Part 3

The Dutch Garden is bounded by a clipped yew hedge on two sides, divided by a rustic archway where Pink Dorothy rambles in June and onwards. Against this hedge there are two long beds lying to the south, filled with crimson and red roses: in spring edged with Darwins and Arabis, before Mme. Normand Levavasseur spreads her disappointing maroon clusters. On the north side the brick wall of the terrace, divided in its turn opposite the archway by brick steps, is flanked by Darwin tulip beds. The beds under the side of the house to the west have also Darwins with a carpet of Forget-me-nots and a fringe of Arabis. The space that runs back to the outer wall under the study windows is planted with Gloire de Versailles, Pyrus Japonica and the ubiquitous Tulips and Forget-me-nots.

There is one thing we have succeeded in impressing on the patient and kindly Adam, and that is that we “cannot bear bald spaces.” Our bulbs lie as close as they can without injuring each other. Our Wallflowers, even now, in January, jostle!

In the bed that runs right along the bricked upper terrace, there lie, awaiting the call of the different months ‹please add docility and punctuality to the moral list›, behind a deep border of Mrs. Sinkins, a double row of Crocuses, a row of Thomas More Tulips, a little hedge of white and red “Polyantha” Roses, and groups of “Candidum” Lilies. At intervals, on the top of the terrace wall, are large Compton vases which will foam with Forget-me-Nots, and thrust clusters of Hyacinths up against the Moor by and by. Just now they carry little yellow torches of Retinospora Aurea, which Adam said, when he first planted them, looked, he thought, “very lonely,” but which, each rising from a field of green moss, stand out, we think, with a classic dignity against the sombre magnificence of those rolling winter hills.

IV

And did we say that one could ever in any circumstances wish Susan into the dogstar? Alas! poor dear little Susan, she reposes in a raw, ostentatious grave in the Oak Tree Glade with six bulb spikes at the top of the mound. We should like to put a granite stone there with the words: “Here lies Susan, a good dog.” All that was possible was done to save her, and she was the most pathetic, gentle, patient creature; at the very end, seeking blindly with one small paw for her master.

[Sidenote: FORBIDDEN TERRITORY]

Poor Juvenal was so disconsolate that we did not know what to do. We hit, however, on the happy thought of purchasing a small white Highland Terrier puppy from a litter on sale in the neighbourhood. Bettine ‹thus she has been christened with a fine disregard of local colour› arrived, a dirty, cringing, abject little wretch; but the atmosphere of Villino Loki has wrought so great a change that she is now a perfect imp of mischief and general cheekiness. The Master of the House says she is like a Paris gamin, and that Gavroche is the only name that befits her. The days of cringing are certainly over. Her long ears cocked, her wide mouth derisively open, she defies authority, with attitudes and expressions that can only be transcribed by such remarks as “Pip, Pip,” or the gesture which the French know as _Pied-de-nez_.

The other dogs at first protested fiercely against this substitute for their beloved Susan even Arabella curling a ferocious lip, and striking out with her fringed paw. But now they have accepted the new comrade with all the generosity of their fine characters. Loki himself makes no objection, except when she ventures upon territory which he regards as peculiarly his own; such as the grand-maternal bedroom.

The month that has taken away the harmless humble life of Juvenal’s fox-terrier, has also brought the news of England’s loss in one of her most gallant sons. He was a friend of the household, and Loki, I am sure, does not forget—for a long memory is one of the Pekinese characteristics—how the South Pole hero played hide-and-seek with him in his puppyhood for a whole hour, one summer’s day, like a very child himself. The family of Villino Loki have memories, too, of that friendship which they valued so highly; and they will always carry the vivid picture of the strong brown face, with the blue eyes that were at once as guileless as a child’s and full of a far-away vision, as if they never ceased to contemplate their high and distant goal. The world is crowded with bumptious people who do nothing at all that is useful, if they do not do harm. Here was a man who had already accomplished mighty achievement and was set on mightier still, and there never was anyone so modest, so anxious to push others forward and keep himself in the background. He was asked by one of us to write a line in an autograph book, and he set down characteristically a tribute to another:

“The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel....”

We laughed ‹after that futile fashion that becomes a kind of habit nowadays› and said, “We always think that sounds so uncomfortable!”

He raised those blue eyes, half humorously, half deprecatingly. “You make me feel ashamed of being incorrigibly romantic.”

It was we who felt ashamed.

“We are sure,” we answered, “you have a good friend somewhere.”

“Yes,” he said, “the best ever a man had.”

We are glad to think that friendship was with him all through and at the end. In one of the last letters ever received from the doomed Antarctic Expedition the tribute is paid again: “No words of mine,” writes he, “can describe what he is.”

* * * * *

[Sidenote: TOM’S GRAND MANNERS]

The birds have eaten every single bud on our baby almond trees—the first year that they have had any flower buds at all. Ungrateful little wretches! the Master of the Villino sees personally to the replenishing of the numerous bird-baths and drinking-pans; and Juvenal provides them with cocoa-nuts filled with lard and baskets full of crumbs—aided by Gold-Else, the cook, who loves little creatures in fur and feather as much as the rest of the household. Tom, the old cat, is very happy under this lady’s kind rule, and, to show his appreciation, accompanies her in stately fashion every night up the kitchen stairs to her bedroom door. The act of courtesy accomplished, she as solemnly reconducts him downstairs again to spread his couch for him—a sheet of brown paper, by his request.

The Hyacinths are breaking out of their green hoods, shaking blue bells; but our Scillas seem to be going to disappoint us. This sandy soil on our Surrey heights is not at all appreciated by bulbs. Snowdrops will have nothing to say to us, unless in a prepared bed. Narcissus Poeticus disappeared altogether after one year’s blooming. We are trying to naturalize Bluebells in a glade which we have cleared—and in which this year has been planted an avenue of pink May trees, to end at the bottom of the dell in a group of white Azaleas—but we are not at all sure that we shall succeed. However, we have our compensations: Azaleas thrive, and so do Rhododendrons. We are year by year adding more of the former to the wild slopes.

Below the terrace, yclept the “Hemicycle,” a path bordered with Azalea Mollis was a perfect glory last May, although it had only been planted the preceding autumn. The “Hemicycle” was a little fairy glade of Crocus a week ago, the second in February; and we have still hope of the Scillas which surround our bereft almond trees. A rough wall rises from it to the Upper Terrace, over which Dorothy Rambler will fling its lovely blooms in immense trails by and by; and its stones themselves hold a never-ending succession of delight in the shape of Arabis, Aubretia, Cerastium, Thrift, and the like. Yellow roses climb up to meet the Dorothy, and the dear little pink China Rose grows in bushes all along the front between the Lavender plants which we are trying to acclimatise, but which, year after year, are blighted by the frost before they have had time to grow strong.

Satisfactory as our wall-garden is, there is a wall-garden at a cottage in a neighbouring village which never fails to fill us with envy every time we see it. It belongs to two maiden ladies, whom we have christened Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza. They are so extraordinarily like each other that even they themselves ‹we have heard› hardly know which is which. They have the same rotundity of figure, the same uncertain obliquity in one eye, the same cheerful rosy visage, the same sleek bands of grey hair.

When the Master of the House was a young man, an Irish servant was heard to observe to him, gazing rapturously at him as he walked away from her vision, all unconsciously, in his shooting-garb: “And indeed he’s a lovely gentleman. Them jars of legs!” ‹As a matter of fact, Loki’s Grandfather has very nice legs.› But Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza, in short, sensible grey tweed skirts, bending their portly forms over their wall garden, have more than often presented to the passer-by a vision....

The Japanese say that reticence is the very soul of art. Our aspirations are always towards the artistic, but there is something touching in four ... exactly similar ... side by side...!

[Sidenote: A TERRIFYING GOOD WISH]

To digress once more: Loki’s Grandfather is no doubt a man of fine proportions; though he is not at all plump, he has all the athlete’s dread of becoming so. Once when we were stranded at a small wayside station in Ireland, without even a bench to sit upon, he began to while away the time by testing his weight on the automatic machine. The indicating needle travelled considerably further than he expected! He was standing, transfixed, staring at the pointing finger, when a very old woman with a shawl over her head, holding a very small boy by the hand, suddenly broke into loud paeans beside him:

“God bless your honour!—Isn’t it the grand gentleman you are! Glory be to God, may you grow larger, and larger, and larger!”

“For heaven’s sake,” cried Loki’s Grandfather, wheeling round in horror, “don’t say such a thing!”

“And indeed I do, yer honour.—Look at him now,” she went on, shaking the little creature she held by the hand, “you’ll never see a finer gentleman. Don’t you wish you had a Dada like that?”

Then she burst out again and continued to wish him increase in Sybilline tones. They were both so extraordinarily serious, she in her benisons, he in his terror of the curse, that as Loki’s Grandmother sat on her trunk she was weak with laughter.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: A LOCAL POET]

The Master of the Villino had a charming little experience last spring. Some time before, in the winter, he fell into conversation with an old sweep, who was tramping up the hill, the evidence of his life-work thick upon him. They discoursed of many things, for the sweep had a wide range of interests. They spoke of the moorland place as it was in bygone days; and of the learned Professor whose eulogies first put it into fashion; of the lectures on Science delivered by this latter; and of the way in which the spring first shows itself in the lower copses while it is still winter on our heights. The sweep knew a dell where the primroses were always a month in advance of any other spot. He had a soul for primroses, unlike Wordsworth’s horrible Peter—which reminds me of the delicious remark made to Loki’s young mistress by an old pensioner in Chelsea Gardens. He led her to the plot he cultivated for himself, with all the childish eagerness of the aged, and pointed to a single yellow crocus, blown this way and that by the wind, for it was a shrewish day. “Look at it, Missie!” he cried. “It’s as playful as a kitten.”

We do not know at what hour in the bleak late February morning the little box was left in the porch. It was found there by the earliest maid, and brought to the Master of the House with his letters in due course; a box that obviously had lately contained carbolic soap. Inside in a nest of moss, carefully covered with red bramble leaves, was a bunch of primroses tied with red wool, and the following “verses”:

“Beneath the moss and the mast, Though the weather has been wet and cold, I manage to raise my head Down in the Sussex wold.”

Thus it began, speaking in the name of the Primrose, to enter, rapidly and boldly into the sweep’s personality:

“To-day I passed by the way, So I stayed and picked you a few, To show I do not forget The chat I had with you.”

Here the muse got a little tired; but it ended up with unimpaired cheerfulness:

“I hope you are hale and well And now I must say Addue, Yours respectfully, STAR.”

Over the page there was a charming P.S.:

“Perhaps you have younger fingers The flowers to unfold, Mine are rather clumsy Being big and old.

Pleasant Hours, Live long.”

It is the kind of little incident that seems to happen at Villino Loki, where animals and human beings are queer and unexpected, and live together in simplicity and cheerfulness.

V

Travelling along the pleasant path of life, on the reverse side of the hill, the downward course ‹how graphic is the French of it for the later and “smaller half” of our allotted span: _sur le retour_›, there is a tendency to dwell more upon memories and proportionately less on ambitions. The prospect now ahead, placid and mellowed as it may be, naturally dwindles to narrower margins. Its interest is more of the immediate order; deals mostly with hopes and doings of the coming season. And, the circle of recollection widening, things distant in the past appeal with proportionate insistency to the mind’s eye.

[Sidenote: “DREAMING BACKWARDS”]

I believe this is the case with all thinking creatures ‹says Loki’s Grandpa—who has fallen into a reminiscent mood›. With one whose lazy and musing propensities, whose delight in day-dreams has proved his paramount weakness, the habit of “dreaming backwards” and hunting for old impressions has become as haunting, in these years of the sixth decade, as was, in salad days, the “dreaming forward” and the straining for a sight of things still below the horizon.

For instance: in a life which has always been one of constant book-companionship, the printed passages which most delight me are those which, having been first read in another age and re-discovered in this one, bring back a pulse of some long forgotten impression. The impression may be one that sober and critical memory does not record as having been so particularly enthralling at the time—yet it now comes back with a subtle fragrance all its own.

The long darkness of winter provides the richest reading hours. And if the page-turning is by the side of a wood fire—as happens on this, the coldest day of the year—if it is in a deep armchair with the lamp throwing its quiet rays over one’s shoulder, why, it is apt to become interspersed with long spells of wide-eyed dreaming. The fire burns with that special clearness, that kind of conscious eagerness which one observes inside the hearth upon a keen frosty night. In the town a frosty night is but a cold night. But here, on our country hill-side, when winter, albeit officially over, is in reality still with us, a frosty night inevitably turns our thoughts to the threatened hopes of the garden.

Now, as one who knows practically nought of the gardener’s “Arte and Mysterie,” my interest in the matter is of the irresponsible kind. I look forward, of course, and keenly, to the satisfying display, first of our sappy, turgid fragrant Hyacinth beds in the Dutch Garden ‹somehow, the Dutch Garden seems to belong more particularly to my own side of the Villino—to be a precinct of my study in fact› than to the proud-pied array of the subsequent Tulips, nodding in the breeze over their bed of close clustering Forget-me-Nots. This is the annual treat provided in the spring—for Grandpa’s especial behoof at Villino Loki—by the industrious care of the knowledgeable ladies. Nevertheless, as I say, my interest is of the general order; not of details; not of ways and means. I expect, in the maturity of every season, delightful achievements, and find them; but I take little part in their planning. I am of no use for device and not called upon in council. I thankfully enjoy the results; and this is perhaps not the worst part the Master of the House could play in the year’s transaction.

Only on two occasions have I volunteered a suggestion with regard to planting—and both are related to early, very early, reminiscences.

Creepers of all sorts we have in profusion. Ivy, of course, and Jessamine and Honeysuckle, and the gorgeous, if short-lived, Virginia-Ampilopsis its name, I believe. But there is one thing, I pointed out, I must have also, and that is the blue clustering, the incomparably fragrant _Glycine_ of my early childhood’s days. Wisteria is its proper English name.

Odoriferous bushes, again, we have, of every description. Ribes, Cassia, Gummy Cistus, what not?—lurk in ambuscade at the turning of paths to waylay you with their gush of essence, not to speak of the Azaleas in their banks; but all these perfumes, in their subtleness, belong to the middle years. No memories of the complete freshness of time cleave to them such as belong to the simple Sweet Briar.

So, now, the two rooted creatures of the Villino, which may be said to exist there more specially for the behoof of Loki’s Grandpa, are the Briar bushes at the end of the Lily Walk and by the _Schöne Aussicht_, and the still tender but promising Wisteria climbers in the re-entering and most sheltered corner of his study walls.

[Sidenote: FLOWER LOVES OF CHILDHOOD]

And it is for those young hopeful Wisterias that on this frosty night I feel a concern. Last year we had a score or so of purple clusters; we look to a goodly increase during the coming _Renouveau_.—‹You perceive the old, obsolete French word for Spring comes back of itself!› The anticipation of the near future, within the shrinking vista of coming pleasures, elicits as usual a return to the widening past. In this case the past that is recalled is that of a childhood spent in France.

The book lies forgotten on my knee. The brown Meerschaum grows cold in my hand. My eyes, lost in musings among the flame-fringed logs, now peer beyond the past half-century—at a time which seems verily as far distant and as little related to the present as that year 1636 stamped and still faintly discernible on the antique cast-iron backplate of the fireplace.... I see a farm-house in a village of that province which in ancient days was known as Ile-de-France ‹I hate your modern régime _départements_›, by name Mesnil-le-Roy; not far distant from Mantes, the natty little town on the upper and green-watered Seine, generally adverted to as _Mantes-la-Jolie_.

[Sidenote: GLYCINE!]

Therein, during nearly a whole year, for reasons of delicate health, resided a certain very small English boy—French enough in those tender years. In this delectable old place, so full of good-smelling things in their seasons: hay, and grain, and fruit, and at all times the health-restoring cow, the house was in the spring-time covered with Glycine. And with the adorable Glycine the small boy, who loved flowers as much as milk and fruits and beasts, fell forthwith in love.

How that coquettish Jappy plant came originally to find a footing in so rustic a corner as Mesnil-le-Roy is more than I can account for. Your French peasant is not, as a rule, addicted to the delights of flower raising; and, in those distant days, Wisteria was still something of a rarity anywhere. But there it was, already in the sturdiest strength of its age, embracing the old walls, forcing its fibrous wood into every cranny of the greystone, framing every window, striving up the chimney stacks—and filling the air with honey sweetness. It must have taken at least two score years to reach such a size.

With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. He feasted on it with his every sense. From morning till eve he would be sucking the base of some blue corolla plucked from its calyx, for the sake of that intense sweetness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of _Glycine_; he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his eyes with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in the scent, and listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz of honey-seekers in the sunshine. And, in the morning, his first thought, as he crept out of his small truckle-bed, was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that glittered upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side at the mansarde window.

Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I remember how, for months after he was removed back into the Paris house, the small boy would ply his mother with the yearning question, infantilely incorrect but vernacular: “_Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines, Maman?_” always to receive the non-committal but consoling:

“_Tantôt ... tantôt._”

This “tantôt” is the wonderful “by-and-by” which never comes to be!

And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in later years—to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of age. For years a many, a purple Wisteria spreading about the eaves of a south-country house, was to me only a purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was nothing more. It was not a “_Glycine_” until I had a creepered wall of my own. Then it surged before imagination’s eye with all the glamour of _les premières amours_, to which, in accordance with the old French saw, “_on en revient toujours_.”

Now, therefore, at Villino Loki, nothing will serve but a _Glycine_ to creep along those walls which are more especially my own; to embrace my south windows and nod in at the casement. And the suave-breathed Eastern beauty, first brought over to the West and god-fathered by Professor Wister, will privily remain Glycine for me; although I may draw the indulgent visitor’s attention to her under the better-known name of Wisteria Sinensis.—I have, by the way, an ever-ready pretext; for I learn from “The Language of Flowers” that the special significance of this blossom is “Welcome, fair stranger!” I mean to have a profusion of it, for old sake’s sake. Besides, is it not meet that Loki should not be deprived, during his villeggiatura, of the company of some Chinese living thing?

VI