Part 4

All these plants, especially the more recently planted ones, will need pretty constant looking after during the next year or so, but once that crucial period of their existence is over, it is my hope--possibly only my delusion--that they will learn so to arrange their affairs as merely to require the sort of attention that is necessary to see that they do not overcrowd one another, or--what is more serious--become invaded by wild neighbours, rose-campions, and the like, swarming in upon them to the point of suffocation. The safest way of avoiding this is undoubtedly to cover the ground with low, carpeting growths, which will remain green nearly all the year round, and at the same time not make too severe a demand upon the soil. The number of such kindly little evergreens, or semi-evergreens is a constant surprise when one comes to collect them, and the fact that there should be so many speaks volumes for a climate that we are none of us ever weary of abusing. Apart from absolute rock-plants, nearly all of which are evergreen, there are a number of others, which rarely or never lose their leaves, and whose presence saves banks and hollows like these from the reproach of bareness, and further takes away--certainly ought to take away--all excuses for visitations from that Tool of the Destroyer, the pitchfork. Of such plants none are better than certain campanulas, including our own hairbells, both the blue and the white. Wood-sorrels again are excellent in a shady place, or, for a sunnier one, there is their energetic cousin Oxalis floribunda, in this soil the most undaunted of colonisers, growing all the winter. “Creeping Jenny” again, and “Blue-eyed Mary,” delightful things with delightful names, will cover as much space as they are allowed to do. Of the more easily grown forget-me-nots there are at least four kinds--palustris, for planting close to the water, or in it; dissitiflora, happy all the summer, so long as it gets a little shade; sylvatica and alpestris, growing anywhere, and everywhere. Epimediums, again, are excellent, though apt to get a little rusty in the winter. So is Tellina grandiflora, an unwisely named plant, since its strength lies, not in its flowers, but its leaves. Thymes, too, are always available; likewise potentillas, erysimums, and veronicas, though these last may seem to be trenching upon the rock-plant region. Then, if we want larger growths, are there not all the megaseas, which may be torn in pieces two or three times a year, if we like? Of low-growing shrubs, such as Euonymus radicans, the various creeping cotoneasters, the savin, Gaultheria shallon, and others, there is no lack. Yet another, and one of the best of them all, Cornus canadensis, a true shrub, and an evergreen one, although no larger than a wild wood-strawberry.

But I find myself growing breathless, and the list of such kindly “carpeters” is in reality only begun. Flinging down woodruffs, wild pansies, foam-flowers, sedums, mossy saxifrages, waldsteinias, and periwinkles, as one might out of a basket, I will only now delay to find room for a few rock-pinks, particularly for these four--cæsius, cruentus, atro-rubens, and deltoides,--all of which may be sown broadcast in the spring, and all of which, especially the last, may be trusted to hold their own against any but the biggest and most ferocious of natives.

We have been honest caterers for our clients, as far as preparation went, and my hope, I may say my ideal, is that they will henceforward be content with receiving merely surface nourishment from time to time, and will neither look for or need that eternal process of renewal, and as a consequence of disorganisation, which is the bane, though I am willing to admit the unavoidable bane, of nearly every flower-bed and border.

Ideals are odd things, and this one of mine seems, even as I write it down, about as ridiculous and puny an ideal as any forlorn idealist was ever driven into making a boast of! Such as it is, however, I cling to it tenaciously. After all what does it mean? Written out a little large it means repose of mind, and a freedom from the strain of change; it even means a certain sense of finality, and that at a very sensitive spot in one’s small environment.

To a greater or less extent we all sigh for finality. Nobody has ever attained to it, that I have heard of, and not many people would perhaps relish it if they could do so. None the less it remains, something haunting; a dimly descried presence, to us vaguely desirable. To sit at ease under their own vines; to be at rest in their own shaded places, has from the earliest days flattered the imaginations of men, busy and idle ones alike. Dawdlers in sunny places, and haunters of gardens like ourselves are naturally assigned to the second of these categories. Since we have to support the reproach of idleness, let us at least then take heed that we secure the comfort of it. If Leisure is an acquaintance of ours he is an acquaintance of so few people nowadays, that we had better make the most of him. Now fuss the good man detests, and change, merely for change’s sake, is undoubtedly one of the very worst forms of fuss. Like every other pursuit and following, horticulture no doubt has its battlefields, and those who go out upon them must expect charge and countercharge, rapid assault and varying vicissitude, like other heroes upon other battlefields. For me such combats, I am free to confess, have not even a vicarious charm; Peace being the only deity to whom I would willingly raise even the smallest of garden altars. With other out-of-door conditions we all aver that it is their stability, their adorable unchangeableness, which lends them in our eyes their most persistent charm. Why then are we not to look for the same charm in our gardens, which after all come nearest home? That it is a charm easy of attainment I were loth to asseverate, but that seems hardly a reason for not endeavouring to attain to it. It is in this direction at all events that my own private plottings and plannings propose to turn. If I must moil and delve; if I must plant, dig, and contrive now, it is with the fixed and fond determination of before long sitting resolutely down, and doing absolutely nothing!

OCTOBER 27, 1899

Who dare forecast even his nearest future?

These last four weeks have been so charged with anxiety--not only, or even chiefly, war anxieties--that I have not made so much as a single entry in this diary. In fact there has been nothing to record. The poor little garden; its flowers; its weeds; the copse surrounding it; the entire _mise-en-scène_, with all the quips and jests which in sunnier hours it gives rise to, seems to have vanished bodily. It is as though the whole thing, erstwhile not without its own little importance, had dwindled to the size of one of those infinitesimal specks, which one sometimes sees in feverish dreams; specks so dim and small, so well-nigh invisible, that one wonders how in the first place one ever discovered them, and why, having done so, one should take the trouble of trying to keep them in sight. That being the case it is as well that I am leaving home to-morrow for several weeks, and, since I shall be chiefly in London, have a good excuse for leaving the garden diary, like the garden itself, behind me. Possibly, by the time I return to them, the old, now submerged, landmarks may have risen once more to the surface, or I may have grown a little better used to this changed landscape; seeing that we all have to get used to every variety of landscape; every admixture of weather; every cruel, blinding storm; every rain-washed shore, or bitter, wreck-strewn sea, which meets us in this very odd journey that we call our lives.

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 1899

There was a slight sprinkling of snow this morning, yet the garden looks exceedingly black. Save for a scarce discernible white line here and there, everything in it seems stiff, and hard, and black as iron; crumpled iron leaves against an iron floor. Black is the livery, not alone of sorrow, but of dismay, so that the garden does very well just now to wear it. There are moments in the individual life, moments, so it appears, even in an entire nation’s life, when the ordinary scheme of things seems to dissolve and change; when all the familiar landmarks for the time being melt away, and disappear under our eyes.

Standing here, staring blankly out of the window, I feel myself for the moment a sort of embodiment of all the other, vacant-eyed starers out of windows, up and down over the face of the country this Christmas morning. How many of them there must be! How many must be staring down at the dull ground, and telling themselves they will never care to walk in, or to look at their gardens again. It may not be an actual garden, but at least it will be a figurative one; some special plot of happiness; some quarter-acre of habitual enjoyment. I hope, indeed I feel sure, that in the great majority of cases they will sooner or later enjoy it again. Father Time is at bottom a kindly creature, kindlier than when in trouble we are inclined to believe him to be. For the moment however the idea seems unrealisable, and would scarcely be welcome if it were realised.

For hardly-pressed humanity there is, I believe, only one really satisfactory way of dealing with misfortune, which is--to refuse to believe in it! That is, I find, the method that our excellent Cuttle in the garden has adopted with regard to most of the recent events in South Africa. Anything exceptionally disagreeable, especially anything that has to do with the surrender of Englishmen, no matter under what circumstances, he simply declines to believe in. It is not that he is ignorant. He reads his paper diligently; he knows everything that is in it, but he refuses to accept more of the contents than he considers proper. When, a few weeks ago, the first of our Natal mishaps occurred, and the number of English prisoners captured was posted up in the village hall, Cuttle informed me the next morning that he had seen it, but that there wasn’t a word of truth in it! I demurred, but he stuck to his guns steadily. It was the same last Monday, when I saw him for the first time after our two most recent misfortunes, that of the Modder and the Tugela.

“This is bad news, Cuttle,” I said, as we met outside the greenhouse.

“Well ma’am, they do try to make it out to be baddish, but I wouldn’t believe it, if I was you.”

“But it is in all the papers, Cuttle.”

“Very likely it is ma’am, but what of that? I don’t hold with none of those papers. They must be a-stuffing themselves out with something.”

“But I’m afraid the generals admit it themselves.”

“Excuse me ma’am, but that’s just where you’re making a great mistake. We don’t know nothing about what the generals admit. All we know is that the papers _say_ they admit it, which is a very different story. Mark my words, you’ll find that it’ll turn out to be some of their muddlings. Just you mark my words for it, that’s how it is.”

I said meekly “I hope so, Cuttle,” and walked away, for really I had not the heart to try and shake his incredulity. Not that I imagine I could have done so had I tried. That good, homespun garment of British pride in which he had wrapped himself was proof against any assaults that I could have brought to bear upon it. I wish with all my heart that he would lend us each a piece of it. We want it badly. Pray heaven and all its saints that we may none of us ever need it much worse than we do this Christmas-day, 1899!

* * * * *

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 4 P.M.

Since luncheon I have been to see a neighbour, in the vague hope that some fresh war news might have arrived this morning. There was none of course, and I walked home again between banks of withered bracken and trailing bramble, under the big tree-hollies, glistening all over their surfaces with a thousand reminders of Christmas, and of its gifts. England is so big, and old, and sensible that she does not generally care about Christmas presents, but there is one present that, I take it, she would dearly like to have to-day. Shiploads of holly, forests of mistletoe are hers for the asking, but that one little leaf of victor’s laurel that she wants so badly, that she would so gladly pin upon that broad breast of hers, this, it seems, is denied her. It may come to-morrow. It _must_, we all, not alone Cuttle, feel convinced, come before long, but it will not come in time for her Christmas-box.

What an odd convention it is, when one thinks of it, that habit of embodying a country in an individual! Considered seriously the whole contention is absurd. To talk of a nation as a person is to talk sheer nonsense. If one handles the idea a little it tumbles to pieces in one’s fingers. The fiction of unity resolves itself into a mere vortex of atoms, all moving in different ways, and moreover with a different general drift in each successive generation. As a matter of fact I doubt whether Englishmen, who are nothing if not practical, ever do think of their own country as an individual, unless one of them happens to be called upon to design a coin or a cartoon. The whole idea is extraneous, a survival from classical days, and the lumbering absurdities which are now and then dragged about the streets only go to prove how far from the genius of the people such representations really are.

Perhaps it is because I am not English that I find myself falling so readily into the trick. There was a time,--not a very recent one--when I thought of England habitually in that light, and in the most truculent fashion possible. In my eyes she stood visibly out as the Great Bully, the Supreme Tyrant, red with the blood of Ireland and Irish heroes. It was always _she_ and _her_ then; indeed it was only by keeping up the fiction of an incarnate Saxondom that indignation could be retained at the proper boiling point. To turn from the past to the present was to spoil the whole effect. In place of War, Famine, Massacre, one only got dull political controversies, or equally dull agrarian disturbances. For the Raleighs, the Sydneys, the Straffords, the Cromwells,--vast impressive figures, large and lurid--only a group of rather harassed gentlemen, “well-meaning English officials,” painfully endeavouring to steer their way so as to offend everyone as little as possible. Yes, I had quite a respectable capacity for hatred in those days, and England--that historic England of which I knew absolutely nothing--enjoyed the greater part of it. Especially, I remember, that I used to gloat over the notion of some day or other a great national HUMILIATION befalling her--a Sedan, a Moscow--I hardly knew what; retribution at all events in some very visible and dramatic form. With what glee I used to picture her standing helplessly before the nations; without a friend or an ally to turn to; naked and ashamed; crushed bleeding to the earth, as she had so often crushed Ireland; a mark for every wagging head----

Well, well, thus we play the fool, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us! Here am I walking home along an English lane, and almost wringing my hands in despair because such a very mild and colourless version of those old cherished dreams has befallen mine ancient enemy!

* * * * *

CHRISTMAS-DAY, 6 P.M.

I forgot to record quite an unlooked-for little pleasure which befell me on my way home this afternoon; one of those little incidents which are nothing in themselves, yet which mean much to us, and never more so than when life is going ill.

I had got as far as the grassy entrance to our copse when a sudden dazzling gleam of sunlight shot across it, sweeping over the fields beyond, and away up to the top of the downs. Though the day had been fairly fine for the time of year, the expectation of so dramatic a finale to it had never for a moment crossed my mind, and I stood gazing about me almost as if something had happened; feeling in fact as if something desirable and unlooked for _had_ happened.

The yellow oak scrub--withered but not leafless--glowed with a sudden russet splendour. Upon the little garden wall the terra-cotta pots shone with a momentary reminiscence of that Italy where they were born and baked. The air seemed to tingle; the tall birches glistened, one sheen of feathery silver up to their tiniest towering twigs. It was a kindly thought of whichever divinity sent that most unexpected and satisfactory beam to cheer this particular day. It did not last long of course, and the gloom of a winter’s night has followed quickly. For all that Christmas 1899 will never seem quite so dark, never so absolutely despairing in the retrospect, as it would have done without that last benevolent gleam at eventide.

JANUARY 3, 1900

The satisfactions of intercourse are apt to be overrated, yet there are times when they are certainly not without their uses. Living for the moment alone--if anyone can be said to be alone who possesses a few good neighbours, and one kind dog--I find myself in an oddly dualistic condition of mind. In bodily presence I am here at H----, engaged in sundry important avocations. I am path making; copse cutting; plant protecting; I am even bricks-and-mortar superintending in a small way. To my own private consciousness I am really engaged in quite another set of preoccupations, and a very long way from these green downs, and rustling oak copses of ours. The experience does not pretend to be particularly original, seeing that a large number of other people’s experience would probably just now bear it out. Solitude however emphasises these sort of odd dualities, and endows them with an air of greater distinction. Are mortals better and wiser, or worse and more foolish when they are alone?

The wisdom of the ages has hitherto declined to answer that question, a fact which probably proves its wisdom. Better or not, one thing is at least certain, and that is that they are extremely different. “Men descend to meet,” says Emerson, and he may be right. I am inclined myself however to think that that profundity, that peculiar mental greatness of which, like others, I am perfectly conscious when I am alone, is less a solid than a gaseous greatness; a sort of exaltation, dependent for the most part upon the fact of there being no one to contradict me. We are all of us at all times microcosms, but never are we so completely microcosms as when we are quite by ourselves. Then we seem to swell into a perfectly multitudinous host, all the members of which exhibit a singular unanimity, and moreover a touching desire to endorse our own views, however often these may contradict one another!

Like many other honest-minded civilians, my thoughts have of late been considerably taken up with schemes of amateur strategy. The plans of campaign that I have formulated in the course of the last two months would have puzzled Von Moltke, and might even have gone far to surprise Napoleon! If I have not forwarded any of them to our Generals in South Africa it has been mainly because I felt that it might be kinder to allow them to go on in their own way without any assistance of mine. I heard lately of someone, by the way, who actually had telegraphed out her recommendations to Sir Redvers Buller. As the story reached me the telegram took this form: “Please try to relieve Ladysmith.” I hope for the credit of human nature that the tale is true, but if so there is a simple innocence about this form of admonition of which I fear that I should have been personally quite incapable. My own ideas, my own forms of suggestion, are entirely different. They are large, nay grandiose, and moreover they are extremely intricate. As I walk about over these lanes and downs I see strategical possibilities in all directions, which cause me to thrill over the magnitude of my own conceptions.

Towards evening, especially, the sense of what might be,--of what, for aught anyone can say to the contrary, still may be,--rises almost palpably; a beckoning ghostly phantom of the Great Coming Invasion. Dorking--that scene of crushing British disaster--is not far off; were I to clamber up the opposite ridge I should be looking down on it. Moreover, between one landscape and another the difference becomes much less when all detail is reduced to one vast blur. I have a friendly knoll upon which I sometimes take my stand towards sunset hour, and from which I have of late conjured up Biggars-bergs, inaccessible and kopje-covered as heart could desire. It is true that the enemy holding them is absolutely invisible, but then so he probably would be in any case. Evening has moreover in my experience an odd power of loosening the tie of the actual. The mind seems to be less fixed to its shell than in the earlier, and more garish hours of the day. As the shadows lengthen stronger and stronger becomes the impression that the world is after all but a small place, and that the scenes that one is thinking of are nearly, if not quite, as close as those that one is actually looking at. Thought flits over the wave-crests between this and South Africa more lightly than one of Mother Carey’s chickens, and alights dry-shod upon the veldt. One is amongst them. One is standing in the midst of them. One can see, literally all but see, that tattered, sunburnt, rather dilapidated-looking host--friends, cousins, kinsfolk; countrymen and fellow-subjects at all events. How odd you all look, dear friends, and yet how familiar! Big English frames, shrewd Scotch faces, tender, devil-may-care Irish hearts. Surely one knows you? Surely you are very near to us, disguise yourselves as you may? The setting may be new, the remoteness considerable, but neither setting nor remoteness can hinder one from feeling at home in the midst of you!

JANUARY 6, 1900

“Bullets--The air was a sieve of them.--They beat upon the boulders like a million hammers. They tore the turf like a harrow!”