Part 10
The last day of May. After the usual “contrariness” of life we have spent the hot span in London, and returned here to find that ungenial nor’west wind blowing in upon us apparently over the same icebergs as a month ago. We think with wails of regret of the long, golden, balmy garden-days we missed; of the full glory of the Azaleas; of those splendours of Rose Tulips which we should have enjoyed, radiant in the sunshine, instead of seeing them yawn their lives away in a hot town drawing-room. And the Florentina Alba Irises, those delicate, fragrant, stately things that look as if they were compounded of cobweb and spun crystal and moonlit snow—it takes but a day to show them in their beauty and another to wilt them—we have missed their lovely hour too, of course. On long, long stems, the Iris Siberica are congregating a little grove of buds in the Blue Border; only two curving purple darlings having outrun the rest. We shall miss them, for the fates have decreed that we are to leave the Earthly Paradise in a day or two once more, and that for the flat horizons of Lancashire. Well, the best of the Spring, early and late, is over, and we do not grudge these intermediary days so much, though we wonder how the bedding out will get on without our stimulating presence. We shall not even have a finger in the “Cherry-Pie.” Lengthy plans will have to be made. The “Miss Wilmott” Verbena must replace, by their delicate rose, the blue of the Myosotis carpet as well as the wonders of the many-hued Darwins, in the two centre beds of the Dutch Garden. And in the border beds we project a fine gathering of Antirrhinums shading from crimson, through Firefly and Rose-Dorée, to palest pink.
The terrace immediately under the house runs, according to our invariable summer programme, to cool colours and sweet scents. Under the dining-room and drawing-room windows, besides the transient prospect of the White Lilies, there are to bloom ‹until the frost lays waste› Heliotrope and Nicotiana, with pale pink Ivy-leaf Geranium to contrast with the mauve and purple, and blue Lobelia to rim the outer border of White Pinks. Against the terrace wall, between the tall Madonna Lilies, which show good promise, and the Polyantha Roses, red and white, with the thick edging of “Mrs. Sinkins,” Lobelia and Petunia shall spread. The pots will bear their customary summer burthen of rose Ivy-leaf Geraniums, with Lobelia too, and the Zonals. We like them to flaunt against the moor.
Below, in the Blue Border, the Delphiniums and the Anchusas, the great old-established White Rose bushes, the steel blue Thistle, must make what show they can over the annuals—Nigella, Gypsophila and Nemophila—not forgetting the kind Campanulas, so dear, so faithful, so hardy! In fine contrast, on the other side of the grass walk, the Dorothy Perkins hedge will spread its vivid masses, and fling out its irrepressible garlands over the border of bright blue Nemophila we have had the audacity to sow.
And below, in the Hemicycle, the colours are to grow cool again, with Heliotrope between the Lilies, the Lavenders, and the Monthly Roses, and Fortune’s Yellow and Rêve d’Or running up the supporting wall.
The beauty of the ancient woods in that Lancashire home from which we have just returned lingers in our memory. Outside the park walls, the flat fields lie that would have a charm of their own if the encroachment of the peculiarly unlovely brick and mortar prosperity of the district did not catch the eye on almost every side; but within there is a sense of wonderful peace and mystery, in the old, old woods with their Rhododendron glades. The astonishing height of the trees seems to keep modernity at bay, and tells stories still of the simple, proud, God-fearing race which has become so associated with the very spot of earth that has borne and nurtured them for many centuries, that, like one or two other families in England, their name in absolute legality is not complete without the territorial appendage.
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[Sidenote: THE DISAPPEARING SQUIRE]
We hear every day that “the Squire” is a being of the past. We know that every effort of present-day legislation is to abolish what was once the strength of England; what might still be its strength, if the restless and destructive spirit of the age would permit it.
The young owner of those old lands ‹who has just been our host› is one who will, we hope, keep up the traditions—so fast dying out, or being stamped out—a little longer. He is, as his grandfather was, the centre of his own people, the shepherd of his flock. Not quite to the same extent, perhaps: we do not suppose, for instance, that he is both maker and depository of their wills, or that he is summoned to every tenant’s deathbed as was that kindly, sturdy old Lancastrian his grandsire.
“Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!” the afflicted wife and mother would say. “Run oop to the Hall and tell Squoire to coom along quick, for feyther’s at his last!”
Neither would he undertake to mend the broken leg; or patch up the conjugal quarrel. But the young Squire will still hear such a phrase as this at election time: “What _we_ wants to know is which way Squoire’s voting? Squoire’s man is the man for we!”
He will let his cottages at eighteen pence a week; and the larger the family is the smaller will be the rent. And the claims of the tenant will be attended to before his own. He seems as much part of them as they are part of him. Has anyone ever heard of a labourer on a large estate being in destitution? We never have. Our great landowners do more to provide for their own dependents and keep down pauperism than any frantic legislator or wholesale philanthropist. But the system is to go; we have the best authority for it, the authority of those in power. God help England and England’s poor peasants, say we, when they have their way!
We can speak with examples under our eyes. Every time a bit of an estate is sold, hereabouts, the cottages thereon are purchased by the local grocer or butcher: and up goes the rent that had been three and six or four shillings a week to seven and six and ten shillings. Here, where we live, there are practically no important landowners, and what is the result? Not the most miserable cottage to be had under seven and six a week, a rent liable to be raised at a moment’s notice. The butcher, the baker, these are the “landlords,” and the rent they exact is exactly what they know they can extract out of the unfortunate tenant, in the present state of cottage scarcity. We ourselves have spent weeks in striving to secure a roof for a wretched woman with three little children, whose husband had attempted to murder her and after her escape had danced upon all her furniture, and burnt the remnants. We had to engage a cottage three months in advance, and then the rent was eight and six a week! She was a stupid poor goose of a woman, who couldn’t do anything for her living except an occasional day’s charing or rough washing. Of course we ought to have let her go to the workhouse; but we didn’t. We guaranteed the rent instead and took in the eldest boy as an unneeded garden assistant. ‹He is rather like a garden slug, so we thought he ought to be at home in the borders›! The other day a local tradesman raised the rent of a cottage sixpence a week upon the hard-working mother of a large family, who occasionally comes in “to oblige” at Villino Loki; and when she remonstrated he humorously remarked that Mr. Lloyd George was “driving him to it!”
[Sidenote: THE REFRESHING FRUIT]
There is a proverb that “good wine needs no bush.” The Chancellor’s efforts to convince his victims of the comfort of the plaster which is blistering them are almost pathetic. But surely it is another proof, if one were needed, of the weakness of his cause. A local laundry owner has been receiving six pounds a week, lecturing, in Devonshire of all places, on the blessedness of the Act as experienced by himself and staff. One of our district nurses, a delightful sturdy North Country woman, was “approached” as to whether she would undertake, for a consideration, to use her persuasiveness with her patients and make them see how much they were benefited by the stamp tax. She declined with a heat that may have astonished the emissary.
It must indeed be a little difficult to make, say, a struggling greengrocer understand the debt of gratitude he owes to the law which constrains him to pay fourpence a week for the assistant he can so ill afford as it is and mulct that discontented youth of threepence! More especially when baker and grocer charge him more to cover their own losses.
The obvious remedy, says Mr. Lloyd George, is for the greengrocer to raise the prices in his town! He does; and somehow it doesn’t work. Being in a poor district and all his patrons being poor, they buy less from him, and he buys less from them.
“But look at the comfort in sickness!” It is tiresome, it almost seems like putting bad will into it, that the greengrocer’s wife should develop consumption before the first stone of any sanatorium is ready!
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Now, that prosperous, contented class, the labourer on the great estate, a man who lives on his lord’s lands, if not rent free, very nearly so, with wood and garden produce, potatoes, milk and what not, and steady employment all the year round, he is to be benefited—save the mark! A “minimum wage,” cheap housing, the fixed hours, the sacred half-holiday, it sounds so plausible! The propagandist is volubly at work. “No wonder,” as the young Squire we have recently visited once ruefully said to us, “my decent, contented, God-fearing villagers were turned in a couple of hours into shrieking, blaspheming lunatics by such a gospel, preached with forcible arguments in the public-house.”
Of course they will get their demands. Striking, with “peaceful picketing,” generally gets its way, even if not backed up by Government emissaries and the glorious visions flash-lighted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But what will be the result? Half the amount of employment on the estates of those who can still afford to keep them, and no all-the-year-round engagements. When the work is slack the over-paid and inimical labourer will naturally be discharged. We say inimical, for how can friendly relations be maintained if the old solidarity is destroyed? This, of course, is what is aimed at; and the quack remedy, the patent pill alluringly held aloft, is—State ownership of land! The land is to be managed like the Workhouse, the Prison, and the Reformatory, of which, we are all aware, the British State makes such a brilliant success. We know how the poor love the Workhouse, and how happy they are in it; yet one can scarcely take up a police report without finding some desperate pauper sentenced for revolt. Oh, no doubt it will be a Merry England when these disinterested and dashing tinkers get their way.
[Sidenote: A HAVEN OF REST]
We have known, in parenthesis, a pauper establishment, run by voluntary effort, in which a hundred and fifty old men and ninety old women were kept happy and contented by a handful of soft-voiced nuns. No need to call in the policeman, in Portobello Road; for there old age is reverenced at once and pitied, and the double aspect of the most natural of all the commandments is put into every-day practice, so unobtrusively and simply that no one can guess how heroically.
But the religious question will soon be treated in the same way as the land question; so no invidious comparisons need be drawn. Little boys and little girls are to be taught that the State is henceforth to take the place of God in their infant minds. How comfortable and warm a creed! How it will strengthen their character for living, and ease the thoughts of the dying. There is no God: but there is a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a dashing gentleman at the Home Office. You have not been created or redeemed, little boy! We have no prayers to teach you. There are no divine commandments which you need obey—naturally, since there is no Divine Father. There are no sacraments to sustain and elevate your soul—for little boys and girls have no souls! But cheer ye: you were evolved by a natural process, and the State is here to cradle and instruct you and to make life beautiful for you. Behold, dear children, the Book of the Laws. These laws which you are bound to keep—unless, of course, you go on strike, become a Suffragette, or organize political vote catching. And this is a picture of a Jail for people who are so blind as to refuse Insurance blessings; behold that inspired countenance. That is the head of the Government! And for Sunday amusements there is the Cinema—the Crippen case, dear children; the Houndsditch Burglary and the Train Smash.... And when the new theories have developed and matured, there will be no such thing as private property in anything to constrain the free mind of emancipated man—A house of your own, a wife to yourself!—fie!
“Surely, surely,” said a young Liberal M.P., “no sanely thinking person would continue to advise religious education in the schools. What is the inevitable result—see the case in your own Church” ‹he was speaking to a Catholic› “the law commands one thing, and the Church another! Take divorce, for instance. Surely, surely—”
“Dear me,” said the Catholic. “We had not looked at it in that light. The laws man made are, then, above the laws God made?”
“Surely, surely you would not teach little children to disobey a law of the land made for their benefit?”
We ventured to say that the ten commandments had forestalled—
His pitying smile arrested us; so infinitely was he above the ten commandments.
XXII
Yesterday Loki’s family motored energetically some fifty miles and back to a garden party near London.
A wonderful house with wonderful lawns and gardens—one feels that the hideous tide of brick and mortar must inevitably sweep over and destroy it before another generation comes and goes, so that there is a kind of pathos in its very beauty.
Out of the unlovely mean streets along which the tram-line runs its abominable way, one turns off into the cool country road. The long avenue is bordered by wide fields where, as we passed yesterday, the new-mown grass was lying in silver furrows. The country is quite flat; but the richness of the green, the incidents of lake and timber, give it a placid English fairness of its own.
The Lady of Villino Loki went with a keen eye to garden hints, and her first thrill was a Honeysuckle screen in the little garden of the second lodge. Such a Honeysuckle screen! It had once, she supposes, been an arch, for it rose to a kind of gable peak in the centre, but it was filled in either by design or natural luxuriance till it was a complete mass of bloom, a solid wall of blossom. Never had she beheld such a thing before. She wants Honeysuckle at the Villino, as she said already, and she is fired with fresh enthusiasm. Why should she not have a hedge of Honeysuckle, not too far from the house itself? It is settled. She will buy fifty in November and try.
The weather, which had been misty, thundery and unpromising, cleared just upon our arrival at the great “Adam” house. The lawns were in their perfection, the shade of the Cedars was cut out on the sun-golden turf, the massed flowers were vivid against their cunningly devised backgrounds. Naturally Villino Loki, even in its wildest dreams, cannot emulate this great and carefully cherished place; but one can find practical suggestions here and there. We cannot mass rare and golden-hued Maples over a broad band of yellow Calceolarias anywhere on our terraced lawns; but it is very instructive to see the management of certain herbaceous borders, where three or four large pillars of Rambler Roses alternate with mauve and silver-leaved Japanese Maples at the back; the foreground being of the usual herbaceous order.
We had no idea that the dwarf bright yellow Evening Primroses would look so well grouped together. And Nemesia, “Heavenly Blue,” has become the one annual our souls long for: blue flowers are all too rare.
Everything was most kindly labelled. We do not know if it is possible to obtain any seedlings this time of year; but certainly, next year, this adorable little plant, Nemesia, with its most exquisite turquoise blue colourings and its splendid efflorescence, shall enter largely into our schemes. In between the Nemesia, bushes of Campanula Persicifolia rose with cool restrained tones; the contrast was one to be copied also.
Another not impossible example was a Rose screen, starting with a background of close growing Ramblers, some ten or twelve feet high, supplemented midway by some of the larger Bush Roses and running down to the edge of the turf in front with pegged-down Teas; so that, to the very top, it was one mass of varied bloom. We do not see any reason why such an effect should not be copied, even in a small garden.
The _standard_ Scarlet Geraniums we must admire from a respectful distance. They are as much beyond our humble resources as the _standard_ Heliotrope we so much admired a year ago in a millionaire’s huge grounds not very far from us. These last rose out of a bed of mauve Violas. The ambitious soul of the mistress of the Villino hungered to copy it; but she knew that hunger would never be assuaged.
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[Sidenote: PICKING UP WRINKLES]
We have had a frightful disappointment in the “Miss Wilmott” Verbenas. For two summers it has been the same story. Last year they came up “all colours,” though purchased from a well-known firm! This year, to make quite sure, we ordered seedlings to be specially grown for us from a local nursery. The wretch has sent a collection of measly little starveling things which cannot be expected to do anything for weeks and weeks. Of course they should not have been accepted; but the deed was done in our absence. We are much inclined to have the beds cleared, and Heliotrope or rose-coloured Ivy-leaf Geraniums put in instead. It is too late for anything else. Gardeners are so tiresome! They are as bad as cooks, who will accept with perfect equanimity, fish ready to illustrate the proverb and game prepared to walk to its own funeral, and then say that “they thought it was ‘a bit high’ perhaps, but they weren’t quite sure!”
We have forced for the house several plants of Canterbury Bells, glorious purple and white, which have grown to an extraordinary size and fill the Compton pots on the landing in very decorative fashion.
The front landing and stairs are wondrous pretty in the Villino: and the colour scheme—Tangerine yellow for the curtains and grey for the carpet—somehow suits the little place, with its Roman air. In the round bow window there is a large copy of the Samothraki Nike on a white stand; and in front of her we place flower-pots all the year round—generally Orange trees in the winter, with which we are successful.
Alas! we leave the little Paradise to-morrow! However, we are still in such an intermediary stage that we mind less than when we lost all the glories of the Azaleas. For anyone of an impatient disposition, this time of the first setting out of the bedding plants is a trying ordeal. We are going this afternoon on a surreptitious round with “plantoids” to which Adam objects, but in the virtues of which we are believers.
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[Sidenote: PITFALLS OF AMBITION]
The longer we labour at garden experiences, the more it is borne in upon us that ambitiousness is to be avoided. No amateurs—however splendid their visions may be—should attempt “Wild Gardens,” or “Bog Gardens” on their own unaided efforts. This does not refer to the flinging of wild-flower seeds in woodland glades, but to the digging up of harmless and unobtrusive patches of field and bank for the insertion of seedlings, which apparently will never be at home in that particular aspect and soil. The worst of it is that the energetic workers are so ensnared by the mental vision that they very often fail to perceive the paltriness of the material result.
“We had to have the meadow mown and to dig it up, just along there,” said an energetic gardening neighbour to us the other day, pointing out with pride a dreadful stretch of raw and muddy earth that lay meaninglessly along the lush field. “And we _think_ the things will do now.”
The things—poor little sprigs of white Violas, and other most unadaptable garden children—were looking very ill and faint at long distances from each other. And in any case, even if they were eventually to flourish, the meadow was quite beautiful enough in itself and needed no such adornment. But we had not the heart to tell her so. We said, “How nice that will be,” but took the lesson to ourselves.
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[Sidenote: TANTALISING NOVELTIES]
A visit to the Horticultural Show at Holland House—even the humblest gardener can take away lessons from these displays of lavish beauty. We wonder whether it would be possible for us to have a pool anywhere upon our sandy height. And, if so, why should we not build rough rock-work round it on one side; fill it with the cool misty mauve of the Nipeta, the cool pale yellow spires of the Dwarf Mulleins, and the faint pinks of Spiræa; and against this background, walled about by a bank of the mysterious Iris “Morning Mist,” let a little slender lead statue rise out of the water? Coolness and mystery! Shall we ever encompass that delightful effect?... The flat flagged paths on the other side of the water should be bordered by Iris; and they should dip down into the pool itself, where just two or three Water Lilies should rock their gold-centred cups. Oh, dear! If we had sufficient money how beautiful we could make our corner of the earth!
Oh, and the Clematis!—It was a shock to find that we had to pay seven and sixpence each to go in, but it was worth it, for we have plunged to the extent of a dozen adorable Clematis from the very fountain head—if one can so strain the poor English language—of Clematis culture itself.
And the Roses! “Coronation,” a new bright scarlet climbing Wichuriana; Tausendschön and Blush Rambler, old favourites, but so beautiful! There were two or three pillars of unnamed seedlings, exquisite apple-blossom beauties, which we longed to purchase, but which were not yet in the market. A firmer, richer apple-blossom best describes the bloom of the new discovery.
Quite beyond our pockets, but most attractive, were the standard Ivies, golden and variegated, fifteen years old ... at the modest charge of six guineas each! Could we ever wait fifteen years to see such developments? After all, why not? The grower assured us they were perfectly hardy, and more they were cut the better. They would look charming on the terrace. Such balls of gold!
Lilies at the top of a rock-garden or at the top of a rough wall have a most charming effect.
We have invested in three and sixpence worth of new fertiliser guaranteed to “produce an appearance like dark green Utrecht velvet in ten days on the roughest lawn.”
“Would you like your lawn to look like that, Madam?” asked the red headed youth in charge of squares that didn’t look in the least like real grass, but a kind of artificial compound as above mentioned.
“Very much!” said one of us, who was struck by the unnatural hue and smoothness of the exhibit.—“Do mind the sun on your head!” she added parenthetically to the delicate member of our party, who is always on her mind. “Oh, pray Madam, do not trouble to shade me,” said the red-haired youth modestly. “I am quite all right, I assure you.”