[Illustration]




ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN

By Elizabeth Von Arnim




INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION


Originally published in 1898, “Elizabeth and her German Garden” is the
first book by Marie Annette Beauchamp—known all her life as
“Elizabeth”. The book, anonymously published, was an incredible
success, going through printing after printing by several publishers
over the next few years. (I myself own three separate early editions of
this book by different publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.) The
present Gutenberg edition was scanned from the illustrated deluxe
MacMillan (London) edition of 1900.

Elizabeth was a cousin of the better-known writer Katherine Mansfield
(whose real name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Born in Australia,
Elizabeth was educated in England. She was reputed to be a fine
organist and musician. At a young age, she captured the heart of a
German Count, was persuaded to marry him, and went to live in Germany.
Over the next years she bore five daughters. After her husband’s death
and the decline of the estate, she returned to England. She was a
friend to many of high social standing, including people such as H. G.
Wells (who considered her one of the finest wits of the day). Some time
later she married the brother of Bertrand Russell; which marriage was a
failure and ended in divorce. Eventually Elizabeth fled to America at
the outbreak of the Second World War, and there died in 1941.

Elizabeth is best known to modern readers by the name “Elizabeth von
Arnim”, author of “The Enchanted April” which was recently made into a
successful film by the same title. Another of her books, “Mr.
Skeffington” was also once made into a film starring Bette Davis, circa
1940.

Some of Elizabeth’s work is published in modern editions by Virago and
other publishers. Among these are: “Love”, “The Enchanted April”,
“Caravaners”, “Christopher and Columbus”, “The Pastor’s Wife”, “Mr.
Skeffington”, “The Solitary Summer”, and “Elizabeth’s Adventures in
Rugen”. Also published by Virago is her non-autobiography “All the Dogs
of My Life”—as the title suggests, it is the story not of her life, but
of the lives of the many dogs she owned; though of course it does touch
upon her own experiences.

In the centennial year of this book’s first publication, I hope that
its availability through Project Gutenberg will stir some renewed
interest in Elizabeth and her delightful work. She is, I would venture,
my favorite author; and I hope that soon she will be one of your
favorites.

R. McGowan San Jose, April 11 1998.




ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN




_May_ 7_th_.—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late
afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the
temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed
half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are
carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of
nightingales. The gentleman owl says [Music], and she answers from her
tree a little way off, [Music], beautifully assenting to and completing
her lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think
it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be
frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.

This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house,
much less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty
old place that the people who might have lived here and did not,
deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must have
belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the
world seems chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does not sound
pretty; but the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent
of the wet earth and young leaves.

I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are
servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring
happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though
it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced
for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and
children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the
decencies.

There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches
sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white
blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I
never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place. Even
across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in
the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture
of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.

My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great
stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave
off the bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their
lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest
gray-green, and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and
everywhere the breathless silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful
too, for one can see across them into eternity almost, and to go out on
to them with one’s face towards the setting sun is like going into the
very presence of God.

In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery
where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray
stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The
house is very old, and has been added to at various times. It was a
convent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the vaulted chapel, with its
brick floor worn by pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall.
Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more than once, as is
duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what was then
the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion
of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to
his convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who
were not without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the
wide, empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of
silence here.

From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the
plain, with no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue
line of distant forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the
setting sun—nothing but a green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge
against the sunset. I love those west windows better than any others,
and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the house so that even times
of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and the young woman who
attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties about a
mistress recumbent in an easy-chair before an open window, and not to
profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved
at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the
sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad
muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that
I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the
news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and
that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when
you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will
hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all forms of
needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for
keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.

We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as
well make use of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five
years were spent in a flat in a town, and during their whole
interminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy,
which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that
my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear place
with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and
completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind
taking the least notice of it, and in May—in all those five lovely
Mays—no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the
virginia creeper madder every year, until at last, in October, the very
roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels
and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and not a living
creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, which got
into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall
into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the
windows. All that was here,—peace, and happiness, and a reasonable
life,—and yet it never struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I
am astonished, and can in no way account for the tardiness of my
discovery that here, in this far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven.
Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even use the place in summer,
that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every
year; until at last, in the early spring of last year, having come down
for the opening of the village school, and wandering out afterwards
into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wet earth
or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the
happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It
was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and
entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown,
quiet earth; leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp
and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight
in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child, and the five
wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and the world was full of hope,
and I vowed myself then and there to nature, and have been happy ever
since.

My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that
it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at
any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks
from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone,
supposed to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a
matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone out
of it.

How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the
days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar
on my eleven o’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with
dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its
charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now
than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were
not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little
faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a
world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three
lawns,—they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into
meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,—and under and among the
groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white
anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in
particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so
beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the
painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few
stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the bird-cherries
blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the
joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs—masses and masses
of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the
side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long
right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could
see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time
came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and
four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the
south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and
grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away
in a dream of pink and purple peace.

There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house, so
that on the plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my
other half calls my _fantaisie déréglée_ as regards meals—that is to
say, meals so simple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a
tray; and I lived, I remember, on salad and bread and tea the whole
time, sometimes a very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as
the old lady thought, from starvation. Who but a woman could have stood
salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and scent of
the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew in grace every day,
though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressed by the
necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of which
are conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper
maintenance of the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded by
joints of meat, how often do I think of my salad days, forty in number,
and of the blessedness of being alone as I was then alone!

And then the evenings, when the workmen had all gone and the house was
left to emptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up
her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another
part of the house had been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave
the friendly frogs and owls, and with my heart somewhere down in my
shoes lock the door to the garden behind me, and pass through the long
series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly
pails of painters’ mess, and humming a tune to make myself believe I
liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up the
creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final
rush of panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!

There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great
dinner-bell to bed with me so that at least I might be able to make a
noise if frightened in the night, though what good it would have been I
don’t know, as there was no one to hear. The housemaid slept in another
little cell opening out of mine, and we two were the only living
creatures in the great empty west wing. She evidently did not believe
in ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep immediately after
getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, “_mais je les redoute_,” as
a French lady said, who from her books appears to have been
strongminded.

The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted
me to see it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but
placid, it was all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and
other noises. I used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light
sleep by the cracking of some board, and listen to the indifferent
snores of the girl in the next room. In the morning, of course, I was
as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold perspirations of the
night before; but even the nights seem to me now to have been
delightful, and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in
every wind and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through
them all over again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house,
empty of servants and upholstery.

How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful
new papers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and
build all sorts of castles in the air about their future and their
past. Would the nuns who had lived in them know their little
white-washed cells again, all gay with delicate flower papers and clean
white paint? And how astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned
into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a cleanliness of body
equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as a snare of
the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked
at the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first
whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish
organist, or rather with the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and
fiery moustache which was all I ever saw of him, and which I loved to
distraction for at least six months; at the end of which time, going
out with my governess one day, I passed him in the street, and
discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined with a
turn-down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any more.

The first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect, for I
had not a thought of anything but the peace and beauty all round me.
Then he appeared suddenly who has a right to appear when and how he
will and rebuked me for never having written, and when I told him that
I had been literally too happy to think of writing, he seemed to take
it as a reflection on himself that I could be happy alone. I took him
round the garden along the new paths I had had made, and showed him the
acacia and lilac glories, and he said that it was the purest
selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were with
me, and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease
him by offering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood
ready at the foot of the little verandah steps when we came back, but
nothing appeased that Man of Wrath, and he said he would go straight
back to the neglected family. So he went; and the remainder of the
precious time was disturbed by twinges of conscience (to which I am
much subject) whenever I found myself wanting to jump for joy. I went
to look at the painters every time my feet were for taking me to look
at the garden; I trotted diligently up and down the passages; I
criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done
in all the rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I
could not manage to fret and yearn. What are you to do if your
conscience is clear and your liver in order and the sun is shining?

_May_ 10_th_.—I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening and
this year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be
done, and have at least made one great stride—from ipomæa to tea-roses.

The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is all round the house, but
the principal part is on the south side and has evidently always been
so. The south front is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one
into the other, and the walls are covered with virginia creeper. There
is a little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight of rickety
wooden steps down into what seems to have been the only spot in the
whole place that was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into the
lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of
different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and
the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by
me. These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be
seen (except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring
in the grass, not because it wanted to, but because it could not help
it), and these I had sown with ipomæa, the whole eleven, having found a
German gardening book, according to which ipomæa in vast quantities was
the one thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise.
Nothing else in that book was recommended with anything like the same
warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary,
I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the eleven beds
but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for the
promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.

Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet-peas which made me very
happy all the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few
hollyhocks under the south windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But
the lilies, after being transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay,
for how was I to know it was the way of lilies? And the hollyhocks
turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was
decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At present we are only
just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and
borders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round
the sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made
mistakes with some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold
communion on this or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is
by making mistakes. All eleven were to have been carpeted with purple
pansies, but finding that I had not enough and that nobody had any to
sell me, only six have got their pansies, the others being sown with
dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte
roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one
with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two with
Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with
three sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt
Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and
several of the others are, I think, but of course I must wait and see,
being such an ignorant person. Then I have had two long beds made in
the grass on either side of the semicircle, each sown with mignonette,
and one filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with Jules Finger
and the Bride; and in a warm corner under the drawing-room windows is a
bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc;
while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a
group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing Rubens,
Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hen. Edith Gifford. All these roses are
dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George
Bruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when
the tea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to
anything; and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little
things have achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or
increase of lovely red shoot.

The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south
windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of
which I have sown two long borders of sweet-peas facing the rose beds,
so that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to
look at until the autumn, when everything is to make place for more
tea-roses. The path leading away from this semicircle down the garden
is bordered with China roses, white and pink, with here and there a
Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I have
misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas,
for the Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows
look as though they intended to be big bushes.

There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the
least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the
flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not
relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and
depriving them for ever of the breath of God. It was no doubt because I
was so ignorant that I rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread
and made my tea-roses face a northern winter; but they did face it
under fir branches and leaves, and not one has suffered, and they are
looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy themselves as any
roses, I am sure, in Europe.




_May_ 14_th_.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the three
babies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already
several of the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners
consoled when duty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent
and drooping sunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores
and nimble black legs.

These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the
gardener’s assistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden,
but then neither are we ever out of it. The gardener has been here a
year and has given me notice regularly on the first of every month, but
up to now has been induced to stay on. On the first of this month he
came as usual, and with determination written on every feature told me
he intended to go in June, and that nothing should alter his decision.
I don’t think he knows much about gardening, but he can at least dig
and water, and some of the things he sows come up, and some of the
plants he plants grow, besides which he is the most unflaggingly
industrious person I ever saw, and has the great merit of never
appearing to take the faintest interest in what we do in the garden. So
I have tried to keep him on, not knowing what the next one may be like,
and when I asked him what he had to complain of and he replied
“Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has a personal objection to me
because of my eccentric preference for plants in groups rather than
plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts from
gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing
something new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead
of explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have
wisdom at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I
quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to
lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage
to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and
wish we could be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty
years’ time, when the garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in
all its ways, of my first happy struggles and failures.

All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the
autumn into their permanent places, and all through April he went about
with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of
beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a
review. Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when
I explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and
not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare
spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than
usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had
planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little
lines of five plants in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five
rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five
rockets, and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to
the end. When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders
and had known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining
borders were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have
patience and see how they look this summer, before digging them up
again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.

If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put
in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can
only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid
down by that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a
garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste
places blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April
during the servants’ dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by
the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and
feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow
surreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house,
and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to
save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one
hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in
Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that
sad business of the apple.

What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds,
and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town
acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don’t
know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if
condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all
my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I
should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself
very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in
the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm
evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the
verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the
May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made
only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and
hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud
hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of
past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair.
The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be
killed. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer
and not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of
all the fun.

This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in
April, is five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so
that the discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the
remaining middle or May baby. While I was stooping over a group of
hollyhocks planted on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill
the garden possesses, the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a
tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror. I
stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole
army of young cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got
through the hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and
most precious belongings. The nurse and I managed to chase them away,
but not before they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in
the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses, and
even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying to
persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be
ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany calls
afternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the holes as
well as she could with mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses,
cheated for ever of their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking
on dejectedly. The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond
her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and went
after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen. She planted
herself in front of them brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row
and stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept them off until
one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and having found the
cowherd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating. The
cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat
him, but he took his punishment as part of the day’s work and made no
remark of any sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather
breeches, and I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work
for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with
less imagination than a poet ought to take it up as a profession.

After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with
as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I
happened to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite
close to my head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught
it easily, for it could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at
all is a mystery. It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the
quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go,
but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a
journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often said how
much he would like to have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it
into a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near where it had been
sitting, and which cannot be far from its nest and its mother. We had
hardly subsided again to our tea when I saw two more balls of fluff on
the ground in the long grass and scarcely distinguishable at a little
distance from small mole-hills. These were promptly united to their
relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath comes home, not
only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,
but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take
them from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again some
day—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I
put a small pot of water in the cage, though they never could have
tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves.
I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of the mice
and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents. But the
raindrop idea is prettier.




_May_ 15_th_.—How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owls into
a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never
pander to the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morning I got up early
to see how they were getting on, and I found the door of the cage wide
open and no owls to be seen. I thought of course that somebody had
stolen them—some boy from the village, or perhaps the chastised
cowherd. But looking about I saw one perched high up in the branches of
the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead on the ground. The
third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in its nest. The
parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance they got
the door open, and then dragged the little ones out and up into the
tree. The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch, as it
was a windy night and its neck is broken. There is one happy life less
in the garden to-day through my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm
day—just the sort of weather for young soft things to enjoy and grow
in. The babies are greatly distressed, and are digging a grave, and
preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.

Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival, and running out I
breathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give
him the owls he has so often said he would like to have, and how sorry
I was they were gone, and how grievous the death of one, and so on
after the voluble manner of women.

He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, “I am surprised
at such cruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so? She had
never done you any harm.”

Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced than
ever that he sang true who sang—

Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone.




_May_ 16_th_.—The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,
not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to
exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings
crowd round me at every step—it is there that I am sorry for the
unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse
than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are
forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and
weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I run
out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause,
it is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many
friends? And always the same, always ready to welcome me and fill me
with cheerful thoughts. Happy children of a common Father, why should
I, their own sister, be less content and joyous than they? Even in a
thunder storm, when other people are running into the house, I run out
of it. I do not like thunder storms—they frighten me for hours before
they come, because I always feel them on the way; but it is odd that I
should go for shelter to the garden. I feel better there, more taken
care of, more petted. When it thunders, the April baby says, “There’s
_lieber Gott_ scolding those angels again.” And once, when there was a
storm in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know why
_lieber Gott_ didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so
_tight_ asleep. They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and
English, adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in
English words in the middle of a German sentence. It always reminds me
of Justice tempered by Mercy.

We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by the name
of the Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground of
innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings, calling each
other out to combat with bayings that ring through the silence and send
agreeable shivers through the lonely listener. I often walk there in
September, late in the evening, and sitting on a fallen tree listen
fascinated to their angry cries.

We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had never seen
such things nor had imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirschwald is
a little open wood of silver birches and springy turf starred with
flowers, and there is a tiny stream meandering amiably about it and
decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have dreams of having a
little cottage built there, with the daisies up to the door, and no
path of any sort—just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside and
a purple clematis outside. Two rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen. How
scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day! I know
the exact spot where it should stand, facing south-east, so that we
should get all the cheerfulness of the morning, and close to the
stream, so that we might wash our plates among the flags. Sometimes,
when in the mood for society, we would invite the remaining babies to
tea and entertain them with wild strawberries on plates of
horse-chestnut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily pleased than
a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny
cottage—indeed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would care to come.
Wise people want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy
themselves, and I feel perpetually apologetic when with them, for only
being able to offer them that which I love best myself—apologetic, and
ashamed of being so easily contented.

The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town (it took us the
whole afternoon to get there) the women after dinner were curious to
know how I had endured the winter, cut off from everybody and snowed up
sometimes for weeks.

“Ah, these husbands!” sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking her
head; “they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don’t care
what their sufferings are.”

Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady
was a great local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful
husband had brought his young wife into the country and had kept her
there, concealing her beauty and accomplishments from the public in a
most cruel manner, and how, after spending a certain number of years in
alternately weeping and producing progeny, she had quite lately run
away with somebody unspeakable—I think it was the footman, or the
baker, or some one of that sort.

“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I could put in a word.

“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” and the female
potentate patted my hand, but continued gloomily to shake her head.

“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,” asserted
another lady, the wife of a high military authority and not accustomed
to be contradicted.

“But I am.”

“But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible.”

“But I _am_.”

“Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter.”

“But I don’t want to be brought to town.”

“And not let you waste your best years buried.”

“But I like being buried.”

“Such solitude is not right.”

“But I’m not solitary.”

“And can come to no good.” She was getting quite angry.

There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark, and renewed
shaking of heads.

“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little
quieter; “I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and
shelves and shelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped.
Reading is an occupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste
of time. And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the
sun shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days?

“It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,” I proceeded,
“and my husband only did it to please me.”

“Such a good little wife,” repeated the patronising potentate, again
patting my hand with an air of understanding all about it, “really an
excellent little wife. But you must not let your husband have his own
way too much, my dear, and take my advice and insist on his bringing
you to town next winter.” And then they fell to talking about their
cooks, having settled to their entire satisfaction that my fate was
probably lying in wait for me too, lurking perhaps at that very moment
behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of the man in the hall
with my cloak.

I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction
when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the
pretty old house; and when I went into the library, with its four
windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the
familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and
knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with
never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate
that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own
blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen—a
life spent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils,
and the noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, and parties
and tattle for all amusement.

But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some
grand person, examining the details of my home through her eyeglass,
and coolly dissecting all that I so much prize from the convenient
distance of the open window, has finished up by expressing sympathy
with my loneliness, and on my protesting that I like it, has murmured,
“_sehr anspruchslos_.” Then indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness
of my wants; but only for a moment, and only under the withering
influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, the owner’s spirit is the
same spirit as that which dwells in my servants—girls whose one idea of
happiness is to live in a town where there are others of their sort
with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion for
being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a few
hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself
quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading
peace, that I have been alone at all. Not but what I like to have
people staying with me for a few days, or even for a few weeks, should
they be as _anspruchslos_ as I am myself, and content with simple joys;
only, any one who comes here and would be happy must have something in
him; if he be a mere blank creature, empty of head and heart, he will
very probably find it dull. I should like my house to be often full if
I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. They should be
welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to
confess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just
as much to see them go.

On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed
for some one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There has
been rain in the night, and the whole garden seems to be singing—not
the untiring birds only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass and
trees, the lilac bushes—oh, those lilac bushes! They are all out
to-day, and the garden is drenched with the scent. I have brought in
armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every pot and bowl and tub
in the house is filled with purple glory, and the servants think there
is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and I go from room to room
gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to
join the scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually
discover that there is no party, and wonder why the house should be
filled with flowers for one woman by herself, and I long more and more
for a kindred spirit—it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to
oneself—but kindred spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost as
well cry for the moon. It is true that my garden is full of friends,
only they are—dumb.




_June_ 3_rd_.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that
it requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus
delivered from casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love,
or people who love me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to
be deterred from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long
drive at the end. Not the least of my many blessings is that we have
only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at
least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping
in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with
your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your
dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certainty
that either you or the dropper-in will say something that would have
been better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and
mischief-making. A woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most
difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and things slip off it
with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very moment when it
ought to be most quiet. In such cases the only safe course is to talk
steadily about cooks and children, and to pray that the visit may not
be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found to be
the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at the
mere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are
experiences common to us all.

Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a
whole troop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied,
besides the business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged
on lines of the most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year,
and she returns the call a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in
the summer, and we ask them to dinner in the winter. By strictly
keeping to this, we avoid all danger of that closer friendship which is
only another name for frequent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a
German country lady should be, and is not only a pretty woman but an
energetic and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least,
effective. She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the
stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a
thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before
lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the
other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are
called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans,
count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless
dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal
punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste
to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to
enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I
would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the
dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on
tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat
her.

The making of cheese and butter and sausages _excellently_ well is a
work which requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable
form of activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the
intelligent. That my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident
by the bright alertness of her eyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that
only gain in prettiness by being used to some good purpose. She is a
recognised authority for miles around on the mysteries of
sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine; and
with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home,
her children are patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear
little German children, with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick
legs, should be. Who shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and
unworthy of a high order of intelligence? I protest that to me it is a
beautiful life, full of wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for
those listless moments of depression and boredom, and of wondering what
you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty woman’s eyes, and
are not unknown even to the most brilliant. But while admiring my
neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my
talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather
of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take
up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and,
sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very
existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the
glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields. And it would make me
perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so refractory as to require
boxing.

Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on
these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is,
and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally
about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the
vast and impassable distance that separates one’s own soul from the
soul of the person sitting in the next chair. I am speaking of
comparative strangers, people who are forced to stay a certain time by
the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you grope about
after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding that
you have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each
minute more benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in
the air and look vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of
wondering who they most take after, generally settling the question by
saying that the May baby, who is the beauty, is like her father, and
that the two more or less plain ones are the image of me, and this
decision, though I know it of old and am sure it is coming, never fails
to depress me as much as though I heard it for the first time. The
babies are very little and inoffensive and good, and it is hard that
they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation, and
their features pulled to pieces one by one, and all their weak points
noted and criticised, while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s
face, their very smile drawing forth comments on the shape of their
mouths; but, after all, it does not occur very often, and they are one
of those few interests one has in common with other people, as
everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I have discovered, is by no
means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few persons really love
theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very tone of
their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest
is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and
roses; but on reflection I don’t know a single person within twenty
miles who really cares for his garden, or has discovered the treasures
of happiness that are buried in it, and are to be found if sought for
diligently, and if needs be with tears. It is after these rare calls
that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever
suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for
allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoiled by anything
so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed
enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably
desire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy
by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach
to your neighbour’s soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the
probability being that he hasn’t got one.

The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put
them right along the very front of two borders, and I don’t know what
his feelings can be now that they are all flowering and the plants
behind are completely hidden; but I have learned another lesson, and no
future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite
so reckless a fashion. They are charming things, as delicate in colour
as in scent, and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the room with
fragrance. Single rows, however, are a mistake; I had masses of them
planted in the grass, and these show how lovely they can be. A border
full of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, must be beautiful;
but I don’t know how long they last nor what they look like when they
have done flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose.
Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No
doubt it would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to
learn solely by my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me
when to do things. At present the only flowers in the garden are the
rockets, the pansies in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis
and pontica. The azaleas have been and still are gorgeous; I only
planted them this spring and they almost at once began to flower, and
the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it were filled with
imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate
shade—what they will be next year and in succeeding years when the
bushes are bigger, I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On
gray, dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall
make a great bank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a
gloomy nook. My tea-roses are covered with buds which will not open for
at least another week, so I conclude this is not the sort of climate
where they will flower from the very beginning of June to November, as
they are said to do.




_July_ 11_th_.—There has been no rain since the day before Whitsunday,
five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for the
disappointment my beds have been. The dejected gardener went mad soon
after Whitsuntide, and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going
about with a spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining
that he felt safer that way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes
civilised beings who respect each other’s prejudices, until one day,
when I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen creeper—and after he bought
the revolver my tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and I
quite left off reading to him aloud—he turned round, looked me straight
in the face for the first time since he has been here, and said, “Do I
look like Graf X———— (a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?”
After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as
expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his
place, and I have only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with
the drought, and the neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my
blunders, the garden is in a sad condition; but even in a sad condition
it is the dearest place in the world, and all my mistakes only make me
more determined to persevere.

The long borders, where the rockets were, are looking dreadful. The
rockets have done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other
walks of life, have degenerated into sticks; and nothing else in those
borders intends to bloom this summer. The giant poppies I had planted
out in them in April have either died off or remained quite small, and
so have the columbines; here and there a delphinium droops unwillingly,
and that is all. I suppose poppies cannot stand being moved, or perhaps
they were not watered enough at the time of transplanting; anyhow,
those borders are going to be sown to-morrow with more poppies for next
year; for poppies I will have, whether they like it or not, and they
shall not be touched, only thinned out.

Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, directly I come out
and sit under the trees, and look at the dappled sky, and see the
sunshine on the cornfields away on the plain, all the disappointment
smooths itself out, and it seems impossible to be sad and discontented
when everything about me is so radiant and kind.

To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, that, sitting here in
this shady corner watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves
across the grass, and listening to the rooks quarrelling in the
treetops, I almost expect to hear English church bells ringing for the
afternoon service. But the church is three miles off, has no bells, and
no afternoon service. Once a fortnight we go to morning prayer at
eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with a room behind, whither
we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long or our flesh too
weak, and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson. In
winter the church is bitterly cold; it is not heated, and we sit
muffled up in more furs than ever we wear out of doors; but it would of
course be very wicked for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may
be, so he puts on a great many extra coats under his gown, and, as the
winter progresses, swells to a prodigious size. We know when spring is
coming by the reduction in his figure. The congregation sit at ease
while the parson does the praying for them, and while they are droning
the long-drawn-out chorales, he retires into a little wooden box just
big enough to hold him. He does not come out until he thinks we have
sung enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives us the signal. I
have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his box
and left us to go on singing. I am sure we should never dare to stop,
unauthorised by the Church. I asked him once what he did in there; he
looked very shocked at such a profane question, and made an evasive
reply.

If it were not for the garden, a German Sunday would be a terrible day;
but in the garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more
profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or fidgeting; only the little
flowers themselves and the whispering trees.

I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors—not stray callers
to be got rid of after a due administration of tea and things you are
sorry afterwards that you said, but people staying in the house and not
to be got rid of at all. All June was lost to me in this way, and it
was from first to last a radiant month of heat and beauty; but a garden
where you meet the people you saw at breakfast, and will see again at
lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy in. Besides, they had a
knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in them just when
I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of the library with
them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to get well
drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat for
roses is poison for books; and they gave me to understand that if they
had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long
ago—whereas I don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They have all
gone now, thank heaven, except one, so that I have a little breathing
space before others begin to arrive. It seems that the place interests
people, and that there is a sort of novelty in staying in such a
deserted corner of the world, for they were in a perpetual state of
mild amusement at being here at all.

Irais is the only one left. She is a young woman with a beautiful,
refined face, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly
lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit
off, and repeats the process, although providence (taking my shape) has
caused salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals down the table.
She lunched to-day on beer, _Schweinekoteletten_, and cabbage-salad
with caraway seeds in it, and now I hear her through the open window,
extemporising touching melodies in her charming, cooing voice. She is
thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. What
better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton
than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music? Cabbage
salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its utility as a means
of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it
results so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that
results in roses, and I give it to Irais every day to make her sing.
She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a charming trick
of making up songs as she goes along. When she begins, I go and lean
out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the
borders while listening to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness
and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad
about.

The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others
hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my
admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was
carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless in
the woodshed.

“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much!”

I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before
this afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on
the grass at my feet, to ask about the _lieber Gott_, it being Sunday
and her pious little nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, on
heaven and angels.

Her questions about the _lieber Gott_ are better left unrecorded, and I
was relieved when she began about the angels.

“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked in her German-English.

“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I answered, “in beautiful, long
dresses, and with big, white wings.”

“Feathers?” she asked.

“I suppose so,—and long dresses, all white and beautiful.”

“Are they girlies?”

“Girls? Ye—es.”

“Don’t boys go into the _Himmel?_”

“Yes, of course, if they’re good.”

“And then what do _they_ wear?”

“Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose.”

“_Dwesses?_”

She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me
of making jokes. “What a funny Mummy!” she said, evidently much amused.
She has a fat little laugh that is very infectious.

“I think,” said I, gravely, “you had better go and play with the other
babies.”

She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began
writing again.

“Mummy,” she said presently.

“Well?”

“Where do the angels get their dwesses?”

I hesitated. “From _lieber Gott_,” I said.

“Are there shops in the _Himmel?_”

“Shops? No.”

“But, then, where does _lieber Gott_ buy their dwesses?”

“Now run away like a good baby; I’m busy.”

“But you said yesterday, when I asked about _lieber Gott_, that you
would tell about Him on Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about
Him.”

There was nothing for it but resignation, so I put down my pencil with
a sigh. “Call the others, then.”

She ran away, and presently they all three emerged from the bushes one
after the other, and tried all together to scramble on to my knee. The
April baby got the knee as she always seems to get everything, and the
other two had to sit on the grass.

I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings.
The April baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder
and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the
story—the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly
listening. I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords and
announced that that was all, when she burst out, “Now _I’ll_ tell about
it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva, and they had _plenty_ of
clothes, and there was no snake, and _lieber Gott_ wasn’t angry with
them, and they could eat as many apples as they liked, and was happy
for ever and ever—there now!”

She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.

“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.

“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”

“But these stories are _true_,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my
telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”

“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled
energy, all her silvery curls flying.

I began about Noah and the flood.

“Did it rain _so_ badly?” she asked with a face of the deepest concern
and interest.

“Yes, all day long and all night long for weeks and weeks——”

“And was everybody so wet?”

“Yes—”

“But why didn’t they open their umbwellas?”

Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the tea-tray.

“I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, putting her off my knee,
greatly relieved; “you must all go to Anna now and have tea.”

“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, not having hitherto opened
her lips; “she is a stupid girl.”

The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement, for,
besides being naturally extremely polite, and at all times anxious not
to hurt any one’s feelings, they had been brought up to love and
respect their kind little nurse.

The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger,
pointed it at the criminal in just indignation. “Such a child will
never go into the _Himmel_,” she said with great emphasis, and the air
of one who delivers judgment.




_September_ 15_th_.—This is the month of quiet days, crimson creepers,
and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea
under the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; of wood-fires in
the library in the chilly evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon
and blackberry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big and fat, sit
cleaning themselves on the sunny verandah steps; the Man of Wrath
shoots partridges across the distant stubble; and the summer seems as
though it would dream on for ever. It is hard to believe that in three
months we shall probably be snowed up and certainly be cold. There is a
feeling about this month that reminds me of March and the early days of
April, when spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the garden
holds its breath in expectation. There is the same mildness in the air,
and the sky and grass have the same look as then; but the leaves tell a
different tale, and the reddening creeper on the house is rapidly
approaching its last and loveliest glory.

My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected, and
the Viscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been most
beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things in the garden,
each flower an exquisite loose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at
the base to a yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred standard tea-roses
for planting next month, half of which are Viscountess Folkestones,
because the tea-roses have such a way of hanging their little heads
that one has to kneel down to be able to see them well in the dwarf
forms—not but what I entirely approve of kneeling before such perfect
beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put standards
down each side of the walk under the south windows, and shall have the
flowers on a convenient level for worship. My only fear is, that they
will stand the winter less well than the dwarf sorts, being so
difficult to pack up snugly. The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have
been, as I predicted, a mistake among the tea-roses; they only flower
twice in the season and all the rest of the time look dull and moping;
and then the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell and so many insects
inside them eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea-roses to put in
their place, as they all come out next month and are to be grouped in
the grass; and the semicircle being immediately under the windows,
besides having the best position in the place, must be reserved solely
for my choicest treasures. I have had a great many disappointments, but
feel as though I were really beginning to learn. Humility, and the most
patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and
sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to
something better.

I had a visitor last week who knows a great deal about gardening and
has had much practical experience. When I heard he was coming, I felt I
wanted to put my arms right round my garden and hide it from him; but
what was my surprise and delight when he said, after having gone all
over it, “Well, I think you have done wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I
was! It was so entirely unexpected, and such a complete novelty after
the remarks I have been listening to all the summer. I could have
hugged that discerning and indulgent critic, able to look beyond the
result to the intention, and appreciating the difficulties of every
kind that had been in the way. After that I opened my heart to him, and
listened reverently to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind and
encouraging advice, and wished he could stay here a whole year and help
me through the seasons. But he went, as people one likes always do go,
and he was the only guest I have had whose departure made me sorry.

The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me,
while I can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know
little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I
would not love them so well—at least, that is what I think on wet days
when the wind is howling round the house and all nature is overcome
with grief; and it has actually happened once or twice when great
friends have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I
might not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact is,
that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the
country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast.
Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul
of the _Hausfrau_ is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her
grandmother’s hair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having
been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of
beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does
so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the
sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the
morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it
is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that
the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but
in bed.




_November_ 11_th_.—When the gray November weather came, and hung its
soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields
and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy
stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the
pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming
faith in the unfailing wisdom of elders. A great need of something to
lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took
possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in
that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of
the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I
not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long;
the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched,
so close to heaven, so near to hell, always either up on a cloud of
glory, or down in the depths with the waters of despair closing over my
head? Cousins live in it now, distant cousins, loved with the exact
measure of love usually bestowed on cousins who reign in one’s stead;
cousins of practical views, who have dug up the flower-beds and planted
cabbages where roses grew; and though through all the years since my
father’s death I have held my head so high that it hurt, and loftily
refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisit
my old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days
sent my spirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be
set aside, and I woke from my musings surprised to find myself sick
with longing. It is foolish but natural to quarrel with one’s cousins,
and especially foolish and natural when they have done nothing, and are
mere victims of chance. Is it their fault that my not being a boy
placed the shoes I should otherwise have stepped into at their
disposal? I know it is not; but their blamelessness does not make me
love them more. “_Noch ein dummes Frauenzimmer!_” cried my father, on
my arrival into the world—he had three of them already, and I was his
last hope,—and a _dummes Frauenzimmer_ I have remained ever since; and
that is why for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in
possession, and that is why, the other day, overcome by the tender
influence of the weather, the purely sentimental longing to join hands
again with my childhood was enough to send all my pride to the winds,
and to start me off without warning and without invitation on my
pilgrimage.

I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the
Middle Ages would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The
pilgrims, leaving all their cares at home, the anxieties of their
riches or their debts, the wife that worried and the children that
disturbed, took only their sins with them, and turning their backs on
their obligations, set out with that sole burden, and perhaps a
cheerful heart. How cheerful my heart would have been, starting on a
fine morning, with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified by
the approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings
of my family, with every step getting farther from the suffocation of
daily duties, out into the wide fresh world, out into the glorious free
world, so poor, so penitent, and so happy! My dream, even now, is to
walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from
place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with
liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the
question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks
on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain
censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having
no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my
plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their
cry, “How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!” The
relative of five hundred years back would simply have said, “How holy!”

My father had the same liking for pilgrimages—indeed, it is evident
that I have it from him—and he encouraged it in me when I was little,
taking me with him on his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a
boy. Often have we been together to the school he was at in
Brandenburg, and spent pleasant days wandering about the old town on
the edge of one of those lakes that lie in a chain in that wide green
plain; and often have we been in Potsdam, where he was quartered as a
lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woods around
and in the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle’s
Frederick under my father’s arm; and often did we spend long summer
days at the house in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of
lakes, where his mother spent her young years, and where, though it
belonged to cousins, like everything else that was worth having, we
could wander about as we chose, for it was empty, and sit in the deep
windows of rooms where there was no furniture, and the painted Venuses
and cupids on the ceiling still smiled irrelevantly and stretched their
futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath. And while we sat and
rested, my father told me, as my grandmother had a hundred times told
him, all that had happened in those rooms in the far-off days when
people danced and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever
to be old or sorry.

There was, and still is, an inn within a stone’s throw of the great
iron gates, with two very old lime trees in front of it, where we used
to lunch on our arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue
check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees
humming in the scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of the house
by my side as I write, done from the lake in old times, with a boat
full of ladies in hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth
playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place were those I loved the
best.

But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories to tell
a little girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the
stone balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or picked the pale
dog-roses in the hedges, or lay in the boat in a shady reed-grown bay
while he smoked to keep the mosquitoes off, were after all only
traditions, imparted to me in small doses from time to time, when his
earnest desire not to raise his remarks above the level of dulness
supposed to be wholesome for _Backfische_ was neutralised by an impulse
to share his thoughts with somebody who would laugh; whereas the place
I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living,
first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and
eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to
me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them
since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months
ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is
perfectly distinct in my memory.

But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, altogether cousinly in
my behaviour towards the people in possession. The invitations to
revisit the old home had ceased. The cousins had grown tired of
refusals, and had left me alone. I did not even know who lived in it
now, it was so long since I had had any news. For two days I fought
against the strong desire to go there that had suddenly seized me, and
assured myself that I would not go, that it would be absurd to go,
undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not know them and would
be in an awkward position, and that I was old enough to know better.
But who can foretell from one hour to the next what a woman will do?
And when does she ever know better? On the third morning I set out as
hopefully as though it were the most natural thing in the world to fall
unexpectedly upon hitherto consistently neglected cousins, and expect
to be received with open arms.

It was a complicated journey, and lasted several hours. During the
first part, when it was still dark, I glowed with enthusiasm, with the
spirit of adventure, with delight at the prospect of so soon seeing the
loved place again; and thought with wonder of the long years I had
allowed to pass since last I was there. Of what I should say to the
cousins, and of how I should introduce myself into their midst, I did
not think at all: the pilgrim spirit was upon me, the unpractical
spirit that takes no thought for anything, but simply wanders along
enjoying its own emotions. It was a quiet, sad morning, and there was a
thick mist. By the time I was in the little train on the light railway
that passed through the village nearest my old home, I had got over my
first enthusiasm, and had entered the stage of critically examining the
changes that had been made in the last ten years. It was so misty that
I could see nothing of the familiar country from the carriage windows,
only the ghosts of pines in the front row of the forests; but the
railway itself was a new departure, unknown in our day, when we used to
drive over ten miles of deep, sandy forest roads to and from the
station, and although most people would have called it an evident and
great improvement, it was an innovation due, no doubt, to the zeal and
energy of the reigning cousin; and who was he, thought I, that he
should require more conveniences than my father had found needful? It
was no use my telling myself that in my father’s time the era of light
railways had not dawned, and that if it had, we should have done our
utmost to secure one; the thought of my cousin, stepping into my shoes,
and then altering them, was odious to me. By the time I was walking up
the hill from the station I had got over this feeling too, and had
entered a third stage of wondering uneasily what in the world I should
do next. Where was the intrepid courage with which I had started? At
the top of the first hill I sat down to consider this question in
detail, for I was very near the house now, and felt I wanted time.
Where, indeed, was the courage and joy of the morning? It had vanished
so completely that I could only suppose that it must be lunch time, the
observations of years having led to the discovery that the higher
sentiments and virtues fly affrighted on the approach of lunch, and
none fly quicker than courage. So I ate the lunch I had brought with
me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but it was chilly, made up of
sandwiches and pears, and it had to be eaten under a tree at the edge
of a field; and it was November, and the mist was thicker than ever and
very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, I
was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody’s spirits
can keep up under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches,
I deplored the headlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn
me from a warm, dry home where I was appreciated, and had brought me
first to the damp tree in the damp field, and when I had finished my
lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going to drag me into the midst of
a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins. Vast sheep loomed
through the mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up a perpetual,
irritating yap. In the fog I could hardly tell where I was, though I
knew I must have played there a hundred times as a child. After the
fashion of woman directly she is not perfectly warm and perfectly
comfortable, I began to consider the uncertainty of human life, and to
shake my head in gloomy approval as lugubrious lines of pessimistic
poetry suggested themselves to my mind.

Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want to do anything, to do
it in the way consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a
woman. The rattle of a carriage along the road just behind me, and the
fact that I started and turned suddenly hot, drove this truth home to
my soul. The mist hid me, and the carriage, no doubt full of cousins,
drove on in the direction of the house; but what an absurd position I
was in! Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, and revealed me lunching in
the wet on their property, the cousin of the short and lofty letters,
the _unangenehme Elisabeth!_ “_Die war doch immer verdreht_,” I could
imagine them hastily muttering to each other, before advancing wreathed
in welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and
I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch under
the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself
nervously what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the
village, go to the _Gasthof_, write a letter craving permission to call
on my cousins, and wait there till an answer came? It would be a
discreet and sober course to pursue; the next best thing to having
written before leaving home. But the _Gasthof_ of a north German
village is a dreadful place, and the remembrance of one in which I had
taken refuge once from a thunderstorm was still so vivid that nature
itself cried out against this plan. The mist, if anything, was growing
denser. I knew every path and gate in the place. What if I gave up all
hope of seeing the house, and went through the little door in the wall
at the bottom of the garden, and confined myself for this once to that?
In such weather I would be able to wander round as I pleased, without
the least risk of being seen by or meeting any cousins, and it was
after all the garden that lay nearest my heart. What a delight it would
be to creep into it unobserved, and revisit all the corners I so well
remembered, and slip out again and get away safely without any need of
explanations, assurances, protestations, displays of affection, without
any need, in a word, of that exhausting form of conversation, so dear
to relations, known as _Redensarten!_

The mist tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have
gone soberly to the _Gasthof_ and written the conciliatory letter; but
the temptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in
ten minutes I had found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and
was standing with a beating heart in the garden of my childhood.

Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same
potency as those that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was
trespassing, which is in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling
when you are trespassing on what might just as well have been your own
ground, on what actually was for years your own ground, and when you
are in deadly peril of seeing the rightful owners, whom you have never
met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear round the corner, and of
hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness “I do not
think I have the pleasure—?” Then the place was unchanged. I was
standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had
always been just there; they curled away on either side among the
shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of
their green stains, just as they did in my day. The overgrown lilac
bushes still met above my head. The moisture dripped from the same
ledge in the wall on to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had done all
through the afternoons of all those past Novembers. This was the place,
this damp and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me. Nobody
ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer so full
of mosquitoes that only a _Backfisch_ indifferent to spots could have
borne it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I
could walk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the
air. There was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much
frequented by the larger black slug, where I used to pass glorious
afternoons making plans. I was for ever making plans, and if nothing
came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy. To me
this out-of-the-way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious
place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant
rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me;
for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all
enchanted.

Standing there and looking round with happy eyes, I forgot the
existence of the cousins. I could have cried for joy at being there
again. It was the home of my fathers, the home that would have been
mine if I had been a boy, the home that was mine now by a thousand
tender and happy and miserable associations, of which the people in
possession could not dream. They were tenants, but it was my home. I
threw my arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every branch of
which I remembered, for had I not climbed it, and fallen from it, and
torn and bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave
it such a hearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green
stain, and still I did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a
reckless, _Backfisch_ pleasure in being dirty, a delicious feeling that
I had not had for years. Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk the
contents of the magic bottle, could not have grown smaller more
suddenly than I grew younger the moment I passed through that magic
door. Bad habits cling to us, however, with such persistency that I did
mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to rub off the
welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in the
glorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the
handkerchief brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of
scorn, the fine scorn for scent of every honest _Backfisch_, I rolled
it up into a ball and flung it away into the bushes, where I daresay it
is at this moment. “Away with you,” I cried, “away with you, symbol of
conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to a desire to please—away
with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!” And so young had I grown
within the last few minutes that I did not even feel silly.

As a _Backfisch_ I had never used handkerchiefs—the child of nature
scorns to blow its nose—though for decency’s sake my governess insisted
on giving me a clean one of vast size and stubborn texture on Sundays.
It was stowed away unfolded in the remotest corner of my pocket, where
it was gradually pressed into a beautiful compactness by the other
contents, which were knives. After a while, I remember, the
handkerchief being brought to light on Sundays to make room for a
successor, and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to an
agreement that it should only be changed on the first and third Sundays
in the month, on condition that I promised to turn it on the other
Sundays. My governess said that the outer folds became soiled from the
mere contact with the other things in my pocket, and that visitors
might catch sight of the soiled side if it was never turned when I
wished to blow my nose in their presence, and that one had no right to
give one’s visitors shocks. “But I never do wish——” I began with great
earnestness. “_Unsinn_,” said my governess, cutting me short.

After the first thrills of joy at being there again had gone, the
profound stillness of the dripping little shrubbery frightened me. It
was so still that I was afraid to move; so still, that I could count
each drop of moisture falling from the oozing wall; so still, that when
I held my breath to listen, I was deafened by my own heart-beats. I
made a step forward in the direction where the arbour ought to be, and
the rustling and jingling of my clothes terrified me into immobility.
The house was only two hundred yards off; and if any one had been
about, the noise I had already made opening the creaking door and so
foolishly apostrophising my handkerchief must have been noticed.
Suppose an inquiring gardener, or a restless cousin, should presently
loom through the fog, bearing down upon me? Suppose Fräulein
Wundermacher should pounce upon me suddenly from behind, coming up
noiselessly in her galoshes, and shatter my castles with her customary
triumphant “_Jetzt halte ich dich aber fest!_” Why, what was I thinking
of? Fräulein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, such an enemy of
day-dreams, such a friend of _das Praktische_, such a lover of creature
comforts, had died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by others,
German sometimes, and sometimes English, and sometimes at intervals
French, and they too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here a
solitary ghost. “Come, Elizabeth,” said I to myself impatiently, “are
you actually growing sentimental over your governesses? If you think
you are a ghost, be glad at least that you are a solitary one. Would
you like the ghosts of all those poor women you tormented to rise up
now in this gloomy place against you? And do you intend to stand here
till you are caught?” And thus exhorting myself to action, and
recognising how great was the risk I ran in lingering, I started down
the little path leading to the arbour and the principal part of the
garden, going, it is true, on tiptoe, and very much frightened by the
rustling of my petticoats, but determined to see what I had come to see
and not to be scared away by phantoms.

How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my
youth, so short, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the
canvas shoes were with the india rubber soles, for creeping about
without making a sound! Thanks to them I could always run swiftly and
unheard into my hiding-places, and stay there listening to the garden
resounding with cries of “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come in at once to your
lessons!” Or, at a different period, “_Où êtes-vous donc, petite
sotte?_” Or at yet another period, “_Warte nur, wenn ich dich erst
habe!_” As the voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiseless
clothes round the next, and it was only Fräulein Wundermacher, a person
of resource, who discovered that all she needed for my successful
circumvention was galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath
calling me, and would come up silently, as I stood lapped in a false
security lost in the contemplation of a squirrel or a robin, and seize
me by the shoulders from behind, to the grievous unhinging of my
nerves. Stealing along in the fog, I looked back uneasily once or
twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could hardly be
reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate twists and curls that
compose what my maid calls my _Frisur_, and that mark the gulf lying
between the present and the past; for it had happened once or twice,
awful to relate and to remember, that Fräulein Wundermacher, sooner
than let me slip through her fingers, had actually caught me by the
long plait of hair to whose other end I was attached and whose English
name I had been told was pigtail, just at the instant when I was
springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led me home
triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and muttering with a
broad smile of special satisfaction, “_Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht
entschlüpfen!_” Fräulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must
have been a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman.
But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me so
persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that she was just
behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched out to seize me.

Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back
with my heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern eyes
shining in the darkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the
cousins should catch me had quite upset my nerves, for I am not by
nature inclined to see eyes where eyes are not. “Don’t be foolish,
Elizabeth,” murmured my soul in rather a faint voice, “go in, and make
sure.” “But I don’t like going in and making sure,” I replied. I did go
in, however, with a sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the
eyes vanished. What I should have done if they had not I am altogether
unable to imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime and
fear at night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The
arbour had fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of
mouldiness. My grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings,
it enjoyed a period of prosperity before being left to the ravages of
slugs and children, when he came down every afternoon in summer and
drank his coffee there and read his _Kreuzzeitung_ and dozed, while the
rest of us went about on tiptoe, and only the birds dared sing. Even
the mosquitoes that infested the place were too much in awe of him to
sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I naturally
concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.
Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my
memory skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was
exclusively his. Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I
felt how well I knew him now from the impressions he made then on my
child’s mind, though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty
years. Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet
within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance
that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born
and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is
rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for
the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though
children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have
no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once
and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not
noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds,
and when they are men and women come crowding back with surprising and
often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little
illusions in flocks.

I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he
often frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he
was a just man, everybody said; a just man who might have been a great
man if he had chosen, and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly
glory. That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof of
his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in the vulgar
sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of privacy and
potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still did
nothing, was the belief of the simple people around. People must
believe in somebody, and having pinned their faith on my grandfather in
the promising years that lie round thirty, it was more convenient to
let it remain there. He pervaded our family life till my sixth year,
and saw to it that we all behaved ourselves, and then he died, and we
were glad that he should be in heaven. He was a good German (and when
Germans are good they are very good) who kept the commandments, voted
for the Government, grew prize potatoes and bred innumerable sheep,
drove to Berlin once a year with the wool in a procession of waggons
behind him and sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly for a
few days there, and then carried most of the proceeds home, hunted as
often as possible, helped his friends, punished his children, read his
Bible, said his prayers, and was genuinely astonished when his wife had
the affectation to die of a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain
this conduct. She ought, of course, to have been happy in the
possession of so good a man; but good men are sometimes oppressive, and
to have one in the house with you and to live in the daily glare of his
goodness must be a tremendous business. After bearing him seven sons
and three daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the way
described, and afforded, said my grandfather, another and a very
curious proof of the impossibility of ever being sure of your ground
with women. The incident faded more quickly from his mind than it might
otherwise have done for its having occurred simultaneously with the
production of a new kind of potato, of which he was justly proud. He
called it _Trost in Trauer_, and quoted the text of Scripture _Auge um
Auge, Zabn um Zahn_, after which he did not again allude to his wife’s
decease. In his last years, when my father managed the estate, and he
only lived with us and criticised, he came to have the reputation of an
oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons at the beginning of any
important phase in their lives, and he received them in this very
arbour, administering eloquent and minute advice in the deep voice that
rolled round the shrubbery and filled me with a vague sense of guilt as
I played. Sitting among the bushes playing muffled games for fear of
disturbing him, I supposed he must be reading aloud, so unbroken was
the monotony of that majestic roll. The young men used to come out
again bathed in perspiration, much stung by mosquitoes, and looking
bewildered; and when they had got over the impression made by my
grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt forgot all he had said with
wholesome quickness, and set themselves to the interesting and
necessary work of gaining their own experience. Once, indeed, a
dreadful thing happened, whose immediate consequence was the abrupt end
to the long and close friendship between us and our nearest neighbour.
His son was brought to the arbour and left there in the usual way, and
either he must have happened on the critical half hour after the coffee
and before the _Kreuzzeitung_, when my grandfather was accustomed to
sleep, or he was more courageous than the others and tried to talk, for
very shortly, playing as usual near at hand, I heard my grandfather’s
voice, raised to an extent that made me stop in my game and quake,
saying with deliberate anger, “_Hebe dich weg von mir, Sohn des
Satans!_” Which was all the advice this particular young man got, and
which he hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes, and
though his face was very pale, there was an odd twist about the corners
of his mouth that reassured me.

This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather’s life, for
almost immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he
need have done because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with
him, in the face of his doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely
die. “What! am I to be conquered by crabs?” he demanded indignantly of
the doctor; for apart from loving them with all his heart he had never
yet been conquered by anything. “Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal—do
not, I pray you, try it again,” replied the doctor. But my grandfather
ordered crabs that very night for supper, and went in to table with the
shining eyes of one who is determined to conquer or die, and the crabs
conquered, and he died. “He was a just man,” said the neighbours,
except that nearest neighbour, formerly his best friend, “and might
have been a great one had he so chosen.” And they buried him with
profound respect, and the sunshine came into our home life with a
burst, and the birds were not the only creatures that sang, and the
arbour, from having been a temple of Delphic utterances, sank into a
home for slugs.

Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate
triumph of the insignificant and small over the important and vast,
illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of
slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round the next bend of the path,
and came to the broad walk along the south side of the high wall
dividing the flower garden from the kitchen garden, in which sheltered
position my father had had his choicest flowers. Here the cousins had
been at work, and all the climbing roses that clothed the wall with
beauty were gone, and some very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up at
proper intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the cousins knew
the value of this warm aspect, for in the border beneath, filled in my
father’s time in this month of November with the wallflowers that were
to perfume the walk in spring, there was a thick crop of—I stooped down
close to make sure—yes, a thick crop of radishes. My eyes filled with
tears at the sight of those radishes, and it is probably the only
occasion on record on which radishes have made anybody cry. My dear
father, whom I so passionately loved, had in his turn passionately
loved this particular border, and spent the spare moments of a busy
life enjoying the flowers that grew in it. He had no time himself for a
more near acquaintance with the delights of gardening than directing
what plants were to be used, but found rest from his daily work
strolling up and down here, or sitting smoking as close to the flowers
as possible. “It is the Purest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest
Refreshment to the Spirits of Man,” he would quote (for he read other
things besides the _Kreuzzeitung_), looking round with satisfaction on
reaching this fragrant haven after a hot day in the fields. Well, the
cousins did not think so. Less fanciful, and more sensible as they
probably would have said, their position plainly was that you cannot
eat flowers. Their spirits required no refreshment, but their bodies
needed much, and therefore radishes were more precious than
wallflowers. Nor was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but they
were grown in the decent obscurity of odd kitchen garden corners and
old cucumber frames, and would never have been allowed to come among
the flowers. And only because I was not a boy here they were profaning
the ground that used to be so beautiful. Oh, it was a terrible
misfortune not to have been a boy! And how sad and lonely it was, after
all, in this ghostly garden. The radish bed and what it symbolised had
turned my first joy into grief. This walk and border me too much of my
father reminded, and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he
had taught me, and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once
during all the years we lived together had we been of different
opinions and fallen out, and it was the one time I ever saw him severe.
I was four years old, and demanded one Sunday to be taken to church. My
father said no, for I had never been to church, and the German service
is long and exhausting. I implored. He again said no. I implored again,
and showed such a pious disposition, and so earnest a determination to
behave well, that he gave in, and we went off very happily hand in
hand. “Now mind, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to me at the church door,
“there is no coming out again in the middle. Having insisted on being
brought, thou shalt now sit patiently till the end.” “Oh, yes, oh,
yes,” I promised eagerly, and went in filled with holy fire. The
shortness of my legs, hanging helplessly for two hours midway between
the seat and the floor, was the weapon chosen by Satan for my
destruction. In German churches you do not kneel, and seldom stand, but
sit nearly the whole time, praying and singing in great comfort. If you
are four years old, however, this unchanged position soon becomes one
of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs, strange
prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifying
numbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to
look, then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and burnings. I
thought I must be very ill, for I had never known my legs like that
before. My father sitting beside me was engrossed in the singing of a
chorale that evidently had no end, each verse finished with a
long-drawn-out hallelujah, after which the organ played by itself for a
hundred years—by the organist’s watch, which was wrong, two minutes
exactly—and then another verse began. My father, being the patron of
the living, was careful to sing and pray and listen to the sermon with
exemplary attention, aware that every eye in the little church was on
our pew, and at first I tried to imitate him; but the behaviour of my
legs became so alarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at
him and seeing that he continued his singing unmoved, I put out my hand
and pulled his sleeve.

“Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with deliberation; continuing in a low
voice without changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly
moving, and his eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the
organist, who was also the postman, should have finished his solo, “Did
I not tell thee to sit still, Elizabeth?” “Yes, but——” “Then do it.”
“But I want to go home.”

“_Unsinn_.” And the next verse beginning, my father sang louder than
ever. What could I do? Should I cry? I began to be afraid I was going
to die on that chair, so extraordinary were the sensations in my legs.
What could my father do to me if I did cry? With the quick instinct of
small children I felt that he could not put me in the corner in church,
nor would he whip me in public, and that with the whole village looking
on, he was helpless, and would have to give in. Therefore I tugged his
sleeve again and more peremptorily, and prepared to demand my immediate
removal in a loud voice. But my father was ready for me. Without
interrupting his singing, or altering his devout expression, he put his
hand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch—not a playful pinch, but a
good hard unmistakeable pinch, such as I had never imagined possible,
and then went on serenely to the next hallelujah. For a moment I was
petrified with astonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my playmate,
adorer, and friend? Smarting with pain, for I was a round baby, with a
nicely stretched, tight skin, and dreadfully hurt in my feelings, I
opened my mouth to shriek in earnest, when my father’s clear whisper
fell on my ear, each word distinct and not to be misunderstood, his
eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, and his lips hardly
moving, “_Elizabeth, wenn du schreist, kneife ich dich bis du platzt_.”
And he finished the verse with unruffled decorum—

“Will Satan mich verschlingen,
So lass die Engel singen
          Hallelujah!”

We never had another difference. Up to then he had been my willing
slave, and after that I was his.

With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to
the door in the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of
which my own little garden used to be. The door was open, and I stood
still a moment before going through, to hold my breath and listen. The
silence was as profound as before. The place seemed deserted; and I
should have thought the house empty and shut up but for the carefully
tended radishes and the recent footmarks on the green of the path. They
were the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examine a
specially clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow
sitting on the wall just above my head made me jump as I have seldom in
my life jumped, and reminded me that I was trespassing. Clearly my
nerves were all to pieces, for I gathered up my skirts and fled through
the door as though a whole army of ghosts and cousins were at my heels,
nor did I stop till I had reached the remote corner where my garden
was. “Are you enjoying yourself, Elizabeth?” asked the mocking sprite
that calls itself my soul: but I was too much out of breath to answer.

This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main
garden and the house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an
orchard, and it was to the last degree unlikely that any one would come
there on such an afternoon. This plot of ground, turned now as I saw
into a rockery, had been the scene of my most untiring labours. Into
the cold earth of this north border on which the sun never shone I had
dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had been spent on it, and
as bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal hour I had
borrowed from Fräulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,
passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next
birthday should come round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner
in her company, against which my very soul revolted. And after all,
nothing came up. The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal
with which I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the
plans made as I sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly
and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with
a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of _pfennings_, the
humiliation of my position in regard to Fräulein Wundermacher,—all, all
had been in vain. No sun shone there, and nothing grew. The gardener
who reigned supreme in those days had given me this big piece for that
sole reason, because he could do nothing with it himself. He was no
doubt of opinion that it was quite good enough for a child to
experiment upon, and went his way, when I had thanked him with a
profuseness of gratitude I still remember, with an unmoved countenance.
For more than a year I worked and waited, and watched the career of the
flourishing orchard opposite with puzzled feelings. The orchard was
only a few yards away, and yet, although my garden was full of manure,
and water, and attentions that were never bestowed on the orchard, all
it could show and ever did show were a few unhappy beginnings of growth
that either remained stationary and did not achieve flowers, or
dwindled down again and vanished. Once I timidly asked the gardener if
he could explain these signs and wonders, but he was a busy man with no
time for answering questions, and told me shortly that gardening was
not learned in a day. How well I remember that afternoon, and the very
shape of the lazy clouds, and the smell of spring things, and myself
going away abashed and sitting on the shaky bench in my domain and
wondering for the hundredth time what it was that made the difference
between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruit trees,
far enough away from the wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade,
were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sunshine in a carelessly
well-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise
in the field behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they
luxuriated in the insolent glory of their white and pink perfection. It
was May, and my heart bled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in
November, and that I had never seen since. The whole of the rest of the
garden was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other side of the
wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of translucent loveliness, a
jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what was there not on the
other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and flowered
exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me,
in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled about or
cultivated or noticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils
thrusting their spears through the grass, crocuses peeping out
inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering their small cold faces when the first
shivering spring days came. Only my piece that I so loved was
perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of these things on
that radiant day, and wept aloud.

Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily
digging, and noticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the
difference between my garden and the profusion of splendour all around,
paused with his barrow on the path in front of me, and remarked that
nobody could expect to get blood out of a stone. The apparent
irrelevance of this statement made me weep still louder, the bitter
tears of insulted sorrow; but he stuck to his point, and harangued me
from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips
and blood and stones till my tears all dried up again and I listened
attentively, for the conclusion to be drawn from his remarks was
plainly that I had been shamefully taken in by the head gardener, who
was an unprincipled person thenceforward to be for ever mistrusted and
shunned. Standing on the path from which the kindly apprentice had
expounded his proverb, this scene rose before me as clearly as though
it had taken place that very day; but how different everything looked,
and how it had shrunk! Was this the wide orchard that had seemed to
stretch away, it and the sloping field beyond, up to the gates of
heaven? I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a
certain time of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up
my mind that on that Day the heavenly host would enter the world by
that very field, coming down the slope in shining ranks, treading the
daffodils under foot, filling the orchard with their songs of
exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep from among the goats. Of
course I was a sheep, and my governess and the head gardener goats, so
that the results could not fail to be in every way satisfactory. But
looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughed at the
smallness of the field I had supposed would hold all heaven.

Here again the cousins had been at work. The site of my garden was
occupied by a rockery, and the orchard grass with all its treasures had
been dug up, and the spaces between the trees planted with currant
bushes and celery in admirable rows; so that no future little cousins
will be able to dream of celestial hosts coming towards them across the
fields of daffodils, and will perhaps be the better for being free from
visions of the kind, for as I grew older, uncomfortable doubts laid
hold of my heart with cold fingers, dim uncertainties as to the exact
ultimate position of the gardener and the governess, anxious
questionings as to how it would be if it were they who turned out after
all to be sheep, and I who—? For that we all three might be gathered
into the same fold at the last never, in those days, struck me as
possible, and if it had I should not have liked it.

“Now what sort of person can that be,” I asked myself, shaking my head,
as I contemplated the changes before me, “who could put a rockery among
vegetables and currant bushes? A rockery, of all things in the
gardening world, needs consummate tact in its treatment. It is easier
to make mistakes in forming a rockery than in any other garden scheme.
Either it is a great success, or it is great failure; either it is very
charming, or it is very absurd. There is no state between the sublime
and the ridiculous possible in a rockery.” I stood shaking my head
disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in these reflections,
when a sudden quick pattering of feet coming along in a great hurry
made me turn round with a start, just in time to receive the shock of a
body tumbling out of the mist and knocking violently against me.

It was a little girl of about twelve years old.

“Hullo!” said the little girl in excellent English; and then we stared
at each other in astonishment.

“I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the little girl, offering no
apology for having nearly knocked me down. “Who are you?”

“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the little
girl’s face, and a host of memories stirring within me. “Why, didn’t
she marry a missionary, and go out to some place where they ate him?”

The little girl stared harder. “Ate him? Marry? What, has she been
married all this time to somebody who’s been eaten and never let on?
Oh, I say, what a game!” And she threw back her head and laughed till
the garden rang again.

“O hush, you dreadful little girl!” I implored, catching her by the
arm, and terrified beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. “Don’t
make that horrid noise—we are certain to be caught if you don’t stop——”

The little girl broke off a shriek of laughter in the middle and shut
her mouth with a snap. Her eyes, round and black and shiny like boot
buttons, came still further out of her head. “Caught?” she said
eagerly. “What, are you afraid of being caught too? Well, this _is_ a
game!” And with her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her coat she
capered in front of me in the excess of her enjoyment, reminding me of
a very fat black lamb frisking round the dazed and passive sheep its
mother.

It was clear that the time had come for me to get down to the gate at
the end of the garden as quickly as possible, and I began to move away
in that direction. The little girl at once stopped capering and planted
herself squarely in front of me. “Who are you?” she said, examining me
from my hat to my boots with the keenest interest.

I considered this ungarnished manner of asking questions impertinent,
and, trying to look lofty, made an attempt to pass at the side.

The little girl, with a quick, cork-like movement, was there before me.

“Who are you?” she repeated, her expression friendly but firm. “Oh,
I—I’m a pilgrim,” I said in desperation.

“A pilgrim!” echoed the little girl. She seemed struck, and while she
was struck I slipped past her and began to walk quickly towards the
door in the wall. “A pilgrim!” said the little girl, again, keeping
close beside me, and looking me up and down attentively. “I don’t like
pilgrims. Aren’t they people who are always walking about, and have
things the matter with their feet? Have you got anything the matter
with your feet?”

“Certainly not,” I replied indignantly, walking still faster.

“And they never wash, Miss Robinson says. You don’t either, do you?”

“Not wash? Oh, I’m afraid you are a very badly brought-up little
girl—oh, leave me alone—I must run—”

“So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, “for Miss Robinson must
be close behind us. She nearly had me just before I found you.” And she
started running by my side.

The thought of Miss Robinson close behind us gave wings to my feet,
and, casting my dignity, of which, indeed, there was but little left,
to the winds, I fairly flew down the path. The little girl was not to
be outrun, and though she panted and turned weird colours, kept by my
side and even talked. Oh, I was tired, tired in body and mind, tired by
the different shocks I had received, tired by the journey, tired by the
want of food; and here I was being forced to run because this very
naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in to her lessons.

“I say—this is jolly—” she jerked out.

“But why need we run to the same place?” I breathlessly asked, in the
vain hope of getting rid of her.

“Oh, yes—that’s just—the fun. We’d get on—together—you and I—”

“No, no,” said I, decided on this point, bewildered though I was.

“I can’t stand washing—either—it’s awful—in winter—and makes one
have—chaps.”

“But I don’t mind it in the least,” I protested faintly, not having any
energy left.

“Oh, I say!” said the little girl, looking at my face, and making the
sound known as a guffaw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly
revolting.

We had got safely through the door, round the corner past the radishes,
and were in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to
hide in the tangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round
and listen. The little girl opened her mouth to speak. With great
presence of mind I instantly put my muff in front of it and held it
there tight, while I listened. Dead silence, except for the laboured
breathing and struggles of the little girl.

“I don’t hear a sound,” I whispered, letting her go again. “Now what
did you want to say?” I added, eyeing her severely.

“I wanted to say,” she panted, “that it’s no good pretending you wash
with a nose like that.”

“A nose like that! A nose like what?” I exclaimed, greatly offended;
and though I put up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt it, I
could find no difference in it. “I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must
have a wretched life,” I said, in tones of deep disgust.

The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I were paying her
compliments. “It’s all green and brown,” she said, pointing. “Is it
always like that?”

Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the gate, and the enraptured
kiss it had received, and blushed.

“Won’t it come off?” persisted the little girl.

“Of course it will come off,” I answered, frowning.

“Why don’t you rub it off?”

Then I remembered the throwing away of the handkerchief, and blushed
again.

“Please lend me your handkerchief,” I said humbly, “I—I have lost
mine.”

There was a great fumbling in six different pockets, and then a
handkerchief that made me young again merely to look at it was
produced. I took it thankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl,
intensely interested, watching the operation and giving me advice.
“There—it’s all right now—a little more on the right—there—now it’s all
off.”

“Are you sure? No green left?” I anxiously asked.

“No, it’s red all over now,” she replied cheerfully. “Let me get home,”
thought I, very much upset by this information, “let me get home to my
dear, uncritical, admiring babies, who accept my nose as an example of
what a nose should be, and whatever its colour think it beautiful.” And
thrusting the handkerchief back into the little girl’s hands, I hurried
away down the path. She packed it away hastily, but it took some
seconds for it was of the size of a small sheet, and then came running
after me. “Where are you going?” she asked surprised, as I turned down
the path leading to the gate.

“Through this gate,” I replied with decision.

“But you mustn’t—we’re not allowed to go through there——”

So strong was the force of old habits in that place that at the words
_not allowed_ my hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that
instant a voice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me
rigid.

“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” called the voice, “Come in at once to your
lessons—Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”

“It’s Miss Robinson,” whispered the little girl, twinkling with
excitement; then, catching sight of my face, she said once more with
eager insistence, “Who are you?”

“Oh, I’m a ghost!” I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my
forehead and looking round fearfully.

“Pooh,” said the little girl.

It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking of
approaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I
pulled the gate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me,
and fled out and away down the wide, misty fields.

The _Gotha Almanach_ says that the reigning cousin married the daughter
of a Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only
child was born, Elizabeth.




_November_ 20_th_.—Last night we had ten degrees of frost (Fahrenheit),
and I went out the first thing this morning to see what had become of
the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake and quite
cheerful—covered with rime it is true, but anything but black and
shrivelled. Even those in boxes on each side of the verandah steps were
perfectly alive and full of buds, and one in particular, a Bouquet
d’Or, is a mass of buds, and would flower if it could get the least
encouragement. I am beginning to think that the tenderness of tea-roses
is much exaggerated, and am certainly very glad I had the courage to
try them in this northern garden. But I must not fly too boldly in the
face of Providence, and have ordered those in the boxes to be taken
into the greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a
sunny place near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds.
The greenhouse is only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just
above freezing, and is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot
stand the very coldest part of the winter out of doors. I don’t use it
for growing anything, because I don’t love things that will only bear
the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and
petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy
creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in
and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty,
either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be
had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are
fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s
wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of
scent and colour.

We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order
and planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer
with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years
would pass quickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian
Yellows have gone into their new quarters, and their place is occupied
by the tea-rose Safrano; all the rose beds are carpeted with pansies
sown in July and transplanted in October, each bed having a separate
colour. The purple ones are the most charming and go well with every
rose, but I have white ones with Laurette Messimy, and yellow ones with
Safrano, and a new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses. Round
the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedge two rows of
annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, and just
beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea and
pillar roses.

In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with
larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks,
Madonna lilies, wallflowers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies,
lavender, starworts, cornflowers, Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs
packed in wherever bulbs could go. These are the borders that were so
hardly used by the other gardener. The spring boxes for the verandah
steps have been filled with pink and white and yellow tulips. I love
tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of
alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a
wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every
movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate
scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more
charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the
sun? I have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to me they seem
modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as
they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them
in the face. On the grass there are two beds of them carpeted with
forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils
and narcissus. Down the wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins
will (I hope) shine majestic; and one cool corner, backed by a group of
firs, is graced by Madonna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines.

In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that
stands alone in the sun—groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus,
hyacinths, and tulips, among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus
Malus spectabilis, floribunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb,
serotina, triloba, and Pissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every
colour, and several kinds of Cratægus and other May lovelinesses. If
the weather behaves itself nicely, and we get gentle rains in due
season, I think this little corner will be beautiful—but what a big
“if” it is! Drought is our great enemy, and the two last summers each
contained five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches
dried up and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times the watering
is naturally quite beyond the strength of two men; but as a garden is a
place to be happy in, and not one where you want to meet a dozen
curious eyes at every turn, I should not like to have more than these
two, or rather one and a half—the assistant having stork-like
proclivities and going home in the autumn to his native Russia,
returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want to keep him
over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I sounded
him on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of human
beings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good
worker and plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk.

“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German words to that effect, “why
don’t you stay here altogether, instead of going home and rioting away
all you have earned?”

“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have my wife there in Russia.”

“Your wife!” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed
creature should have found a mate—as though there were not a
superfluity of mates in the world—“I didn’t know you were married?”

“Yes, and I have two little children, and I don’t know what they would
do if I were not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to
Russia, and costs me every time seven marks.”

“Seven marks!”

“Yes, it is a great sum.”

I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks,
supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.

All the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians and
Poles, or a mixture of both. We send a man over who can speak their
language, to fetch as many as he can early in the year, and they arrive
with their bundles, men and women and babies, and as soon as they have
got here and had their fares paid, they disappear in the night if they
get the chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go and work
singly or in couples for the peasants, who pay them a _pfenning_ or two
more a day than we do, and let them eat with the family. From us they
get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they
can eat. The women get less, not because they work less, but because
they are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives with
them, and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his
heels. For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters and
other permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are
put into. I suppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that
spring after spring the same thing happens, fifty of them getting away
in spite of all our precautions, and we are left with our mouths open
and much out of pocket. This spring, by some mistake, they arrived
without their bundles, which had gone astray on the road, and, as they
travel in their best clothes, they refused utterly to work until their
luggage came. Nearly a week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in
authority.

Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints’ days,
and there surely never was a church so full of them as the Russian
Church. In the spring, when every hour is of vital importance, the work
is constantly being interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping
in the sun the whole day, agreeably conscious that they are pleasing
themselves and the Church at one and the same time—a state of
perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided by Faith is of
course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confess that
during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is
possible to begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom
of the Man of Wrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days
on which no man will labour, and have listened in silence to his
remarks about distant Russian saints.

I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made me
pity these people when first I came to live among them. They herd
together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the
armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed
down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they
would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new
clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing.
They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to
grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s
sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for
rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not yet
persuaded myself, however, that the women are happy. They have to work
as hard as the men and get less for it; they have to produce offspring,
quite regardless of times and seasons and the general fitness of
things; they have to do this as expeditiously as possible, so that they
may not unduly interrupt the work in hand; nobody helps them, notices
them, or cares about them, least of all the husband. It is quite a
usual thing to see them working in the fields in the morning, and
working again in the afternoon, having in the interval produced a baby.
The baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babies
collectively. When I expressed my horror at the poor creatures working
immediately afterwards as though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath
informed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn
corsets, nor had their mothers and grandmothers. We were riding
together at the time, and had just passed a batch of workers, and my
husband was speaking to the overseer, when a woman arrived alone, and
taking up a spade, began to dig. She grinned cheerfully at us as she
made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked that she had just been back
to the house and had a baby.

“Poor, _poor_ woman!” I cried, as we rode on, feeling for some occult
reason very angry with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched husband
doesn’t care a rap, and will probably beat her to-night if his supper
isn’t right. What nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the
sexes when the women have the babies!”

“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly.
“You have got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing
this agreeable duty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any
serious competition with man. How can a person who is constantly losing
a year of the best part of her life compete with a young man who never
loses any time at all? He has the brute force, and his last word on any
subject could always be his fist.”

I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon in the beginning of
November, and the leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horses’
feet as we rode towards the Hirschwald.

“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man of Wrath, “amongst these
Russians, and I believe amongst the lower classes everywhere, and
certainly commendable on the score of simplicity, to silence a woman’s
objections and aspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said
that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening
effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is
soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by
other and more polite methods. Do you suppose,” he went on, flicking a
twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, “that the intellectual
husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his
intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may and does
go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very least
convince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat has got
through the whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about
it. There is no doubt that these poor women fulfil their vocation far
more thoroughly than the women in our class, and, as the truest:
happiness consists in finding one’s vocation quickly and continuing in
it all one’s days, I consider they are to be envied rather than not,
since they are early taught, by the impossibility of argument with
marital muscle, the impotence of female endeavour and the blessings of
content.”

“Pray go on,” I said politely.

“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all
praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the
strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent
rebukes. In Russia, not only _may_ a man beat his wife, but it is laid
down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation
as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or
not, for the sake of her general health and happiness.”

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat
over these castigations.

“Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby
moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind
that silver birch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you
don’t understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and
whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the
confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband,
and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man.”

“And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me
and putting his arm round my waist, “has she ceased to be a woman?”

“I should think so indeed,—she is a goddess, and can never be
worshipped and adored enough.”

“It seems to me,” he said, “that the conversation is growing personal.”

I started off at a canter across the short, springy turf. The
Hirschwald is an enchanted place on such an evening, when the mists lie
low on the turf, and overhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver
birches stand out clear against the soft sky, while the little moon
looks down kindly on the damp November world. Where the trees thicken
into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked
up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love
that smell,—it brings before me the entire benevolence of Nature, for
ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means
of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works.




_December_ 7_th_.—I have been to England. I went for at least a month
and stayed a week in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I
fled before the fogs into the country to see friends with gardens, but
it was raining, and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had in the
Fatherland) and the infinite possibilities, there was nothing to
interest the intelligent and garden-loving foreigner, for the good
reason that you cannot be interested in gardens under an umbrella. So I
went back to the fogs, and after groping about for a few days more
began to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific gale sprang up after
I had started, and the journey both by sea and land was full of
horrors, the trains in Germany being heated to such an extent that it
is next to impossible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up
under the cushions, the cushions themselves being very hot, and the
wretched traveller still hotter.

But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest,
brightest snow-atmosphere, the air so still that the whole world seemed
to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow sparkling underfoot
and on the trees, and a happy row of three beaming babies awaiting me,
I was consoled for all my torments, only remembering them enough to
wonder why I had gone away at all.

The babies each had a kitten in one hand and an elegant bouquet of pine
needles and grass in the other, and what with the due presentation of
the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, the hugging and kissing
was much interfered with. Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all
somehow squeezed into the sleigh, and off we went with jingling bells
and shrieks of delight. “Directly you comes home the fun begins,” said
the May baby, sitting very close to me. “How the snow purrs!” cried the
April baby, as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. The June
baby sat loudly singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” and swinging
her kitten round by its tail to emphasise the rhythm.

The house, half-buried in the snow, looked the very abode of peace, and
I ran through all the rooms, eager to take possession of them again,
and feeling as though I had been away for ever. When I got to the
library I came to a standstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I
have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my
garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing!
There was a big peat fire blazing half up the chimney, and the old
housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, and on the writing-table was
a great bunch of violets scenting the room. “Oh, how _good_ it is to be
home again!” I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies clung about my
knees, looking up at me with eyes full of love. Outside the dazzling
snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and happy faces—I thought of
those yellow fogs and shivered. The library is not used by the Man of
Wrath; it is neutral ground where we meet in the evenings for an hour
before he disappears into his own rooms—a series of very smoky dens in
the southeast corner of the house. It looks, I am afraid, rather too
gay for an ideal library; and its colouring, white and yellow, is so
cheerful as to be almost frivolous. There are white bookcases all round
the walls, and there is a great fireplace, and four windows, facing
full south, opening on to my most cherished bit of garden, the bit
round the sun-dial; so that with so much colour and such a big fire and
such floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober air, in spite of
the venerable volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should never be
surprised if they skipped down from their places, and, picking up their
leaves, began to dance.

With this room to live in, I can look forward with perfect equanimity
to being snowed up for any time Providence thinks proper; and to go
into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of
purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that
it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of
all the spotlessness. Yesterday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial
the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many degrees below
freezing that it will be weeks finding its way up again; but there was
no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in furs. I
even had tea brought out there, to the astonishment of the menials, and
sat till long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I had to
drink the tea very quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to begin
to freeze. After the sun had gone down the rooks came home to their
nests in the garden with a great fuss and fluttering, and many
hesitations and squabbles before they settled on their respective
trees. They flew over my head in hundreds with a mighty swish of wings,
and when they had arranged themselves comfortably, an intense hush fell
upon the garden, and the house began to look like a Christmas card,
with its white roof against the clear, pale green of the western sky,
and lamplight shining in the windows.

I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by our parson, in the
intervals between looking round me and being happy. He came one day
with the book and begged me to read it, having discovered that my
interest in Luther was not as living as it ought to be; so I took it
out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a
certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter,
devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. I
read Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances at the
garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in my heart. His struggles
with devils amazed me; and I wondered whether such a day as that, full
of grace and the forgiveness of sins, never struck him as something to
make him relent even towards devils. He apparently never allowed
himself just to be happy. He was a wonderful man, but I am glad I was
not his wife.

Our parson is an interesting person, and untiring in his efforts to
improve himself. Both he and his wife study whenever they have a spare
moment, and there is a tradition that she stirs her puddings with one
hand and holds a Latin grammar in the other, the grammar, of course,
getting the greater share of her attention. To most German _Hausfraus_
the dinners and the puddings are of paramount importance, and they
pride themselves on keeping those parts of their houses that are seen
in a state of perpetual and spotless perfection, and this is
exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly inquire, are there not
other things even more important? And is not plain living and high
thinking better than the other way about? And all too careful making of
dinners and dusting of furniture takes a terrible amount of precious
time, and—and with shame I confess that my sympathies are all with the
pudding and the grammar. It cannot be right to be the slave of one’s
household gods, and I protest that if my furniture ever annoyed me by
wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doing something else, and
there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast it all into the
nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great
contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar
who was weak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the
housework and cooking themselves, and are thus not only cooks and
housemaids, but if they have children—and they always do have
children—they are head and under nurse as well; and besides these
trifling duties have a good deal to do with their fruit and vegetable
garden, and everything to do with their poultry. This being so, is it
not pathetic to find a young woman bravely struggling to learn
languages and keep up with her husband? If I were that husband, those
puddings would taste sweetest to me that were served with Latin sauce.
They are both severely pious, and are for ever engaged in desperate
efforts to practise what they preach; than which, as we all know,
nothing is more difficult. He works in his parish with the most noble
self-devotion, and never loses courage, although his efforts have been
several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the
street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden
wall. The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a
sensitive, intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before
swine. For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most
living faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they
are any better now in his parish than they were under his predecessor,
a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning to Saturday night,
never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty congregation
waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial nap. It
is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parish
to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged,
and goes on sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when
all his tastes are literary, and all his inclinations towards the life
of the student. His convictions drag him out of his little home at all
hours to minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no
rest, and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes home
weary, after a day’s wrestling with his parishioners’ souls, he is
confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front
door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be hid?
Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over,
and what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the
most astounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy
cottage, and a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His
predecessor used to hang out his washing on the tombstones to dry, but
then he was a person entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had
finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon of a most
vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath,
who sat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself
thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never
been heard before. It is spoken of in the village to this day with
bated breath and awful joy.




_December_ 22_nd_.—Up to now we have had a beautiful winter. Clear
skies, frost, little wind, and, except for a sharp touch now and then,
very few really cold days. My windows are gay with hyacinths and lilies
of the valley; and though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell of
hyacinths in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and chastity
next to that of other flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my nose in
their heavy sweetness. In December one cannot afford to be fastidious;
besides, one is actually less fastidious about everything in the
winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into robustness, and
the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectly welcome
then.

I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up
in a room alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower
catalogues and make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the
spring. It is a fascinating occupation, and acquires an additional
charm when you know you ought to be doing something else, that
Christmas is at the door, that children and servants and farm hands
depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you don’t see to the
decoration of the trees and house, and the buying of the presents,
nobody else will. The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues and
with Duty snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t like
Duty—everything in the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s
duty. Why cannot it be my duty to make lists and plans for the dear
garden? “And so it _is_,” I insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he
protested against what he called wasting my time upstairs. “No,” he
replied sagely; “your garden is not your duty, because it is your
Pleasure.”

What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my
disposal! Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a
sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed,
in its practical utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a
sofa my neighbour has bought as a Christmas surprise for her husband,
and which she showed me the last time I called there—a beautiful
invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a chest
of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on top of which
you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night and
you happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, you just pop the
bedclothes inside, and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa
and looking for all the world as though you had been expecting visitors
for hours.

“Pray, does he wear pyjamas?” I inquired.

But she had never heard of pyjamas.

It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I want to have a border
all yellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white,
and the amount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will
only be appreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks
planning it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it to be a
succession of glories from May till the frosts, and the chief feature
is to be the number of “ardent marigolds”—flowers that I very tenderly
love—and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of every sort and
shade, and are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show their
lovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to be
eschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca,
yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow
lupins—everything that is yellow or that has a yellow variety. The
place I have chosen for it is a long, wide border in the sun, at the
foot of a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and pines, and facing
southeast. You go through a little pine wood, and, turning a corner,
are to come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning glory. I want it
to be blinding in its brightness after the dark, cool path through the
wood.

That is the idea. Depression seizes me when I reflect upon the probable
difference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and the
gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some
tulips, and they have all shrivelled up and died, and he says he cannot
imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going to
marry her after Christmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans
with the enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily
chopping wood from morning till night to keep the beloved one’s kitchen
fire well supplied. I cannot understand any one preferring cooks to
marigolds; those future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and whose seeds
are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone through my winter days
like golden lamps.

I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I
should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should
have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands
and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else.
It is dull work giving orders and trying to describe the bright visions
of one’s brain to a person who has no visions and no brain, and who
thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged with blue.

I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants to put down only those
humble ones that are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my
soil is by no means all that it might be, and to most plants the
climate is rather trying. I feel really grateful to any flower that is
sturdy and willing enough to flourish here. Pansies seem to like the
place and so do sweet-peas; pinks don’t, and after much coaxing gave
hardly any flowers last summer. Nearly all the roses were a success, in
spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam, which was covered
with buds ready to open, when they suddenly turned brown and died, and
three standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and simply sulked. I had
been very excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues
being specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I
got. “Never be excited, my dears, about _anything_,” shall be the
advice I will give the three babies when the time comes to take them
out to parties, “or, if you are, don’t show it. If by nature you are
volcanoes, at least be only smouldering ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t
look interested, don’t, above all things, look eager. Calm indifference
should be written on every feature of your faces. Never show that you
like any one person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid, and reserved.
If you don’t do as your mother tells you and are just gushing, frisky,
young idiots, snubs will be your portion. If you do as she tells you,
you’ll marry princes and live happily ever after.”

Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this part of the world the more you
are pleased to see a person the less is he pleased to see you; whereas,
if you are disagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance
expanding into wider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour.
But I was not prepared for that sort of thing in a rose, and was
disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had the best place in the garden—warm,
sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared with the tenderest care;
he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay, and manure; he
was watered assiduously all through the drought when more willing
flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black and
shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and
at the end of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf
than when he was first put in in April. It would have been better if he
had died straight away, for then I should have known what to do; as it
is, there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully
for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and probably intending to
repeat the same conduct next year. Well, trials are the portion of
mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better
to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know
that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the
other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of
injured innocence, and known them to be grievous?

I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to
provoke such an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy
little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate
decreed otherwise. Quite regularly, if I look forward to anything, Fate
steps in and decrees otherwise; I don’t know why it should, but it
does. I had not even invited these good ladies—like greatness on the
modest, they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweet singer of the
summer, whom I love as she deserves, but of whom I certainly thought I
had seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked if I
would have her over Christmas, as her husband was out of sorts, and she
didn’t like him in that state. Neither do I like sick husbands, so,
full of sympathy, I begged her to come, and here she is. And the other
is Minora.

Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for I was not even aware of her
existence a fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning to
breakfast—it was the very day after my return from England—I found a
letter from an English friend, who up till then had been perfectly
innocuous, asking me to befriend Minora. I read the letter aloud for
the benefit of the Man of Wrath, who was eating _Spickgans_, a delicacy
much sought after in these parts. “Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my
friend, “take some notice of the poor thing. She is studying art in
Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go for Christmas. She is very
ambitious and hardworking—”

“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she is not pretty. Only ugly
girls work hard.”

“—and she is really very clever—”

“I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” again interrupted the
Man of Wrath.

“—and unless some kind creature like yourself takes pity on her she
will be very lonely.”

“Then let her be lonely.”

“Her mother is my oldest friend, and would be greatly distressed to
think that her daughter should be alone in a foreign town at such a
season.”

“I do not mind the distress of the mother.”

“Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “I shall have to ask her to
come!”

“If you _should_ be inclined,” the letter went on, “to play the good
Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, I am positive you would find Minora a
bright, intelligent companion—”

“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath.

The April baby, who has had a nursery governess of an altogether
alarmingly zealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks,
looked up from her bread and milk.

“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.

The governess coughed.

“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.

I looked at her severely.

“If you are not careful, April,” I said, “you’ll be a genius when you
grow up and disgrace your parents.”

Miss Jones looked as though she did not like Germans. I am afraid she
despises us because she thinks we are foreigners—an attitude of mind
quite British and wholly to her credit; but we, on the other hand,
regard _her_ as a foreigner, which, of course, makes things
complicated.

“Shall I really have to have this strange girl?” I asked, addressing
nobody in particular and not expecting a reply.

“You need not have her,” said the Man of Wrath composedly, “but you
will. You will write to-day and cordially invite her, and when she has
been here twenty-four hours you will quarrel with her. I know you, my
dear.”

“Quarrel! I? With a little art-student?”

Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is perpetually scenting a scene, and
is always ready to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and
good taste to bear on us, and seems to know we are disputing in an
unseemly manner when we would never dream it ourselves but for the
warning of her downcast eyes. I would take my courage in both hands and
ask her to go, for besides this superfluity of discreet behaviour she
is, although only nursery, much too zealous, and inclined to be always
teaching and never playing; but, unfortunately, the April baby adores
her and is sure there never was any one so beautiful before. She comes
every day with fresh accounts of the splendours of her wardrobe, and
feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats; and Miss Jones looks
offended and purses up her lips. In common with most governesses, she
has a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared
one day at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation, having
achieved it after much struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil and
unbounded love. Miss Jones put her in the corner for impertinence. I
wonder why governesses are so unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it is
because they are not married. Without venturing to differ entirely from
the opinion of experience, I would add that the strain of continually
having to set an example must surely be very great. It is much easier,
and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example, and
governesses are but women, and women are sometimes foolish, and when
you want to be foolish it must be annoying to have to be wise.

Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; or rather, when the
carriage drove up, Irais got out of it alone, and informed me that
there was a strange girl on a bicycle a little way behind. I sent back
the carriage to pick her up, for it was dusk and the roads are
terrible.

“But why do you have strange girls here at all?” asked Irais rather
peevishly, taking off her hat in the library before the fire, and
otherwise making herself very much at home; “I don’t like them. I’m not
sure that they’re not worse than husbands who are out of order. Who is
she? She would bicycle from the station, and is, I am sure, the first
woman who has done it. The little boys threw stones at her.”

“Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance of the little boys. Never
mind her. Let us have tea in peace before she comes.”

“But we should be much happier without her,” she grumbled. “Weren’t we
happy enough in the summer, Elizabeth—just you and I?”

“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, putting my arms round her.
The flame of my affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day of
her arrival; besides, this time I have prudently provided against her
sinning with the salt-cellars by ordering them to be handed round like
vegetable dishes. We had finished tea and she had gone up to her room
to dress before Minora and her bicycle were got here. I hurried out to
meet her, feeling sorry for her, plunged into a circle of strangers at
such a very personal season as Christmas. But she was not very shy;
indeed, she was less shy than I was, and lingered in the hall, giving
the servants directions to wipe the snow off the tyres of her machine
before she lent an attentive ear to my welcoming remarks.

“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the station,” she said at
last, when her mind was at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how far
it was, and what the roads were like, and he only smiled. Is he German?
But of course he is—how odd that he didn’t understand. You speak
English very well,—very well indeed, do you know.” By this time we were
in the library, and she stood on the hearth-rug warming her back while
I poured her out some tea.

“What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking round, “and the hall is so
curious too. Very old, isn’t it? There’s a lot of copy here.”

The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall on her arrival and had come
in with us, began to look about on the carpet. “Copy?” he inquired,
“Where’s copy?”

“Oh—material, you know, for a book. I’m just jotting down what strikes
me in your country, and when I have time shall throw it into book
form.” She spoke very loud, as English people always do to foreigners.

“My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when I had got into her room
and shut the door and Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think—she
writes books!”

“What—the bicycling girl?”

“Yes—Minora—imagine it!”

We stood and looked at each other with awestruck faces.

“How dreadful!” murmured Irais. “I never met a young girl who did that
before.”

“She says this place is full of copy.”

“Full of what?”

“That’s what you make books with.”

“Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a
bore among good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl
who writes books—why, it isn’t respectable! And you can’t snub that
sort of people; they’re unsnubbable.”

“Oh, but we’ll try!” I cried, with such heartiness that we both
laughed.

The hall and the library struck Minora most; indeed, she lingered so
long after dinner in the hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put
on his fur coat by way of a gentle hint. His hints are always gentle.

She wanted to hear the whole story about the chapel and the nuns and
Gustavus Adolphus, and pulling out a fat note-book began to take down
what I said. I at once relapsed into silence.

“Well?” she said.

“That’s all.”

“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.”

“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come into the library?”

In the library she again took up her stand before the fire and warmed
herself, and we sat in a row and were cold. She has a wonderfully good
profile, which is irritating. The wind, however, is tempered to the
shorn lamb by her eyes being set too closely together.

Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her chair, contemplated her
critically beneath her long eyelashes. “You are writing a book?” she
asked presently.

“Well—yes, I suppose I may say that I am. Just my impressions, you
know, of your country. Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing—I
jot it down, and when I have time shall work it up into something, I
daresay.”

“Are you not studying painting?”

“Yes, but I can’t study that for ever. We have an English proverb:
‘Life is short and Art is long’—too long, I sometimes think—and writing
is a great relaxation when I am tired.”

“What shall you call it?”

“Oh, I thought of calling it _Journeyings in Germany_. It sounds well,
and would be correct. Or _Jottings from German Journeyings_,—I haven’t
quite decided yet which.”

“By the author of _Prowls in Pomerania_, you might add,” suggested
Irais.

“And _Drivel from Dresden_,” said I.

“And _Bosh from Berlin_,” added Irais.

Minora stared. “I don’t think those two last ones would do,” she said,
“because it is not to be a facetious book. But your first one is rather
a good title,” she added, looking at Irais and drawing out her
note-book. “I think I’ll just jot that down.”

“If you jot down all we say and then publish it, will it still be your
book?” asked Irais.

But Minora was so busy scribbling that she did not hear.

“And have _you_ no suggestions to make, Sage?” asked Irais, turning to
the Man of Wrath, who was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence.

“Oh, do you call him Sage?” cried Minora; “and always in English?”

Irais and I looked at each other. We knew what we did call him, and
were afraid Minora would in time ferret it out and enter it in her
note-book. The Man of Wrath looked none too well pleased to be alluded
to under his very nose by our new guest as “him.”

“Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely.

“Though sages are not always husbands,” said Irais with equal gravity.
“Sages and husbands—sage and husbands—” she went on musingly, “what
does that remind you of, Miss Minora?”

“Oh, I know,—how stupid of me!” cried Minora eagerly, her pencil in
mid-air and her brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “sage
and,—why,—yes,—no,—yes, of course—oh,” disappointedly, “but that’s
vulgar—I can’t put it in.”

“What is vulgar?” I asked.

“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said Irais languidly; “but it
isn’t, it is very good.” She got up and walked to the piano, and,
sitting down, began, after a little wandering over the keys, to sing.

“Do you play?” I asked Minora.

“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of practice.”

I said no more. I know what _that_ sort of playing is.

When we were lighting our bedroom candles Minora began suddenly to
speak in an unknown tongue. We stared. “What is the matter with her?”
murmured Irais.

“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, “you might prefer to talk
German, and as it is all the same to me what I talk—”

“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like airing our English—don’t
we, Elizabeth?”

“I don’t want my German to get rusty though,” said Minora; “I shouldn’t
like to forget it.”

“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said Irais, twisting round her
neck as she preceded us upstairs, “‘’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom
to forget’?”

“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” I said hastily.

“What room is she in?” asked Irais.

“No. 12.”

“Oh!—do you believe in ghosts?”

Minora turned pale.

“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts here. Good-night. If you
want anything, mind you ring.”

“And if you see anything curious in that room,” called Irais from her
bedroom door, “mind you jot it down.”




_December_ 27_th_—It is the fashion, I believe, to regard Christmas as
a bore of rather a gross description, and as a time when you are
invited to over-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry without just
cause. As a matter of fact, it is one of the prettiest and most poetic
institutions possible, if observed in the proper manner, and after
having been more or less unpleasant to everybody for a whole year, it
is a blessing to be forced on that one day to be amiable, and it is
certainly delightful to be able to give presents without being haunted
by the conviction that you are spoiling the recipient, and will suffer
for it afterward. Servants are only big children, and are made just as
happy as children by little presents and nice things to eat, and, for
days beforehand, every time the three babies go into the garden they
expect to meet the Christ Child with His arms full of gifts. They
firmly believe that it is thus their presents are brought, and it is
such a charming idea that Christmas would be worth celebrating for its
sake alone.

As great secrecy is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me,
and it is not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and
on each of the farms, and all the children, big and little, expecting
their share of happiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days
before and after, as it is there that we have the trees and presents.
All down one side are the trees, and the other three sides are lined
with tables, a separate one for each person in the house. When the
trees are lighted, and stand in their radiance shining down on the
happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, and the number of
times I have had to run up and down stairs, and the various aches in
head and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. First the June baby
is ushered in, then the others and ourselves according to age, then the
servants, then come the head inspector and his family, the other
inspectors from the different farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and
secretaries, and then all the children, troops and troops of them—the
big ones leading the little ones by the hand and carrying the babies in
their arms, and the mothers peeping round the door. As many as can get
in stand in front of the trees, and sing two or three carols; then they
are given their presents, and go off triumphantly, making room for the
next batch. My three babies sang lustily too, whether they happened to
know what was being sung or not. They had on white dresses in honour of
the occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed in a low-necked and
short-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever
the state of the thermometer. Her arms are like miniature
prize-fighter’s arms—I never saw such things; they are the pride and
joy of her little nurse, who had tied them up with blue ribbons, and
kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not be able to take her to
balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms like that.

When they came to say good-night, they were all very pale and subdued.
The April baby had an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which
she said she was taking to bed, not because she liked him, but because
she was so sorry for him, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me
absently, and went away, only the April baby glancing at the trees as
she passed and making them a curtesy.

“Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll
bow to them, which he did, in a very languid and blasé fashion.
“_You’ll_ never see such trees again,” she told him, giving him a
vindictive shake, “for you’ll be brokened _long_ before next time.”

She went out, but came back as though she had forgotten something.

“Thank the _Christkind_ so _much_, Mummy, won’t you, for all the lovely
things He brought us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t you?”

I cannot see that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we
were perfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two
days it brought us a little nearer together, and made us kind.
Happiness is so wholesome; it invigorates and warms me into piety far
more effectually than any amount of trials and griefs, and an
unexpected pleasure is the surest means of bringing me to my knees. In
spite of the protestations of some peculiarly constructed persons that
they are the better for trials, I don’t believe it. Such things must
sour us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and make us kinder, and
more gentle. And will anybody affirm that it behoves us to be more
thankful for trials than for blessings? We were meant to be happy, and
to accept all the happiness offered with thankfulness—indeed, we are
none of us ever thankful enough, and yet we each get so much, so very
much, more than we deserve. I know a woman—she stayed with me last
summer—who rejoices grimly when those she loves suffer. She believes
that it is our lot, and that it braces us and does us good, and she
would shield no one from even unnecessary pain; she weeps with the
sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her
continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the
beauty and the happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire
to possess one; her convictions have the sad gray colouring of the
dingy streets and houses she lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity
in masses. Submission to what people call their “lot” is simply
ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and
take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to the shrieks of
your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let your own
microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; don’t be
afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbour in the next
house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything
is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize
opportunity by the scruff of the neck.

“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would ever imagine that you
dream away your days in a garden with a book, and that you never in
your life seized anything by the scruff of its neck. And what is
scruff? I hope I have not got any on me.” And she craned her neck
before the glass.

She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees, but very soon
Irais wandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took up a
book; so I called in Miss Jones and the babies—it was Miss Jones’s last
public appearance, as I shall relate—and after working for the best
part of two days they were finished, and looked like lovely ladies in
widespreading, sparkling petticoats, holding up their skirts with
glittering fingers. Minora wrote a long description of them for a
chapter of her book which is headed _Noel_,—I saw that much, because
she left it open on the table while she went to talk to Miss Jones.
They were fast friends from the very first, and though it is said to be
natural to take to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether to
sympathise with such a reason for sudden affection.

“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to Irais yesterday, when there
was no getting Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged in
conversation with Miss Jones.

“Oh, my dear, how can I tell? Lovers, I suppose, or else they think
they are clever, and then they talk rubbish.”

“Well, of course, Minora thinks she is clever.”

“I suppose she does. What does it matter what she thinks? Why does your
governess look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon I always imagine
she must have just heard that somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that
every day. What is the matter with her?”

“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she looks,” I said
doubtfully; I was for ever trying to account for Miss Jones’s
expression.

“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “It would be awful for her
if she felt exactly the same as she looks.”

At that moment the door leading into the schoolroom opened softly, and
the April baby, tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet,
leaving the door open; and this is what we heard Miss Jones saying—

“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the conscientious place upon
themselves to appear so before their children and governess must be
terrible. Nor are clergymen more pious than other men, yet they have
continually to pose before their flock as such. As for governesses,
Miss Minora, I know what I am saying when I affirm that there is
nothing more intolerable than to have to be polite, and even humble, to
persons whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly apparent in every
word they utter, and to be forced by the presence of children and
employers to a dignity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s
feelings. The grave father of a family, who was probably one of the
least respectable of bachelors, is an interesting study at his own
table, where he is constrained to assume airs of infallibility merely
because his children are looking at him. The fact of his being a parent
does not endow him with any supreme and sudden virtue; and I can assure
you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not the least critical and
amused are those of the humble person who fills the post of governess.”

“Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard Minora say in accents of
rapture, while we sat transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “Do
you mind if I put that down in my book? You say it all so beautifully.”

“Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued Miss Jones, “of private
indemnification for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could
wade through days of correct behaviour? There would be no reaction, no
room for better impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, priests,
and governesses would be in the situation of a stout lady who never has
a quiet moment in which she can take off her corsets.”

“My dear, what a firebrand!” whispered Irais. I got up and went in.
They were sitting on the sofa, Minora with clasped hands, gazing
admiringly into Miss Jones’s face, which wore a very different
expression from the one of sour and unwilling propriety I have been
used to seeing.

“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to Minora. “And I should like to
have the children a little while.”

She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with the door open until she
had gone in and the two babies had followed. They had been playing at
stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of newspaper while Miss Jones
provided Minora with noble thoughts for her work, and had to be
tortured afterward with tweezers. I said nothing to Minora, but kept
her with us till dinner-time, and this morning we went for a long
sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch there was no Miss Jones.

“Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora.

“She is gone,” I said.

“Gone?”

“Did you never hear of such things as sick mothers?” asked Irais
blandly; and we talked resolutely of something else.

All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had found a kindred spirit, and
it has been ruthlessly torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often
are. It is enough to make her mope, and it is not her fault, poor
thing, that she should have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to
that of Irais and myself.

At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on one side. “You look so
pale,” she said; “are you not well?”

Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the patient air of one who likes
to be thought a sufferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied
gently.

“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais with great concern,
“because there is only a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he means
well, I believe he is rather rough.” Minora was plainly startled. “But
what do you do if you are ill?” she asked.

“Oh, we are never ill,” said I; “the very knowledge that there would be
no one to cure us seems to keep us healthy.”

“And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, “Elizabeth always calls
in the cow-doctor.”

Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that she has got into a part
of the world peopled solely by barbarians, and that the only civilised
creature besides herself has departed and left her at our mercy.
Whatever her reflections may be her symptoms are visibly abating.




_January_ 1_st_.—The service on New Year’s Eve is the only one in the
whole year that in the least impresses me in our little church, and
then the very bareness and ugliness of the place and the ceremonial
produce an effect that a snug service in a well-lit church never would.
Last night we took Irais and Minora, and drove the three lonely miles
in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark, and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped
up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a funeral procession.

“We are going to the burial of our last year’s sins,” said Irais, as we
started; and there certainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air.
Up in our gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by the light of
the spluttering tallow candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the
flames wildly blown about by the draughts. The wind banged against the
windows in great gusts, screaming louder than the organ, and
threatening to blow out the agitated lights together. The parson in his
gloomy pulpit, surrounded by a framework of dusty carved angels, took
on an awful appearance of menacing Authority as he raised his voice to
make himself heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the dark, I felt
very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black
world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some of the candles guttered
and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of death and judgment;
I thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardly believe
it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all my
faith and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I
should probably be well punished, though for what I had no precise
idea. If it had not been so dark, and if the wind had not howled so
despairingly, I should have paid little attention to the threats
issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, I fell to making good
resolutions. This is always a bad sign,—only those who break them make
them; and if you simply do as a matter of course that which is right as
it comes, any preparatory resolving to do so becomes completely
superfluous. I have for some years past left off making them on New
Year’s Eve, and only the gale happening as it did reduced me to doing
so last night; for I have long since discovered that, though the year
and the resolutions may be new, I myself am not, and it is worse than
useless putting new wine into old bottles.

“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indignantly, when I held forth
to her to the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored
to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, “and I find my
resolutions carry me very nicely into the spring. I revise them at the
end of each month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By the end of
April they have been so severely revised that there are none left.”

“There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new
contents would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you,
and the practice of your resolutions would lose its bitterness by
becoming a habit.”

She shook her head. “Such things never lose their bitterness,” she
said, “and that is why I don’t let them cling to me right into the
summer. When May comes, I give myself up to jollity with all the rest
of the world, and am too busy being happy to bother about anything I
may have resolved when the days were cold and dark.”

“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. She often says what I
feel.

“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “whether men ever make
resolutions?”

“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries. It is a
nice sort of feeling, when you have nothing else to do, giving way to
endless grief and penitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes in
contrition; but it is silly. Why cry over things that are done? Why do
naughty things at all, if you are going to repent afterward? Nobody is
naughty unless they like being naughty; and nobody ever really repents
unless they are afraid they are going to be found out.”

“By ‘nobody’ of course you mean women,” said Irais.

“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Besides, men generally have the
courage of their opinions.”

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais in the amiably
polite tone she assumes whenever she speaks to that young person.

It was getting on towards midnight, and we were sitting round the fire,
waiting for the New Year, and sipping _Glühwein_, prepared at a small
table by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and rather nasty, but
it is proper to drink it on this one night, so of course we did.

Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We very soon discovered
that, and laugh about it when we are alone together. I can understand
her disliking Irais, but she must be a perverse creature not to like
me. Irais has poked fun at her, and I have been, I hope, very kind; yet
we are bracketed together in her black books. It is also apparent that
she looks upon the Man of Wrath as an interesting example of an
ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed to take him
under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against us. He never
speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far as
Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits
sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some
remark of a profane nature that we may have addressed to him. One
night, some days after her arrival, she developed a skittishness of
manner which has since disappeared, and tried to be playful with him;
but you might as well try to be playful with a graven image. The wife
of one of the servants had just produced a boy, the first after a
series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health of all
parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the happy father drink a
glass off at one gulp, his heels well together in military fashion.
Minora thought the incident typical of German manners, and not only
made notes about it, but joined heartily in the health-drinking, and
afterward grew skittish.

She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance called, I think, the
Washington Post, and which was, she said, much danced in England; and,
to induce us to learn, she played the tune to us on the piano. We
remained untouched by its beauties, each buried in an easy-chair
toasting our toes at the fire. Amongst those toes were those of the Man
of Wrath, who sat peaceably reading a book and smoking. Minora
volunteered to show us the steps, and as we still did not move, danced
solitary behind our chairs. Irais did not even turn her head to look,
and I was the only one amiable or polite enough to do so. Do I deserve
to be placed in Minora’s list of disagreeable people side by side with
Irais? Certainly not. Yet I most surely am.

“It wants the music, of course,” observed Minora breathlessly, darting
in and out between the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing
at the Man of Wrath.

No answer from anybody.

“It is _such_ a pretty dance,” she panted again, after a few more
gyrations.

No answer.

“And is all the rage at home.”

No answer.

“Do let me teach you. Won’t _you_ try, Herr Sage?”

She went up to him and dropped him a little curtesy. It is thus she
always addresses him, entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to
every one else, that he resents it.

“Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” she went on gaily, as he
did not move; “I am certain it is only some dry agricultural work that
you just nod over. Dancing is much better for you.” Irais and I looked
at one another quite frightened. I am sure we both turned pale when the
unhappy girl actually laid hold forcibly of his book, and, with a
playful little shriek, ran away with it into the next room, hugging it
to her bosom and looking back roguishly over her shoulder at him as she
ran. There was an awful pause. We hardly dared raise our eyes. Then the
Mall of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the ashes off the end of his
cigar, looked at his watch, and went out at the opposite door into his
own rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. She has never,
I must say, been skittish since.

“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais, “because this sort
of conversation is likely to do you good.”

“I always listen when people talk sensibly,” replied Minora, stirring
her grog.

Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eyebrows. “Do you agree
with our hostess’s description of women?” she asked after a pause.

“As nobodies? No, of course I do not.”

“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we are literally nobodies in
our country. Did you know that women are forbidden to go to political
meetings here?”

“Really?” Out came the note-book.

“The law expressly forbids the attendance at such meetings of women,
children, and idiots.”

“Children and idiots—I understand that,” said Minora; “but women—and
classed with children and idiots?”

“Classed with children and idiots,” repeated Irais, gravely nodding her
head. “Did you know that the law forbids females of any age to ride on
the top of omnibuses or tramcars?”

“Not really?”

“Do you know why?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“Because in going up and down the stairs those inside might perhaps
catch a glimpse of the stocking covering their ankles.”

“But what—”

“Did you know that the morals of the German public are in such a shaky
condition that a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?”

“But I don’t see how a stocking—”

“With stripes round it,” said Irais.

“And darns in it,” I added.

“—could possibly be pernicious?”

“‘The Pernicious Stocking; or, Thoughts on the Ethics of Petticoats,’”
said Irais. “Put that down as the name of your next book on Germany.”

“I never know,” complained Minora, letting her note-book fall, “whether
you are in earnest or not.”

“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly.

“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons
in the background, “that your law classes women with children and
idiots?”

“Certainly,” he answered promptly, “and a very proper classification,
too.”

We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I at last.

“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied complacently. Then he
added, “If I were commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had
previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been doing lately, of
listening to the conversation of you three young ladies, I should make
precisely the same classification.”

Even Minora was incensed at this.

“You are telling us in the most unvarnished manner that we are idiots,”
said Irais.

“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children,—nice little agreeable
children. I very much like to hear you talk together. It is all so
young and fresh what you think and what you believe, and not of the
least consequence to any one.”

“Not of the least consequence?” cried Minora. “What we believe is of
very great consequence indeed to us.”

“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired Irais sternly.

“Not for worlds. I would not on any account disturb or change your
pretty little beliefs. It is your chief charm that you always believe
every-thing. How desperate would our case be if young ladies only
believed facts, and never accepted another person’s assurance, but
preferred the evidence of their own eyes! They would have no illusions,
and a woman without illusions is the dreariest and most difficult thing
to manage possible.”

“Thing?” protested Irais.

The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes up for it from time to time
by holding forth at unnecessary length. He took up his stand now with
his back to the fire, and a glass of _Glühwein_ in his hand. Minora had
hardly heard his voice before, so quiet had he been since she came, and
sat with her pencil raised, ready to fix for ever the wisdom that
should flow from his lips.

“What would become of poetry if women became so sensible that they
turned a deaf ear to the poetic platitudes of love? That love does
indulge in platitudes I suppose you will admit.” He looked at Irais.

“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” she acknowledged.

“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the beauty of a common sacrifice,
if the listener’s want of imagination was such as to enable her only to
distinguish one victim in the picture, and that one herself?”

Minora took that down word for word,—much good may it do her.

“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if refused he will die, if
his assurances merely elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take
plenty of outdoor exercise? Women are responsible for such lies,
because they believe them. Their amazing vanity makes them swallow
flattery so gross that it is an insult, and men will always be ready to
tell the precise number of lies that a woman is ready to listen to. Who
indulges more recklessly in glowing exaggerations than the lover who
hopes, and has not yet obtained? He will, like the nightingale, sing
with unceasing modulations, display all his talent, untiringly repeat
his sweetest notes, until he has what he wants, when his song, like the
nightingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be heard.”

“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to Minora—unnecessary advice,
for her pencil was scribbling as fast as it could.

“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, after having had ninety-nine
object-lessons in the difference between promise and performance and
the emptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning of the hundredth will
find her lending the same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of
flattery as she did on the occasion of the first. What can the
exhortations of the strong-minded sister, who has never had these
experiences, do for such a woman? It is useless to tell her she is
man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that she is cheated,
down-trodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in every
way—that is not a true statement of the case. She is simply the victim
of her own vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own
fascinations, against the very part of herself that gives all the
colour to her life, who shall expect a woman to take up arms?”

“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais with a shocked face, “and
had you lent a willing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before
you reached your final destiny?”

“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I replied, “for nobody ever
wanted me to listen to blandishments.”

Minora sighed.

“I like to hear you talk together about the position of women,” he went
on, “and wonder when you will realise that they hold exactly the
position they are fitted for. As soon as they are fit to occupy a
better, no power on earth will be able to keep them out of it.
Meanwhile, let me warn you that, as things now are, only strong-minded
women wish to see you the equals of men, and the strong-minded are
invariably plain. The pretty ones would rather see men their slaves
than their equals.”

“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I consider myself
strong-minded.”

“And never rise till lunch-time?”

Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of such conduct, it is very
convenient in more ways than one; I get through my housekeeping
undisturbed, and whenever she is disposed to lecture me, I begin about
this habit of hers. Her conscience must be terribly stricken on the
point, for she is by no means as a rule given to meekness.

“A woman without vanity would be unattackable,” resumed the Man of
Wrath. “When a girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, she
is led solely by her own vanity; for in these days of policemen no
young woman can be forced against her will from the path of virtue, and
the cries of the injured are never heard until the destroyer begins to
express his penitence for having destroyed. If his passion could remain
at white-heat and he could continue to feed her ear with the
protestations she loves, no principles of piety or virtue would disturb
the happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches that
piety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest
where temptations are most rare.”

“But what has all this to do with us?” I inquired severely.

“You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely
wish to justify it,” he answered. “Creatures who habitually say _yes_
to everything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it,
and when it is so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.”

“I shall never say it to you again, my dear man,” I said.

“And not only _that_ fatal weakness,” he continued, “but what is there,
candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but not
wiser,—really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you
had as children. Have you ever heard a group of women talking
reasonably together?”

“Yes—we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath.

“It has interested me,” went on the Man of Wrath, “in my idle moments,
to listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little
stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note the
spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present, to
watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale of
some other woman’s conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed in
connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom, if some
topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance, were
introduced.”

“You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,” remarked Irais.

“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never heard them mentioned
among women.”

“Children and idiots are not interested in such things,” I said.

“And we are much too frightened of being put in prison,” said Irais.

“In prison?” echoed Minora.

“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her “that if you talk about
such things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?”

“But why?”

“But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what
was innocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to
the evil minds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls it
_dolus eventualis_, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to
prison and are punished as you deserve to be.”

Minora looked mystified.

“That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them,” said
the Man of Wrath; “they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that
you do not consider your female friends’ opinions worth listening to,
for you certainly display an astonishing thirst for information when
male politicians are present. I have seen a pretty young woman, hardly
in her twenties, sitting a whole evening drinking in the doubtful
wisdom of an elderly political star, with every appearance of eager
interest. He was a bimetallic star, and was giving her whole
pamphletsful of information.”

“She wanted to make up to him for some reason,” said Irais, “and got
him to explain his hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken
in. Now which was the sillier in that case?”

She threw herself back in her chair and looked up defiantly, beating
her foot impatiently on the carpet.

“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled
me,” he went on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene
and happy as when she came. The explanation of the principles of
bimetallism produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.”

“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star
had been making a fine goose of himself the whole evening.

“Prattle, prattle, simple star,
Bimetallic, _wunderbar_.
Though you’re given to describe
Woman as a _dummes Weib_.
You yourself are sillier far,
Prattling, bimetallic star!”

“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath,
taking no notice of this effusion.

“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was
plainly irritated.

“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a
high one. But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one
could take her place?”

“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that
I believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a
strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.”

“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being
knocked about, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in
which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most valuable.”

“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met
those qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience,
she is a disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite
opportunities for asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate
mankind. I know of no more humiliating position for a man than to be in
bed having his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange
woman, bristling with starch and spotlessness. He would give half his
income for his clothes, and probably the other half if she would leave
him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her superiority through
every pore; he never before realised how absolutely inferior he is; he
is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to
see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening behind
the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more
intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he
has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand,
but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks
in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt
as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his first term.”

Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of
Wrath stood smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person
so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry
with you; so we sat round and said nothing.

“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt
the truth of my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of
noble, self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the
rough places on the road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try
for yourself, next time any one in your house is ill, whether the
actual fact in any way corresponds to the picturesque belief. The angel
who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such a questionable shape,
that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an extremely
self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing
her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to
helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary
capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior
being she knows herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants
should, by some mistake, treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish
if the patient gives more trouble than she had expected, intensely
injured and disagreeable if he is made so courageous by his
wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act of desperation of
which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women! What sane
man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object to
having them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every
fibre what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to
enable us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being
forced besides to assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness
towards the angel in the house.”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.

“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began
to beat her foot up and down again,—what did it matter what Men of
Wrath would have us do? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing,
“husbands enough for every one, and the rest must do something.”

“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress
and manner as long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all,
let all women, pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of
cookery. If you are an artist in the kitchen you will always be
esteemed.”

I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has
learned to cook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and
wouldn’t.

“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget
the great truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not
blandishments dinner. A man must be made comfortable before he will
make love to you; and though it is true that if you offered him a
choice between _Spickgans_ and kisses, he would say he would take both,
yet he would invariably begin with the _Spickgans_, and allow the
kisses to wait.”

At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is
disgusting,” I said icily.

“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smiling
amiably.

He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her
hands, and says her husband married her for their sake, which I can
quite believe. I am glad they are on her and not on Minora, for if
Minora had had them I should have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with
chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and too much wrist. I feel very
well disposed towards her when my eye falls on them. She put one
forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed too.

“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the custom
here to kiss women’s hands?”

“But only married women’s,” I added, not desiring her to feel out of
it, “never young girls’.”

She drew it in again. “It is a pretty custom,” she said with a sigh;
and pensively inscribed it in her book.




_January_ 15_th_.—The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last
year’s horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down
to breakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is
expensive, I find, when it has to be paid for out of one’s own private
pin-money. The Man of Wrath does not in the least want roses, or
flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new paths, and therefore, he asks,
why should he pay for them? So he does not and I do, and I have to make
up for it by not indulging all too riotously in new clothes, which is
no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to
new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time coming
when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I
shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell
those that I already have. The garden is so big that everything has to
be bought wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much
longer with only one man and a stork, because the more I plant the more
there will be to water in the inevitable drought, and the watering is a
serious consideration when it means going backwards and forwards all
day long to a pump near the house, with a little water-cart. People
living in England, in almost perpetual mildness and moisture, don’t
really know what a drought is. If they have some weeks of cloudless
weather, it is generally preceded and followed by good rains; but we
have perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then comes a month or six
weeks’ drought. The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that,
after the heaviest thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in
my thin shoes; and to keep the garden even moderately damp it should
pour with rain regularly every day for three hours. My only means of
getting water is to go to the pump near the house, or to the little
stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the little stream dries up
too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of times difficult
to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possess
one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted with silver
birches in imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between
the birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy—the
soil for pines and acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what
love will do—there are more roses in my garden than any other flower!
Next spring the bare places are to be filled with trees that I have
ordered: pines behind the delicate acacias, and startling
mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches,
juniper-trees—was it not Elijah who sat down to rest under a
juniper-tree? I have often wondered how he managed to get under it. It
is a compact little tree, not more than two to three yards high here,
and all closely squeezed up together. Perhaps they grew more
aggressively where he was. By the time the babies have grown old and
disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and then possibly they won’t
like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s indifference to
gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return to the state
in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to
live in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of
course its fate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don’t
flourish in the desert, and that the three will have to wait a long
time before enough are found to go round. Mothers tell me that it is a
dreadful business finding one husband; how much more painful then to
have to look for three at once!—the babies are so nearly the same age
that they only just escaped being twins. But I won’t look. I can
imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I
don’t think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I
shall do my best in the years at my disposal to train them so to love
the garden, and out-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a
spark of their mother in them, they will want and ask for nothing
better. My hope of success is however exceedingly small, and there is
probably a fearful period in store for me when I shall be taken every
day during the winter to the distant towns to balls—a poor old mother
shivering in broad daylight in her party gown, and being made to start
after an early lunch and not getting home till breakfast-time next
morning. Indeed, they have already developed an alarming desire to go
to “partings” as they call them, the April baby announcing her
intention of beginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are _you_ twelve,
Mummy?” she asked.

The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find
another. It is grievous changing so often—in two years I shall have had
three—because at each change a great part of my plants and plans
necessarily suffers. Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in
time, places already sown are planted with something else, and there is
confusion out of doors and despair in my heart. But he was to have
married the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and immediately left, and he
is going after her as soon as he can, and meanwhile is wasting visibly
away. What she saw was doors that are locked opening with a great
clatter all by themselves _on the hinge-side_, and then somebody
invisible cursed at her. These phenomena now go by the name of “the
ghost.” She asked to be allowed to leave at once, as she had never been
in a place where there was a ghost before. I suggested that she should
try and get used to it; but she thought it would be wasting time, and
she looked so ill that I let her go, and the garden has to suffer. I
don’t know why it should be given to cooks to see such interesting
things and withheld from me, but I have had two others since she left,
and they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very silent as bed-time
approaches, and relents towards Irais and myself; and, after having
shown us all day how little she approves us, when the bedroom candles
are brought she quite begins to cling. She has once or twice anxiously
inquired whether Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone.

“If you are at all nervous, I will come and keep you company,” she
said; “I don’t mind at all, I assure you.”

But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple wiles, and has told me
she would rather sleep with fifty ghosts than with one Minora.

Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called away to her parent’s
bedside I have seen a good deal of the babies; and it is so nice
without a governess that I would put off engaging another for a year or
two, if it were not that I should in so doing come within the reach of
the arm of the law, which is what every German spends his life in
trying to avoid. The April baby will be six next month, and, after her
sixth birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment to receive a
visit from a school inspector, who will inquire curiously into the
state of her education, and, if it is not up to the required standard,
all sorts of fearful things might happen to the guilty parents,
probably beginning with fines, and going on _crescendo_ to dungeons if,
owing to gaps between governesses and difficulties in finding the right
one, we persisted in our evil courses. Shades of the prison-house begin
to close here upon the growing boy, and prisons compass the Teuton
about on every side all through life to such an extent that he has to
walk very delicately indeed if he would stay outside them and pay for
their maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, neglect to
teach their offspring to read, and write, and say their prayers, and
are apt to resent the intrusion of an examining inspector into their
homes; but it does not much matter after all, and I daresay it is very
good for us to be worried; indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance
declares that people who are not regularly and properly worried are
never any good for anything. In the eye of the law we are all sinners,
and every man is held to be guilty until he has proved that he is
innocent.

Minora has seen so much of the babies that, after vainly trying to get
out of their way for several days, she thought it better to resign
herself, and make the best of it by regarding them as copy, and using
them to fill a chapter in her book. So she took to dogging their
footsteps wherever they went, attended their uprisings and their lyings
down, engaged them, if she could, in intelligent conversation, went
with them into the garden to study their ways when they were sleighing,
drawn by a big dog, and generally made their lives a burden to them.
This went on for three days, and then she settled down to write the
result with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, borrowed whenever her notes
for any chapter have reached the state of ripeness necessary for the
process she describes as “throwing into form.” She writes everything
with a typewriter, even her private letters.

“Don’t forget to put in something about a mother’s knee,” said Irais;
“you can’t write effectively about children without that.”

“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied Minora.

“And pink toes,” I added. “There are always toes, and they are never
anything but pink.”

“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turning over her notes.

“But, after all, babies are not a German speciality,” said Irais, “and
I don’t quite see why you should bring them into a book of German
travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the fashionable number of
arms and legs, and are exactly the same as English ones.”

“Oh, but they can’t be _just_ the same, you know,” said Minora, looking
worried. “It must make a difference living here in this place, and
eating such odd things, and never having a doctor, and never being ill.
Children who have never had measles and those things can’t be quite the
same as other children; it must all be in their systems and can’t get
out for some reason or other. And a child brought up on chicken and
rice-pudding must be different to a child that eats _Spickgans_ and
liver sausages. And they _are_ different; I can’t tell in what way, but
they certainly are; and I think if I steadily describe them from the
materials I have collected the last three days, I may perhaps hit on
the points of difference.”

“Why bother about points of difference?” asked Irais. “I should write
some little thing, bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as
knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.”

“But it is by no means an easy thing for me to do,” said Minora
plaintively; “I have so little experience of children.”

“Then why write it at all?” asked that sensible person Elizabeth.

“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no
children; but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing
is easier than to write bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen
in an hour.”

She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled
for about five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you
may have it—pink toes and all complete.”

Minora put on her eye-glasses and read aloud:

“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bed-time my stale
and battered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd
into my mind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years
ago!—of the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her
arms, and undressed, and put in my cot, without being wakened; of the
angels I believed in; of little children coming straight from heaven,
and still being surrounded, so long as they were good, by the shadow of
white wings,—all the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby is
learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not an idea of the beauty of
the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with heavenly
eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately come from,
and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At
two years old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread
and milk; at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread
and milk; at ten both bread and milk and angels have been left behind
in the nursery, and she has already found out that they are luxuries
not necessary to her everyday life. In later years she may be
disinclined to accept truths second-hand, insist on thinking for
herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off exploded traditions, be
untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moral standard and
to be strong, and pure, and good—”

“Like tea,” explained Irais.

“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part
of the charm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids,
her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to
come in at bed-time and sit in the window in the setting sunshine
watching the mysteries of her going to bed. Her mother tubs her, for
she is far too precious to be touched by any nurse, and then she is
rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little pink toes peep out;
and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in her night-dress,
and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt down
on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face
reflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening
prayer for pity and for peace.”

“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is
exactly what I was going to say.”

“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can
copy that if you like.”

“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.

“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied;
“it will make people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am
going to take a man’s name.”

“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call
yourself John Jones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace
name, to emphasise your uncompromising attitude towards all feminine
weaknesses, and no one will be taken in.”

“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of
Minora’s typewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you
and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say.
Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees
are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you?
But then in my case they were only stepmother’s, and nobody ever sings
their praises.”

“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say
my prayers in French.”

“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such
things were not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no
tubs; our faces and hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the
room, and in the summer we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards
for fear we might catch cold. My stepmother didn’t worry much; she used
to wear pink dresses all over lace, and the older she got the prettier
the dresses got. When is she going?”

“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”

“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this.
She has been here an unconscionable time,—it must be nearly three
weeks.”

“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.

Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to
neglect one’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this
time stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so
agreeably with me. She has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or
any other business in the world than just to stay on chatting with me,
and reading, and singing, and laughing at any one there is to laugh at,
and kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of Wrath. Naturally I
love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes in his head must love
her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month the passages and
offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have ever whitewashed
their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in while it
is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those
succulent salads full of caraway seeds that she so devotedly loves. I
shall begin to lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring
every day anxiously after her husband’s health. She is not very fond of
him, because he does not run and hold the door open for her every time
she gets up to leave the room; and though she has asked him to do so,
and told him how much she wishes he would, he still won’t. She stayed
once in a house where there was an Englishman, and his nimbleness in
regard to doors and chairs so impressed her that her husband has had no
peace since, and each time she has to go out of a room she is reminded
of her disregarded wishes, so that a shut door is to her symbolic of
the failure of her married life, and the very sight of one makes her
wonder why she was born; at least, that is what she told me once, in a
burst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant
to talk to, good-tempered, and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old
to begin to learn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that horror of
being made better by his wife that distinguishes so many righteous men,
and is shared by the Man of Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in
his left hand at meals, because if he did not (and I don’t believe he
particularly likes doing it) his relations might say that marriage has
improved him, and thus drive the iron into his soul. This habit
occasions an almost daily argument between one or other of the babies
and myself.

“April, hold your glass in your right hand.”

“But papa doesn’t.”

“When you are as old as papa you can do as you like.”

Which was embellished only yesterday by Minora adding impressively,
“And only think how strange it would look if _everybody_ held their
glasses so.”

April was greatly struck by the force of this proposition.




_January_ 28_th_.—It is very cold,—fifteen degrees of frost _Réaumur_,
but perfectly delicious, still, bright weather, and one feels jolly and
energetic and amiably disposed towards everybody. The two young ladies
are still here, but the air is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh on
me any longer, and besides, they have both announced their approaching
departure, so that after all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace,
and the house will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome the
spring.

Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to present it as a parting
gift to the Man of Wrath; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat
meekly times innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that I am not
vain. When Irais first saw it she laughed till she cried, and at once
commissioned her to paint hers, so that she may take it away with her
and give it to her husband on his birthday, which happens to be early
in February. Indeed, if it were not for this birthday, I really think
she would have forgotten to go at all; but birthdays are great and
solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip by unnoticed, and
always celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd of relations
(gathered from far and near to tell you how well you are wearing, and
that nobody would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), who
stand round a sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are
offered up as a burnt-offering to the gods in the shape of lighted pink
and white candles, stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake
with its candles is the chief feature, and on the table round it lie
the gifts each person present is more or less bound to give. As my
birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well as blotting-books
and photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer I should get
photograph-frames and blotting-books and no mittens; but whatever the
present may be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed with the
noisiest gratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and such words as
_entzückend, reizend, herrlich, wundervoll_, and _süss_ repeated over
and over again, until the unfortunate _Geburtstagskind_ feels indeed
that another year has gone, and that she has grown older, and wiser,
and more tired of folly and of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and
all the morning the rites are celebrated, the cake eaten, healths
drunk, speeches made, and hands nearly shaken off. The neighbouring
parsons drive up, and when nobody is looking their wives count the
candles in the cake; the active lady in the next _Schloss_ spares time
to send a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the _Gotha
Almanach;_ a deputation comes from the farms headed by the chief
inspector in white kid gloves who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the
gracious lady’s head; and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a corner
trying on all the mittens. In the evening there is a dinner for the
relations and the chief local authorities, with more health-drinking
and speechifying, and the next morning, when I come downstairs thankful
to have done with it, I am confronted by the altar still in its place,
cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, because any hasty removal of it
would imply a most lamentable want of sentiment, deplorable in anybody,
but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. All birthdays are
observed in this fashion, and not a few wise persons go for a short
trip just about the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate
them next year; only trips to the country or seaside in December are
not usually pleasant, and if I go to a town there are sure to be
relations in it, and then the cake will spring up mushroom-like from
the teeming soil of their affection.

I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais and
myself are to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further proof
were needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both, in defiance of
tradition, scorn this celebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when
first I knew her, and long before we were either of us married, I sent
her a little brass candlestick on her birthday; and when mine followed
a few months later, she sent me a note-book. No notes were written in
it, and on her next birthday I presented it to her; she thanked me
profusely in the customary manner, and when my turn came I received the
brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy the possession of
each of these articles, and the present question is comfortably settled
once and for all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We never mention
this little arrangement except at the proper time, when we send a
letter of fervid thanks.

This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over
the fire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week.
Sleighing and skating have been our chief occupation, especially
skating, which is more than usually fascinating here, because the place
is intersected by small canals communicating with a lake and the river
belonging to the lake, and as everything is frozen black and hard, we
can skate for miles straight ahead without being obliged to turn round
and come back again,—at all times an annoying, and even mortifying,
proceeding. Irais skates beautifully: modesty is the only obstacle to
my saying the same of myself; but I may remark that all Germans skate
well, for the simple reason that every year of their lives, for three
or four months, they may do it as much as they like. Minora was
astonished and disconcerted by finding herself left behind, and
arriving at the place where tea meets us half an hour after we had
finished. In some places the banks of the canals are so high that only
our heads appear level with the fields, and it is, as Minora noted in
her book, a curious sight to see three female heads skimming along
apparently by themselves, and enjoying it tremendously. When the banks
are low, we appear to be gliding deliciously over the roughest ploughed
fields, with or without legs according to circumstances. Before we
start, I fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, and we
drive home again; because skating against the wind is as detestable as
skating with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature arranges its
blowing without the smallest regard for our convenience. Yesterday, by
way of a change, we went for a picnic to the shores of the Baltic,
ice-bound at this season, and utterly desolate at our nearest point. I
have a weakness for picnics, especially in winter, when the mosquitoes
cease from troubling and the ant-hills are at rest; and of all my many
favourite picnic spots this one on the Baltic is the loveliest and
best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man of Wrath is loud in his
lamentations when the special sort of weather comes which means, as
experience has taught him, this particular excursion. There must be
deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on
waking up, I see these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some
very potent reason to keep me from having out a sleigh and going off.
It is, I admit, a hard day for the horses; but why have horses if they
are not to take you where you want to go to, and at the time you want
to go? And why should not horses have hard days as well as everybody
else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and
frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest that
does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more
admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that
ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. Now
observe the superiority of woman, who sees that both are good, and
after having gazed at the pine and been made happy by its beauty, goes
home and placidly eats the turnip. He went once and only once to this
particular place, and made us feel so small by his _blasé_ behaviour
that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest
stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and after
driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue
of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the
orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shilling in the
sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and
the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The
humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds
in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.

Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested by
mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those
of my visitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably
lost their tempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing
and lamentations. These despicable but irritating insects don’t seem to
have anything to do but to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for
any prey Providence may send them; and as soon as the carriage appears
they rise up in a cloud, and rush to meet us, almost dragging us out
bodily, and never leave us until we drive away again. The sudden view
of the sea from the messy, pine-covered height directly above it where
we picnic; the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forest to the
water’s edge; the coloured sails in the blue distance; the freshness,
the brightness, the vastness—all is lost upon the picnickers, and made
worse than indifferent to them, by the perpetual necessity they are
under of fighting these horrid creatures. It is nice being the only
person who ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but if more people
went, perhaps the mosquitoes would be less lean, and hungry, and
pleased to see us. It has, however, the advantage of being a suitable
place to which to take refractory visitors when they have stayed too
long, or left my books out in the garden all night, or otherwise made
their presence a burden too grievous to be borne; then one fine hot
morning when they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on
the Baltic. I have never known this proposal fail to be greeted with
exclamations of surprise and delight.

“The Baltic! You never told us you were within driving distance? How
_heavenly_ to get a breath of sea air on a day like this! The very
_thought_ puts new life into one! And how _delightful_ to see the
Baltic! Oh, _please_ take us!” And then I take them.

But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience is as clear as the frosty
air itself, and yesterday morning we started off in the gayest of
spirits, even Minora being disposed to laugh immoderately on the least
provocation. Only our eyes were allowed to peep out from the fur and
woollen wrappings necessary to our heads if we would come back with our
ears and noses in the same places they were in when we started, and for
the first two miles the mirth created by each other’s strange
appearance was uproarious,—a fact I mention merely to show what an
effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how
much better it is to go out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and
sulk. As we passed through the neighbouring village with cracking of
whip and jingling of bells, heads popped up at the windows to stare,
and the only living thing in the silent, sunny street was a melancholy
fowl with ruffled feathers, which looked at us reproachfully, as we
dashed with so much energy over the crackling snow.

“Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we passed; “you’ll be indeed a
cold fowl if you stand there motionless, and every one prefers them hot
in weather like this!”

And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though the most splendid joke
had been made, and before we had done we were out of the village and in
the open country beyond, and could see my house and garden far away
behind, glittering in the sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest,
with its vistas of pines stretching away into infinity, and a drive
through it of fourteen miles before we reached the sea. It was a
hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchanted forest leading into
fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there often before, and
always thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the final
arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer loveliness of the
place. For a long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep
blue line, and a cluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a
narrow strip of pale yellow sand; right and left the line of sparkling
forest; and we ourselves standing in a world of white and diamond
traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place like a
benediction.

Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she
thought this beat it almost.

“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, as though she were
in a holy place, “how the two can be compared.”

“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” replied Minora; after
which we turned away and thought we would keep her quiet by feeding
her, so we went back to the sleigh and had the horses taken out and
their cloths put on, and they were walked up and down a distant glade
while we sat in the sleigh and picnicked. It _is_ a hard day for the
horses,—nearly thirty miles there and back and no stable in the middle;
but they are so fat and spoiled that it cannot do them much harm
sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmed soup in a little
apparatus I have for such occasions, which helped to take the
chilliness off the sandwiches,—this is the only unpleasant part of a
winter picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most
long for something very hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of
its wrappings, took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly again. She
was nervous lest it should be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to add
that her nose is not a bad nose, and might even be pretty on anybody
else; but she does not know how to carry it, and there is an art in the
angle at which one’s nose is held just as in everything else, and
really noses were intended for something besides mere blowing.

It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with
immense fur and woollen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much
fur as anything, and choked exceedingly during the process. Minora was
angry at this, and at last pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on
again.

“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of
fur.

“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.

“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.

“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and
splutter; “we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter
it.”

“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.

“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of
what use are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to
continue to eat her gloves.

By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees
and the clouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was
given sandwiches and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with
one hand and held his lunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be
correct, I packed, and the others looked on and gave me valuable
advice.

This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the
place, and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as
fond of him as I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should
do without him, so entirely does he appear to understand and approve of
my tastes and wishes. No drive is too long or difficult for the horses
if I want to take it, no place impossible to reach if I want to go to
it, no weather or roads too bad to prevent my going out if I wish to:
to all my suggestions he responds with the readiest cheerfulness, and
smoothes away all objections raised by the Man of Wrath, who rewards
his alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking of him as an _alter
Esel_. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and alone
in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and
sit quite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little
tune over and over again after interludes of gurgling, or if there are
no nightingales, listening to the marvellous silence, and letting its
blessedness descend into my very soul. The nightingales in the forests
about here all sing the same tune, and in the same key of (E flat).


I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar to
this particular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their
throats a little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the
prettiest little song in the world. How could I indulge my passion for
these drives with their pauses without Peter? He is so used to them
that he stops now at the right moment without having to be told, and he
is ready to drive me all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything
but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Man of Wrath
deplores these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has
given up trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is
deploring in one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the
other, and am gone before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost
in the shadows of the forest by the time he has discovered that I am
nowhere to be found.

The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied however by one spot,
and that is, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the
horses in if they don’t want to be held in, but he goes to sleep
sometimes on his box if I have him out too soon after lunch, and has
upset me twice within the last year—once last winter out of a sleigh,
and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted
into the ditch on one side of the _chaussée_ (German for high road),
and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too
into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the
bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who
never lost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue
clave to the roof of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.

“But I should think he ought to have been _thoroughly_ scolded on an
occasion like that,” said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story
as we wandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in
the sleigh; and she glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was
visible between the bushes above us. “Shall we get home before dark?”
she asked.

The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very
highest of the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists were
creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull
brown; a flight of wild geese passed across the disc of the moon with
loud cacklings.

“Before dark?” echoed Irais, “I should think not. It is dark now nearly
in the forest, and we shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.”

“But it is surely very dangerous to let a man who goes to sleep drive
you,” said Minora apprehensively.

“But he’s such an old dear,” I said.

“Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied tastily; “but there are wakeful old
dears to be had, and on a box they are preferable.”

Irais laughed. “You are growing quite amusing, Miss Minora,” she said.

“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I never knew him to go to
sleep standing up behind us on a sleigh.” But Minora was not to be
appeased, and muttered something about seeing no fun in foolhardiness,
which shows how alarmed she was, for it was rude.

Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way home, and Irais and I at
least were as happy as possible driving back, with all the glories of
the western sky flashing at us every now and then at the end of a long
avenue as we swiftly passed, and later on, when they had faded, myriads
of stars in the narrow black strip of sky over our heads. It was
bitterly cold, and Minora was silent, and not in the least inclined to
laugh with us as she had been six hours before.

“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out
of the forest on to the _chaussée_, and the lights of the village
before ours twinkled in the distance.

“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to
this question.

“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais
solicitously.

“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais
pinched me. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been
without all that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” she said.

“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,”
said I. “Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English
person who has ever been to just this part of it.”

“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who
ever burst—”

“‘Into that silent sea,’” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote
that without its context, you know.”

“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe.
I must breathe, or perhaps I might die.”

The lights from my energetic friend’s _Schloss_ shone brightly down
upon us as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she
is very proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the
only one in the whole district.

“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the
direction of the house.

“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the
way if I went often.”

“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said
Minora; “and I should be obliged if you would take me.”

“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested;
“and we are not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking
all my visitors to see her.”

“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can
tell you what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you,
and if you were to ask questions, and began to take notes, the good
lady would stare at you in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth
had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. _Everybody_ is not as
patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxious to pay off old scores.

“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do
that.”

“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great
ceremony on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a
crochet-mat in the centre—it _has_ got a crochet-mat in the centre,
hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And you would sit on one of the four little
podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other side
of the table facing the sofa. They _are_ red, Elizabeth?” Again I
nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a
rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost
black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show,
and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see,
Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so
much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At
intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on
them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?”
she asked, turning to me.

“No, it is white.”

“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air
and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains
under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just
opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead
of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight,
no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up
under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.”

“When did you go there?” asked Minora.

“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been
calling there all my life.”

Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the
depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark
eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself
is fine, but they are put in all wrong.

“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the
significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there
together, I should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa,
because it is the place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger;
Elizabeth would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as
next in importance; the hostess would sit near us in an arm-chair; and
you, as a person of no importance whatever, would either be left to sit
where you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, and with the
entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense social gulf
that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa
corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that
nothing else could. The world might come to an end, and create less
sensation in doing it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance
you got into the right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a chair
on the other side of the table places you at once in the scale of
precedence, and exactly defines your social position, or rather your
complete want of a social position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever so
little heavenwards.

“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”

“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.

“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais.
“If,” she continued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this
suggestion, “you were to call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues
the innocent would most likely make you hit on a washing-day, and the
distracted mistress of the house would keep you waiting in the cold
room so long while she changed her dress, that you would begin to fear
you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; and when she did
appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the rage
that was boiling in her heart.”

“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”

“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my
familiarity, but such ignorance of country-life customs is very
touching in one who is writing a book about them.”

“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.

“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by the
_Hausfrau_ to be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months,
and while they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every
other consideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into
insignificance, and no one approaching, or interfering with the
mistress of the house during these days of purification, but at their
peril.”

“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes
four times a year?”

“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.

“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.

Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must
take care and not marry a German,” she said.

“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.

“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”

“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”

“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of
linen. If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as
you do in England, you would be put down as a person who only has just
enough to last that length of time, and would be an object of general
contempt.”

“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not
be full of accumulated dirt.”

We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.

“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after
a while with a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her
mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at
door-handles.

“It is a _clean_ land, at any rate,” replied Minora.

“_I_ don’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up to
the house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I
looked up fondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I
want is to live and die just here, and that there never was such a
happy woman as Elizabeth.




_April_ 18_th_.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora left
that I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying
on its green and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for
though the underwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees
above are still quite bare.

February was gone before I well knew that it had come, so deeply was I
engaged in making hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias,
verbenas, and nicotina affinis; while no less than thirty are dedicated
solely to vegetables, it having been borne in upon me lately that
vegetables must be interesting things to grow, besides possessing solid
virtues not given to flowers, and that I might as well take the orchard
and kitchen garden under my wing. So I have rushed in with all the zeal
of utter inexperience, and my February evenings were spent poring over
gardening books, and my days in applying the freshly absorbed wisdom.
Who says that February is a dull, sad, slow month in the country? It
was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description here, and its mild days
enabled me to get on beautifully with the digging and manuring, and
filled my rooms with snowdrops. The longer I live the greater is my
respect and affection for manure in all its forms, and already, though
the year is so young, a considerable portion of its pin-money has been
spent on artificial manure. The Man of Wrath says he never met a young
woman who spent her money that way before; I remarked that it must be
nice to have an original wife; and he retorted that the word original
hardly described me, and that the word eccentric was the one required.
Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since even my husband says so; but
if my eccentricities are of such a practical nature as to result later
in the biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia, why then
he ought to be the first to rise up and call me blessed.

I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, as they are not grown
here, and people try and make boiled cucumbers take their place; but
boiled cucumbers are nasty things, and I don’t see why marrows should
not do here perfectly well. These, and primrose-roots, are the English
contributions to my garden. I brought over the roots in a tin box last
time I came from England, and am anxious to see whether they will
consent to live here. Certain it is that they don’t exist in the
Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter kills them, for surely,
if such lovely things would grow, they never would have been
overlooked. Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she reads so
many English books, and has heard so much about primroses, and they
have got so mixed up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and
Disraelis, that she longs to see this mysterious political flower, and
has made me promise to telegraph when it appears, and she will come
over. Bur they are not going to do anything this year, and I only hope
those cold days did not send them off to the Paradise of flowers. I am
afraid their first impression of Germany was a chilly one.

Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after the garden and the
babies, and announces her intention of coming back as soon as the
numerous relations staying with her have left,—“which they won’t do,”
she wrote the other day, “until the first frosts nip them off, when
they will disappear like belated dahlias—double ones of course, for
single dahlias are too charming to be compared to relations. I have
every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they have been
ever since my husband’s birthday—not the same ones exactly, but I get
so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins. My
husband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I
am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to go and look at—I should
be grateful even for one, and would look at it from morning till night,
and quite stare it out of countenance, sooner than stay at home and
have the truth told me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha?
she, in particular, spends her time propounding obscure questions for
my solution. I get so tired and worried trying to guess the answers,
which are always truths supposed to be good for me to hear. ‘Why do you
wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks,—and that sets me off
wondering why I _do_ wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to know
for, or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answer
truthfully. ‘I am sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after
puzzling over it for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring
and ask her?’ And then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly
line she says I have down the middle of my forehead, and that betokens
a listless and discontented disposition. Well, if she knew, what did
she ask me for? Whenever I am with them they ask me riddles like that,
and I simply lead a _dog’s_ life. Oh, my dear, relations are like
drugs,—useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small
quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the
truly wise avoid them.”

From Minora I have only had one communication since her departure, in
which she thanked me for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending
me a bottle of English embrocation to rub on my bruises after skating;
that it was wonderful stuff, and she was sure I would like it; and that
it cost two marks, and would I send stamps. I pondered long over this.
Was it a parting hit, intended as revenge for our having laughed at
her? Was she personally interested in the sale of embrocation? Or was
it merely Minora’s idea of a graceful return for my hospitality? As for
bruises, nobody who skates decently regards it as a bruise-producing
exercise, and whenever there were any they were all on Minora; but she
did happen to turn round once, I remember, just as I was in the act of
tumbling down for the first and only time, and her delight was but
thinly veiled by her excessive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the
stamps, received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of my
life; I had been a good Samaritan to her at the request of my friend,
but the best of Samaritans resents the offer of healing oil for his own
use. But why waste a thought on Minora at Easter, the real beginning of
the year in defiance of calendars. She belongs to the winter that is
past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life
I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for
joy that the spring is here! What a resurrection of beauty there is in
my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! The whole of this radiant
Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the
windflowers and celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to
the Hirschwald, to see what the spring had been doing there; and the
afternoon was so hot that we lay a long time on the turf, blinking up
through the leafless branches of the silver birches at the soft, fat
little white clouds floating motionless in the blue. We had tea on the
grass in the sun, and when it began to grow late, and the babies were
in bed, and all the little wind-flowers folded up for the night, I
still wandered in the green paths, my heart full of happiest gratitude.
It makes one very humble to see oneself surrounded by such a wealth of
beauty and perfection _anonymously_ lavished, and to think of the
infinite meanness of our own grudging charities, and how displeased we
are if they are not promptly and properly appreciated. I do sincerely
trust that the benediction that is always awaiting me in my garden may
by degrees be more deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and
patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy flowers I so much love.