CHAPTER XIXMICHAELMAS DAISY AND ROSE-BUGS
A greathedge, cut to resemble the old-fashioned pillar-and-ball entrance to a driveway, welcomed one into the beginning of the gardens. Beyond the hedge the path curved abruptly, and a six-foot wall with high terraces beyond filled the view. Blue masses of sentinel-like larkspur in mounting tiers gave the first greeting. Here was the evidence of an intelligent planning to capture the eye right at the beginning and make one eager to follow the curving path to see what would be beyond. Instinctively Richard stopped and uttered the prophesied word, “Beautiful!” The thought of “Grapes fust!” never intruded.
At the curve the walk widened into a little circle of violet phlox, walled-up on all sides except towards the sun and towards the narrow arched opening that led farther on. The walls were not high and were almost concealed by the climbing blue clematis; beyond them was slightly higher ground crowded with blue harebell, and farther back a battalion of Chinese larkspur. Blue snapdragon—giants, every one—sprang out here and there, and a bevy of smaller border flowers filled in the scheme—all blue. An old-fashioned hickory settle invited one to sit and enjoy; and near it had been planted nests of the more fragrant plants, and borders of blue campanula, Jacob’s ladder and creeping phlox.
Richard sat on the settle and admired. “Beautiful!” he exclaimed again and again. It was a bower of blue—blue and purple and violet and lavender and red-blue; but nothing clashed or interfered with the dominant cerulean note; there was enough rich green to separate what would otherwise be jarring shades.
What a puzzling mute Jerry Wells could be when she chose! In all their chatty hours together there had been hardly a word about this; and undoubtedly here was but the vestibule of the gardens. “Red Jacket” should be discovered for oneself, she always said. Well, it was better so; half the delight in life is the unanticipated joys.
Green shrubs blocked the view through the arch, but one turn—the garden was a maze of turns—and behold, a diminutive bridge and a slender spring-fed rivulet, and beyond, in clumps and patches raised at various elevations by hidden walls, blooms of delicate pink: Canterbury bells, hollyhock, phlox, gladiolus, lupine, foxglove.
The pink bower was larger than the blue and was, therefore, not to be taken in at once. Curving paths appeared leading to a series of surprises, a sward of rest-harrow here and a bevy of tall canna there, but no alien colour had been permitted to spoil the general tone.
Just over a hedge Richard heard voices and the light-hearted laugh of negroes at work. Someone in authority was giving directions; it sounded like Jerry’s voice, so he chanted the family song, the two musical notes, the fifth and the third of the scale, “Hel-lo!”
The song came back, softly wafted over the green barrier, “Hel-lo!”—the “lo” held until it diminished into a whisper.
Eagerly he sought a path, singing the call occasionallyas he missed his way and getting the response every time. The path that he chose dropped down broad flagstone steps and then rose. He had completed a half-circle before he came upon a hillside of yellow blooms, gaillardia, black-eyed Susans, and dahlia. They fairly shouted at him, especially the yellow daisies, but he did not see them at all. “Hel-lo!” he sang in his flutest tones; and “Hel-lo!” came back almost at his feet. He found himself standing on a six-foot wall at the top of a set of narrow stone steps; below him Mrs. Wells was engaging the attention of several negroes with wheelbarrows, spades and a whole galaxy of garden tools.
“Hel-lo!” she sang up at him.
Richard was astonished at his own disappointment. Courage to face folks was not always ready at call, and at this precise hour he felt no terrifying shyness. He was not one to be courageous at a moment’s notice; his ridiculous left-handedness had a habit of visiting him when he least desired it; it was a pity that Jerry was not present now when he felt so able.
But to Mrs. Wells he showed no sign either of surprise or disappointment.
“Hel-lo!” he sang cheerfully; and came down the steep irregular steps.
“I’ll never be kind to a Michaelmas daisy again,” she greeted him, trowel in hand.
“Are they ungrateful?” he asked and looked at the black-eyed Susans. “They seem very sweet and ingratiating to me.”
“Oh, I don’t mean the rudbeckia,” she laughed. “They are just as bad, but——”
“Pardon me,” Richard interrupted. “Introduce me to this bad rude Becky; I don’t know her at all.”
“The black-eyed Susans!” she laughed at his ignorance. “You are staring at them. We gardeners call them rudbeckias. You just daren’t let them go to seed; they’d run over the whole place. Just look how they have multiplied since I have been away! But they’re not half so bad as the Michaelmas daisy, who have no right to be in the yellow garden at all.”
“Why, pray?” Richard searched about for the offending member.
“Because they are blue.”
“H-m! Blue!” he still looked about him. “Perhaps I’m growing blinded by all the beauty hereabouts, but I don’t see anything blue.”
She laughed again, delighted with his stupidity.
“If you look into those barrows,” she pointed, “you’ll see the blue truants. They belong in the blue beds, but they got loose somehow and cropped up all over the place. I’ve been spending my hours hunting them out. Don’t you see where we have been digging?”
Then Richard saw the great gashes, and admitted his folly. Everything was so wonderful and colossal he had not been able to see the defects, he told her. By this time his eye was taking in the spreading expanse of yellow field.
“‘And then my heart with rapture fills,’” he quoted, “‘and dances with the——’ I don’t see any daffodils.”
Even the negroes laughed at this.
“Have I said something stupid?” he asked. “Don’t blame me; blame Wordsworth. I’m sure he said daffodils—but perhaps he only did it for the rhyme. If Jawn were here he’d make a limerick to fit black-eyed Susans.... But just why are daffodils so funny?”
“Daffodils are a spring flower, my dear Richard,” Mrs. Wells began to explain.
“Of course they are!” Richard remembered. “Wretchedly stupid of me. But I never can keep pace with that kind of information. I never know when it is kite time or top time.... We’ll have to bring Wordsworth up to the minute. How is this:
“And then with joy my heart goes crazyAnd dances with the Michaelmas daisy?”
“And then with joy my heart goes crazyAnd dances with the Michaelmas daisy?”
“And then with joy my heart goes crazy
And dances with the Michaelmas daisy?”
“Not mine!” Mrs. Wells shook her head and flourished the trowel.
“Oh,” he corrected himself, “your version should be,
“And then with anger my mind goes crazyAnd trowels away at the Michaelmas daisy!
“And then with anger my mind goes crazyAnd trowels away at the Michaelmas daisy!
“And then with anger my mind goes crazy
And trowels away at the Michaelmas daisy!
“It isn’t as smooth as one of Jawn’s, but the idea is sound.”
“Quite right,” agreed Mrs. Wells. “Michaelmas daisies are decent enough, like some of these black boys, when they know their proper places.”
The black boys “hyah-hyahed” at this tribute to their ambitious proclivities. “Saul there,” she went on, “is a black Michaelmas daisy”—Saul exploded with appreciative laughter—“he goes right into my refrigerator without so much as by-your-leave and helps himself to the best musk-melons. Some day I’ll have to take my trowel to him and let you boys wheel him off to the weed-fire.”
The darkies enjoyed this amiable attack on Saul’s weakness for musk-melon, but none more than the black culprit. The Virginia give and take between master and servant was strangely at home in these northern hills. Evidently, thought Richard, the transplanting of a hundred years ago had been done with expert skill; none of the southern flavour had been lost.
“Trowel won’t nebber do, M’s Wells,” cried Saul between choking guffaws; “reckon you-all’ll hab to git a pickaxe! Yass’m—sho’ hab to git a pickaxe.”
Interested as Richard was in the plantation setting and in the glorious richness of the floral display his heart was not dancing like Wordsworth’s for either daffodils or black-eyed Susans. The first eager thought that he might find Jerry alone in the gardens had left a strong desire to go to her. There was much that he had to say to that young lady. It had better be done now. “Do it now” was not his favourite motto; it smacked too much of commerce; but doing it now seemed suddenly to acquire appropriateness. With this idea in mind he turned towards the ladder of stones and began to mount.
“As we go up the steps and turn to the left,” Mrs. Wells remarked as she followed, “you’ll come upon something I very much wish you to admire. Jerry said I mustn’t guide-book you about, so I’ll say nothing about what you’ll find; but I’m very proud of my—well, never mind what.”
She was going with him! Well, he would take a look and then be off. Of course, the gardens were wonderful, but they would keep, and——
Suddenly he found himself saying, “Beautiful!” again, exactly as George Alexander had predicted. Through a dense mass of shrubbery they had picked their way until abruptly the hollyhocks broke upon them, thousands of them! It was like a magnificent western cornfield, tilted to the sun. Walks of snapdragon and lupine and hardy pinks wound their way among the giant flowers. And no particular colour had been allowed to grow in very large masses; the foxglove and the larkspur and the gladiolus came back, liketheleitmotivof a German opera, and all joined in a monster symphonic design, whose design was not apparent at all. It was the climax, thefinale, of the piece, the full orchestra wherein the little bowers of blue and pink and yellow had been solos, unaccompanied flute and clarionet and French horn.
But even here there were turns of the path, hummocks of hardy shrubs, unexpected beflowered walls, and finally, at the top of the hill, in the early stage of light-green bloom, a veritable grove of hydrangeas. “Gi-unts, they is, reg-u-lar hydrang’agi-unts!” George Alexander had called them. Through the myriad straight slender trunks the blue sky beyond the hill formed a perfect background; and with the massive clustered heads, seemingly clipped out into symmetrical designs, the scene had all the effect of a gigantic Maxfield Parrish poster.
For the first time Richard neglected to say “Beautiful!” Instead, he looked on in thoughtful wonder, turned about and took in the sweep of acres below him crowded with perennials, masses of deep red and old rose and white which he had not seen before. Then he began to understand the enormous effort of the thing, and the cost in money, time and labour. So he did not say “Beautiful,” but he thought of George Alexander and said to himself, “Grapes fust!”
But he did not follow George Alexander’s directions and say it aloud. The beauty of the scene before him was too rare an experience; and grapes, after all, were simply something for sale. It was not expected that George Alexander’s mind could get above the rise and fall of the market. Beauty was an emotional experience, not something to be sold for a penny; and emotional experiences were the essence of living. Bettera dinner of herbs where beauty is than many profitable baskets of grapes.
So he turned to the expectant woman beside him and praised and praised. These gardens were a revelation of her mind, he told her, a cross-section of her soul. Unconsciously he began to batter down George Alexander’s arguments against thrift and close buying and selling and all the other despicable acts of trade.
The penniless are the most eloquent abusers of wealth! What is money, he asked her derisively, compared with the wealth before them! “Let the millioned-dollared ride! Barefoot trudging at his side” hath what wealth cannot purchase. Thrift? Economy? Profit? He repudiated them all and apostrophized the work before him, and crowned with rhetoric the Workwoman.
The Workwoman glowed and applauded; and for payment she let him into the secrets of her craft; her fight against mullein and sorrel, grubs, and cut-worms; the mysteries of mulch; the struggle to keep a steady Christian colour in sweet-williams, hollyhocks and columbines; the everlasting effort to lift the cup of cold water to the lips of the ever-thirsty gladiolus; the war against the onrush of Michaelmas daisy, Bouncing Bet and hawkbit; the constant necessity of nipping helianthus, phlox and golden glow, which otherwise grow rank and ungainly; the multifarious uses of sprays for killing everything from larkspur blight to rose-bugs. And she confessed her private theories of soils and her views on seed propagation and root splitting; on fertilizers; on cold frames; and on continuous bloom throughout the year.
“Helen Albee tells me that no one can get a continuous blue,” she warmed up enthusiastically, “but Idid it one year.” And then she started a technical avalanche of names. “Who is Helen Albee? She is a fellow-conspirator among us hardy perennialists. I give her credit for all this—she and Lena Walker—I was nowhere until I met those two.”
There was no false egotism about this artist. Richard was astonished at the change in her. Her old self had almost come back, and something moved him to tell her so. They had been sitting for some time in the shadow of the hydrangeas and were facing out towards the Lake.
“No;” she closed her lips firmly; “I am not myself yet.... I am not well. Ever since——”
Abruptly she stopped speaking and with caution pressed a hand to her heart, almost furtively. It was there that Walter had struck her, but she would not have admitted it. The blow had been something more than mental; it had left a physical bruise which declined to heal; and she was conscious of occasional inward pain which she tried to tell herself would soon pass away. But Richard, who saw the quiver pass over her face, did not observe the motion of her hand, and he could not have suspected its cause. And even if he had guessed, this weak old woman would have straightened up valiantly and would have lied about it with deceiving outward cheerfulness. The Virginia plantation of the early nineteenth century had been moved north with all its characteristic virtues intact!
But she had begun to confess once more to this dutiful squire. “No; I am not well,” she said.
“I am sorry,” Richard said feelingly.
“I know you are,” she nodded her head several times thoughtfully; “I feel your sincerity. That’s why I tell you so much that I conceal from others. Let metell you some more.... You are as good as a priest,” she smiled at him. “It is only in my gardens that I feel my old self. I am not strong any more—no! you need not try to encourage me; I know. But up here among my flowers I fool myself—I act as if I were in control of things; I boss the black boys about and boss even the flowers and the rose-bugs. I’m happy up here; I have nothing to worry me.”
She stopped, evidently at the preamble of her confession. Walter was on Richard’s mind, and on that score he was preparing himself to infuse self-confidence into her; but her mind was leagues from Walter.
Richard laughed to dispel the effect of her gloomy tone and asked what on earth she had to worry about.
“‘Red Jacket’ is mortgaged to the limit, and the interest is long overdue; I have been borrowing for twenty years, and I don’t know how many thousands I owe,” she remarked simply, as casually as if she had invited him to enjoy the view.
The unexpected information shocked him, although certainly George Alexander had given him ample clues. He began a speech about the uselessness of money—one of his favourite poetic theories—but it did not ring true. For the first time in his life he found that Thoreauean point of view distasteful.
“Does Jerry know?” he interrupted himself.
“She’ll know if she can ever make head or tail out of the books,” she answered serenely. “Well!” she gave a tremendous sigh of relief and actually smiled. “I’m glad I don’t have to do the juggling any longer. I’ve thrown it all on Jerry now. She’s young and able, I guess. She’ll find a way out, never fear.”
And so she talked complacently, meanwhile with every other sentence giving ugly details which showedplainly enough, even to Richard’s non-commercial experience, that Jerry would have to be a financial magician to find any way out except via bankruptcy. He tried to quiz her, but she put him off with the plea that the business of managing the estate was no longer her affair. She was too happy with her perennials to spoil it all with figures that would not come out right. She joked about it, too; showing all too clearly that if bossing things in the gardens had given her the appearance of her old masterful self, it was an appearance only. A bit of her mind, seemingly, had become atrophied without in the least harming the remainder. Heretofore she had been both a dominating manager of a complicated estate and a clever gardener; at present the dominating manager had vanished, leaving only the clever gardener.
Richard rose precipitately. He must see Jerry at once. She had seemed particularly worried lately; and he remembered with a pang that he and Jawn had been trying to joke her into good spirits. With this calamity hanging over her—already she must have got an inkling of the state of affairs—they had been unforgivably cruel. He must go to her instantly.
“Who is your lawyer?” he asked Mrs. Wells; his tone was almost crisp.
“My lawyer?” she inquired in turn. “I never had any.”
“You speak of mortgages and bonds and transfers of property,” he followed up quickly. “Whom do you consult about such matters?”
“Oh,” she smiled sweetly; “you mean Mitchell Lear, I suppose. Of course, he’s a lawyer; but I never go to him about law matters—only as a friend.”
“Does he know about your affairs?”
She thought carefully. “Ye-es,” she admitted. “He knows; not that I ever told him much, but he always guessed, I reckon. I fibbed to him about everything,” she laughed at the remembrance, “but you can’t fool Mitchell Lear. Words aren’t anything to him; he just looks on quietly through your eyes and into the very privacy of your soul. Once I told him a long story about deciding to buy more orchard land—buy, you understand—and after I was quite done, he nodded his wise head and remarked, ‘I’m sorry you’ve made up your mind to sell!’ ‘But I said “buy,”’ said I. ‘I heard you,’ said he; ‘and I say that you are making a mistake to sell.’”
Mrs. Wells laughed quietly and contentedly at the remembrance. “And the funny part of it was,” she told Richard, “I had just sold all the orchard we possessed; and itwasa mistake, too,” she added, “just as he knew it would be.... Oh, well! I mustn’t think of those things any more; they make me too unhappy.”
Mrs. Wells was sorry to see Richard go—there were many more things to show him, but he would have none of them. With a faintly troubled face she watched him stride down a path and disappear behind a grove of hollyhocks. But in a moment or two she had forgotten about him and was calling her blacks about her. The imperative duty of the hour was rose-bugs.