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Title: The Solitary Summer

Author: Elizabeth von Arnim

Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5991]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on October 9, 2002]

Edition: 10

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOLITARY SUMMER ***




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and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





The Solitary Summer

by Elizabeth von Arnim


To the man of wrath
With some apologies and much love



May


May 2nd.--Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said,
"I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of
life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to
grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they
will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months
in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the
things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On
wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the
pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on
the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be
perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there
on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have
discovered there is peace."

"Mind you do not get your feet damp," said the Man of Wrath, removing
his cigar.

It was the evening of May Day, and the spring had taken hold of me body
and soul. The sky was full of stars, and the garden of scents, and the
borders of wallflowers and sweet, sly pansies. All day there had been a
breeze, and all day slow masses of white clouds had been sailing across
the blue. Now it was so still, so motionless, so breathless, that it
seemed as though a quiet hand had been laid on the garden, soothing and
hushing it into silence.

The Man of Wrath sat at the foot of the verandah steps in that placid
after-dinner mood which suffers fools, if not gladly, at least
indulgently, and I stood in front of him, leaning against the sun-dial.

"Shall you take a book with you?" he asked.

"Yes, I shall," I replied, slightly nettled by his tone. "I am quite
ready to admit that though the fields and flowers are always ready to
teach, I am not always in the mood to learn, and sometimes my eyes are
incapable of seeing things that at other times are quite plain."

"And then you read?"

"And then I read. Well, dear Sage, what of that?"

But he smoked in silence, and seemed suddenly absorbed by the stars.

"See," he said, after a pause, during which I stood looking at him and
wishing he would use longer sentences, and he looked at the sky and did
not think about me at all, "see how bright the stars are to-night.
Almost as though it might freeze."

"It isn't going to freeze, and I won't look at anything until you have
told me what you think of my idea. Wouldn't a whole lovely summer, quite
alone, be delightful? Wouldn't it be perfect to get up every morning for
weeks and feel that you belong to yourself and to nobody else?" And I
went over to him and put a hand on each shoulder and gave him a little
shake, for he persisted in gazing at the stars just as though I had not
been there. "Please, Man of Wrath, say something long for once," I
entreated; "you haven't said a good long sentence for a week."

He slowly brought his gaze from the stars down to me and smiled. Then he
drew me on to his knee.

"Don't get affectionate," I urged; "it is words, not deeds, that I want.
But I'll stay here if you'll talk."

"Well then, I will talk. What am I to say? You know you do as you
please, and I never interfere with you. If you do not want to have any
one here this summer you will not have any one, but you will find it a
very long summer."

"No, I won't."

"And if you lie on the heath all day, people will think you are mad."

"What do I care what people think?"

"No, that is true. But you will catch cold, and your little nose will
swell."

"Let it swell."

"And when it is hot you will be sunburnt and your skin spoilt."

"I don't mind my skin."

"And you will be dull."

"Dull?"

It often amuses me to reflect how very little the Man of Wrath really
knows me. Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as
happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people
have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do
not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel
disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of
birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during
which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it
is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago
who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves.
They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how
can you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great deal
into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if
you try for ever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has
not got it in him to be happy. The only result probably would be that
you knock your own out of yourself. Obviously happiness must come from
within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my
present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me
more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.

"I wonder," I remarked after a pause, during which I began to suspect
that I too must belong to the serried ranks of the femmes incomprises,
"why you think I shall be dull. The garden is always beautiful, and I am
nearly always in the mood to enjoy it. Not quite always, I must confess,
for when those Schmidts were here" (their name was not Schmidt, but what
does that matter?) "I grew almost to hate it. Whenever I went into it
there they were, dragging themselves about with faces full of indignant
resignation. Do you suppose they saw one of those blue hepaticas
overflowing the shrubberies? And when I drove with them into the woods,
where the fairies were so busy just then hanging the branches with
little green jewels, they talked about Berlin the whole time, and the
good savouries their new chef makes."

"Well, my dear, no doubt they missed their savouries. Your garden, I
acknowledge, is growing very pretty, but your cook is bad. Poor Schmidt
sometimes looked quite ill at dinner, and the beauty of your floral
arrangements in no way made up for the inferior quality of the food.
Send her away."

"Send her away? Be thankful you have her. A bad cook is more effectual a
great deal than Kissingen and Carlsbad and Homburg rolled into one, and
very much cheaper. As long as I have her, my dear man, you will be
comparatively thin and amiable. Poor Schmidt, as you call him, eats too
much of those delectable savouries, and then looks at his wife and
wonders why he married her. Don't let me catch you doing that."

"I do not think it is very likely," said the Man of Wrath; but whether
he meant it prettily, or whether he was merely thinking of the
improbability of his ever eating too much of the local savouries, I
cannot tell. I object, however, to discussing cooks in the garden on a
starlight night, so I got off his knee and proposed that we should
stroll round a little.

It was such a sweet evening, such a fitting close to a beautiful May
Day, and the flowers shone in the twilight like pale stars, and the air
was full of fragrance, and I envied the bats fluttering through such a
bath of scent, with the real stars above and the pansy stars beneath,
and themselves so fashioned that even if they wanted to they could not
make a noise and disturb the prevailing peace. A great deal that is
poetical has been written by English people about May Day, and the
impression left on the foreign mind is an impression of posies, and
garlands, and village greens, and youths and maidens much be-ribboned,
and lambs, and general friskiness. I was in England once on a May Day,
and we sat over the fire shivering and listening blankly to the north-
east wind tearing down the street and the rattling of the hail against
the windows, and the friends with whom I was staying said it was very
often so, and that they had never seen any lambs and ribbons. We Germans
attach no poetical significance to it at all, and yet we well might, for
it is almost invariably beautiful; and as for garlands, I wonder how
many villages full of young people could have been provided with them
out of my garden, and nothing be missed. It is to-day a garden of
wallflowers, and I think I have every colour and sort in cultivation.
The borders under the south windows of the house, so empty and
melancholy this time last year, are crammed with them, and are finished
off in front by a broad strip from end to end of yellow and white
pansies. The tea rose beds round the sun-dial facing these borders are
sheets of white, and golden, and purple, and wine-red pansies, with the
dainty red shoots of the tea roses presiding delicately in their midst.
The verandah steps leading down into this pansy paradise have boxes of
white, and pink, and yellow tulips all the way up on each side, and on
the lawn, behind the roses, are two big beds of every coloured tulip
rising above a carpet of forget-me-nots. How very much more charming
different-coloured tulips are together than tulips in one colour by
itself! Last year, on the recommendation of sundry writers about
gardens, I tried beds of scarlet tulips and forget-me-nots. They were
pretty enough; but I wish those writers could see my beds of mixed
tulips. I never saw anything so sweetly, delicately gay. The only ones I
exclude are the rose-coloured ones; but scarlet, gold, delicate pink,
and white are all there, and the effect is infinitely enchanting. The
forget-me-nots grow taller as the tulips go off, and will presently
tenderly engulf them altogether, and so hide the shame of their decay in
their kindly little arms. They will be left there, clouds of gentle
blue, until the tulips are well withered, and then they will be taken
away to make room for the scarlet geraniums that are to occupy these two
beds in the summer and flare in the sun as much as they like. I love an
occasional mass of fiery colour, and these two will make the lilies look
even whiter and more breathless that are to stand sentinel round the
semicircle containing the precious tea roses.

The first two years I had this garden, I was determined to do exactly as
I chose in it, and to have no arrangements of plants that I had not
planned, and no plants but those I knew and loved; so, fearing that an
experienced gardener would profit by my ignorance, then about as
absolute as it could be, and thrust all his bedding nightmares upon me,
and fill the place with those dreadful salad arrangements so often seen
in the gardens of the indifferent rich, I would only have a meek man of
small pretensions, who would be easily persuaded that I knew as much as,
or more than, he did himself. I had three of these meek men one after
the other, and learned what I might long ago have discovered, that the
less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and that
no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity. The
first of these three went melancholy mad at the end of a year; the
second was love-sick, and threw down his tools and gave up his situation
to wander after the departed siren who had turned his head; the third,
when I inquired how it was that the things he had sown never by any
chance came up, scratched his head, and as this is a sure sign of
ineptitude, I sent him away.

Then I sat down and thought. I had been here two years and worked hard,
through these men, at the garden; I had done my best to learn all I
could and make it beautiful; I had refused to have more than an inferior
gardener because of his supposed more perfect obedience, and one
assistant, because of my desire to enjoy the garden undisturbed; I had
studied diligently all the gardening books I could lay hands on; I was
under the impression that I am an ordinarily intelligent person, and
that if an ordinarily intelligent person devotes his whole time to
studying a subject he loves, success is very probable; and yet at the
end of two years what was my garden like? The failures of the first two
summers had been regarded with philosophy; but that third summer I used
to go into it sometimes and cry.

As far as I was concerned I had really learned a little, and knew what
to buy, and had fairly correct notions as to when and in what soil to
sow and plant what I had bought; but of what use is it to buy good seeds
and plants and bulbs if you are forced to hand them over to a gardener
who listens with ill-concealed impatience to the careful directions you
give him, says Jawohl a great many times, and then goes off and puts
them in in the way he has always done, which is invariably the wrong
way? My hands were tied because of the unfortunate circumstance of sex,
or I would gladly have changed places with him and requested him to do
the talking while I did the planting, and as he probably would not have
talked much there would have been a distinct gain in the peace of the
world, which would surely be very materially increased if women's
tongues were tied instead of their hands, and those that want to could
work with them without collecting a crowd. And is it not certain that
the more one's body works the fainter grow the waggings of one's tongue?
I sometimes literally ache with envy as I watch the men going about
their pleasant work in the sunshine, turning up the luscious damp earth,
raking, weeding, watering, planting, cutting the grass, pruning the
trees--not a thing that they do from the first uncovering of the roses
in the spring to the November bonfires but fills my soul with longing to
be up and doing it too. A great many things will have to happen,
however, before such a state of popular large-mindedness as will allow
of my digging without creating a sensation is reached, so I have plenty
of time for further grumblings; only I do very much wish that the
tongues inhabiting this apparently lonely and deserted countryside would
restrict their comments to the sins, if any, committed by the indigenous
females (since sins are fair game for comment) and leave their harmless
eccentricities alone. After having driven through vast tracts of forest
and heath for hours, and never meeting a soul or seeing a house, it is
surprising to be told that on such a day you took such a drive and were
at such a spot; yet this has happened to me more than once. And if even
this is watched and noted, with what lightning rapidity would the news
spread that I had been seen stalking down the garden path with a hoe
over my shoulder and a basket in my hand, and weeding written large on
every feature! Yet I should love to weed.

I think it was the way the weeds flourished that put an end at last to
my hesitations about taking an experienced gardener and giving him a
reasonable number of helpers, for I found that much as I enjoyed
privacy, I yet detested nettles more, and the nettles appeared really to
pick out those places to grow in where my sweetest things were planted,
and utterly defied the three meek men when they made periodical and
feeble efforts to get rid of them. I have a large heart in regard to
things that grow, and many a weed that would not be tolerated anywhere
else is allowed to live and multiply undisturbed in my garden. They are
such pretty things, some of them, such charmingly audacious things, and
it is so particularly nice of them to do all their growing, and
flowering, and seed-bearing without any help or any encouragement. I
admit I feel vexed if they are so officious as to push up among my tea
roses and pansies, and I also prefer my paths without them; but on the
grass, for instance, why not let the poor little creatures enjoy
themselves quietly, instead of going out with a dreadful instrument and
viciously digging them up one by one? Once I went into the garden just
as the last of the three inept ones had taken up his stand, armed with
this implement, in the middle of the sheet of gold and silver that is
known for convenience' sake as the lawn, and was scratching his head, as
he looked round, in a futile effort to decide where he should begin. I
saved the dandelions and daisies on that occasion, and I like to believe
they know it. They certainly look very jolly when I come out, and I
rather fancy the dandelions dig each other in their little ribs when
they see me, and whisper, "Here comes Elizabeth; she's a good sort,
ain't she?"--for of course dandelions do not express themselves very
elegantly.

But nettles are not to be tolerated. They settled the question on which
I had been turning my back for so long, and one fine August morning,
when there seemed to be nothing in the garden but nettles, and it was
hard to believe that we had ever been doing anything but carefully
cultivating them in all their varieties, I walked into the Man of
Wrath's den.

"My dear man," I began, in the small caressing voice of one who has long
been obstinate and is in the act of giving in, "will you kindly
advertise for a head gardener and a proper number of assistants? Nearly
all the bulbs and seeds and plants I have squandered my money and my
hopes on have turned out to be nettles, and I don't like them. I have
had a wretched summer, and never want to see a meek gardener again."

"My dear Elizabeth," he replied, "I regret that you did not take my
advice sooner. How often have I pointed out the folly of engaging one
incapable person after the other? The vegetables, when we get any, are
uneatable, and there is never any fruit. I do not in the least doubt
your good intentions, but you are wanting in judgment. When will you
learn to rely on my experience?"

I hung my head; for was he not in the pleasant position of being able to
say, "I told you so"?--which indeed he has been saying for the last two
years. "I don't like relying," I murmured, "and have rather a prejudice
against somebody else's experience. Please will you send the
advertisement to-day?"

They came in such shoals that half the population must have been head
gardeners out of situations. I took all the likely ones round the
garden, and I do not think I ever spent a more chastening week than that
week of selection. Their remarks were, naturally, of the frankest
nature, as I had told them I had had practically only gardeners'
assistants since I lived here, and they had no idea, when they were
politely scoffing at some arrangement, that it happened to be one of my
own. The hot-beds in the kitchen garden with which I had taken such
pains were objects of special derision. It appeared that they were all
wrong--measurements, preparation, soil, manure, everything that could be
wrong, was. Certainly the only crop we had from them was weeds. But I
began about half way through the week to grow sceptical, because on
comparing their criticisms I found they seldom agreed, and so took
courage again. Finally I chose a nice, trim young man, with strikingly
intelligent eyes and quick movements, who had shown himself less
concerned with the state of chaos existing than with considerations of
what might eventually be made of the place. He is very deaf, so he
wastes no time in words, and is exceedingly keen on gardening, and
knows, as I very soon discovered, a vast amount more than I do, in spite
of my three years' application. Moreover, he is filled with that
humility and eagerness to learn which is only found in those who have
already learned more than their neighbours. He enters into my plans with
enthusiasm, and makes suggestions of his own, which, if not always quite
in accordance with what are perhaps my peculiar tastes, at least plainly
show that he understands his business. We had a very busy winter
together altering all the beds, for they none of them had been given a
soil in which plants could grow, and next autumn I intend to have all
the so-called lawns dug up and levelled, and shall see whether I cannot
have decent turf here. I told him he must save the daisy and dandelion
roots, and he looked rather crestfallen at that, but he is young, and
can learn to like what I like, and get rid of his only fault, a nursery-
gardener attitude towards all flowers that are not the fashion. "I shall
want a great many daffodils next spring," I shouted one day at the
beginning of our acquaintance.

His eyes gleamed. "Ah yes," he said with immediate approval, "they are
_sehr modern."

I was divided between amusement at the notion of Spenser's
daffadowndillies being _modern_, and indignation at hearing exactly the
same adjective applied to them that the woman who sells me my hats
bestows on the most appalling examples of her stock.

"They are to be in troops on the grass," I said; whereupon his face grew
doubtful. "That is indeed _sehr modern_," I shouted. But he had grown
suddenly deafer--a phenomenon I have observed to occur every time my
orders are such as he has never been given before. After a time he will,
I think, become imbued with my unorthodoxy in these matters; and
meanwhile he has the true gardening spirit and loves his work, and love,
after all, is the chief thing. I know of no compost so good. In the
poorest soil, love alone, by itself, will work wonders.

Down the garden path, past the copse of lilacs with their swelling dark
buds, and the great three-cornered bed of tea roses and pansies in front
of it, between the rows of china roses and past the lily and foxglove
groups, we came last night to the spring garden in the open glade round
the old oak; and there, the first to flower of the flowering trees, and
standing out like a lovely white naked thing against the dusk of the
evening, was a double cherry in full bloom, while close beside it, but
not so visible so late, with all their graceful growth outlined by rosy
buds, were two Japanese crab apples. The grass just there is filled with
narcissus, and at the foot of the oak a colony of tulips consoles me for
the loss of the purple crocus patches, so lovely a little while since.

"I must be by myself for once a whole summer through," I repeated,
looking round at these things with a feeling of hardly being able to
bear their beauty, and the beauty of the starry sky, and the beauty of
the silence and the scent--"I must be alone, so that I shall not miss
one of these wonders, and have leisure really to _live_."

"Very well, my dear," replied the Man of Wrath, "only do not grumble
afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose,
and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best
to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal
of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective
punishment."

"Dear Sage," I cried, slipping my hand through his arm, "don't be so
wise! I promise you that I won't be dull, and I won't be punished, and I
will be happy."

And we sauntered slowly back to the house in great contentment,
discussing the firmament and such high things, as though we knew all
about them.

May 15th.--There is a dip in the rye-fields about half a mile from my
garden gate, a little round hollow like a dimple, with water and reeds
at the bottom, and a few water-loving trees and bushes on the shelving
ground around. Here I have been nearly every morning lately, for it
suits the mood I am in, and I like the narrow footpath to it through the
rye, and I like its solitary dampness in a place where everything is
parched, and when I am lying on the grass and look down I can see the
reeds glistening greenly in the water, and when I look up I can see the
rye-fringe brushing the sky. All sorts of beasts come and stare at me,
and larks sing above me, and creeping things crawl over me, and stir in
the long grass beside me; and here I bring my book, and read and dream
away the profitable morning hours, to the accompaniment of the amorous
croakings of innumerable frogs.

Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as
more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was
hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who
loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try
to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the
sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the
happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing
heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have
more ripely considered the thing. He, of course, does not like me as
much as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs produced
by wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get a
match and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which I
wipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told me
that he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is best
to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yet
reached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in its
true character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like to
wipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it were
possible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, I
should also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoes
too, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for this
purpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreau
came back again, and lived for the rest of his days like other people.
During his life, I imagine he would have refused to notice anything so
fatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigned
discourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs
to me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much
and as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his
dearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant
companion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning
hours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it
grieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint
sentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain
bush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and
that I must be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefully
tucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass
to keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine.
"Oh, my dear Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat
of the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you
have flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your
philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that
inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of
allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool
called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the
necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another
way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for
all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left
there, because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit,
which, if not fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance. Yet he is
right; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to
sail by it like Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me,
but there are the babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a
respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which
those dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished
every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so
much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny
morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet,
and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy
of love with life, to come back and live through those dreary luncheon-
ridden hours, when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets
and asparagus and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns his
back on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the
afternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will
not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they
are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a
drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the
grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great
friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be
entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty
tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is
that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I
read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit,
buried in cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with
the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so
much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who asserts
that in the country the only things that make one happy are meals. "I
was happy," he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin in
the Island of Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain,--"I
was happy when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who live
in the country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity of
mind, as well as from the desire of eating." And such is the
perverseness of human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even more
than Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily.

In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am
sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many
lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as
persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual
feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could so
beautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amount
before they can painfully stammer out a sentence that will describe it;
and when they have got it out, how it seems to have just missed the core
of the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it is
of what was perhaps a mighty feeling! I read Goethe on a special seat,
never departed from when he accompanies me, a seat on the south side of
an ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimes
prevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a great
beech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches I
can see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming out
beyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, its
first spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almost
golden backed by a solemn cluster of firs. Here I read Goethe--
everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here
I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I
wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the
complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder
and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the
shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the
opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on
the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from
which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception of
what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not.

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt
Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful
spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,
silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the
beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such
rapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and
trees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all
that breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and
mend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended and
comforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the one
complete and final consolation--before this revelation of yearning,
universal pity, every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.

When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my
drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath
the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take
Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,
and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship,
bearing Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights.
How can I tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is
brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the
elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by
simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have
done with them once and for all.

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and
I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing
returns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have been to come
into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consuming
passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul! I feel I
owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation is
that they too did not care for hats. In the centre of my library there is
a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told,
from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor to
ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books
that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more--all
the books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases round
the walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, and
easiest to get at, are those I love the _best_--the very elect among my
favourites. They change from time to time as I get older, and with years
some that are in the bookcases come here, and some that are here go into
the bookcases, and some again are removed altogether, and are placed on
certain shelves in the drawing-room which are reserved for those that
have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and from whence they
seldom, if ever, return. Carlyle used to be among the elect. That was
years ago, when my hair was very long, and my skirts very short, and I
sat in the paternal groves with _Sartor Resartus_, and felt full of
wisdom and _Weltschmerz_; and even after I was married, when we lived in
town, and the noise of his thunderings was almost drowned by the rattle
of droschkies over the stones in the street below, he still shone forth a
bright, particular star. Now, whether it is age creeping upon me, or
whether it is that the country is very still and sound carries, or
whether my ears have grown sensitive, I know not; but the moment I open
him there rushes out such a clatter of denunciation, and vehemence, and
wrath, that I am completely deafened; and as I easily get bewildered, and
love peace, and my chief aim is to follow the apostle's advice and study
to be quiet, he has been degraded from his high position round the pillar
and has gone into retirement against the wall, where the accident of
alphabet causes him to rest in the soothing society of one Carina, a
harmless gentleman, whose book on the _Bagni di Lucca_ is on his left,
and a Frenchman of the name of Charlemagne, whose soporific comedy
written at the beginning of the century and called _Le Testament de
l'Oncle_, _ou Les Lunettes Cassees_, is next to him on his right. Two
works of his still remain, however, among the elect, though differing in
glory--his _Frederick the Great_, fascinating for obvious reasons to the
patriotic German mind, and his _Life of Sterling_, a quiet book on the
whole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the natural
positions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of genius
writing the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friend
was exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the face
of such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether removed
from Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence at all, unless it be
an eminence, that (happily) crowded bit of ground, where the bright and
courageous and lovable stand together. We Germans have all heard of
Carlyle, and many of us have read him with due amazement, our admiration
often interrupted by groans at the difficulties his style places in the
candid foreigner's path; but without Carlyle which of us would ever have
heard of Sterling? And even in this comparatively placid book mines of
the accustomed vehemence are sprung on the shrinking reader. To the
prosaic German, nourished on a literature free from thunderings and any
marked acuteness of enthusiasm, Carlyle is an altogether astonishing
phenomenon.

And here I feel constrained to inquire sternly who I am that I should
talk in this unbecoming manner of Carlyle? To which I reply that I am
only a humble German seeking after peace, devoid of the least real
desire to criticise anybody, and merely anxious to get out of the way of
geniuses when they make too much noise. All I want is to read quietly
the books that I at present prefer. Carlyle is shut up now and therefore
silent on his comfortable shelf; yet who knows but what in my old age,
when I begin to feel really young, I may not once again find comfort in
him?

What a medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austen
leaning against Heine--what would she have said to that, I wonder?--with
Miss Mitford and _Cranford_ to keep her in countenance on her other
side. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one
that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Here
are Ruskin, Lubbock, White's _Selborne_, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert
Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do
not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, _Wuthering Heights_, Lamb's _Essays_,
Johnson's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal
Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I
loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French
children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German
children's books, on which I was brought up, with their charming
woodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and good
housemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of the
atmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgments
and rewards in which they lived, and how the _Finger Gottes_ was
impressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most of
the dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and book
about gardens that has been published of late years.

These gardening books are an unfailing delight, especially in winter,
when to sit by my blazing peat fire with the snow driving past the
windows and read the luscious descriptions of roses and all the other
summer glories is one of my greatest pleasures. And then how well I get
to know and love those gardens whose gradual development has been
described by their owners, and how happily I wander in fancy down the
paths of certain specially charming ones in Lancashire, Berkshire,
Surrey, and Kent, and admire the beautiful arrangement of bed and
border, and the charming bits in unexpected corners, and all the
evidences of untiring love! Any book I see advertised that treats of
gardens I immediately buy, and thus possess quite a collection of
fascinating and instructive garden literature. A few are feeble, and get
shunted off into the drawing-room; but the others stay with me winter
and summer, and soon lose the gloss of their new coats, and put on the
comfortable look of old friends in every-day clothes, under the frequent
touch of affection. They are such special friends that I can hardly pass
them without a nod and a smile at the well-known covers, each of which
has some pleasant association of time and place to make it still more
dear.

My spirit too has wandered in one or two French gardens, but has not yet
heard of a German one loved beyond everything by its owner. It is, of
course, possible that my countrymen do love them and keep quiet about
them, but many things are possible that are not probable, and experience
compels me to the opinion that this is one of them. We have the usual
rich man who has fine gardens laid out regardless of expense, but those
are not gardens in the sense I mean; and we have the poor man with his
bit of ground, hardly ever treated otherwise than as a fowl-run or a
place dedicated to potatoes; and as for the middle class, it is too busy
hurrying through life to have time or inclination to stop and plant a
rose.

How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and
spending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floating
leisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hot
scramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at the
vulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring and
unabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are only
pennies, after all--unpleasant, battered copper things, without a gold
piece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and the
hatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of those
above you who have more. And as I perceive I am growing wise, and what
is even worse, allegorical, and as these are tendencies to be fought
against as long as possible, I'll go into the garden and play with the
babies, who at this moment are sitting in a row on the buttercups,
singing what appear to be selections from popular airs.



June


June 3rd.--The Man of Wrath, I observe, is laying traps for me and being
deep. He has prophesied that I will find solitude intolerable, and he is
naturally desirous that his prophecy should be fulfilled. He knows that
continuous rain depresses me, and he is awaiting a spell of it to bring
me to a confession that I was wrong after all, whereupon he will make
that remark so precious to the married heart, "My dear, I told you so."
He begins the day by tapping the barometer, looking at the sky, and
shaking his head. If there are any clouds he remarks that they are
coming up, and if there are none he says it is too fine to last. He has
even gone the length once or twice of starting off to the farm on hot,
sunny mornings in his mackintosh, in order to impress on me beyond all
doubt that the weather is breaking up. He studiously keeps out of my way
all day, so that I may have every opportunity of being bored as quickly
as possible, and in the evenings he retires to his den directly after
dinner, muttering something about letters. When he has finally
disappeared, I go out to the stars and laugh at his transparent wiles.

But how would it be if we did have a spell of wet weather? I do not
quite know. As long as it is fine, rainy days in the future do not seem
so very terrible, and one, or even two really wet ones are quite
enjoyable when they do come--pleasant times that remind one of the snug
winter now so far off, times of reading, and writing, and paying one's
bills. I never pay bills or write letters on fine summer days. Not for
any one will I forego all that such a day rightly spent out of doors
might give me; so that a wet day at intervals is almost as necessary for
me as for my garden. But how would it be if there were many wet days? I
believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the
stoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simple
expedient of turning your face to the fire; but when you have no fire,
and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and the
dreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blank
corners of your heart. I rather fancy, however, that it is a waste of
energy to ponder over what I should do if we had a wet summer on such a
radiant day as this. I prefer sitting here on the verandah and looking
down through a frame of leaves at all the rosebuds June has put in the
beds round the sun-dial, to ponder over nothing, and just be glad that I
am alive. The verandah at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon is a place
in which to be happy and not decide anything, as my friend Thoreau told
me of some other tranquil spot this morning. The chairs are comfortable,
there is a table to write on, and the shadows of young leaves flicker
across the paper. On one side a Crimson Rambler is thrusting inquisitive
shoots through the wooden bars, being able this year for the first time
since it was planted to see what I am doing up here, and next to it a
Jackmanni clematis clings with soft young fingers to anything it thinks
likely to help it up to the goal of its ambition, the roof. I wonder
which of the two will get there first. Down there in the rose beds,
among the hundreds of buds there is only one full-blown rose as yet, a
Marie van Houtte, one of the loveliest of the tea roses, perfect in
shape and scent and colour, and in my garden always the first rose to
flower; and the first flowers it bears are the loveliest of its own
lovely flowers, as though it felt that the first of its children to see
the sky and the sun and the familiar garden after the winter sleep ought
to put on the very daintiest clothes they can muster for such a festal
occasion.

Through the open schoolroom windows I can hear the two eldest babies at
their lessons. The village schoolmaster comes over every afternoon and
teaches them for two hours, so that we are free from governesses in the
house, and once those two hours are over they are free for twenty-four
from anything in the shape of learning. The schoolroom is next to the
verandah, and as two o'clock approaches their excitement becomes more
and more intense, and they flutter up and down the steps, looking in
their white dresses like angels on a Jacob's ladder, or watch eagerly
among the bushes for a first glimpse of him, like miniature and
perfectly proper Isoldes. He is a kind giant with that endless supply of
patience so often found in giants, especially when they happen to be
village schoolmasters, and judging from the amount of laughter I hear,
the babies seem to enjoy their lessons in a way they never did before.
Every day they prepare bouquets for him, and he gets more of them than a
_prima donna_, or at any rate a more regular supply. The first day he
came I was afraid they would be very shy of such a big strange man, and
that he would extract nothing from them but tears; but the moment I left
them alone together and as I shut the door, I heard them eagerly
informing him, by way of opening the friendship, that their heads were
washed every Saturday night, and that their hair-ribbons did not match
because there had not been enough of the one sort to go round. I went
away hoping that they would not think it necessary to tell him how often
my head is washed, or any other news of a personal nature about me; but
I believe by this time that man knows everything there is to know about
the details of my morning toilet, which is daily watched with the
greatest interest by the Three. I hope he will be more successful than I
was in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, at
which stage their questions became so searching as to completely
confound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especially
regrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought the
course to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiar
to infallibility in a corner, and telling them that they were too young
to understand these things for the present; and they, having a touching
faith in the truth of every word I say, gave three contented little
purrs of assent, and proposed that we should play instead at rolling
down the grass bank under the south windows--which I did not do, I am
glad to remember.

But the schoolmaster, after four weeks' teaching, has got them as far as
Moses, and safely past the Noah's ark on which I came to grief, and if
glibness is a sign of knowledge then they have learned the story very
thoroughly. Yesterday, after he had gone, they emerged into the verandah
fresh from Moses and bursting with eagerness to tell me all about it.

"Herr Schenk told us to-day about Moses," began the April baby, making a
rush at me.

"Oh?"

"Yes, and a _boser_, _boser Konig_ who said every boy must be deaded,
and Moses was the _allerliebster_."

"Talk English, my _dear_ baby, and not such a dreadful mixture," I
besought.

"He wasn't a cat."

"A cat?"

"Yes, he wasn't a cat, that Moses--a boy was he."

"But of course he wasn't a cat," I said with some severity; "no one ever
supposed he was."

"Yes, but mummy," she explained eagerly, with much appropriate hand-
action, "the cook's Moses _is_ a cat."

"Oh, I see. Well?"

"And he was put in a basket in the water, and that did swim. And then
one time they comed, and she said--"

"Who came? And who said?"

"Why, the ladies; and the _Konigstochter_ said, _'Ach hormal_, _da_
_schreit so etwas_.'"

"In German?"

"Yes, and then they went near, and one must take off her shoes and
stockings and go in the water and fetch that tiny basket, and then they
made it open, and that _Kind_ did cry and cry and _strampel_ so"--here
both the babies gave such a vivid illustration of the _strampeln_ that
the verandah shook--"and see! it is a tiny baby. And they fetched
somebody to give it to eat, and the _Konigstochter_ can keep that boy,
and further it doesn't go."

"Do you love Moses, mummy?" asked the May baby, jumping into my lap, and
taking my face in both her hands--one of the many pretty, caressing
little ways of a very pretty, caressing little creature.

"Yes," I replied bravely, "I love him."

"Then I too!" they cried with simultaneous gladness, the seal having
thus been affixed to the legitimacy of their regard for him. To be of
such authority that your verdict on every subject under heaven is
absolute and final is without doubt to be in a proud position, but, like
all proud positions, it bristles with pitfalls and drawbacks to the
weak-kneed; and most of my conversations with the babies end in a sudden
change of subject made necessary by the tendency of their remarks and
the unanswerableness of their arguments. Happily, yesterday the Moses
talk was brought to an end by the April baby herself, who suddenly
remembered that I had not yet seen and sympathised with her dearest
possession, a Dutch doll called Mary Jane, since a lamentable accident
had bereft it of both its legs; and she had dived into the schoolroom
and fished it out of the dark corner reserved for the mangled and thrust
it in my face before I had well done musing on the nature and extent of
my love for Moses--for I try to be conscientious--and bracing myself to
meet the next question.

"See this poor Mary Jane," she said, her voice and hand quivering with
tenderness as she lifted its petticoats to show me the full extent of
the calamity, "see, mummy, no legs--only twowsers and nothing further."

I wish they would speak English a little better. The pains I take to
correct them and weed out the German words that crop up in every
sentence are really untiring, and the results discouraging. Indeed, as
they get older the German asserts itself more and more, and is
threatening to swallow up the little English they have left entirely. I
talk English steadily with them, but everybody else, including a small
French nurse lately imported, nothing but German. Somebody told me the
thing to do was to let children pick up languages when they were babies,
at which period they absorb them as easily as food and drink, and are
quite unaware that they are learning anything at all; whereupon I
immediately introduced this French girl into the family, forgetting how
little English they have absorbed, and the result has been that they
pass their days delightfully in teaching her German. They were
astonished at first on discovering that she could not understand a word
they said, and soon set about altering such an uncomfortable state of
things; and as they are three to one and very zealous, and she is a meek
little person with a profile like a teapot with a twisted black handle
of hair, their success was practically certain from the beginning, and
she is getting on quite nicely with her German, and has at least already
thoroughly learned all the mistakes. She wanders in the garden with a
surprised look on her face as of one who is moving about in worlds not
realised; and the three cling to her skirts and give her enthusiastic
lessons all day long.

Poor Seraphine! What courage to weigh anchor at eighteen and go into a
foreign country, to a place where you are among utter strangers, without
a friend, unable to speak a word of the language, and not even sure
before you start whether you will be given enough to eat. Either it is
that saddest of courage forced on the timid by necessity, or, as Doctor
Johnson would probably have said, it is stark insensibility; and I am
afraid when I look at her I silently agree with the apostle of common
sense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling,
for the altogether inadequate reason that she has a certain resemblance
to a teapot. Now is it not hard that a person may have a soul as
beautiful as an angel's, a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and
harmonies, and if nature has not thought fit to endow his body with a
chin the world will have none of him? The vulgar prejudice is in favour
of chins, and who shall escape its influence? I, for one, cannot, though
theoretically I utterly reject the belief that the body is the likeness
of the soul; for has not each of us friends who, we know, love beyond
everything that which is noble and good, and who by no means themselves
look noble and good? And what about all the beautiful persons who love
nothing on earth except themselves? Yet who in the world cares how
perfect the nature may be, how humble, how sweet, how gracious, that
dwells in a chinless body? Nobody has time to inquire into natures, and
the chinless must be content to be treated in something of the same
good-natured, tolerant fashion in which we treat our poor relations
until such time as they shall have grown a beard; and those who by their
sex are for ever shut out from this glorious possibility will have to
take care, should they be of a bright intelligence, how they speak with
the tongues of men and of angels, nothing being more droll than the
effect of high words and poetic ideas issuing from a face that does not
match them.

I wish we were not so easily affected by each other's looks. Sometimes,
during the course of a long correspondence with a friend, he grows to be
inexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine his
intellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in great
perfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity,
after which I have been so long and so vainly striving. It is not I
clothing him with the attributes I love and wandering away insensibly
into that sweet land of illusions to which our footsteps turn whenever
they are left to themselves, it is his very self unconsciously writing
itself into his letters, the very man as he is without his body. Then I
meet him again, and all illusions go. He is what I had always found him
when we were together, good and amiable; but some trick of manner, some
feature or attitude that I do not quite like, makes me forget, and be
totally unable to remember, what I know from his letters to be true of
him. He, no doubt, feels the same thing about me, and so between us
there is a thick veil of something fixed, which, dodge as we may, we
never can get round.

"Well, and what do you conclude from all that?" said the Man of Wrath,
who had been going out by the verandah door with his gun and his dogs to
shoot the squirrels before they had eaten up too many birds, and of
whose coat-sleeve I had laid hold as he passed, keeping him by me like a
second Wedding Guest, and almost as restless, while I gave expression to
the above sentiments.

"I don't know," I replied, "unless it is that the world is very evil and
the times are waxing late, but that doesn't explain anything either,
because it isn't true."

And he went down the steps laughing and shaking his head and muttering
something that I could not quite catch, and I am glad I could not, for
the two words I did hear were women and nonsense.

He has developed an unexpected passion for farming, much to my relief,
and though we came down here at first only tentatively for a year, three
have passed, and nothing has been said about going back to town. Nor
will anything be said so long as he is not the one to say it, for no
three years of my life can come up to these in happiness, and not even
those splendid years of childhood that grow brighter as they recede were
more full of delights. The delights are simple, it is true, and of the
sort that easily provoke a turning up of the worldling's nose; but who
cares for noses that turn up? I am simple myself, and never tire of the
blessed liberty from all restraints. Even such apparently indifferent
details as being able to walk straight out of doors without first
getting into a hat and gloves and veil are full of a subtle charm that
is ever fresh, and of which I can never have too much. It is clear that
I was born for a placid country life, and placid it certainly is; so
much so that the days are sometimes far more like a dream than anything
real, the quiet days of reading, and thinking, and watching the changing
lights, and the growth and fading of the flowers, the fresh quiet days
when life is so full of zest that you cannot stop yourself from singing
because you are so happy, the warm quiet days lying on the grass in a
secluded corner observing the procession of clouds--this being, I admit,
a particularly undignified attitude, but think of the edification! Each
morning the simple act of opening my bedroom windows is the means of
giving me an ever-recurring pleasure. Just underneath them is a border
of rockets in full flower, at that hour in the shadow of the house,
whose gables lie sharply defined on the grass beyond, and they send up
their good morning of scent the moment they see me leaning out, careful
not to omit the pretty German custom of morning greeting. I call back
mine, embellished with many endearing words, and then their fragrance
comes up close, and covers my face with gentlest little kisses. Behind
them, on the other side of the lawn on this west side of the house, is a
thick hedge of lilac just now at its best, and what that best is I wish
all who love lilac could see. A century ago a man lived here who loved
his garden. He loved, however, in his younger years, travelling as well,
but in his travels did not forget this little corner of the earth
belonging to him, and brought back the seeds of many strange trees such
as had never been seen in these parts before, and tried experiments with
them in the uncongenial soil, and though many perished, a few took hold,
and grew, and flourished, and shade me now at tea-time. What flowers he
had, and how he arranged his beds, no one knows, except that the eleven
beds round the sun-dial were put there by him; and of one thing he seems
to have been inordinately fond, and that was lilac. We have to thank him
for the surprising beauty of the garden in May and early June, for he it
was who planted the great groups of it, and the banks of it, and massed
it between the pines and firs. Wherever a lilac bush could go a lilac
bush went; and not common sorts, but a variety of good sorts, white, and
purple, and pink, and mauve, and he must have planted it with special
care and discrimination, for it grows here as nothing else will, and
keeps his memory, in my heart at least, for ever gratefully green. On
the wall behind our pew in church there is his monument, he having died
here full of years, in the peace that attends the last hours of a good
man who has loved his garden; and to the long Latin praises of his
virtues and eminence I add, as I pass beneath it on Sundays, a heartiest
Amen. Who would not join in the praises of a man to whom you owe your
lilacs, and your Spanish chestnuts, and your tulip trees, and your
pyramid oaks? "He was a good man, for he loved his garden"--that is the
epitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a far
clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of
sonorous Latinities. How could he be anything _but_ good since he loved
a garden--that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us,
and leaves us, each time we have been in it, clearer, and purer, and
more harmless?


June 16th.--Yesterday morning I got up at three o'clock and stole
through the echoing passages and strange dark rooms, undid with
trembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah, and passed out
into a wonderful, unknown world. I stood for a few minutes motionless on
the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the
sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the
beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless
grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with
scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud
raptures at the coming of the sun. There in front of me was the sun-
dial, there were the rose bushes, there was the bunch of pansies I had
dropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange and
unfamiliar it all looked, and how holy--as though God must be walking
there in the cool of the day. I went down the path leading to the stream
on the east side of the garden, brushing aside the rockets that were
bending across it drowsy with dew, the larkspurs on either side of me
rearing their spikes of heavenly blue against the steely blue of the
sky, and the huge poppies like splashes of blood amongst the greys and
blues and faint pearly whites of the innocent, new-born day. On the
garden side of the stream there is a long row of silver birches, and on
the other side a rye-field reaching across in powdery grey waves to the
part of the sky where a solemn glow was already burning. I sat down on
the twisted, half-fallen trunk of a birch and waited, my feet in the
long grass and my slippers soaking in dew. Through the trees I could see
the house with its closed shutters and drawn blinds, the people in it
all missing, as I have missed day after day, the beauty of life at that
hour. Just behind me the border of rockets and larkspurs came to an end,
and, turning my head to watch a stealthy cat, my face brushed against a
wet truss of blossom and got its first morning washing. It was
wonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything to
itself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burning
redder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because one
associates daylight with people, and voices, and bustle, and hurryings
to and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, and
feeding our bodies that we may be able to work to feed them again; but
here was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure
air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living
soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up
to warm only me, and nowhere a single hard word being spoken, or a
single selfish act being done, nowhere anything that could tarnish the
blessed purity of the world as God has given it us. If one believed in
angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and
cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every
twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The
doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent,
and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave,
judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless,
and forgiven. And see the blessedness of sleep, that sends us back for a
space to our early innocence. Are not our first impulses on waking
always good? Do we not all know how in times of wretchedness our first
thoughts after the night's sleep are happy? We have been dreaming we are
happy, and we wake with a smile, and stare still smiling for a moment at
our stony griefs before with a stab we recognise them.

There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up
quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the
field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet
flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and
intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and
suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the
beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs
all our courage--the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each
of us lives and dies. Often I could cry for pity of our forlornness, and
of the pathos of our endeavours to comfort ourselves. With what an agony
of patience we build up the theories of consolation that are to protect,
in times of trouble, our quivering and naked souls! And how fatally
often the elaborate machinery refuses to work at the moment the blow is
struck.

I got up and turned my face away from the unbearable, indifferent
brightness. Myriads of small suns danced before my eyes as I went along
the edge of the stream to the seat round the oak in my spring garden,
where I sat a little, looking at the morning from there, drinking it in
in long breaths, and determining to think of nothing but just be happy.
What a smell of freshly mown grass there was, and how the little heaps
into which it had been raked the evening before sparkled with dewdrops
as the sun caught them. And over there, how hot the poppies were already
beginning to look--blazing back boldly in the face of the sun, flashing
back fire for fire. I crossed the wet grass to the hammock under the
beech on the lawn, and lay in it awhile trying to swing in time to the
nightingale's tune; and then I walked round the ice-house to see how
Goethe's corner looked at such an hour; and then I went down to the fir
wood at the bottom of the garden where the light was slanting through
green stems; and everywhere there was the same mystery, and emptiness,
and wonder. When four o'clock drew near I set off home again, not
desiring to meet gardeners and have my little hour of quiet talked
about, still less my dressing-gown and slippers; so I picked a bunch of
roses and hurried in, and just as I softly bolted the door, dreadfully
afraid of being taken for a burglar, I heard the first water-cart of the
day creaking round the corner. Fearfully I crept up to my room, and when
I awoke at eight o'clock and saw the roses in a glass by my side, I
remembered what had happened as though it had been years ago.

Now here I have had an experience that I shall not soon forget,
something very precious, and private, and close to my soul; a feeling as
though I had taken the world by surprise, and seen it as it really is
when off its guard--as though I had been quite near to the very core of
things. The quiet holiness of that hour seems all the more mysterious
now, because soon after breakfast yesterday the wind began to blow from
the northwest, and has not left off since, and looking out of the window
I cannot believe that it is the same garden, with the clouds driving
over it in black layers, and angry little showers every now and then
bespattering its harassed and helpless inhabitants, who cannot pull
their roots up out of the ground and run for their lives, as I am sure
they must long to do. How discouraging for a plant to have just proudly
opened its loveliest flowers, the flowers it was dreaming about all the
winter and working at so busily underground during the cold weeks of
spring, and then for a spiteful shower of five minutes' duration to come
and pelt them down, and batter them about, and cover the tender,
delicate things with irremediable splashes of mud! Every bed is already
filled with victims of the gale, and those that escape one shower go
down before the next; so I must make up my mind, I suppose, to the
wholesale destruction of the flowers that had reached perfection--that
head of white rockets among them that washed my face a hundred years
ago--and look forward cheerfully to the development of the younger
generation of buds which cannot yet be harmed.

I know these gales. We get them quite suddenly, always from the north-
west, and always cold. They ruin my garden for a day or two, and in the
summer try my temper, and at all seasons try my skin; yet they are
precious because of the beautiful clear light they bring, the intensity
of cold blue in the sky and the terrific purple blackness of the clouds
one hour and their divine whiteness the next. They fly screaming over
the plain as though ten thousand devils with whips were after them, and
in the sunny intervals there is nothing in any of nature's moods to
equal the clear sharpness of the atmosphere, all the mellowness and
indistinctness beaten out of it, and every leaf and twig glistening
coldly bright. It is not becoming, a north-westerly gale; it treats us
as it treats the garden, but with opposite results, roughly rubbing the
softness out of our faces, as I can see when I look at the babies, and
avoid the further proof of my own reflection in the glass. But there is
life in it, glowing, intense, robust life, and when in October after
weeks of serene weather this gale suddenly pounces on us in all its
savageness, and the cold comes in a gust, and the trees are stripped in
an hour, what a bracing feeling it is, the feeling that here is the
first breath of winter, that it is time to pull ourselves together, that
the season of work, and discipline, and severity is upon us, the stern
season that forces us to look facts in the face, to put aside our dreams
and languors, and show what stuff we are made of. No one can possibly
love the summer, the dear time of dreams, more passionately than I do;
yet I have no desire to prolong it by running off south when the winter
approaches and so cheat the year of half its lessons. It is delightful
and instructive to potter among one's plants, but it is imperative for
body and soul that the pottering should cease for a few months, and that
we should be made to realise that grim other side of life. A long hard
winter lived through from beginning to end without shirking is one of
the most salutary experiences in the world. There is no nonsense about
it; you could not indulge in vapours and the finer sentiments in the
midst of its deadly earnest if you tried. The thermometer goes down to
twenty degrees of frost Reaumur, and down you go with it to the
realities, to that elementary state where everything is big--health and
sickness, delight and misery, ecstasy and despair. It makes you remember
your poorer neighbours, and sends you into their homes to see that they
too are fitted out with the armour of warmth and food necessary in the
long fight; and in your own home it draws you nearer than ever to each
other. Out of doors it is too cold to walk, so you run, and are rewarded
by the conviction that you cannot be more than fifteen; or you get into
your furs, and dart away in a sleigh over the snow, and are sure there
never was music so charming as that of its bells; or you put on your
skates, and are off to the lake to which you drove so often on June
nights, when it lay rosy in the reflection of the northern glow, and all
alive with myriads of wild duck and plovers, and which is now, but for
the swish of your skates, so silent, and but for your warmth and
jollity, so forlorn. Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and
the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books. It is
then that I am glad I do not live in a cave, as I confess I have in my
more godlike moments wished to do; it is then that I feel most capable
of attending to the Man of Wrath's exhortations with an open mind; it is
then that I actually like to hear the shrieks of the wind, and then that
I give my heartiest assent, as I warm my feet at the fire, to the poet's
proposition that all which we behold is full of blessings.

But what dreariness can equal the dreariness of a cold gale at
midsummer? I have been chilly and dejected all day, shut up behind the
streaming window-panes, and not liking to have a fire because of its
dissipated appearance in the scorching intervals of sunshine. Once or
twice my hand was on the bell and I was going to order one, when out
came the sun and it was June again, and I ran joyfully into the
dripping, gleaming garden, only to be driven in five minutes later by a
yet fiercer squall. I wandered disconsolately round my pillar of books,
looking for the one that would lend itself best to the task of
entertaining me under the prevailing conditions, but they all looked
gloomy, and reserved, and forbidding. So I sat down in a very big chair,
and reflected that if there were to be many days like this it might be
as well to ask somebody cheerful to come and sit opposite me in all
those other big chairs that were looking so unusually gigantic and
empty. When the Man of Wrath came in to tea there were such heavy clouds
that the room was quite dark, and he peered about for a moment before he
saw me. I suppose in the gloom of the big room I must have looked rather
lonely, and smaller than usual buried in the capacious chair, for when
he finally discovered me his face widened into an inappropriately
cheerful smile.

"Well, my dear," he said genially, "how very cold it is."

"Did you come in to say that?" I asked.

"This tempest is very unusual in the summer," he proceeded; to which I
made no reply of any sort.

"I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. At
least, I saw you, but it is so dark I thought you were a cushion."

Now no woman likes to be taken for a cushion, so I rose and began to
make tea with an icy dignity of demeanour.

"I am afraid I shall be forced to break my promise not to invite any one
here," he said, watching my face as he spoke. My heart gave a distinct
leap--so small is the constancy and fortitude of woman. "But it will
only be for one night." My heart sank down as though it were lead. "And
I have just received a telegram that it will be to-night." Up went my
heart with a cheerful bound.

"Who is it?" I inquired. And then he told me that it was the least
objectionable of the candidates for the living here, made vacant by our
own parson having been appointed superintendent, the highest position in
the Lutheran Church; and the gale must have brought me low indeed for
the coming of a solitary parson to give me pleasure. The entire race of
Lutheran parsons is unpleasing to me,--whether owing to their fault or
to mine, it would ill become me to say,--and the one we are losing is
the only one I have met that I can heartily respect, and admire, and
like. But he is quite one by himself in his extreme godliness, perfect
simplicity, and real humility, and though I knew it was unlikely we
should find another as good, and I despised myself for the eagerness
with which I felt I was looking forward to seeing a new face, I could
not stop myself from suddenly feeling cheerful. Such is the weakness of
the female mind, and such the unexpected consequences of two months'
complete solitude with forty-eight hours' gale at the end of them.

We have had countless applications during the last few weeks for the
living, as it is a specially fat one for this part of the country, with
a yearly income of six thousand marks, and a good house, and several
acres of land. The Man of Wrath has been distracted by the difficulties
of choice. According to the letters of recommendation, they were all
wonderful men with unrivalled powers of preaching, but on closer inquiry
there was sure to be some drawback. One was too old, another not old
enough; another had twelve children, and the parsonage only allows for
eight; one had a shrewish wife, and another was of Liberal tendencies in
politics--a fatal objection; one was in money difficulties because he
would spend more than he had, which was not surprising when one heard
what he did have; and another was disliked in his parish because he and
his wife were too close-fisted and would not spend at all; and at last,
the Man of Wrath explained, the moment having arrived when if he did not
himself appoint somebody his right to do so would lapse, he had written
to the one who was coming, and invited him down that he might look at
him, and ask him searching questions as to the faith which is in him.

I forgot my gloom, and my half-formed desperate resolve to break my vow
of solitude and fill the house with the frivolous, as I sat listening to
the cheerful talk of the little parson this evening. He was so cheerful,
yet it was hard to see any cause for it in the life he was leading, a
life led by the great majority of the German clergy, fat livings being
as rare here as anywhere else. He told us with pleasant frankness all
about himself, how he lived on an income of two thousand marks with a
wife and six children, and how he was often sorely put to it to keep
decent shoes on their feet. "I am continually drawing up plans of
expenditure," he said, "but the shoemaker's bill is always so much more
than I had expected that it throws my calculations completely out."

His wife, of course, was ailing, but already his eldest child, a girl of
ten, took a great deal of the work off her mother's shoulders, poor
baby. He was perfectly natural, and said in the simplest way that if the
choice were to fall on him it would relieve him of many grinding
anxieties; whereupon I privately determined that if the choice did not
fall on him the Man of Wrath and I would be strangers from that hour.

"Have you been worrying him with questions about his principles?" I
asked, buttonholing the Man of Wrath as he came out from a private
conference with him.

"Principles? My dear Elizabeth, how can he have any on that income?"

"If he is not a Conservative will you let that stand in his way, and
doom that little child to go on taking work off other people's
shoulders?"

"My dear Elizabeth," he protested, "what has my decision for or against
him to do with dooming little children to go on doing anything? I really
cannot be governed by sentiment."

"If you don't give it to him--" and I held up an awful finger of warning
as he retreated, at which he only laughed.

When the parson came to say good-night and good-bye, as he was leaving
very early in the morning, I saw at once by his face that all was right.
He bent over my hand, stammering out words of thanks and promises of
devotion and invocations of blessings in such quantities that I began to
feel quite pleased with myself, and as though I had been doing a
virtuous deed. This feeling I saw reflected on the Man of Wrath's face,
which made me consider that all we had done was to fill the living in
the way that suited us best, and that we had no cause whatever to look
and feel so benevolent. Still, even now, while the victorious candidate
is dreaming of his trebled income and of the raptures of his home-coming
to-morrow, the glow has not quite departed, and I am dwelling with
satisfaction on the fact that we have been able to raise eight people
above those hideous cares that crush all the colour out of the lives of
the genteel poor. I am glad he has so many children, because there will
be more to be made happy. They will be rich on the little income, and
will no doubt dismiss the wise and willing eldest baby to appropriate
dolls and pinafores; and everybody will have what they never yet have
had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure--leisure to sit
down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean,
and really want, and really intend to do with their lives. And this, I
may observe, is a beneficial process wholly impossible on 100 pounds a
year divided by eight.

But I wonder whether they will be thin-skinned enough ever to discover
that other and less delightful side of life only seen by those who have
plenty of leisure. Sordid cares may be very terrible to the sensitive,
and make them miss the best of everything, but as long as they have them
and are busy from morning till night keeping up appearances, they miss
also the burden of those fears, and dreads, and realisations that beset
him who has time to think. When in the morning I go into my sausage-room
and give out sausages, I never think of anything but sausages. My
horizon is bounded by them, every faculty is absorbed by them, and they
engross me, while I am with them, to the exclusion of the whole world.
Not that I love them; as far as that goes, unlike the effect they
produce on most of my country-men, they leave me singularly cold; but it
is one of my duties to begin the day with sausages, and every morning
for the short time I am in the midst of their shining rows, watching my
_Mamsell_ dexterously hooking down the sleekest with an instrument like
a boat-hook, I am practically dead to every other consideration in
heaven or on earth. What are they to me, Love, Life, Death, all the
mysteries? The one thing that concerns me is the due distribution to the
servants of sausages; and until that is done, all obstinate questionings
and blank misgivings must wait. If I were to spend my days in their
entirety doing such work I should never have time to think, and if I
never thought I should never feel, and if I never felt I should never
suffer or rapturously enjoy, and so I should grow to be something very
like a sausage myself, and not on that account, I do believe, any the
less precious to the Man of Wrath.

I know what I would do if I were both poor and genteel--the gentility
should go to the place of all good ilities, including utility,
respectability, and imbecility, and I would sit, quite frankly poor,
with a piece of bread, and a pot of geraniums, and a book. I conclude
that if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary to
decency I might be able to afford a geranium, because I see them so
often in the windows of cottages where there is little else; and if I
preferred such inexpensive indulgences as thinking and reading and
wandering in the fields to the doubtful gratification arising from kept-
up appearances (always for the bedazzlement of the people opposite, and
therefore always vulgar), I believe I should have enough left over to
buy a radish to eat with my bread; and if the weather were fine, and I
could eat it under a tree, and give a robin some crumbs in return for
his cheeriness, would there be another creature in the world so happy? I
know there would not.



JULY


July 1st.--I think that after roses sweet-peas are my favourite flowers.
Nobody, except the ultra-original, denies the absolute supremacy of the
rose. She is safe on her throne, and the only question to decide is
which are the flowers that one loves next best. This I have been a long
while deciding, though I believe I knew all the time somewhere deep down
in my heart that they were sweet-peas; and every summer when they first
come out, and every time, going round the garden, that I come across
them, I murmur involuntarily, "Oh yes, _you_ are the sweetest, you dear,
dear little things." And what a victory this is, to be ranked next the
rose even by one person who loves her garden. Think of the wonderful
beauty triumphed over--the lilies, the irises, the carnations, the
violets, the frail and delicate poppies, the magnificent larkspurs, the
burning nasturtiums, the fierce marigolds, the smooth, cool pansies. I
have a bed at this moment in the full glory of all these things, a
little chosen plot of fertile land, about fifteen yards long and of
irregular breadth, shutting in at its broadest the east end of the walk
along the south front of the house, and sloping away at the back down to
a moist, low bit by the side of a very tiny stream, or rather thread of
trickling water, where, in the dampest corner, shining in the sun, but
with their feet kept cool and wet, is a colony of Japanese irises, and
next to them higher on the slope Madonna lilies, so chaste in looks and
so voluptuous in smell, and then a group of hollyhocks in tenderest
shades of pink, and lemon, and white, and right and left of these white
marguerites and evening primroses and that most exquisite of poppies
called Shirley, and a little on one side a group of metallic blue
delphiniums beside a towering white lupin, and in and out and everywhere
mignonette, and stocks, and pinks, and a dozen other smaller but not
less lovely plants. I wish I were a poet, that I might properly describe
the beauty of this bit as it sparkles this afternoon in the sunshine
after rain; but of all the charming, delicate, scented groups it
contains, none to my mind is so lovely as the group of sweet-peas in its
north-west corner. There is something so utterly gentle and tender about
sweet-peas, something so endearing in their clinging, winding, yielding
growth; and then the long straight stalk, and the perfect little winged
flower at the top, with its soft, pearly texture and wonderful range and
combination of colours--all of them pure, all of them satisfying, not an
ugly one, or even a less beautiful one among them. And in the house,
next to a china bowl of roses, there is no arrangement of flowers so
lovely as a bowl of sweet-peas, or a Delf jar filled with them. What a
mass of glowing, yet delicate colour it is! How prettily, the moment you
open the door, it seems to send its fragrance to meet you! And how you
hang over it, and bury your face in it, and love it, and cannot get away
from it. I really am sorry for all the people in the world who miss such
keen pleasure. It is one that each person who opens his eyes and his
heart may have; and indeed, most of the things that are really worth
having are within everybody's reach. Any one who chooses to take a
country walk, or even the small amount of trouble necessary to get him
on to his doorstep and make him open his eyes, may have them, and there
are thousands of them thrust upon us by nature, who is for ever giving
and blessing, at every turn as we walk. The sight of the first pale
flowers starring the copses; an anemone held up against the blue sky
with the sun shining through it towards you; the first fall of snow in
the autumn; the first thaw of snow in the spring; the blustering, busy
winds blowing the winter away and scurrying the dead, untidy leaves into
the corners; the hot smell of pines--just like blackberries--when the
sun is on them; the first February evening that is fine enough to show
how the days are lengthening, with its pale yellow strip of sky behind
the black trees whose branches are pearled with raindrops; the swift
pang of realisation that the winter is gone and the spring is coming;
the smell of the young larches a few weeks later; the bunch of cowslips
that you kiss and kiss again because it is so perfect, because it is so
divinely sweet, because of all the kisses in the world there is none
other so exquisite--who that has felt the joy of these things would
exchange them, even if in return he were to gain the whole world, with
all its chimney-pots, and bricks, and dust, and dreariness? And we know
that the gain of a world never yet made up for the loss of a soul.

One day, in going round the head inspector's garden with his wife, whose
care it is, I remarked with surprise that she had no sweet-peas. I
called them _Lathyrus odoratus_, and she, having little Latin, did not
understand. Then I called them _wohlriechende Wicken_, the German
rendering of that which sounds so pretty in English, and she said she
had never heard of them. The idea of an existence in a garden yet
without sweet-peas, so willing, so modest, and so easily grown, had
never presented itself as possible to my imagination. Ever since I can
remember, my summers have been filled with them; and in the days when I
sat in my own perambulator and they were three times as tall as I was, I
well recollect a certain waving hedge of them in the garden of my
childhood, and how I stared up longingly at the flowers so far beyond my
reach, inaccessibly tossing against the sky. When I grew bigger and had
a small garden of my own, I bought their seeds to the extent of twenty
pfennings, and trained the plants over the rabbit-hutch that was the
chief feature in the landscape. There were other seeds in that garden
seeds on which I had laid out all my savings and round which played my
fondest hopes, but the sweet-peas were the only ones that came up. The
same thing happened here in my first summer, my gardening knowledge not
having meanwhile kept pace with my years, and of the seeds sown that
first season sweet-peas again were the only ones that came up. I should
say they were just the things for people with very little time and
experience at their disposal to grow. A garden might be made beautiful
with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet
labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of
delicacy and refinement. Yet the Frau Inspector not only had never heard
of them, but, on my showing her a bunch, was not in the least impressed,
and led me in her garden to a number of those exceedingly vulgar red
herbaceous peonies growing among her currant bushes, and announced with
conviction that they were her favourite flower. It was on the tip of my
tongue to point out that in these days of tree-peonies, and peonies so
lovely in their silvery faint tints that they resemble gigantic roses,
it is absolutely wicked to suffer those odious red ones to pervert one's
taste; that a person who sees nothing but those every time he looks out
of his window very quickly has his nice perception for true beauty
blunted; that such a person would do well to visit my garden every day
during the month of May, and so get himself cured by the sight of my
peony bushes covered with huge scented white and blush flowers; and that
he would, I was convinced, at the end of the cure, go home and pitch his
own on to the dust-heap. But of what earthly use would it have been?
Pointing out the difference between what is beautiful and what misses
beauty to a Frau Inspector of forty, whose chief business it is to make
butter, is likely to be singularly unprolific of good results; and,
further, experience has taught me that whenever anything is on the tip
of my tongue the best thing to do is to keep it there. I wonder why a
woman always wants to interfere.

It is a pity, nevertheless, that this lady should be so wanting in the
aesthetic instinct, for her garden is full of possibilities. It lies due
south, sheltered on the north, east, and west by farm buildings, and is
rich in those old fruit-trees and well-seasoned gooseberry bushes that
make such a good basis for the formation of that most delightful type of
little garden, the flower-and-fruit-and-vegetable-mixed sort. She has,
besides, an inestimable slimy, froggy pond, a perpetual treasure of
malodorous water, much pined after by thirsty flowers; and then does she
not live in the middle of a farmyard flowing with fertilising properties
that only require a bucket and a shovel to transform them into roses?
The way in which people miss their opportunities is melancholy.

This pond of hers, by the way, is an object of the liveliest interest to
the babies. They do not seem to mind the smell, and they love the slime,
and they had played there for several days in great peace before the
unfortunate accident of the June baby's falling in and being brought
back looking like a green and speckled frog herself, revealed where it
was they had persuaded Seraphine to let them spend their mornings. Then
there was woe and lamentation, for I was sure they would all have
typhoid fever, and I put them mercilessly to bed, and dosed them, as a
preliminary, with castor oil--that oil of sorrow, as Carlyle calls it.
It was no use sending for the doctor because there is no doctor within
reach; a fact which simplifies life amazingly when you have children.
During the time we lived in town the doctor was never out of the house.
Hardly a day passed but one or other of the Three had a spot, or, as the
expressive German has it, a _Pickel_, and what parent could resist
sending for a doctor when one lived round the corner? But doctors are
like bad habits--once you have shaken them off you discover how much
better you are without them; and as for the babies, since they inhabit a
garden, prompt bed and the above-mentioned simple remedy have been all
that is necessary to keep them robust. I admit I was frightened when I
heard where they had been playing, for when the wind comes from that
quarter even sitting by my rose beds I have been reminded of the
existence of the pond; and I kept them in bed for three days, anxiously
awaiting symptoms, and my head full of a dreadful story I had heard of a
little boy who had drunk seltzer water and thereupon been seized with
typhoid fever and had died, and if, I asked myself with a power of
reasoning unusual in a woman, you die after seltzer water, what will you
not do after frog-pond? But they did nothing, except be uproarious, and
sing at the top of their voices, and clamour for more dinner than I felt
would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in
a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and
turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared.
The pond was at first strictly forbidden as a playground, but afterwards
I made concessions, and now they are allowed to go to a deserted little
burying-ground on the west side of it when the wind is in the west; and
there at least they can hear the frogs, and sometimes, if they are
patient, catch a delightful glimpse of them.

The graveyard is in the middle of a group of pines that bounds the Frau
Inspector's garden on that side, and has not been used within the memory
of living man. The people here love to make their little burying-grounds
in the heart of a wood if they can, and they are often a long way away
from the church to which they belong because, while every hamlet has its
burying-ground, three or four hamlets have to share a church; and indeed
the need for churches is not so urgent as that for graves, seeing that,
though we may not all go to church, we all of us die and must be buried.
Some of these little cemeteries are not even anywhere near a village,
and you come upon them unexpectedly in your drives through the woods--
bits of fenced-in forest, the old gates dropping off their hinges, the
paths green from long disuse, the unchecked trees casting black,
impenetrable shadows across the poor, meek, pathetic graves. I try
sometimes, pushing aside the weeds, to decipher the legend on the almost
speechless headstones; but the voice has been choked out of them by
years of wind, and frost, and snow, and a few stray letters are all that
they can utter--a last stammering protest against oblivion.

The Man of Wrath says all women love churchyards. He is fond of sweeping
assertions, and is sometimes curiously feminine in his tendency to infer
a general principle from a particular instance. The deserted little
forest burying-grounds interest and touch me because they are so
solitary, and humble, and neglected, and forgotten, and because so many
long years have passed since tears were shed over the newly made graves.
Nobody cries now for the husband, or father, or brother buried there;
years and years ago the last tear that would ever be shed for them was
dried--dried probably before the gate was reached on the way home--and
they were not missed. Love and sorrow appear to be flowers of
civilisation, and most to flourish where life has the broadest margin of
leisure and abundance. The primary instincts are always there, and must
first be satisfied; and if to obtain the means of satisfying them you
have to work from morning till night without rest, who shall find time
and energy to sit down and lament? I often go with the babies to the
enclosure near the Frau Inspector's pond, and it seems just as natural
that they should play there as that the white butterflies should chase
each other undisturbed across the shadows. And then the place has a
soothing influence on them, and they sober down as we approach it, and
on hot afternoons sit quietly enough as close to the pond as they may,
content to watch for the chance appearance of a frog while talking to me
about angels.

This is their favourite topic of conversation in this particular place.
Just as I have special times and places for certain books, so do they
seem to have special times and places for certain talk. The first time I
took them there they asked me what the mounds were, and by a series of
adroit questions extracted the information that the people who had been
buried there were now angels (I am not a specialist, and must take
refuge in telling them what I was told in my youth), and ever since then
they refuse to call it a graveyard, and have christened it the angel-
yard, and so have got into the way of discussing angels in all their
bearings, sometimes to my confusion, whenever we go there.

"But what _are_> angels, mummy?" said the June baby inconsequently this
afternoon, after having assisted at the discussions for several days and
apparently listening with attention.

"_Such_ a silly baby!" cried April, turning upon her with contempt,
"don't you know they are _lieber Gott's_ little girls?"

Now I protest I had never told those babies anything of the sort. I
answer their questions to the best of my ability and as conscientiously
as I can, and then, when I hear them talking together afterwards, I am
staggered by the impression they appear to have received. They live in a
whole world of independent ideas in regard to heaven and the angels,
ideas quite distinct from other people's, and, as far as I can make out,
believe that the Being they call _lieber Gott_ pervades the garden,
and is identical with, among other things, the sunshine and the air on a
fine day. I never told them so, nor, I am sure, did Seraphine, and still
less Seraphine's predecessor Miss Jones, whose views were wholly
material; yet if, on bright mornings, I forget to immediately open all
the library windows on coming down, the April baby runs in, and with
quite a worried look on her face cries, "Mummy, won't you open the
windows and let the _lieber Gott_ come in?"

If they were less rosy and hungry, or if I were less prosaic, I might
have gloomy forebodings that such keen interest in things and beings
celestial was prophetic of a short life; and in books, we know, the
children who talk much on these topics invariably die, after having
given their reverential parents a quantity of advice. Fortunately such
children are confined to books, and there is nothing of the ministering
child--surely a very uncomfortable form of infant--about my babies.
Indeed, I notice that in their conversations together on such matters a
healthy spirit of contradiction prevails, and this afternoon, after
having accepted April's definition of angels with apparent reverence,
the June baby electrified the other two (always more orthodox and
yielding) by remarking that she hoped she would never go to heaven. I
pretended to be deep in my book and not listening; April and May were
sitting on the grass sewing ("needling" they call it) fearful-looking
woolwork things for Seraphine's birthday, and June was leaning idly
against a pine trunk, swinging a headless doll round and round by its
one remaining leg, her heels well dug into the ground, her sun-bonnet
off, and all the yellow tangles of her hair falling across her sunburnt,
grimy little face.

"No," she repeated firmly, with her eyes fixed on her sisters' startled
faces, "I don't want to. There's nothing there for babies to play with."

"Nothing to play with?" exclaimed the other two in a breath--and
throwing down their needle-work they made a simultaneous rush for me.

"Mummy, did you hear? June says she doesn't want to go into the
_Himmel_!" cried April, horror-stricken.

"Because there's nothing to play with there, she says," cried May,
breathlessly; and then they added with one voice, as though the subject
had long ago been threshed out and settled between them, "Why, she can
play at ball there with all the _Sternleins_ if she likes!"

The idea of the June baby striding across the firmament and hurling the
stars about as carelessly as though they were tennis-balls was so
magnificent that it sent shivers of awe through me as I read.

"But if you break all your dolls," added April, turning severely to
June, and eyeing the distorted remains in her hand, "I don't think
_lieber Gott_ will let you in at all. When you're big and have tiny
Junes--real live Junes--I think you'll break them too, and _lieber_
_Gott_ doesn't love mummies what breaks their babies."

"But I _must_ break my dolls," cried June, stung into indignation by
what she evidently regarded as celestial injustice; "_lieber Gott_
made me that way, so I can't help doing it, can I, mummy?"

On these occasions I keep my eyes fixed on my book, and put on an air of
deep abstraction; and indeed, it is the only way of keeping out of
theological disputes in which I am invariably worsted.


July 15th.--Yesterday, as it was a cool and windy afternoon and not as
pleasant in my garden as it has lately been, I thought I would go into
the village and see how my friends the farm hands were getting on.
Philanthropy is intermittent with me as with most people, only they do
not say so, and seize me like a cold in the head whenever the weather is
chilly. On warm days my bump of benevolence melts away entirely, and
grows bigger in proportion as the thermometer descends. When the wind is
in the east it is quite a decent size, and about January, in a north-
easterly snowstorm, it is plainly visible to the most casual observer.
For a few weeks from then to the end of February I can hold up my head
and look our parson in the face, but during the summer, if I see him
coming my mode of progression in getting out of the way is described
with perfect accuracy by the verb "to slink."

The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer
buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms
for four families--two in front, looking on to the wall of the farmyard,
which is the fashionable side, and two at the back, looking on to
nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has one
room and a larder sort of place, and shares the kitchen with the family
on the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing their
cooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contents
of their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On the
fashionable side there is a little fenced-in garden for every family,
where fowls walk about pensively and meditate beneath the scarlet-
runners (for all the world like me in my garden), and hollyhocks tower
above the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked for
winter use; but on the other side you walk straight out of the door on
to manure heaps and pigs.

The street did not look very inviting yesterday, with a lowering sky
above, and the wind blowing dust and bits of straw and paper into my
face and preventing me from seeing what I knew to be there, a consoling
glimpse of green fields and fir woods down at the other end; but I had
not been for a long while--we have had such a lovely summer--and
something inside me had kept on saying aggressively all the morning,
"Elizabeth, don't you know you are due in the village? Why don't you go
then? When are you going? Don't you know you _ought_ to go? Don't you
feel you _must_? Elizabeth, pull yourself together and _go_" Strange
effect of a grey sky and a cool wind! For I protest that if it had been
warm and sunny my conscience would not have bothered about me at all. We
had a short fight over it, in which I got all the knocks, as was evident
by the immediate swelling of the bump alluded to above, and then I gave
in, and by two o'clock in the afternoon was lifting the latch of the
first door and asking the woman who lived behind it what she had given
the family for dinner. This, I was instructed on my first round by the
Frau Inspector, is the proper thing to ask; and if you can follow it up
by an examination of the contents of the saucepan, and a gentle sniff
indicative of your appreciation of their savouriness, so much the
better. I was diffident at first about this, but the gratification on
their faces at the interest displayed is so unmistakable that I never
now omit going through the whole business. This woman, the wife of one
of the men who clean and feed the cows, has arrived at that enviable
stage of existence when her children have all been confirmed and can go
out to work, leaving her to spend her days in her clean and empty room
in comparative dignity and peace. The children go to school till they
are fourteen, then they are confirmed, are considered grown up, and
begin to work for wages; and her three strapping daughters were out in
the fields yesterday reaping. The mother has a keen, shrewd face, and
everything about her was neat and comfortable. Her floor was freshly
strewn with sand, her cups and saucers and spoons shone bright and clean
from behind the glass door of the cupboard, and the two beds, one for
herself and her husband and the other for her three daughters, were more
mountainous than any I afterwards saw. The size and plumpness of her
feather beds, the Frau Inspector tells me, is a woman's chief claim to
consideration from the neighbours. She who can pile them up nearest to
the ceiling becomes the principal personage in the community, and a flat
bed is a social disgrace. It is a mystery to me, when I see the
narrowness of the bedsteads, how so many people can sleep in them. They
are rather narrower than what are known as single beds, yet father and
mother and often a baby manage to sleep very well in one, and three or
four children in the opposite corner of the room in another. The
explanation no doubt is that they do not know what nerves are, and what
it is to be wakened by the slightest sound or movement in the room and
lie for hours afterwards, often the whole night, totally unable to fall
asleep again, staring out into the darkness with eyes that refuse to
shut. No nerves, and a thick skin--what inestimable blessings to these
poor people! And they never heard of either.

I stood a little while talking, not asked to sit down, for that would be
thought a liberty, and hearing how they had had potatoes and bacon for
dinner, and how the eldest girl Bertha was going to be married at
Michaelmas, and how well her baby was getting through its teething.

"Her baby?" I echoed, "I have not heard of a baby?"

The woman went to one of the beds and lifted up a corner of the great
bag of feathers, and there, sure enough, lay a round and placid baby,
sleeping as sweetly and looking as cherubic as the most legitimate of
its contemporaries.

"And he is going to marry her at Michaelmas?" I asked, looking as
sternly as I could at the grandmother.

"Oh yes," she replied, "he is a good young man, and earns eighteen marks
a week. They will be very comfortable."

"It is a pity," I said, "that the baby did not make its appearance after
Michaelmas instead of before. Don't you see yourself what a pity it is,
and how everything has been spoilt?"

She stared at me for a moment with a puzzled look, and then turned away
and carefully covered the cherub again. "They will be very comfortable,"
she repeated, seeing that I expected an answer; "he earns eighteen marks
a week."

What was there to be said? If I had told her her daughter was a grievous
sinner she might perhaps have felt transiently uncomfortable, but as
soon as I had gone would have seen for herself, with those shrewd eyes
of hers, that nothing had been changed by my denunciations, that there
lay the baby, dimpled and healthy, that her daughter was making a good
match, that none of her set saw anything amiss, and that all the young
couples in the district had prefaced their marriages in this way.

Our parson is troubled to the depths of his sensitive soul by this
custom. He preaches, he expostulates, he denounces, he implores, and
they listen with square stolid faces and open mouths, and go back to
their daily work among their friends and acquaintances, with no feeling
of shame, because everybody does it, and public opinion, the only force
that could stop it, is on their side. The parson looks on with
unutterable sadness at the futility of his efforts; but the material is
altogether too raw for successful manipulation by delicate fingers.

"Poor things," I said one day, in answer to an outburst of indignation
from him, after he had been marrying one of our servants at the eleventh
hour, "I am so sorry for them. It is so pitiful that they should always
have to be scolded on their wedding day. Such children--so ignorant, so
uncontrolled, so frankly animal--what do they know about social laws?
They only know and follow nature, and I would from my heart forgive them
all."

"It is _sin_" he said shortly.

"Then the forgiveness is sure."

"Not if they do not seek it."

I was silent, for I wished to reply that I believed they would be
forgiven in spite of themselves, that probably they were forgiven
whether they sought it or not, and that you cannot limit things divine;
but who can argue with a parson? These people do not seek forgiveness
because it never enters their heads that they need it. The parson tells
them so, it is true, but they regard him as a person bound by his
profession to say that sort of thing, and are sharp enough to see that
the consequences of their sin, foretold by him with such awful
eloquence, never by any chance come off. No girl is left to languish and
die forsaken by her betrayer, for the betrayer is a worthy young man who
marries her as soon as he possibly can; no finger of scorn is pointed at
the fallen one, for all the fingers in the street are attached to women
who began life in precisely the same fashion; and as for that
problematical Day of Judgment of which they hear so much on Sundays,
perhaps they feel that that also may be one of the things which after
all do not happen.

The servant who had been married and scolded that morning was a groom,
aged twenty, and he had met his little wife, she being then seventeen,
in the place he was in before he came to us. She was a housemaid there,
and must have been a pretty thing, though there were few enough traces
of it, except the beautiful eyes, in the little anxious face that I saw
for the first time immediately after the wedding, and just before the
weary and harassed parson came in to talk things over. I had never heard
of her existence until, about ten days previously, the groom had
appeared, bathed in tears, speechlessly holding out a letter from her in
which she said she could not bear things any longer and was going to
kill herself. The wretched young man was at his wit's end, for he had
not yet saved enough to buy any furniture and set up housekeeping, and
she was penniless after so many months out of a situation. He did not
know any way out of it, he had no suggestions to offer, no excuses to
make, and just stood there helplessly and sobbed.

I went to the Man of Wrath, and we laid our heads together. "We do not
want another married servant," he said.

"No, of course we don't," said I.

"And there is not a room empty in the village."

"No, not one."

"And how can we give him furniture? It is not fair to the other servants
who remain virtuous, and wait till they can buy their own."

"No, certainly it isn't fair."

There was a pause.

"He is a good boy," I murmured presently.

"A very good boy."

"And she will be quite ruined unless somebody--"

"I'll tell you what we can do, Elizabeth," he interrupted; "we can buy
what is needful and let him have it on condition that he buys it back
gradually by some small monthly payment."

"So we can."

"And I think there is a room over the stables that is empty."

"So there is."

"And he can go to town and get what furniture he needs and bring the
girl back with him and marry her at once. The sooner the better, poor
girl."

And so within a fortnight they were married, and came hand in hand to
me, he proud and happy, holding himself very straight, she in no wise
yet recovered from the shock and misery of the last few hopeless months,
looking up at me with eyes grown much too big for her face, eyes in
which there still lurked the frightened look caught in the town where
she had hidden herself, and where fingers of scorn could not have been
wanting, and loud derision, and utter shame, besides the burden of
sickness, and hunger, and miserable pitiful youth.

They stood hand in hand, she in a decent black dress, and both wearing
very tight white kid gloves that refused to hide entirely the whole of
the rough red hands, and they looked so ridiculously young, and the
whole thing was so wildly improvident, that no words of exhortation
would come to my lips as I gazed at them in silence, between laughter
and tears. I ought to have told them they were sinners; I ought to have
told them they were reckless; I ought to have told them by what a narrow
chance they had escaped the just punishment of their iniquity, and
instead of that I found myself stretching out hands that were at once
seized and kissed, and merely saying with a cheerful smile, "_Nun_
_Kinder_, _liebt Euch_, _und seid brav_." And so they were
dismissed, and then the parson came, in a fever at this latest example
of deadly sin, while I, with the want of moral sense so often observable
in woman, could only think with pity of their childishness. The baby was
born three days later, and the mother very nearly slipped through our
fingers; but she was a country girl, and she fought round, and by and by
grew young again in the warmth of married respectability; and I met her
the other day airing her baby in the sun, and holding her head as high
as though she were conscious of a whole row of feather beds at home,
every one of which touched the ceiling.

In the next room I went into an old woman lay in bed with her head tied
up in bandages. The room had not much in it, or it would have been
untidier; it looked neglected and gloomy, and some dirty plates,
suggestive of long-past dinners, were piled on the table.

"Oh, such headaches!" groaned the old woman when she saw me, and moved
her head from side to side on the pillow. I could see she was not
undressed, and had crept under her feather bag as she was. I went to the
bedside and felt her pulse--a steady pulse, with nothing of feverishness
in it.

"Oh, such draughts!" moaned the old woman, when she saw I had left the
door open.

"A little air will make you feel better," I said; the atmosphere in the
shut-up room was so indescribable that my own head had begun to throb.

"Oh, oh!" she moaned, in visible indignation at being forced for a
moment to breathe the pure summer air.

"I have something at home that will cure your headache," I said, "but
there is nobody I can send with it to-day. If you feel better later on,
come round and fetch it. I always take it when I have a headache"--
("Why, Elizabeth, you know you never have such things!" whispered my
conscience, appalled. "You just keep quiet," I whispered back, "I have
had enough of you for one day.")--"and I have some grapes I will give
you when you come, so that if you possibly can, do."

"Oh, I can't move," groaned the old woman, "oh, oh, oh!" But I went away
laughing, for I knew she would appear punctually to fetch the grapes,
and a walk in the air was all she needed to cure her.

How the whole village hates and dreads fresh air! A baby died a few days
ago, killed, I honestly believe, by the exceeding love of its mother,
which took the form of cherishing it so tenderly that never once during
its little life was a breath of air allowed to come anywhere near it.
She is the watchman's wife, a gentle, flabby woman, with two rooms at
her disposal, but preferring to live and sleep with her four children in
one, never going into the other except for the christenings and funerals
which take place in her family with what I cannot but regard as
unnecessary frequency. This baby was born last September in a time of
golden days and quiet skies, and when it was about three weeks old I
suggested that she should take it out every day while the fine weather
lasted. She pointed out that it had not yet been christened, and
remembering that it is the custom in their class for both mother and
child to remain shut up and invisible till after the christening, I said
no more. Three weeks later I was its godmother, and it was safely got
into the fold of the Church. As I was leaving, I remarked that now she
would be able to take it out as much as she liked. The following March,
on a day that smelt of violets, I met her near the house. I asked after
the baby, and she began to cry. "It does not thrive," she wept, "and its
arms are no thicker than my finger."

"Keep it out in the sun as much as you can," I said; "this is the very
weather to turn weak babies into strong ones."

"Oh, I am so afraid it will catch cold if I take it out," she cried, her
face buried in what was once a pocket-handkerchief.

"When was it out last?"

"Oh--" she stopped to blow her nose, very violently, and, as it seemed
to me, with superfluous thoroughness. I waited till she had done, and
then repeated my question.

"Oh--" a fresh burst of tears, and renewed exhaustive nose-blowing.

I began to suspect that my question, put casually, was of more
importance than I had thought, and repeated it once more.

"I--can't t-take it out," she sobbed, "I know it--it would die."

"But has it not been out at all, then?"

She shook her head.

"Not once since it was born? Six months ago?"

She shook her head.

"_Poor_ baby!" I exclaimed; and indeed from my heart I pitied the little
thing, perishing in a heap of feathers, in one close room, with four
people absorbing what air there was. "I am afraid," I said, "that if it
does not soon get some fresh air it will not live. I wonder what would
happen to my children if I kept them in one hot room day and night for
six months. You see how they are out all day, and how well they are."

"They are so strong," she said, with a doleful sniff, "that they can
stand it."

I was confounded by this way of looking at it, and turned away, after
once more begging her to take the child out. She plainly regarded the
advice as brutal, and I heard her blowing her nose all down the drive.
In June the father told me he would like the doctor; the child grew
thinner every day in spite of all the food it took. A doctor was got
from the nearest town, and I went across to hear what he ordered. He
ordered bottles at regular intervals instead of the unbroken series it
had been having, and fresh air. He could find nothing the matter with
it, except unusual weakness. He asked if it always perspired as it was
doing then, and himself took off the topmost bag of feathers. Early in
July it died, and its first outing was to the cemetery in the pine woods
three miles off.

"I took such care of it," moaned the mother, when I went to try and
comfort her after the funeral; "it would never have lived so long but
for the care I took of it."

"And what the doctor ordered did no good?" I ventured to ask, as gently
as I could.

"Oh, I did not take it out--how could I--it would have killed it at
once--at least I have kept it alive till now." And she flung her arms
across the table, and burying her head in them wept bitterly.

There is a great wall of ignorance and prejudice dividing us from the
people on our place, and in every effort to help them we knock against
it and cannot move it any more than if it were actual stone. Like the
parson on the subject of morals, I can talk till I am hoarse on the
subject of health, without at any time producing the faintest
impression. When things are very bad the doctor is brought, directions
are given, medicines made up, and his orders, unless they happen to be
approved of, are simply not carried out. Orders to wash a patient and
open windows are never obeyed, because the whole village would rise up
if, later on, the illness ended in death, and accuse the relatives of
murder. I suppose they regard us and our like who live on the other side
of the dividing wall as persons of fantastic notions which, when carried
into effect among our own children, do no harm because of the vast
strength of the children accumulated during years of eating in the
quantities only possible to the rich. Their idea of happiness is eating,
and they naturally suppose that everybody eats as much as he can
possibly afford to buy. Some of them have known hunger, and food and
strength are coupled together in their experience--the more food the
greater the strength; and people who eat roast meat (oh, bliss
ineffable!) every day of their lives can bear an amount of washing and
airing that would surely kill such as themselves. But how useless to try
and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like
about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no real
conception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talk
to them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give them
nice things to eat. Shocked at the horrors that must surround the poor
women at the birth of their babies, I asked the Man of Wrath to try and
make some arrangement that would ensure their quiet at those times. He
put aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for them
in their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and bright
and pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delight
of the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be. Not a baby
has been born in that cottage, for not a woman has allowed herself to be
taken there. At the end of a year it had to be let out again to
families, and the nurse dismissed.

"_Why_ wouldn't they go?" I asked the Frau Inspector, completely
puzzled. She shrugged her shoulders. "They like their husband and
children round them," she said, "and are afraid something will be done
to them away from home--that they will be washed too often, perhaps. The
gracious lady will never get them to leave their homes."

"The gracious lady gives it up," I muttered.

When I opened the next door I was bewildered by the crowd in the room. A
woman stood in the middle at a wash-tub which took up most of the space.
Every now and then she put out a dripping hand and jerked a perambulator
up and down for a moment, to calm the shrieks of the baby inside. On a
wooden bench at the foot of one of the three beds a very old man sat and
blinked at nothing. Crouching in a corner were two small boys of pasty
complexion, playing with a guinea-pig and coughing violently. The
loveliest little girl I have seen for a very long while lay in the bed
nearest the door, quite silent, with her eyes closed and her mouth shut
tight, as though she were trying hard to bear something. As I pulled the
door open the first thing I saw, right up against it, was this set young
face framed in tossed chestnut hair. "Why, _Frauchen_," I said to the
woman at the tub, "so many of you at home to-day? Are you all ill?"
There was hardly standing room for an extra person, and the room was
full of steam.

"They have all got the cough I had," she answered, without looking up,
"and Lotte there is very bad."

I took Lotte's rough little hand--so different from the delicate face--
and found she was in a fever.

"We must get the doctor," I said.

"Oh, the doctor--" said the mother with a shrug, "he's no use."

"You must do what he tells you, or he cannot help you."

"That last medicine he sent me all but killed me," she said, washing
vigorously. "I'll never take any more of his, nor shall any child of
mine."

"What medicine was it?"

She wiped her hand on her apron, and reaching across to the cupboard
took out a little bottle. "I was in bed two days after it," she said,
handing it to me--"as though I were dead, not knowing what was going on
round me." The bottle had contained opium, and there were explicit
directions written on it as to the number of drops to be taken and the
length of the intervals between the taking.

"Did you do exactly what is written here?" I asked.

"I took it all at once. There wasn't much of it, and I was feeling bad."

"But then of course it nearly killed you. I wonder it didn't quite. What
good is it our taking all the trouble we do to send that long distance
for the doctor if you don't do as he orders?"

"I'll take no more of his medicine. If it had been any good and able to
cure me, the more I took the quicker I ought to have been cured." And
she scrubbed and thumped with astounding energy, while Lotte lay with
her little ashen face a shade more set and suffering. The wash-tub,
though in the middle of the room, was quite close to Lotte's bed,
because the middle of the room was quite close to every other part of
it, and each extra hard maternal thump must have hit the child's head
like a blow from a hammer. She was, you see, only thirteen, and her skin
had not had time to turn into leather.

"Has this child eaten anything to-day?"

"She won't."

"Is she not thirsty?"

"She won't drink coffee or milk."

"I'll send her something she may like, and I shall send, too, for the
doctor."

"I'll not give her his stuff."

"Let me beg you to do as he tells you."

"I'll not give her his stuff."

"Was it absolutely necessary to wash to-day?"

"It's the day."

"My good woman," said I to myself, gazing at her with outward blandness,
"I'd like exceedingly to tip you up into your wash-tub and thump you as
thoroughly as you are thumping those unfortunate clothes." Aloud I said
in flute-like tones of conciliation, "Good afternoon."

"Good afternoon," said she without looking up.

Washing days always mean tempers, and I ought to have fled at the first
sight of that tub, but then there was Lotte in her little yellow flannel
night-gown, suffering as only children can suffer, helpless, forced to
patience, forced to silent endurance of any banging and vehemence in
which her mother might choose to indulge. No wonder her mouth was shut
like a clasp and she would not open her eyes. Her eyebrows were reddish
like her hair, an