MICHAELMAS DAISY AND ROSE-BUGS
A GREAT hedge, cut to resemble the old-fashioned pillar-and-ball
entrance to a driveway, welcomed one into the beginning of the gardens.
Beyond the hedge the path curved abruptly, and a six-foot wall with
high terraces beyond filled the view. Blue masses of sentinel-like
larkspur in mounting tiers gave the first greeting. Here was the
evidence of an intelligent planning to capture the eye right at
the beginning and make one eager to follow the curving path to see
what would be beyond. Instinctively Richard stopped and uttered the
prophesied word, “Beautiful!” The thought of “Grapes fust!” never
intruded.
At the curve the walk widened into a little circle of violet phlox,
walled-up on all sides except towards the sun and towards the narrow
arched opening that led farther on. The walls were not high and
were almost concealed by the climbing blue clematis; beyond them
was slightly higher ground crowded with blue harebell, and farther
back a battalion of Chinese larkspur. Blue snapdragon--giants, every
one--sprang out here and there, and a bevy of smaller border flowers
filled in the scheme--all blue. An old-fashioned hickory settle invited
one to sit and enjoy; and near it had been planted nests of the more
fragrant plants, and borders of blue campanula, Jacob’s ladder and
creeping phlox.
Richard sat on the settle and admired. “Beautiful!” he exclaimed
again and again. It was a bower of blue--blue and purple and violet
and lavender and red-blue; but nothing clashed or interfered with the
dominant cerulean note; there was enough rich green to separate what
would otherwise be jarring shades.
What a puzzling mute Jerry Wells could be when she chose! In all their
chatty hours together there had been hardly a word about this; and
undoubtedly here was but the vestibule of the gardens. “Red Jacket”
should be discovered for oneself, she always said. Well, it was better
so; half the delight in life is the unanticipated joys.
Green shrubs blocked the view through the arch, but one turn--the
garden was a maze of turns--and behold, a diminutive bridge and a
slender spring-fed rivulet, and beyond, in clumps and patches raised at
various elevations by hidden walls, blooms of delicate pink: Canterbury
bells, hollyhock, phlox, gladiolus, lupine, foxglove.
The pink bower was larger than the blue and was, therefore, not to
be taken in at once. Curving paths appeared leading to a series of
surprises, a sward of rest-harrow here and a bevy of tall canna there,
but no alien colour had been permitted to spoil the general tone.
Just over a hedge Richard heard voices and the light-hearted laugh of
negroes at work. Someone in authority was giving directions; it sounded
like Jerry’s voice, so he chanted the family song, the two musical
notes, the fifth and the third of the scale, “Hel-lo!”
The song came back, softly wafted over the green barrier,
“Hel-lo!”--the “lo” held until it diminished into a whisper.
Eagerly he sought a path, singing the call occasionally as he missed
his way and getting the response every time. The path that he chose
dropped down broad flagstone steps and then rose. He had completed
a half-circle before he came upon a hillside of yellow blooms,
gaillardia, black-eyed Susans, and dahlia. They fairly shouted at
him, especially the yellow daisies, but he did not see them at all.
“Hel-lo!” he sang in his flutest tones; and “Hel-lo!” came back almost
at his feet. He found himself standing on a six-foot wall at the top
of a set of narrow stone steps; below him Mrs. Wells was engaging the
attention of several negroes with wheelbarrows, spades and a whole
galaxy of garden tools.
“Hel-lo!” she sang up at him.
Richard was astonished at his own disappointment. Courage to face
folks was not always ready at call, and at this precise hour he felt
no terrifying shyness. He was not one to be courageous at a moment’s
notice; his ridiculous left-handedness had a habit of visiting him when
he least desired it; it was a pity that Jerry was not present now when
he felt so able.
But to Mrs. Wells he showed no sign either of surprise or
disappointment.
“Hel-lo!” he sang cheerfully; and came down the steep irregular steps.
“I’ll never be kind to a Michaelmas daisy again,” she greeted him,
trowel in hand.
“Are they ungrateful?” he asked and looked at the black-eyed Susans.
“They seem very sweet and ingratiating to me.”
“Oh, I don’t mean the rudbeckia,” she laughed. “They are just as bad,
but----”
“Pardon me,” Richard interrupted. “Introduce me to this bad rude Becky;
I don’t know her at all.”
“The black-eyed Susans!” she laughed at his ignorance. “You are staring
at them. We gardeners call them rudbeckias. You just daren’t let them
go to seed; they’d run over the whole place. Just look how they have
multiplied since I have been away! But they’re not half so bad as the
Michaelmas daisy, who have no right to be in the yellow garden at all.”
“Why, pray?” Richard searched about for the offending member.
“Because they are blue.”
“H-m! Blue!” he still looked about him. “Perhaps I’m growing blinded by
all the beauty hereabouts, but I don’t see anything blue.”
She laughed again, delighted with his stupidity.
“If you look into those barrows,” she pointed, “you’ll see the blue
truants. They belong in the blue beds, but they got loose somehow and
cropped up all over the place. I’ve been spending my hours hunting them
out. Don’t you see where we have been digging?”
Then Richard saw the great gashes, and admitted his folly. Everything
was so wonderful and colossal he had not been able to see the defects,
he told her. By this time his eye was taking in the spreading expanse
of yellow field.
“‘And then my heart with rapture fills,’” he quoted, “‘and dances with
the----’ I don’t see any daffodils.”
Even the negroes laughed at this.
“Have I said something stupid?” he asked. “Don’t blame me; blame
Wordsworth. I’m sure he said daffodils--but perhaps he only did it for
the rhyme. If Jawn were here he’d make a limerick to fit black-eyed
Susans.... But just why are daffodils so funny?”
“Daffodils are a spring flower, my dear Richard,” Mrs. Wells began to
explain.
“Of course they are!” Richard remembered. “Wretchedly stupid of me. But
I never can keep pace with that kind of information. I never know when
it is kite time or top time.... We’ll have to bring Wordsworth up to
the minute. How is this:
“And then with joy my heart goes crazy
And dances with the Michaelmas daisy?”
“Not mine!” Mrs. Wells shook her head and flourished the trowel.
“Oh,” he corrected himself, “your version should be,
“And then with anger my mind goes crazy
And trowels away at the Michaelmas daisy!
“It isn’t as smooth as one of Jawn’s, but the idea is sound.”
“Quite right,” agreed Mrs. Wells. “Michaelmas daisies are decent
enough, like some of these black boys, when they know their proper
places.”
The black boys “hyah-hyahed” at this tribute to their ambitious
proclivities. “Saul there,” she went on, “is a black Michaelmas
daisy”--Saul exploded with appreciative laughter--“he goes right into
my refrigerator without so much as by-your-leave and helps himself to
the best musk-melons. Some day I’ll have to take my trowel to him and
let you boys wheel him off to the weed-fire.”
The darkies enjoyed this amiable attack on Saul’s weakness for
musk-melon, but none more than the black culprit. The Virginia give and
take between master and servant was strangely at home in these northern
hills. Evidently, thought Richard, the transplanting of a hundred years
ago had been done with expert skill; none of the southern flavour had
been lost.
“Trowel won’t nebber do, M’s Wells,” cried Saul between choking
guffaws; “reckon you-all’ll hab to git a pickaxe! Yass’m--sho’ hab to
git a pickaxe.”
Interested as Richard was in the plantation setting and in the
glorious richness of the floral display his heart was not dancing like
Wordsworth’s for either daffodils or black-eyed Susans. The first eager
thought that he might find Jerry alone in the gardens had left a strong
desire to go to her. There was much that he had to say to that young
lady. It had better be done now. “Do it now” was not his favourite
motto; it smacked too much of commerce; but doing it now seemed
suddenly to acquire appropriateness. With this idea in mind he turned
towards the ladder of stones and began to mount.
“As we go up the steps and turn to the left,” Mrs. Wells remarked as
she followed, “you’ll come upon something I very much wish you to
admire. Jerry said I mustn’t guide-book you about, so I’ll say nothing
about what you’ll find; but I’m very proud of my--well, never mind
what.”
She was going with him! Well, he would take a look and then be off. Of
course, the gardens were wonderful, but they would keep, and----
Suddenly he found himself saying, “Beautiful!” again, exactly as
George Alexander had predicted. Through a dense mass of shrubbery they
had picked their way until abruptly the hollyhocks broke upon them,
thousands of them! It was like a magnificent western cornfield, tilted
to the sun. Walks of snapdragon and lupine and hardy pinks wound their
way among the giant flowers. And no particular colour had been allowed
to grow in very large masses; the foxglove and the larkspur and the
gladiolus came back, like the _leitmotiv_ of a German opera, and all
joined in a monster symphonic design, whose design was not apparent at
all. It was the climax, the _finale_, of the piece, the full orchestra
wherein the little bowers of blue and pink and yellow had been solos,
unaccompanied flute and clarionet and French horn.
But even here there were turns of the path, hummocks of hardy shrubs,
unexpected beflowered walls, and finally, at the top of the hill, in
the early stage of light-green bloom, a veritable grove of hydrangeas.
“_Gi_-unts, they is, reg-u-lar hydrang’a _gi_-unts!” George Alexander
had called them. Through the myriad straight slender trunks the blue
sky beyond the hill formed a perfect background; and with the massive
clustered heads, seemingly clipped out into symmetrical designs, the
scene had all the effect of a gigantic Maxfield Parrish poster.
For the first time Richard neglected to say “Beautiful!” Instead, he
looked on in thoughtful wonder, turned about and took in the sweep
of acres below him crowded with perennials, masses of deep red and
old rose and white which he had not seen before. Then he began to
understand the enormous effort of the thing, and the cost in money,
time and labour. So he did not say “Beautiful,” but he thought of
George Alexander and said to himself, “Grapes fust!”
But he did not follow George Alexander’s directions and say it aloud.
The beauty of the scene before him was too rare an experience; and
grapes, after all, were simply something for sale. It was not expected
that George Alexander’s mind could get above the rise and fall of the
market. Beauty was an emotional experience, not something to be sold
for a penny; and emotional experiences were the essence of living.
Better a dinner of herbs where beauty is than many profitable baskets
of grapes.
So he turned to the expectant woman beside him and praised and
praised. These gardens were a revelation of her mind, he told her, a
cross-section of her soul. Unconsciously he began to batter down George
Alexander’s arguments against thrift and close buying and selling and
all the other despicable acts of trade.
The penniless are the most eloquent abusers of wealth! What is money,
he asked her derisively, compared with the wealth before them! “Let
the millioned-dollared ride! Barefoot trudging at his side” hath what
wealth cannot purchase. Thrift? Economy? Profit? He repudiated them all
and apostrophized the work before him, and crowned with rhetoric the
Workwoman.
The Workwoman glowed and applauded; and for payment she let him into
the secrets of her craft; her fight against mullein and sorrel, grubs,
and cut-worms; the mysteries of mulch; the struggle to keep a steady
Christian colour in sweet-williams, hollyhocks and columbines; the
everlasting effort to lift the cup of cold water to the lips of the
ever-thirsty gladiolus; the war against the onrush of Michaelmas daisy,
Bouncing Bet and hawkbit; the constant necessity of nipping helianthus,
phlox and golden glow, which otherwise grow rank and ungainly; the
multifarious uses of sprays for killing everything from larkspur blight
to rose-bugs. And she confessed her private theories of soils and her
views on seed propagation and root splitting; on fertilizers; on cold
frames; and on continuous bloom throughout the year.
“Helen Albee tells me that no one can get a continuous blue,” she
warmed up enthusiastically, “but I did it one year.” And then she
started a technical avalanche of names. “Who is Helen Albee? She is a
fellow-conspirator among us hardy perennialists. I give her credit for
all this--she and Lena Walker--I was nowhere until I met those two.”
There was no false egotism about this artist. Richard was astonished
at the change in her. Her old self had almost come back, and something
moved him to tell her so. They had been sitting for some time in the
shadow of the hydrangeas and were facing out towards the Lake.
“No;” she closed her lips firmly; “I am not myself yet.... I am not
well. Ever since----”
Abruptly she stopped speaking and with caution pressed a hand to her
heart, almost furtively. It was there that Walter had struck her, but
she would not have admitted it. The blow had been something more than
mental; it had left a physical bruise which declined to heal; and she
was conscious of occasional inward pain which she tried to tell herself
would soon pass away. But Richard, who saw the quiver pass over her
face, did not observe the motion of her hand, and he could not have
suspected its cause. And even if he had guessed, this weak old woman
would have straightened up valiantly and would have lied about it with
deceiving outward cheerfulness. The Virginia plantation of the early
nineteenth century had been moved north with all its characteristic
virtues intact!
But she had begun to confess once more to this dutiful squire. “No; I
am not well,” she said.
“I am sorry,” Richard said feelingly.
“I know you are,” she nodded her head several times thoughtfully; “I
feel your sincerity. That’s why I tell you so much that I conceal from
others. Let me tell you some more.... You are as good as a priest,”
she smiled at him. “It is only in my gardens that I feel my old self.
I am not strong any more--no! you need not try to encourage me; I
know. But up here among my flowers I fool myself--I act as if I were
in control of things; I boss the black boys about and boss even the
flowers and the rose-bugs. I’m happy up here; I have nothing to worry
me.”
She stopped, evidently at the preamble of her confession. Walter was on
Richard’s mind, and on that score he was preparing himself to infuse
self-confidence into her; but her mind was leagues from Walter.
Richard laughed to dispel the effect of her gloomy tone and asked what
on earth she had to worry about.
“‘Red Jacket’ is mortgaged to the limit, and the interest is long
overdue; I have been borrowing for twenty years, and I don’t know how
many thousands I owe,” she remarked simply, as casually as if she had
invited him to enjoy the view.
The unexpected information shocked him, although certainly George
Alexander had given him ample clues. He began a speech about the
uselessness of money--one of his favourite poetic theories--but it did
not ring true. For the first time in his life he found that Thoreauean
point of view distasteful.
“Does Jerry know?” he interrupted himself.
“She’ll know if she can ever make head or tail out of the books,” she
answered serenely. “Well!” she gave a tremendous sigh of relief and
actually smiled. “I’m glad I don’t have to do the juggling any longer.
I’ve thrown it all on Jerry now. She’s young and able, I guess. She’ll
find a way out, never fear.”
And so she talked complacently, meanwhile with every other sentence
giving ugly details which showed plainly enough, even to Richard’s
non-commercial experience, that Jerry would have to be a financial
magician to find any way out except via bankruptcy. He tried to quiz
her, but she put him off with the plea that the business of managing
the estate was no longer her affair. She was too happy with her
perennials to spoil it all with figures that would not come out right.
She joked about it, too; showing all too clearly that if bossing things
in the gardens had given her the appearance of her old masterful self,
it was an appearance only. A bit of her mind, seemingly, had become
atrophied without in the least harming the remainder. Heretofore she
had been both a dominating manager of a complicated estate and a clever
gardener; at present the dominating manager had vanished, leaving only
the clever gardener.
Richard rose precipitately. He must see Jerry at once. She had seemed
particularly worried lately; and he remembered with a pang that he and
Jawn had been trying to joke her into good spirits. With this calamity
hanging over her--already she must have got an inkling of the state of
affairs--they had been unforgivably cruel. He must go to her instantly.
“Who is your lawyer?” he asked Mrs. Wells; his tone was almost crisp.
“My lawyer?” she inquired in turn. “I never had any.”
“You speak of mortgages and bonds and transfers of property,” he
followed up quickly. “Whom do you consult about such matters?”
“Oh,” she smiled sweetly; “you mean Mitchell Lear, I suppose. Of
course, he’s a lawyer; but I never go to him about law matters--only as
a friend.”
“Does he know about your affairs?”
She thought carefully. “Ye-es,” she admitted. “He knows; not that I
ever told him much, but he always guessed, I reckon. I fibbed to him
about everything,” she laughed at the remembrance, “but you can’t fool
Mitchell Lear. Words aren’t anything to him; he just looks on quietly
through your eyes and into the very privacy of your soul. Once I told
him a long story about deciding to buy more orchard land--buy, you
understand--and after I was quite done, he nodded his wise head and
remarked, ‘I’m sorry you’ve made up your mind to sell!’ ‘But I said
“buy,”’ said I. ‘I heard you,’ said he; ‘and I say that you are making
a mistake to sell.’”
Mrs. Wells laughed quietly and contentedly at the remembrance. “And
the funny part of it was,” she told Richard, “I had just sold all the
orchard we possessed; and it _was_ a mistake, too,” she added, “just as
he knew it would be.... Oh, well! I mustn’t think of those things any
more; they make me too unhappy.”
Mrs. Wells was sorry to see Richard go--there were many more things
to show him, but he would have none of them. With a faintly troubled
face she watched him stride down a path and disappear behind a grove
of hollyhocks. But in a moment or two she had forgotten about him and
was calling her blacks about her. The imperative duty of the hour was
rose-bugs.