Part 5

These three lines came out of a recent number of the _Daily Mail_, and they describe Elandslaagte. Is it, I wonder, because Literature is so much more familiar to me than War that I seem to require the aid of the one in order to bring home to me the reality of the other? These three lines are certainly literature, literature of the impressionist kind, which, if not the best in the abstract, is at any rate the best for such a purpose. Trying to put oneself into the position of such a bystander as the writer of them, I am able to fancy that if the bullets came thick enough they really _might_ seem to tear the turf like a harrow. In what way exactly the air could be said to be a sieve of them, I am not clear, yet the phrase seems to live, and therefore to carry its own justification. As it happens I was out yesterday in a rather exceptionally imposing hail-storm. It was so dry that there was no occasion to hurry, and I stood still for a while to study effects. The stones, as they pattered and rattled round me, might--danger apart--have quite served as a suggestion of the other sort of rattling and pattering. Looking at them dispassionately I inquired of myself, “Would one run?” and Truth--there being no one else present--promptly replied, “Madly!” So, save for the grace of acquired training, I take it would nearly everybody. My hail bullets seemed to be in a prodigious hurry, and were being prodigally, if not very scientifically, directed by marksmen concealed somewhere above Leith hill. They hissed, they danced, they ricochetted off the trees, they bespattered the ground in all directions in a very businesslike and realistic fashion. There was a good deal of snow still lying unmelted in corners, and into that snow the new-comers as they fell cut deep little pits, and disappeared from sight in an instant. Elsewhere they drove in white flocks over the ground, hardly melting at all. They were not quite so large as carrots, as someone assured me that he had once seen hailstones, but they were certainly as large as fair-sized gooseberries. Through such a furious hail--only appropriately black--the famous Bagarrah cavalry rode to their deaths last September year. Through such a hail, as thick, as fierce, as brutally indifferent, who that one knows, that one cares for, may not be riding or walking to-day?

JANUARY 8, 1900

We have been enveloped all this morning in a cloud of smoke, not exactly battlesmoke, but nearly as thick, perhaps, in these days of smokeless powder, rather thicker. Our indefatigable Cuttle has decreed that we must at all costs get rid of those mountains of garden rubbish, which seem to be for ever accumulating. Hence this smoke! Never in my life did I see such volumes! They rolled in blackish blue columns all about our leafless copse, till towards the afternoon, a wind getting up, they were swept finally westward, across the downs, somewhere in the direction of Guildford.

Personally I like the smell, acrid though it undoubtedly is. The pile itself is moreover the nearest approach one ever gets in these degenerate days to a bonfire, for which I still retain the most infantile affection, and which never seems to be so familiar, or so endearing, as upon the afternoon of a winter’s day. Who can explain those incredibly remote, yet at the same time perfectly definite feelings of association, of which we are all at times more or less aware? Why should certain perfectly commonplace things awaken dreams, reminiscences, suggestions; whereas others, every bit equally qualified to do so, find us blank, and indifferent? Of all such aids to impersonal memory, commend me to an out-of-door fire! The wild, keen smell of it. The red eye of flame, blinking at one out of the heap. The sleepy rolls of smoke, tumbling about, and making one’s eyes water. The sudden “crick, crick, crackle” of a snapping twig, travelling sharply through the frosty air. All these separately, or the whole combined, bring with them trains of association that have been accumulating very much longer, or I am much mistaken, than the course of any one single lifetime. Reminiscences, who can tell, of that remote day when the human hearth was for the most part not an indoor, but an out-of-door one?

A friend and neighbour of ours has recently improved upon such casual burnings by having what may be called a permanent bonfire in her grounds, and I wonder more people who love their gardens, and spend whole winters in the country, do not adopt the plan. In one respect it is certainly an inferior bonfire, for its main constituents are, not leaves and sticks, but anthracite coal. To make amends, it burns merrily away night and day, only needing to be replenished, I am assured, once in twenty-four hours. Her garden lies in the heart of a big pinewood, and the fire has its home in an open lodge or gazebo, supported by larch poles, without door or window, but made possible to sit in in cold weather, by being match-boarded upon two sides, the south and south-east sides alone being widely open. Until one has actually tried, it is difficult to believe how comfortable one can be in such a spot even on a very frosty evening, both feet extended to the blaze, and a rug tucked round one to keep off stray draughts. As daylight wanes the red glow increases, lighting up the big pine trunks, and awakening in one’s mind vagrant suggestions of camp fires, and forest settlements, while at other times it has the practical advantage of making many garden operations possible which, without such a speedy refuge to fly to, would in this chill-evoking climate of ours scarce be practicable.

It is odd what minute deviations from the everyday stir the mind, and help it to shake off that crust of routine, which it ought to be the aim of all of us to get rid of. In these days too, one is thankful to anything that gives a stir to existence, apart from the weary newspapers. It is, I think, one of the few merits of winter that spots, at other times tame to flatness, seem in fierce, or exceptionally cold weather to revert to an older, and a wilder condition. Snow admittedly recreates everything; our most familiar paths and shrubberies, nay our very stable runnels, growing quite arctic and hyperborean-looking under its disguise. Apart from snow, the same impression is produced by any really strong atmospheric variation. Crackling grass, and glittering ice-bound trees, awaken one set of suggestions. Roaring winds, a drenched earth, and inky clouds tumbling wildly over the sky, arouse quite others. Even objects inside the garden, plants that have been perhaps put there by one’s own hands; clumps say, of bamboos and reedy grasses--Arundo donax or the like--assume suddenly new, and slightly savage aspects when one sees them sweeping to and fro, or buckling like so many fishing rods under the lash of a sudden tempest. The commonplace is not really unescapable, though it often seems as though it were. There are wider, freer notes, which only need awakening to stir, and thrill us with their presence. The imagination leaps to meet them, and feels them to be its right. For we are all heirs to a large inheritance, though we are apt, as a rule, to be forgetful of the fact.

JANUARY 10, 1900

Two kindly days in a desperately grim winter have had the effect of reawakening in one’s mind half-forgotten thrillings; thrillings after long grass, and green shadows; after a thousand eye-caressing tints; after the pure, delicious life and companionship of flowers. There are times when all this seems rather to pain than to please. When the persistency of such perishable things appears but an added wrong, but an additional unkindness. Why should these last, and other, and higher ones, _not_ last? we demand; one of those questions which, seeing that they can never be answered, it were as well, perhaps, that they should remain permanently unasked.

Walking briskly along the lanes this morning, with a determination to think only of what lay immediately below my eyes, I have been struck afresh, as often before, by the capabilities of beauty possessed even by the poorest plots of ground; plots which, far from having been intentionally beautified, have been stripped, on the contrary, for utilitarian reasons of such beauty as Nature had originally endowed them with. Yet, under the influence of a little kindly sunshine, how they still gleam, those poor plots; how the few green things left in them manage to prink themselves out, and to respond genially to that genial greeting! “And is it not slightly discreditable,” I reflected, “that we, who call ourselves gardeners, and have deliberately taken in hand similar, often much better plots, specially with an eye to beautifying them, should again and again completely fail in doing so; should again and again spend thought, time, money, and the sweat of the brow--chiefly of other people’s brows--and all that they should, as often as not, be rather worse at the end than at the beginning?”

The truth is that this business of “beautifying,” into which many of us have recklessly plunged, is a very much more difficult and a very much more delicate operation than we are prepared to admit. To the truly discerning, the truly nature-loving eye, the smallest scrap of plant-producing ground, the homeliest corner of earth--“long heath, brown furze, anything"--has potentialities of beauty and interest which even the best gardener rarely develops as they might, and ought to be developed. It is not merely that individually our powers are weak, our taste poor, our ignorance great, our imagination defective, but that over and above all this we have in most cases not the faintest idea of what we are aiming at. With no clear vision of what we propose ultimately to produce, how in the name of reason can we hope to produce it, or anything else worth having?

The cause of the mischance in nine cases out of ten lies in the fact that we attempt too much. Our original combination may have been good, but we want to make it still better. Our gold gets overgilt; our lilies are painted till they almost cease to be lilies at all, and the result is failure all along the line. This sounds the reverse of encouraging, but I am not sure but what it is in some respects better that it should be so. I suspect that all gardeners--professionals and amateurs, experts and gropers,--are just now rather in a state of flux and indecision. Two chief schools hold the field, and are in some respects mutually destructive of one another. There is the school which avows itself the faithful, not to say the servile, follower and imitator of Nature, and there is the school that proposes to itself to improve upon her. The tendency of the first is to develop a good deal of picturesque disorder, a pleasant, rather easy-going sense of repose, and possibly some want of definite form and colour. The tendency of the second, or rather of its members, is to regard the garden as a battle-ground; colour, size, brilliancy, height, as so many tests of their own personal victory, and every plant, species and hybrid alike, as objects for them to shape and manipulate at their own good pleasure.

Will these two divergent schools ultimately combine into one harmonious whole? Will the over-strenuous science of the second strengthen and reform the airy, somewhat weed-encouraging grace of the first? Will the aspiration after beauty of the one, in time relax the utilitarian tension of the other? These are questions which must be left to be resolved in the still unplumbed future. Possibly the gardener of the twenty-first or twenty-second century may be able to reply to them!

Pending that desirable, but still rather remote, contingency, I have left the lanes, and returned homeward, and am now looking down at our own somewhat chaotic little garden, with its small brown beds, each edged with a neat white frost-frill. Poor little garden! I have felt so oblivious of it of late that a certain compunction comes over me as I look at it. After all, gratitude for such good things as have come in one’s way is an undoubted part of decent living, and the most practical way of showing that gratitude is to make the best of them. Well, the year is still young; there will be time enough for fulfilling that, and every other small social obligation in the course of it. Eleven and a half months! What unknown things have you got hidden away? What secrets, as yet unguessed at by any of us, do you keep concealed behind those picturesque, and friendly-sounding names of yours?

JANUARY 20, 1900

The wind this morning was excruciatingly cold, with a hungry whistle, that belied the pale sunrays, which were doing their best to redeem the situation. On such a morning the good gardener’s thoughts, even before going out, fly to the younger and weaklier amongst his plants, and his imagination towards devising new shelters, and, if possible, more efficient ones. Creepers are, as a rule, easily protected; either there is a wall, against which mats can be laid, or, at worst, some post that they can be fastened to. It is shrubs in the open that present the greatest difficulty; nightcaps of sacking, or tents of matting not adding to the picturesqueness even of a winter garden.

Our more recently planted rhododendrons look anything but happy, and I have just been begging Cuttle to bestow a good shovelful of nourishment about the roots of each of them. It is not protection that they need, for they are hardy enough, but they sicken in this thin, dry soil, which seems to reach them through their two-foot blanket of peat.

Even when well grown and long established, rhododendrons hardly seem to me to be quite the ideal thing for these rustling oak copses of ours. We plant them, partly for the sake of their colour in its season, partly because we need evergreens, and the common ponticum is one of the best of evergreens, but they seem to me to remain exotics, and not altogether happy ones. There are two distinct varieties of scenery with both of which rhododendrons consort magnificently. One is heavy, boggy ground, deep, dark, and oozy, under large trees, into the recesses of which they can settle, spreading out in all directions, re-rooting themselves as they choose in the black earth; their flowers catching the divided sunrays, and turning every hollow place into a pool of colour. Another, and a yet more ideal place is a steep hillside, provided that it is furnished with boulders, and provided that the said boulders are not of limestone. There is one such hillside above the Bay of Dublin which I find it difficult to believe might not be able to hold its own, even though confronted with any similar extent of ground amongst the Himalayas themselves. It begins as a ravine, rising out of a rather thin wood. As one mounts the ravine opens, and the trees fall back. The boulders, with which the slopes are covered, rise higher and higher, and larger and larger, till they tower into the air over one’s head, perfect monoliths. In and out, above, behind, and between them grow the rhododendrons, in their flowering season an absolute feast of colour, the sort of thing that in a cultivated age pilgrimages will be formed to venerate. To see them in such a place is to get a new impression of the possibilities of heroic gardening. One’s eyes are caught, one’s whole mind and spirit is swept away upon a tide of colour; the grey micaceous granite of the ravine, the heather looking down over its top, the long blue river of sky, even the sea and its ships, seeming to be merely so many adjuncts and accessories of the central picture.

Such conditions are not to be found every day in the week, or in everybody’s back garden. We have to work out our own redemption, each of us as we best can, with such materials as the Fates have lent us. Happily, as regards natural conditions, here in West Surrey, the garden-lover, whatever other difficulties he may have to contend with, has much to be grateful for. Thanks to its blessed unproductiveness, the harrow has literally in many cases never passed over its soil; its very weeds being mostly those of Nature’s own introduction, not imported ones. Her handiwork is still plainly visible on every side. She looks up at him out of the bracken with an aspect not very different from what she wore at the Prime, and if he wishes to spoil her--well, he has to do it for himself! This to many excellent gardeners would seem a poor compensation for a sadly unproductive soil, and a deplorable lack of summer moisture. There are others, however, to whom a certain sense of indwelling peace, a certain feeling of underlying harmony, are the first of all requirements. Now both of these are more easily _found_ than made.

FEBRUARY 5, 1900

Not to devote an indefinite number of hours to the reading of war news; to eschew the luxury of idle hands, less on account of Dr. Watts’ reasons against it, as on account of more personal ones, which have taught me to reprobate the practice. Here are a couple of respectable resolutions for a bitterly cold February morning. “Books, and work, and healthful play”! Could a more commendable little programme be invented? or one that might be followed with greater advantage by many of us who only exhibit our superiority by laughing at it?

Into which of the two latter categories gardening is to be ranged I am not quite clear; it depends, I should say, upon the number of rose-campions, “Snaking Tommys” and the like, that are to be found in the garden in question. Winter is supposed to be a time of year which gives comparatively little scope to the energies of the amateur gardener. If so, then in this respect, if in no other, I am in luck’s way this winter, for there is abundance to be done here; work moreover which must either be attended to now, or else not done at all. With such weather as we have of late had there is no margin either for dawdling. To-day seems to be an off day with the frost fiend’s gang, and we must try, therefore, to push our own work forward before they are back upon us in renewed strength. By the look of the sky, and the general feeling of things, it is evident that they are only just round the corner, and collecting themselves for a fresh assault. As I crossed the open end of the “glade” just now the wind met me with an edge, cruel and cutting as spite, or hatred. A few aconites and snowdrops are pushing out their flower-tips, but it is a mere bit of gallant bravado upon their part. By night the stars, seen through any uncurtained window, seem to wink at one derisively, and winter is still at the very top of its strength.

FEBRUARY 7, 1900

“At the very top of its strength!” Cold as it has been of late, I hardly expected to find no garden left when I got up to-day! So it is however. Late last night everything seemed normal. This morning our little Dutch garden has vanished utterly; swept out of existence as though it had never existed. From centre to margin--beds, borders, walks, red walls, everything--the entire little depression has been covered with a uniform white blanket, effacing it completely, and restoring the landscape to what it was before man, woman, or measuring tapes arrived to trouble it. For the plants this new state of things is an improvement, but how about our work? Behold us suddenly reduced to a state of deadlock; all our various little activities brought to an absolute standstill. The paths that were being cut through the copse; the ground that was being got ready for grass-sowing; the flower-beds that had to be clipped into the right shape; the heather that was being brought from a distant common, where it could be cut discreetly; the entire bustle of the garden has been brought to a condition of arrest. Into the middle of our fussy little rhythm Nature has dropped her own imperious full-stop. Against that full-stop there is no appeal. In vain one protests that one is really in a great hurry; that unless these flower-beds are made, unless yonder piece of ground is got ready for grass-sowing, March will be upon us, and close at its heels, April; that the spring is coming on, and that we _must_ get our work done. To this remonstrance Nature merely opens her eyes with a mildly sarcastic air, and replies, “Must you?” It is the case of the old woman of the nursery tale over again, who _had_ to get her pig over the stile in order to give her old man his supper. In that case she did, after many repulses, find a complacent beast, I think, who undertook the task. The right spring was touched; the spell broken, and the whole state of deadlock dissolved at once. How we are to obtain so desirable a dissolution I have yet to learn. I see no spring to touch; no bird, beast, or element that could be appealed to with the slightest hope of success. The sky, iron-grey, with vicious, inky streaks across it, does not seem promising; neither does the wind, which keeps to its beloved north-east. The earth is invisible, consequently is for the moment out of reckoning; while as for the birds and beasts, they are much more disposed to turn to us for help, than to make any friendly propositions the other way.

It may be mere vanity upon my part, but it always seems to me that small birds recognise their heavy, wingless, two-legged kinsfolk with less difficulty during this sort of weather than at any other time of the year. The fact that one bribes them to such recognition by vulgar doles of breadcrumbs may have something to say to the matter, but I fancy that I read a distinctly kindlier expression in their eyes. They glance at us with an air of comparative condescension. They perceive that we share their own helplessness; that we are not so very different from themselves, only bigger and stupider. For instance, I have been publicly snubbed this whole winter by the tomtits. Under the eye and to the knowledge of the entire garden I set up a large post, hung over with cocoa-nuts for their convenience. Some of these cocoa-nuts were sawn into slices, others, more artfully, into rings, and I pleased myself by believing that they would sit and swing in them, as they pecked an unfamiliar, but not unpalatable meal. Will it be believed that not one tomtit has deigned to touch those cocoa-nuts? They have hopped to and fro on the boughs almost within peck of them, yet never so much as tried to ascertain whether they were eatable or not. They preferred, in fact, not to do so; in _their_ family, they practically sent me word, they never ate victuals that had not been selected by themselves; other people might do so, and they had heard that sparrows were less particular, but it had never been _their_ custom. I felt--as anyone would feel under the circumstances! To-day for the first time, thanks to the friendly connivance of the snow, this fastidiousness has broken down. With elation I perceive my disdainful blue neighbours, not only pecking at, but actually sitting and swinging in the long-despised brown rings. I am trying to bear my triumph meekly, and am helped towards doing so by reminding myself of the well-known fact that in times of stress and famine social distinctions are apt to break down. I shall have to wait till the weather relaxes to see whether this amiability is anything more than a truce, born of the hour of trouble, and not intended to last beyond it.

We are apt to talk as if the hyperborean conditions were no concern of ours, yet, as Alphonse Karr long ago remarked, we have only to sit still to find that these, and most other extremes of climate have come round to us. It was the tropical or sub-tropical regions of the globe that not long ago were good enough to send us specimens of their weather, as enterprising trades-people enclose samples of their goods in envelopes.