ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

May 7th.—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late
afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the temptation to
look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed half an hour ago in a
cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are carrying on a long
conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of nightingales. The
gentleman owl says , and she answers from her tree a
little way off, , beautifully assenting to and completing her
lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl. They say the
same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think it must be
something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be frightened away by the
sarcasm of owls.

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house, much
less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty old place
that the people who might have lived here and did not, deliberately preferring
the horrors of a flat in a town, must have belonged to that vast number of
eyeless and earless persons of whom the world seems chiefly composed. Noseless
too, though it does not sound pretty; but the greater part of my spring
happiness is due to the scent of the wet earth and young leaves.

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are
servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring happiness
bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though it is not more
intense, and there were days last winter when I danced for sheer joy out in my
frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and children. But I did it behind a
bush, having a due regard for the decencies.

There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches sweeping
the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white blossoms and tenderest
green that the garden looks like a wedding. I never saw such masses of them;
they seemed to fill the place. Even across a little stream that bounds the
garden on the east, and right in the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is
an immense one, a picture of grace and glory against the cold blue of the
spring sky.

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great
stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave off the
bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their lofty,
pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest gray-green, and
underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and everywhere the breathless
silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful too, for one can see across them
into eternity almost, and to go out on to them with one’s face towards the
setting sun is like going into the very presence of God.

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery where I
spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray stone house
with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The house is very old, and
has been added to at various times. It was a convent before the Thirty Years’
War, and the vaulted chapel, with its brick floor worn by pious peasant knees,
is now used as a hall. Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more
than once, as is duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what
was then the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion
of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to his
convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who were not
without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the wide, empty plain
to piteously seek some life to replace the life of silence here.

From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the plain, with
no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue line of distant
forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the setting sun—nothing but a
green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge against the sunset. I love those west
windows better than any others, and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the
house so that even times of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and the
young woman who attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties
about a mistress recumbent in an easy-chair before an open window, and not to
profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved at my
habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the sort of life
a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad muddle since she came
to me. The people round about are persuaded that I am, to put it as kindly as
possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the news has travelled that I spend the
day out of doors with a book, and that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew
or cook. But why cook when you can get some one to cook for you? And as for
sewing, the maids will hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all
forms of needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for
keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.

We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as well make
use of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five years were spent
in a flat in a town, and during their whole interminable length I was perfectly
miserable and perfectly healthy, which disposes of the ugly notion that has at
times disturbed me that my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a
good digestion. And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear
place with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and
completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind taking
the least notice of it, and in May—in all those five lovely Mays—no one to look
at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more wonderful masses of lilacs,
everything glowing and blowing, the virginia creeper madder every year, until
at last, in October, the very roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the
owls and the squirrels and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and
not a living creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, which
got into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall
into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the windows.
All that was here,—peace, and happiness, and a reasonable life,—and yet it
never struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I am astonished, and can
in no way account for the tardiness of my discovery that here, in this far-away
corner, was my kingdom of heaven. Indeed, so little did it enter my head to
even use the place in summer, that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with
all its horrors every year; until at last, in the early spring of last year,
having come down for the opening of the village school, and wandering out
afterwards into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wet
earth or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the happy
days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It was the
beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and entering into my
kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown, quiet earth; leafless and
sad and lonely enough out there in the damp and silence, yet there I stood
feeling the same rapture of pure delight in the first breath of spring that I
used to as a child, and the five wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and
the world was full of hope, and I vowed myself then and there to nature, and
have been happy ever since.

My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that it
might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at any rate
for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks from the end of
April into June, during which I was here alone, supposed to be superintending
the painting and papering, but as a matter of fact only going into the house
when the workmen had gone out of it.

How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the days when
I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar on my eleven
o’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with dandelions and
daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its charm, but I love the
dandelions and daisies even more passionately now than then, and never would
endure to see them all mown away if I were not certain that in a day or two
they would be pushing up their little faces again as jauntily as ever. During
those six weeks I lived in a world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions
carpeted the three lawns,—they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed
out into meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,—and under and among the
groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white anemones,
violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in particular delighted me
with their clean, happy brightness, so beautifully trim and newly varnished, as
though they too had had the painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones
went, came a few stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the
bird-cherries blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to
the joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs—masses and masses of
them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the side of walks,
and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long right past the west
front of the house, away down as far as one could see, shining glorious against
a background of firs. When that time came, and when, before it was over, the
acacias all blossomed too, and four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies
flowered under the south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and
thankful, and grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to
melt away in a dream of pink and purple peace.

There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house, so that on
the plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my other half
calls my fantaisie déréglée as regards meals—that is to say, meals so
simple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a tray; and I lived, I
remember, on salad and bread and tea the whole time, sometimes a very tiny
pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as the old lady thought, from starvation.
Who but a woman could have stood salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified by
the presence and scent of the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew in
grace every day, though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressed
by the necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of which
are conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper maintenance
of the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded by joints of meat, how
often do I think of my salad days, forty in number, and of the blessedness of
being alone as I was then alone!

And then the evenings, when the workmen had all gone and the house was left to
emptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up her rheumatic
limbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another part of the house had
been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave the friendly frogs and owls,
and with my heart somewhere down in my shoes lock the door to the garden behind
me, and pass through the long series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and
ladders and ghostly pails of painters’ mess, and humming a tune to make myself
believe I liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up the
creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final rush of
panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!

There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great dinner-bell to bed
with me so that at least I might be able to make a noise if frightened in the
night, though what good it would have been I don’t know, as there was no one to
hear. The housemaid slept in another little cell opening out of mine, and we
two were the only living creatures in the great empty west wing. She evidently
did not believe in ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep immediately
after getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, “mais je les redoute,”
as a French lady said, who from her books appears to have been strongminded.

The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted me to
see it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but placid, it
was all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and other noises. I
used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light sleep by the cracking of
some board, and listen to the indifferent snores of the girl in the next room.
In the morning, of course, I was as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold
perspirations of the night before; but even the nights seem to me now to have
been delightful, and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in every
wind and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through them all over
again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house, empty of servants and
upholstery.

How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful new
papers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and build all sorts
of castles in the air about their future and their past. Would the nuns who had
lived in them know their little white-washed cells again, all gay with delicate
flower papers and clean white paint? And how astonished they would be to see
cell No. 14 turned into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a
cleanliness of body equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as a
snare of the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked
at the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first whiteness
of my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish organist, or rather
with the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and fiery moustache which was all I
ever saw of him, and which I loved to distraction for at least six months; at
the end of which time, going out with my governess one day, I passed him in the
street, and discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined with
a turn-down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any more.

The first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect, for I had not
a thought of anything but the peace and beauty all round me. Then he appeared
suddenly who has a right to appear when and how he will and rebuked me for
never having written, and when I told him that I had been literally too happy
to think of writing, he seemed to take it as a reflection on himself that I
could be happy alone. I took him round the garden along the new paths I had had
made, and showed him the acacia and lilac glories, and he said that it was the
purest selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were with
me, and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease him by
offering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood ready at the
foot of the little verandah steps when we came back, but nothing appeased that
Man of Wrath, and he said he would go straight back to the neglected family. So
he went; and the remainder of the precious time was disturbed by twinges of
conscience (to which I am much subject) whenever I found myself wanting to jump
for joy. I went to look at the painters every time my feet were for taking me
to look at the garden; I trotted diligently up and down the passages; I
criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done in all
the rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I could not
manage to fret and yearn. What are you to do if your conscience is clear and
your liver in order and the sun is shining?

May 10th.—I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening and
this year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be done, and
have at least made one great stride—from ipomæa to tea-roses.

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is all round the house, but the
principal part is on the south side and has evidently always been so. The south
front is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one into the other, and
the walls are covered with virginia creeper. There is a little verandah in the
middle, leading by a flight of rickety wooden steps down into what seems to
have been the only spot in the whole place that was ever cared for. This is a
semicircle cut into the lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are
eleven beds of different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial,
and the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by me.
These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be seen (except a
solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring in the grass, not
because it wanted to, but because it could not help it), and these I had sown
with ipomæa, the whole eleven, having found a German gardening book, according
to which ipomæa in vast quantities was the one thing needful to turn the most
hideous desert into a paradise. Nothing else in that book was recommended with
anything like the same warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of
seed necessary, I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the
eleven beds but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for
the promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet-peas which made me very happy all
the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few hollyhocks under the
south windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But the lilies, after being
transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay, for how was I to know it was the
way of lilies? And the hollyhocks turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that
my first summer was decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At present
we are only just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and
borders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round the
sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made mistakes
with some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold communion on this or
indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is by making mistakes. All eleven
were to have been carpeted with purple pansies, but finding that I had not
enough and that nobody had any to sell me, only six have got their pansies, the
others being sown with dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled with
Marie van Houtte roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette
Messimy, one with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two
with Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with three
sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt Scarlet, and
Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and several of the others
are, I think, but of course I must wait and see, being such an ignorant person.
Then I have had two long beds made in the grass on either side of the
semicircle, each sown with mignonette, and one filled with Marie van Houtte,
and the other with Jules Finger and the Bride; and in a warm corner under the
drawing-room windows is a bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and
Comtesse Riza du Parc; while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north
and west by a group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing
Rubens, Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All these roses are
dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George
Bruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when the
tea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to anything;
and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little things have
achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or increase of lovely
red shoot.

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south windows
in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of which I have
sown two long borders of sweet-peas facing the rose beds, so that my roses may
have something almost as sweet as themselves to look at until the autumn, when
everything is to make place for more tea-roses. The path leading away from this
semicircle down the garden is bordered with China roses, white and pink, with
here and there a Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I
have misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas, for
the Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows look as
though they intended to be big bushes.

There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the least
understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the flowering of
these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not relegate all
tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriving them for ever
of the breath of God. It was no doubt because I was so ignorant that I rushed
in where Teutonic angels fear to tread and made my tea-roses face a northern
winter; but they did face it under fir branches and leaves, and not one has
suffered, and they are looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy
themselves as any roses, I am sure, in Europe.

May 14th.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the three
babies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already several
of the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners consoled when
duty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent and drooping
sunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble black
legs.

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the gardener’s
assistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden, but then neither are
we ever out of it. The gardener has been here a year and has given me notice
regularly on the first of every month, but up to now has been induced to stay
on. On the first of this month he came as usual, and with determination written
on every feature told me he intended to go in June, and that nothing should
alter his decision. I don’t think he knows much about gardening, but he can at
least dig and water, and some of the things he sows come up, and some of the
plants he plants grow, besides which he is the most unflaggingly industrious
person I ever saw, and has the great merit of never appearing to take the
faintest interest in what we do in the garden. So I have tried to keep him on,
not knowing what the next one may be like, and when I asked him what he had to
complain of and he replied “Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has a
personal objection to me because of my eccentric preference for plants in
groups rather than plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts
from gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing
something new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead of
explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at its
very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I quite recognise that
this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to lose a whole year through
some stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it. I laugh sometimes behind
the book at his disgusted face, and wish we could be photographed, so that I
may be reminded in twenty years’ time, when the garden is a bower of loveliness
and I learned in all its ways, of my first happy struggles and failures.

All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn into
their permanent places, and all through April he went about with a long piece
of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful exactitude and
arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review. Two long borders were done
during my absence one day, and when I explained that I should like the third to
have plants in groups and not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural
effect with no bare spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily
hopeless than usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he
had planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little
lines of five plants in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five rockets,
and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets, and so on
with different plants of every sort and size down to the end. When I protested,
he said he had only carried out my orders and had known it would not look well;
so I gave in, and the remaining borders were done after the pattern of the
first two, and I will have patience and see how they look this summer, before
digging them up again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in your
plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can only be half
understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by that long
piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my own, and in my
burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a rose, I did one warm
Sunday in last year’s April during the servants’ dinner hour, doubly secure
from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake
and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow
surreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get
into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my
reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a
blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to
do with it, we should not have had all that sad business of the apple.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and
flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look
upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don’t know what besides, and would
rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel
as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so
easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could
enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town
offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm
evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps,
with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over
the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by
the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting by
close to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure
at the reminder of past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught
in my hair. The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be
killed. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer and not
crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of all the fun.

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in April, is
five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so that the
discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the remaining middle or May
baby. While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on the top of the
only thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses, the April baby, who had
been sitting pensive on a tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to run
aimlessly about, shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror.
I stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole army of
young cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got through the hedge
and were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and most precious belongings. The
nurse and I managed to chase them away, but not before they had trampled down a
border of pinks and lilies in the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed
of China roses, and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am
trying to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be
ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany calls
afternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the holes as well as she
could with mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses, cheated for ever of
their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking on dejectedly. The June
baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond her size and years, seized a
stick much bigger than herself and went after the cows, the cowherd being
nowhere to be seen. She planted herself in front of them brandishing her stick,
and they stood in a row and stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept
them off until one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and having
found the cowherd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating.
The cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat
him, but he took his punishment as part of the day’s work and made no remark of
any sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches, and I
think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work for a strong young man
with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with less imagination than a poet
ought to take it up as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with as many
hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils, and while we
were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened to look up into its
mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my head, sat a little baby
owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for it could not fly, and how it
had reached the branch at all is a mystery. It is a little round ball of gray
fluff, with the quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let
it go, but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a
journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often said how much he
would like to have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it into a roomy
cage and slung it up on a branch near where it had been sitting, and which
cannot be far from its nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided again to our
tea when I saw two more balls of fluff on the ground in the long grass and
scarcely distinguishable at a little distance from small mole-hills. These were
promptly united to their relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath
comes home, not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox
smiles, but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take
them from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again some
day—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I put a
small pot of water in the cage, though they never could have tasted water yet
unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves. I suppose they get all
the liquid they need from the bodies of the mice and other dainties provided
for them by their fond parents. But the raindrop idea is prettier.

May 15th.—How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owls
into a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never pander
to the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morning I got up early to see how they
were getting on, and I found the door of the cage wide open and no owls to be
seen. I thought of course that somebody had stolen them—some boy from the
village, or perhaps the chastised cowherd. But looking about I saw one perched
high up in the branches of the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead
on the ground. The third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in its
nest. The parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance they
got the door open, and then dragged the little ones out and up into the tree.
The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch, as it was a windy
night and its neck is broken. There is one happy life less in the garden to-day
through my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm day—just the sort of weather
for young soft things to enjoy and grow in. The babies are greatly distressed,
and are digging a grave, and preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival, and running out I
breathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give him the
owls he has so often said he would like to have, and how sorry I was they were
gone, and how grievous the death of one, and so on after the voluble manner of
women.

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, “I am surprised at such
cruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so? She had never done you
any harm.”

Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced than ever
that he sang true who sang—

Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone.

May 16th.—The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,
not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to exhort and
admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings crowd round me at every
step—it is there that I am sorry for the unkindness in me, for those selfish
thoughts that are so much worse than they feel; it is there that all my sins
and silliness are forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every
flower and weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I
run out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause, it
is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many friends? And
always the same, always ready to welcome me and fill me with cheerful thoughts.
Happy children of a common Father, why should I, their own sister, be less
content and joyous than they? Even in a thunder storm, when other people are
running into the house, I run out of it. I do not like thunder storms—they
frighten me for hours before they come, because I always feel them on the way;
but it is odd that I should go for shelter to the garden. I feel better there,
more taken care of, more petted. When it thunders, the April baby says,
“There’s lieber Gott scolding those angels again.” And once, when there
was a storm in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know why
lieber Gott didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so
tight asleep. They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and
English, adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in English
words in the middle of a German sentence. It always reminds me of Justice
tempered by Mercy.

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by the name of the
Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground of innumerable deer who
fight there in the autumn evenings, calling each other out to combat with
bayings that ring through the silence and send agreeable shivers through the
lonely listener. I often walk there in September, late in the evening, and
sitting on a fallen tree listen fascinated to their angry cries.

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had never seen such
things nor had imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirschwald is a little open
wood of silver birches and springy turf starred with flowers, and there is a
tiny stream meandering amiably about it and decking itself in June with yellow
flags. I have dreams of having a little cottage built there, with the daisies
up to the door, and no path of any sort—just big enough to hold myself and one
baby inside and a purple clematis outside. Two rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen.
How scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day! I know the
exact spot where it should stand, facing south-east, so that we should get all
the cheerfulness of the morning, and close to the stream, so that we might wash
our plates among the flags. Sometimes, when in the mood for society, we would
invite the remaining babies to tea and entertain them with wild strawberries on
plates of horse-chestnut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily pleased
than a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny
cottage—indeed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would care to come. Wise
people want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy themselves, and
I feel perpetually apologetic when with them, for only being able to offer them
that which I love best myself—apologetic, and ashamed of being so easily
contented.

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town (it took us the whole
afternoon to get there) the women after dinner were curious to know how I had
endured the winter, cut off from everybody and snowed up sometimes for weeks.

“Ah, these husbands!” sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking her head;
“they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don’t care what their
sufferings are.”

Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady was a
great local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful husband had
brought his young wife into the country and had kept her there, concealing her
beauty and accomplishments from the public in a most cruel manner, and how,
after spending a certain number of years in alternately weeping and producing
progeny, she had quite lately run away with somebody unspeakable—I think it was
the footman, or the baker, or some one of that sort.

“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I could put in a word.

“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” and the female potentate
patted my hand, but continued gloomily to shake her head.

“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,” asserted another
lady, the wife of a high military authority and not accustomed to be
contradicted.

“But I am.”

“But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible.”

“But I am.”

“Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter.”

“But I don’t want to be brought to town.”

“And not let you waste your best years buried.”

“But I like being buried.”

“Such solitude is not right.”

“But I’m not solitary.”

“And can come to no good.” She was getting quite angry.

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark, and renewed shaking of
heads.

“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little quieter;
“I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and shelves and
shelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped. Reading is an
occupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste of time. And how could
I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the sun shone on the snow, or of
the deep delight of hoar-frost days?

“It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,” I proceeded, “and my
husband only did it to please me.”

“Such a good little wife,” repeated the patronising potentate, again patting my
hand with an air of understanding all about it, “really an excellent little
wife. But you must not let your husband have his own way too much, my dear, and
take my advice and insist on his bringing you to town next winter.” And then
they fell to talking about their cooks, having settled to their entire
satisfaction that my fate was probably lying in wait for me too, lurking
perhaps at that very moment behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of the
man in the hall with my cloak.

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction when we
reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the pretty old house;
and when I went into the library, with its four windows open to the moonlight
and the scent, and looked round at the familiar bookshelves, and could hear no
sounds but sounds of peace, and knew that here I might read or dream or idle
exactly as I chose with never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to
the kindly Fate that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my
own blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen—a life
spent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils, and the
noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, and parties and tattle for all
amusement.

But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some grand
person, examining the details of my home through her eyeglass, and coolly
dissecting all that I so much prize from the convenient distance of the open
window, has finished up by expressing sympathy with my loneliness, and on my
protesting that I like it, has murmured, “sehr anspruchslos.” Then
indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness of my wants; but only for a moment,
and only under the withering influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, the
owner’s spirit is the same spirit as that which dwells in my servants—girls
whose one idea of happiness is to live in a town where there are others of
their sort with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion
for being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a few
hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself quite
well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading peace, that I
have been alone at all. Not but what I like to have people staying with me for
a few days, or even for a few weeks, should they be as anspruchslos as I
am myself, and content with simple joys; only, any one who comes here and would
be happy must have something in him; if he be a mere blank creature, empty of
head and heart, he will very probably find it dull. I should like my house to
be often full if I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. They
should be welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to
confess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just as much
to see them go.

On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed for some
one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There has been rain in the
night, and the whole garden seems to be singing—not the untiring birds only,
but the vigorous plants, the happy grass and trees, the lilac bushes—oh, those
lilac bushes! They are all out to-day, and the garden is drenched with the
scent. I have brought in armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every pot
and bowl and tub in the house is filled with purple glory, and the servants
think there is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and I go from room to
room gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to join
the scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually discover that
there is no party, and wonder why the house should be filled with flowers for
one woman by herself, and I long more and more for a kindred spirit—it seems so
greedy to have so much loveliness to oneself—but kindred spirits are so very,
very rare; I might almost as well cry for the moon. It is true that my garden
is full of friends, only they are—dumb.

June 3rd.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that
it requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus delivered
from casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love, or people who
love me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to be deterred from
coming by the roundabout train journey and the long drive at the end. Not the
least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If you have to
have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there should be only one;
for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are
you to get on with your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and
dream your dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certainty
that either you or the dropper-in will say something that would have been
better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and mischief-making. A
woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most difficult thing in the world to
keep in order, and things slip off it with a facility nothing short of
appalling at the very moment when it ought to be most quiet. In such cases the
only safe course is to talk steadily about cooks and children, and to pray that
the visit may not be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have
found to be the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at the
mere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are experiences
common to us all.

Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a whole
troop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied, besides the
business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged on lines of the
most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, and she returns the call
a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in the summer, and we ask them to
dinner in the winter. By strictly keeping to this, we avoid all danger of that
closer friendship which is only another name for frequent quarrels. She is a
pattern of what a German country lady should be, and is not only a pretty woman
but an energetic and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least,
effective. She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the stock, the
butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done
while most people are fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast
she is off in her pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the
“mamsells,” as the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the
lids off the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any
careless dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal
punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste to
decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to enjoy using
this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I would give much to
be able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless little lady, terrible
in her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box the ears of some great
strapping girl big enough to eat her.

The making of cheese and butter and sausages excellently well is a work
which requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable form of
activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the intelligent. That my
neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident by the bright alertness of her
eyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that only gain in prettiness by being used
to some good purpose. She is a recognised authority for miles around on the
mysteries of sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine;
and with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home, her
children are patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear little German
children, with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Who
shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and unworthy of a high order of
intelligence? I protest that to me it is a beautiful life, full of wholesome
outdoor work, and with no room for those listless moments of depression and
boredom, and of wondering what you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a
pretty woman’s eyes, and are not unknown even to the most brilliant. But while
admiring my neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps,
my talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather of
that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take up a volume
of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow
trunk beside a little stream, forget the very existence of everything but green
pastures and still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous
fields. And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so
refractory as to require boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these
occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is, and how far
away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies, past,
present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and impassable distance
that separates one’s own soul from the soul of the person sitting in the next
chair. I am speaking of comparative strangers, people who are forced to stay a
certain time by the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you grope
about after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding that
you have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each minute
more benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air and look
vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of wondering who they most
take after, generally settling the question by saying that the May baby, who is
the beauty, is like her father, and that the two more or less plain ones are
the image of me, and this decision, though I know it of old and am sure it is
coming, never fails to depress me as much as though I heard it for the first
time. The babies are very little and inoffensive and good, and it is hard that
they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation, and their
features pulled to pieces one by one, and all their weak points noted and
criticised, while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s face, their very
smile drawing forth comments on the shape of their mouths; but, after all, it
does not occur very often, and they are one of those few interests one has in
common with other people, as everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I have
discovered, is by no means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few persons
really love theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very tone
of their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest is at
its warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and roses; but on
reflection I don’t know a single person within twenty miles who really cares
for his garden, or has discovered the treasures of happiness that are buried in
it, and are to be found if sought for diligently, and if needs be with tears.
It is after these rare calls that I experience the only moments of depression
from which I ever suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished
person, for allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoilt by
anything so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed
enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably
desire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such
abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your
neighbour’s soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability being
that he hasn’t got one.

The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put them right
along the very front of two borders, and I don’t know what his feelings can be
now that they are all flowering and the plants behind are completely hidden;
but I have learned another lesson, and no future gardener shall be allowed to
run riot among my rockets in quite so reckless a fashion. They are charming
things, as delicate in colour as in scent, and a bowl of them on my
writing-table fills the room with fragrance. Single rows, however, are a
mistake; I had masses of them planted in the grass, and these show how lovely
they can be. A border full of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, must
be beautiful; but I don’t know how long they last nor what they look like when
they have done flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose.
Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No doubt
it would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to learn solely
by my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me when to do things.
At present the only flowers in the garden are the rockets, the pansies in the
rose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis and pontica. The azaleas have been
and still are gorgeous; I only planted them this spring and they almost at once
began to flower, and the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it were
filled with imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in every
delicate shade—what they will be next year and in succeeding years when the
bushes are bigger, I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On gray,
dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall make a great
bank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy nook. My
tea-roses are covered with buds which will not open for at least another week,
so I conclude this is not the sort of climate where they will flower from the
very beginning of June to November, as they are said to do.

July 11th.—There has been no rain since the day before
Whitsunday, five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for the
disappointment my beds have been. The dejected gardener went mad soon after
Whitsuntide, and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going about with a
spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining that he felt safer
that way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes civilised beings who
respect each other’s prejudices, until one day, when I mildly asked him to tie
up a fallen creeper—and after he bought the revolver my tones in addressing him
were of the mildest, and I quite left off reading to him aloud—he turned round,
looked me straight in the face for the first time since he has been here, and
said, “Do I look like Graf X———— (a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?”
After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as
expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his place, and I
have only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with the drought, and the
neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my blunders, the garden is in a sad
condition; but even in a sad condition it is the dearest place in the world,
and all my mistakes only make me more determined to persevere.

The long borders, where the rockets were, are looking dreadful. The rockets
have done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other walks of life,
have degenerated into sticks; and nothing else in those borders intends to
bloom this summer. The giant poppies I had planted out in them in April have
either died off or remained quite small, and so have the columbines; here and
there a delphinium droops unwillingly, and that is all. I suppose poppies
cannot stand being moved, or perhaps they were not watered enough at the time
of transplanting; anyhow, those borders are going to be sown to-morrow with
more poppies for next year; for poppies I will have, whether they like it or
not, and they shall not be touched, only thinned out.

Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, directly I come out and sit
under the trees, and look at the dappled sky, and see the sunshine on the
cornfields away on the plain, all the disappointment smooths itself out, and it
seems impossible to be sad and discontented when everything about me is so
radiant and kind.

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, that, sitting here in this shady
corner watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves across the grass, and
listening to the rooks quarrelling in the treetops, I almost expect to hear
English church bells ringing for the afternoon service. But the church is three
miles off, has no bells, and no afternoon service. Once a fortnight we go to
morning prayer at eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with a room
behind, whither we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long or our
flesh too weak, and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson.
In winter the church is bitterly cold; it is not heated, and we sit muffled up
in more furs than ever we wear out of doors; but it would of course be very
wicked for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may be, so he puts on a
great many extra coats under his gown, and, as the winter progresses, swells to
a prodigious size. We know when spring is coming by the reduction in his
figure. The congregation sit at ease while the parson does the praying for
them, and while they are droning the long-drawn-out chorales, he retires into a
little wooden box just big enough to hold him. He does not come out until he
thinks we have sung enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives us the
signal. I have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his box
and left us to go on singing. I am sure we should never dare to stop,
unauthorised by the Church. I asked him once what he did in there; he looked
very shocked at such a profane question, and made an evasive reply.

If it were not for the garden, a German Sunday would be a terrible day; but in
the garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more profound peace,
nobody raking or sweeping or fidgeting; only the little flowers themselves and
the whispering trees.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors—not stray callers to be got
rid of after a due administration of tea and things you are sorry afterwards
that you said, but people staying in the house and not to be got rid of at all.
All June was lost to me in this way, and it was from first to last a radiant
month of heat and beauty; but a garden where you meet the people you saw at
breakfast, and will see again at lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy
in. Besides, they had a knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in
them just when I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of the
library with them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to get
well drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat for
roses is poison for books; and they gave me to understand that if they had had
the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long ago—whereas I
don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They have all gone now, thank heaven,
except one, so that I have a little breathing space before others begin to
arrive. It seems that the place interests people, and that there is a sort of
novelty in staying in such a deserted corner of the world, for they were in a
perpetual state of mild amusement at being here at all.

Irais is the only one left. She is a young woman with a beautiful, refined
face, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly lovable. At
meals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit off, and repeats the
process, although providence (taking my shape) has caused salt-spoons to be
placed at convenient intervals down the table. She lunched to-day on beer,
Schweinekoteletten, and cabbage-salad with caraway seeds in it, and now
I hear her through the open window, extemporising touching melodies in her
charming, cooing voice. She is thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all on
the above diet. What better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of
the Teuton than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music?
Cabbage salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its utility as a means
of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it results so
poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that results in roses, and
I give it to Irais every day to make her sing. She is the sweetest singer I
have ever heard, and has a charming trick of making up songs as she goes along.
When she begins, I go and lean out of the window and look at my little friends
out there in the borders while listening to her music, and feel full of
pleasant sadness and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to
be sad about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others hurrying
along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my admiration three
brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was carrying in her pinafore, and
that had just been found motherless in the woodshed.

“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much!”

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before this
afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on the grass at
my feet, to ask about the lieber Gott, it being Sunday and her pious
little nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, on heaven and angels.

Her questions about the lieber Gott are better left unrecorded, and I
was relieved when she began about the angels.

“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked in her German-English.

“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I answered, “in beautiful, long dresses,
and with big, white wings.”

“Feathers?” she asked.

“I suppose so,—and long dresses, all white and beautiful.”

“Are they girlies?”

“Girls? Ye—es.”

“Don’t boys go into the Himmel?”

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.”

“And then what do they wear?”

“Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose.”

“Dwesses?”

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me of making
jokes. “What a funny Mummy!” she said, evidently much amused. She has a fat
little laugh that is very infectious.

“I think,” said I, gravely, “you had better go and play with the other babies.”

She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began writing
again.

“Mummy,” she said presently.

“Well?”

“Where do the angels get their dwesses?”

I hesitated. “From lieber Gott,” I said.

“Are there shops in the Himmel?”

“Shops? No.”

“But, then, where does lieber Gott buy their dwesses?”

“Now run away like a good baby; I’m busy.”

“But you said yesterday, when I asked about lieber Gott, that you would
tell about Him on Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about Him.”

There was nothing for it but resignation, so I put down my pencil with a sigh.
“Call the others, then.”

She ran away, and presently they all three emerged from the bushes one after
the other, and tried all together to scramble on to my knee. The April baby got
the knee as she always seems to get everything, and the other two had to sit on
the grass.

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings. The April
baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder and redder. I was
surprised at the breathless interest she took in the story—the other two were
tearing up tufts of grass and hardly listening. I had scarcely got to the
angels with the flaming swords and announced that that was all, when she burst
out, “Now I’ll tell about it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva,
and they had plenty of clothes, and there was no snake, and lieber
Gott wasn’t angry with them, and they could eat as many apples as they
liked, and was happy for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are true,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my
telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled energy,
all her silvery curls flying.

I began about Noah and the flood.

“Did it rain so badly?” she asked with a face of the deepest concern and
interest.

“Yes, all day long and all night long for weeks and weeks——”

“And was everybody so wet?”

“Yes—”

“But why didn’t they open their umbwellas?”

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the tea-tray.

“I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, putting her off my knee, greatly
relieved; “you must all go to Anna now and have tea.”

“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, not having hitherto opened her
lips; “she is a stupid girl.”

The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement, for, besides
being naturally extremely polite, and at all times anxious not to hurt any
one’s feelings, they had been brought up to love and respect their kind little
nurse.

The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger, pointed it
at the criminal in just indignation. “Such a child will never go into the
Himmel,” she said with great emphasis, and the air of one who delivers
judgment.

September 15th.—This is the month of quiet days, crimson
creepers, and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea
under the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; of wood-fires in the
library in the chilly evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon and
blackberry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big and fat, sit cleaning
themselves on the sunny verandah steps; the Man of Wrath shoots partridges
across the distant stubble; and the summer seems as though it would dream on
for ever. It is hard to believe that in three months we shall probably be
snowed up and certainly be cold. There is a feeling about this month that
reminds me of March and the early days of April, when spring is still
hesitating on the threshold and the garden holds its breath in expectation.
There is the same mildness in the air, and the sky and grass have the same look
as then; but the leaves tell a different tale, and the reddening creeper on the
house is rapidly approaching its last and loveliest glory.

My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected, and the
Viscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been most beautiful, the
latter being quite the loveliest things in the garden, each flower an exquisite
loose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at the base to a yellow-white. I
have ordered a hundred standard tea-roses for planting next month, half of
which are Viscountess Folkestones, because the tea-roses have such a way of
hanging their little heads that one has to kneel down to be able to see them
well in the dwarf forms—not but what I entirely approve of kneeling before such
perfect beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put standards
down each side of the walk under the south windows, and shall have the flowers
on a convenient level for worship. My only fear is, that they will stand the
winter less well than the dwarf sorts, being so difficult to pack up snugly.
The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have been, as I predicted, a mistake among the
tea-roses; they only flower twice in the season and all the rest of the time
look dull and moping; and then the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell and
so many insects inside them eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea-roses to
put in their place, as they all come out next month and are to be grouped in
the grass; and the semicircle being immediately under the windows, besides
having the best position in the place, must be reserved solely for my choicest
treasures. I have had a great many disappointments, but feel as though I were
really beginning to learn. Humility, and the most patient perseverance, seem
almost as necessary in gardening as rain and sunshine, and every failure must
be used as a stepping-stone to something better.

I had a visitor last week who knows a great deal about gardening and has had
much practical experience. When I heard he was coming, I felt I wanted to put
my arms right round my garden and hide it from him; but what was my surprise
and delight when he said, after having gone all over it, “Well, I think you
have done wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I was! It was so entirely unexpected,
and such a complete novelty after the remarks I have been listening to all the
summer. I could have hugged that discerning and indulgent critic, able to look
beyond the result to the intention, and appreciating the difficulties of every
kind that had been in the way. After that I opened my heart to him, and
listened reverently to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind and
encouraging advice, and wished he could stay here a whole year and help me
through the seasons. But he went, as people one likes always do go, and he was
the only guest I have had whose departure made me sorry.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me, while I
can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know little and care
less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I would not love them so
well—at least, that is what I think on wet days when the wind is howling round
the house and all nature is overcome with grief; and it has actually happened
once or twice when great friends have been staying with me that I have wished,
when they left, I might not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose
the fact is, that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the
country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast. Civilisation
has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul of the
Hausfrau is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her grandmother’s
hair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having been trained that way
by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of beginning to wake up for other
people till lunch-time, and never does so completely till it has been taken out
of doors and aired in the sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the
first thing in the morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural
tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced
that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in
bed.

November 11th.—When the gray November weather came, and hung its
soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields and the
vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy stillness weighed my
heart down to a forlorn yearning after the pleasant things of childhood, the
petting, the comforting, the warming faith in the unfailing wisdom of elders. A
great need of something to lean on, and a great weariness of independence and
responsibility took possession of my soul; and looking round for support and
comfort in that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness
of the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I not go
and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long; the place where
I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched, so close to heaven, so
near to hell, always either up on a cloud of glory, or down in the depths with
the waters of despair closing over my head? Cousins live in it now, distant
cousins, loved with the exact measure of love usually bestowed on cousins who
reign in one’s stead; cousins of practical views, who have dug up the
flower-beds and planted cabbages where roses grew; and though through all the
years since my father’s death I have held my head so high that it hurt, and
loftily refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisit
my old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days sent my
spirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be set aside, and I
woke from my musings surprised to find myself sick with longing. It is foolish
but natural to quarrel with one’s cousins, and especially foolish and natural
when they have done nothing, and are mere victims of chance. Is it their fault
that my not being a boy placed the shoes I should otherwise have stepped into
at their disposal? I know it is not; but their blamelessness does not make me
love them more. “Noch ein dummes Frauenzimmer!” cried my father, on my
arrival into the world—he had three of them already, and I was his last
hope,—and a dummes Frauenzimmer I have remained ever since; and that is
why for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in possession, and that
is why, the other day, overcome by the tender influence of the weather, the
purely sentimental longing to join hands again with my childhood was enough to
send all my pride to the winds, and to start me off without warning and without
invitation on my pilgrimage.

I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the Middle
Ages would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The pilgrims, leaving
all their cares at home, the anxieties of their riches or their debts, the wife
that worried and the children that disturbed, took only their sins with them,
and turning their backs on their obligations, set out with that sole burden,
and perhaps a cheerful heart. How cheerful my heart would have been, starting
on a fine morning, with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified by
the approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings of my
family, with every step getting farther from the suffocation of daily duties,
out into the wide fresh world, out into the glorious free world, so poor, so
penitent, and so happy! My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some
friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route
arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all
day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim,
is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is
the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and
having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my
plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, “How
very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!” The relative of five
hundred years back would simply have said, “How holy!”

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages—indeed, it is evident that I have
it from him—and he encouraged it in me when I was little, taking me with him on
his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a boy. Often have we been
together to the school he was at in Brandenburg, and spent pleasant days
wandering about the old town on the edge of one of those lakes that lie in a
chain in that wide green plain; and often have we been in Potsdam, where he was
quartered as a lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woods
around and in the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle’s
Frederick under my father’s arm; and often did we spend long summer days at the
house in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of lakes, where his
mother spent her young years, and where, though it belonged to cousins, like
everything else that was worth having, we could wander about as we chose, for
it was empty, and sit in the deep windows of rooms where there was no
furniture, and the painted Venuses and cupids on the ceiling still smiled
irrelevantly and stretched their futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath.
And while we sat and rested, my father told me, as my grandmother had a hundred
times told him, all that had happened in those rooms in the far-off days when
people danced and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever to be
old or sorry.

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone’s throw of the great iron gates,
with two very old lime trees in front of it, where we used to lunch on our
arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue check cloth, the lime
blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees humming in the scented shadows
overhead. I have a picture of the house by my side as I write, done from the
lake in old times, with a boat full of ladies in hoops and powder in the
foreground, and a youth playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place were
those I loved the best.

But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories to tell a
little girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the stone
balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or picked the pale dog-roses in the
hedges, or lay in the boat in a shady reed-grown bay while he smoked to keep
the mosquitoes off, were after all only traditions, imparted to me in small
doses from time to time, when his earnest desire not to raise his remarks above
the level of dulness supposed to be wholesome for Backfische was
neutralised by an impulse to share his thoughts with somebody who would laugh;
whereas the place I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with
living, first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and
eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to me the
older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them since; and though I
have forgotten most of what happened six months ago, every incident, almost
every day of those wonderful long years is perfectly distinct in my memory.

But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, altogether cousinly in my
behaviour towards the people in possession. The invitations to revisit the old
home had ceased. The cousins had grown tired of refusals, and had left me
alone. I did not even know who lived in it now, it was so long since I had had
any news. For two days I fought against the strong desire to go there that had
suddenly seized me, and assured myself that I would not go, that it would be
absurd to go, undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not know them and
would be in an awkward position, and that I was old enough to know better. But
who can foretell from one hour to the next what a woman will do? And when does
she ever know better? On the third morning I set out as hopefully as though it
were the most natural thing in the world to fall unexpectedly upon hitherto
consistently neglected cousins, and expect to be received with open arms.

It was a complicated journey, and lasted several hours. During the first part,
when it was still dark, I glowed with enthusiasm, with the spirit of adventure,
with delight at the prospect of so soon seeing the loved place again; and
thought with wonder of the long years I had allowed to pass since last I was
there. Of what I should say to the cousins, and of how I should introduce
myself into their midst, I did not think at all: the pilgrim spirit was upon
me, the unpractical spirit that takes no thought for anything, but simply
wanders along enjoying its own emotions. It was a quiet, sad morning, and there
was a thick mist. By the time I was in the little train on the light railway
that passed through the village nearest my old home, I had got over my first
enthusiasm, and had entered the stage of critically examining the changes that
had been made in the last ten years. It was so misty that I could see nothing
of the familiar country from the carriage windows, only the ghosts of pines in
the front row of the forests; but the railway itself was a new departure,
unknown in our day, when we used to drive over ten miles of deep, sandy forest
roads to and from the station, and although most people would have called it an
evident and great improvement, it was an innovation due, no doubt, to the zeal
and energy of the reigning cousin; and who was he, thought I, that he should
require more conveniences than my father had found needful? It was no use my
telling myself that in my father’s time the era of light railways had not
dawned, and that if it had, we should have done our utmost to secure one; the
thought of my cousin, stepping into my shoes, and then altering them, was
odious to me. By the time I was walking up the hill from the station I had got
over this feeling too, and had entered a third stage of wondering uneasily what
in the world I should do next. Where was the intrepid courage with which I had
started? At the top of the first hill I sat down to consider this question in
detail, for I was very near the house now, and felt I wanted time. Where,
indeed, was the courage and joy of the morning? It had vanished so completely
that I could only suppose that it must be lunch time, the observations of years
having led to the discovery that the higher sentiments and virtues fly
affrighted on the approach of lunch, and none fly quicker than courage. So I
ate the lunch I had brought with me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but it
was chilly, made up of sandwiches and pears, and it had to be eaten under a
tree at the edge of a field; and it was November, and the mist was thicker than
ever and very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, I
was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody’s spirits can keep
up under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches, I deplored the
headlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn me from a warm, dry home
where I was appreciated, and had brought me first to the damp tree in the damp
field, and when I had finished my lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going to
drag me into the midst of a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins. Vast
sheep loomed through the mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up a
perpetual, irritating yap. In the fog I could hardly tell where I was, though I
knew I must have played there a hundred times as a child. After the fashion of
woman directly she is not perfectly warm and perfectly comfortable, I began to
consider the uncertainty of human life, and to shake my head in gloomy approval
as lugubrious lines of pessimistic poetry suggested themselves to my mind.

Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want to do anything, to do it in the
way consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a woman. The rattle of a
carriage along the road just behind me, and the fact that I started and turned
suddenly hot, drove this truth home to my soul. The mist hid me, and the
carriage, no doubt full of cousins, drove on in the direction of the house; but
what an absurd position I was in! Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, and
revealed me lunching in the wet on their property, the cousin of the short and
lofty letters, the unangenehme Elisabeth! “Die war doch immer
verdreht,” I could imagine them hastily muttering to each other, before
advancing wreathed in welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrow
escape, and I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch
under the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself nervously
what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the village, go to the
Gasthof, write a letter craving permission to call on my cousins, and
wait there till an answer came? It would be a discreet and sober course to
pursue; the next best thing to having written before leaving home. But the
Gasthof of a north German village is a dreadful place, and the
remembrance of one in which I had taken refuge once from a thunderstorm was
still so vivid that nature itself cried out against this plan. The mist, if
anything, was growing denser. I knew every path and gate in the place. What if
I gave up all hope of seeing the house, and went through the little door in the
wall at the bottom of the garden, and confined myself for this once to that? In
such weather I would be able to wander round as I pleased, without the least
risk of being seen by or meeting any cousins, and it was after all the garden
that lay nearest my heart. What a delight it would be to creep into it
unobserved, and revisit all the corners I so well remembered, and slip out
again and get away safely without any need of explanations, assurances,
protestations, displays of affection, without any need, in a word, of that
exhausting form of conversation, so dear to relations, known as
Redensarten!

The mist tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have gone
soberly to the Gasthof and written the conciliatory letter; but the
temptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in ten minutes I
had found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and was standing with a
beating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same potency as
those that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was trespassing, which
is in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling when you are trespassing on
what might just as well have been your own ground, on what actually was for
years your own ground, and when you are in deadly peril of seeing the rightful
owners, whom you have never met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear
round the corner, and of hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful
politeness “I do not think I have the pleasure—?” Then the place was unchanged.
I was standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had
always been just there; they curled away on either side among the shrubs, with
the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of their green stains, just
as they did in my day. The overgrown lilac bushes still met above my head. The
moisture dripped from the same ledge in the wall on to the sodden leaves
beneath, as it had done all through the afternoons of all those past Novembers.
This was the place, this damp and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to
me. Nobody ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer so
full of mosquitoes that only a Backfisch indifferent to spots could have
borne it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I could
walk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the air. There
was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much frequented by the
larger black slug, where I used to pass glorious afternoons making plans. I was
for ever making plans, and if nothing came of them, what did it matter? The
mere making had been a joy. To me this out-of-the-way corner was always a
wonderful and a mysterious place, where my castles in the air stood close
together in radiant rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures
befell me; for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all
enchanted.

Standing there and looking round with happy eyes, I forgot the existence of the
cousins. I could have cried for joy at being there again. It was the home of my
fathers, the home that would have been mine if I had been a boy, the home that
was mine now by a thousand tender and happy and miserable associations, of
which the people in possession could not dream. They were tenants, but it was
my home. I threw my arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every branch
of which I remembered, for had I not climbed it, and fallen from it, and torn
and bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave it such a
hearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green stain, and still
I did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a reckless, Backfisch
pleasure in being dirty, a delicious feeling that I had not had for years.
Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk the contents of the magic bottle,
could not have grown smaller more suddenly than I grew younger the moment I
passed through that magic door. Bad habits cling to us, however, with such
persistency that I did mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to rub
off the welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in the
glorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the handkerchief
brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of scorn, the fine scorn for
scent of every honest Backfisch, I rolled it up into a ball and flung it
away into the bushes, where I daresay it is at this moment. “Away with you,” I
cried, “away with you, symbol of conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to a
desire to please—away with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!” And so young
had I grown within the last few minutes that I did not even feel silly.

As a Backfisch I had never used handkerchiefs—the child of nature scorns
to blow its nose—though for decency’s sake my governess insisted on giving me a
clean one of vast size and stubborn texture on Sundays. It was stowed away
unfolded in the remotest corner of my pocket, where it was gradually pressed
into a beautiful compactness by the other contents, which were knives. After a
while, I remember, the handkerchief being brought to light on Sundays to make
room for a successor, and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to an
agreement that it should only be changed on the first and third Sundays in the
month, on condition that I promised to turn it on the other Sundays. My
governess said that the outer folds became soiled from the mere contact with
the other things in my pocket, and that visitors might catch sight of the
soiled side if it was never turned when I wished to blow my nose in their
presence, and that one had no right to give one’s visitors shocks. “But I never
do wish——” I began with great earnestness. “Unsinn,” said my governess,
cutting me short.

After the first thrills of joy at being there again had gone, the profound
stillness of the dripping little shrubbery frightened me. It was so still that
I was afraid to move; so still, that I could count each drop of moisture
falling from the oozing wall; so still, that when I held my breath to listen, I
was deafened by my own heart-beats. I made a step forward in the direction
where the arbour ought to be, and the rustling and jingling of my clothes
terrified me into immobility. The house was only two hundred yards off; and if
any one had been about, the noise I had already made opening the creaking door
and so foolishly apostrophising my handkerchief must have been noticed. Suppose
an inquiring gardener, or a restless cousin, should presently loom through the
fog, bearing down upon me? Suppose Fräulein Wundermacher should pounce upon me
suddenly from behind, coming up noiselessly in her galoshes, and shatter my
castles with her customary triumphant “Jetzt halte ich dich aber fest!”
Why, what was I thinking of? Fräulein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, such
an enemy of day-dreams, such a friend of das Praktische, such a lover of
creature comforts, had died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by others,
German sometimes, and sometimes English, and sometimes at intervals French, and
they too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here a solitary ghost.
“Come, Elizabeth,” said I to myself impatiently, “are you actually growing
sentimental over your governesses? If you think you are a ghost, be glad at
least that you are a solitary one. Would you like the ghosts of all those poor
women you tormented to rise up now in this gloomy place against you? And do you
intend to stand here till you are caught?” And thus exhorting myself to action,
and recognising how great was the risk I ran in lingering, I started down the
little path leading to the arbour and the principal part of the garden, going,
it is true, on tiptoe, and very much frightened by the rustling of my
petticoats, but determined to see what I had come to see and not to be scared
away by phantoms.

How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my youth, so
short, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the canvas shoes were with
the india rubber soles, for creeping about without making a sound! Thanks to
them I could always run swiftly and unheard into my hiding-places, and stay
there listening to the garden resounding with cries of “Elizabeth! Elizabeth!
Come in at once to your lessons!” Or, at a different period, “Où êtes-vous
donc, petite sotte?” Or at yet another period, “Warte nur, wenn ich dich
erst habe!” As the voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiseless
clothes round the next, and it was only Fräulein Wundermacher, a person of
resource, who discovered that all she needed for my successful circumvention
was galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath calling me, and would come
up silently, as I stood lapped in a false security lost in the contemplation of
a squirrel or a robin, and seize me by the shoulders from behind, to the
grievous unhinging of my nerves. Stealing along in the fog, I looked back
uneasily once or twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could hardly
be reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate twists and curls that
compose what my maid calls my Frisur, and that mark the gulf lying
between the present and the past; for it had happened once or twice, awful to
relate and to remember, that Fräulein Wundermacher, sooner than let me slip
through her fingers, had actually caught me by the long plait of hair to whose
other end I was attached and whose English name I had been told was pigtail,
just at the instant when I was springing away from her into the bushes; and so
had led me home triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and muttering
with a broad smile of special satisfaction, “Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht
entschlüpfen!” Fräulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must have
been a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman. But I wished
at that moment that she would not haunt me so persistently, and that I could
get rid of the feeling that she was just behind in her galoshes, with her hand
stretched out to seize me.

Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back with my
heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern eyes shining in the
darkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the cousins should catch me had
quite upset my nerves, for I am not by nature inclined to see eyes where eyes
are not. “Don’t be foolish, Elizabeth,” murmured my soul in rather a faint
voice, “go in, and make sure.” “But I don’t like going in and making sure,” I
replied. I did go in, however, with a sufficient show of courage, and
fortunately the eyes vanished. What I should have done if they had not I am
altogether unable to imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime
and fear at night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The arbour
had fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of mouldiness. My
grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings, it enjoyed a period of
prosperity before being left to the ravages of slugs and children, when he came
down every afternoon in summer and drank his coffee there and read his
Kreuzzeitung and dozed, while the rest of us went about on tiptoe, and
only the birds dared sing. Even the mosquitoes that infested the place were too
much in awe of him to sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I
naturally concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.
Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my memory
skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was exclusively his.
Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I felt how well I knew him
now from the impressions he made then on my child’s mind, though I was not
conscious of them for more than twenty years. Nobody told me about him, and he
died when I was six, and yet within the last year or two, that strange Indian
summer of remembrance that comes to us in the leisured times when the children
have been born and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well.
It is rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for the
parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though children may not
understand what is said and done before them, and have no interest in it at the
time, and though they may forget it at once and for years, yet these things
that they have seen and heard and not noticed have after all impressed
themselves for ever on their minds, and when they are men and women come
crowding back with surprising and often painful distinctness, and away frisk
all the cherished little illusions in flocks.

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he often
frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he was a just man,
everybody said; a just man who might have been a great man if he had chosen,
and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly glory. That he had not so chosen
was held to be a convincing proof of his greatness; for he was plainly too
great to be great in the vulgar sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of
privacy and potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still did
nothing, was the belief of the simple people around. People must believe in
somebody, and having pinned their faith on my grandfather in the promising
years that lie round thirty, it was more convenient to let it remain there. He
pervaded our family life till my sixth year, and saw to it that we all behaved
ourselves, and then he died, and we were glad that he should be in heaven. He
was a good German (and when Germans are good they are very good) who kept the
commandments, voted for the Government, grew prize potatoes and bred
innumerable sheep, drove to Berlin once a year with the wool in a procession of
waggons behind him and sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly for a
few days there, and then carried most of the proceeds home, hunted as often as
possible, helped his friends, punished his children, read his Bible, said his
prayers, and was genuinely astonished when his wife had the affectation to die
of a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain this conduct. She ought, of
course, to have been happy in the possession of so good a man; but good men are
sometimes oppressive, and to have one in the house with you and to live in the
daily glare of his goodness must be a tremendous business. After bearing him
seven sons and three daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the way
described, and afforded, said my grandfather, another and a very curious proof
of the impossibility of ever being sure of your ground with women. The incident
faded more quickly from his mind than it might otherwise have done for its
having occurred simultaneously with the production of a new kind of potato, of
which he was justly proud. He called it Trost in Trauer, and quoted the
text of Scripture Auge um Auge, Zabn um Zahn, after which he did not
again allude to his wife’s decease. In his last years, when my father managed
the estate, and he only lived with us and criticised, he came to have the
reputation of an oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons at the beginning of
any important phase in their lives, and he received them in this very arbour,
administering eloquent and minute advice in the deep voice that rolled round
the shrubbery and filled me with a vague sense of guilt as I played. Sitting
among the bushes playing muffled games for fear of disturbing him, I supposed
he must be reading aloud, so unbroken was the monotony of that majestic roll.
The young men used to come out again bathed in perspiration, much stung by
mosquitoes, and looking bewildered; and when they had got over the impression
made by my grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt forgot all he had said
with wholesome quickness, and set themselves to the interesting and necessary
work of gaining their own experience. Once, indeed, a dreadful thing happened,
whose immediate consequence was the abrupt end to the long and close friendship
between us and our nearest neighbour. His son was brought to the arbour and
left there in the usual way, and either he must have happened on the critical
half hour after the coffee and before the Kreuzzeitung, when my
grandfather was accustomed to sleep, or he was more courageous than the others
and tried to talk, for very shortly, playing as usual near at hand, I heard my
grandfather’s voice, raised to an extent that made me stop in my game and
quake, saying with deliberate anger, “Hebe dich weg von mir, Sohn des
Satans!” Which was all the advice this particular young man got, and which
he hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes, and though his face
was very pale, there was an odd twist about the corners of his mouth that
reassured me.

This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather’s life, for almost
immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he need have done
because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with him, in the face of
his doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely die. “What! am I to be
conquered by crabs?” he demanded indignantly of the doctor; for apart from
loving them with all his heart he had never yet been conquered by anything.
“Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal—do not, I pray you, try it again,” replied
the doctor. But my grandfather ordered crabs that very night for supper, and
went in to table with the shining eyes of one who is determined to conquer or
die, and the crabs conquered, and he died. “He was a just man,” said the
neighbours, except that nearest neighbour, formerly his best friend, “and might
have been a great one had he so chosen.” And they buried him with profound
respect, and the sunshine came into our home life with a burst, and the birds
were not the only creatures that sang, and the arbour, from having been a
temple of Delphic utterances, sank into a home for slugs.

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate triumph of
the insignificant and small over the important and vast, illustrated in this
instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of slugs for grandfathers, I
went slowly round the next bend of the path, and came to the broad walk along
the south side of the high wall dividing the flower garden from the kitchen
garden, in which sheltered position my father had had his choicest flowers.
Here the cousins had been at work, and all the climbing roses that clothed the
wall with beauty were gone, and some very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up at
proper intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the cousins knew the value
of this warm aspect, for in the border beneath, filled in my father’s time in
this month of November with the wallflowers that were to perfume the walk in
spring, there was a thick crop of—I stooped down close to make sure—yes, a
thick crop of radishes. My eyes filled with tears at the sight of those
radishes, and it is probably the only occasion on record on which radishes have
made anybody cry. My dear father, whom I so passionately loved, had in his turn
passionately loved this particular border, and spent the spare moments of a
busy life enjoying the flowers that grew in it. He had no time himself for a
more near acquaintance with the delights of gardening than directing what
plants were to be used, but found rest from his daily work strolling up and
down here, or sitting smoking as close to the flowers as possible. “It is the
Purest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest Refreshment to the Spirits of
Man,” he would quote (for he read other things besides the
Kreuzzeitung), looking round with satisfaction on reaching this fragrant
haven after a hot day in the fields. Well, the cousins did not think so. Less
fanciful, and more sensible as they probably would have said, their position
plainly was that you cannot eat flowers. Their spirits required no refreshment,
but their bodies needed much, and therefore radishes were more precious than
wallflowers. Nor was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but they were grown
in the decent obscurity of odd kitchen garden corners and old cucumber frames,
and would never have been allowed to come among the flowers. And only because I
was not a boy here they were profaning the ground that used to be so beautiful.
Oh, it was a terrible misfortune not to have been a boy! And how sad and lonely
it was, after all, in this ghostly garden. The radish bed and what it
symbolised had turned my first joy into grief. This walk and border me too much
of my father reminded, and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he had
taught me, and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once during all
the years we lived together had we been of different opinions and fallen out,
and it was the one time I ever saw him severe. I was four years old, and
demanded one Sunday to be taken to church. My father said no, for I had never
been to church, and the German service is long and exhausting. I implored. He
again said no. I implored again, and showed such a pious disposition, and so
earnest a determination to behave well, that he gave in, and we went off very
happily hand in hand. “Now mind, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to me at the
church door, “there is no coming out again in the middle. Having insisted on
being brought, thou shalt now sit patiently till the end.” “Oh, yes, oh, yes,”
I promised eagerly, and went in filled with holy fire. The shortness of my
legs, hanging helplessly for two hours midway between the seat and the floor,
was the weapon chosen by Satan for my destruction. In German churches you do
not kneel, and seldom stand, but sit nearly the whole time, praying and singing
in great comfort. If you are four years old, however, this unchanged position
soon becomes one of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs,
strange prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifying
numbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to look,
then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and burnings. I thought I must
be very ill, for I had never known my legs like that before. My father sitting
beside me was engrossed in the singing of a chorale that evidently had no end,
each verse finished with a long-drawn-out hallelujah, after which the organ
played by itself for a hundred years—by the organist’s watch, which was wrong,
two minutes exactly—and then another verse began. My father, being the patron
of the living, was careful to sing and pray and listen to the sermon with
exemplary attention, aware that every eye in the little church was on our pew,
and at first I tried to imitate him; but the behaviour of my legs became so
alarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at him and seeing that he
continued his singing unmoved, I put out my hand and pulled his sleeve.

“Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with deliberation; continuing in a low voice
without changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly moving, and his
eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the organist, who was also the
postman, should have finished his solo, “Did I not tell thee to sit still,
Elizabeth?” “Yes, but——” “Then do it.” “But I want to go home.”

“Unsinn.” And the next verse beginning, my father sang louder than ever.
What could I do? Should I cry? I began to be afraid I was going to die on that
chair, so extraordinary were the sensations in my legs. What could my father do
to me if I did cry? With the quick instinct of small children I felt that he
could not put me in the corner in church, nor would he whip me in public, and
that with the whole village looking on, he was helpless, and would have to give
in. Therefore I tugged his sleeve again and more peremptorily, and prepared to
demand my immediate removal in a loud voice. But my father was ready for me.
Without interrupting his singing, or altering his devout expression, he put his
hand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch—not a playful pinch, but a good hard
unmistakeable pinch, such as I had never imagined possible, and then went on
serenely to the next hallelujah. For a moment I was petrified with
astonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my playmate, adorer, and friend?
Smarting with pain, for I was a round baby, with a nicely stretched, tight
skin, and dreadfully hurt in my feelings, I opened my mouth to shriek in
earnest, when my father’s clear whisper fell on my ear, each word distinct and
not to be misunderstood, his eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, and
his lips hardly moving, “Elizabeth, wenn du schreist, kneife ich dich bis du
platzt.” And he finished the verse with unruffled decorum—

“Will Satan mich verschlingen,
So lass die Engel singen
          Hallelujah!”

We never had another difference. Up to then he had been my willing slave, and
after that I was his.

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to the door
in the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of which my own little
garden used to be. The door was open, and I stood still a moment before going
through, to hold my breath and listen. The silence was as profound as before.
The place seemed deserted; and I should have thought the house empty and shut
up but for the carefully tended radishes and the recent footmarks on the green
of the path. They were the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examine
a specially clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow sitting
on the wall just above my head made me jump as I have seldom in my life jumped,
and reminded me that I was trespassing. Clearly my nerves were all to pieces,
for I gathered up my skirts and fled through the door as though a whole army of
ghosts and cousins were at my heels, nor did I stop till I had reached the
remote corner where my garden was. “Are you enjoying yourself, Elizabeth?”
asked the mocking sprite that calls itself my soul: but I was too much out of
breath to answer.

This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main garden and
the house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an orchard, and it was
to the last degree unlikely that any one would come there on such an afternoon.
This plot of ground, turned now as I saw into a rockery, had been the scene of
my most untiring labours. Into the cold earth of this north border on which the
sun never shone I had dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had been
spent on it, and as bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal
hour I had borrowed from Fräulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,
passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next birthday should
come round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner in her company, against
which my very soul revolted. And after all, nothing came up. The labour of
digging and watering, the anxious zeal with which I pounced on weeds, the
poring over gardening books, the plans made as I sat on the little seat in the
middle gazing admiringly and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon
to be gemmed with a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of
pfennings, the humiliation of my position in regard to Fräulein
Wundermacher,—all, all had been in vain. No sun shone there, and nothing grew.
The gardener who reigned supreme in those days had given me this big piece for
that sole reason, because he could do nothing with it himself. He was no doubt
of opinion that it was quite good enough for a child to experiment upon, and
went his way, when I had thanked him with a profuseness of gratitude I still
remember, with an unmoved countenance. For more than a year I worked and
waited, and watched the career of the flourishing orchard opposite with puzzled
feelings. The orchard was only a few yards away, and yet, although my garden
was full of manure, and water, and attentions that were never bestowed on the
orchard, all it could show and ever did show were a few unhappy beginnings of
growth that either remained stationary and did not achieve flowers, or dwindled
down again and vanished. Once I timidly asked the gardener if he could explain
these signs and wonders, but he was a busy man with no time for answering
questions, and told me shortly that gardening was not learned in a day. How
well I remember that afternoon, and the very shape of the lazy clouds, and the
smell of spring things, and myself going away abashed and sitting on the shaky
bench in my domain and wondering for the hundredth time what it was that made
the difference between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruit
trees, far enough away from the wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade,
were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sunshine in a carelessly
well-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise in the
field behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they luxuriated in
the insolent glory of their white and pink perfection. It was May, and my heart
bled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in November, and that I had
never seen since. The whole of the rest of the garden was on fire with tulips;
behind me, on the other side of the wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of
translucent loveliness, a jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what
was there not on the other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and
flowered exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me,
in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled about or cultivated or
noticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils thrusting their spears
through the grass, crocuses peeping out inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering their
small cold faces when the first shivering spring days came. Only my piece that
I so loved was perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of these
things on that radiant day, and wept aloud.

Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily digging, and
noticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the difference between my
garden and the profusion of splendour all around, paused with his barrow on the
path in front of me, and remarked that nobody could expect to get blood out of
a stone. The apparent irrelevance of this statement made me weep still louder,
the bitter tears of insulted sorrow; but he stuck to his point, and harangued
me from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips and
blood and stones till my tears all dried up again and I listened attentively,
for the conclusion to be drawn from his remarks was plainly that I had been
shamefully taken in by the head gardener, who was an unprincipled person
thenceforward to be for ever mistrusted and shunned. Standing on the path from
which the kindly apprentice had expounded his proverb, this scene rose before
me as clearly as though it had taken place that very day; but how different
everything looked, and how it had shrunk! Was this the wide orchard that had
seemed to stretch away, it and the sloping field beyond, up to the gates of
heaven? I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a certain
time of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up my mind that on
that Day the heavenly host would enter the world by that very field, coming
down the slope in shining ranks, treading the daffodils under foot, filling the
orchard with their songs of exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep from
among the goats. Of course I was a sheep, and my governess and the head
gardener goats, so that the results could not fail to be in every way
satisfactory. But looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughed
at the smallness of the field I had supposed would hold all heaven.

Here again the cousins had been at work. The site of my garden was occupied by
a rockery, and the orchard grass with all its treasures had been dug up, and
the spaces between the trees planted with currant bushes and celery in
admirable rows; so that no future little cousins will be able to dream of
celestial hosts coming towards them across the fields of daffodils, and will
perhaps be the better for being free from visions of the kind, for as I grew
older, uncomfortable doubts laid hold of my heart with cold fingers, dim
uncertainties as to the exact ultimate position of the gardener and the
governess, anxious questionings as to how it would be if it were they who
turned out after all to be sheep, and I who—? For that we all three might be
gathered into the same fold at the last never, in those days, struck me as
possible, and if it had I should not have liked it.

“Now what sort of person can that be,” I asked myself, shaking my head, as I
contemplated the changes before me, “who could put a rockery among vegetables
and currant bushes? A rockery, of all things in the gardening world, needs
consummate tact in its treatment. It is easier to make mistakes in forming a
rockery than in any other garden scheme. Either it is a great success, or it is
great failure; either it is very charming, or it is very absurd. There is no
state between the sublime and the ridiculous possible in a rockery.” I stood
shaking my head disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in these
reflections, when a sudden quick pattering of feet coming along in a great
hurry made me turn round with a start, just in time to receive the shock of a
body tumbling out of the mist and knocking violently against me.

It was a little girl of about twelve years old.

“Hullo!” said the little girl in excellent English; and then we stared at each
other in astonishment.

“I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the little girl, offering no apology
for having nearly knocked me down. “Who are you?”

“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the little girl’s
face, and a host of memories stirring within me. “Why, didn’t she marry a
missionary, and go out to some place where they ate him?”

The little girl stared harder. “Ate him? Marry? What, has she been married all
this time to somebody who’s been eaten and never let on? Oh, I say, what a
game!” And she threw back her head and laughed till the garden rang again.

“O hush, you dreadful little girl!” I implored, catching her by the arm, and
terrified beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. “Don’t make that horrid
noise—we are certain to be caught if you don’t stop——”

The little girl broke off a shriek of laughter in the middle and shut her mouth
with a snap. Her eyes, round and black and shiny like boot buttons, came still
further out of her head. “Caught?” she said eagerly. “What, are you afraid of
being caught too? Well, this is a game!” And with her hands plunged deep
in the pockets of her coat she capered in front of me in the excess of her
enjoyment, reminding me of a very fat black lamb frisking round the dazed and
passive sheep its mother.

It was clear that the time had come for me to get down to the gate at the end
of the garden as quickly as possible, and I began to move away in that
direction. The little girl at once stopped capering and planted herself
squarely in front of me. “Who are you?” she said, examining me from my hat to
my boots with the keenest interest.

I considered this ungarnished manner of asking questions impertinent, and,
trying to look lofty, made an attempt to pass at the side.

The little girl, with a quick, cork-like movement, was there before me.

“Who are you?” she repeated, her expression friendly but firm. “Oh, I—I’m a
pilgrim,” I said in desperation.

“A pilgrim!” echoed the little girl. She seemed struck, and while she was
struck I slipped past her and began to walk quickly towards the door in the
wall. “A pilgrim!” said the little girl, again, keeping close beside me, and
looking me up and down attentively. “I don’t like pilgrims. Aren’t they people
who are always walking about, and have things the matter with their feet? Have
you got anything the matter with your feet?”

“Certainly not,” I replied indignantly, walking still faster.

“And they never wash, Miss Robinson says. You don’t either, do you?”

“Not wash? Oh, I’m afraid you are a very badly brought-up little girl—oh, leave
me alone—I must run—”

“So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, “for Miss Robinson must be close
behind us. She nearly had me just before I found you.” And she started running
by my side.

The thought of Miss Robinson close behind us gave wings to my feet, and,
casting my dignity, of which, indeed, there was but little left, to the winds,
I fairly flew down the path. The little girl was not to be outrun, and though
she panted and turned weird colours, kept by my side and even talked. Oh, I was
tired, tired in body and mind, tired by the different shocks I had received,
tired by the journey, tired by the want of food; and here I was being forced to
run because this very naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in to
her lessons.

“I say—this is jolly—” she jerked out.

“But why need we run to the same place?” I breathlessly asked, in the vain hope
of getting rid of her.

“Oh, yes—that’s just—the fun. We’d get on—together—you and I—”

“No, no,” said I, decided on this point, bewildered though I was.

“I can’t stand washing—either—it’s awful—in winter—and makes one have—chaps.”

“But I don’t mind it in the least,” I protested faintly, not having any energy
left.

“Oh, I say!” said the little girl, looking at my face, and making the sound
known as a guffaw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly revolting.

We had got safely through the door, round the corner past the radishes, and
were in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to hide in the
tangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round and listen. The
little girl opened her mouth to speak. With great presence of mind I instantly
put my muff in front of it and held it there tight, while I listened. Dead
silence, except for the laboured breathing and struggles of the little girl.

“I don’t hear a sound,” I whispered, letting her go again. “Now what did you
want to say?” I added, eyeing her severely.

“I wanted to say,” she panted, “that it’s no good pretending you wash with a
nose like that.”

“A nose like that! A nose like what?” I exclaimed, greatly offended; and though
I put up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt it, I could find no
difference in it. “I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must have a wretched life,” I
said, in tones of deep disgust.

The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I were paying her compliments.
“It’s all green and brown,” she said, pointing. “Is it always like that?”

Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the gate, and the enraptured kiss it
had received, and blushed.

“Won’t it come off?” persisted the little girl.

“Of course it will come off,” I answered, frowning.

“Why don’t you rub it off?”

Then I remembered the throwing away of the handkerchief, and blushed again.

“Please lend me your handkerchief,” I said humbly, “I—I have lost mine.”

There was a great fumbling in six different pockets, and then a handkerchief
that made me young again merely to look at it was produced. I took it
thankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl, intensely interested,
watching the operation and giving me advice. “There—it’s all right now—a little
more on the right—there—now it’s all off.”

“Are you sure? No green left?” I anxiously asked.

“No, it’s red all over now,” she replied cheerfully. “Let me get home,” thought
I, very much upset by this information, “let me get home to my dear,
uncritical, admiring babies, who accept my nose as an example of what a nose
should be, and whatever its colour think it beautiful.” And thrusting the
handkerchief back into the little girl’s hands, I hurried away down the path.
She packed it away hastily, but it took some seconds for it was of the size of
a small sheet, and then came running after me. “Where are you going?” she asked
surprised, as I turned down the path leading to the gate.

“Through this gate,” I replied with decision.

“But you mustn’t—we’re not allowed to go through there——”

So strong was the force of old habits in that place that at the words not
allowed my hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that instant a
voice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me rigid.

“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” called the voice, “Come in at once to your
lessons—Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”

“It’s Miss Robinson,” whispered the little girl, twinkling with excitement;
then, catching sight of my face, she said once more with eager insistence, “Who
are you?”

“Oh, I’m a ghost!” I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my forehead
and looking round fearfully.

“Pooh,” said the little girl.

It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking of
approaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I pulled the
gate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me, and fled out and away
down the wide, misty fields.

The Gotha Almanach says that the reigning cousin married the daughter of
a Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only child was
born, Elizabeth.

November 20th.—Last night we had ten degrees of frost
(Fahrenheit), and I went out the first thing this morning to see what had
become of the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake and quite
cheerful—covered with rime it is true, but anything but black and shrivelled.
Even those in boxes on each side of the verandah steps were perfectly alive and
full of buds, and one in particular, a Bouquet d’Or, is a mass of buds, and
would flower if it could get the least encouragement. I am beginning to think
that the tenderness of tea-roses is much exaggerated, and am certainly very
glad I had the courage to try them in this northern garden. But I must not fly
too boldly in the face of Providence, and have ordered those in the boxes to be
taken into the greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a sunny
place near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds. The greenhouse
is only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just above freezing, and is
reserved entirely for such plants as cannot stand the very coldest part of the
winter out of doors. I don’t use it for growing anything, because I don’t love
things that will only bear the garden for three or four months in the year and
require coaxing and petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of
strong, healthy creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally
giving in and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty,
either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be had by
heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are fifty others
still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s wholesome air and are blessed
in return with a far greater intensity of scent and colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order and
planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer with more
hope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years would pass
quickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian Yellows have gone
into their new quarters, and their place is occupied by the tea-rose Safrano;
all the rose beds are carpeted with pansies sown in July and transplanted in
October, each bed having a separate colour. The purple ones are the most
charming and go well with every rose, but I have white ones with Laurette
Messimy, and yellow ones with Safrano, and a new red sort in the big centre bed
of red roses. Round the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedge
two rows of annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, and
just beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea and
pillar roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with larkspurs, annual
and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks, Madonna lilies, wallflowers,
hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies, lavender, starworts, cornflowers,
Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs packed in wherever bulbs could go. These are
the borders that were so hardly used by the other gardener. The spring boxes
for the verandah steps have been filled with pink and white and yellow tulips.
I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of
alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a
wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement
weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate scent is refinement
itself; and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly way
they hold up their little faces to the sun? I have heard them called bold and
flaunting, but to me they seem modest grace itself, only always on the alert to
enjoy life as much as they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything
else above them in the face. On the grass there are two beds of them carpeted
with forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils and
narcissus. Down the wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins will (I hope)
shine majestic; and one cool corner, backed by a group of firs, is graced by
Madonna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines.

In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that stands
alone in the sun—groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus, hyacinths, and
tulips, among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus Malus spectabilis,
floribunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb, serotina, triloba, and
Pissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every colour, and several kinds of Cratægus
and other May lovelinesses. If the weather behaves itself nicely, and we get
gentle rains in due season, I think this little corner will be beautiful—but
what a big “if” it is! Drought is our great enemy, and the two last summers
each contained five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches dried
up and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times the watering is naturally
quite beyond the strength of two men; but as a garden is a place to be happy
in, and not one where you want to meet a dozen curious eyes at every turn, I
should not like to have more than these two, or rather one and a half—the
assistant having stork-like proclivities and going home in the autumn to his
native Russia, returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want to
keep him over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I sounded
him on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of human
beings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good worker
and plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk.

“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German words to that effect, “why don’t you
stay here altogether, instead of going home and rioting away all you have
earned?”

“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have my wife there in Russia.”

“Your wife!” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed creature
should have found a mate—as though there were not a superfluity of mates in the
world—“I didn’t know you were married?”

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I don’t know what they would do if I
were not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to Russia, and costs
me every time seven marks.”

“Seven marks!”

“Yes, it is a great sum.”

I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks, supposing
I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.

All the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians and Poles,
or a mixture of both. We send a man over who can speak their language, to fetch
as many as he can early in the year, and they arrive with their bundles, men
and women and babies, and as soon as they have got here and had their fares
paid, they disappear in the night if they get the chance, sometimes fifty of
them at a time, to go and work singly or in couples for the peasants, who pay
them a pfenning or two more a day than we do, and let them eat with the
family. From us they get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many
potatoes as they can eat. The women get less, not because they work less, but
because they are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives with
them, and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his heels.
For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters and other
permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are put into. I
suppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that spring after spring
the same thing happens, fifty of them getting away in spite of all our
precautions, and we are left with our mouths open and much out of pocket. This
spring, by some mistake, they arrived without their bundles, which had gone
astray on the road, and, as they travel in their best clothes, they refused
utterly to work until their luggage came. Nearly a week was lost waiting, to
the despair of all in authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints’ days, and there
surely never was a church so full of them as the Russian Church. In the spring,
when every hour is of vital importance, the work is constantly being
interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping in the sun the whole day,
agreeably conscious that they are pleasing themselves and the Church at one and
the same time—a state of perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided
by Faith is of course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confess
that during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is possible
to begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom of the Man of
Wrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days on which no man will
labour, and have listened in silence to his remarks about distant Russian
saints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made me pity
these people when first I came to live among them. They herd together like
animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the armed overseer, the
dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed down by weak vinegar and water,
I am beginning to believe that they would strongly object to soap, I am sure
they would not wear new clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at
dusk singing. They are like little children or animals in their utter inability
to grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s
sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for rest and
not much inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not yet persuaded myself,
however, that the women are happy. They have to work as hard as the men and get
less for it; they have to produce offspring, quite regardless of times and
seasons and the general fitness of things; they have to do this as
expeditiously as possible, so that they may not unduly interrupt the work in
hand; nobody helps them, notices them, or cares about them, least of all the
husband. It is quite a usual thing to see them working in the fields in the
morning, and working again in the afternoon, having in the interval produced a
baby. The baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babies
collectively. When I expressed my horror at the poor creatures working
immediately afterwards as though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath
informed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn corsets, nor
had their mothers and grandmothers. We were riding together at the time, and
had just passed a batch of workers, and my husband was speaking to the
overseer, when a woman arrived alone, and taking up a spade, began to dig. She
grinned cheerfully at us as she made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked that
she had just been back to the house and had a baby.

“Poor, poor woman!” I cried, as we rode on, feeling for some occult
reason very angry with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched husband doesn’t care
a rap, and will probably beat her to-night if his supper isn’t right. What
nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the sexes when the women have the
babies!”

“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly. “You
have got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing this agreeable
duty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any serious competition
with man. How can a person who is constantly losing a year of the best part of
her life compete with a young man who never loses any time at all? He has the
brute force, and his last word on any subject could always be his fist.”

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon in the beginning of November, and
the leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horses’ feet as we rode towards
the Hirschwald.

“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man of Wrath, “amongst these
Russians, and I believe amongst the lower classes everywhere, and certainly
commendable on the score of simplicity, to silence a woman’s objections and
aspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said that this apparently
brutal action has anything but the maddening effect tenderly nurtured persons
might suppose, and that the patient is soothed and satisfied with a rapidity
and completeness unattainable by other and more polite methods. Do you
suppose,” he went on, flicking a twig off a tree with his whip as we passed,
“that the intellectual husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic
yearnings of his intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may
and does go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very least
convince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat has got through
the whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about it. There is no
doubt that these poor women fulfil their vocation far more thoroughly than the
women in our class, and, as the truest: happiness consists in finding one’s
vocation quickly and continuing in it all one’s days, I consider they are to be
envied rather than not, since they are early taught, by the impossibility of
argument with marital muscle, the impotence of female endeavour and the
blessings of content.”

“Pray go on,” I said politely.

“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and
far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the
man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a
man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at
the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she has
done anything or not, for the sake of her general health and happiness.”

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat over these
castigations.

“Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby moon so
innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver
birch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you don’t understand. What
is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the
dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you
are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased
to be a man.”

“And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me and
putting his arm round my waist, “has she ceased to be a woman?”

“I should think so indeed,—she is a goddess, and can never be worshipped and
adored enough.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “that the conversation is growing personal.”

I started off at a canter across the short, springy turf. The Hirschwald is an
enchanted place on such an evening, when the mists lie low on the turf, and
overhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver birches stand out clear
against the soft sky, while the little moon looks down kindly on the damp
November world. Where the trees thicken into a wood, the fragrance of the wet
earth and rotting leaves kicked up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul with
delight. I particularly love that smell,—it brings before me the entire
benevolence of Nature, for ever working death and decay, so piteous in
themselves, into the means of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours
as she works.

December 7th.—I have been to England. I went for at least a month
and stayed a week in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I fled
before the fogs into the country to see friends with gardens, but it was
raining, and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had in the Fatherland) and
the infinite possibilities, there was nothing to interest the intelligent and
garden-loving foreigner, for the good reason that you cannot be interested in
gardens under an umbrella. So I went back to the fogs, and after groping about
for a few days more began to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific gale
sprang up after I had started, and the journey both by sea and land was full of
horrors, the trains in Germany being heated to such an extent that it is next
to impossible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up under the
cushions, the cushions themselves being very hot, and the wretched traveller
still hotter.

But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest, brightest
snow-atmosphere, the air so still that the whole world seemed to be listening,
the sky cloudless, the crisp snow sparkling underfoot and on the trees, and a
happy row of three beaming babies awaiting me, I was consoled for all my
torments, only remembering them enough to wonder why I had gone away at all.

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and an elegant bouquet of pine needles
and grass in the other, and what with the due presentation of the bouquets and
the struggles of the kittens, the hugging and kissing was much interfered with.
Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all somehow squeezed into the sleigh, and
off we went with jingling bells and shrieks of delight. “Directly you comes
home the fun begins,” said the May baby, sitting very close to me. “How the
snow purrs!” cried the April baby, as the horses scrunched it up with their
feet. The June baby sat loudly singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” and
swinging her kitten round by its tail to emphasise the rhythm.

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked the very abode of peace, and I ran
through all the rooms, eager to take possession of them again, and feeling as
though I had been away for ever. When I got to the library I came to a
standstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I have spent in it rummaging
amongst the books, making plans for my garden, building castles in the air,
writing, dreaming, doing nothing! There was a big peat fire blazing half up the
chimney, and the old housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, and on the
writing-table was a great bunch of violets scenting the room. “Oh, how
good it is to be home again!” I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies
clung about my knees, looking up at me with eyes full of love. Outside the
dazzling snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and happy faces—I thought of
those yellow fogs and shivered. The library is not used by the Man of Wrath; it
is neutral ground where we meet in the evenings for an hour before he
disappears into his own rooms—a series of very smoky dens in the southeast
corner of the house. It looks, I am afraid, rather too gay for an ideal
library; and its colouring, white and yellow, is so cheerful as to be almost
frivolous. There are white bookcases all round the walls, and there is a great
fireplace, and four windows, facing full south, opening on to my most cherished
bit of garden, the bit round the sun-dial; so that with so much colour and such
a big fire and such floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober air, in
spite of the venerable volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should never be
surprised if they skipped down from their places, and, picking up their leaves,
began to dance.

With this room to live in, I can look forward with perfect equanimity to being
snowed up for any time Providence thinks proper; and to go into the garden in
its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of purity. The first breath on
opening the door is so ineffably pure that it makes me gasp, and I feel a black
and sinful object in the midst of all the spotlessness. Yesterday I sat out of
doors near the sun-dial the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many
degrees below freezing that it will be weeks finding its way up again; but
there was no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in furs. I
even had tea brought out there, to the astonishment of the menials, and sat
till long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I had to drink the
tea very quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to begin to freeze. After
the sun had gone down the rooks came home to their nests in the garden with a
great fuss and fluttering, and many hesitations and squabbles before they
settled on their respective trees. They flew over my head in hundreds with a
mighty swish of wings, and when they had arranged themselves comfortably, an
intense hush fell upon the garden, and the house began to look like a Christmas
card, with its white roof against the clear, pale green of the western sky, and
lamplight shining in the windows.

I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by our parson, in the intervals
between looking round me and being happy. He came one day with the book and
begged me to read it, having discovered that my interest in Luther was not as
living as it ought to be; so I took it out with me into the garden, because the
dullest book takes on a certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as
bread and butter, devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under
a tree. I read Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances at
the garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in my heart. His struggles with
devils amazed me; and I wondered whether such a day as that, full of grace and
the forgiveness of sins, never struck him as something to make him relent even
towards devils. He apparently never allowed himself just to be happy. He was a
wonderful man, but I am glad I was not his wife.

Our parson is an interesting person, and untiring in his efforts to improve
himself. Both he and his wife study whenever they have a spare moment, and
there is a tradition that she stirs her puddings with one hand and holds a
Latin grammar in the other, the grammar, of course, getting the greater share
of her attention. To most German Hausfraus the dinners and the puddings
are of paramount importance, and they pride themselves on keeping those parts
of their houses that are seen in a state of perpetual and spotless perfection,
and this is exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly inquire, are there
not other things even more important? And is not plain living and high thinking
better than the other way about? And all too careful making of dinners and
dusting of furniture takes a terrible amount of precious time, and—and with
shame I confess that my sympathies are all with the pudding and the grammar. It
cannot be right to be the slave of one’s household gods, and I protest that if
my furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doing
something else, and there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast it
all into the nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great
contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar who was
weak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the housework and cooking
themselves, and are thus not only cooks and housemaids, but if they have
children—and they always do have children—they are head and under nurse as
well; and besides these trifling duties have a good deal to do with their fruit
and vegetable garden, and everything to do with their poultry. This being so,
is it not pathetic to find a young woman bravely struggling to learn languages
and keep up with her husband? If I were that husband, those puddings would
taste sweetest to me that were served with Latin sauce. They are both severely
pious, and are for ever engaged in desperate efforts to practise what they
preach; than which, as we all know, nothing is more difficult. He works in his
parish with the most noble self-devotion, and never loses courage, although his
efforts have been several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the
street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden wall.
The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a sensitive,
intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before swine. For years he has
gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most living faith and hope and charity,
and I sometimes wonder whether they are any better now in his parish than they
were under his predecessor, a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning
to Saturday night, never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty
congregation waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial
nap. It is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parish
to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged, and goes
on sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when all his tastes
are literary, and all his inclinations towards the life of the student. His
convictions drag him out of his little home at all hours to minister to the
sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no rest, and never let him feel he
has done enough; and when he comes home weary, after a day’s wrestling with his
parishioners’ souls, he is confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up
on his own front door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be
hid? Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over, and
what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the most
astounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy cottage, and a good
bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His predecessor used to hang out his
washing on the tombstones to dry, but then he was a person entirely lost to all
sense of decency, and had finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon of
a most vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath, who
sat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself thoroughly. The
Man of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never been heard before. It
is spoken of in the village to this day with bated breath and awful joy.

December 22nd.—Up to now we have had a beautiful winter. Clear
skies, frost, little wind, and, except for a sharp touch now and then, very few
really cold days. My windows are gay with hyacinths and lilies of the valley;
and though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell of hyacinths in the spring
when it seems wanting in youth and chastity next to that of other flowers, I am
glad enough now to bury my nose in their heavy sweetness. In December one
cannot afford to be fastidious; besides, one is actually less fastidious about
everything in the winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into
robustness, and the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectly
welcome then.

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up in a
room alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower catalogues
and make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the spring. It is a
fascinating occupation, and acquires an additional charm when you know you
ought to be doing something else, that Christmas is at the door, that children
and servants and farm hands depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you
don’t see to the decoration of the trees and house, and the buying of the
presents, nobody else will. The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues and
with Duty snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t like Duty—everything
in the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s duty. Why cannot it be my
duty to make lists and plans for the dear garden? “And so it is,” I
insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he protested against what he called wasting
my time upstairs. “No,” he replied sagely; “your garden is not your duty,
because it is your Pleasure.”

What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my disposal!
Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a sage, and the
combination of both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed, in its practical
utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a sofa my neighbour has bought
as a Christmas surprise for her husband, and which she showed me the last time
I called there—a beautiful invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a
sofa, and a chest of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on top
of which you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night and
you happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, you just pop the
bedclothes inside, and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa and
looking for all the world as though you had been expecting visitors for hours.

“Pray, does he wear pyjamas?” I inquired.

But she had never heard of pyjamas.

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I want to have a border all
yellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white, and the
amount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will only be
appreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks planning it, and it is
not nearly finished. I want it to be a succession of glories from May till the
frosts, and the chief feature is to be the number of “ardent marigolds”—flowers
that I very tenderly love—and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of every
sort and shade, and are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show their
lovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to be
eschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca, yellow
violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow lupins—everything that is
yellow or that has a yellow variety. The place I have chosen for it is a long,
wide border in the sun, at the foot of a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and
pines, and facing southeast. You go through a little pine wood, and, turning a
corner, are to come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning glory. I want it
to be blinding in its brightness after the dark, cool path through the wood.

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when I reflect upon the probable
difference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and the
gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some tulips, and
they have all shrivelled up and died, and he says he cannot imagine why.
Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going to marry her after
Christmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans with the enthusiasm they
deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily chopping wood from morning till
night to keep the beloved one’s kitchen fire well supplied. I cannot understand
any one preferring cooks to marigolds; those future marigolds, shadowy as they
are, and whose seeds are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone through
my winter days like golden lamps.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I should
do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should have the
delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands and need not waste
time explaining what I want done to somebody else. It is dull work giving
orders and trying to describe the bright visions of one’s brain to a person who
has no visions and no brain, and who thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias
edged with blue.

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants to put down only those humble
ones that are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my soil is by no
means all that it might be, and to most plants the climate is rather trying. I
feel really grateful to any flower that is sturdy and willing enough to
flourish here. Pansies seem to like the place and so do sweet-peas; pinks
don’t, and after much coaxing gave hardly any flowers last summer. Nearly all
the roses were a success, in spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam,
which was covered with buds ready to open, when they suddenly turned brown and
died, and three standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and simply sulked. I
had been very excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues being
specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I got. “Never be
excited, my dears, about anything,” shall be the advice I will give the
three babies when the time comes to take them out to parties, “or, if you are,
don’t show it. If by nature you are volcanoes, at least be only smouldering
ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t look interested, don’t, above all things, look
eager. Calm indifference should be written on every feature of your faces.
Never show that you like any one person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid,
and reserved. If you don’t do as your mother tells you and are just gushing,
frisky, young idiots, snubs will be your portion. If you do as she tells you,
you’ll marry princes and live happily ever after.”

Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this part of the world the more you are
pleased to see a person the less is he pleased to see you; whereas, if you are
disagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance expanding into
wider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour. But I was not prepared
for that sort of thing in a rose, and was disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had the
best place in the garden—warm, sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared
with the tenderest care; he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay,
and manure; he was watered assiduously all through the drought when more
willing flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black and
shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and at the
end of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf than when he
was first put in in April. It would have been better if he had died straight
away, for then I should have known what to do; as it is, there he is still
occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully for the winter, excluding kinder
roses, and probably intending to repeat the same conduct next year. Well,
trials are the portion of mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any
case it is better to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants
you know that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the
other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of injured
innocence, and known them to be grievous?

I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to provoke such
an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy little Christmas alone
with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate decreed otherwise. Quite regularly,
if I look forward to anything, Fate steps in and decrees otherwise; I don’t
know why it should, but it does. I had not even invited these good ladies—like
greatness on the modest, they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweet
singer of the summer, whom I love as she deserves, but of whom I certainly
thought I had seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked if I
would have her over Christmas, as her husband was out of sorts, and she didn’t
like him in that state. Neither do I like sick husbands, so, full of sympathy,
I begged her to come, and here she is. And the other is Minora.

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for I was not even aware of her
existence a fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning to
breakfast—it was the very day after my return from England—I found a letter
from an English friend, who up till then had been perfectly innocuous, asking
me to befriend Minora. I read the letter aloud for the benefit of the Man of
Wrath, who was eating Spickgans, a delicacy much sought after in these
parts. “Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my friend, “take some notice of the poor
thing. She is studying art in Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go for
Christmas. She is very ambitious and hardworking—”

“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she is not pretty. Only ugly girls work
hard.”

“—and she is really very clever—”

“I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” again interrupted the Man of
Wrath.

“—and unless some kind creature like yourself takes pity on her she will be
very lonely.”

“Then let her be lonely.”

“Her mother is my oldest friend, and would be greatly distressed to think that
her daughter should be alone in a foreign town at such a season.”

“I do not mind the distress of the mother.”

“Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “I shall have to ask her to come!”

“If you should be inclined,” the letter went on, “to play the good
Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, I am positive you would find Minora a bright,
intelligent companion—”

“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath.

The April baby, who has had a nursery governess of an altogether alarmingly
zealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks, looked up from her
bread and milk.

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.

The governess coughed.

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.

I looked at her severely.

“If you are not careful, April,” I said, “you’ll be a genius when you grow up
and disgrace your parents.”

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like Germans. I am afraid she despises
us because she thinks we are foreigners—an attitude of mind quite British and
wholly to her credit; but we, on the other hand, regard her as a
foreigner, which, of course, makes things complicated.

“Shall I really have to have this strange girl?” I asked, addressing nobody in
particular and not expecting a reply.

“You need not have her,” said the Man of Wrath composedly, “but you will. You
will write to-day and cordially invite her, and when she has been here
twenty-four hours you will quarrel with her. I know you, my dear.”

“Quarrel! I? With a little art-student?”

Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is perpetually scenting a scene, and is
always ready to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and good taste to
bear on us, and seems to know we are disputing in an unseemly manner when we
would never dream it ourselves but for the warning of her downcast eyes. I
would take my courage in both hands and ask her to go, for besides this
superfluity of discreet behaviour she is, although only nursery, much too
zealous, and inclined to be always teaching and never playing; but,
unfortunately, the April baby adores her and is sure there never was any one so
beautiful before. She comes every day with fresh accounts of the splendours of
her wardrobe, and feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats; and Miss
Jones looks offended and purses up her lips. In common with most governesses,
she has a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared one
day at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation, having achieved it
after much struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil and unbounded love. Miss
Jones put her in the corner for impertinence. I wonder why governesses are so
unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it is because they are not married. Without
venturing to differ entirely from the opinion of experience, I would add that
the strain of continually having to set an example must surely be very great.
It is much easier, and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example,
and governesses are but women, and women are sometimes foolish, and when you
want to be foolish it must be annoying to have to be wise.

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; or rather, when the carriage drove
up, Irais got out of it alone, and informed me that there was a strange girl on
a bicycle a little way behind. I sent back the carriage to pick her up, for it
was dusk and the roads are terrible.

“But why do you have strange girls here at all?” asked Irais rather peevishly,
taking off her hat in the library before the fire, and otherwise making herself
very much at home; “I don’t like them. I’m not sure that they’re not worse than
husbands who are out of order. Who is she? She would bicycle from the station,
and is, I am sure, the first woman who has done it. The little boys threw
stones at her.”

“Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance of the little boys. Never mind her.
Let us have tea in peace before she comes.”

“But we should be much happier without her,” she grumbled. “Weren’t we happy
enough in the summer, Elizabeth—just you and I?”

“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, putting my arms round her. The
flame of my affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day of her arrival;
besides, this time I have prudently provided against her sinning with the
salt-cellars by ordering them to be handed round like vegetable dishes. We had
finished tea and she had gone up to her room to dress before Minora and her
bicycle were got here. I hurried out to meet her, feeling sorry for her,
plunged into a circle of strangers at such a very personal season as Christmas.
But she was not very shy; indeed, she was less shy than I was, and lingered in
the hall, giving the servants directions to wipe the snow off the tyres of her
machine before she lent an attentive ear to my welcoming remarks.

“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the station,” she said at last, when
her mind was at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how far it was, and what
the roads were like, and he only smiled. Is he German? But of course he is—how
odd that he didn’t understand. You speak English very well,—very well indeed,
do you know.” By this time we were in the library, and she stood on the
hearth-rug warming her back while I poured her out some tea.

“What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking round, “and the hall is so curious
too. Very old, isn’t it? There’s a lot of copy here.”

The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall on her arrival and had come in with
us, began to look about on the carpet. “Copy?” he inquired, “Where’s copy?”

“Oh—material, you know, for a book. I’m just jotting down what strikes me in
your country, and when I have time shall throw it into book form.” She spoke
very loud, as English people always do to foreigners.

“My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when I had got into her room and shut
the door and Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think—she writes books!”

“What—the bicycling girl?”

“Yes—Minora—imagine it!”

We stood and looked at each other with awestruck faces.

“How dreadful!” murmured Irais. “I never met a young girl who did that before.”

“She says this place is full of copy.”

“Full of what?”

“That’s what you make books with.”

“Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a bore
among good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl who writes
books—why, it isn’t respectable! And you can’t snub that sort of people;
they’re unsnubbable.”

“Oh, but we’ll try!” I cried, with such heartiness that we both laughed.

The hall and the library struck Minora most; indeed, she lingered so long after
dinner in the hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put on his fur coat by
way of a gentle hint. His hints are always gentle.

She wanted to hear the whole story about the chapel and the nuns and Gustavus
Adolphus, and pulling out a fat note-book began to take down what I said. I at
once relapsed into silence.

“Well?” she said.

“That’s all.”

“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.”

“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come into the library?”

In the library she again took up her stand before the fire and warmed herself,
and we sat in a row and were cold. She has a wonderfully good profile, which is
irritating. The wind, however, is tempered to the shorn lamb by her eyes being
set too closely together.

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her chair, contemplated her
critically beneath her long eyelashes. “You are writing a book?” she asked
presently.

“Well—yes, I suppose I may say that I am. Just my impressions, you know, of
your country. Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing—I jot it down, and
when I have time shall work it up into something, I daresay.”

“Are you not studying painting?”

“Yes, but I can’t study that for ever. We have an English proverb: ‘Life is
short and Art is long’—too long, I sometimes think—and writing is a great
relaxation when I am tired.”

“What shall you call it?”

“Oh, I thought of calling it Journeyings in Germany. It sounds well, and
would be correct. Or Jottings from German Journeyings,—I haven’t quite
decided yet which.”

“By the author of Prowls in Pomerania, you might add,” suggested Irais.

“And Drivel from Dresden,” said I.

“And Bosh from Berlin,” added Irais.

Minora stared. “I don’t think those two last ones would do,” she said, “because
it is not to be a facetious book. But your first one is rather a good title,”
she added, looking at Irais and drawing out her note-book. “I think I’ll just
jot that down.”

“If you jot down all we say and then publish it, will it still be your book?”
asked Irais.

But Minora was so busy scribbling that she did not hear.

“And have you no suggestions to make, Sage?” asked Irais, turning to the
Man of Wrath, who was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence.

“Oh, do you call him Sage?” cried Minora; “and always in English?”

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew what we did call him, and were afraid
Minora would in time ferret it out and enter it in her note-book. The Man of
Wrath looked none too well pleased to be alluded to under his very nose by our
new guest as “him.”

“Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely.

“Though sages are not always husbands,” said Irais with equal gravity. “Sages
and husbands—sage and husbands—” she went on musingly, “what does that remind
you of, Miss Minora?”

“Oh, I know,—how stupid of me!” cried Minora eagerly, her pencil in mid-air and
her brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “sage and,—why,—yes,—no,—yes,
of course—oh,” disappointedly, “but that’s vulgar—I can’t put it in.”

“What is vulgar?” I asked.

“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said Irais languidly; “but it isn’t, it
is very good.” She got up and walked to the piano, and, sitting down, began,
after a little wandering over the keys, to sing.

“Do you play?” I asked Minora.

“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of practice.”

I said no more. I know what that sort of playing is.

When we were lighting our bedroom candles Minora began suddenly to speak in an
unknown tongue. We stared. “What is the matter with her?” murmured Irais.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, “you might prefer to talk German,
and as it is all the same to me what I talk—”

“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like airing our English—don’t we,
Elizabeth?”

“I don’t want my German to get rusty though,” said Minora; “I shouldn’t like to
forget it.”

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said Irais, twisting round her neck as
she preceded us upstairs, “‘’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom to forget’?”

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” I said hastily.

“What room is she in?” asked Irais.

“No. 12.”

“Oh!—do you believe in ghosts?”

Minora turned pale.

“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts here. Good-night. If you want
anything, mind you ring.”

“And if you see anything curious in that room,” called Irais from her bedroom
door, “mind you jot it down.”

December 27th—It is the fashion, I believe, to regard Christmas
as a bore of rather a gross description, and as a time when you are invited to
over-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry without just cause. As a matter of
fact, it is one of the prettiest and most poetic institutions possible, if
observed in the proper manner, and after having been more or less unpleasant to
everybody for a whole year, it is a blessing to be forced on that one day to be
amiable, and it is certainly delightful to be able to give presents without
being haunted by the conviction that you are spoiling the recipient, and will
suffer for it afterward. Servants are only big children, and are made just as
happy as children by little presents and nice things to eat, and, for days
beforehand, every time the three babies go into the garden they expect to meet
the Christ Child with His arms full of gifts. They firmly believe that it is
thus their presents are brought, and it is such a charming idea that Christmas
would be worth celebrating for its sake alone.

As great secrecy is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me, and it
is not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and on each of the
farms, and all the children, big and little, expecting their share of
happiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days before and after, as
it is there that we have the trees and presents. All down one side are the
trees, and the other three sides are lined with tables, a separate one for each
person in the house. When the trees are lighted, and stand in their radiance
shining down on the happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, and the
number of times I have had to run up and down stairs, and the various aches in
head and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. First the June baby is
ushered in, then the others and ourselves according to age, then the servants,
then come the head inspector and his family, the other inspectors from the
different farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and secretaries, and then all
the children, troops and troops of them—the big ones leading the little ones by
the hand and carrying the babies in their arms, and the mothers peeping round
the door. As many as can get in stand in front of the trees, and sing two or
three carols; then they are given their presents, and go off triumphantly,
making room for the next batch. My three babies sang lustily too, whether they
happened to know what was being sung or not. They had on white dresses in
honour of the occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed in a low-necked and
short-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever the state
of the thermometer. Her arms are like miniature prize-fighter’s arms—I never
saw such things; they are the pride and joy of her little nurse, who had tied
them up with blue ribbons, and kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not be
able to take her to balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms like
that.

When they came to say good-night, they were all very pale and subdued. The
April baby had an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which she said she
was taking to bed, not because she liked him, but because she was so sorry for
him, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me absently, and went away, only the
April baby glancing at the trees as she passed and making them a curtesy.

“Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll bow to
them, which he did, in a very languid and blasé fashion. “You’ll never
see such trees again,” she told him, giving him a vindictive shake, “for you’ll
be brokened long before next time.”

She went out, but came back as though she had forgotten something.

“Thank the Christkind so much, Mummy, won’t you, for all the
lovely things He brought us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t you?”

I cannot see that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we were
perfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two days it
brought us a little nearer together, and made us kind. Happiness is so
wholesome; it invigorates and warms me into piety far more effectually than any
amount of trials and griefs, and an unexpected pleasure is the surest means of
bringing me to my knees. In spite of the protestations of some peculiarly
constructed persons that they are the better for trials, I don’t believe it.
Such things must sour us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and make us
kinder, and more gentle. And will anybody affirm that it behoves us to be more
thankful for trials than for blessings? We were meant to be happy, and to
accept all the happiness offered with thankfulness—indeed, we are none of us
ever thankful enough, and yet we each get so much, so very much, more than we
deserve. I know a woman—she stayed with me last summer—who rejoices grimly when
those she loves suffer. She believes that it is our lot, and that it braces us
and does us good, and she would shield no one from even unnecessary pain; she
weeps with the sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her
continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the beauty and
the happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire to possess one; her
convictions have the sad gray colouring of the dingy streets and houses she
lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity in masses. Submission to what people
call their “lot” is simply ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched,
get rid of it and take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to the
shrieks of your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let your
own microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; don’t be afraid
of public opinion in the shape of the neighbour in the next house, when all the
world is before you new and shining, and everything is possible, if you will
only be energetic and independent and seize opportunity by the scruff of the
neck.

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would ever imagine that you dream away
your days in a garden with a book, and that you never in your life seized
anything by the scruff of its neck. And what is scruff? I hope I have not got
any on me.” And she craned her neck before the glass.

She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees, but very soon Irais
wandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took up a book; so I called
in Miss Jones and the babies—it was Miss Jones’s last public appearance, as I
shall relate—and after working for the best part of two days they were
finished, and looked like lovely ladies in widespreading, sparkling petticoats,
holding up their skirts with glittering fingers. Minora wrote a long
description of them for a chapter of her book which is headed Noel,—I
saw that much, because she left it open on the table while she went to talk to
Miss Jones. They were fast friends from the very first, and though it is said
to be natural to take to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether to
sympathise with such a reason for sudden affection.

“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to Irais yesterday, when there was no
getting Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged in conversation with
Miss Jones.

“Oh, my dear, how can I tell? Lovers, I suppose, or else they think they are
clever, and then they talk rubbish.”

“Well, of course, Minora thinks she is clever.”

“I suppose she does. What does it matter what she thinks? Why does your
governess look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon I always imagine she must
have just heard that somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that every day. What
is the matter with her?”

“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she looks,” I said doubtfully; I
was for ever trying to account for Miss Jones’s expression.

“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “It would be awful for her if she
felt exactly the same as she looks.”

At that moment the door leading into the schoolroom opened softly, and the
April baby, tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet, leaving the door
open; and this is what we heard Miss Jones saying—

“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the conscientious place upon
themselves to appear so before their children and governess must be terrible.
Nor are clergymen more pious than other men, yet they have continually to pose
before their flock as such. As for governesses, Miss Minora, I know what I am
saying when I affirm that there is nothing more intolerable than to have to be
polite, and even humble, to persons whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly
apparent in every word they utter, and to be forced by the presence of children
and employers to a dignity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s feelings.
The grave father of a family, who was probably one of the least respectable of
bachelors, is an interesting study at his own table, where he is constrained to
assume airs of infallibility merely because his children are looking at him.
The fact of his being a parent does not endow him with any supreme and sudden
virtue; and I can assure you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not the least
critical and amused are those of the humble person who fills the post of
governess.”

“Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard Minora say in accents of rapture, while
we sat transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “Do you mind if I put that
down in my book? You say it all so beautifully.”

“Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued Miss Jones, “of private
indemnification for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could wade
through days of correct behaviour? There would be no reaction, no room for
better impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, priests, and governesses
would be in the situation of a stout lady who never has a quiet moment in which
she can take off her corsets.”

“My dear, what a firebrand!” whispered Irais. I got up and went in. They were
sitting on the sofa, Minora with clasped hands, gazing admiringly into Miss
Jones’s face, which wore a very different expression from the one of sour and
unwilling propriety I have been used to seeing.

“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to Minora. “And I should like to have
the children a little while.”

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with the door open until she had gone
in and the two babies had followed. They had been playing at stuffing each
other’s ears with pieces of newspaper while Miss Jones provided Minora with
noble thoughts for her work, and had to be tortured afterward with tweezers. I
said nothing to Minora, but kept her with us till dinner-time, and this morning
we went for a long sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch there was no Miss
Jones.

“Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora.

“She is gone,” I said.

“Gone?”

“Did you never hear of such things as sick mothers?” asked Irais blandly; and
we talked resolutely of something else.

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had found a kindred spirit, and it has
been ruthlessly torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often are. It is
enough to make her mope, and it is not her fault, poor thing, that she should
have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to that of Irais and myself.

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on one side. “You look so pale,” she
said; “are you not well?”

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the patient air of one who likes to be
thought a sufferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied gently.

“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais with great concern, “because
there is only a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he means well, I believe
he is rather rough.” Minora was plainly startled. “But what do you do if you
are ill?” she asked.

“Oh, we are never ill,” said I; “the very knowledge that there would be no one
to cure us seems to keep us healthy.”

“And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, “Elizabeth always calls in the
cow-doctor.”

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that she has got into a part of the
world peopled solely by barbarians, and that the only civilised creature
besides herself has departed and left her at our mercy. Whatever her
reflections may be her symptoms are visibly abating.

January 1st.—The service on New Year’s Eve is the only one in the
whole year that in the least impresses me in our little church, and then the
very bareness and ugliness of the place and the ceremonial produce an effect
that a snug service in a well-lit church never would. Last night we took Irais
and Minora, and drove the three lonely miles in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark,
and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a
funeral procession.

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s sins,” said Irais, as we
started; and there certainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air. Up in
our gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by the light of the
spluttering tallow candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the flames wildly
blown about by the draughts. The wind banged against the windows in great
gusts, screaming louder than the organ, and threatening to blow out the
agitated lights together. The parson in his gloomy pulpit, surrounded by a
framework of dusty carved angels, took on an awful appearance of menacing
Authority as he raised his voice to make himself heard above the clatter.
Sitting there in the dark, I felt very small, and solitary, and defenceless,
alone in a great, big, black world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some of
the candles guttered and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of death
and judgment; I thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardly
believe it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all my
faith and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I should
probably be well punished, though for what I had no precise idea. If it had not
been so dark, and if the wind had not howled so despairingly, I should have
paid little attention to the threats issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, I
fell to making good resolutions. This is always a bad sign,—only those who
break them make them; and if you simply do as a matter of course that which is
right as it comes, any preparatory resolving to do so becomes completely
superfluous. I have for some years past left off making them on New Year’s Eve,
and only the gale happening as it did reduced me to doing so last night; for I
have long since discovered that, though the year and the resolutions may be
new, I myself am not, and it is worse than useless putting new wine into old
bottles.

“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indignantly, when I held forth to her
to the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored to all my
philosophy by the warmth and light, “and I find my resolutions carry me very
nicely into the spring. I revise them at the end of each month, and strike out
the unnecessary ones. By the end of April they have been so severely revised
that there are none left.”

“There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new contents
would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you, and the practice
of your resolutions would lose its bitterness by becoming a habit.”

She shook her head. “Such things never lose their bitterness,” she said, “and
that is why I don’t let them cling to me right into the summer. When May comes,
I give myself up to jollity with all the rest of the world, and am too busy
being happy to bother about anything I may have resolved when the days were
cold and dark.”

“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. She often says what I feel.

“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “whether men ever make resolutions?”

“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries. It is a nice sort
of feeling, when you have nothing else to do, giving way to endless grief and
penitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes in contrition; but it is silly.
Why cry over things that are done? Why do naughty things at all, if you are
going to repent afterward? Nobody is naughty unless they like being naughty;
and nobody ever really repents unless they are afraid they are going to be
found out.”

“By ‘nobody’ of course you mean women,” said Irais.

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Besides, men generally have the courage
of their opinions.”

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais in the amiably polite tone
she assumes whenever she speaks to that young person.

It was getting on towards midnight, and we were sitting round the fire, waiting
for the New Year, and sipping Glühwein, prepared at a small table by the
Man of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and rather nasty, but it is proper to
drink it on this one night, so of course we did.

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We very soon discovered that, and
laugh about it when we are alone together. I can understand her disliking
Irais, but she must be a perverse creature not to like me. Irais has poked fun
at her, and I have been, I hope, very kind; yet we are bracketed together in
her black books. It is also apparent that she looks upon the Man of Wrath as an
interesting example of an ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she is
disposed to take him under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against
us. He never speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far
as Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits sphinx-like
and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some remark of a profane
nature that we may have addressed to him. One night, some days after her
arrival, she developed a skittishness of manner which has since disappeared,
and tried to be playful with him; but you might as well try to be playful with
a graven image. The wife of one of the servants had just produced a boy, the
first after a series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health of
all parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the happy father drink a glass
off at one gulp, his heels well together in military fashion. Minora thought
the incident typical of German manners, and not only made notes about it, but
joined heartily in the health-drinking, and afterward grew skittish.

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance called, I think, the Washington
Post, and which was, she said, much danced in England; and, to induce us to
learn, she played the tune to us on the piano. We remained untouched by its
beauties, each buried in an easy-chair toasting our toes at the fire. Amongst
those toes were those of the Man of Wrath, who sat peaceably reading a book and
smoking. Minora volunteered to show us the steps, and as we still did not move,
danced solitary behind our chairs. Irais did not even turn her head to look,
and I was the only one amiable or polite enough to do so. Do I deserve to be
placed in Minora’s list of disagreeable people side by side with Irais?
Certainly not. Yet I most surely am.

“It wants the music, of course,” observed Minora breathlessly, darting in and
out between the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing at the Man of
Wrath.

No answer from anybody.

“It is such a pretty dance,” she panted again, after a few more
gyrations.

No answer.

“And is all the rage at home.”

No answer.

“Do let me teach you. Won’t you try, Herr Sage?”

She went up to him and dropped him a little curtesy. It is thus she always
addresses him, entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to every one else,
that he resents it.

“Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” she went on gaily, as he did not
move; “I am certain it is only some dry agricultural work that you just nod
over. Dancing is much better for you.” Irais and I looked at one another quite
frightened. I am sure we both turned pale when the unhappy girl actually laid
hold forcibly of his book, and, with a playful little shriek, ran away with it
into the next room, hugging it to her bosom and looking back roguishly over her
shoulder at him as she ran. There was an awful pause. We hardly dared raise our
eyes. Then the Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the ashes off the end of
his cigar, looked at his watch, and went out at the opposite door into his own
rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. She has never, I must say,
been skittish since.

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais, “because this sort of
conversation is likely to do you good.”

“I always listen when people talk sensibly,” replied Minora, stirring her grog.

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eyebrows. “Do you agree with our
hostess’s description of women?” she asked after a pause.

“As nobodies? No, of course I do not.”

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we are literally nobodies in our
country. Did you know that women are forbidden to go to political meetings
here?”

“Really?” Out came the note-book.

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at such meetings of women, children,
and idiots.”

“Children and idiots—I understand that,” said Minora; “but women—and classed
with children and idiots?”

“Classed with children and idiots,” repeated Irais, gravely nodding her head.
“Did you know that the law forbids females of any age to ride on the top of
omnibuses or tramcars?”

“Not really?”

“Do you know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because in going up and down the stairs those inside might perhaps catch a
glimpse of the stocking covering their ankles.”

“But what—”

“Did you know that the morals of the German public are in such a shaky
condition that a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?”

“But I don’t see how a stocking—”

“With stripes round it,” said Irais.

“And darns in it,” I added.

“—could possibly be pernicious?”

“‘The Pernicious Stocking; or, Thoughts on the Ethics of Petticoats,’” said
Irais. “Put that down as the name of your next book on Germany.”

“I never know,” complained Minora, letting her note-book fall, “whether you are
in earnest or not.”

“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly.

“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons in the
background, “that your law classes women with children and idiots?”

“Certainly,” he answered promptly, “and a very proper classification, too.”

We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I at last.

“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied complacently. Then he added, “If I
were commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had previously enjoyed the
privilege, as I have been doing lately, of listening to the conversation of you
three young ladies, I should make precisely the same classification.”

Even Minora was incensed at this.

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished manner that we are idiots,” said
Irais.

“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children,—nice little agreeable children. I
very much like to hear you talk together. It is all so young and fresh what you
think and what you believe, and not of the least consequence to any one.”

“Not of the least consequence?” cried Minora. “What we believe is of very great
consequence indeed to us.”

“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired Irais sternly.

“Not for worlds. I would not on any account disturb or change your pretty
little beliefs. It is your chief charm that you always believe every-thing. How
desperate would our case be if young ladies only believed facts, and never
accepted another person’s assurance, but preferred the evidence of their own
eyes! They would have no illusions, and a woman without illusions is the
dreariest and most difficult thing to manage possible.”

“Thing?” protested Irais.

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes up for it from time to time by
holding forth at unnecessary length. He took up his stand now with his back to
the fire, and a glass of Glühwein in his hand. Minora had hardly heard
his voice before, so quiet had he been since she came, and sat with her pencil
raised, ready to fix for ever the wisdom that should flow from his lips.

“What would become of poetry if women became so sensible that they turned a
deaf ear to the poetic platitudes of love? That love does indulge in platitudes
I suppose you will admit.” He looked at Irais.

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” she acknowledged.

“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the beauty of a common sacrifice, if the
listener’s want of imagination was such as to enable her only to distinguish
one victim in the picture, and that one herself?”

Minora took that down word for word,—much good may it do her.

“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if refused he will die, if his
assurances merely elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take plenty of
outdoor exercise? Women are responsible for such lies, because they believe
them. Their amazing vanity makes them swallow flattery so gross that it is an
insult, and men will always be ready to tell the precise number of lies that a
woman is ready to listen to. Who indulges more recklessly in glowing
exaggerations than the lover who hopes, and has not yet obtained? He will, like
the nightingale, sing with unceasing modulations, display all his talent,
untiringly repeat his sweetest notes, until he has what he wants, when his
song, like the nightingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be heard.”

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to Minora—unnecessary advice, for her
pencil was scribbling as fast as it could.

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, after having had ninety-nine
object-lessons in the difference between promise and performance and the
emptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning of the hundredth will find her
lending the same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of flattery as she
did on the occasion of the first. What can the exhortations of the
strong-minded sister, who has never had these experiences, do for such a woman?
It is useless to tell her she is man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that
she is cheated, down-trodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in every
way—that is not a true statement of the case. She is simply the victim of her
own vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own fascinations,
against the very part of herself that gives all the colour to her life, who
shall expect a woman to take up arms?”

“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais with a shocked face, “and had you
lent a willing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before you reached your
final destiny?”

“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I replied, “for nobody ever wanted
me to listen to blandishments.”

Minora sighed.

“I like to hear you talk together about the position of women,” he went on,
“and wonder when you will realise that they hold exactly the position they are
fitted for. As soon as they are fit to occupy a better, no power on earth will
be able to keep them out of it. Meanwhile, let me warn you that, as things now
are, only strong-minded women wish to see you the equals of men, and the
strong-minded are invariably plain. The pretty ones would rather see men their
slaves than their equals.”

“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I consider myself strong-minded.”

“And never rise till lunch-time?”

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of such conduct, it is very convenient
in more ways than one; I get through my housekeeping undisturbed, and whenever
she is disposed to lecture me, I begin about this habit of hers. Her conscience
must be terribly stricken on the point, for she is by no means as a rule given
to meekness.

“A woman without vanity would be unattackable,” resumed the Man of Wrath. “When
a girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, she is led solely by her
own vanity; for in these days of policemen no young woman can be forced against
her will from the path of virtue, and the cries of the injured are never heard
until the destroyer begins to express his penitence for having destroyed. If
his passion could remain at white-heat and he could continue to feed her ear
with the protestations she loves, no principles of piety or virtue would
disturb the happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches that
piety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest where
temptations are most rare.”

“But what has all this to do with us?” I inquired severely.

“You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely wish to
justify it,” he answered. “Creatures who habitually say yes to
everything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it, and when it
is so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.”

“I shall never say it to you again, my dear man,” I said.

“And not only that fatal weakness,” he continued, “but what is there,
candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but not
wiser,—really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you had as
children. Have you ever heard a group of women talking reasonably together?”

“Yes—we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath.

“It has interested me,” went on the Man of Wrath, “in my idle moments, to
listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little stories they
told of their best friends who were absent, to note the spiteful little digs
they gave their best friends who were present, to watch the utter incredulity
with which they listened to the tale of some other woman’s conquests, the
radiant good faith they displayed in connection with their own, the instant
collapse into boredom, if some topic of so-called general interest, by some
extraordinary chance, were introduced.”

“You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,” remarked Irais.

“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never heard them mentioned among
women.”

“Children and idiots are not interested in such things,” I said.

“And we are much too frightened of being put in prison,” said Irais.

“In prison?” echoed Minora.

“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her “that if you talk about such
things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?”

“But why?”

“But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what was
innocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to the evil
minds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls it dolus
eventualis, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to prison and
are punished as you deserve to be.”

Minora looked mystified.

“That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them,” said the Man
of Wrath; “they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that you do not
consider your female friends’ opinions worth listening to, for you certainly
display an astonishing thirst for information when male politicians are
present. I have seen a pretty young woman, hardly in her twenties, sitting a
whole evening drinking in the doubtful wisdom of an elderly political star,
with every appearance of eager interest. He was a bimetallic star, and was
giving her whole pamphletsful of information.”

“She wanted to make up to him for some reason,” said Irais, “and got him to
explain his hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken in. Now which was
the sillier in that case?”

She threw herself back in her chair and looked up defiantly, beating her foot
impatiently on the carpet.

“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled me,” he
went on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene and happy as
when she came. The explanation of the principles of bimetallism produce, as a
rule, a contrary effect.”

“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star had been
making a fine goose of himself the whole evening.

“Prattle, prattle, simple star,
Bimetallic, wunderbar.
Though you’re given to describe
Woman as a dummes Weib.
You yourself are sillier far,
Prattling, bimetallic star!”

“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath, taking no
notice of this effusion.

“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was plainly
irritated.

“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a high one.
But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one could take her
place?”

“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that I
believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a strange woman
to nurse him when he is sick.”

“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being knocked
about, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in which a woman’s
gentleness and tact are most valuable.”

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met those
qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience, she is a
disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite opportunities for
asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate mankind. I know of no
more humiliating position for a man than to be in bed having his feverish brow
soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange woman, bristling with starch and
spotlessness. He would give half his income for his clothes, and probably the
other half if she would leave him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her
superiority through every pore; he never before realised how absolutely
inferior he is; he is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a
friend comes to see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening
behind the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more
intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he has
read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand, but the day
on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks in private fills him
with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt as a homesick schoolboy at
the end of his first term.”

Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of Wrath stood
smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person so utterly
convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry with you; so we sat
round and said nothing.

“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt the truth
of my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of noble,
self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the rough places on
the road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try for yourself, next time
any one in your house is ill, whether the actual fact in any way corresponds to
the picturesque belief. The angel who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in
such a questionable shape, that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an
extremely self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing
her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to
helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary capacity
for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior being she knows
herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants should, by some mistake,
treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish if the patient gives more trouble
than she had expected, intensely injured and disagreeable if he is made so
courageous by his wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act of
desperation of which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women!
What sane man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object to
having them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every fibre
what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to enable us to
bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being forced besides to
assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness towards the angel in the
house.”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.

“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began to beat
her foot up and down again,—what did it matter what Men of Wrath would have us
do? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing, “husbands enough for every
one, and the rest must do something.”

“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress and manner
as long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all, let all women,
pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of cookery. If you are an
artist in the kitchen you will always be esteemed.”

I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has learned to
cook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and wouldn’t.

“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget the
great truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not blandishments dinner. A
man must be made comfortable before he will make love to you; and though it is
true that if you offered him a choice between Spickgans and kisses, he
would say he would take both, yet he would invariably begin with the
Spickgans, and allow the kisses to wait.”

At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is disgusting,”
I said icily.

“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smiling
amiably.

He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her hands, and
says her husband married her for their sake, which I can quite believe. I am
glad they are on her and not on Minora, for if Minora had had them I should
have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with chilly-looking knuckles, ignored
nails, and too much wrist. I feel very well disposed towards her when my eye
falls on them. She put one forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed
too.

“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the custom here to
kiss women’s hands?”

“But only married women’s,” I added, not desiring her to feel out of it, “never
young girls’.”

She drew it in again. “It is a pretty custom,” she said with a sigh; and
pensively inscribed it in her book.

January 15th.—The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last
year’s horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down to
breakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is expensive, I
find, when it has to be paid for out of one’s own private pin-money. The Man of
Wrath does not in the least want roses, or flowering shrubs, or plantations, or
new paths, and therefore, he asks, why should he pay for them? So he does not
and I do, and I have to make up for it by not indulging all too riotously in
new clothes, which is no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying new
rose-trees to new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time
coming when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I
shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell those that
I already have. The garden is so big that everything has to be bought
wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much longer with only one
man and a stork, because the more I plant the more there will be to water in
the inevitable drought, and the watering is a serious consideration when it
means going backwards and forwards all day long to a pump near the house, with
a little water-cart. People living in England, in almost perpetual mildness and
moisture, don’t really know what a drought is. If they have some weeks of
cloudless weather, it is generally preceded and followed by good rains; but we
have perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then comes a month or six weeks’
drought. The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that, after the heaviest
thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in my thin shoes; and to keep
the garden even moderately damp it should pour with rain regularly every day
for three hours. My only means of getting water is to go to the pump near the
house, or to the little stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the little
stream dries up too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of times
difficult to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possess
one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted with silver birches
in imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between the birches with
flaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy—the soil for pines and
acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what love will do—there are more
roses in my garden than any other flower! Next spring the bare places are to be
filled with trees that I have ordered: pines behind the delicate acacias, and
startling mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches,
juniper-trees—was it not Elijah who sat down to rest under a juniper-tree? I
have often wondered how he managed to get under it. It is a compact little
tree, not more than two to three yards high here, and all closely squeezed up
together. Perhaps they grew more aggressively where he was. By the time the
babies have grown old and disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and then
possibly they won’t like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s
indifference to gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return to
the state in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to
live in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of course its
fate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don’t flourish in the desert,
and that the three will have to wait a long time before enough are found to go
round. Mothers tell me that it is a dreadful business finding one husband; how
much more painful then to have to look for three at once!—the babies are so
nearly the same age that they only just escaped being twins. But I won’t look.
I can imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I
don’t think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I shall do my
best in the years at my disposal to train them so to love the garden, and
out-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a spark of their mother in
them, they will want and ask for nothing better. My hope of success is however
exceedingly small, and there is probably a fearful period in store for me when
I shall be taken every day during the winter to the distant towns to balls—a
poor old mother shivering in broad daylight in her party gown, and being made
to start after an early lunch and not getting home till breakfast-time next
morning. Indeed, they have already developed an alarming desire to go to
“partings” as they call them, the April baby announcing her intention of
beginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are you twelve, Mummy?” she
asked.

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find another.
It is grievous changing so often—in two years I shall have had three—because at
each change a great part of my plants and plans necessarily suffers. Seeds get
lost, seedlings are not pricked out in time, places already sown are planted
with something else, and there is confusion out of doors and despair in my
heart. But he was to have married the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and
immediately left, and he is going after her as soon as he can, and meanwhile is
wasting visibly away. What she saw was doors that are locked opening with a
great clatter all by themselves on the hinge-side, and then somebody
invisible cursed at her. These phenomena now go by the name of “the ghost.” She
asked to be allowed to leave at once, as she had never been in a place where
there was a ghost before. I suggested that she should try and get used to it;
but she thought it would be wasting time, and she looked so ill that I let her
go, and the garden has to suffer. I don’t know why it should be given to cooks
to see such interesting things and withheld from me, but I have had two others
since she left, and they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very silent as
bed-time approaches, and relents towards Irais and myself; and, after having
shown us all day how little she approves us, when the bedroom candles are
brought she quite begins to cling. She has once or twice anxiously inquired
whether Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone.

“If you are at all nervous, I will come and keep you company,” she said; “I
don’t mind at all, I assure you.”

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple wiles, and has told me she would
rather sleep with fifty ghosts than with one Minora.

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called away to her parent’s bedside I have
seen a good deal of the babies; and it is so nice without a governess that I
would put off engaging another for a year or two, if it were not that I should
in so doing come within the reach of the arm of the law, which is what every
German spends his life in trying to avoid. The April baby will be six next
month, and, after her sixth birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment to
receive a visit from a school inspector, who will inquire curiously into the
state of her education, and, if it is not up to the required standard, all
sorts of fearful things might happen to the guilty parents, probably beginning
with fines, and going on crescendo to dungeons if, owing to gaps between
governesses and difficulties in finding the right one, we persisted in our evil
courses. Shades of the prison-house begin to close here upon the growing boy,
and prisons compass the Teuton about on every side all through life to such an
extent that he has to walk very delicately indeed if he would stay outside them
and pay for their maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, neglect
to teach their offspring to read, and write, and say their prayers, and are apt
to resent the intrusion of an examining inspector into their homes; but it does
not much matter after all, and I daresay it is very good for us to be worried;
indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance declares that people who are not
regularly and properly worried are never any good for anything. In the eye of
the law we are all sinners, and every man is held to be guilty until he has
proved that he is innocent.

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, after vainly trying to get out of
their way for several days, she thought it better to resign herself, and make
the best of it by regarding them as copy, and using them to fill a chapter in
her book. So she took to dogging their footsteps wherever they went, attended
their uprisings and their lyings down, engaged them, if she could, in
intelligent conversation, went with them into the garden to study their ways
when they were sleighing, drawn by a big dog, and generally made their lives a
burden to them. This went on for three days, and then she settled down to write
the result with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, borrowed whenever her notes for
any chapter have reached the state of ripeness necessary for the process she
describes as “throwing into form.” She writes everything with a typewriter,
even her private letters.

“Don’t forget to put in something about a mother’s knee,” said Irais; “you
can’t write effectively about children without that.”

“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied Minora.

“And pink toes,” I added. “There are always toes, and they are never anything
but pink.”

“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turning over her notes.

“But, after all, babies are not a German speciality,” said Irais, “and I don’t
quite see why you should bring them into a book of German travels. Elizabeth’s
babies have each got the fashionable number of arms and legs, and are exactly
the same as English ones.”

“Oh, but they can’t be just the same, you know,” said Minora, looking
worried. “It must make a difference living here in this place, and eating such
odd things, and never having a doctor, and never being ill. Children who have
never had measles and those things can’t be quite the same as other children;
it must all be in their systems and can’t get out for some reason or other. And
a child brought up on chicken and rice-pudding must be different to a child
that eats Spickgans and liver sausages. And they are different; I
can’t tell in what way, but they certainly are; and I think if I steadily
describe them from the materials I have collected the last three days, I may
perhaps hit on the points of difference.”

“Why bother about points of difference?” asked Irais. “I should write some
little thing, bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as knees and
toes, and make it mildly pathetic.”

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me to do,” said Minora plaintively; “I
have so little experience of children.”

“Then why write it at all?” asked that sensible person Elizabeth.

“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no children;
but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing is easier than to
write bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen in an hour.”

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled for
about five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you may have
it—pink toes and all complete.”

Minora put on her eye-glasses and read aloud:

“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bed-time my stale and
battered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd into my
mind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years ago!—of the sweet
helplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her arms, and undressed, and
put in my cot, without being wakened; of the angels I believed in; of little
children coming straight from heaven, and still being surrounded, so long as
they were good, by the shadow of white wings,—all the dear poetic nonsense
learned, just as my baby is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not an
idea of the beauty of the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed,
with heavenly eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately come
from, and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At two
years old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread and milk;
at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread and milk; at ten
both bread and milk and angels have been left behind in the nursery, and she
has already found out that they are luxuries not necessary to her everyday
life. In later years she may be disinclined to accept truths second-hand,
insist on thinking for herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off exploded
traditions, be untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moral
standard and to be strong, and pure, and good—”

“Like tea,” explained Irais.

“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part of the
charm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids, her first
reluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to come in at bed-time
and sit in the window in the setting sunshine watching the mysteries of her
going to bed. Her mother tubs her, for she is far too precious to be touched by
any nurse, and then she is rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little
pink toes peep out; and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in her
night-dress, and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt
down on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face
reflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening prayer
for pity and for peace.”

“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is exactly what I
was going to say.”

“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can copy
that if you like.”

“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied; “it will
make people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am going to take a
man’s name.”

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call yourself John
Jones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace name, to emphasise
your uncompromising attitude towards all feminine weaknesses, and no one will
be taken in.”

“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of Minora’s
typewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you and I are writing
her book for her. She takes down everything we say. Why does she copy all that
about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees are supposed to be touching? I
never learned anything at them, did you? But then in my case they were only
stepmother’s, and nobody ever sings their praises.”

“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say my
prayers in French.”

“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such things
were not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no tubs; our faces
and hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the room, and in the summer
we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards for fear we might catch cold. My
stepmother didn’t worry much; she used to wear pink dresses all over lace, and
the older she got the prettier the dresses got. When is she going?”

“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”

“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this. She has
been here an unconscionable time,—it must be nearly three weeks.”

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to neglect
one’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this time stretched
on a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so agreeably with me. She
has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or any other business in the world
than just to stay on chatting with me, and reading, and singing, and laughing
at any one there is to laugh at, and kissing the babies, and tilting with the
Man of Wrath. Naturally I love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes in
his head must love her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month the
passages and offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have ever
whitewashed their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in while
it is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those
succulent salads full of caraway seeds that she so devotedly loves. I shall
begin to lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring every day
anxiously after her husband’s health. She is not very fond of him, because he
does not run and hold the door open for her every time she gets up to leave the
room; and though she has asked him to do so, and told him how much she wishes
he would, he still won’t. She stayed once in a house where there was an
Englishman, and his nimbleness in regard to doors and chairs so impressed her
that her husband has had no peace since, and each time she has to go out of a
room she is reminded of her disregarded wishes, so that a shut door is to her
symbolic of the failure of her married life, and the very sight of one makes
her wonder why she was born; at least, that is what she told me once, in a
burst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant to talk
to, good-tempered, and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old to begin to
learn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that horror of being made better
by his wife that distinguishes so many righteous men, and is shared by the Man
of Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in his left hand at meals, because
if he did not (and I don’t believe he particularly likes doing it) his
relations might say that marriage has improved him, and thus drive the iron
into his soul. This habit occasions an almost daily argument between one or
other of the babies and myself.

“April, hold your glass in your right hand.”

“But papa doesn’t.”

“When you are as old as papa you can do as you like.”

Which was embellished only yesterday by Minora adding impressively, “And only
think how strange it would look if everybody held their glasses so.”

April was greatly struck by the force of this proposition.

January 28th.—It is very cold,—fifteen degrees of frost
Réaumur, but perfectly delicious, still, bright weather, and one feels
jolly and energetic and amiably disposed towards everybody. The two young
ladies are still here, but the air is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh on
me any longer, and besides, they have both announced their approaching
departure, so that after all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace, and the
house will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome the spring.

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to present it as a parting gift to
the Man of Wrath; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat meekly times
innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that I am not vain. When Irais first
saw it she laughed till she cried, and at once commissioned her to paint hers,
so that she may take it away with her and give it to her husband on his
birthday, which happens to be early in February. Indeed, if it were not for
this birthday, I really think she would have forgotten to go at all; but
birthdays are great and solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip by
unnoticed, and always celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd of
relations (gathered from far and near to tell you how well you are wearing, and
that nobody would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), who stand round
a sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are offered up as a
burnt-offering to the gods in the shape of lighted pink and white candles,
stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake with its candles is the chief
feature, and on the table round it lie the gifts each person present is more or
less bound to give. As my birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well as
blotting-books and photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer I should get
photograph-frames and blotting-books and no mittens; but whatever the present
may be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed with the noisiest
gratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and such words as entzückend,
reizend, herrlich, wundervoll, and süss repeated over and over
again, until the unfortunate Geburtstagskind feels indeed that another
year has gone, and that she has grown older, and wiser, and more tired of folly
and of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and all the morning the rites are
celebrated, the cake eaten, healths drunk, speeches made, and hands nearly
shaken off. The neighbouring parsons drive up, and when nobody is looking their
wives count the candles in the cake; the active lady in the next Schloss
spares time to send a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the Gotha
Almanach; a deputation comes from the farms headed by the chief inspector
in white kid gloves who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the gracious lady’s head;
and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a corner trying on all the mittens. In
the evening there is a dinner for the relations and the chief local
authorities, with more health-drinking and speechifying, and the next morning,
when I come downstairs thankful to have done with it, I am confronted by the
altar still in its place, cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, because any
hasty removal of it would imply a most lamentable want of sentiment, deplorable
in anybody, but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. All birthdays are
observed in this fashion, and not a few wise persons go for a short trip just
about the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate them next year; only
trips to the country or seaside in December are not usually pleasant, and if I
go to a town there are sure to be relations in it, and then the cake will
spring up mushroom-like from the teeming soil of their affection.

I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais and myself
are to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further proof were needed, it
is furnished by the fact that we both, in defiance of tradition, scorn this
celebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when first I knew her, and long
before we were either of us married, I sent her a little brass candlestick on
her birthday; and when mine followed a few months later, she sent me a
note-book. No notes were written in it, and on her next birthday I presented it
to her; she thanked me profusely in the customary manner, and when my turn came
I received the brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy the
possession of each of these articles, and the present question is comfortably
settled once and for all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We never mention
this little arrangement except at the proper time, when we send a letter of
fervid thanks.

This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over the
fire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week. Sleighing and
skating have been our chief occupation, especially skating, which is more than
usually fascinating here, because the place is intersected by small canals
communicating with a lake and the river belonging to the lake, and as
everything is frozen black and hard, we can skate for miles straight ahead
without being obliged to turn round and come back again,—at all times an
annoying, and even mortifying, proceeding. Irais skates beautifully: modesty is
the only obstacle to my saying the same of myself; but I may remark that all
Germans skate well, for the simple reason that every year of their lives, for
three or four months, they may do it as much as they like. Minora was
astonished and disconcerted by finding herself left behind, and arriving at the
place where tea meets us half an hour after we had finished. In some places the
banks of the canals are so high that only our heads appear level with the
fields, and it is, as Minora noted in her book, a curious sight to see three
female heads skimming along apparently by themselves, and enjoying it
tremendously. When the banks are low, we appear to be gliding deliciously over
the roughest ploughed fields, with or without legs according to circumstances.
Before we start, I fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, and
we drive home again; because skating against the wind is as detestable as
skating with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature arranges its blowing
without the smallest regard for our convenience. Yesterday, by way of a change,
we went for a picnic to the shores of the Baltic, ice-bound at this season, and
utterly desolate at our nearest point. I have a weakness for picnics,
especially in winter, when the mosquitoes cease from troubling and the
ant-hills are at rest; and of all my many favourite picnic spots this one on
the Baltic is the loveliest and best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man of
Wrath is loud in his lamentations when the special sort of weather comes which
means, as experience has taught him, this particular excursion. There must be
deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on waking up, I
see these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some very potent reason to
keep me from having out a sleigh and going off. It is, I admit, a hard day for
the horses; but why have horses if they are not to take you where you want to
go to, and at the time you want to go? And why should not horses have hard days
as well as everybody else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for
nature and frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest
that does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more admirable
in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that ever reared its
snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. Now observe the superiority of
woman, who sees that both are good, and after having gazed at the pine and been
made happy by its beauty, goes home and placidly eats the turnip. He went once
and only once to this particular place, and made us feel so small by his
blasé behaviour that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot,
endless forest stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and
after driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue
of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the orange-coloured sails
of distant fishing-smacks shining in the sunlight. Whenever I have been there
it has been windless weather, and the silence so profound that I could hear my
pulses beating. The humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the
only sounds in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested by
mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those of my
visitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably lost their
tempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing and lamentations.
These despicable but irritating insects don’t seem to have anything to do but
to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for any prey Providence may send
them; and as soon as the carriage appears they rise up in a cloud, and rush to
meet us, almost dragging us out bodily, and never leave us until we drive away
again. The sudden view of the sea from the mossy, pine-covered height directly
above it where we picnic; the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forest
to the water’s edge; the coloured sails in the blue distance; the freshness,
the brightness, the vastness—all is lost upon the picnickers, and made worse
than indifferent to them, by the perpetual necessity they are under of fighting
these horrid creatures. It is nice being the only person who ever goes there or
shows it to anybody, but if more people went, perhaps the mosquitoes would be
less lean, and hungry, and pleased to see us. It has, however, the advantage of
being a suitable place to which to take refractory visitors when they have
stayed too long, or left my books out in the garden all night, or otherwise
made their presence a burden too grievous to be borne; then one fine hot
morning when they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on the
Baltic. I have never known this proposal fail to be greeted with exclamations
of surprise and delight.

“The Baltic! You never told us you were within driving distance? How
heavenly to get a breath of sea air on a day like this! The very
thought puts new life into one! And how delightful to see the
Baltic! Oh, please take us!” And then I take them.

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience is as clear as the frosty air
itself, and yesterday morning we started off in the gayest of spirits, even
Minora being disposed to laugh immoderately on the least provocation. Only our
eyes were allowed to peep out from the fur and woollen wrappings necessary to
our heads if we would come back with our ears and noses in the same places they
were in when we started, and for the first two miles the mirth created by each
other’s strange appearance was uproarious,—a fact I mention merely to show what
an effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how much
better it is to go out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and sulk. As we
passed through the neighbouring village with cracking of whip and jingling of
bells, heads popped up at the windows to stare, and the only living thing in
the silent, sunny street was a melancholy fowl with ruffled feathers, which
looked at us reproachfully, as we dashed with so much energy over the crackling
snow.

“Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we passed; “you’ll be indeed a cold
fowl if you stand there motionless, and every one prefers them hot in weather
like this!”

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though the most splendid joke had been
made, and before we had done we were out of the village and in the open country
beyond, and could see my house and garden far away behind, glittering in the
sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest, with its vistas of pines
stretching away into infinity, and a drive through it of fourteen miles before
we reached the sea. It was a hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchanted
forest leading into fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there often
before, and always thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the final
arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer loveliness of the place. For
a long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep blue line, and a
cluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a narrow strip of pale yellow
sand; right and left the line of sparkling forest; and we ourselves standing in
a world of white and diamond traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay
on the place like a benediction.

Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she thought
this beat it almost.

“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, as though she were in a holy
place, “how the two can be compared.”

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” replied Minora; after which we
turned away and thought we would keep her quiet by feeding her, so we went back
to the sleigh and had the horses taken out and their cloths put on, and they
were walked up and down a distant glade while we sat in the sleigh and
picnicked. It is a hard day for the horses,—nearly thirty miles there
and back and no stable in the middle; but they are so fat and spoiled that it
cannot do them much harm sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmed
soup in a little apparatus I have for such occasions, which helped to take the
chilliness off the sandwiches,—this is the only unpleasant part of a winter
picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most long for
something very hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of its wrappings,
took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly again. She was nervous lest it
should be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to add that her nose is not a bad
nose, and might even be pretty on anybody else; but she does not know how to
carry it, and there is an art in the angle at which one’s nose is held just as
in everything else, and really noses were intended for something besides mere
blowing.

It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with immense fur
and woollen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much fur as anything, and
choked exceedingly during the process. Minora was angry at this, and at last
pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on again.

“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of fur.

“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.

“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and splutter;
“we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter it.”

“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.

“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of what
use are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to continue to eat
her gloves.

By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees and the
clouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was given sandwiches
and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with one hand and held his
lunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be correct, I packed, and the others
looked on and gave me valuable advice.

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the place,
and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as fond of him as
I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should do without him, so
entirely does he appear to understand and approve of my tastes and wishes. No
drive is too long or difficult for the horses if I want to take it, no place
impossible to reach if I want to go to it, no weather or roads too bad to
prevent my going out if I wish to: to all my suggestions he responds with the
readiest cheerfulness, and smoothes away all objections raised by the Man of
Wrath, who rewards his alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking of him as an
alter Esel. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and
alone in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and sit
quite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little tune over and
over again after interludes of gurgling, or if there are no nightingales,
listening to the marvellous silence, and letting its blessedness descend into
my very soul. The nightingales in the forests about here all sing the same
tune, and in the same key of (E flat).

I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar to this
particular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their throats a
little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the prettiest little song
in the world. How could I indulge my passion for these drives with their pauses
without Peter? He is so used to them that he stops now at the right moment
without having to be told, and he is ready to drive me all night if I wish it,
with no sign of anything but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Man
of Wrath deplores these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has
given up trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is deploring in
one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the other, and am gone
before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost in the shadows of the
forest by the time he has discovered that I am nowhere to be found.

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied however by one spot, and that
is, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the horses in if they
don’t want to be held in, but he goes to sleep sometimes on his box if I have
him out too soon after lunch, and has upset me twice within the last year—once
last winter out of a sleigh, and once this summer, when the horses shied at a
bicycle, and bolted into the ditch on one side of the chaussée (German
for high road), and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it
shied too into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and
the bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who never
lost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue clave to the roof
of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.

“But I should think he ought to have been thoroughly scolded on an
occasion like that,” said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story as we
wandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in the sleigh; and
she glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was visible between the
bushes above us. “Shall we get home before dark?” she asked.

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very highest
of the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists were creeping up,
and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull brown; a flight of wild
geese passed across the disc of the moon with loud cacklings.

“Before dark?” echoed Irais, “I should think not. It is dark now nearly in the
forest, and we shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.”

“But it is surely very dangerous to let a man who goes to sleep drive you,”
said Minora apprehensively.

“But he’s such an old dear,” I said.

“Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily; “but there are wakeful old dears to
be had, and on a box they are preferable.”

Irais laughed. “You are growing quite amusing, Miss Minora,” she said.

“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I never knew him to go to sleep
standing up behind us on a sleigh.” But Minora was not to be appeased, and
muttered something about seeing no fun in foolhardiness, which shows how
alarmed she was, for it was rude.

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way home, and Irais and I at least
were as happy as possible driving back, with all the glories of the western sky
flashing at us every now and then at the end of a long avenue as we swiftly
passed, and later on, when they had faded, myriads of stars in the narrow black
strip of sky over our heads. It was bitterly cold, and Minora was silent, and
not in the least inclined to laugh with us as she had been six hours before.

“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out of the
forest on to the chaussée, and the lights of the village before ours
twinkled in the distance.

“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to this
question.

“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais solicitously.

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais pinched
me. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been without all that fur
you ate for lunch inside you,” she said.

“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,” said I.
“Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English person who has
ever been to just this part of it.”

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who ever
burst—”

“‘Into that silent sea,’” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote that
without its context, you know.”

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe. I must
breathe, or perhaps I might die.”

The lights from my energetic friend’s Schloss shone brightly down upon
us as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she is very
proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the only one in the
whole district.

“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the direction of the
house.

“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the way if I
went often.”

“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said Minora;
“and I should be obliged if you would take me.”

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested; “and we
are not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking all my visitors
to see her.”

“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can tell you
what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you, and if you were to
ask questions, and began to take notes, the good lady would stare at you in the
frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth had brought a young lunatic out for an
airing. Everybody is not as patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxious
to pay off old scores.

“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do that.”

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great ceremony
on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a crochet-mat in the
centre—it has got a crochet-mat in the centre, hasn’t it?” I nodded.
“And you would sit on one of the four little podgy, buttony, tasselly red
chairs that are ranged on the other side of the table facing the sofa. They
are red, Elizabeth?” Again I nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and
there is no carpet except a rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark
chocolate colour, almost black; that is in order that after years of use the
dirt may not show, and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness,
you see, Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so
much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At intervals
round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on them, and in one
corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?” she asked, turning to
me.

“No, it is white.”

“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air and the
sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains under heavy
stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just opposite, with peering
eyes at every window trying to look in, instead of there only being fields, and
trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight, no books, no flowers; but a consoling
smell of red cabbage coming up under the door, mixed, in due season, with
soapsuds.”

“When did you go there?” asked Minora.

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been calling
there all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the depths of
her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark eyelashes, and far be it
from me to deny that each eye taken by itself is fine, but they are put in all
wrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the
significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there together, I
should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa, because it is the
place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger; Elizabeth would be invited to
seat herself in the left-hand corner, as next in importance; the hostess would
sit near us in an arm-chair; and you, as a person of no importance whatever,
would either be left to sit where you could, or would be put on a chair facing
us, and with the entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense
social gulf that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa
corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that nothing
else could. The world might come to an end, and create less sensation in doing
it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance you got into the right-hand
corner of one. That you are put on a chair on the other side of the table
places you at once in the scale of precedence, and exactly defines your social
position, or rather your complete want of a social position.” And Irais tilted
her nose ever so little heavenwards.

“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais. “If,” she
continued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this suggestion, “you were
to call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues the innocent would most likely
make you hit on a washing-day, and the distracted mistress of the house would
keep you waiting in the cold room so long while she changed her dress, that you
would begin to fear you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; and
when she did appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the
rage that was boiling in her heart.”

“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my familiarity,
but such ignorance of country-life customs is very touching in one who is
writing a book about them.”

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by the
Hausfrau to be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months, and
while they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every other
consideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into insignificance, and no
one approaching, or interfering with the mistress of the house during these
days of purification, but at their peril.”

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes four
times a year?”

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must take care
and not marry a German,” she said.

“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of linen.
If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as you do in
England, you would be put down as a person who only has just enough to last
that length of time, and would be an object of general contempt.”

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not be full
of accumulated dirt.”

We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.

“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after a while
with a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her mind of a land
full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at door-handles.

“It is a clean land, at any rate,” replied Minora.

“I don’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up to
the house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I looked up
fondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I want is to live and
die just here, and that there never was such a happy woman as Elizabeth.

April 18th.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora left
that I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying on its
green and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for though the
underwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees above are still
quite bare.

February was gone before I well knew that it had come, so deeply was I engaged
in making hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias, verbenas, and nicotina
affinis; while no less than thirty are dedicated solely to vegetables, it
having been borne in upon me lately that vegetables must be interesting things
to grow, besides possessing solid virtues not given to flowers, and that I
might as well take the orchard and kitchen garden under my wing. So I have
rushed in with all the zeal of utter inexperience, and my February evenings
were spent poring over gardening books, and my days in applying the freshly
absorbed wisdom. Who says that February is a dull, sad, slow month in the
country? It was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description here, and its mild
days enabled me to get on beautifully with the digging and manuring, and filled
my rooms with snowdrops. The longer I live the greater is my respect and
affection for manure in all its forms, and already, though the year is so
young, a considerable portion of its pin-money has been spent on artificial
manure. The Man of Wrath says he never met a young woman who spent her money
that way before; I remarked that it must be nice to have an original wife; and
he retorted that the word original hardly described me, and that the word
eccentric was the one required. Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since even
my husband says so; but if my eccentricities are of such a practical nature as
to result later in the biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia,
why then he ought to be the first to rise up and call me blessed.

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, as they are not grown here, and
people try and make boiled cucumbers take their place; but boiled cucumbers are
nasty things, and I don’t see why marrows should not do here perfectly well.
These, and primrose-roots, are the English contributions to my garden. I
brought over the roots in a tin box last time I came from England, and am
anxious to see whether they will consent to live here. Certain it is that they
don’t exist in the Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter kills them,
for surely, if such lovely things would grow, they never would have been
overlooked. Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she reads so many
English books, and has heard so much about primroses, and they have got so
mixed up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and Disraelis, that she longs to
see this mysterious political flower, and has made me promise to telegraph when
it appears, and she will come over. But they are not going to do anything this
year, and I only hope those cold days did not send them off to the Paradise of
flowers. I am afraid their first impression of Germany was a chilly one.

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after the garden and the babies,
and announces her intention of coming back as soon as the numerous relations
staying with her have left,—“which they won’t do,” she wrote the other day,
“until the first frosts nip them off, when they will disappear like belated
dahlias—double ones of course, for single dahlias are too charming to be
compared to relations. I have every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and
here they have been ever since my husband’s birthday—not the same ones exactly,
but I get so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins. My
husband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I am left
at their mercy. I wish I had crops to go and look at—I should be grateful even
for one, and would look at it from morning till night, and quite stare it out
of countenance, sooner than stay at home and have the truth told me by
enigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha? she, in particular, spends her
time propounding obscure questions for my solution. I get so tired and worried
trying to guess the answers, which are always truths supposed to be good for me
to hear. ‘Why do you wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks,—and that sets
me off wondering why I do wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to
know for, or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answer
truthfully. ‘I am sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after puzzling over
it for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring and ask her?’ And
then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly line she says I have down
the middle of my forehead, and that betokens a listless and discontented
disposition. Well, if she knew, what did she ask me for? Whenever I am with
them they ask me riddles like that, and I simply lead a dog’s life. Oh,
my dear, relations are like drugs,—useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if
taken in small quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole,
and the truly wise avoid them.”

From Minora I have only had one communication since her departure, in which she
thanked me for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending me a bottle of
English embrocation to rub on my bruises after skating; that it was wonderful
stuff, and she was sure I would like it; and that it cost two marks, and would
I send stamps. I pondered long over this. Was it a parting hit, intended as
revenge for our having laughed at her? Was she personally interested in the
sale of embrocation? Or was it merely Minora’s idea of a graceful return for my
hospitality? As for bruises, nobody who skates decently regards it as a
bruise-producing exercise, and whenever there were any they were all on Minora;
but she did happen to turn round once, I remember, just as I was in the act of
tumbling down for the first and only time, and her delight was but thinly
veiled by her excessive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the stamps,
received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of my life; I had been a
good Samaritan to her at the request of my friend, but the best of Samaritans
resents the offer of healing oil for his own use. But why waste a thought on
Minora at Easter, the real beginning of the year in defiance of calendars. She
belongs to the winter that is past, to the darkness that is over, and has no
part or lot in the life I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance
and sing for joy that the spring is here! What a resurrection of beauty there
is in my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! The whole of this radiant
Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the windflowers
and celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to the Hirschwald, to
see what the spring had been doing there; and the afternoon was so hot that we
lay a long time on the turf, blinking up through the leafless branches of the
silver birches at the soft, fat little white clouds floating motionless in the
blue. We had tea on the grass in the sun, and when it began to grow late, and
the babies were in bed, and all the little wind-flowers folded up for the
night, I still wandered in the green paths, my heart full of happiest
gratitude. It makes one very humble to see oneself surrounded by such a wealth
of beauty and perfection anonymously lavished, and to think of the
infinite meanness of our own grudging charities, and how displeased we are if
they are not promptly and properly appreciated. I do sincerely trust that the
benediction that is always awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be more
deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and patience, and cheerfulness, just
like the happy flowers I so much love.