Part 9

“Sweet little fellow—what can he want?” they say, and vainly offer tit-bits from the tea-table. Loki’s Grandparents of course cannot answer, “He begs you to go away”—but such unfortunately is the true explanation. He sneezes with rapture when the door is closed on the last departing guest: he then is able to lead his Grandmother upstairs for the evening romp. His Grandmamma has weak health, which is no doubt the reason why he has fixed on her as the only person who understands the true inwardness of his games. They are very exhausting to mere humans, and he has a great deal of cat perversity in his composition. He spent the whole time of a recent dinner-party sitting upon a chair in full view of the company, ceaselessly begging with prayerful paws; “Oh do, do go away!” As usual he evoked a great deal of undeserved sympathy—meanwhile his tactful family held their peace.

Bettine is growing into the hobbledehoy stage. A few weeks ago it was an entrancing spectacle to see her playing with a butterfly on the moor. It was a yellow butterfly, and we think it must have understood the rules of catch-who-catch-can, for it fluttered along just ahead of the white puppy’s nose. It was a little vision of youth and spring to snapshot for the gallery of mental memories. Loki’s female relations, who are given to transcendental discussions, sometimes wonder whether in the next world they will be vouchsafed these dear small pleasures which make up the best of life down here. Unless we find our animals there, there will certainly be something missing. Surely there are flowers in Heaven, and birds—why not those faithful creatures in which a soul seems so often struggling into birth?

[Sidenote: HEAVEN, AND OUR BEASTS]

“My little god, my little god!” Maeterlinck makes the dog say to his master. It is certain that man, in making the dog his companion, has in some sort endowed him with spiritual faculties. And it is this piteously loving, confiding, blindly adoring, dumb creature that has been selected by the “master minds” of the day as the chief victim for the horrors of scientific research!

Indeed, that humanity should thus use its God-given dominion over the helpless lower order of creation is an idea so hideous that it can only have emanated from the Powers of Darkness. All the glib arguments that this animal torture benefits suffering man seem to us as much beside the mark as they are immoral. Almost every crime can be justified by some such theory, from the century-old customs of child exposure in China to the modern Suffragette outrages. And already the boundaries on this speculative field have been extended so as to include members of the community whose defencelessness or unimportance preclude unpleasant reprisals. How many unfortunate patients, for instance, are quite unnecessarily operated upon in our great hospitals? Within our narrow personal experience we have known cases where life has been absolutely sacrificed to the “knife mania.”

Loki’s Grandmother, who feels very strongly on this subject, has always wanted to write an article giving chapter and verse of the facts. She would have headed her instructive pages with the title “Killing no Murder;” but she knows no magazine would publish them because of the storm it would raise.

During a recent severe illness of hers, one of her nurses, whom she used to call her “ministering devil,” was very fond of entertaining her—at moments when the patient was too weak for speech—with the hopes which many eminent men of science now entertain of being able, some day, to get a bill passed permitting vivisection on the condemned criminal!

Why speak of such abominations in these pages dedicated to kind, happy days and sweet garden thoughts? Only for this reason—that it is the policy of ignoring, of cowardly turning away from unpleasant subjects, on the part of the great majority of the world that makes the thing possible at all.

* * * * *

One of the first orders we give a new gardener is that nothing is to be slain at Villino Loki except the Green Fly and the Rose-Beetle. The birds may devour all our buds, strip up our crocuses, and denude our raspberry canes ‹if they get a chance›. The mole may tunnel and burrow and raise his convulsive mounds in our most cherished lawn—and that is certainly a test of garden endurance—we will have no traps! As for the squirrels, we are afraid we have cleared too much in our wilderness to tempt them now. But one of the family actually bought little green tables in order to spread repasts for them near their favourite haunt.

In certain wild corners of Dorsetshire squirrels become almost familiars in such households as are kindly enough to set forth a dainty, now and again, for the frolicsome company. One understanding person of our acquaintance was given to spreading nuts on a certain window-sill, where every day the squirrels used to come and fetch them. One morning she was a little later than usual in this attention; on coming into the room, she was startled by a knocking on the window, and there on the sill sat a thing, all fur and bright eyes, knocking with its fairy paw! We think Loki has a good deal of the squirrel in him. There are no end of nice little beasts that Loki resembles. Sometimes we declare that he is least of all dog.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: THE WILD PATCH]

It is a wonder that people do not make more use of Broom in their Wild Gardens. We have seen a woodland path where great bushes of alternate white and yellow Plantagenista made riot in the sunshine; but it was too regular an arrangement to harmonize with scene. A wild garden, however cultivated secret, should grow as naturally as possible. It is a rather interesting experiment to fling the contents of a packet of wild flower seeds about one’s banks and unkept spaces. One forgets all about it; and, behold! after the second year, there are all kinds of engaging discoveries to be made: patches of grey-blue Campanulas, bold Foxgloves, Loose-strife, white Campions, all the more delightful because forgotten and unexpected and fitting into their surroundings as no amount of planting in can make them do. A giant Mullein has just made itself a home under the fir-trees and stands as if it had always been there, boldly and defiantly established in its proper place and determined to maintain it.

We caress the project of planting tall Ericas and Mediterranean Heaths on the borders of a certain rough path; and in between the Heather we shall make drifts of Colchicum, so that it may look lovely in all seasons. We do not consider that Colchicum is properly placed in the garden. Its summer leaf is too coarse, and it is hideous when it dies off. Mrs. Earle has made the same remark in one of her delightful books.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: VISCOUNTESS, AND OTHERS]

It will be very interesting to see how the new Roses turn out. A good many were ordered on the strength of the catalogue description, from three different rose growers. Hybrid Perpetuals do not do with us; neither do pure Teas stand our cold, otherwise we should riot in “Lady Hillingdon.”

“You never can go wrong with a Viscountess,” said his gardener to a friend of ours.

He was a man of lightning wit—as all lovers of “Savoy” operas know.

“That is a very interesting statement of yours,” he said in that brief, unsmiling manner that added zest to his quaintness. “I have been given to understand the contrary.”

We can go wrong with a Viscountess, unfortunately, and do. As we have said, Hybrid Perpetuals do not behave well with us, except, perhaps, that model of excellence, Ulrich Brunner.—Morals are a question of climate even with roses.

Loki’s Ma-Ma ‹to be discursive—and we are afraid that this chronicle is nothing if not discursive› was a great favourite with this genius of mirth above mentioned, who made the world ring with honest laughter and whose heroic death brought many tears, at least to Villino Loki. He used to call her “his little Lemur” because she had a way of clinging to her mother, in her first debutante days.

Never was there a man so tender-hearted. On his estate no wild thing was to be robbed of its life: not even a rabbit. Loki’s Grandmother used to be a little timid in his company, because of this gift of swift humour. She never felt able to meet him on his own ground—except once when in a windy June he told her that he had begun to take his daily swim in the lake, and she shuddered at the thought.

“Cold!” he cried, “not a bit of it! Delightful! You shall take a dip with me when next you come to us.”

“No,” she retorted—and it was the only time in all their pleasant intercourse that she was ever brave enough to make a pass with him—“No, I had rather get into hot water with you.”

Alas, alas! That lake! We felt the menace of it even then. It was there, trying to save another, he found his death.

It has often been said that real wit is a thing of the past. Certainly the younger generation’s idea of pleasantry is a kind of rough-and-tumble fight as compared to the neat, delicate thrust-play of an older world. But this friend of ours had a gift quite apart, a mixture of humour, wit and satire, something dry, comic, quaint, peculiarly his own.

“It reminds me,” said a clever relation of his once in our hearing, “of an old wood carving.”

We understood what he meant; the odd angles, the sharp turns, the simplicity, the brusque sincerity—and withal how richly genial!

In a single instance one of us beheld him almost meet his match, and that in a most unexpected manner. The pretty fairy lady, his wife, happened to comment with surprise upon the fact that a woman who had been very rude to her should have attempted to greet her upon a recent occasion as if nothing had happened.

“She actually held out her hand!” she concluded.

“Well, my dear,” observed her lord, in his serious way, “that is the member most usually extended.”

To the surprise of the whole table, a shy lady on his left, who had not yet uttered a word, said in a small meek voice: “She might have put out her tongue!”

We never met that shy woman again. We should like to. “Please will you keep your Pickle out of my preserves,” he wrote to a neighbour whose dog was given to roving. The neighbour bore a name well known in grocers’ lists.

* * * * *

For two days the wind has been blowing over the moors from the east. The sound of it through the trees on the hill-side is like the roar of a torrent; and now and again it is like the wash of waves upon the beach. A very unseasonable wind, but it makes a grave and beautiful music. Fortunately the Dutch Garden with its wealth of Tulips is sheltered, or there would scarce be left an unbruised petal.

People are very much struck by our beds of Myosotis, surmounted by the swaying chalices of the Darwins. The simple plan of the blue carpet for these slender May Queens seems to them very wonderful and new.

[Sidenote: OAKS AND BLUE GLADES]

“Oh, look! What’s happened? Is it real? It’s like fairyland!” cried a visitor yesterday to a sympathetic sister.—Such kind people to walk about the garden with! They have themselves a mysterious Oak wood, falling away beneath their lawns, that is now carpeted with Bluebells: a place to sit and dream in. Oaks are trees full of romance, we think. They tell long stories out of the past, and speak of Shakespeare and the glories of England, and their glades are for ever peopled with brave figures of history or fiction.

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Beeches, on the other hand, have a kind of fairy glory about them that does not seem to belong to our land. We drove through a beech forest the other day; the road went up zigzagging to the top of a steep hill, and one looked down upon the Beech glades, all golden green in a fierce sunburst between two showers. And they were still dripping with the rain. It was wonderful, but not English, distinctively English, like that Oak wood. It was a _Märchen-Wald_. Siegfried might have strode through it, blowing his horn: youth incarnate, leaping out of Mime’s cave to conquer the world. On the inspiration of such a haunt was the _Wald-Musick_ conceived.

[Sidenote: MAY AND SEPTEMBER MOODS]

If we had a dwelling for every different mood, a log-house at the top of that Beech ravine would suit us very well in a sunny month of May. Between the great smooth boles of the trees we would want to peep out at the flat wide land, with the rich far woods below, misty in the sunshine; and the distant moors as with the bloom of the grape upon them. We would not want flowers; nothing but that heavenly green of the young leaves against the blue; and the whispering and the swaying of the boughs to cradle our souls; and the thrushes and blackbirds to sing the dawn in and the twilight out! How holy and innocent and loving would one’s mind become after a week in that log hut—a week alone, or with one’s best beloved!

After we came out from that Beech wood we took a wrong turning, and landed ourselves far out on the downs instead of back to our moors. Now, for another mood—say, a warm, still, serene September mood—why not a small stone house in a high hollow of those downs, miles removed from any other human habitation? Just a stone house dumped in the hollow—pale grey, so as not to offend the eye in that stretch of bleached vastness, with a group of Thorns at the back and nothing else, not even a path; only a long way off, the vision of a white ribbon of road, looping and twisting, running to the sea. No flowers but the little wild, stiff, aromatic things that push up through the short turf. Overhead, one or two quite round, white clouds, sailing along the blue, caught by some high current that hardly touches us below—the kind of cloud that you see in an old German print. And all about, as far as the gaze can encompass, nothing but the dip and rise, the scoop and billow of the downs; and the hollows, blue on that wonderful sun-steeped, warm, yet bleached expanse. And the shadows of the clouds, running along across it; and perhaps a lark’s song, somewhere not too close, beaten back to earth from an unseen height of joy; and far, far away, the tinkle of a sheep-bell! Would not one’s soul expand with the grand silence and the glorious wide spaces? One would not want to hear or behold the sea, only to taste the salt of it in every breath. Now does it not seem that up there, sitting outside that stone house, you would touch the prehistoric past? Or, rather, that the great eternity, the never-dying essences of things, would sink into your little passing bit of humanity? Your soul would mirror all infinity.—A place to turn Buddhist in!

[Sidenote: A TUSCAN VILLINO]

There was a pink Villino on the unusual side of Rome. You looked in upon it through high gates into a tangle of garden, where everything seemed to riot. It had an odd, incongruous tower from which you could surely have a vast prospect of the plains of the Campagna and the Alban mountains beyond. There was an archway in one side of it through which one certainly drove into some inner courtyard of delight. That little habitation you might covet with a covetousness that gave you a pain in your heart. We did.

And outside Florence, too, there was another small house. It had been once a farm. A certain great lady had her spring quarters there, liking the contrast, we suppose, between that and the old Scotch castle where Fate had planted her. We drove to tea with her there ‹early May it was› through the hot, wind-swept, noisy Florentine streets. It was just the time of year when the Iris was flooding the land with its penetrating and yet not sickly sweetness. There never was any scent so perfect. And the small pink roses were flinging themselves over the tops of tall garden walls, as if the prodigal Italian springtide had been at its full and left a foam of bloom behind it. Up, up the mountain road, between uncompromising walls and out into the freer country—and there was the farmhouse! Its garden has left an odd blurred impression on our minds: vaguely—a path bordered by lush grass and gay with Apple trees—there was a storm brewing, and all was black overhead; under the weird sky the delicate blossoms took a curious vividness like minute paintings.

One had to go across a red-brick kitchen to get to the stairs that led to the two long, quaint, cool rooms, in the farther of which the hostess sat.

[Sidenote: LANDSCAPE ECSTASY]

She had kept the charm of simplicity there. Plain white walls and rather empty spaces, with bits of Italian black oak, and a painting or two; a vase of lilac, a dim missal warmth of colour in the Persian carpets that lay on the bricks—that was the picture. A very pleasant impression those rooms made, with the old great lady in her high-backed chair, clad in flowing black satin and with a white lace that framed a face as fresh as the apple blossom without. The storm broke as we sat there. She was nervous, and so were some of her visitors; therefore she had the wooden shutters closed. Perhaps she was not really frightened, for she was as sturdy a Scotchwoman as ever we beheld, and her bright blue eye was stern in spite of her affability. Perhaps she only compassionated the nerves of her guests. Be it as it may, we sat an hour while the thunder rolled bars of sound over our heads and the wind whistled and the rain hissed and roared down the valley, and the lightning kept a perpetual play between the chinks of the shutters. And though Loki’s Grandma generally gibbers during a thunderstorm, she never enjoyed an hour more, so delightful was her hostess and so fascinating the sense of isolation and strangeness, being thus shut away amid the fury of the elements in a little Italian farmhouse! And when the tempest was grumbling itself off in the distance, the shutters were all thrown back and the doors on the square wooden balcony opened. The air rushed in, vivifying, full of the scent of the earth and charged with ozone and perfumes. We went out on the dripping balcony, and never, oh! never can any of us forget the vision! For below the _casa_ the land dropped away, and it was all vineyards; and they rose and dipped and rose again, a sight no one has ever beheld out of Italy. And beyond were the mountains; and the whole wide valley was filled with mist and all of it was stained rose and crimson from the sunset.

You may not believe it, you who read it, but it is a fact that the valley was carmine up to the balcony, indescribably shot with the fires of the West—a steaming cauldron of glory! That is the kind of vision one carries gratefully to one’s grave.

For a long time we vowed that our old age would see us, like the Scotch Dowager, steeping our being in the joys of Spring in a farmhouse outside Florence.—But now we don’t know. Villino Loki has laid hold of us; it is our real home, the rest are but dreams.

The Master of the House saw this morning a tiny Golden-crested Wren fluttering from stem to stem of the tall Darwin Tulips to pick at the Forget-me-nots below; and every time it pecked it twittered with joy, so light a thing that it scarcely swayed the slender stalks—a fairy vision.

* * * * *

The Hemicycle, where the grass must be allowed to grow lush, because of the bulbs, until the leaves “ripen off,” is none the less attractive on that account. There are eight little square beds, each containing a weeping standard—“Dorothy Perkins” or “Stella”—thickly planted below with Forget-me-nots and Bybloemen Tulips. Between the beds there is a large red pot also filled with Forget-me-nots and Bybloemen. The Tulips have a kind of wild grace, coming out of the long grass; and Myosotis, darling little creature, accommodates herself in every surrounding. There is a pretty, stemmed fountain, or rather bird-bath; in its centre, where, in a basin shaped like a spreading lotus flower, a sturdy _putto_ astride a dolphin blows soundless blasts. This half-circle of vivid beauty, with the young green grass, the swaying Tulips, the blue of the Forget-me-nots against the moor is good to look upon.

Beyond the Hemicycle, the Azalea Glade runs down now in lines of orange-rose and creamy-salmon, bordered too with Forget-me-nots. Up against it the cool silver of a great Service-tree comes just where it makes a perfect background; and beyond that again the rivulets of blue in the Reserve Garden lie deep below.

[Sidenote: TRANSIENT COLOUR GLORIES]

This is the hour of our garden’s glory. No Delphinium muster, no spreading garlands of Roses, can equal the exquisite freshness, the fulness of life of this May world. With the Brooms, white and yellow; with the pink foam of the Floribunda trees, the incomparable gold and green of the Beech and Birch, one wants to put one’s arms round the little place and kiss it.

“So much work, so long and great a travail of nature,” said a friend to us to-day; “ever since November, preparing for this wonderful revelation of bloom ... and all for so short a span! All this beauty scarce reaches its climax but it is already on the wane!”

Perhaps it is to give us an idea of the permanence of what “eye hath not seen” beyond, that its glories are described in terms of jewels; and yet so perversely is one made that it is the very fragility that endears here below—a sense of the fleeting moment that gives ecstasy its finest edge. No, this limited humanity of ours cannot conceive the infinitude. It is only with those perceptions which transcend the senses that one gets a gleam, a hint, a possibility of once understanding. The restless mind of man for ever demands and creates change, but the soul aspires to immutability.

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[Sidenote: END OF SPRING, SUMMER PLANS]