Part 5

When we first began to own a garden we could not bring ourselves to wait in patience for developments. We expected our beds to bloom as by magic. We vehemently ordered pot-plants because no seedlings could be expected to “do anything” in June; and the disproportion between our bills and the result filled us with dismay. But a garden is at once the most delightful and cunning of teachers. How kindly are the virtues it inculcates!—Patience, faith, hope, tenderness, gratitude, resignation, things in themselves as fragrant and beautiful as the flowers, or like the herbs, a little repellent of aspect, but sweet in their bruised savour.

Now we have even been taught to take pleasure and comfort from the vision of the beds in their winter preparation, where with the believer’s eye, we anticipate the fulfilment of the spring. In the little Dutch Garden under the new wing, the two long beds between the clipped Bilberry hedges are full of compact cushions of Forget-me-not. Through these the green noses of the china-blue Hyacinths, that are to make lakes of colour and scent at the end of March, are beginning to push upwards.

The winter has been very mild.—Another garden lesson: too much spoiling in infancy is bound to produce forwardness in the young, and the inevitable result of withering snubs!

When the Hyacinths have faded, the Forget-me-nots will have spread a sheet of tender beauty over the unsightliness. ‹Did we mention that a garden teaches charity?› And between this flying scud of blue foam the Darwin Tulips will have already reared bold green snake heads which will gradually become invaded by tints of mauve, rose, dark purple, until the day when their glorious chalices will open, as if cut out of living jewels, translucent to the light.

The Dutch Garden is bounded by a clipped yew hedge on two sides, divided by a rustic archway where Pink Dorothy rambles in June and onwards. Against this hedge there are two long beds lying to the south, filled with crimson and red roses: in spring edged with Darwins and Arabis, before Mme. Normand Levavasseur spreads her disappointing maroon clusters. On the north side the brick wall of the terrace, divided in its turn opposite the archway by brick steps, is flanked by Darwin tulip beds. The beds under the side of the house to the west have also Darwins with a carpet of Forget-me-nots and a fringe of Arabis. The space that runs back to the outer wall under the study windows is planted with Gloire de Versailles, Pyrus Japonica and the ubiquitous Tulips and Forget-me-nots.

There is one thing we have succeeded in impressing on the patient and kindly Adam, and that is that we “cannot bear bald spaces.” Our bulbs lie as close as they can without injuring each other. Our Wallflowers, even now, in January, jostle!

In the bed that runs right along the bricked upper terrace, there lie, awaiting the call of the different months ‹please add docility and punctuality to the moral list›, behind a deep border of Mrs. Sinkins, a double row of Crocuses, a row of Thomas More Tulips, a little hedge of white and red “Polyantha” Roses, and groups of “Candidum” Lilies. At intervals, on the top of the terrace wall, are large Compton vases which will foam with Forget-me-Nots, and thrust clusters of Hyacinths up against the Moor by and by. Just now they carry little yellow torches of Retinospora Aurea, which Adam said, when he first planted them, looked, he thought, “very lonely,” but which, each rising from a field of green moss, stand out, we think, with a classic dignity against the sombre magnificence of those rolling winter hills.

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And did we say that one could ever in any circumstances wish Susan into the dogstar? Alas! poor dear little Susan, she reposes in a raw, ostentatious grave in the Oak Tree Glade with six bulb spikes at the top of the mound. We should like to put a granite stone there with the words: “Here lies Susan, a good dog.” All that was possible was done to save her, and she was the most pathetic, gentle, patient creature; at the very end, seeking blindly with one small paw for her master.

Poor Juvenal was so disconsolate that we did not know what to do. We hit, however, on the happy thought of purchasing a small white Highland Terrier puppy from a litter on sale in the neighbourhood. Bettine ‹thus she has been christened with a fine disregard of local colour› arrived, a dirty, cringing, abject little wretch; but the atmosphere of Villino Loki has wrought so great a change that she is now a perfect imp of mischief and general cheekiness. The Master of the House says she is like a Paris gamin, and that Gavroche is the only name that befits her. The days of cringing are certainly over. Her long ears cocked, her wide mouth derisively open, she defies authority, with attitudes and expressions that can only be transcribed by such remarks as “Pip, Pip,” or the gesture which the French know as Pied-de-nez.

The other dogs at first protested fiercely against this substitute for their beloved Susan even Arabella curling a ferocious lip, and striking out with her fringed paw. But now they have accepted the new comrade with all the generosity of their fine characters. Loki himself makes no objection, except when she ventures upon territory which he regards as peculiarly his own; such as the grand-maternal bedroom.

The month that has taken away the harmless humble life of Juvenal’s fox-terrier, has also brought the news of England’s loss in one of her most gallant sons. He was a friend of the household, and Loki, I am sure, does not forget—for a long memory is one of the Pekinese characteristics—how the South Pole hero played hide-and-seek with him in his puppyhood for a whole hour, one summer’s day, like a very child himself. The family of Villino Loki have memories, too, of that friendship which they valued so highly; and they will always carry the vivid picture of the strong brown face, with the blue eyes that were at once as guileless as a child’s and full of a far-away vision, as if they never ceased to contemplate their high and distant goal. The world is crowded with bumptious people who do nothing at all that is useful, if they do not do harm. Here was a man who had already accomplished mighty achievement and was set on mightier still, and there never was anyone so modest, so anxious to push others forward and keep himself in the background. He was asked by one of us to write a line in an autograph book, and he set down characteristically a tribute to another:

“The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel....”

We laughed ‹after that futile fashion that becomes a kind of habit nowadays› and said, “We always think that sounds so uncomfortable!”

He raised those blue eyes, half humorously, half deprecatingly. “You make me feel ashamed of being incorrigibly romantic.”

It was we who felt ashamed.

“We are sure,” we answered, “you have a good friend somewhere.”

“Yes,” he said, “the best ever a man had.”

We are glad to think that friendship was with him all through and at the end. In one of the last letters ever received from the doomed Antarctic Expedition the tribute is paid again: “No words of mine,” writes he, “can describe what he is.”

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The birds have eaten every single bud on our baby almond trees—the first year that they have had any flower buds at all. Ungrateful little wretches! the Master of the Villino sees personally to the replenishing of the numerous bird-baths and drinking-pans; and Juvenal provides them with cocoa-nuts filled with lard and baskets full of crumbs—aided by Gold-Else, the cook, who loves little creatures in fur and feather as much as the rest of the household. Tom, the old cat, is very happy under this lady’s kind rule, and, to show his appreciation, accompanies her in stately fashion every night up the kitchen stairs to her bedroom door. The act of courtesy accomplished, she as solemnly reconducts him downstairs again to spread his couch for him—a sheet of brown paper, by his request.

The Hyacinths are breaking out of their green hoods, shaking blue bells; but our Scillas seem to be going to disappoint us. This sandy soil on our Surrey heights is not at all appreciated by bulbs. Snowdrops will have nothing to say to us, unless in a prepared bed. Narcissus Poeticus disappeared altogether after one year’s blooming. We are trying to naturalize Bluebells in a glade which we have cleared—and in which this year has been planted an avenue of pink May trees, to end at the bottom of the dell in a group of white Azaleas—but we are not at all sure that we shall succeed. However, we have our compensations: Azaleas thrive, and so do Rhododendrons. We are year by year adding more of the former to the wild slopes.

Below the terrace, yclept the “Hemicycle,” a path bordered with Azalea Mollis was a perfect glory last May, although it had only been planted the preceding autumn. The “Hemicycle” was a little fairy glade of Crocus a week ago, the second in February; and we have still hope of the Scillas which surround our bereft almond trees. A rough wall rises from it to the Upper Terrace, over which Dorothy Rambler will fling its lovely blooms in immense trails by and by; and its stones themselves hold a never-ending succession of delight in the shape of Arabis, Aubretia, Cerastium, Thrift, and the like. Yellow roses climb up to meet the Dorothy, and the dear little pink China Rose grows in bushes all along the front between the Lavender plants which we are trying to acclimatise, but which, year after year, are blighted by the frost before they have had time to grow strong.

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Satisfactory as our wall-garden is, there is a wall-garden at a cottage in a neighbouring village which never fails to fill us with envy every time we see it. It belongs to two maiden ladies, whom we have christened Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza. They are so extraordinarily like each other that even they themselves ‹we have heard› hardly know which is which. They have the same rotundity of figure, the same uncertain obliquity in one eye, the same cheerful rosy visage, the same sleek bands of grey hair.

When the Master of the House was a young man, an Irish servant was heard to observe to him, gazing rapturously at him as he walked away from her vision, all unconsciously, in his shooting-garb: “And indeed he’s a lovely gentleman. Them jars of legs!” ‹As a matter of fact, Loki’s Grandfather has very nice legs.› But Tweedle-Ann and Tweedle-Liza, in short, sensible grey tweed skirts, bending their portly forms over their wall garden, have more than often presented to the passer-by a vision....

The Japanese say that reticence is the very soul of art. Our aspirations are always towards the artistic, but there is something touching in four ... exactly similar ... side by side...!