i have been here nearly a month without spending a single night away—that in itself is a sign of improvement, for i suppose (to my shame i own it) that it must be years since i have slept thirty consecutive nights in the same bed. and what i believe is a greater sign of improvement is that i have not wanted to go away, and i do not want to go away. i like these level, uneventful days: these mornings of work, followed by a few hours of out-of-doors, and in the evening ‘the face of a friend,’ in this house or another. how dull i should have thought it, not long ago; how antipodal to dull i find it!
i said ‘uneventful’ just now—that was a mistake. i have been through fiery trials, in the shape of a cook, who could not only not cook decently, but could not cook at all. in any case, she didn’t, and i have eaten raw flesh on the altar of rusticity.{82} then there was a personage who represented herself as a charwoman. though i cannot say she was a housebreaker, she was certainly nearer that than anything else; for though she did not actually break the house, she broke everything inside it. she began ‘cleaning,’ as she called it, before it was yet day, and till nightfall the house was resonant with fracture. when there was nothing left to break, she upset her washpail over anything that came handy, brocade for choice. she upset, also, permanganate of potash, with which i was staining a floor, over a green carpet, and one evening i found her eating asparagus (my asparagus, too!) in the scullery. thereupon i said ‘board-wages,’ and it is my belief that she simply added board-wages to her ordinary diet, which she ate at my expense. otherwise, there is no possible way of accounting for the fact that a sirloin of beef, which had come in in the morning—— enough! she is gone.
stevenson recommends weeding and cacao-seed planting as a suitable pursuit for anyone who thinks he can make his living out of writing ‘measly yarns.’ but now i have one advantage over that divine author: i know a far better{83} employment. it is to paint floors with permanganate of potash (otherwise known as condy’s fluid; but you can get much more of it for your money, though it is cheap anyhow, if you buy it in the raw). for a shilling you get enough to stain all the floors in your house (unless you live in an exceptionally large one) the most beautiful brown. the very process reminds one of the scene of the powder-mixing in ‘jekyll and hyde.’ it is laid on dark purple; before your eyes it changes to a livid angry green, and while yet it is wet it becomes a dark brown. you lay it on with a large paste-brush, and feel you are saving money. incidentally you get a quantity on to your hands, and it is apparently indelible. then you rub it with beeswax, and your deal floor becomes positively ancestral. a few persian rugs on the top bring you back from a villa to the gorgeous east.
but even before i stained the floors i bought seeds, and planted sweet-peas and nasturtiums broadcast, also (these in seedlings) jackmanni,[a] and trop?olum and tobacco-plant, and two crimson ramblers. then, on a day to be marked with red in the annals{84} of scarification, i took a trowel and a pocket-knife, and went into the highways and hedges to cut standards for rose-trees. but i took no gloves. hinc ill? lacrim?. anyhow, i cut seven standards. this is the way not to do it.
[a] purple clematis.
i started cheerfully along an unfrequented lane. larks hovered trilling: spring was bursting in numberless buds, and the green mist of leaves hung round the hedgerows. before long i saw in the hedge by which i went a suitable standard. it was rather inaccessible, but the lust of the gardener burned in me, and i took a sort of header into the hedge. a shoot from the coveted standard playfully retained my cap, another took one arm in keeping, a third gently fixed itself to my left hand. that had to be very carefully disengaged, since the thorns were encompassing it, and in disengaging it i dropped the trowel. an incautious recovery of the trowel drew the first blood. then i began.
it is necessary in cutting a standard to get a piece of real root. this particular standard, however, seemed to have no particular roots. it went on and on below ground without object, so far as i could judge; infirm of purpose, it could not{85} begin. when it did begin, it was already mixed up with a bramble, the thorns of which were set on the parent stem on a perfectly different principle, and i did not want the bramble. but, with a totally undeserved popularity on my part, the bramble wanted me. it got me—in pieces which i hope were no use to it; and i began to see that, under certain circumstances and to a certain extent, as mr. gladstone might have said, gloves were, if not necessary to human life, at any rate a protective agent against possibly fatal h?morrhage. just then the root began.
i destroyed the bramble, root and branch; i destroyed a hazel (branch), and i destroyed the standard (root). that was all at present.
clearly this would not do: i was as far from standards as ever, but i was bleeding like a pig. so i went home, got some gloves, and became successful. but to be successful in a tale of adventure is to become dull, and with a view to avoiding this as much as is possible, short of not writing at all, i will merely say that i cut seven standards on that divine afternoon, and—but that i can’t sing—went home singing.{86}
the cat next door, so it appeared, had observed the planting of the jackmanni with a disapproving eye, and even as i went into the garden with my seven standards (like a roman emperor) i saw a stealthy form moving slowly away from the corner where i had put one of them. now, i know something about cats, though nothing, it appears, about standards, and, without the least hurry, i walked into the garden and said ‘poor puss,’ and saw, out of the corner of my eye (i dared not look honestly round for fear ‘poor puss’ should see), that my jackmanni was entirely disinterred, and a scurry of freshly-dug earth lay round it. there were therefore two courses open to me: either the direct, which lay in taking the cat, which (with the shallow diplomacy of its species) had advanced towards me, straight to the disinterred jackmanni and there slapping it, or the subtle course. i chose the subtle. the cat was a knave—i knew that perfectly well—i chose to be the knave set to catch it. so i said ‘poor puss’ again, and went to the uprooted jackmanni and planted it again in the sight of ‘poor puss.’ then i went slowly indoors, a very bismarck.{87} once arrived inside, i flew to the lumber-room, and with feverish hands unearthed a large garden squirt, and, filling it with cold water (i wish it had been iced), flew to what we may call the wing of the house—it consists merely of a bootroom, which commands, strategically speaking, the jackmanni. the window was open, and with great caution i advanced to it and looked out. already, once more that very stupid knave of a cat was busy in the bed. i took careful aim, and the cold water drenched the knave. i will teach it—at least, i think i have taught it—that i do not plant jackmanni merely to give it a few moments’ senseless amusement. besides, to-morrow i shall have a fox-terrier; so the garden squirt was the kindest sort of cruelty.
i am afraid that, in talking thus vaguely of ‘the house’ and ‘the garden,’ the reader may have formed a totally erroneous impression of scale, and i must inform him at once that ‘the house’ is the kind of house which is called the cedars, because, apparently, it has one withered furze-bush in the garden. it is semi-detached, stands on the outskirts of the town, and is of an external{88} appearance which is better forgotten. inside, however, the rooms are good, high and airy, and, anyhow, it suits me. there is a small strip of garden in front, in which at present i take no interest, and a square of garden behind measuring some sixty or seventy feet by thirty, encompassed by a wall of old and very large brick. a strip of border, sown from end to end with sweet-peas, runs up one side. at the far end is a small raised terrace of grass, on which grow an apple-tree and a plum-tree, by which i have planted the crimson ramblers. the seven standards, to be budded in june, stand in a formal row below the terrace, and parallel to the border of sweet-peas stand half a dozen tubs, in which are sown nasturtiums of the large climbing kind. this leaves a space of grass, twenty feet by forty, and on this is being now erected ‘the shelter,’ a wooden room with trellis on two sides, match-boarding on one, and entirely open on the other. felt will be laid down over the grass, and over the felt rugs. there will be a couple of basket-chairs there, an old french mattress covered with rugs, a writing-table, and a small dining-table, with four{89} chairs. there i propose to live as soon as the summer comes. over one side the nasturtiums in the tubs will trail their green and ruddy arms, and i shall look towards the seven standards and the scarlet ramblers. in the evening an arab lamp with electric light, brought on a long cord from the house, will illuminate it.
the very planning of ‘the shelter’ was an absorbing joy; absorbing, too, is it to see it rise, smelling clean of freshly-chiselled wood. then it will be painted green, and ready for habitation. in front of it, towards the terrace, will stand a sundial, which will not get, as far as i can see, any sun at all, since the stately shelter will entirely shade it. however, i dare say it will do better in the shade, like lilies of the valley. besides, one never uses a sundial in order to tell the time.
i often wonder how large an area of house and garden it is possible to get really fond of. the fact of broad acres and limitless corridors may be, and often is, delightful to the possessor, especially if they are of long-standing possession; but to be fond of a place in the way that i mean implies{90} to be intimate with every square inch of it. your own niche, your own particular angulus terr?, must, i think, be small; the great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste, some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and brought within the scope of his invention. the great lawns and shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own garden corner. and it is the personal aroma, the definite impress of an individual taste on rooms and gardens, that makes them alive with their own individual entity: they are parasitic, like mistletoe, drawing their life from a parent stem. the large rooms, the rows of marbles, the acres of signed canvas, are beautiful and wonderful things; but no one man can appropriate them and fashion them to himself, or himself to them, for they are too large, and are the setting not for one person, but for the brilliant crowd. but his own ‘den,’ where he{91} has the books he wants, the chair he likes, the few pictures he loves, it is there that he is chez lui—at home. that is the good part; to have the other is enviable, no doubt, but one does not envy it with the sense of need. of course, no two people may have the same idea of a chez lui; and it is always with a certain anxiety that one awaits the arrival of a friend who has not seen one’s own. he may easily not like it at all (as i have said, the appearance of the house outside is among the things to be forgotten), and if he does not, it is part of me he does not like. but it takes all sorts to make a world; if it were not so, the world would be infinitely less entertaining than it is and infinitely less lovable.
almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in which are for the most part mossed and gray. a gravel path winds in and out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a half-dozen of fine elms. it borders on the road, and is separated from it by only a low paling. and looking out of my window this morning, i saw here one of those very simple little common things that give the{92} lie to cynics. it was a fine sunshiny morning and the road was populous, and among others there came down it two big, strapping privates out of the regiment that is stationed here, all trappings and scarlet, while between them, with a hand in the arm of each, walked a little old lady dressed in black. each of the two men carried a cross of white flowers, and they walked very slowly, hanging on their steps, and suiting their pace to the woman. all three passed in at the cemetery gate, and went across the grass to a tomb which lay underneath the elms, and had an old weatherworn stone to mark it. on it the two soldiers laid down their crosses, and took off their forage-caps, and all three knelt side by side for a couple of minutes, it may be, at the foot of the grave, close by the road. then they rose, and the old lady kissed her tall sons very tenderly, and stood with them there a minute more, a hand clasped by each, while they talked together, i suppose of the dead. then they passed out of the cemetery gate again, and, for aught i know, out of my life. but a little later i went across the road, and to the grave where the crosses of{93} lilies lay. the stone, as i had seen, was of old standing, and i read that it was in memory of a man who had died in the year 1880, on april 17, so that to-day was the twenty-second anniversary of his death. two days afterwards i happened to ask the colonel of that regiment whether there were two privates of a certain name among the men.
‘yes,’ said he, ‘excellent steady fellows; they look after their old mother, who lives here.’
so the reconstruction was simple enough. the father must have died while the two sons were still boys of five or six; yet on the anniversary of his death, so it seems, they still go to the grave with their mother, quite simply and naturally, and say a prayer there with her. the grass, too, on the grave itself was, i noticed, kept short and carefully tended, so i suppose they go there not infrequently. i think the man who lies there must have been a good husband. god keep all our memories as green in loving hearts!
meantime april is here, and it is good to be in england, for in no other country that i have ever seen is the rush of colour more jubilant.{94} flowers you may get in plenty on the grecian hills when ‘blossom by blossom the spring begins,’ but nowhere do you get such green as that in which here april hangs the trees and hedgerows. star-like the pink petalled daisies shine in the grass of the water-meadows, and soon the yellow shower of buttercups will make dana? of the earth. in lonely places the daffodils dance together for the joy of their renewed life, and the warm wind shakes the snow of almond and apple-blossom on to the thick-bladed turf. morning by morning fresh spears of living stuff have pierced the earth, rising upwards in obedience to the great law that moves all life, to look on the kingdom of the sun; and every day the sap of growth hums and tingles to the end of twig and tree, bursting forth through pink-sheathed bud into stars and crescents of leaf and blossom. on the great downs the grass of last year already shows gray and withered by the newness of the excellent emerald, soon to be wrought with tapestries of thyme, where the bee scrambles heavy-legged with the pollen of its fragrant labour, and the chimes of the harebells, to which, so the legend of the countryside has it,{95} the fairies dance, leaving a deeper green where their feet have trod.
brimful from bank to grassy bank the chalk-streams drawn from the cool deep brain of the downs hurry steadfastly through the meadows, setting the reeds quivering and jerking. here their courses lie over beds of white chalk and gravel, each pebble shining lucently, jewel-like; here the water-weeds, growing thickly from bank to bank, are combed and waved by the passage of the water; here the stream is set on a more industrious and earnest purpose, as it twirls itself together in the bricked and narrowed passage that leads to the melodious thunder of a mill, from which, having accomplished its work without any loss or fatigue, it emerges in a soda-water of bubble from the dripping sides of the sluice and the mist of its own outpouring. there in the pool below lie its great mysterious citizens, the aldermen of the river, for whom on many days i shall, with my heart in my mouth, cast flies upon the water. think, if i should catch the lord mayor himself—an eight-pounder at least, so the miller tells me, who has broken as many lines, it appears,{96} as there are bubbles in the stream, or heads of racing thistledown in a windy meadow. and if, as is highly probable, the lord of the stream defends his own, and will put such slight wisdom into the heads of his fish that not even the least cautious stripling among them is lured by me, yet he cannot wean me from that fond hope that this cast or this will meet its reward, or when evening comes, and the creel is still unburdened, take away from me the benefit of those waterside hours, the combing of the water-weeds, the translucency of sun-smitten ripples, the infinite refreshment of companionship with things that are quiet and alive. nor at the end of the day will my machinations against his citizens debar me from becoming for a moment one of them, and dividing the frothy waters of his deepest pool.
