Part 6
From this there was born the scheme of giving a haymaking party, to which we originally planned to ask everybody we knew, amended that to asking all the children we knew, and afterwards (this was Helen’s amendment) decided not to ask anybody at all, partly because children were so serious, but chiefly because there might not be enough hay to go round. We neither of us knew how many square yards of hay it was reasonable to supply to each person, and it would be dreadful if there was not enough. Either Helen or I, or both of us, would have to go without, and it was safer to give the haymaking party to each other. We were in town all May, and the first half of June, but had left word with the gardener to send us a postcard when the hay was ready. The weather throughout these weeks was gloriously sunny, and in our mind’s eye we saw the crop growing taller and thicker with each blazing day.
Then one evening came the memorable postcard:
‘A reddy.’
We flew to the ‘A.’ In the middle of the largest field was a small haycock like a penwiper. One not quite so large and round at the top, more like a pincushion, was visible in the next field.
* * * * *
It was clear after this that the Powers that Are willed that our fields should not be used for utilitarian purposes. Hence the inception of the rose-garden.
A brick wall (the one against which the insane cow had blooded her nose) bounded the garden. From there the ground declined steeply away into the middle of the larger field, which was cup-shaped, the ground rising on all sides of it. (It was at the centre of the cup, where the sugar is, that the penwiper had been raked together.) To-day a flight of steps made of broken paving-stones--an entrancing material--led down the side of the cup from the garden-gate, and up the opposite slope. Standing where the sugar is, therefore, you saw on every side of you rising ground, which had been terraced, and walks of broken paving-stone, communicating with the two staircases, lay concentrically round. And the Herculean labour which had already occupied us so many rapturous afternoons was to plant the whole cup with rose-trees, so that, standing in the centre, there was nothing visible except sky and roses. That was practically done; and to-day what occupied us was the consideration of the level remainder of the field, of which there was some half acre. It was rough, coarse grass, starred with dandelion, which gave the first hint. We wanted to get rid of the dandelion, and----
At last I got Helen to agree, and I mixed together in a wheelbarrow an infinity of bulbs, and other delectable roots. There were big onion-like daffodils, neat crocuses with an impatient little yellow horn sticking up, fritillary roots, bottle-shaped tulips, the corms of anemones, and the orris of the iris. Then, trowel in hand, each with a bag of bulbs taken haphazard out of the wheelbarrow and with a bag of sand to make a delectable sprouting-place for the roots, we started. Every dandelion encountered was to be dug up with honesty and thoroughness, and where the dandelion had been there was to be planted a bulb taken at random out of the bag. Helen said it would take ten years. Personally, when I looked, I thought longer, but I did not say so, for I practice reticence on discouraging occasions.
I wonder how many people know the extraordinary delight of doing a thing for oneself, starting from the beginning. I do not say that it gives me the smallest pleasure to black my boots or brush my clothes, since somebody has already made those boots and woven the cloth. But there is nothing more entrancing than to deal first-hand with Nature, to make holes in the earth, and put in them roots, the farthest back that we can go with regard to vegetable life. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me a pleasure as clean and as elemental as the joy of creation itself. Whether we write a book, or paint a picture, or carve a statue, we, though we do not really create, but only arrange what is in existence already, are going back as far as we can, taking just the root-thoughts and translating them to song or shape. And though we do not really create at all, but only use and arrange, as I have said, the already existing facts of the world, passing them, it may be, through the crucible of the mind, we get quite as near to Nature, if not nearer, when we go a-bulb-planting. The bulbs are our thoughts, our pigments, what you will, and when in spring-time we shall see them making a meadow of Fra Angelico, it will be because we have actually planted these things ourselves that the joy of creation will be ours. Not to do that would be as if an artist laid no brush on the canvas himself, but merely dictated to a dependent where such a colour should be spread. But given that he had a slave so intelligent and so obedient that he could follow to a hair’s-breadth the directions given him, can you imagine the artist feeling the possessive joy of creation in the result, even though it realized the conception to the uttermost? Not I; nor, in the garden, do I care, like that, to see what others have done. It is not sufficient to direct; one has to do it oneself.
I love, too, and cannot conceive not loving, getting hot and dirty over the wrestling with the clean, black earth. A great deal of nonsense is talked about the dignity of labour, but it is chiefly talked by those whose labour lies indoors, who, excellent craftsmen as they may be, go spudding about in the intangible realms of the mind. I doubt, indeed, whether any market-gardener has ever spoken of the dignity of labour. We leave that to those who only know it by repute. But I long to put down the manner of the transaction. I do not in the least think it dignified, but it is such fun.
* * * * *
The green had mostly faded from the grass, leaving the meadow, as is always the case in October, far more grey than green. Certain plants, however, were still of varnished brightness, and the dandelion leaf was one. There was no need to pick and choose, and without moving a step, I dug the trowel down into the earth, loosened it all round the vegetable enemy, and lifted it. An ominous muffled snap came from inches down in the earth, which I tried to pretend I had not heard. But one could not cheat the eye also. There, at the bottom of my excavation, was a milky root, showing a danger-signal of white against the brown loam. I had to go deeper yet: the whole of the tap-root must be exhumed. Another dig, another snap, a raw-looking worm recoiled from the trowel, only just in time, and eventually up came the remotest fibre. How good the earth smelt! How reeking with the life of the world! Cold, clammy, rich earth, ever drawn upon by the needs of the Bank of Life, ever renewed by that which life paid back to it. A thousand years had gone to the formation of my trowelful, and a few inches below was the chalk, where a million lives a million years ago had spent themselves on the square inch of it. Slowly, by work of the myriad sea-beasts, this shoulder of chalk was heaved from the sea, the myriad lives became a myriad myriad, and here I had the little lump of chalk borne up on the end of the trowel which told of the labourers of the unnumbered years. Then, in a spoonful of sand, I put the sign, the evidence of another decade of millions on the top of them, and stuck thereon an onion-like daffodil root that was born last year. In a fortnight’s time that child of to-day will have reached downwards, feeling with delicate, pleased touch the sand of a thousand years ago, will delve through the time of the pyramids of Egypt, will draw moisture from the chalk that was old when our computation of time was not yet born, and will blossom next April, feeding its sap on the primeval years. And for what? To make Helen and Legs and me say, ‘Oh, what a beautiful Horsfeldii!’ Then we shall look at the fritillary that prospers a yard away.
The eternal romance of it all! To the right-minded there is nothing that is not a fairy-story. Like children, we crowd round the knees of the wonderful teller of it, and say, ‘Is it true? Is it all true?’ And He can’t tell lies. Sometimes, when we have a sort of moral toothache, we sit apart, and sniff. We say that scientifically we have proved there is no God. So said the fool in his heart. But nowadays the fools write it down in their damned books, and correct the proofs of it, and choose the bindings of it, and read, with gusto, the thoughtful reviews of it. And, God forgive them, they think they are very clever people, if I may be excused for mentioning them at all.
But fairy-stories! How surprising and entrancing are even those which people make up and put in books, while round us every day a fairy-story far more wonderful is being told not only for us to read, but enacted for us to see. It is only familiarity with it which robs us of the sense of its wonder, for imagine, if we could make ourselves ignorant again of what happens to bulbs when we put them in the earth, how the possibilities of flying-machines would grow flat and stale before the opening of the daffodil. For a man’s capacity for happiness is in great measure the same as his capacity for wonder and interest, and considering that there is absolutely nothing round us which does not teem with wonder if only we had the sense to see it, it argues very ill for our----
A wild shriek from the hillside opposite (distance forty yards) interrupted me.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ cried Helen; ‘but I cut a centipede in half. They are going in opposite directions.’
‘Dig another hole!’ I shouted. ‘Then go back when the halves have gone away. Yes, very distressing, but you can’t avoid everything.’
‘Murderer!’ said Helen.
This was feminine logic. I had not cut the centipede in half!
* * * * *
It was one of those golden October days of which we have now had some half-dozen. Every night there is a little frost, so that morning both looks and smells exquisitely clean, and it is hardly possible to regret the turn of the year; though dahlias are blackened, the trees blaze with copper and gold, for in this week of windless days scarce a leaf has fallen, and the stems are as thick with foliage as they were in the summer, and to my mind doubly beautiful. And this work of bulb-planting seems to bridge over the winter, for we are already at work on spring. But in November, Helen and I mean to turn our faces townwards again, for it is possible there to be unaware of the transition to winter, which is so patently before one’s eyes in the country, and which, with the best will in the world, it is impossible not to find rather depressing. Some people, I know, label the squalls of February March as execrable, and flee the country then. But we both love them. These are the last despairing efforts of winter. His hand is already loosed from the earth; he strikes wildly, knowing that there are but few blows left in him. But in the autumn he is gaining strength every day: it is life whose hold is being loosed. And that is not exhilarating to watch. True, it is only a mimic death-bed, but personally we don’t want to sit by the bedside. In London there is no bedside. The shorter the day, the earlier the lamps are lit. Those avenues of shining eyes, which are not shocked whatever they see.... And the fogs--the mysterious fogs! I suppose we are Cockneys.
* * * * *
Helen gave out first in the matter of bulbs, and came and sat by me.
‘How very dirty you are!’ she said. ‘And have you been planting bulbs with your nose?’
‘Not at present. But it tickled, and so I rubbed it.’
‘Well, let’s stop now. I want to go for a walk. My back aches with bending, and though I haven’t got toothache, I feel as if I might have, and the kitchen-maid has given notice, and I don’t think anybody loves me, and if Legs marries that awful girl, I will never speak to you again. And they are coming to dinner to-night! I pray Heaven that Legs may miss his train, and not get here till late.’
‘So do I. Yes; let’s go for a real tramp on the downs. Hadn’t I better go and wash my face first?’
‘Oh no; what does it matter? But are you sure you don’t want to go on bulbing?’
‘Quite sure. I think we won’t go by the road, do you know. We can strike across the meadows and up the beacon.’
Helen gave a little purr--a querulous rumble of the throat.
‘I have the blues,’ she said, with great distinctness. ‘I was as happy as possible till ten minutes ago, and then they came on like--like a thunderstorm. Everything ached. I groaned aloud: my mind hurt me like lumbago. It hurts still. Oh, do rub something on it.’
That is one of the heavenly things about Helen. If she ‘feels bad,’ she comes and tells me about it like a child. She scolds me for all sorts of things of which I am perfectly innocent, because she knows I don’t mind one scrap (I love it, really, but I don’t tell her that), and it makes her feel better. She scolded now, even when we had passed the water-meadow and began a really steep ascent of the flanking hills.
‘I knew the kitchen-maid wouldn’t stop,’ she said, ‘because those London girls hate the country. So do I. And it was all your fault. You engaged her; I had nothing to do with it. And we never _had_ such a kitchen-maid. She cooks better than the cook, and does everybody else’s work as well. You might have known she wouldn’t stand the country.’
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘My fault entirely. So is the toothache, isn’t it?’
‘I haven’t got one, but I might have. And that’s your fault, too. I wanted to go to the dentist as I passed through London, and you persuaded me to come down here without stopping. It did ache just then--it did.’
The hill got rather steeper.
‘Go on,’ said I. ‘How slowly you walk!’
‘Yes, but I have to do all the talking. You have no conversation. Oh dear, what a devil I am! Aren’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘There! I told you nobody loved me. Oh, look! we are going to have a real red sunset. All the hills are getting molten, as if they were red-hot and glowing.’
She was feeling a little better--not much, but a little. We had come up the two hundred feet of steep down-side as if we had been storming a breach. To walk very fast up a hill makes all proper people feel better, unless they have heart disease, in which case they die, and so, we hope, feel better also. But for those who have not heart disease, and want to feel better, the prescription is confidently recommended.
‘And then that awful girl!’ she went on. ‘You insisted on being neighbourly, as you call it, with the Ampses, and this is the result.’
‘There has been none at present.’
‘No; but you tell me to ask the family to dinner on the very day that Legs comes down. Oh dear, what a heavenly evening! I should so enjoy it if everything wasn’t wrong. Look at the sky! Fifty thousand little pink, fluffy angels floating about in it! Do you want to go right to the top of the hill?’
‘Yes, right to the top. Then I shall begin to answer you back.’
Helen laughed.
‘Oh no, don’t,’ she said. ‘It is no fun plaguing you if you dispute my facts. So tell me quickly: isn’t everything your fault, and not mine? Please pull me, if you intend to go that pace.’
So I pulled her, she holding the end of my stick, and we arrived at the very top of all. Sunset was below us, evening stars were above us, and on the huge expanse of down there was no one else. It was the loneliness I love.
‘The devil has gone,’ she said, after a while. ‘You are rather nice to me. And I don’t think I have toothache, and--well, you thought that Charlotte was a little Ampsy before I did. And even if nobody loves me--oh, how dirty your nose is!’
That was true, anyhow.
An extraordinary phenomenon in country towns is that, though nobody has anything to do, everyone feels extremely busy; whereas in town, though you have got an enormous deal to do, you never feel busy at all, and can, without fail, find time for anything else. I think there must be some microbe which cannot live in London, but thrives elsewhere, which produces the illusion of being rushed. Personally, I know it well: it is not an old enemy of mine, nor is it an old friend, but it is a pleasant old humbug, which I am afraid I rather encourage. This evening, for instance, when I went to my room after tea, I encouraged it, and argued that one never had a moment to oneself. I had two hours in front of me now, as a matter of fact, in which I should be undisturbed; but the Old Humbug said that it was all very well to think about the future. All he knew was that he--that is, I--had been rushed--yes, rushed--all day and all yesterday, and ever since we came down to this dear, sleepy old town. To-day was Tuesday, and people were coming to dinner. We had gone out to lunch yesterday, and had dined out twice last week. Also, there was the garden to attend to, and a little golf (almost every day, as a matter of fact) was necessary for the health, and what with letters to write and cigarettes to smoke, and the Meistersinger overture to learn, in order to play it with Legs, I was a victim of this hurrying, bustling mode of life, which in a generation or so more would assuredly send everybody off their heads.
I made myself quite comfortable in my chair, and proceeded to think about it seriously, because I had two hours in front of me. It was all quite true (I was encouraging the Old Humbug, you will understand), and the modern mode of life was insane. London, anyhow, was insane, and in a little while I should probably get to agree with the Old Humbug that I was rushed and driven in the country also. But, to encourage credulity, I took London first. There one certainly was busy--all the hours, that is to say, of a day that began quite early and ended next morning were full, and I reconstructed one such as I often spend, and hope to spend many times more. I do not give it, because it seems to me the least edifying, and all stern moralists (the Old Humbug is an awfully stern moralist) would--as, indeed, they have done--shake their heads over it, and say, ‘To what purpose?’ I will tell you that afterwards.
I was called, let me say, at half-past seven, and after a few incredulous groans got up. I shaved, washed a little--not much, for reasons that will appear--drank some tea, and in a quarter of an hour was wildly bicycling towards the Park. When things flourished very much, and money flowed, Helen and I rode champing steeds; but just now things were what is called fluctuating, and I rode a bicycle, and she stayed in bed. An hour and a half of frantic pedalling on a hot June morning produces excellent physical results; and at half-past nine I was in the swimming-bath at the Bath Club, where I became cool and clean. I changed into another suit of flannels there, rode sedately home, and had breakfast at precisely a quarter-past ten. By eleven I had eaten breakfast, read the _Daily Mail_, and smoked a cigarette, and was about to spend a quiet, studious morning until half-past one (for we were lunching out at two), when Helen came in.
‘Do come to Lord’s,’ she said; ‘it’s Gentlemen and Players, and we can sit there till lunch. We can’t go this afternoon, and you are playing golf at Woking to-morrow.’
‘I can’t. Not time.’
‘Oh, just this once.’
Just this once, then, we went. It was too heavenly, and we were late for lunch.
It was one of the rather long lunches, and it was nearly four when we left the house. Then, as we had neither of us seen the Sargents at the Academy, we went there, since the afternoon was already gone, and got home about six; and as we had been given a box at the opera for ‘Tristan,’ which began at half-past seven, it was necessary to dine at half-past six--a terrible hour, but true. At the opera Legs picked Helen up to go to a ball, and I went home to answer my morning’s post, which I had not yet read.
But, it will be objected, Gentlemen and Players, and the one necessary visit to the Academy, and ‘Tristan’ does not occur every day. Quite true; but something else always does, and the Old Humbug, who had got quite large and important during this short survey, said in those canting tones which I knew so well: ‘You are wasting your life over this insensate rush and hurry. And you do no better down here. What have you done to-day? Planted bulbs, and written two or three pages of your silly book. What will you do to-morrow? You won’t even write your silly book, because you are going to play golf with Legs in the morning, and you say you can’t work after lunch. And the days will make themselves into months, and the months into years’ (here he dropped into poetry), ‘and you will ever be a name of scorn--at least, you would if ten minutes after you were dead anybody remembered what your name was. But you will have gone to your account.’
Well, I join issue with the Old Humbug over this. For my part, I assert that it was perfectly right for me to go to the Gentlemen and Players, and to the opera, and to plant bulbs, and to play golf with Legs to-morrow morning if fine. And as for his objection to what he calls ‘rush,’ why, I fling it in his face, since I must rush. If I set apart a certain time every day for private meditation, I should be simply bored. I should get--I suppose this must be the proposed practical effect of the plan--no great and ennobling thoughts out of my solitary meditations, and instead of feeling that I had spent the morning to some serious purpose, I should feel, and I think rightly, that I had merely wasted it. But if I have planted bulbs all morning, I haven’t wasted it. I will assert that on the Day of Judgment; for I have been busy walking along the path I feel sure I was meant to walk on. There are a thousand other paths all leading to the central and celestial light, and they are for other people to walk on. It would, of course, be a terrible waste of time for one who by nature was a meditative recluse to go to the match between the Gentlemen and Players, or for a deaf man to go to ‘Tristan,’ or for a blind one to lie on his back and look at the filtering sunlight between the leaves of beech-trees in June. But the point for everybody is to get into touch with life as continually as he can, and at as many points as he can. This is gospel. I would I had the palate of a wine-taster to get into touch with life there; the prehensile toe and sense of balance of a tight-rope walker to get into touch there, the mathematical head of the astronomer to learn the orbit of a star that has never been seen, but only conjectured; or I wish very much indeed that I had the missionary spirit. Indeed, then I would go to the nearest cannibal islands and (probably a good thing, too) be cheerfully devoured; or, again, if I had it in a lesser degree, I would go and teach in the Sunday-school, and have a class for boys in the evening. I did try the Sunday-school when first I lived here, and for four unhallowed Sundays I passed a feverish hour surrounded by mystified infants and intolerable lithographs. You never saw such a failure as I was: I dreaded those hours so much that I thought my reason would be unhinged. And the children used to regard me, I am sure, as they would have regarded some queer, though harmless, creature of the menagerie. I couldn’t do that sort of thing.
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