Chapter IX
I AM not getting on at all; it is days since Delia was here and I wrote about her. There is certainly this advantage in the walls of a house, they make a fold for your mind, which must browse inside, picking up what it can. But existence in a garden was not meant to be interfered with by a pen; we have the best reason for believing that Adam never wrote for publication, much less Eve, who of course, when one thinks of it, was absorbed at that time in the first principles of dress-making. I envy her that original seam; sewing is an ideal occupation in a garden. You can be for ever looking up and the hand goes on of itself; everything rhymes with your needle, and your mind seems stimulated by its perfunctory superintendence to spin and weave other things, often lovely and interesting things which it is a pain to haveforgotten by dinner-time. I should very much prefer fine stitching to composition out here if I could choose. One might then look at the sun on the leaves without the itch and necessity to explain just what it is like. Moreover, there is always this worry: you cannot make a whole chapter out of the sun on the leaves, even at different angles, and yet before that happy circumstance what else is there to say? But how little use there is in crying for what one was not meant to have. The fairy godmother who put this unwilling instrument into my hand and denied me a needle will have something to answer for if ever I meet her. Meanwhile I might as well confess that my finest stitching only makes mirth for Thisbe, and “lay a violence,” as Stevenson advises, upon my will to other ends.
It is the very height of the season in the garden. The roses have held several drawing-rooms and practically everybody is here. Sweet-peas flutter up two of the verandah pillars, the rest are dark with honeysuckle and heavy with Maréchal Niels. Thepansies are thicker than ever, and a very elegant double wisteria, a lady from Japan, trails her purple skirts over the trellis under which the rickshaws go to their abode. The corn-bottles have come up exactly where I asked them to, scattered thick among the leaves of the chrysanthemums which are already tall and bushy. They are exactly the right blue in exactly the right green and they give a little air, not at all a disagreeable little air, of discernment and sophistication to their corner of the garden. I would like to venture to say that they resemble blue stars in a green sky, if I were sure of offending nobody’s sense of humour. It is natural enough to observe this and pass on, but why should one find a subtle pleasure in the comparison, and linger over it? It must be the same throb of joyful activity with which the evolved human intelligence first detected a likeness between any two of the phenomena about it, and triumphed in the perception, attracted to wisdom and stirred to art. Those indeed were days to live in, when everything was mysteriously to copyand inherit and nothing was exploited, explained, laid bare, when the great sweet thoughts were all to think and heroism had not yet received its molecular analysis, and babies equipped with an instinctive perception of the fundamental weakness of socialistic communism were neither born nor thought of. These seem violent reflections to make in a garden, and they may well be obscured behind the long bed of poppies and field-daisies and more bluets that runs along the side of the house under the windows that support the roses. If you can tell me for what primitive reason poppies and field-daisies and corn-flowers go well together I had rather you didn’t.
I have clumps and clumps of hollyhocks, and a balustrade of them, pink and white ones, on each side of the steps that run down from the verandah in front of the drawing-room door. It is an unsophisticated thing, the single hollyhock, like a bashful school child in a sun-bonnet. Do what you will you cannot make it feel at home among the beaux and belles of highlife in the garden; it never looks really happy except just inside a cottage paling with a bunch of rhubarb on one side and a tangle of “old man” on the other. Still it is a good and grateful flower in whatever station it pleases the sun to call it. It gets along on the merest necessities of life when times are bad and water scarce, and flowers, with anything like a chance, twice in the season. One cannot, after all, encourage class feeling in the garden; there every one must stand on his own roots, and take his share of salts and carbon dioxide without precedence, and the hollyhocks in my garden receive as much consideration as anybody.
Petunias are up all over the place, purple and white and striped. I knew by experience that we could have too many petunias on this shelf, so whenever a vague, young pushing thing disclosed itself to be a petunia, as it nearly always did, I requested Atma to pull it up. Nevertheless they survive surprisingly everywhere, looking out among the feet of the roses, flaunting over the forget-me-nots, unexpected in a box of seedlingasters. Now if I were going to recognize social distinctions in the garden, which I am not, I should call the good petunia a person unmistakably middle-class. Whether it is this incapacity of hers to see a snub, or her very full skirt, or her very high colour, the petunia always seems to me a bourgeoise little lady in her Sunday best, with her hair smooth and her temper well kept under for the occasion. I think she leads her family a nagging life, and goes to church regularly. One should always mass them; a single petunia here and there among the community of flowers is more desolate and ineffective than most maiden ladies. Rather late this spring we discovered a corner of the bed in front of the dining-room window to be quite empty, and what to put in we couldn’t think, and were considering, when Atma told us that he knew of a thousand petunias homeless and roaming the shelf. I quite believed him, and bade him gather them in, with such a resultant blaze of purple as I shall never in future be without. The border just beyond them is simply shouting with yellowcoreopsis, and behind that rise the dark branches of the firs on the khud-side, and between these, very often in broken pictures sharp against the blue, the jagged points and peaks of the far snows. All this every morning the person has with her eggs and bacon who sits opposite the dining-room window. I am glad to say that the other members of my family object to the glare.
Atma has a liberal and progressive mind toward the garden; he is always trying to smuggle some new thing into it. In out-of-the-way corners I constantly come upon perfect strangers, well-rooted and entirely at home, and when I ask him by whose order they were admitted, he smiles apologetically and says that without doubt they will be very beautiful, and that his brother gave them to him. He can never tell me the name. “It will be so high,” he shows me with his hand, stooping, “and the flower will be red, simply red it will arrive.” I look at it without enthusiasm, and weakly let it stay. Generally it “arrives” a common little disappointment, but once a greatleggy thing turned out an evening primrose, and I knew, before it was too late, that I had been entertaining an angel unawares.
“To grow a little catholic,” writes Stevenson, “is the compensation of years.” Dear shade, is it so? In the spiritual outlook, perhaps, in the moral retrospect,—but in matters of taste, in likes and dislikes? You who wrote nothing lightly must have proved this dispensation, poorer spirits can only wish it more general. I remember youth as curious and enterprising, hospitable to everything, and I begin to find the middle years jealously content with what they have. Who, when he has reached the age of all the world, looks with instinctive favour upon anything new? An acquaintance, who may create the common debt of friendship; you are long since heavily involved. An author, who may insist upon intimately engaging your intelligence,—a thing you feel, after a time, to be a liberty in a new-comer. Or even a flower, offering another sentiment to the little store that holds some pain already. Now this godetia. I suppose it argues adepth of ignorance, but until Mr. Johnson recommended it to me in the spring, I had never heard of godetia. Mr. Johnson is the source of seeds and bulbs for Simla, we all go to him; but I, for one, always come away a little ruffled by his habit of referring to everything by its Latin name, and plainly showing that his respect for you depends upon your understanding him. I have wished to preserve Mr. Johnson’s respect, and things have come up afterward that I did not think I had ordered. However, this is by the way. Mr. Johnson assured me that godetia had a fine fleshy flower of variegated colours, would be an abundant bloomer, and with reasonable care should make a good appearance. I planted it with misgivings, and watched its advent with aloofness, I knew I shouldn’t recognize it, and I didn’t. I had never seen it before, I very nearly said so; and at my time of life, with so many old claims pressing, I could not attempt a new affection. And I have taken the present opportunity, when Atma’s back is turned, and pulled it all up. Besidesit may have been fleshy, but it wasn’t pretty, and the slugs ate it till its appearance was disgraceful.
I suppose our love of flowers is impregnated with our love of life and our immense appreciation of each other. We hand our characteristics up to God to figure in; we look for them in animals with delight and laughter, and it is even our pleasure to find them out here in the garden. Who cares much for lupins, for example; they are dull fellows, they have no faces; yet who does not care for every flower with a heart and eyes, that gives back your glance to you and holds up its head bravely to any day’s luck, as you would like to do.
But it is growing late. I can still see a splendid crimson cactus glooming at me from his tub in the verandah; the rest of the garden has drawn away into the twilight. Only the honeysuckle, that nobody notices when the sun is bright and the flowers all talk at once, sends out a timid sweetness to the night and murmurs, “I am here.” If I might have had a seam to do, it would havebeen finished; but instead there has been this vexatious chapter, which only announces, when all is said and done, that another human being has spent a day in the garden. I intended to write about the applied affections.
But it is too late even for the misapplied affections, generally thought, I believe, the more interesting presentment. Happy Thisbe on the verandah, conscious of another bud to her tapestry, glances at the fading west and makes ready to put all away. I will lay down my pen, as she does her needle, and gather up my sheets and scraps, as she does her silks and wools; and humbly, if I can get no one else to do it for me, carry my poor pattern into the house.