Chapter XIX
I WAS congratulating the hydrangea this morning on its delightful attitude toward life. This is no virtue of the hydrangea’s; it is a thing conferred, a mere capacity, but how enviable! All through its youth and proper blossoming time, which is the rains, it has the pink-and-white prettiness that belongs to that period. When it is over, instead of acknowledging middle age by any form of frumpishness the hydrangea grows delicately green again; it retires agreeably, indistinguishably into leaves, a most artistic pose. That, too, passes in these sharp days when the sun is only gold that glitters, and the hydrangea, taking its unerring tone from the season, turns a kind of purplish rose, and still never drops a petal, never turns a hair. In the end the hydrangea will be able to say with truth that it has not died without having lived.
Sooner or later I might perhaps have seen that for myself, but it was Cousin Christina who pointed it out to me. It is one of the subtler and more gratifying forms of selfishness to ask persons of taste to help you to enjoy your garden; and at no one’s expense do I indulge in this oftener than at Cousin Christina’s. She spends more time with me here under the pencil-cedar than any one else does, partly because I think she likes me a little and the garden a great deal, and partly because she has fallen, recently, upon very idle circumstances.
We always thought, she and I, that we should more or less take to one another. Mutual friends told us so, and there was evidence to support the statement. We approved what they carried back and forth between us of our respective habits and opinions; and once I saw a scrap of her interesting handwriting conveying a view in terms very net. Constantly we were made to feel that upon the basis of human intercourse—the delicate terms of which who can quite expose?—we had things togive each other, and constantly we said with intention, “Next summer I must really manage to meet her.” That is all I knew of Cousin Christina, except that life had offered her, somehow, less than she had a title to, and that she spent a great deal of time in her garden.
And then—“on sait trop de cela, que les heures sont comptées à l’homme qui doit mourir, et on agit comme si le trésor de ces heures était inépuisable, l’occasion indéfiniment renouvable et nos amis éternels.”[5]Cousin Christina died last year, and we had never met.
It will be judged how much I value her visits now, now that she has so far to come, and her efforts to make me understand; we who remain are so deaf. There were many points at which the world irritated her while she was conditioned in it; and I think the remoteness of this place appeals to her in her freedom; she is pleased in its great lines and vast spaces which yet hold just the touch of human enterprise and affectionwhich she too thought essential, here in my garden. She seems, at all events, to belong to the vague, as if she loved it, and of course I can never lay my hand on her.
She is devoted to the garden, constantly she trails about it, having nothing to say to me, with precisely that attitude toward a rose and that hand under a top-heavy aster which separates the true lover from the mere admirer. Dahlias swing free as she passes, and leaves that keep the sun off the convolvuluses get out of their way. It is not the wind, it is Cousin Christina. She is more intimate with the flowers than I; almost invariably, when I show her anything new in bloom she informs me “I saw that yesterday.” She does not seem to think it a liberty to see another person’s flowers before the person herself. I criticise her there.
I cannot put down what she says in the form of dialogue, because, although the meaning is plain, it seems to take some other. She herself is amused at the idea of confining her within quotation marks. It comes to this that I can give you only an essence,an extract, of what she conveys. How blundering and explosive, after Cousin Christina’s way, are the great words of other people! I like sleeping in the attic because the sun climbing up behind the shoulder of Jakko, comes in there first. This morning, looking up through the little high window in the wall I saw a hawk sailing with broad sunlight on his wings, though none had reached the window yet, and the attic was still grey and waiting. I have seen it all day, the hawk up there with his wings gleaming, but it was Cousin Christina who suggested that perhaps after all it was only necessary to rise high enough to meet the light. A more definite showing, it appears, was what she lacked most in life. Among a bewildering worldful of facts, appearances and incidents, vague, she complains, is the short existence, and untrustworthy the interests which are our only guides to spend it to the best account. She seems grieved now to discover how much more there was and how much better worth doing. Upon one thingonly I feel that she congratulates herself. Among our poor chances there is one which is supreme, and she had it. Within her radius shesaw. The mirror was hers which prints the lovely suggestion of things, and I have learned from her and from the garden that there is no finer or more delicate or more charming occupation for a person of leisure than to sit and polish her mirror.
She did not live as long as I wish to do, and I think at the time she would have been glad to stay. Nevertheless, she looks with no great encouragement upon the efforts after completer health which I hope I have not too continuously referred to in these chapters. I gather from her that if you are asked to an entertainment, you do not reproach your host that it is so soon over, nor are you supposed to resent other people getting more extended invitations. The lights and the music please you, but at the end you never hesitate to step outside again into the dark. Perhaps we are all here quite as long as we are wanted. Life is very hospitable, but she cannot puton every card “1 to 70 years.” I gather that these are Cousin Christina’s views; and I reply that it is easy to be wise after the event, which I am nevertheless still inclined to postpone.
On days when life is a pure pleasure she is not much with me, but on days when it is a mere duty—she knew many of those herself, poor dear—I can always depend upon her. It was she who lifted her long-handled glasses and looked at Thisbe, who one morning came and stood in the sun between us, and quoted,—
“A happy soul that all the wayTo heaven hath a summer’s day,”
“A happy soul that all the wayTo heaven hath a summer’s day,”
“A happy soul that all the way
To heaven hath a summer’s day,”
which exactly prints Thisbe, and she who described Lutetia as soothing but uninteresting, like a patent food—her invalid’s fancies seem to cling to her. Cousin Christina is a little difficult to please; she dismissed the fresh-coloured, vigorous Alexandra very shortly as a nice thing growing in a garden, and when I hinted that Alexandra held views of her own she admitted that thecreature had a strong scent. She permits herself these vagaries, these liberties with my acquaintances, the majority of whom she finds, I fear, a trifle limited. And she has a courage of expression which belongs, I am sure, only to the disembodied. Nothing rouses her to more impatience than the expression “quite a character.” Is it not deplorable and distressing, she demands, that we are not all characters? She herself was very much of a character, one could imagine soft, stupid, little women saying so, at meetings to dress dolls for zenanas, and how it would irritate her when the mild imputation was brought home to her. She is delightful to take one’s indignations to; she underlines every word, though she pretends a tolerance for the unintelligent which I am sure she does not feel. “Consider,” I almost heard her say, “if we clever ones of the world were not so few, how miserable the stupid ones would be! Secure in their grunting majority they let us smite them and turn the other cheek, but if they had to grunt solitarily!” She sometimes forgets,like that, that she is gone, is not. How sharp must have been the individuality that refuses so obstinately to blend with the universal current!
In the simple mosaic here, put together at odd times, piece by piece rubbed up as it came and set in its place, many of the fragments are here. I know this because they are not things that would naturally occur to me, whereas they correspond exactly with the sentiments I know she used to hold. I have nevertheless written them out without scruple because she seems in a way to have given them to me.
My possession in her is uncertain after all, hardly greater, I suppose, than a kind of constructive regret. Yet somehow I imagine it is more tangible than hers in the asters and the carnations. Her impressions were always strong and her affections always loyal; but divested, denuded as she is, I fancy it must be only the memory that flowers are beautiful that brings her here, poor ghost.