints a copy of verses, ancient or modern, every week, and our
friend had got hold of a gem. The roses reminded him of it He could only
recollect the first two lines, but they were striking:--
“There's a bower of rose by Bendameer's stream
And the nightingale sings in it all the night long.”
Bendameer was some place in China, he thought, or perhaps Japan--but for
the matter of that it might not be a real locality, but merely a place
invented by the poet. Anyhow, he would in future call the terrace walk
Bendameer, for could any one imagine a finer bower of roses than that
beneath us? He did not believe that Bendameer could beat it.
If our friend had talked to Sir Foster Fraser--the only person I ever
met who had been to Bendameer's stream--he might have expressed his
belief much more enthusiastically. On returning from his bicycle tour
round the world, and somewhat disillusioned by the East, ready to affirm
that fifty years of Europe were better than a cycle in Cathay, he told
me that Bendameer's stream was a complete fraud. It was nothing but a
muddy puddle oozing its way through an uninteresting district.
In accordance with our rule, neither Dorothy nor I went further than to
confess that the lines were very sweet.
“I'll get you a copy with pleasure,” he cried. “I knew you would like
them, you are both so literary; and you know how literary I am myself--I
cut out all the poems that appear in the _Gazette_. It's a hobby, and
elevating. I suppose you don't think it possible to combine antiquarian
tastes and poetical.” Dorothy assured him that she could see a distinct
connection between the two; and he went on: “There was another about
roses the week before. The editor is clearly a man of taste, and he puts
in only things that are appropriate to the season. The other one was
about a garden--quite pretty, only perhaps a little vague. I could not
quite make out what it meant at places; but I intend to get it off by
heart, so I wrote it down in iny pocket-book. Here it is:--
“Rosy is the north,
Rosy is the south,
Rosy are her cheeks
And a rose her mouth.”
Now what do you think of it? I call it very pretty--not so good, on
the whole, as the bower of roses by Bendameer's stream, but still quite
nice. You would not be afraid to let one of your little girls read
it--yes, every line.”
Dorothy said that she would not; but then Dorothy is afraid of
nothing--not even an antiquarian.
He returned to us the next day with the full text--only embellished with
half a dozen of the _Gazette's_ misprints--of the _Lalla Rookh_ song,
and read it out to us in full, but failing now and again to get into the
lilt of Moore's melodious anapaests--a marvellous feat, considering how
they sing and swing themselves along from line to line. But that was not
enough, He had another story for us--fresh, quite fresh, from the stock
of a brother antiquarian who recollected it, he said, when watching the
players on the bowling-green.
“I thought I should not lose a minute in coming to you with it,” he
said. “You are so close to the bowling-green here, it should have
additional interest in your eyes. The story is that Nelson was playing
bowls when some one rushed in to say that the Spanish Armada was in
sight. But the news did not put him off his game. 'We'll have plenty of
time to finish our game and beat the Spaniards afterwards,' he cried;
and sure enough he went on with the game to the end. There was a man for
you!”
“And who won?” asked Dorothy innocently.
“That's just the question I put to my friend,” he cried. “The story is
plainly unfinished. He did not say whether Nelson and his partner won
his game against the other players; but you may be sure that he did.”
“He didn't say who was Nelson's partner?” said Dorothy.
“No, I have told you all that he told me,” he replied.
“I shouldn't be surprised to hear that his partner was a man named
Drake,” said I. “A senior partner too in that transaction and others.
But the story is a capital one and show's the Englishman as he is
to-day. Why, it was only the year before the war that there was a verse
going about,--
'I was playing golf one day
When the Germans landed;
All our men had run away,
All our ships were stranded.
And the thought of England's shame
Almost put me off my game.'”
Our antiquarian friend looked puzzled for some time; then he shook his
head gravely, saying:--
“I don't like that. It's a gross libel upon our brave men--and on our
noble sailors too: I heard some one say in a speech the other day that
there are no better seamen in the world than are in the British Navy.
Our soldiers did not run away, and all our ships were not stranded. It
was one of the German lies to say so. And what I say is that it was very
lucky for the man who wrote that verse that there was a British fleet
to prevent the Germans landing. They never did succeed in landing, I'm
sure, though I was talking to a man who had it on good authority that
there were five U-boats beginning to disembark some crack regiments of
Hun cavalry when a British man-o'-war--one, mind you--a single ship--came
'n sight, and they all bundled back to their blessed U-boats hi double
quick time.”
“I think you told me about that before,” said I--and he had. “It was
the same person who brought the first news of the Russian troops going
through England--he had seen them on the platform of Crewe stamping off
the snow they had brought on their boots from Archangel; and afterwards
he had been talking with a soldier who had seen the angels at Mons, and
had been ordered home to be one of the shooting party at the Tower of
London, when Prince Louis was court-martialled and sentenced.”
“Quite true,” he cried. “My God! what an experience for any one man to
go through. But we are living in extraordinary times--that's what I've
never shrunk from saying, no matter who was present--extraordinary
times.”
I could not but agree with him I did not say that what I thought the
most extraordinary feature of the times was the extraordinary credulity
of so many people. The story of the Mons angels was perhaps the most
remarkable of all the series. A journalist sitting in his office in
London simply introduced in a newspaper article the metaphor of a host
of angels holding up the advancing Germans, and within a week scores of
people in England had talked with soldiers who had seen those imaginary
angels and were ready to give a poulterer's description of them, as
Sheridan said some one would do if he introduced the Phoenix into his
Drury Lane Address.
It was no use the journalist explaining that his angels were purely
imaginary ones; people said, when you pointed this out to them:--
“That may be so; but these were the angels he imagined.”
Clergymen preached beautiful sermons on the angel host; and I heard of a
man who sold for half a crown a feather which had dropped from the wing
of one of the angels who had come on duty before he had quite got over
his moult.
When Dorothy heard this she said she was sure that it was no British
soldier who had shown the white feather in France during that awful
time.
“If they were imaginary angels, the white feather must have been
imaginary too,” said Olive, the practical one.
“One of the earliest of angel observers was an ass, and the tradition
has been carefully adhered to ever since,” said Friswell, and after that
there was, of course, no use talking further.
But when we were still laughing over our antiquarian and his novelties
in the form of verse and anecdote, Friswell himself appeared with a
newspaper in his hand, and he too was laughing.
It was over the touching letter of an actress to her errant husband,
entreating him to return and all would be forgiven. I had read it and
smiled; so had Dorothy, and wept.
But it really was a beautiful letter, and I said so to Friswell.
“It is the most beautiful of the four actresses' letters to errant
spouses for Divorce Court purposes that I have read within the past few
months,” said he. “But they are all beautiful--all touching. It makes
one almost ready to condone the sin that results in such an addition to
the literature of the Law Courts. I wonder who is the best person to go
to for such a letter--some men must make a speciality of that sort of
work to meet the demands of the time. But wouldn't it be dreadful if the
errant husband became so convicted of his trespass through reading the
wife's appeal to return, that he burst into tears, called a taxi and
drove home! But these Divorce Court pleading letters are of great value
professionally they have quite blanketed the old lost jewel-case stunt
as a draw. I was present and assisted in the reception given by the
audience to the lady whose beautiful letter had appeared in the paper in
the morning. She was overwhelmed. She had made up pale in view of that
reception; and there was something in her throat that prevented her from
going on with her words for some time. The 'poor things!' that one heard
on all sides showed how truly sympathetic is a British audience.”
“I refuse to listen to your cynicism,” cried Dorothy; “I prefer to
believe that people are good rather than bad.”
“And so do I, my dear lady,” said he, laughing. “But don't you see that
if you prefer to think good of all people, you cannot exclude the poor
husband of the complete letter-writer, and if you believe good of him
and not bad, you must believe that his charming wife is behaving badly
in trying to get a divorce.”
“She doesn't want a divorce: she wants him to come back to her and
writes to him begging him to do so,” said she.
“And such a touching letter too,” I added.
“I have always found 'the profession,' as they call themselves, more
touchy than touching,” said he. “But I admit that I never was so touched
as when, at the funeral of a brother artist, the leading actor of
that day walked behind the coffin with the brokenhearted widow of the
deceased on his right arm and the broken-hearted mistress on the left.
Talk of stage pathos!”
“For my part, I shall do nothing of the sort,” said I sharply. “I think,
Friswell, that you sometimes forget that it was you who gave this place
the name of A Garden of Peace. You introduce controversial topics--The
Actor is the title of one of these, The Actress is the title of the
other. Let us have done with them, and talk poetry instead.”
“Lord of the Garden of Peace! as if poetry was the antithesis of
polemics--verses of controversies!” cried he. “Never mind! give us a
poem--of The Peace.”
“I wish I could,” said I. “The two copies of verses which, as you know,
without having read them, I contributed to the literature--I mean the
writings--in connection with the war could scarcely be called pacific.”
“They were quite an effective medium for getting rid of his superfluous
steam,” said Dorothy to him. “I made no attempt to prevent his writing
them.”
“It would have been like sitting on the safety-valve, wouldn't it?” said
he. “I think that literature would not have suffered materially if
a good number of safety-valves had been sat upon by stouter wives of
metre-engineers than you will ever be, O guardian lady of the Garden of
Peace! The poets of the present hour have got much to recommend them to
the kindly notice of readers of taste, but they have all fallen short
of the true war note on their bugles. Perhaps when they begin to pipe of
peace they will show themselves better masters of the reed than of the
conch.”
“Whatever some of them may be----” I began, when he broke in.
“Say some of _us_, my friend: you can't dissociate yourself from your
pals in the dock: you will be sentenced _en bloc_, believe me.”
“Well, whatever _we_ may be we make a better show than the Marlborough
Muses or the Wellington or the Nelson Muses did. What would be thought
of _The Campaign_ if it were to appear to-morrow, I wonder. But it
did more in advancing the interests of Addison than the complete
_Spectator_.”