Part 14

Having told them that we would wait on ourselves for the rest of the day, and no one need stay in, I was not surprised to hear a gay party setting off a little later on; but I _was_ surprised to see that it was Pamela, and not cook, who made the fourth in the quartette!

Pamela and Abigail hadn’t spoken since the episode previously mentioned. It was curious that she should have chanced to call for the purpose of burying the hatchet, the very afternoon that the “common sailors,” as she had called them, should be there!

For the time of the sailors’ leave I cut the housework down to the minimum and arranged a week of cold dinners, Spartan-like in their simplicity, for ourselves, so that “evenings out” could be taken as often as my household assistants pleased.

I hoped to find the kitchen radiating sunshine in consequence. Picture my consternation, therefore, when I came upon Abigail weeping her eyes out in their sitting-room one afternoon (when only half of the leave had expired too!), the coral necklace flung into one corner, and “affection’s offering” lying face downwards under the table.

To give her opportunity to pull herself together, I picked up the coral necklace and inquired what Mr. Dick would be likely to think if he saw it there. She sobbed that she didn’t know and she didn’t care.

“That Pamela——” Then I saw it all in a flash!

Well, to make a long story short, Pamela, whom I had long known to be as unscrupulous as she was good-looking, had stepped in and carried off Dick right from under Abigail’s nose! She had seen the two men arrive on the previous Saturday afternoon, and that accounted for her unexpected call. She had appropriated Dick from the first minute she saw him.

“And now,” said Abigail into her handkerchief, “just ten minutes ago, when I ran out to post some letters, who should I see coming out of The Gables, but Dick and that creature, starting off together for all the world as though they had known each other all their lives. Only last night she had the sauce to say _she_ was going out to Canada when the war was over!”

I felt truly sorry for the girl, and it was some satisfaction to me to reflect that Pamela wasn’t quite as successful as she imagined!

“I don’t think she will see much of Dick even if she does go out to Canada,” I said; “I don’t think his wife would have a room to spare to invite her there—with seven children. I daresay Dick told you that the lady in the checked apron was Mrs. Dick?” I stooped to pick up the forlorn anchor, and dusted it most carefully, to give her time to recover.

“No!” she gasped, and then went on bitterly, “he hasn’t had a chance to tell me a _thing_, with Pamela talking to him the whole time! But, of course, I guessed all along he was married.” She meant to take her disappointment bravely. “_I_ don’t want to marry anyone; men are all alike. But it does make you wild, when——”

I was facing the window, but Abigail had her back to it. Therefore she did not see what I saw coming along the road—a large bunch of flowers, surmounted by Mick’s round, jovial face.

“I think I should hang this up,” I interrupted her, having thoroughly dusted the anchor; “after all, Mick has no wall of his own to hang it on; he isn’t like Dick, with a home and wife and family—and one doesn’t get ‘affection’s offering’ every day!”

“Oh, but that wasn’t really meant for me,” and Abigail’s grief threatened to break out afresh. “Mick was so taken with the lovely parcels you sent, and he thought as you lived with me you were a widow, and——”

Fortunately, I was spared the rest, for the downstairs door bell rang with a vehemence that was now most familiar, and Abigail, patting her hair and her cap into shape, went smilingly down the passage to answer the side door.

XIV

The Bonfire

I HAD pointed out, quite nicely and kindly, to Virginia, that she was not clipping the top of the square box-tree table straight and even; and she had pointed out, quite witheringly, to me that she was cutting it by perspective, adding that if I had only been privileged to learn perspective when I was young, I should have known that for a thing to be correct in its outlines and proportions it must necessarily run askew and aslant and out-at-corners, just as the top of the box-tree table was now doing. She assured me, however, that it would appear all right, she thought, if I looked at it from an airship above, with half-closed eyes.

And then she advised me to do a little hoeing.

I ignored her sarcasm, knowing full well that a pair of shears, applied by amateur hands to tough overgrown greenstuff, is apt to provoke cutting remarks when the wielder has got to the moist stage and the hedge is looking like a ploughed field.

You see, there was an inwardness in her last remark; for hoeing looks an easy, graceful, carefree occupation—till you try it. My own method is distinctive; I didn’t invent it, it came to me as a natural inspiration. I find I invariably start to hoe with my back, doubling up more and more, and aching more and more, as I proceed with the hacking. Then, as I warm to the work (and it’s very much warm as a rule), I likewise hoe with my teeth. By the time I have set and ground these nearly to nothing—my hands all the while getting lower and lower down the handle of my tool—I find myself beginning to hoe quite viciously with my head.

When I have extracted all the motive power I can from this part of me, and have projected it so far in front of the rest of me—hoe included—that I almost lose my balance, the only thing left for me to do, by way of piling up yet more energy and effort, appears to be to go down on all fours, seeing that by this time I am clasping the hoe handle at about a foot from the ground.

Fortunately, it is just here that I usually realize what I am doing, and I straighten my rounded back, and undo my teeth (that doesn’t sound polite, but you know what I mean), and return my head to its proper place. I then remind myself that I am not hoeing at all scientifically, that most of the energy I have been putting forth has been waste—because misdirected—force.

Whereupon I stand at ease, and other things like that. Maintaining the upright as far as I can, I take hold of the top end of the long handle of my weapon, and, still keeping quite in the perpendicular, I merely hoe with my arms, thus saving the rest of me quite a considerable number of unclassified aches. So long as I can remember to keep my vertebræ like this, all is well, and I really get through a fair amount of work. But, alas, I soon forget.

One thing I have never yet managed to do is to keep cool and collected, my misfortune being that I boil up so soon. My hat gets out of angle, my hair flattens out where it ought to be wavy, and waves around where it ought to lie flat; and—worst of all—it ceases to worry me that these things are so.

And then I open a periodical wherein some unknown celebrity has been photographed “at home”; and she is sure to be shown “in the garden,” where, behold! you see her in the airiest of fashionable nothings in the way of a white frock, accompanied by a ten-guinea hat, a twenty-guinea dog, and a sixpence-halfpenny trowel—all worn with consummate photographic grace, as she artlessly sets to work to transplant a hoary wistaria that has smothered the (photographer’s) verandah for fifty years, explaining to the interviewer, meanwhile, how she simply adores gardening, how she gets all her ideas for the dresses she wears in the third act from her pet bed of marigolds, and how she never dreams of taking part in a first night performance without having previously run the lawn-mower twice round the gravel paths.

Clever creature; you don’t wonder she is labelled a celebrity; any woman who can keep that hat on while using that trowel, has accomplished something!

* * * * *

I didn’t feel like hoeing just then, no matter what the cost of my gardening outfit. The moment seemed to call for non-strenuous occupation that would admit of leisurely movement and unlimited pauses with nothing doing—which is what I find a mind like mine requires.

Of course there was plenty of hoeing waiting to be done, there always is; I never knew a soil so chock-full of weed-seeds as ours seems to be, and I never knew a place where folks are so little worried by them. Where things grow as easily as they do about our hills and valleys (and where the angle of the garden is just what ours is), you will find that the native reduces land-labour to the minimum, and nothing is disturbed unless absolutely necessary. Reasonably, if you have left the hoe at the top of the garden, and the top is a hundred feet above the bottom of the garden where you are standing, you think twice before you climb up and fetch it.

As one result of this universal conservation of energy, our local nettle crop is one of the finest in the kingdom, I verily believe.

“Why are those things left standing in every field corner?” I asked a farmer on one occasion, pointing to the usual grey-green waving jungle of weeds.

“They nettles?” he questioned, in surprise; “well, what’s the good of wasting attention on ’em? They don’t hurt no one!”

Incidentally I may say it is always well to criticize the methods employed on other people’s land rather than those practised on your own, since most right-minded employés resent any implication, no matter how politely you wrap it up, that improvement is possible; and if you question the why and wherefore of anything, it may be mistaken for fault-finding in this imaginative age. Hence, unless the handy man chances to be one of exceptional make up, I go farther afield when gleaning information.

One day I watched a man very leisurely inspecting a thistle in a meadow by the weir, and then, with a deliberation that was most restful to a harried, hustled, war-time Londoner, he tenderly and carefully cut it off near the ground with a scythe. After he had decapitated about twenty thistles in this way, he naturally needed a little time for recuperation, and sat down on the river bank to meditate. I hadn’t liked to interrupt him when he was working, because so far as I could roughly estimate, there were thirteen thousand four hundred and fifty-three thistles in the meadow—approximately, you understand—and we don’t work according to trade union hours here; sometimes we start an hour later and leave off an hour earlier, and miss out several in between. But since he had evidently reached his rest-hour—and remembering that one of my own fields was plentifully dotted with thistles at the moment, and feeling quite equal myself to that gentle picturesque swish of the scythe—I asked him whether that process killed the thistle right out? (My business instinct forbade my wasting time on the job if it would all have to be done over again later on.)

No, he said, he didn’t think as how it would kill the thistles right out.

Then why did he do it that way? I asked, instead of spudding the thing right up by the root?

“Well”—and he scratched his head thoughtfully—“doing it like this jest diskerridges of ’em a bit, and isn’t sech a deluge o’ trouble as mooting ’em right out would be.” And with that he promptly dropped thistles, and proceeded to discuss the fiendishness of the Germans.

He had a long talk (there wasn’t room for me to say anything), and gave recipes for annihilating completely everything connected with them (excepting thistles; I presume they have some; they deserve a good crop, anyhow), finishing up with—

“But thur—what I says about ’em I won’t exackly repeat in yer presence, m’m; for my wife often says to me, ‘It won’t do nobody no pertickler good,’ she says, ‘if you gets yerself shut out o’ Heaven by yer langidge,’ she says, ‘just to spite they Huns, what don’t even _hear_ it!’”

For a full two minutes he worked that scythe with real zest, as though onslaughting the enemy.

Perhaps his method is right (in regard to thistles, I mean), perhaps it is wrong; I’ve never gone sufficiently deep into the subject to be competent to pass an opinion. But I do know that the larger proportion of handy men who have honoured me with their patronage (though there are conspicuous exceptions) invariably weed on these lines of least resistance, and “jest diskerridge ’em”—though I own it takes a lot to discourage _our_ weeds!

* * * * *

Not feeling like diskerridging weeds at the moment, I asked Ursula to suggest some occupation for my idle hands, though I didn’t put it like that; I inquired which of the many jobs needing urgent attention I had better tackle next. (It came to the same thing in the end; but instead of advertising my natural indolence, I hoped it would convey an impression that I was rushing pell-mell through an endless succession of tasks.)

Ursula was sitting on a pile of logs under a big fir tree inside the orchard gate—oh yes, there are firs in the orchard, and lilacs, and daffodils, and snowdrops, and a huge Wellingtonia, and a trickle of water with forget-me-nots and mint on its brink; we’re not at all particular about classification. She was darning a stocking, and it seemed a lengthy job. Not that there was any large, vulgar gash in the stocking; it was merely suffering from general war-time debility, and was one of those that you can go on and on darning, and still find more thin places to run up and down.

Have you ever noticed what a snare a stocking of this description can be? You can sit at it for an hour or so, until it seems easier to go on darning it than to bestir yourself to do anything else. In the end, you haven’t accomplished much, considering the time you’ve been about it, but you have acquired a large dose of the virtuous and exemplary feeling that is always the outcome of stocking-darning.

Ursula had got like that, though I wouldn’t have you think I under-estimated her efforts, for it was my apparel she was darning.

“I often think that a garden embodies all the philosophy of life,” she replied to my query, in a detached way, as she closely inspected the stocking foot drawn over her hand, in order to pounce upon any further signs of impending dissolution.

“I seem to fancy I’ve heard that——”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt someone has said it before me. I’ve noticed over and over again that people plagiarize my really cleverest remarks before I’ve actually had time to say them myself; and I think something ought to be done to prevent the infringement of copyright in this barefaced way. But all the same, whether anyone has, or has not, already helped themselves to this unique creation of my brain, the fact remains that I thought it out for myself, alone and unaided. And the more I meditate upon it, the more I notice what heaps of things in the garden resemble life.”

“As for example——?”

“Well, slugs, for instance, and the bindweed, and the rabbits, and the broad beans. They all seem to typify that here we have no abiding anything.”

I agreed mournfully, as I thought of the succulent, hopeful-looking scarlet runners that the slugs had eaten right through the tender main stems close to the ground. It was a sad awakening for us the day we found a few score of limp and dying remains, where over-night we had watered as promising a row of youngsters as one could have wished to see. To our grieving spirits, it seemed as though it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if they had eaten the leaves and left us the stems, at least more leaves might have grown, whereas now——!

And the bindweed—where could you find a more striking analogy to original sin? Flaunting beautiful flowers (which I greatly love), yet all the while spreading wicked roots out of sight, choking everything it lays hold of, turning up in the most unlooked-for places—but there is no need to write more under this heading; a healthy crop of bindweed (and I never knew one that wasn’t most irritatingly healthy) could give points to a preacher every Sunday in the year, and then have enough to spare for the week-night services. And when he had done with bindweed, he could start afresh on mint.

Rabbits, again, are dear things, with an appeal that is quite different from that of any other of the wild things. Sometimes in the past, when I have been doomed to sit for an hour or so in the airlessness and weariness of crowded hall or place of entertainment, or in the loneliness of a congested social function, where everybody is too buzzingly busy with “being social” to have time to say a word to anyone, I just switch my mind right off the glare and the heat and the stuffiness and the superficiality and the heartlessness, and take a look at the little orchard adjoining the cottage garden, and for just a minute I watch the rabbits, nibbling the grass, sitting up on their hind legs to get a better view of any possible enemy-approach, and scampering back to cover in the coppice with a bobbing of white tails, at the least suspicion of danger. To a woman there is something very touching about the timidity of these little brown things. I always wish I could make them understand that I am their friend and not their enemy—but this is a difficult matter, because there is the small white dog to be considered in the compact, and there is no sentimentality about him where rabbits are concerned!

I wouldn’t be without these little furry families in the coppice, but oh, I do wish they would leave the young cabbages alone, or at any rate spare the tenderest of the green leaves! It is a bit damping even to ardour like ours to be greeted, when we arrive from town, by a gardener waving a deprecating hand over rows of hardy cabbage stumps bereft of leaves. At such times it seems as though it wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if they had eaten the stems and left us the leaves, at least we could have cooked them, whereas now——!

Rabbits certainly emphasize the fact that life grows thistles as well as figs.

* * * * *

With regard to the beans, it is difficult to be philosophical. I can be to some extent resigned when my misfortunes are handed out to me by Nature, but it is a different thing when they are manufactured for me (at my expense, too) by my fellow-creatures.

On the whole, I cannot speak too highly of the men who have worked for me about the Flower-patch; I have been exceedingly well served, but now and again one comes upon misfortune, and on one occasion I found I had engaged an Ananias of the most proficient type. During his brief _régime_ the weeds thrived apace, while the choicest bulbs and flowers took on a world of diskerridgement. When the black pansies, and the heliotrope Spanish iris feathered with white and yellow, and the rare delphiniums, and the yellow arum lily disappeared at one fell swoop, Ananias shook his head sadly and put their defalcation down to the rush of the rain and the angle of the earth.

“Everything do simply run off this soil!” he explained.

Quite true; it certainly did. And two legs invariably ran with it.

And the vegetables seemed as subject to diskerridgement as the flowers, though it was always referred to as “blight.”

There were the broad beans, for instance; I had given him two quarts of seed, and indicated where I would like them planted. They were a special prize strain that had been sent to me by a famous firm of seedsmen, who had been moved to this generous deed on reading some of the chronicles of the Flower-patch when they were first published in _The Woman’s Magazine_. The head of the firm wrote me that they were a new mammoth variety, and they would be pleased if I would try them in my cottage garden.

We planned great things when those broad beans should be ready. Two quarts would make about ten rows, we reckoned, quite a goodly plantation for us; and we decided that as we should have plenty, considering our small household, we would be extravagant and gather our first dishful when they were quite young and in that deliciously tender state that is unknown to the town dweller, who seldom sees a broad bean till it is a tough old patriarch, and in such a condition considers it a coarse vegetable.

It was a cold day in February when I handed the seed to Ananias; we were returning to London the same day, so we beguiled part of the long journey discussing whether that first dish should be accompanied by parsley sauce and boiled ham, or whether to fry the ham and have the broad beans given one turn in the frying-pan after they were boiled.

The subject seemed more and more vital the further we got along the road, for we couldn’t get luncheon baskets (no, not the War; it was before that event, and due to one of the many cheerful strikes with which our pre-war existence was punctuated), and the bananas and Banbury cakes we purchased _en route_ seemed woefully unsatisfying. Hence, it was pleasant, but very tantalizing, to contemplate that dish of beans, and we finally agreed that the ham should be fried, and that we would dig some new potatoes specially for the occasion. We sat and meditated on that meal, as the winter landscape flew past us, and the more we meditated the more violently hungry we got.

You see, the beans really assumed more than ordinary importance.

But alas, when bean time came, all that decorated the bean plot was one miserable row of wretched-looking stalks.

“It’s that thur blight agin,” remarked Ananias; “I watched it a-comin’ up the valley.”

“But why didn’t you pinch off the tops, if they were showing blight?” I inquired; “then they would have made fresh shoots lower down.”

He shook his head and looked at me pityingly: “We don’t do our beans like that a-here.”

“And where are all the other rows,” I asked; “I suppose blight didn’t carry off roots and all of the remainder?”

“No, ’twere slugs, I warrant, or birds, or else the seed were stale, maybe.”

Ursula carefully turned over the rest of the ground later on, but never a glimmer of a benighted bean did she find.

Still, Ananias was, as usual, quite willing to be obliging. “My beans has done uncommon well this year,” he continued. “It’s jest all accordin’ how it takes ’em; sometimes mine does well and t’other people’s doesn’t; and then agin t’other people’ll have a fine crop and I won’t have a bean. I can let you have some o’ mine if you like. I know you’re powerful fond o’ broad beans. I allus say you’re jest like my missus.” (I’m sorry I haven’t a portrait of stout, unwashed, sixty-five-year-old Sapphira to reproduce; without it you cannot possibly understand how pleased I was!)

He brought over half a bushel, explaining that he had to charge twopence a pound more than other people, as these were specially large and good yielders, that were expensive in the first place.

They were remarkably fine beans, indeed as fine as I have ever seen; and I wrote to the firm of seedsmen and told them their mammoth variety had proved all they claimed for it.

I conclude the miserable row in my garden was a twopenny packet bought from the travelling huckster who peddles seeds around the villages at suitable seasons.

* * * * *

These instances are sufficient to indicate the trend of Ursula’s thoughts when she started to philosophize on the garden. She interrupted her valuable remarks, however, to exclaim: “Do look at that wench!” And Virginia might well be looked at! Her exertions had turned her the colour of a peony; down her face streamed copious “extract of forehead.” The clipping mania had got thorough hold of her, and she was trying to trim every hedge about the place, leaving in her wake a trail of clippings for someone else to clear up—as is the way with all first-class amateurs.

The next task pointed out itself. Ursula got a birch broom, while I trundled the wheelbarrow out of the tool barn; and seeing that there was already a pile of greenstuff waiting disposal, I started a bonfire, while Ursula swept up and supplied extra fuel.