Section 2 of 15 - Table of Contents
May 14th.--To-day I am writing on the verandah with the
three babies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me,
and already several of the thirty fingers have been in
the ink-pot and the owners consoled when duty pointed to rebukes.
But who can rebuke such penitent and drooping sunbonnets?
I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble black legs.
These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener,
and the gardener's assistant, are the only people who ever
go into my garden, but then neither are we ever out of it.
The gardener has been here a year and has given me notice
regularly on the first of every month, but up to now has
been induced to stay on. On the first of this month he came
as usual, and with determination written on every feature told
me he intended to go in June, and that nothing should alter
his decision. I don't think he knows much about gardening,
but he can at least dig and water, and some of the things
he sows come up, and some of the plants he plants grow,
besides which he is the most unflaggingly industrious person
I ever saw, and has the great merit of never appearing
to take the faintest interest in what we do in the garden.
So I have tried to keep him on, not knowing what the next one
may be like, and when I asked him what he had to complain
of and he replied "Nothing," I could only conclude
that he has a personal objection to me because of my eccentric
preference for plants in groups rather than plants in lines.
Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts from gardening books I
read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing something new.
Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead of explaining,
to take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom
at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked.
I quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety
not to lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given
me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book
at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed,
so that I may be reminded in twenty years' time, when the garden
is a bower of loveliness and I learned in all its ways,
of my first happy struggles and failures.
All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn
into their permanent places, and all through April he went about with a
long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful
exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review.
Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when I
explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and not
in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare spaces
of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than usual;
and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had planted
two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little lines
of five plants in a row--first five pinks, and next to them five rockets,
and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets,
and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to the end.
When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders and had
known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining borders
were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have patience
and see how they look this summer, before digging them up again;
for it becomes beginners to be humble.
If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier,
besides being so fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where
you want them and put in your plants exactly as you choose instead
of giving orders that can only be half understood from the moment
you depart from the lines laid down by that long piece of string!
In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my
burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose,
I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants'
dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner,
slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little
piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea,
and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair
and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.
And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it
is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise
and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that sad
business of the apple.
What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books,
babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them!
Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying,
and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks
if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest
above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily.
I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone,
and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day.
And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal
the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month
sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume
of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over
the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound
in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?
A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver
through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of past summers,
and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair.
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be killed.
I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer
and not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning
of all the fun.
This has been quite an eventful afternoon.
My eldest baby, born in April, is five years old, and the youngest,
born in June, is three; so that the discerning will at once
be able to guess the age of the remaining middle or May baby.
While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on the top
of the only thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses,
the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a tree stump
close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror.
I stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw
that a whole army of young cows, pasturing in a field next
to the garden, had got through the hedge and were grazing
perilously near my tea-roses and most precious belongings.
The nurse and I managed to chase them away, but not before
they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in the
cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses,
and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying
to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener
happened to be ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers--
as Lutheran Germany calls afternoon tea or its equivalent--
so the nurse filled up the holes as well as she could with mould,
burying the crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever of their
hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking on dejectedly.
The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond
her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself
and went after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen.
She planted herself in front of them brandishing her stick,
and they stood in a row and stared at her in great astonishment;
and she kept them off until one of the men from the farm
arrived with a whip, and having found the cowherd sleeping
peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating.
The cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger
than the man who beat him, but he took his punishment
as part of the day's work and made no remark of any sort.
It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches,
and I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work
for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows.
Nobody with less imagination than a poet ought to take it up
as a profession.
After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two
with as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened
to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my head,
sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for it
could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery.
It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the quaintest,
wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go,
but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present
on a journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often
said how much he would like to have a young owl and try and tame it.
So I put it into a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near where it
had been sitting, and which cannot be far from its nest and its mother.
We had hardly subsided again to our tea when I saw two more balls
of fluff on the ground in the long grass and scarcely distinguishable
at a little distance from small mole-hills. These were promptly united
to their relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath comes home,
not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,
but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take them
from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again some day--
perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey.
I put a small pot of water in the cage, though they never could have
tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves.
I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of
the mice and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents.
But the raindrop idea is prettier.
May 15th.--How cruel it was of me to put those poor little
owls into a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself,
and shall never pander to the Man of Wrath's wishes again.
This morning I got up early to see how they were getting on,
and I found the door of the cage wide open and no owls to be seen.
I thought of course that somebody had stolen them--
some boy from the village, or perhaps the chastised cowherd.
But looking about I saw one perched high up in the branches of
the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead on the ground.
The third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in its nest.
The parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance
they got the door open, and then dragged the little ones out
and up into the tree. The one that is dead must have been blown
off the branch, as it was a windy night and its neck is broken.
There is one happy life less in the garden to-day through
my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm day--just the sort
of weather for young soft things to enjoy and grow in.
The babies are greatly distressed, and are digging a grave,
and preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.
Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival,
and running out I breathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been
able to give him the owls he has so often said he would like to have,
and how sorry I was they were gone, and how grievous the death of one,
and so on after the voluble manner of women.
He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, "I am
surprised at such cruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so?
She had never done you any harm."
Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced
than ever that he sang true who sang--
Two paradises 'twere in one to live in Paradise alone.
May 16th.--The garden is the place I go to for refuge
and shelter, not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances,
servants to exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals;
but out there blessings crowd round me at every step--
it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me,
for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse than they feel;
it is there that all my sins and silliness are forgiven,
there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower
and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been
vexed I run out to them for comfort, and when I have been
angry without just cause, it is there that I find absolution.
Did ever a woman have so many friends? And always the same,
always ready to welcome me and fill me with cheerful thoughts.
Happy children of a common Father, why should I, their own sister,
be less content and joyous than they? Even in a thunder storm,
when other people are running into the house, I run out of it.
I do not like thunder storms--they frighten me for hours
before they come, because I always feel them on the way;
but it is odd that I should go for shelter to the garden.
I feel better there, more taken care of, more petted.
When it thunders, the April baby says, "There's lieber Gott scolding
those angels again." And once, when there was a storm in the night,
she complained loudly, and wanted to know why lieber Gott didn't
do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so tight asleep.
They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and English,
adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting
in English words in the middle of a German sentence.
It always reminds me of Justice tempered by Mercy.
We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by
the name of the Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground
of innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings,
calling each other out to combat with bayings that ring through
the silence and send agreeable shivers through the lonely listener.
I often walk there in September, late in the evening, and sitting
on a fallen tree listen fascinated to their angry cries.
We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had
never seen such things nor had imagined anything half so sweet.
The Hirschwald is a little open wood of silver birches and springy
turf starred with flowers, and there is a tiny stream meandering
amiably about it and decking itself in June with yellow flags.
I have dreams of having a little cottage built there,
with the daisies up to the door, and no path of any sort--
just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside and a purple
clematis outside. Two rooms--a bedroom and a kitchen.
How scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day!
I know the exact spot where it should stand, facing south-east,
so that we should get all the cheerfulness of the morning,
and close to the stream, so that we might wash our plates among the flags. Sometimes, when in the
mood for society,
we would invite the remaining babies to tea and entertain them
with wild strawberries on plates of horse-chestnut leaves;
but no one less innocent and easily pleased than a baby would
be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny cottage--
indeed, I don't suppose that anybody wiser would care to come.
Wise people want so many things before they can even begin to
enjoy themselves, and I feel perpetually apologetic when with them,
for only being able to offer them that which I love best myself--
apologetic, and ashamed of being so easily contented.
The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town
(it took us the whole afternoon to get there) the women after
dinner were curious to know how I had endured the winter,
cut off from everybody and snowed up sometimes for weeks.
"Ah, these husbands!" sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking
her head; "they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don't
care what their sufferings are."
Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady
was a great local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful
husband had brought his young wife into the country and had kept
her there, concealing her beauty and accomplishments from the public
in a most cruel manner, and how, after spending a certain number of years
in alternately weeping and producing progeny, she had quite lately run
away with somebody unspeakable--I think it was the footman, or the baker,
or some one of that sort.
"But I am quite happy," I began, as soon as I could put
in a word.
"Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,"
and the female potentate patted my hand, but continued gloomily
to shake her head.
"You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,"
asserted another lady, the wife of a high military authority and not
accustomed to be contradicted.
"But I am."
"But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible."
"But I _am_."
"Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter."
"But I don't want to be brought to town."
"And not let you waste your best years buried."
"But I like being buried."
"Such solitude is not right."
"But I'm not solitary."
"And can come to no good." She was getting quite angry.
There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark,
and renewed shaking of heads.
"I enjoyed the winter immensely," I persisted when they
were a little quieter; "I sleighed and skated, and then
there were the children, and shelves and shelves full of--"
I was going to say books, but stopped. Reading is an occupation
for men; for women it is reprehensible waste of time.
And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun
shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hear-frost days?
"It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,"
I proceeded, "and my husband only did it to please me."
"Such a good little wife," repeated the patronising potentate,
again patting my hand with an air of understanding all about it,
"really an excellent little wife. But you must not let your husband
have his own way too much, my dear, and take my advice and insist
on his bringing you to town next winter."
And then they fell to talking about their cooks, having settled to their
entire satisfaction that my fate was probably lying in wait for me too,
lurking perhaps at that very moment behind the apparently harmless brass
buttons of the man in the hall with my cloak.
I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction
when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty
old house; and when I went into the library, with its four windows open
to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves,
and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read
or dream or idle exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me,
how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me
a heart to understand my own blessedness, and rescued me from a life like
that I had just seen--a life spent with the odours of other people's dinners
in one's nostrils, and the noise of their wrangling servants in one's ears,
and parties and tattle for all amusement.
But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed
when some grand person, examining the details of my home
through her eyeglass, and coolly dissecting all that I
so much prize from the convenient distance of the open window,
has finished up by expressing sympathy with my loneliness, and on
my protesting that I like it, has murmured, "sebr anspruchslos."
Then indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants;
but only for a moment, and only under the withering influence
of the eyeglass; for, after all, the owner's spirit is the same
spirit as that which dwells in my servants--girls whose one idea
of happiness is to live in a town where there are others of their
sort with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons.
The passion for being for ever with one's fellows, and the fear of
being left for a few hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible.
I can entertain myself quite well for weeks together, hardly aware,
except for the pervading peace, that I have been alone at all.
Not but what I like to have people staying with me for a few days,
or even for a few weeks, should they be as anspruchslos as I am myself,
and content with simple joys; only, any one who comes here and would
be happy must have something in him; if he be a mere blank creature,
empty of head and heart, he will very probably find it dull.
I should like my house to be often full if I could find people
capable of enjoying themselves. They should be welcomed and sped
with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to confess that,
though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just as much
to see them go.
On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually
longed for some one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me.
There has been rain in the night, and the whole garden seems to
be singing--not the untiring birds only, but the vigorous plants,
the happy grass and trees, the lilac bushes--oh, those lilac bushes!
They are all out to-day, and the garden is drenched with the scent.
I have brought in armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every
pot and bowl and tub in the house is filled with purple glory,
and the servants think there is going to be a party and are extra nimble,
and I go from room to room gazing at the sweetness, and the windows
are all flung open so as to join the scent within to the scent without;
and the servants gradually discover that there is no party,
and wonder why the house should be filled with flowers for one woman
by herself, and I long more and more for a kindred spirit--
it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to oneself--but kindred
spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost as well cry for the moon.
It is true that my garden is full of friends, only they are--dumb.
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