Part 4

Now, this herding together of human beings with wealth and leisure into London for several months every year--there to meet their friends, of course, but also a whole host of people who will never, and can never, be more than acquaintances--is a very curious modern phenomenon. London--in this sense of the word--was born not so many decades ago, and since then has grown, and is growing, in a manner perfectly amazing. There was a time, say eighty years ago, when London in this sense practically did not exist; the ‘season’ was enjoyed by those who now go to London in a dozen country towns, to which the rank and fashion of the country flocked, and there made gay on their native pavements. And, by all accounts, they _did_ make gay. Then, by degrees, this remarkable monster of London began growing. People of leisure--or so I take it--began to weary of that priceless benefit, and in a couple of generations have turned themselves into perfect galley-slaves in the barque which they term, some of them mistakenly, ‘Pleasure.’ Means of travel got easier, quicker, and cheaper; more families every year, who had no business, either political or of money-making, took to going to London, where they found twenty theatres instead of one, a million people to move among instead of a thousand. Intimacies, it is true, were less common there than in the friendly and less populous streets of their county town, but, instead, they might in the streets or at the houses of their acquaintances behold, in _propriâ personâ_, the man or woman with whose name at the moment the world was ringing; or a new play claimed their attention and provided an easy subject of conversation--for conversation, unless they were people of brains, and many excellent folk are not, began, perhaps, to wear a little thin in the sixth week of their season at York or Winchester. But it would be impossible to be in London in the autumn or winter, during the months of shooting and hunting, and so, by common consent, the London season--a unique fact--was fixed for the months May, June, and July--a time when air in town is scarce, and suns are sultry, but a time in the country when Nature holds high festival, and all who have eyes to see and ears to hear are equally honoured at her banquet. But--and this could only happen in the Anglo-Saxon race, and it is symptomatic of the strength, and possibly, in years to come, of its weakness--Sport said the final word. Half-fledged pheasants are not shootable, and foxes, that strange breed, which would have been exterminated long ago were it not for the ordinance that they shall be killed in one way only, were busy with the propagation of their species. And thus, though Nature spreads her feast, but sits alone at her empty board, she still has the last compelling word on the subject.

In fact, during the last half-dozen decades a new feverish and nervous disease has spread over England in a terrifying manner. We may call it Turbamania, or the passion for crowds, and, like the influenza, it attacks the upper classes more, it would appear, than the lower. No cure for it has yet been found, and it has not received, as a specific disease, the attention it deserves. This is curious: for in this inquisitive age, though it was a disease that only manifested itself in, let us say, slight redness of the little finger, and was perfectly harmless, we should probably by this time be possessed of a hospital for treatment of the cases, and dozens of savants squinting themselves purblind in the hope of discovering its bacillus. Many daily, and especially weekly, papers have columns devoted to its symptoms, though they apparently do not know that they are speaking of it. But whenever I see that the Marquis of ---- entertained the following distinguished company to dinner, I recognise Turbamania. For whom (except the sufferers from this distressing malady) can such an announcement concern? Not the diners, surely, for they were aware of it before. Nor, as far as I can see, those who were not asked, for the simple reason that they were not asked. Or who (except Turbamaniacs) care to hear how Lady ---- was dressed? She herself, those who saw her, or those who did not see her? For the life of me I cannot tell. Yet how great must be the demand for such information, if we consider in what enormous quantities it is supplied! It must be read and looked for by thousands who do not know Lady ---- by sight. Her mother, her sister, her daughter perhaps, if in India, might have gentle emotions raised by the knowledge of how she was dressed. But who else?

The theme is not worth consideration, except from my own standpoint, my own private view of it, which at this moment occupies me enormously. Six months ago I decided to leave London, that most jealous of all mistresses, who exacts from us not merely our conscious thoughts, but pervades us in a way that no Cleopatra ever did yet. To anyone who has not known London the idea is unintelligible; to anyone who has, all explanations fall short of what he knows.

Think of it! Five million people, awake or asleep, round one--five million, each of whom is as important to himself as I to me, stealing about like thoughts in the brain of this busy city, intent, alert, as are no other five million people in the world. My God! how I love the sense of it! how each street is to me a room, a passage, in a great house to which I have but lately succeeded, and is crammed with treasures, some few of which I know by sight, but of which as yet I do not know the thousandth part. What are they? Men and women, that is all; and is that not enough?

What is it? What is it, I vainly ask myself, that stirs me so? Me, who know unconsciously the drone of the four-wheeler as it passes up this huge beating artery of life, and, without distraction of thought, can distinguish it from the quick cloop-cloop of the hansom, and can recognise the boom of the omnibus, and divine the meaning of a hundred noises in the street without raising my eyes or losing the thread of what I am doing. Life, jostling, vulgar, crowded, commonplace (God forgive me!) life. Oh, how excellent! I do not look at the placards of the latest news; I look at the seedy man who carries them about like a plaster on his usually weak chest. How can I convey it all? The wet asphalt of the roadway, the streaked mud of the roadway, the smell of the Twopenny Tube, the reek from the restaurant next door, the reprints of Cosway in the shop-window adjoining, my own door with a circling lock, which is always upside down to my key. What does it all mean to the person who does not know what it means? and what can that which I say mean to the person who does know?

Yet, drunk as I am with crowds (here indeed is Turbamania), I propose to-morrow to go forth to a house in a sleepy county town, where no one is ever in a hurry, though many have the impression that they are, and there are oiled wheels of existence continually gently turning, which, as far as I know at present, find no particular grist, instead of these grating, roaring, spinning fly-wheels of the world. There is a hotel bus there, and no hansoms; no vomiting of crowds from embowelled stations, no--no anything, as it seems to me this moment, except--and this is in the main the reason for which I go--there is as much time there as in London (all the time there is, in fact), and less to do in it. I want, in fact, to arrive at a greater simplicity of life than seems to me possible in London, to get into what I believe to be more normal and healthy conditions, instead of living an existence which, however delightful and absorbing, is yet slightly feverish. I want to get out of the habit of thinking of the next delightful thing I am going to do in the course of the one which I am doing, and so largely missing its point--not to be in a hurry, not to clutch so much at pleasures.

Also, in spite of my passion for crowds, I have desired all this last year, with a haunting intensity which I cannot hope to convey, to watch the bursting of the spring, to see it mix into the great triumph of the summer, to follow step by step the fruition of the sun, and, to round the perfect circle, see the accomplished and completed year fall to sleep again in the arms of winter--the year which, since the beginning of time, has been waiting among the crowds of the uncounted centuries for its turn to give to the sons of men sweet and bitter, ecstasy, and life and death, as God has ordained.

APRIL

I have been here nearly a month without spending a single night away--that in itself is a sign of improvement, for I suppose (to my shame I own it) that it must be years since I have slept thirty consecutive nights in the same bed. And what I believe is a greater sign of improvement is that I have not wanted to go away, and I do not want to go away. I like these level, uneventful days: these mornings of work, followed by a few hours of out-of-doors, and in the evening ‘the face of a friend,’ in this house or another. How dull I should have thought it, not long ago; how antipodal to dull I find it!

I said ‘uneventful’ just now--that was a mistake. I have been through fiery trials, in the shape of a cook, who could not only not cook decently, but could not cook at all. In any case, she didn’t, and I have eaten raw flesh on the altar of rusticity. Then there was a personage who represented herself as a charwoman. Though I cannot say she was a housebreaker, she was certainly nearer that than anything else; for though she did not actually break the house, she broke everything inside it. She began ‘cleaning,’ as she called it, before it was yet day, and till nightfall the house was resonant with fracture. When there was nothing left to break, she upset her washpail over anything that came handy, brocade for choice. She upset, also, permanganate of potash, with which I was staining a floor, over a green carpet, and one evening I found her eating asparagus (my asparagus, too!) in the scullery. Thereupon I said ‘Board-wages,’ and it is my belief that she simply added board-wages to her ordinary diet, which she ate at my expense. Otherwise, there is no possible way of accounting for the fact that a sirloin of beef, which had come in in the morning---- Enough! She is gone.

Stevenson recommends weeding and cacao-seed planting as a suitable pursuit for anyone who thinks he can make his living out of writing ‘measly yarns.’ But now I have one advantage over that divine author: I know a far better employment. It is to paint floors with permanganate of potash (otherwise known as Condy’s fluid; but you can get much more of it for your money, though it is cheap anyhow, if you buy it in the raw). For a shilling you get enough to stain all the floors in your house (unless you live in an exceptionally large one) the most beautiful brown. The very process reminds one of the scene of the powder-mixing in ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’ It is laid on dark purple; before your eyes it changes to a livid angry green, and while yet it is wet it becomes a dark brown. You lay it on with a large paste-brush, and feel you are saving money. Incidentally you get a quantity on to your hands, and it is apparently indelible. Then you rub it with beeswax, and your deal floor becomes positively ancestral. A few Persian rugs on the top bring you back from a villa to the gorgeous East.

But even before I stained the floors I bought seeds, and planted sweet-peas and nasturtiums broadcast, also (these in seedlings) Jackmanni,[A] and tropæolum and tobacco-plant, and two Crimson Ramblers. Then, on a day to be marked with red in the annals of scarification, I took a trowel and a pocket-knife, and went into the highways and hedges to cut standards for rose-trees. But I took no gloves. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ._ Anyhow, I cut seven standards. This is the way _not_ to do it.

[A] Purple clematis.

I started cheerfully along an unfrequented lane. Larks hovered trilling: spring was bursting in numberless buds, and the green mist of leaves hung round the hedgerows. Before long I saw in the hedge by which I went a suitable standard. It was rather inaccessible, but the lust of the gardener burned in me, and I took a sort of header into the hedge. A shoot from the coveted standard playfully retained my cap, another took one arm in keeping, a third gently fixed itself to my left hand. That had to be very carefully disengaged, since the thorns were encompassing it, and in disengaging it I dropped the trowel. An incautious recovery of the trowel drew the first blood. Then I began.

It is necessary in cutting a standard to get a piece of real root. This particular standard, however, seemed to have no particular roots. It went on and on below ground without object, so far as I could judge; infirm of purpose, it could not begin. When it did begin, it was already mixed up with a bramble, the thorns of which were set on the parent stem on a perfectly different principle, and I did not want the bramble. But, with a totally undeserved popularity on my part, the bramble wanted me. It got me--in pieces which I hope were no use to it; and I began to see that, under certain circumstances and to a certain extent, as Mr. Gladstone might have said, gloves were, if not necessary to human life, at any rate a protective agent against possibly fatal hæmorrhage. Just then the root began.

I destroyed the bramble, root and branch; I destroyed a hazel (branch), and I destroyed the standard (root). That was all at present.

Clearly this would not do: I was as far from standards as ever, but I was bleeding like a pig. So I went home, got some gloves, and became successful. But to be successful in a tale of adventure is to become dull, and with a view to avoiding this as much as is possible, short of not writing at all, I will merely say that I cut seven standards on that divine afternoon, and--but that I can’t sing--went home singing.

The cat next door, so it appeared, had observed the planting of the Jackmanni with a disapproving eye, and even as I went into the garden with my seven standards (like a Roman Emperor) I saw a stealthy form moving slowly away from the corner where I had put one of them. Now, I know something about cats, though nothing, it appears, about standards, and, without the least hurry, I walked into the garden and said ‘Poor puss,’ and saw, out of the corner of my eye (I dared not look honestly round for fear ‘Poor puss’ should see), that my Jackmanni was entirely disinterred, and a scurry of freshly-dug earth lay round it. There were therefore two courses open to me: either the direct, which lay in taking the cat, which (with the shallow diplomacy of its species) had advanced towards me, straight to the disinterred Jackmanni and there slapping it, or the subtle course. I chose the subtle. The cat was a knave--I knew that perfectly well--I chose to be the knave set to catch it. So I said ‘Poor puss’ again, and went to the uprooted Jackmanni and planted it again in the sight of ‘Poor puss.’ Then I went slowly indoors, a very Bismarck. Once arrived inside, I flew to the lumber-room, and with feverish hands unearthed a large garden squirt, and, filling it with cold water (I wish it had been iced), flew to what we may call the wing of the house--it consists merely of a bootroom, which commands, strategically speaking, the Jackmanni. The window was open, and with great caution I advanced to it and looked out. Already, once more that very stupid knave of a cat was busy in the bed. I took careful aim, and the cold water drenched the knave. I will teach it--at least, I think I have taught it--that I do _not_ plant Jackmanni merely to give it a few moments’ senseless amusement. Besides, to-morrow I shall have a fox-terrier; so the garden squirt was the kindest sort of cruelty.

I am afraid that, in talking thus vaguely of ‘the house’ and ‘the garden,’ the reader may have formed a totally erroneous impression of scale, and I must inform him at once that ‘the house’ is the kind of house which is called The Cedars, because, apparently, it has one withered furze-bush in the garden. It is semi-detached, stands on the outskirts of the town, and is of an external appearance which is better forgotten. Inside, however, the rooms are good, high and airy, and, anyhow, it suits me. There is a small strip of garden in front, in which at present I take no interest, and a square of garden behind measuring some sixty or seventy feet by thirty, encompassed by a wall of old and very large brick. A strip of border, sown from end to end with sweet-peas, runs up one side. At the far end is a small raised terrace of grass, on which grow an apple-tree and a plum-tree, by which I have planted the Crimson Ramblers. The seven standards, to be budded in June, stand in a formal row below the terrace, and parallel to the border of sweet-peas stand half a dozen tubs, in which are sown nasturtiums of the large climbing kind. This leaves a space of grass, twenty feet by forty, and on this is being now erected ‘the shelter,’ a wooden room with trellis on two sides, match-boarding on one, and entirely open on the other. Felt will be laid down over the grass, and over the felt rugs. There will be a couple of basket-chairs there, an old French mattress covered with rugs, a writing-table, and a small dining-table, with four chairs. There I propose to live as soon as the summer comes. Over one side the nasturtiums in the tubs will trail their green and ruddy arms, and I shall look towards the seven standards and the Scarlet Ramblers. In the evening an Arab lamp with electric light, brought on a long cord from the house, will illuminate it.

The very planning of ‘the shelter’ was an absorbing joy; absorbing, too, is it to see it rise, smelling clean of freshly-chiselled wood. Then it will be painted green, and ready for habitation. In front of it, towards the terrace, will stand a sundial, which will not get, as far as I can see, any sun at all, since the stately shelter will entirely shade it. However, I dare say it will do better in the shade, like lilies of the valley. Besides, one never uses a sundial in order to tell the time.

I often wonder how large an area of house and garden it is possible to get really fond of. The fact of broad acres and limitless corridors may be, and often is, delightful to the possessor, especially if they are of long-standing possession; but to be fond of a place in the way that I mean implies to be intimate with every square inch of it. Your own niche, your own particular _angulus terræ_, must, I think, be small; the great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste, some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and brought within the scope of his invention. The great lawns and shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own garden corner. And it is the personal aroma, the definite impress of an individual taste on rooms and gardens, that makes them alive with their own individual entity: they are parasitic, like mistletoe, drawing their life from a parent stem. The large rooms, the rows of marbles, the acres of signed canvas, are beautiful and wonderful things; but no one man can appropriate them and fashion them to himself, or himself to them, for they are too large, and are the setting not for one person, but for the brilliant crowd. But his own ‘den,’ where he has the books he wants, the chair he likes, the few pictures he loves, it is there that he is _chez lui_--at home. That is the good part; to have the other is enviable, no doubt, but one does not envy it with the sense of need. Of course, no two people may have the same idea of a _chez lui_; and it is always with a certain anxiety that one awaits the arrival of a friend who has not seen one’s own. He may easily not like it at all (as I have said, the appearance of the house outside is among the things to be forgotten), and if he does not, it is part of me he does not like. But it takes all sorts to make a world; if it were not so, the world would be infinitely less entertaining than it is and infinitely less lovable.

Almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in which are for the most part mossed and gray. A gravel path winds in and out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a half-dozen of fine elms. It borders on the road, and is separated from it by only a low paling. And looking out of my window this morning, I saw here one of those very simple little common things that give the lie to cynics. It was a fine sunshiny morning and the road was populous, and among others there came down it two big, strapping privates out of the regiment that is stationed here, all trappings and scarlet, while between them, with a hand in the arm of each, walked a little old lady dressed in black. Each of the two men carried a cross of white flowers, and they walked very slowly, hanging on their steps, and suiting their pace to the woman. All three passed in at the cemetery gate, and went across the grass to a tomb which lay underneath the elms, and had an old weatherworn stone to mark it. On it the two soldiers laid down their crosses, and took off their forage-caps, and all three knelt side by side for a couple of minutes, it may be, at the foot of the grave, close by the road. Then they rose, and the old lady kissed her tall sons very tenderly, and stood with them there a minute more, a hand clasped by each, while they talked together, I suppose of the dead. Then they passed out of the cemetery gate again, and, for aught I know, out of my life. But a little later I went across the road, and to the grave where the crosses of lilies lay. The stone, as I had seen, was of old standing, and I read that it was in memory of a man who had died in the year 1880, on April 17, so that to-day was the twenty-second anniversary of his death. Two days afterwards I happened to ask the Colonel of that regiment whether there were two privates of a certain name among the men.

‘Yes,’ said he, ‘excellent steady fellows; they look after their old mother, who lives here.’

So the reconstruction was simple enough. The father must have died while the two sons were still boys of five or six; yet on the anniversary of his death, so it seems, they still go to the grave with their mother, quite simply and naturally, and say a prayer there with her. The grass, too, on the grave itself was, I noticed, kept short and carefully tended, so I suppose they go there not infrequently. I think the man who lies there must have been a good husband. God keep all our memories as green in loving hearts!