Part 9

“There are two hundred, or three hundred perhaps--spaniels, sheep-dogs, fox-terriers, even small ridiculous lap-dogs--and they wait, all of them, with their heads turned in the same direction, with an air of intense melancholy and passionate interest. What are they waiting for? Oh, it is very easy to guess. Sometimes one of the old inhabitants of the town makes up his mind to come back from Holland. The longing to see his home, to know what is left of his house, to search the ruins, is stronger than all else--stronger than hatred, stronger than fear. And sometimes then one of the dogs recognizes him. His dog! If you could see it. If you could imagine it. All that troop of dogs who prick their ears at the first sight of a man coming along the road from Holland, a man who has no helmet, a man not in uniform; the instantaneous painful agitation of the animals who gaze and gaze with all their might--dogs have not very good eyes--and who sniff and sniff from afar, because their scent is better than their sight. And then the leap, the great leap of one of these dogs who has recognized his master, his wild race along the devastated road, ploughed with the furrows by the passage of cannons and heavy traction motors and dug with trenches; his joyous barks, his wagging tail, his flickering tongue! His whole body is one quiver of happiness. The dog will not leave that man any more, he is too much afraid of losing him. He will follow close to his heels without stopping to eat; one day, two days if needful; and in the end he goes away with him.

“But the others? They have remained on the road. And when they see this dog depart, having found at last what they all are seeking, they lift up their muzzles despairingly and howl, howl as if they would never stop, with great cries that fill the air, and re-echo until there is nothing more to be seen upon the road. Then they are dumb, but they do not move. They are there; they still hope.”

VII

OUR GARDEN IN JUNE

“Still may Time hold some golden space Where I’ll unpack that scented store Of song and flower and sky and face, And count, and touch, and turn them o’er.”

RUPERT BROOKE.

_June 1._--The garden in early June! Like a great many other things the idea is very different from the reality. The first of June in the garden represents to the mind’s eye bowers of roses, exuberance in the borders, a riot of colour and fragrance. As a matter of fact, with us, in our late-blooming, high-perched terraces, it means a transition stage, and is annually very exasperating and disappointing to the impatient spirit of the Signora. It is the time when the azaleas look dishevelled, with their delicate blossom hanging depressingly from the stamens. The forget-me-nots have all been cleared away, and in those places where bulbs are preserved against the future spring, masses of yellowing tangled leaf-spikes are an eyesore. The bedding-out plants still look tiny on the raw borders. All our roses, except those climbers against the house, are yet in the bud. There are just the poppies that flaunt in the borders; and even their colour becomes an exasperation, because they would have done so much better to wait and join in the grand symphony, instead of blowing isolated trumpet flourishes, prepared to relapse into sulky silence when the delphiniums strike up their blue music.

There is also another frightful drawback to this first week of leafy June, and that is that it would be easier to separate Pyramus from Thisbe than the gardener from the vegetables. A constant enervating struggle goes on between us on the relative values of cabbages and roses, beans and poppies. We want the roses sprayed, we want the borders staked, we want sustenance in the shape of liquid manure and Clay’s fertilizer copiously administered to our darlings; and he wants to put in “that there other row of scarlet runners and set out them little lettuces.” And when it comes to watering: he doesn’t know, he’s sure, how he’s to get them cabbages seen to as they ought to be seen to; a deal of moisture _they_ want, if they’re to do him any justice.

Meanwhile our terraces are panting. The climbing roses up the house--and this year they would have been glorious--are pale and brittle in petal and foliage, as if they had been actually blasted.

The master of the Villino, after due representations from the Padrona, has seen the necessity of sacrifice, and assiduously waters the garden every evening--and himself! The hose is defective; being war time we cannot afford a new one. Two jets break out at the wrong angle and take you in the eye and down the waistcoat at the most unexpected moments; and though amenable to persuasion, the Padrone’s devotion has its limits, and he positively declines the remanipulation of the tube which will bring it--after having done service in the Dutch garden--to the end of the Lily Walk. So that, as it is two yards short, the deficiency has to be made up by hand watering, and two obsolete bath-cans are produced out of the house, which seems, for some unexplained reason, easier than using the proper garden furniture. These cans are generally left, forgotten, where they were last used, unless the piercing eye of the mistress of the Villino happens to dart in that direction.

Yesterday we had visitors--in eighteenth-century parlance, a General and his Lady--and of course the two cans stood in the middle of the path, confidingly, nose to nose. Being war time nobody minded. It is the blessing and the danger of war time that nobody minds anything. And the General’s Lady, being tactful, kept her eye on the buddleia.

Death having come to the little garden and taken Adam away; and greed of gain having deprived us of Reginald Arthur in favour of the post office; and patriotism having rendered the local young man as precious as he is scarce, we were five weeks--five invaluable, irreplaceable weeks--gardenerless, odd-manless at the Villino. Nothing this year will ever restore the lost time. No amount of pulling and straining will draw the gap together.

Japhet, Adam’s successor, is worn, as the Americans say, very nearly “to a frazzle.” He is a deeply conscientious man, and peas and beans and cabbages are to him the very principles upon which all garden morality is built up. He was much grieved the other day when someone “passed a remark” on the subject of weeds in the back-garden.

Weeds! We should think there were! It was so blatantly self-evident a fact that we wondered that anyone should have thought it worth while to pass a remark upon it. But Japhet was hurt to his very soul: considering his vocation, it would perhaps be more in keeping to say--his marrow.

Professional pride is a very delicate and easily bruised growth. When the Padrona was in her teens the whole of her mother’s orderly establishment was convulsed one June--a hot June it was too--because the professional pride of the family butler had been wounded by the footman’s presuming to hand a dish which it was not his business to touch. His sense of dignity was doubtless sharpened to a very fine edge by the fact that, the June weather being so hot, an unusual amount of cooling beer had been found necessary. This may seem a curious mixture of metaphors, nevertheless the facts are exact.

Reilly--that was his name--was very deeply and, in the opinion of the rest of the household, justifiably incensed when Edmund lifted the entrée dish with the obvious intention of offering it to his mistress; and though it was regarded as an exaggeration of sensitiveness for him to knock the footman down immediately after lunch in the seclusion of the pantry, to kneel upon his chest and endeavour to strangle him with his white tie; and though the cook deemed it incumbent upon her to draw the attention of the authorities to the drama by seizing a broom and brushing it backwards and forwards across the row of bells; all the sympathies of the establishment remained with Reilly, and “the mistress” was regarded as extremely hard-hearted for dismissing him from her service. The footman was a shock-headed, snub-nosed youth, and we will never forget his appearance when, released from his assailant, he burst into the dining-room, collarless, his white tie protruding at an acute angle behind his left ear, with a mixture of triumph, importance, and suffering upon his scarlet countenance.

So we were compassionate with Japhet when he waxed plaintive over his underling’s house duties, and even forbore having the windows cleaned for several weeks, and endured tortures at the sight of her spattered panes, out of regard for his difficulties.

The underling is aptly named Fox. He has red hair and long moustaches and a furtive eye and a general air of alertness and slyness which show that if he had ever belonged to the animal kingdom in a previous state of existence, Vulpus he certainly was. But we did not expect him to develop garden susceptibilities too. This, however, it seems he has done.

“I’ve very bad news for you,” said Japhet sombrely to his master last week, when he came into the long, book-lined room to receive his Saturday pay. He has naturally a lugubrious countenance.

His master’s thoughts flew to Zeppelins, spotted fever, and other national dangers.

“Indeed, Japhet. What is it?”

“Fox, he says, he can’t put up with the couch-grass and the docks in the lower garden. They seem to have got on his mind, like. He don’t see how he can go on dealing with them. They _’ave_ got a strong hold,” concluded Japhet with a sigh, as if he too were overwhelmed by the enemy.

Well, it was tragic enough, for the precious Fox had been caught after long hunting, and had made his own bargain--a foxy one--with every eye to the main chance. We want to keep him, but have a guilty sensation too, he being young and strong, and obviously the right stuff for enlisting; though, indeed, if docks and couch-grass daunt him, how would he stand shrapnel and gas?

The daughter of the house, who is extremely tactful, and who is generally trusted with delicate situations, interviewed him on the spot. She found him in a condition only to be described as one of nerve-shock. His long, red moustaches quivered. All he could reply, in a broken voice, was:

“It don’t do me no credit. It won’t never do me no credit.”

Japhet, consulted, gave it as his opinion that it was not a question of his subordinate’s bettering himself; but said “Fox had always been a sensitive worker.” Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to hear that war prices have something to do with it.

* * * * *

It is only now, after nearly five years, that we are beginning to reap some benefit of our constant planting. The Signora wonders if her irritable mind had allowed her to leave undisturbed those divers perennials and bushes which she had rooted up after a year’s trial from beds and borders, how might she not now be gathering the reward of longanimity.

The Léonie Lamesche roses, for instance. She hunted them out of the middle of the Dutch garden; out of the beds before the entrance arches into the rose-garden; into that corner of the kitchen-garden where the derelicts gather. And just now the child of the house has brought into her bunch after bunch of little orange-crimson pompoms, delicious and quaint to look at, and delicious and quaint to smell, with their faint tartness, as of apples, mixed with an aromatic herbiness as of myrtles.

“There’s quantities more,” says the Signorina. Poor little things! they have been allowed to settle and spread their roots, and one would not know them for the nipped, disreputable, guttersnipe objects that hitherto called down the master of the Villino’s scorn.

We do not regret them in the Dutch garden after all. It is too near the house not to have its garland for every season; and the forget-me-nots, hyacinths, and tulips are too precious and beautiful in the spring. But under the rose-arches now there are gaps; and this year, between the loss of our poor Adam and war scruples, these gaps have not been filled.

If the Signora had left Léonie Lamesche where she was, all those nice varnished green leaves and all those darling rosettes of bloom with their odd colour and fragrance would be in their right place, instead of in the waste ground from which Japhet, with the zeal of the new broom, is already preparing to sweep them next autumn--not, be it said, with any special disapprobation for Léonie, but because he declares he wants to get rid of all that there stuff which hadn’t no right to be in a vegetable garden at all.

The moral is--as has been said long ago in the “Sentimental Garden”--that chief among the many virtues a garden inculcates is patience. If the Signora had had patience, she would not have turned all the Standard Soleil d’Or and Conrad Meyers out of the Lily Walk, because the shadow of the buddleias interfered with their bloom. For behold! this winter’s snow has cast the great honey-trees sideways, and the united efforts of Japhet and Fox, who pulled and propped and strained in vain, have left them sideways, and sideways, in the opinion of these experts, they will for ever after remain. And the Lily Walk is in full sunshine. Had we but left the standards, who, of course, will be sulky in their new positions for a couple of years more!

_June 15._--The complaint begun in the first week of our transitional garden has already been reproved by the mid-month’s splendours. In spite of the drought and the desiccating south-east winds (which by some inscrutable decree of Providence have been sent to us this year when so much depends upon field, orchard, and garden), the roses are magnificent and of unusual promise.

Our peony beds--the mistress of the garden did know that peonies are slow ladies and will take their time--are beginning to reward her forbearance. Such a basketful as came into her bedroom to-day with the Polyantha roses!--those large, pink, scented beauties which are so satisfying to settle in big bowls. We have put them in the chapel against boughs of the service-tree. The effect is all one could wish.

The service-tree bloomed this year as never it bloomed before. It looked like the bridal bouquet of a fairy giantess! We trust this daring hyperbole will enable our readers to represent to themselves something at once immense and ethereal, misty grey, and delicate silver-white. It is of huge size and beautiful shape, and grows a little higher on the slope than the greater of the two beech-trees. For colour effect we know nothing more soul-filling than the way it stands between the ardent tawny glories of the Azalea Walk and the young jewel green of its cousin--the beech above mentioned. Put the shoulder of the moor at the back in its May mantle of coppery mauve heather not yet in bud--that is a picture to gaze upon under a blue sky, thanking God for the loveliness of the earth!

This last May, which will be ever memorable as one of the most tragic months of the war, hazard--or that _slithy tove_, the alien Hun--provided us with a background approximately _macabre_ for the radiant youthful joy. Our moor has been burnt--five fires started simultaneously one day of high east wind, and the first great swelling hill is covered with a garment as of hell. The scattered fir-trees here and there are of a livid, scorched brown. To look out on the scene and see them stand in the slaty black, casting mysterious shadows under the dome of relentless brightness we have had of late, is like looking upon a circle of Dante’s Inferno, out of one of the cool, bowery regions of his upper Purgatorio. Our daughter finds a wilder beauty in our blossom and verdure against the savage gloom beyond; but not so the Padrona. She laments the tapestry of her peaceful, rolling heights. Now, past mid-June, bracken is creeping slowly through the charred roots of the heather, and she does not want a bracken hill. It is spreading democracy, taking the place of some royal line; the rule of the irresponsible, the coarse, the mediocre; though she grants there will be beauty in the autumn when it all turns golden. And perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn somewhere, but she will have none of it, for there is nothing so tiresome as the unpalatable moral.

* * * * *

Fox has condescended to remain another week, so we need not feverishly search garden chronicles for the quite impossible he, who shall be strong, sturdy, ineligible for the army, and willing to take a place as under-gardener at something less than the honorarium of an aniline dye expert! All those who want places are head-gardeners, “under glass”; except “a young Dutchman speaking languages perfectly” who fills our souls with doubt. In every district it is the same story; we wish we could think it was all patriotic ardour, but we are afraid that the high wages offered by camps and greengrocers are responsible for a good deal of the shortage of labour in our part of the world.

One of the Villino quartette--we call ourselves the lucky clover-leaf--writes from Dorset that they have an aged man of past seventy-two who comes in to help in the flowery, bowery old garden of the manor-house where she is staying. In justice to simple rural Dorset, it may be mentioned parenthetically that there the response to the country’s need has been extraordinary in its unanimity. So the superannuated labourers who have grown white and wise over the soil, instead of sitting by the chimney-corner and enjoying their old-age pensions, come tottering forth to do their little bit, in the place of the young stalwartness that has gone out to fight and struggle and perhaps die for England.

Our Dorset clover petal writes: “Old Mason is very sad at having to water the borders. ‘Ye mid water and water for days and days,’ he declares, ‘and it not have the value of a single night’s rain. There, miss, as I did say to my darter last night, my Father, I says, he do water a deal better than I do.’”

Yesterday there came a box of white pinks from that Dorset garden; these have been put all together into an immense cut-glass bowl, with an effect of innocent, white, overflowing freshness that is perfect of its kind. And the scent of them is admirably fitted to the sweet clean wonder of their looks. It is a quintessence of all simple fragrance, a sort of intensified new-mown hay smell. That is another thing the heavenly Father has done very well--the delicate matching of attributes in His flower children. A tea-rose looks her scent, just as does her deep crimson sister.

“How it must have amused Almighty God,” said our daughter one day last winter, lifting the cineraria foliage to show the purple bloom of the lining which exactly matched the note of the starry flower, “how it must have amused Him to do this.”

And surely a violet bears in her little modest face the promise of her insinuating and delicate perfume.

And if the big pink peonies had had bright green instead of shadowy grey foliage they might have been vulgar.

And if you had put lily leaves to an iris instead of their own romantic sword-blades, how awkward and wrong it would have been; whereas the lily-stalk, with its conventional layers, is perfection in support of the queenly head of the Madonna or the Auratum. It is not association, but recognition of a Great Artist, in all reverence be it said: “He hath done all things well.”

To come back to the walled enclosure about the old Dorset manor house. Here, looking down our wind-swept terraces, we sometimes hanker for the sunny seclusion of that walled garden, though apparently all is not perfect even there, for the last message from it says:

“The strong sun takes all the strength out of the pinks after the first day or two. It has been very hot in the early afternoon, and as the garden faces west all the poor little things are drawn in a long slant towards the setting sun. Some of the long-stemmed ones have got positive wriggles in their stalks from so much exercise; it is really bad for their systems.”

In a previous letter she writes less pessimistically:

“I can’t tell you the loveliness of the garden. It is like Venus rising from the sea--Venus and her foam together--roses, pinks, sweet-williams, everything leaping into bloom and over the walls. I have given up trying to harmonize colours. There is nothing so wilful as an old garden. The plants simply walk about, much as our ‘Pekies’ do. I planted nigella last year, which didn’t do very well; however it skipped across a path of its own accord this year, and there is a patch of it in a forbidden corner which shames the sky. One looks on and laughs helplessly, as one does with ‘Pekies.’”

* * * * *

The Penzance briar hedge dividing the new rosary from the reserve garden promises very well. It is already breaking into many coloured stars, carmine, pink, amber, and the fashionable khaki. Is this the musk-rose of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”?

To contradict our statement of a page or two back, the Creator has made here one of the exceptions to His rule of rich and delicate balance, and it is the unsuspected fragrance of the sweetbriar that adds so extraordinarily to its attraction in a garden. No one would credit it with the scent, its evanescent fragile bloom gives no indication of it. And, like the perfectly saintly, its fragrance has nothing to do with youth or beauty. You pass an unimportant-looking green bush, and all at once you are assailed with the breath of Heaven. There is a mystery, almost a mysticism, about the perfection of this sweetness, this intangible, invisible beauty. One is reminded of Wordsworth’s lines:

“quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration.”

It is the image of a pure soul exhaling itself before God, in a rapture of ecstatic contemplation.