Part 8

“What did you say? Is Ladysmith relieved?”

“Lor bless you ma’am, don’t you know? Why hours and hours ago! We heard of it a little afore eleven we did!”

“But are you certain? Is there no mistake this time?”

“Mistake? Bless you, no ma’am, there ain’t no mistake! Why it were stuck up at the office by Mr. Smith hisself, just gone quarter to the hour. I was a-coming along with my husband’s second breakfast, for he’s working now for Mr. Bellew at the Mills. So as I was passing close to the office ‘Whatever is all this about,’ thinks I, for there was eight or ten people a-standin’ there, and a-readin’ somethink. And with that I sees----”

I too had seen something! A flag--unmistakably a Union Jack--hanging near the Church, I had overlooked it in my hurry. At sight of that, excitement, combined with the fear of missing my train, overcame my politeness, and I flew down the lane in the direction of the station.

The train was caught, but only by the narrowest margin. I sprang into a carriage, all but shaking hands as I did so with an absolutely unknown old gentleman, who was its only other occupant. Everyone knows the shrinking, the more than maidenly dread of the solitary travelling he, for the unknown travelling she, however harmless the latter may look. On this occasion public interest overcame even that terror. As a river bursts through its banks, so my old gentleman burst into a torrent of repressed information. He had just come from London; he had witnessed the scene at the Mansion House; he described to me the Lord Mayor coming to the window with a telegram in his hands; he dilated upon the crowds, the cheering, the flags, the block in the streets; above all upon the central fact of the situation, which was that he had himself been thereby made twenty minutes late at his board, or meeting, whatever it was. “For the first time in twenty-five years!--the very first time! They couldn’t make out what had happened to me; thought I must have been run over!” he assured me several times between Guildford and Godalming.

Well, well, it has come at last! All is right, all is well, and we may go back to our own little concerns; our housekeepings, and our marketings, our weedings, and our seed-sowing, with lighter; let us hope, perhaps also, with a trifle gratefuller hearts?

MARCH 3, 1900

Our good old Cuttle is leaving us; will be gone by this time next week, and I feel more sorry than seems quite reasonable! To-day, when we began talking the matter over together, a suspicious huskiness in my voice warned me that I should do well to get away from the subject before my character for propriety was quite lost!

It is better I know for many reasons that he should leave. He cannot, indeed will not, undertake sole charge of both flower and kitchen garden, and to have anyone over him in either department is not to be dreamed of. Moreover his own home is four miles away, all up and down a long crooked lane, and a walk like that after a hard day’s work would be enough to try anyone half his age. Under ordinary circumstances the departure of a man who, though he has been with us now nearly three years, came at first as a mere jobber, would be a small affair on either side. Our poor old Cuttle is however so identified with the very existence of this little possession of ours that to lose him seems like losing a piece, and moreover a considerable piece of it. If the pegs and the marking-tapes have been our contributions, all the solid work, the earth turning and delving, the trenching, the grass-sowing, the cutting down of trees, above all the interminable pitchfork operations, have been his, and his satellite’s. Surely then he has a right to regard himself as its creator? Our good, old, kindly, argumentative Cuttle! The familiar little nooks and corners, cultivated, wild, half wild, will hardly seem so entirely themselves; hardly so intimately familiar, without your friendly face!

MARCH 5, 1900

Allah be praised for a leisurely life! I have been visiting A. R. D., whose days are filled with large and various activities; whose responsibilities are great; whose hours of work are long; of leisure few and scanty. I admire such indomitable workers, with an admiration which increases with every year I live, but I envy them, Oh ye gods, not at all!

“Cling to the peace of obscurity; they shall be happy that love thee.” Where, I wonder, have I acquired that rather ignominious injunction? There is a seventeenth-century flavour about it which makes it sound respectable, yet at bottom I suppose it is merely a counsel of laziness. Work, far from the curse, is the alleviation of the curse; of that I am as convinced as anybody. At the same time a good deal of the work that goes on around one seems to be rather the product of the unasked volition of the worker, than of any violent external necessity. Obscurity and laziness moreover are far from interchangeable terms, seeing that the majority of the hard-workers of the world are, and as a necessity always will be, obscure. It is only in our little fussy artistic or literary coteries that the two ideas have attained to a sort of accidental connection. Personally I have a relish, I might almost say a passion for obscurity. The retort is of course easy, and I am able to reply to myself that the alternative has never been pressed upon my attention with any very urgent insistence. That is true, but does not really affect the matter. Honestly, I do regard obscurity as a blessing, apart from such satisfactions it may provide for laziness. For what does it mean? It means that you belong to yourself; that you have your years, your days, hours, and minutes undisposed of, unbargained for, unwatched, and unwished for by anybody. It means that you are free to go in and out without witnesses; free as the grass, free rather as the birds of the air. Further, I am inclined to think that only Obscurity can properly and heartily enjoy his sunsets, moon-rises, spring mornings, running streams, first flowers, and all the rest of the good cheap joys that lie about his path. The known and admired person is expected to make capital out of such matters, and he probably does so too, poor fellow! Yet upon the untrammelled enjoyment of such things how much, not only of the satisfaction, but of the peace of life depends? As was said by one--who, by the way, was very far himself from being an Obscurity--“Nothing startles me beyond the moment. A setting sun will always set me to rights, and if a sparrow comes hopping to my window, I can take part in its existence, and pick about the gravel.”

MARCH 7, 1900

A sentimentalist sleeps in nearly everyone, whether he is aware of the fact or not; just as we are all potential poets or lovers, though some of us undoubtedly under rather a deep disguise. My particular vein of sentiment has lately taken the form of linking together sundry small spots here with others far away, upon the other side of St. George’s boisterous channel. Thus I have a Burren corner, a West Galway corner, a Kerry corner, a Kildare corner, even a green memento or two of the great lost forest of Ossory, of which only a few shadowy remnants survive to a remote, but happily not an indifferent generation.

That pleasure is to be found in such childishness might at first sight seem incredible. Since it is so, there is no use, however, in refusing to recognise it oneself. Take the Burren, for instance. Burren the wild, the remote, the austere, the solitary; to the few who know it a region absolutely unique, with its cyclopean terraces sloping slowly to the waves, that moan and mutter eternally around their bases. To represent the Burren--even the Burren plants--by three or four tiers of stones, which are not even limestones, might well seem even to oneself the very acme of absurdity. I refuse however to be ashamed of it, and if my Dryas octopetala and my Helianthemum canum, my Potentilla fruticosa, and my Cystopteris fragilis would but accept such hospitality as I can offer them; would but pretend that fragments of lime rubbish are slabs of limestone, I should be content, and ask no more of them.

Some are kindly enough, but others are hopelessly supercilious, and I am at my wits’ end how to cater for them. If distinguished visitors would only condescend to mention their wants plainly, how gladly, I have often thought, would one hasten to satisfy them. When they merely look disgusted, and, after sulking hopelessly for some months, die upon one’s hands, what is an unfortunate host or hostess to do? Here is Helianthemum canum, for instance, which for the last nine months I have been keeping from dying, as it were by main force. Up to now I have in a measure succeeded, and have even occasionally flattered myself that it was beginning to resign itself. I know perfectly well however that it has in reality made up its mind upon the subject, and that one of these mornings I shall hurry out to my “Burren” corner, only to find Helianthemum canum looking black but satisfied, having just succeeded in dying triumphantly on my hands!

MARCH 8, 1900

The pace at which some plants, no matter how discouraging the weather, manage to swell out their tissues, and to spring aloft under one’s very eyes, is an unfailing marvel, and in this unpropitious soil the marvel seems all the greater. So many quite common plants decline to live in it in its natural state, that one’s gratitude goes out all the more to the few that are willing to put up with us as we are. Foremost amongst such obliging vegetables stand the mulleins, and foremost amongst the mulleins stands that really noble person, Verbascum olympicum. If it has a fault it is that it is too good-natured, and too vigorous. Not only does it attain to its robust proportions at a rate that takes one’s breath away, but further it increases so rapidly, and with such a reckless prodigality, as threatens to people the whole neighbourhood with its descendants. Seeing that each of such descendants requires as much space for its development as does its parent, the perplexed gardener wonders at times how he is to dispose of his too obliging property, and ends by being not a little embarrassed by his own wealth.

There was one day last summer, when, returning home after a short absence, and going into the garden, I was not a little startled to discover what a congregation of the giants we had unwittingly been entertaining. A giant may of course be highly ornamental, and a giant that is eight feet high, and of a bright canary-yellow throughout the greater part of that length, is almost bound to be so. There were--I took the trouble to count them--one hundred and eleven such giants at that moment all in flower together in the garden. Now considering that the proportions of that garden are not those of Kew or Versailles, there is no denying that one hundred and eleven bright yellow giants, all occupying it at the same time, affected the mind with a certain sense of surplusage! They stood in rows along the grassy paths; they shouldered one another, and everything else out of any place they had been allowed to spring up in; they appeared unexpectedly in out-of-the-way corners of the copse, where the elderly oak-scrub found itself reduced to the position of a mere underling at the feet of these aspiring biennials. To come suddenly round a corner was to receive an impression of being surrounded by a crowd of gigantic, lemon-coated attendants, all standing respectfully at attention, an experience naturally rather trying to mere modest humanity.

There is another equally large and complacent biennial, which, on account perhaps of that very complacence, I find myself constantly treating with the scantiest civility. It has not I think quite the solid strength and impressive bearing of the great mullein, but as regards height, is often even more gigantesque. This is the large variety of Œnothera biennis, familiar to most people as Œnothera Lamarckiana, but possessing no English name that I am aware of beyond the generic, and not very descriptive one of “Evening primrose.” There are a good many varieties of evening primroses in gardens, both perennials and biennials, and a few true species, of which missouriensis, otherwise macrocarpa, is undoubtedly one of the best. Lamarckiana on the other hand is hardly a subject for the garden proper. As a tenant of steep banks, of rough borders; of all sorts of half, or three-quarter wild places, it has in this soil no competitor, or only finds such competitors in the two biggest of the mulleins.

I have been trying this year the experiment of planting it along both sides of the green walk that crosses the upper part of our copse. Whether it will endure the amount of shade that it will find there remains to be seen. It is a sun-lover by nature, like most of its tribe, but its growth is so redundant that a little curtailment of it will do it no great harm. Though less spreading, it requires almost more room than the verbascums, for, if the space it covers is less, it is a true biennial, never failing in my experience to flower the year after it is sown. With Verbascum olympicum this is not so. There are some here at this moment that were sown three years ago, and have not yet flowered. They will do so no doubt this year, and with that event the cycle of their existence ends. The worst is that the gap they leave when they die is large; moreover, as in the case of foxgloves, the black stump is both an ugly object in itself, and a difficult one to get rid of. When are we to possess a really good perennial foxglove I wonder? There is a perennial yellow one, but it is a poor thing, hardly worthy of its name. Perennial verbascums are also few in number, most of the family showing a more or less aloe-like fashion of flowering. In their case one is able to console oneself. The imagination grows a trifle giddy in fact at the thought of every mullein one has seen spring from seed remaining as a permanent possession; always equally towering, and equally clamorous of space and sunlight. Many-acred would be the garden that could support them all!

MARCH 19, 1900

Some way back in this diary I was unwise enough to inveigh against that “pleasant herb called Vanity,” especially in its relation to gardens. A greater error I now feel there could not be, and I am convinced that if we only took care to cultivate a sufficient supply of it, it would not only be a satisfaction in itself, but an immense stimulus to the successful cultivation of all other desirable plants.

This is not, I am aware, the general view. The general idea being that the herb in question is a mere weed, one that will not only grow everywhere, and at all seasons, but that grows the most luxuriantly upon the poorest soil. Now this is certainly not the case. What amount of it is grown in other gardens I cannot say, no report--or only a very indirect one--being forwarded to any of the regular gardening periodicals. That there are poor varieties of it I am willing to admit, but a really good “strain” is always worth securing, if it can be done legitimately, and so I am sure every successful gardener would be the first to say. So convinced do I feel of its value that there are many succulent, and quite wholesome vegetables, that I would gladly see thrown away in order to make room for more of it!

That admirable essayist, and, from his own account, horticulturist also, Sir Thomas Browne, evidently grew a good deal of it in his garden, though with the odd humour that prevails amongst its cultivators, he imagined that he had very little, in fact none at all. Here is the Religio Medici, so I have only to turn to his panegyric of it, a panegyric all the more satisfactory because he apparently intended it to be the reverse. Perhaps though, as Mr. Pepys would say, “That was in mirth.”

“I thank God amongst those millions of vices I do inherit and hold from Adam, I have escaped this one.” [Millions of vices! now may heaven help thee, Sir Thomas! however one must remember that he was a rhetorician.] “Those petty acquisitions, and reputed perfections, that advance and elevate the conceits of other men, add no feather unto mine. I have seen a grammarian tower and plume himself over a single line in Horace, and show more pride in the construction of one ode, than the Author in the composure of the whole book. For my own part, besides the jargon and patois of several provinces, I understand no less than six languages; yet I protest I have no higher conceit of myself than had our fathers before the confusion of Babel, when there was but one language in the world, and none to boast himself either linguist or critick. I have not only seen several countries, beheld the nature of their climes, the chorography of their provinces, topography of their cities, but understand their several laws, customs, and policies; yet cannot all this persuade the dullness of my spirit unto such an opinion of myself as I behold in nimbler and conceited heads, that never looked a degree beyond their nests. I know the names, and somewhat more, of all the constellations in my horizon; yet I have seen a prating mariner, that could only name the Pointers, and the North star, out-talk me, and conceit himself a whole sphere above me. I know most of the plants of my country, and of those about me, yet....”

Nay Sir Thomas, dear Sir Thomas, let me not follow thee longer in this vein, else might one of the devoutest of thy followers lose some share of that devoutness! I hastily ruffle thy pages over, feeling certain before long of coming upon thee in a worthier one.