Part 7

“It is with me! Sixteen tufts in full flower--beauties! I shelter them a bit of course, but only to save them from getting knocked about. You never saw such a colour as they are! Yours were the pale blue ones, weren’t they? I know there’s a lot of that sort in the trade that are sold as Anemone Blanda, but they’re not the right Blanda at all. Mine are as blue as, oh, as blue as--blue paint.”

“We have numbers of bulbs at present in flower,” I said severely. “Scillas and chinodoxas, and daffodils, and tulips, and Iris Alata, and many others.”

“Ah, potted bulbs. They’re poor sort of things generally, don’t you think? Some people, I believe, like them though.”

“We have Cyclamen Coum in flower out of doors,” I added; garden vanity, or more probably deflected ill-humour, arousing in me a sudden spirit of violent horticultural rivalry.

“Oh, you have, have you?"--this in a tone of somewhat enhanced respect. “Don’t you shelter it at all?”

“Not in the least!” I replied contemptuously. “We grow it out in the copse; on the stones; in all directions. It is a perfect weed with us. No weather seems to make the slightest difference.”

I am really surprised that I did not assert that we had Orchids and Bougainvillæas growing out of doors in the snow! It is probable that I should have done so in another five minutes, for irritation sometimes takes the oddest forms. Luckily for my veracity our roads just then diverged; my horticultural acquaintance getting out at the next station, and I continuing on my way to Guildford.

I don’t think I have ever in my life felt more ruffled, more thoroughly exasperated than I was by that most uncalled-for remark about the Tommies. Had they been all individually my sons or my nephews I doubt if I could have felt more insulted! I adore my garden, and yield to no one in my estimation of its supreme importance as a topic; still there are moments when even horticulture must learn to bow its head; when the reputation of one’s Flag rises to a higher place in one’s estimation than even the reputation of one’s flower-beds. “Anemone Blanda!” I repeated several times to myself in the course of the afternoon, and each time with a stronger feeling of exasperation. “Anemone Blanda, indeed!”

FEBRUARY 13, 1900

If what lies beyond the next few weeks could be suddenly laid open to us, what should we see? It is, I am aware, rank cowardice upon my part, but if by merely ruffling over the blank pages of this diary which I hold in my hand I could in an instant find out, I know that I should refuse to do so. The same feeling has beset me before now, but hitherto always with regard to personal matters; never, so far as I can remember, with regard to public ones. Three weeks! It is not a very long time. Only a few more crocuses and scillas will be out in our little Dutch garden; only a few more oaks and chestnuts cut in the copse, yet within that time the fate of Ladysmith must be decided. Should help fail to reach it--and it may well prove impossible--what shall we see? what will the world see? what will our various enemies see? Only two alternatives appear to be open: an unbelievable surrender, and an only too easily believable slaughter. That last of course is the central thought, the unendurable one; the vision that hangs before one’s eyes day and night. Death upon those iron hills; death without the possibility of accomplishing anything; death under the most unendurable of conditions; shot helplessly, like the furred or the feathered beasts of a battue. I write it down deliberately, in the hope of thereby getting rid of it, for it haunts one unendurably. With that perversity, which makes us all at times our own most ingenious torturer, my mind revolves continually around the disaster before it comes, and fills up every detail with the most diabolical distinctness. “Fall of Ladysmith! Fall of Ladysmith! Destruction of the garrison!” It seems to reverberate along the roads; it presents itself upon every village hoarding, as a friend of mine saw it several times this winter upon those of the Paris boulevards. Before I open my paper in the morning it seems to be hidden under the folds, ready like an asp to spring out and poison me. At night I fall asleep to the thought of it, and in my dreams it performs wild and Weirtz-like antics, projecting itself in and out of them with all that monstrous reduplication which the besetting idea has a way of achieving for itself, when the brain that originated it is nominally asleep, and at peace.

LONDON, FEBRUARY 16, 1900

God be thanked! God be thanked! one of them, at least, is safe. Kimberley has been relieved, and the others, assuredly the others will follow? This leap from a midnight of gloom to a midday of joy has been almost too great; life, even for the most placid, has become too breathless, too crowded; let me pause a moment and recapitulate. I came to London upon Saint Valentine’s day, the 14th; S. S. being on her way south; circumstances delayed her a day, and in that day all this happened. We had gone to see a friend; she left me to take a turn in the Park; in a few minutes she returned breathlessly; she had met a park-keeper and he had told her the news. Five minutes more we were both in the park; had caught the same inspired park-keeper, and had fallen upon him simultaneously.

“Is it true? How do you know? Who told you?”

“Quite true ma’am. Quite true ladies. You’ll find it written up at the War Office.”

“But how? Where did they get in from? The enemy were right across; so----”

“Well ladies, as I understand it were like this. General French was sent north, and he fetched a big circuit as it were so. And----”

With our umbrellas we drew a hasty but effectual scheme of attack upon the park gravel, then hurried away from our gold-braided informant in the direction of Pall Mall.

Oddly enough St. James’s Palace did not appear to be in the least irradiated by the intelligence! its grim old face remained as unresponsive, and as dirty as usual. Everything else however had caught the glamour. It shone upon the cabs, or at any rate upon their cabbies; it lit up the sea of mud; it seemed to float along the pavements scoured by a recent shower. Men were coming out of the clubs in groups, talking loudly; everyone talked loudly; not an acquaintance was in sight, yet they seemed to be all acquaintances; more than acquaintances, friends, dear friends; we looked benignantly at them, and they looked benignantly back at us. In London; in St. James’ Street! Tall or short, stiff or pompous, young or old, it was all one; they were brothers; brothers in a common joy, brothers in a common relief from an all but maddening dread. To smile for no reason in some perfectly decorous stranger’s face seemed to be the most usual, the most natural behaviour. Safe! Safe! It was a chime, one which needed no joy bells to make it sound louder. Surely for us at least it was worth the strain, worth the long suspense, the almost hopeless anxiety for this? And Ladysmith? and Mafeking? The turn has come; the tide has changed! We shall shortly hear the same news of them. We shall be rejoicing over both of them to-morrow!

SURREY, FEBRUARY 26, 1900

There is a little tapestry fire-screen in my sitting-room here, which has been disturbing me quite seriously all this winter. It represents a group of Boers--when the tapestry was made I take it the word was spelt boors--of various ages and sexes, but all equally convulsed with laughter. The central figure is a big, square-jawed, good-natured looking fellow, who holds aloft in his hands a tiny, red-coated toy manikin, which he is causing to perform ridiculous antics for the amusement of a solid infant of two or three years old, who is trying to reach it. At a table close by an old man sits eating, in a suit of what appears to be greasy grey corduroys. He also grins with satisfaction at the performance. So does a woman--presumably the mother of the solid infant--who looks back laughingly from a doorway, over the dish which she carries in her hands. Other Boers, or boors, are to be seen in the background, all equally convulsed by the ludicrous figure cut by little Red-coat; all distorting jaws--wide enough by nature--into grimaces expressive of appreciation at his ridiculous position.

Since the original of this piece of tapestry was painted over three hundred years ago by a painter named Teniers, it is not at all likely that it was meant to represent our Boers of to-day, nor that the ridiculous little manikin in the red coat could be meant for an unfortunate Rooinek! In spite of that fact I have been unable for months to endure to look at this side of my harmless little fire-screen. Every morning on entering my sitting-room my first act has been to push it up through its sliding groove, until only a pair of prodigiously stout calves, and one infant’s shoe remain to be seen. To-day--and I write the fact down as a sign of changed times--my fire-screen remains untouched! More than this, I have found a malignant satisfaction in sitting down before it, and, as I warmed my feet--damp with gardening operations--surveying the row of grinning faces, with the little red manikin still performing his degrading antics in their midst.

“Laugh away, my friends!” I remarked. “Laugh away! Make the most of your time. Don’t disturb yourselves pray on my account. The unfortunate Rooinek is no doubt, as you say, a very ridiculous and helpless sort of creature. At the same time don’t be too sure that he may not make a sudden leap yet out of your fingers! Stranger things have happened.”

So many caricaturists, friendly and unfriendly, have made capital out of this struggle of ours that I rather wonder none of them seem to have hit upon this familiar Teniers. That accuracy that pertains to all genius is plainly visible, moreover, as one looks at it, for the portraits--evidently they are portraits--might be those of any group of our worthy enemies to-day. As for the old fellow at the table, it might be Oom Paul himself in proper person; the same air of somewhat sanctimonious rectitude; the same broad fleshy nose, the same protruding chin, the same semicircular sweep of grizzled beard. It sets one reflecting upon the persistency of national types. Centuries rise, and grow, and fade away; wars are made and cease again, but probably few things in this fluctuating world change so little, or with such a snail-like slowness, as the few broad lines upon which the characteristics of any given race have once got themselves legibly inscribed.

MARCH 1, 1900

Surely we need no satirist to point out the ironies of life, for they are for ever with us! Here is the latest in my own experience:--

After all my arrangements, my care about telegrams, my determination not to be defrauded of even half an hour’s satisfaction, I have heard at last of the relief of Ladysmith from a child by the roadside; from a child? nay but from a baby, a smudgy-faced cottage infant, that could barely walk, and certainly was quite unable to talk! It happened in this wise. I was hurrying along the lane on my way to take the train for Godalming, having waited till the last minute in hopes of a telegram which never came. My morning papers had told me nothing, or nothing beyond vague surmises, which I was quite competent to provide for myself; consequently I was famishing for more substantial fare. I had nearly reached the village, and was hurrying round the last corner. Suddenly out of one of the cottage doors came this creature, dragging after it a stick with something red tied to it, which I entirely failed to distinguish as having been even intended for a flag. Either it stumbled, or from sheer force of circumstances simply sat down in the middle of the road, right in front of me. I was delayed an instant, and in that instant out flew its mother, and plucked it to its feet again, with a sound maternal smack.

“There ain’t no sense in yer being run over, is there, ye little fule, not if Ladysmith is relieved!”

“Ladysmith!” I was upon the two of them in an instant, and had seized the bigger one by the arm, though she was not an acquaintance of mine.