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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1327 ***
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN
+
+By Elizabeth Von Arnim
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EDITION
+
+
+Originally published in 1898, “Elizabeth and her German Garden” is the
+first book by Marie Annette Beauchamp—known all her life as
+“Elizabeth”. The book, anonymously published, was an incredible
+success, going through printing after printing by several publishers
+over the next few years. (I myself own three separate early editions of
+this book by different publishers on both sides of the Atlantic.) The
+present Gutenberg edition was scanned from the illustrated deluxe
+MacMillan (London) edition of 1900.
+
+Elizabeth was a cousin of the better-known writer Katherine Mansfield
+(whose real name was Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Born in Australia,
+Elizabeth was educated in England. She was reputed to be a fine
+organist and musician. At a young age, she captured the heart of a
+German Count, was persuaded to marry him, and went to live in Germany.
+Over the next years she bore five daughters. After her husband’s death
+and the decline of the estate, she returned to England. She was a
+friend to many of high social standing, including people such as H. G.
+Wells (who considered her one of the finest wits of the day). Some time
+later she married the brother of Bertrand Russell; which marriage was a
+failure and ended in divorce. Eventually Elizabeth fled to America at
+the outbreak of the Second World War, and there died in 1941.
+
+Elizabeth is best known to modern readers by the name “Elizabeth von
+Arnim”, author of “The Enchanted April” which was recently made into a
+successful film by the same title. Another of her books, “Mr.
+Skeffington” was also once made into a film starring Bette Davis, circa
+1940.
+
+Some of Elizabeth’s work is published in modern editions by Virago and
+other publishers. Among these are: “Love”, “The Enchanted April”,
+“Caravaners”, “Christopher and Columbus”, “The Pastor’s Wife”, “Mr.
+Skeffington”, “The Solitary Summer”, and “Elizabeth’s Adventures in
+Rugen”. Also published by Virago is her non-autobiography “All the Dogs
+of My Life”—as the title suggests, it is the story not of her life, but
+of the lives of the many dogs she owned; though of course it does touch
+upon her own experiences.
+
+In the centennial year of this book’s first publication, I hope that
+its availability through Project Gutenberg will stir some renewed
+interest in Elizabeth and her delightful work. She is, I would venture,
+my favorite author; and I hope that soon she will be one of your
+favorites.
+
+R. McGowan San Jose, April 11 1998.
+
+
+
+
+ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN
+
+
+
+
+_May_ 7_th_.—I love my garden. I am writing in it now in the late
+afternoon loveliness, much interrupted by the mosquitoes and the
+temptation to look at all the glories of the new green leaves washed
+half an hour ago in a cold shower. Two owls are perched near me, and are
+carrying on a long conversation that I enjoy as much as any warbling of
+nightingales. The gentleman owl says [Music], and she answers from her
+tree a little way off, [Music], beautifully assenting to and completing
+her lord’s remark, as becomes a properly constructed German she-owl.
+They say the same thing over and over again so emphatically that I think
+it must be something nasty about me; but I shall not let myself be
+frightened away by the sarcasm of owls.
+
+This is less a garden than a wilderness. No one has lived in the house,
+much less in the garden, for twenty-five years, and it is such a pretty
+old place that the people who might have lived here and did not,
+deliberately preferring the horrors of a flat in a town, must have
+belonged to that vast number of eyeless and earless persons of whom the
+world seems chiefly composed. Noseless too, though it does not sound
+pretty; but the greater part of my spring happiness is due to the scent
+of the wet earth and young leaves.
+
+I am always happy (out of doors be it understood, for indoors there are
+servants and furniture) but in quite different ways, and my spring
+happiness bears no resemblance to my summer or autumn happiness, though
+it is not more intense, and there were days last winter when I danced
+for sheer joy out in my frost-bound garden, in spite of my years and
+children. But I did it behind a bush, having a due regard for the
+decencies.
+
+There are so many bird-cherries round me, great trees with branches
+sweeping the grass, and they are so wreathed just now with white
+blossoms and tenderest green that the garden looks like a wedding. I
+never saw such masses of them; they seemed to fill the place. Even
+across a little stream that bounds the garden on the east, and right in
+the middle of the cornfield beyond, there is an immense one, a picture
+of grace and glory against the cold blue of the spring sky.
+
+My garden is surrounded by cornfields and meadows, and beyond are great
+stretches of sandy heath and pine forests, and where the forests leave
+off the bare heath begins again; but the forests are beautiful in their
+lofty, pink-stemmed vastness, far overhead the crowns of softest
+gray-green, and underfoot a bright green wortleberry carpet, and
+everywhere the breathless silence; and the bare heaths are beautiful
+too, for one can see across them into eternity almost, and to go out on
+to them with one’s face towards the setting sun is like going into the
+very presence of God.
+
+In the middle of this plain is the oasis of bird-cherries and greenery
+where I spend my happy days, and in the middle of the oasis is the gray
+stone house with many gables where I pass my reluctant nights. The
+house is very old, and has been added to at various times. It was a
+convent before the Thirty Years’ War, and the vaulted chapel, with its
+brick floor worn by pious peasant knees, is now used as a hall.
+Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedes passed through more than once, as is
+duly recorded in archives still preserved, for we are on what was then
+the high-road between Sweden and Brandenburg the unfortunate. The Lion
+of the North was no doubt an estimable person and acted wholly up to
+his convictions, but he must have sadly upset the peaceful nuns, who
+were not without convictions of their own, sending them out on to the
+wide, empty plain to piteously seek some life to replace the life of
+silence here.
+
+From nearly all the windows of the house I can look out across the
+plain, with no obstacle in the shape of a hill, right away to a blue
+line of distant forest, and on the west side uninterruptedly to the
+setting sun—nothing but a green, rolling plain, with a sharp edge
+against the sunset. I love those west windows better than any others,
+and have chosen my bedroom on that side of the house so that even times
+of hair-brushing may not be entirely lost, and the young woman who
+attends to such matters has been taught to fulfil her duties about a
+mistress recumbent in an easy-chair before an open window, and not to
+profane with chatter that sweet and solemn time. This girl is grieved
+at my habit of living almost in the garden, and all her ideas as to the
+sort of life a respectable German lady should lead have got into a sad
+muddle since she came to me. The people round about are persuaded that
+I am, to put it as kindly as possible, exceedingly eccentric, for the
+news has travelled that I spend the day out of doors with a book, and
+that no mortal eye has ever yet seen me sew or cook. But why cook when
+you can get some one to cook for you? And as for sewing, the maids will
+hem the sheets better and quicker than I could, and all forms of
+needlework of the fancy order are inventions of the evil one for
+keeping the foolish from applying their heart to wisdom.
+
+We had been married five years before it struck us that we might as
+well make use of this place by coming down and living in it. Those five
+years were spent in a flat in a town, and during their whole
+interminable length I was perfectly miserable and perfectly healthy,
+which disposes of the ugly notion that has at times disturbed me that
+my happiness here is less due to the garden than to a good digestion.
+And while we were wasting our lives there, here was this dear place
+with dandelions up to the very door, all the paths grass-grown and
+completely effaced, in winter so lonely, with nobody but the north wind
+taking the least notice of it, and in May—in all those five lovely
+Mays—no one to look at the wonderful bird-cherries and still more
+wonderful masses of lilacs, everything glowing and blowing, the
+virginia creeper madder every year, until at last, in October, the very
+roof was wreathed with blood-red tresses, the owls and the squirrels
+and all the blessed little birds reigning supreme, and not a living
+creature ever entering the empty house except the snakes, which got
+into the habit during those silent years of wriggling up the south wall
+into the rooms on that side whenever the old housekeeper opened the
+windows. All that was here,—peace, and happiness, and a reasonable
+life,—and yet it never struck me to come and live in it. Looking back I
+am astonished, and can in no way account for the tardiness of my
+discovery that here, in this far-away corner, was my kingdom of heaven.
+Indeed, so little did it enter my head to even use the place in summer,
+that I submitted to weeks of seaside life with all its horrors every
+year; until at last, in the early spring of last year, having come down
+for the opening of the village school, and wandering out afterwards
+into the bare and desolate garden, I don’t know what smell of wet earth
+or rotting leaves brought back my childhood with a rush and all the
+happy days I had spent in a garden. Shall I ever forget that day? It
+was the beginning of my real life, my coming of age as it were, and
+entering into my kingdom. Early March, gray, quiet skies, and brown,
+quiet earth; leafless and sad and lonely enough out there in the damp
+and silence, yet there I stood feeling the same rapture of pure delight
+in the first breath of spring that I used to as a child, and the five
+wasted years fell from me like a cloak, and the world was full of hope,
+and I vowed myself then and there to nature, and have been happy ever
+since.
+
+My other half being indulgent, and with some faint thought perhaps that
+it might be as well to look after the place, consented to live in it at
+any rate for a time; whereupon followed six specially blissful weeks
+from the end of April into June, during which I was here alone,
+supposed to be superintending the painting and papering, but as a
+matter of fact only going into the house when the workmen had gone out
+of it.
+
+How happy I was! I don’t remember any time quite so perfect since the
+days when I was too little to do lessons and was turned out with sugar
+on my eleven o’clock bread and butter on to a lawn closely strewn with
+dandelions and daisies. The sugar on the bread and butter has lost its
+charm, but I love the dandelions and daisies even more passionately now
+than then, and never would endure to see them all mown away if I were
+not certain that in a day or two they would be pushing up their little
+faces again as jauntily as ever. During those six weeks I lived in a
+world of dandelions and delights. The dandelions carpeted the three
+lawns,—they used to be lawns, but have long since blossomed out into
+meadows filled with every sort of pretty weed,—and under and among the
+groups of leafless oaks and beeches were blue hepaticas, white
+anemones, violets, and celandines in sheets. The celandines in
+particular delighted me with their clean, happy brightness, so
+beautifully trim and newly varnished, as though they too had had the
+painters at work on them. Then, when the anemones went, came a few
+stray periwinkles and Solomon’s Seal, and all the bird-cherries
+blossomed in a burst. And then, before I had a little got used to the
+joy of their flowers against the sky, came the lilacs—masses and masses
+of them, in clumps on the grass, with other shrubs and trees by the
+side of walks, and one great continuous bank of them half a mile long
+right past the west front of the house, away down as far as one could
+see, shining glorious against a background of firs. When that time
+came, and when, before it was over, the acacias all blossomed too, and
+four great clumps of pale, silvery-pink peonies flowered under the
+south windows, I felt so absolutely happy, and blest, and thankful, and
+grateful, that I really cannot describe it. My days seemed to melt away
+in a dream of pink and purple peace.
+
+There were only the old housekeeper and her handmaiden in the house, so
+that on the plea of not giving too much trouble I could indulge what my
+other half calls my _fantaisie déréglée_ as regards meals—that is to
+say, meals so simple that they could be brought out to the lilacs on a
+tray; and I lived, I remember, on salad and bread and tea the whole
+time, sometimes a very tiny pigeon appearing at lunch to save me, as
+the old lady thought, from starvation. Who but a woman could have stood
+salad for six weeks, even salad sanctified by the presence and scent of
+the most gorgeous lilac masses? I did, and grew in grace every day,
+though I have never liked it since. How often now, oppressed by the
+necessity of assisting at three dining-room meals daily, two of which
+are conducted by the functionaries held indispensable to a proper
+maintenance of the family dignity, and all of which are pervaded by
+joints of meat, how often do I think of my salad days, forty in number,
+and of the blessedness of being alone as I was then alone!
+
+And then the evenings, when the workmen had all gone and the house was
+left to emptiness and echoes, and the old housekeeper had gathered up
+her rheumatic limbs into her bed, and my little room in quite another
+part of the house had been set ready, how reluctantly I used to leave
+the friendly frogs and owls, and with my heart somewhere down in my
+shoes lock the door to the garden behind me, and pass through the long
+series of echoing south rooms full of shadows and ladders and ghostly
+pails of painters’ mess, and humming a tune to make myself believe I
+liked it, go rather slowly across the brick-floored hall, up the
+creaking stairs, down the long whitewashed passage, and with a final
+rush of panic whisk into my room and double lock and bolt the door!
+
+There were no bells in the house, and I used to take a great
+dinner-bell to bed with me so that at least I might be able to make a
+noise if frightened in the night, though what good it would have been I
+don’t know, as there was no one to hear. The housemaid slept in another
+little cell opening out of mine, and we two were the only living
+creatures in the great empty west wing. She evidently did not believe
+in ghosts, for I could hear how she fell asleep immediately after
+getting into bed; nor do I believe in them, “_mais je les redoute_,” as
+a French lady said, who from her books appears to have been
+strongminded.
+
+The dinner-bell was a great solace; it was never rung, but it comforted
+me to see it on the chair beside my bed, as my nights were anything but
+placid, it was all so strange, and there were such queer creakings and
+other noises. I used to lie awake for hours, startled out of a light
+sleep by the cracking of some board, and listen to the indifferent
+snores of the girl in the next room. In the morning, of course, I was
+as brave as a lion and much amused at the cold perspirations of the
+night before; but even the nights seem to me now to have been
+delightful, and myself like those historic boys who heard a voice in
+every wind and snatched a fearful joy. I would gladly shiver through
+them all over again for the sake of the beautiful purity of the house,
+empty of servants and upholstery.
+
+How pretty the bedrooms looked with nothing in them but their cheerful
+new papers! Sometimes I would go into those that were finished and
+build all sorts of castles in the air about their future and their
+past. Would the nuns who had lived in them know their little
+white-washed cells again, all gay with delicate flower papers and clean
+white paint? And how astonished they would be to see cell No. 14 turned
+into a bathroom, with a bath big enough to insure a cleanliness of body
+equal to their purity of soul! They would look upon it as a snare of
+the tempter; and I know that in my own case I only began to be shocked
+at the blackness of my nails the day that I began to lose the first
+whiteness of my soul by falling in love at fifteen with the parish
+organist, or rather with the glimpse of surplice and Roman nose and
+fiery moustache which was all I ever saw of him, and which I loved to
+distraction for at least six months; at the end of which time, going
+out with my governess one day, I passed him in the street, and
+discovered that his unofficial garb was a frock-coat combined with a
+turn-down collar and a “bowler” hat, and never loved him any more.
+
+The first part of that time of blessedness was the most perfect, for I
+had not a thought of anything but the peace and beauty all round me.
+Then he appeared suddenly who has a right to appear when and how he
+will and rebuked me for never having written, and when I told him that
+I had been literally too happy to think of writing, he seemed to take
+it as a reflection on himself that I could be happy alone. I took him
+round the garden along the new paths I had had made, and showed him the
+acacia and lilac glories, and he said that it was the purest
+selfishness to enjoy myself when neither he nor the offspring were with
+me, and that the lilacs wanted thoroughly pruning. I tried to appease
+him by offering him the whole of my salad and toast supper which stood
+ready at the foot of the little verandah steps when we came back, but
+nothing appeased that Man of Wrath, and he said he would go straight
+back to the neglected family. So he went; and the remainder of the
+precious time was disturbed by twinges of conscience (to which I am
+much subject) whenever I found myself wanting to jump for joy. I went
+to look at the painters every time my feet were for taking me to look
+at the garden; I trotted diligently up and down the passages; I
+criticised and suggested and commanded more in one day than I had done
+in all the rest of the time; I wrote regularly and sent my love; but I
+could not manage to fret and yearn. What are you to do if your
+conscience is clear and your liver in order and the sun is shining?
+
+_May_ 10_th_.—I knew nothing whatever last year about gardening and
+this year know very little more, but I have dawnings of what may be
+done, and have at least made one great stride—from ipomæa to tea-roses.
+
+The garden was an absolute wilderness. It is all round the house, but
+the principal part is on the south side and has evidently always been
+so. The south front is one-storied, a long series of rooms opening one
+into the other, and the walls are covered with virginia creeper. There
+is a little verandah in the middle, leading by a flight of rickety
+wooden steps down into what seems to have been the only spot in the
+whole place that was ever cared for. This is a semicircle cut into the
+lawn and edged with privet, and in this semicircle are eleven beds of
+different sizes bordered with box and arranged round a sun-dial, and
+the sun-dial is very venerable and moss-grown, and greatly beloved by
+me. These beds were the only sign of any attempt at gardening to be
+seen (except a solitary crocus that came up all by itself each spring
+in the grass, not because it wanted to, but because it could not help
+it), and these I had sown with ipomæa, the whole eleven, having found a
+German gardening book, according to which ipomæa in vast quantities was
+the one thing needful to turn the most hideous desert into a paradise.
+Nothing else in that book was recommended with anything like the same
+warmth, and being entirely ignorant of the quantity of seed necessary,
+I bought ten pounds of it and had it sown not only in the eleven beds
+but round nearly every tree, and then waited in great agitation for the
+promised paradise to appear. It did not, and I learned my first lesson.
+
+Luckily I had sown two great patches of sweet-peas which made me very
+happy all the summer, and then there were some sunflowers and a few
+hollyhocks under the south windows, with Madonna lilies in between. But
+the lilies, after being transplanted, disappeared to my great dismay,
+for how was I to know it was the way of lilies? And the hollyhocks
+turned out to be rather ugly colours, so that my first summer was
+decorated and beautified solely by sweet-peas. At present we are only
+just beginning to breathe after the bustle of getting new beds and
+borders and paths made in time for this summer. The eleven beds round
+the sun-dial are filled with roses, but I see already that I have made
+mistakes with some. As I have not a living soul with whom to hold
+communion on this or indeed on any matter, my only way of learning is
+by making mistakes. All eleven were to have been carpeted with purple
+pansies, but finding that I had not enough and that nobody had any to
+sell me, only six have got their pansies, the others being sown with
+dwarf mignonette. Two of the eleven are filled with Marie van Houtte
+roses, two with Viscountess Folkestone, two with Laurette Messimy, one
+with Souvenir de la Malmaison, one with Adam and Devoniensis, two with
+Persian Yellow and Bicolor, and one big bed behind the sun-dial with
+three sorts of red roses (seventy-two in all), Duke of Teck, Cheshunt
+Scarlet, and Prefet de Limburg. This bed is, I am sure, a mistake, and
+several of the others are, I think, but of course I must wait and see,
+being such an ignorant person. Then I have had two long beds made in
+the grass on either side of the semicircle, each sown with mignonette,
+and one filled with Marie van Houtte, and the other with Jules Finger
+and the Bride; and in a warm corner under the drawing-room windows is a
+bed of Madame Lambard, Madame de Watteville, and Comtesse Riza du Parc;
+while farther down the garden, sheltered on the north and west by a
+group of beeches and lilacs, is another large bed, containing Rubens,
+Madame Joseph Schwartz, and the Hon. Edith Gifford. All these roses are
+dwarf; I have only two standards in the whole garden, two Madame George
+Bruants, and they look like broomsticks. How I long for the day when
+the tea-roses open their buds! Never did I look forward so intensely to
+anything; and every day I go the rounds, admiring what the dear little
+things have achieved in the twenty-four hours in the way of new leaf or
+increase of lovely red shoot.
+
+The hollyhocks and lilies (now flourishing) are still under the south
+windows in a narrow border on the top of a grass slope, at the foot of
+which I have sown two long borders of sweet-peas facing the rose beds,
+so that my roses may have something almost as sweet as themselves to
+look at until the autumn, when everything is to make place for more
+tea-roses. The path leading away from this semicircle down the garden
+is bordered with China roses, white and pink, with here and there a
+Persian Yellow. I wish now I had put tea-roses there, and I have
+misgivings as to the effect of the Persian Yellows among the Chinas,
+for the Chinas are such wee little baby things, and the Persian Yellows
+look as though they intended to be big bushes.
+
+There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the
+least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the
+flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not
+relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and
+depriving them for ever of the breath of God. It was no doubt because I
+was so ignorant that I rushed in where Teutonic angels fear to tread
+and made my tea-roses face a northern winter; but they did face it
+under fir branches and leaves, and not one has suffered, and they are
+looking to-day as happy and as determined to enjoy themselves as any
+roses, I am sure, in Europe.
+
+
+
+
+_May_ 14_th_.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the three
+babies, more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already
+several of the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners
+consoled when duty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent
+and drooping sunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores
+and nimble black legs.
+
+These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the
+gardener’s assistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden,
+but then neither are we ever out of it. The gardener has been here a
+year and has given me notice regularly on the first of every month, but
+up to now has been induced to stay on. On the first of this month he
+came as usual, and with determination written on every feature told me
+he intended to go in June, and that nothing should alter his decision.
+I don’t think he knows much about gardening, but he can at least dig
+and water, and some of the things he sows come up, and some of the
+plants he plants grow, besides which he is the most unflaggingly
+industrious person I ever saw, and has the great merit of never
+appearing to take the faintest interest in what we do in the garden. So
+I have tried to keep him on, not knowing what the next one may be like,
+and when I asked him what he had to complain of and he replied
+“Nothing,” I could only conclude that he has a personal objection to me
+because of my eccentric preference for plants in groups rather than
+plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts from
+gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing
+something new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead
+of explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have
+wisdom at its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I
+quite recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to
+lose a whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage
+to do it. I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and
+wish we could be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty
+years’ time, when the garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in
+all its ways, of my first happy struggles and failures.
+
+All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the
+autumn into their permanent places, and all through April he went about
+with a long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of
+beautiful exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a
+review. Two long borders were done during my absence one day, and when
+I explained that I should like the third to have plants in groups and
+not in lines, and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare
+spaces of earth to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than
+usual; and on my going out later on to see the result, I found he had
+planted two long borders down the sides of a straight walk with little
+lines of five plants in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five
+rockets, and behind the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five
+rockets, and so on with different plants of every sort and size down to
+the end. When I protested, he said he had only carried out my orders
+and had known it would not look well; so I gave in, and the remaining
+borders were done after the pattern of the first two, and I will have
+patience and see how they look this summer, before digging them up
+again; for it becomes beginners to be humble.
+
+If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
+fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put
+in your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can
+only be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid
+down by that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a
+garden all my own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste
+places blossom like a rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year’s April
+during the servants’ dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by
+the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and
+feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow
+surreptitious ipomæa, and run back very hot and guilty into the house,
+and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to
+save my reputation. And why not? It is not graceful, and it makes one
+hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if Eve had had a spade in
+Paradise and known what to do with it, we should not have had all that
+sad business of the apple.
+
+What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds,
+and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town
+acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don’t
+know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if
+condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all
+my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I
+should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself
+very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in
+the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm
+evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the
+verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the
+May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made
+only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and
+hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud
+hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of
+past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair.
+The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be
+killed. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer
+and not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of
+all the fun.
+
+This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in
+April, is five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so
+that the discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the
+remaining middle or May baby. While I was stooping over a group of
+hollyhocks planted on the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill
+the garden possesses, the April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a
+tree stump close by, got up suddenly and began to run aimlessly about,
+shrieking and wringing her hands with every symptom of terror. I
+stared, wondering what had come to her; and then I saw that a whole
+army of young cows, pasturing in a field next to the garden, had got
+through the hedge and were grazing perilously near my tea-roses and
+most precious belongings. The nurse and I managed to chase them away,
+but not before they had trampled down a border of pinks and lilies in
+the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China roses, and
+even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying to
+persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be
+ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany calls
+afternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the holes as
+well as she could with mould, burying the crushed and mangled roses,
+cheated for ever of their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by looking
+on dejectedly. The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant beyond
+her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and went
+after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen. She planted
+herself in front of them brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row
+and stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept them off until
+one of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and having found the
+cowherd sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating. The
+cowherd is a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat
+him, but he took his punishment as part of the day’s work and made no
+remark of any sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather
+breeches, and I think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work
+for a strong young man with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with
+less imagination than a poet ought to take it up as a profession.
+
+After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with
+as many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils,
+and while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I
+happened to look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite
+close to my head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught
+it easily, for it could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at
+all is a mystery. It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the
+quaintest, wisest, solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go,
+but the temptation to keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a
+journey, has seen it was not to be resisted, as he has often said how
+much he would like to have a young owl and try and tame it. So I put it
+into a roomy cage and slung it up on a branch near where it had been
+sitting, and which cannot be far from its nest and its mother. We had
+hardly subsided again to our tea when I saw two more balls of fluff on
+the ground in the long grass and scarcely distinguishable at a little
+distance from small mole-hills. These were promptly united to their
+relation in the cage, and now when the Man of Wrath comes home, not
+only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the orthodox smiles,
+but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems wicked to take
+them from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go again some
+day—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a journey. I
+put a small pot of water in the cage, though they never could have
+tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the beech leaves.
+I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of the mice
+and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents. But the
+raindrop idea is prettier.
+
+
+
+
+_May_ 15_th_.—How cruel it was of me to put those poor little owls into
+a cage even for one night! I cannot forgive myself, and shall never
+pander to the Man of Wrath’s wishes again. This morning I got up early
+to see how they were getting on, and I found the door of the cage wide
+open and no owls to be seen. I thought of course that somebody had
+stolen them—some boy from the village, or perhaps the chastised
+cowherd. But looking about I saw one perched high up in the branches of
+the beech tree, and then to my dismay one lying dead on the ground. The
+third was nowhere to be seen, and is probably safe in its nest. The
+parents must have torn at the bars of the cage until by chance they got
+the door open, and then dragged the little ones out and up into the
+tree. The one that is dead must have been blown off the branch, as it
+was a windy night and its neck is broken. There is one happy life less
+in the garden to-day through my fault, and it is such a lovely, warm
+day—just the sort of weather for young soft things to enjoy and grow
+in. The babies are greatly distressed, and are digging a grave, and
+preparing funeral wreaths of dandelions.
+
+Just as I had written that I heard sounds of arrival, and running out I
+breathlessly told the Man of Wrath how nearly I had been able to give
+him the owls he has so often said he would like to have, and how sorry
+I was they were gone, and how grievous the death of one, and so on
+after the voluble manner of women.
+
+He listened till I paused to breathe, and then he said, “I am surprised
+at such cruelty. How could you make the mother owl suffer so? She had
+never done you any harm.”
+
+Which sent me out of the house and into the garden more convinced than
+ever that he sang true who sang—
+
+Two paradises ’twere in one to live in Paradise alone.
+
+
+
+
+_May_ 16_th_.—The garden is the place I go to for refuge and shelter,
+not the house. In the house are duties and annoyances, servants to
+exhort and admonish, furniture, and meals; but out there blessings
+crowd round me at every step—it is there that I am sorry for the
+unkindness in me, for those selfish thoughts that are so much worse
+than they feel; it is there that all my sins and silliness are
+forgiven, there that I feel protected and at home, and every flower and
+weed is a friend and every tree a lover. When I have been vexed I run
+out to them for comfort, and when I have been angry without just cause,
+it is there that I find absolution. Did ever a woman have so many
+friends? And always the same, always ready to welcome me and fill me
+with cheerful thoughts. Happy children of a common Father, why should
+I, their own sister, be less content and joyous than they? Even in a
+thunder storm, when other people are running into the house, I run out
+of it. I do not like thunder storms—they frighten me for hours before
+they come, because I always feel them on the way; but it is odd that I
+should go for shelter to the garden. I feel better there, more taken
+care of, more petted. When it thunders, the April baby says, “There’s
+_lieber Gott_ scolding those angels again.” And once, when there was a
+storm in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know why
+_lieber Gott_ didn’t do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so
+_tight_ asleep. They all three speak a wonderful mixture of German and
+English, adulterating the purity of their native tongue by putting in
+English words in the middle of a German sentence. It always reminds me
+of Justice tempered by Mercy.
+
+We have been cowslipping to-day in a little wood dignified by the name
+of the Hirschwald, because it is the happy hunting-ground of
+innumerable deer who fight there in the autumn evenings, calling each
+other out to combat with bayings that ring through the silence and send
+agreeable shivers through the lonely listener. I often walk there in
+September, late in the evening, and sitting on a fallen tree listen
+fascinated to their angry cries.
+
+We made cowslip balls sitting on the grass. The babies had never seen
+such things nor had imagined anything half so sweet. The Hirschwald is
+a little open wood of silver birches and springy turf starred with
+flowers, and there is a tiny stream meandering amiably about it and
+decking itself in June with yellow flags. I have dreams of having a
+little cottage built there, with the daisies up to the door, and no
+path of any sort—just big enough to hold myself and one baby inside and
+a purple clematis outside. Two rooms—a bedroom and a kitchen. How
+scared we would be at night, and how completely happy by day! I know
+the exact spot where it should stand, facing south-east, so that we
+should get all the cheerfulness of the morning, and close to the
+stream, so that we might wash our plates among the flags. Sometimes,
+when in the mood for society, we would invite the remaining babies to
+tea and entertain them with wild strawberries on plates of
+horse-chestnut leaves; but no one less innocent and easily pleased than
+a baby would be permitted to darken the effulgence of our sunny
+cottage—indeed, I don’t suppose that anybody wiser would care to come.
+Wise people want so many things before they can even begin to enjoy
+themselves, and I feel perpetually apologetic when with them, for only
+being able to offer them that which I love best myself—apologetic, and
+ashamed of being so easily contented.
+
+The other day at a dinner party in the nearest town (it took us the
+whole afternoon to get there) the women after dinner were curious to
+know how I had endured the winter, cut off from everybody and snowed up
+sometimes for weeks.
+
+“Ah, these husbands!” sighed an ample lady, lugubriously shaking her
+head; “they shut up their wives because it suits them, and don’t care
+what their sufferings are.”
+
+Then the others sighed and shook their heads too, for the ample lady
+was a great local potentate, and one began to tell how another dreadful
+husband had brought his young wife into the country and had kept her
+there, concealing her beauty and accomplishments from the public in a
+most cruel manner, and how, after spending a certain number of years in
+alternately weeping and producing progeny, she had quite lately run
+away with somebody unspeakable—I think it was the footman, or the
+baker, or some one of that sort.
+
+“But I am quite happy,” I began, as soon as I could put in a word.
+
+“Ah, a good little wife, making the best of it,” and the female
+potentate patted my hand, but continued gloomily to shake her head.
+
+“You cannot possibly be happy in the winter entirely alone,” asserted
+another lady, the wife of a high military authority and not accustomed
+to be contradicted.
+
+“But I am.”
+
+“But how can you possibly be at your age? No, it is not possible.”
+
+“But I _am_.”
+
+“Your husband ought to bring you to town in the winter.”
+
+“But I don’t want to be brought to town.”
+
+“And not let you waste your best years buried.”
+
+“But I like being buried.”
+
+“Such solitude is not right.”
+
+“But I’m not solitary.”
+
+“And can come to no good.” She was getting quite angry.
+
+There was a chorus of No Indeeds at her last remark, and renewed
+shaking of heads.
+
+“I enjoyed the winter immensely,” I persisted when they were a little
+quieter; “I sleighed and skated, and then there were the children, and
+shelves and shelves full of—” I was going to say books, but stopped.
+Reading is an occupation for men; for women it is reprehensible waste
+of time. And how could I talk to them of the happiness I felt when the
+sun shone on the snow, or of the deep delight of hoar-frost days?
+
+“It is entirely my doing that we have come down here,” I proceeded,
+“and my husband only did it to please me.”
+
+“Such a good little wife,” repeated the patronising potentate, again
+patting my hand with an air of understanding all about it, “really an
+excellent little wife. But you must not let your husband have his own
+way too much, my dear, and take my advice and insist on his bringing
+you to town next winter.” And then they fell to talking about their
+cooks, having settled to their entire satisfaction that my fate was
+probably lying in wait for me too, lurking perhaps at that very moment
+behind the apparently harmless brass buttons of the man in the hall
+with my cloak.
+
+I laughed on the way home, and I laughed again for sheer satisfaction
+when we reached the garden and drove between the quiet trees to the
+pretty old house; and when I went into the library, with its four
+windows open to the moonlight and the scent, and looked round at the
+familiar bookshelves, and could hear no sounds but sounds of peace, and
+knew that here I might read or dream or idle exactly as I chose with
+never a creature to disturb me, how grateful I felt to the kindly Fate
+that has brought me here and given me a heart to understand my own
+blessedness, and rescued me from a life like that I had just seen—a
+life spent with the odours of other people’s dinners in one’s nostrils,
+and the noise of their wrangling servants in one’s ears, and parties
+and tattle for all amusement.
+
+But I must confess to having felt sometimes quite crushed when some
+grand person, examining the details of my home through her eyeglass,
+and coolly dissecting all that I so much prize from the convenient
+distance of the open window, has finished up by expressing sympathy
+with my loneliness, and on my protesting that I like it, has murmured,
+“_sehr anspruchslos_.” Then indeed I have felt ashamed of the fewness
+of my wants; but only for a moment, and only under the withering
+influence of the eyeglass; for, after all, the owner’s spirit is the
+same spirit as that which dwells in my servants—girls whose one idea of
+happiness is to live in a town where there are others of their sort
+with whom to drink beer and dance on Sunday afternoons. The passion for
+being for ever with one’s fellows, and the fear of being left for a few
+hours alone, is to me wholly incomprehensible. I can entertain myself
+quite well for weeks together, hardly aware, except for the pervading
+peace, that I have been alone at all. Not but what I like to have
+people staying with me for a few days, or even for a few weeks, should
+they be as _anspruchslos_ as I am myself, and content with simple joys;
+only, any one who comes here and would be happy must have something in
+him; if he be a mere blank creature, empty of head and heart, he will
+very probably find it dull. I should like my house to be often full if
+I could find people capable of enjoying themselves. They should be
+welcomed and sped with equal heartiness; for truth compels me to
+confess that, though it pleases me to see them come, it pleases me just
+as much to see them go.
+
+On some very specially divine days, like today, I have actually longed
+for some one else to be here to enjoy the beauty with me. There has
+been rain in the night, and the whole garden seems to be singing—not
+the untiring birds only, but the vigorous plants, the happy grass and
+trees, the lilac bushes—oh, those lilac bushes! They are all out
+to-day, and the garden is drenched with the scent. I have brought in
+armfuls, the picking is such a delight, and every pot and bowl and tub
+in the house is filled with purple glory, and the servants think there
+is going to be a party and are extra nimble, and I go from room to room
+gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to
+join the scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually
+discover that there is no party, and wonder why the house should be
+filled with flowers for one woman by herself, and I long more and more
+for a kindred spirit—it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to
+oneself—but kindred spirits are so very, very rare; I might almost as
+well cry for the moon. It is true that my garden is full of friends,
+only they are—dumb.
+
+
+
+
+_June_ 3_rd_.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that
+it requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus
+delivered from casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love,
+or people who love me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to
+be deterred from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long
+drive at the end. Not the least of my many blessings is that we have
+only one neighbour. If you have to have neighbours at all, it is at
+least a mercy that there should be only one; for with people dropping
+in at all hours and wanting to talk to you, how are you to get on with
+your life, I should like to know, and read your books, and dream your
+dreams to your satisfaction? Besides, there is always the certainty
+that either you or the dropper-in will say something that would have
+been better left unsaid, and I have a holy horror of gossip and
+mischief-making. A woman’s tongue is a deadly weapon and the most
+difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and things slip off it
+with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very moment when it
+ought to be most quiet. In such cases the only safe course is to talk
+steadily about cooks and children, and to pray that the visit may not
+be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found to be
+the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at the
+mere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are
+experiences common to us all.
+
+Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a
+whole troop of flaxen-haired little children to keep them occupied,
+besides the business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged
+on lines of the most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year,
+and she returns the call a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in
+the summer, and we ask them to dinner in the winter. By strictly
+keeping to this, we avoid all danger of that closer friendship which is
+only another name for frequent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a
+German country lady should be, and is not only a pretty woman but an
+energetic and practical one, and the combination is, to say the least,
+effective. She is up at daylight superintending the feeding of the
+stock, the butter-making, the sending off of the milk for sale; a
+thousand things get done while most people are fast asleep, and before
+lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her pony-carriage to the
+other farms on the place, to rate the “mamsells,” as the head women are
+called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off the saucepans,
+count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any careless
+dairymaid’s ears. We are allowed by law to administer “slight corporal
+punishment” to our servants, it being left entirely to individual taste
+to decide what “slight” shall be, and my neighbour really seems to
+enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I
+would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the
+dauntless little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on
+tiptoe to box the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat
+her.
+
+The making of cheese and butter and sausages _excellently_ well is a
+work which requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable
+form of activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the
+intelligent. That my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident
+by the bright alertness of her eyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that
+only gain in prettiness by being used to some good purpose. She is a
+recognised authority for miles around on the mysteries of
+sausage-making, the care of calves, and the slaughtering of swine; and
+with all her manifold duties and daily prolonged absences from home,
+her children are patterns of health and neatness, and of what dear
+little German children, with white pigtails and fearless eyes and thick
+legs, should be. Who shall say that such a life is sordid and dull and
+unworthy of a high order of intelligence? I protest that to me it is a
+beautiful life, full of wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for
+those listless moments of depression and boredom, and of wondering what
+you will do next, that leave wrinkles round a pretty woman’s eyes, and
+are not unknown even to the most brilliant. But while admiring my
+neighbour, I don’t think I shall ever try to follow in her steps, my
+talents not being of the energetic and organising variety, but rather
+of that order which makes their owner almost lamentably prone to take
+up a volume of poetry and wander out to where the kingcups grow, and,
+sitting on a willow trunk beside a little stream, forget the very
+existence of everything but green pastures and still waters, and the
+glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields. And it would make me
+perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so refractory as to require
+boxing.
+
+Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on
+these occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is,
+and how far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally
+about babies, past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the
+vast and impassable distance that separates one’s own soul from the
+soul of the person sitting in the next chair. I am speaking of
+comparative strangers, people who are forced to stay a certain time by
+the eccentricities of trains, and in whose presence you grope about
+after common interests and shrink back into your shell on finding that
+you have none. Then a frost slowly settles down on me and I grow each
+minute more benumbed and speechless, and the babies feel the frost in
+the air and look vacant, and the callers go through the usual form of
+wondering who they most take after, generally settling the question by
+saying that the May baby, who is the beauty, is like her father, and
+that the two more or less plain ones are the image of me, and this
+decision, though I know it of old and am sure it is coming, never fails
+to depress me as much as though I heard it for the first time. The
+babies are very little and inoffensive and good, and it is hard that
+they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in conversation, and
+their features pulled to pieces one by one, and all their weak points
+noted and criticised, while they stand smiling shyly in the operator’s
+face, their very smile drawing forth comments on the shape of their
+mouths; but, after all, it does not occur very often, and they are one
+of those few interests one has in common with other people, as
+everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I have discovered, is by no
+means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few persons really love
+theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very tone of
+their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest
+is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and
+roses; but on reflection I don’t know a single person within twenty
+miles who really cares for his garden, or has discovered the treasures
+of happiness that are buried in it, and are to be found if sought for
+diligently, and if needs be with tears. It is after these rare calls
+that I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever
+suffer, and then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for
+allowing even a single precious hour of life to be spoilt by anything
+so indifferent. That is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed
+enough, and warmed enough, and of having everything you can reasonably
+desire—on the least provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy
+by such abstract discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach
+to your neighbour’s soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the
+probability being that he hasn’t got one.
+
+The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put
+them right along the very front of two borders, and I don’t know what
+his feelings can be now that they are all flowering and the plants
+behind are completely hidden; but I have learned another lesson, and no
+future gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite
+so reckless a fashion. They are charming things, as delicate in colour
+as in scent, and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the room with
+fragrance. Single rows, however, are a mistake; I had masses of them
+planted in the grass, and these show how lovely they can be. A border
+full of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, must be beautiful;
+but I don’t know how long they last nor what they look like when they
+have done flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose.
+Was ever a would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No
+doubt it would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to
+learn solely by my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me
+when to do things. At present the only flowers in the garden are the
+rockets, the pansies in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis
+and pontica. The azaleas have been and still are gorgeous; I only
+planted them this spring and they almost at once began to flower, and
+the sheltered corner they are in looks as though it were filled with
+imprisoned and perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate
+shade—what they will be next year and in succeeding years when the
+bushes are bigger, I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On
+gray, dull days the effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall
+make a great bank of them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a
+gloomy nook. My tea-roses are covered with buds which will not open for
+at least another week, so I conclude this is not the sort of climate
+where they will flower from the very beginning of June to November, as
+they are said to do.
+
+
+
+
+_July_ 11_th_.—There has been no rain since the day before Whitsunday,
+five weeks ago, which partly, but not entirely, accounts for the
+disappointment my beds have been. The dejected gardener went mad soon
+after Whitsuntide, and had to be sent to an asylum. He took to going
+about with a spade in one hand and a revolver in the other, explaining
+that he felt safer that way, and we bore it quite patiently, as becomes
+civilised beings who respect each other’s prejudices, until one day,
+when I mildly asked him to tie up a fallen creeper—and after he bought
+the revolver my tones in addressing him were of the mildest, and I
+quite left off reading to him aloud—he turned round, looked me straight
+in the face for the first time since he has been here, and said, “Do I
+look like Graf X———— (a great local celebrity), or like a monkey?”
+After which there was nothing for it but to get him into an asylum as
+expeditiously as possible. There was no gardener to be had in his
+place, and I have only just succeeded in getting one; so that what with
+the drought, and the neglect, and the gardener’s madness, and my
+blunders, the garden is in a sad condition; but even in a sad condition
+it is the dearest place in the world, and all my mistakes only make me
+more determined to persevere.
+
+The long borders, where the rockets were, are looking dreadful. The
+rockets have done flowering, and, after the manner of rockets in other
+walks of life, have degenerated into sticks; and nothing else in those
+borders intends to bloom this summer. The giant poppies I had planted
+out in them in April have either died off or remained quite small, and
+so have the columbines; here and there a delphinium droops unwillingly,
+and that is all. I suppose poppies cannot stand being moved, or perhaps
+they were not watered enough at the time of transplanting; anyhow,
+those borders are going to be sown to-morrow with more poppies for next
+year; for poppies I will have, whether they like it or not, and they
+shall not be touched, only thinned out.
+
+Well, it is no use being grieved, and after all, directly I come out
+and sit under the trees, and look at the dappled sky, and see the
+sunshine on the cornfields away on the plain, all the disappointment
+smooths itself out, and it seems impossible to be sad and discontented
+when everything about me is so radiant and kind.
+
+To-day is Sunday, and the garden is so quiet, that, sitting here in
+this shady corner watching the lazy shadows stretching themselves
+across the grass, and listening to the rooks quarrelling in the
+treetops, I almost expect to hear English church bells ringing for the
+afternoon service. But the church is three miles off, has no bells, and
+no afternoon service. Once a fortnight we go to morning prayer at
+eleven and sit up in a sort of private box with a room behind, whither
+we can retire unobserved when the sermon is too long or our flesh too
+weak, and hear ourselves being prayed for by the black-robed parson. In
+winter the church is bitterly cold; it is not heated, and we sit
+muffled up in more furs than ever we wear out of doors; but it would of
+course be very wicked for the parson to wear furs, however cold he may
+be, so he puts on a great many extra coats under his gown, and, as the
+winter progresses, swells to a prodigious size. We know when spring is
+coming by the reduction in his figure. The congregation sit at ease
+while the parson does the praying for them, and while they are droning
+the long-drawn-out chorales, he retires into a little wooden box just
+big enough to hold him. He does not come out until he thinks we have
+sung enough, nor do we stop until his appearance gives us the signal. I
+have often thought how dreadful it would be if he fell ill in his box
+and left us to go on singing. I am sure we should never dare to stop,
+unauthorised by the Church. I asked him once what he did in there; he
+looked very shocked at such a profane question, and made an evasive
+reply.
+
+If it were not for the garden, a German Sunday would be a terrible day;
+but in the garden on that day there is a sigh of relief and more
+profound peace, nobody raking or sweeping or fidgeting; only the little
+flowers themselves and the whispering trees.
+
+I have been much afflicted again lately by visitors—not stray callers
+to be got rid of after a due administration of tea and things you are
+sorry afterwards that you said, but people staying in the house and not
+to be got rid of at all. All June was lost to me in this way, and it
+was from first to last a radiant month of heat and beauty; but a garden
+where you meet the people you saw at breakfast, and will see again at
+lunch and dinner, is not a place to be happy in. Besides, they had a
+knack of finding out my favourite seats and lounging in them just when
+I longed to lounge myself; and they took books out of the library with
+them, and left them face downwards on the seats all night to get well
+drenched with dew, though they might have known that what is meat for
+roses is poison for books; and they gave me to understand that if they
+had had the arranging of the garden it would have been finished long
+ago—whereas I don’t believe a garden ever is finished. They have all
+gone now, thank heaven, except one, so that I have a little breathing
+space before others begin to arrive. It seems that the place interests
+people, and that there is a sort of novelty in staying in such a
+deserted corner of the world, for they were in a perpetual state of
+mild amusement at being here at all.
+
+Irais is the only one left. She is a young woman with a beautiful,
+refined face, and her eyes and straight, fine eyebrows are particularly
+lovable. At meals she dips her bread into the salt-cellar, bites a bit
+off, and repeats the process, although providence (taking my shape) has
+caused salt-spoons to be placed at convenient intervals down the table.
+She lunched to-day on beer, _Schweinekoteletten_, and cabbage-salad
+with caraway seeds in it, and now I hear her through the open window,
+extemporising touching melodies in her charming, cooing voice. She is
+thin, frail, intelligent, and lovable, all on the above diet. What
+better proof can be needed to establish the superiority of the Teuton
+than the fact that after such meals he can produce such music? Cabbage
+salad is a horrid invention, but I don’t doubt its utility as a means
+of encouraging thoughtfulness; nor will I quarrel with it, since it
+results so poetically, any more than I quarrel with the manure that
+results in roses, and I give it to Irais every day to make her sing.
+She is the sweetest singer I have ever heard, and has a charming trick
+of making up songs as she goes along. When she begins, I go and lean
+out of the window and look at my little friends out there in the
+borders while listening to her music, and feel full of pleasant sadness
+and regret. It is so sweet to be sad when one has nothing to be sad
+about.
+
+The April baby came panting up just as I had written that, the others
+hurrying along behind, and with flaming cheeks displayed for my
+admiration three brand-new kittens, lean and blind, that she was
+carrying in her pinafore, and that had just been found motherless in
+the woodshed.
+
+“Look,” she cried breathlessly, “such a much!”
+
+I was glad it was only kittens this time, for she had been once before
+this afternoon on purpose, as she informed me, sitting herself down on
+the grass at my feet, to ask about the _lieber Gott_, it being Sunday
+and her pious little nurse’s conversation having run, as it seems, on
+heaven and angels.
+
+Her questions about the _lieber Gott_ are better left unrecorded, and I
+was relieved when she began about the angels.
+
+“What do they wear for clothes?” she asked in her German-English.
+
+“Why, you’ve seen them in pictures,” I answered, “in beautiful, long
+dresses, and with big, white wings.”
+
+“Feathers?” she asked.
+
+“I suppose so,—and long dresses, all white and beautiful.”
+
+“Are they girlies?”
+
+“Girls? Ye—es.”
+
+“Don’t boys go into the _Himmel?_”
+
+“Yes, of course, if they’re good.”
+
+“And then what do _they_ wear?”
+
+“Why, the same as all the other angels, I suppose.”
+
+“_Dwesses?_”
+
+She began to laugh, looking at me sideways as though she suspected me
+of making jokes. “What a funny Mummy!” she said, evidently much amused.
+She has a fat little laugh that is very infectious.
+
+“I think,” said I, gravely, “you had better go and play with the other
+babies.”
+
+She did not answer, and sat still a moment watching the clouds. I began
+writing again.
+
+“Mummy,” she said presently.
+
+“Well?”
+
+“Where do the angels get their dwesses?”
+
+I hesitated. “From _lieber Gott_,” I said.
+
+“Are there shops in the _Himmel?_”
+
+“Shops? No.”
+
+“But, then, where does _lieber Gott_ buy their dwesses?”
+
+“Now run away like a good baby; I’m busy.”
+
+“But you said yesterday, when I asked about _lieber Gott_, that you
+would tell about Him on Sunday, and it is Sunday. Tell me a story about
+Him.”
+
+There was nothing for it but resignation, so I put down my pencil with
+a sigh. “Call the others, then.”
+
+She ran away, and presently they all three emerged from the bushes one
+after the other, and tried all together to scramble on to my knee. The
+April baby got the knee as she always seems to get everything, and the
+other two had to sit on the grass.
+
+I began about Adam and Eve, with an eye to future parsonic probings.
+The April baby’s eyes opened wider and wider, and her face grew redder
+and redder. I was surprised at the breathless interest she took in the
+story—the other two were tearing up tufts of grass and hardly
+listening. I had scarcely got to the angels with the flaming swords and
+announced that that was all, when she burst out, “Now _I’ll_ tell about
+it. Once upon a time there was Adam and Eva, and they had _plenty_ of
+clothes, and there was no snake, and _lieber Gott_ wasn’t angry with
+them, and they could eat as many apples as they liked, and was happy
+for ever and ever—there now!”
+
+She began to jump up and down defiantly on my knee.
+
+“But that’s not the story,” I said rather helplessly.
+
+“Yes, yes! It’s a much nicelier one! Now another.”
+
+“But these stories are _true_,” I said severely; “and it’s no use my
+telling them if you make them up your own way afterwards.”
+
+“Another! another!” she shrieked, jumping up and down with redoubled
+energy, all her silvery curls flying.
+
+I began about Noah and the flood.
+
+“Did it rain _so_ badly?” she asked with a face of the deepest concern
+and interest.
+
+“Yes, all day long and all night long for weeks and weeks——”
+
+“And was everybody so wet?”
+
+“Yes—”
+
+“But why didn’t they open their umbwellas?”
+
+Just then I saw the nurse coming out with the tea-tray.
+
+“I’ll tell you the rest another time,” I said, putting her off my knee,
+greatly relieved; “you must all go to Anna now and have tea.”
+
+“I don’t like Anna,” remarked the June baby, not having hitherto opened
+her lips; “she is a stupid girl.”
+
+The other two stood transfixed with horror at this statement, for,
+besides being naturally extremely polite, and at all times anxious not
+to hurt any one’s feelings, they had been brought up to love and
+respect their kind little nurse.
+
+The April baby recovered her speech first, and lifting her finger,
+pointed it at the criminal in just indignation. “Such a child will
+never go into the _Himmel_,” she said with great emphasis, and the air
+of one who delivers judgment.
+
+
+
+
+_September_ 15_th_.—This is the month of quiet days, crimson creepers,
+and blackberries; of mellow afternoons in the ripening garden; of tea
+under the acacias instead of the too shady beeches; of wood-fires in
+the library in the chilly evenings. The babies go out in the afternoon
+and blackberry in the hedges; the three kittens, grown big and fat, sit
+cleaning themselves on the sunny verandah steps; the Man of Wrath
+shoots partridges across the distant stubble; and the summer seems as
+though it would dream on for ever. It is hard to believe that in three
+months we shall probably be snowed up and certainly be cold. There is a
+feeling about this month that reminds me of March and the early days of
+April, when spring is still hesitating on the threshold and the garden
+holds its breath in expectation. There is the same mildness in the air,
+and the sky and grass have the same look as then; but the leaves tell a
+different tale, and the reddening creeper on the house is rapidly
+approaching its last and loveliest glory.
+
+My roses have behaved as well on the whole as was to be expected, and
+the Viscountess Folkestones and Laurette Messimys have been most
+beautiful, the latter being quite the loveliest things in the garden,
+each flower an exquisite loose cluster of coral-pink petals, paling at
+the base to a yellow-white. I have ordered a hundred standard tea-roses
+for planting next month, half of which are Viscountess Folkestones,
+because the tea-roses have such a way of hanging their little heads
+that one has to kneel down to be able to see them well in the dwarf
+forms—not but what I entirely approve of kneeling before such perfect
+beauty, only it dirties one’s clothes. So I am going to put standards
+down each side of the walk under the south windows, and shall have the
+flowers on a convenient level for worship. My only fear is, that they
+will stand the winter less well than the dwarf sorts, being so
+difficult to pack up snugly. The Persian Yellows and Bicolors have
+been, as I predicted, a mistake among the tea-roses; they only flower
+twice in the season and all the rest of the time look dull and moping;
+and then the Persian Yellows have such an odd smell and so many insects
+inside them eating them up. I have ordered Safrano tea-roses to put in
+their place, as they all come out next month and are to be grouped in
+the grass; and the semicircle being immediately under the windows,
+besides having the best position in the place, must be reserved solely
+for my choicest treasures. I have had a great many disappointments, but
+feel as though I were really beginning to learn. Humility, and the most
+patient perseverance, seem almost as necessary in gardening as rain and
+sunshine, and every failure must be used as a stepping-stone to
+something better.
+
+I had a visitor last week who knows a great deal about gardening and
+has had much practical experience. When I heard he was coming, I felt I
+wanted to put my arms right round my garden and hide it from him; but
+what was my surprise and delight when he said, after having gone all
+over it, “Well, I think you have done wonders.” Dear me, how pleased I
+was! It was so entirely unexpected, and such a complete novelty after
+the remarks I have been listening to all the summer. I could have
+hugged that discerning and indulgent critic, able to look beyond the
+result to the intention, and appreciating the difficulties of every
+kind that had been in the way. After that I opened my heart to him, and
+listened reverently to all he had to say, and treasured up his kind and
+encouraging advice, and wished he could stay here a whole year and help
+me through the seasons. But he went, as people one likes always do go,
+and he was the only guest I have had whose departure made me sorry.
+
+The people I love are always somewhere else and not able to come to me,
+while I can at any time fill the house with visitors about whom I know
+little and care less. Perhaps, if I saw more of those absent ones, I
+would not love them so well—at least, that is what I think on wet days
+when the wind is howling round the house and all nature is overcome
+with grief; and it has actually happened once or twice when great
+friends have been staying with me that I have wished, when they left, I
+might not see them again for at least ten years. I suppose the fact is,
+that no friendship can stand the breakfast test, and here, in the
+country, we invariably think it our duty to appear at breakfast.
+Civilisation has done away with curl-papers, yet at that hour the soul
+of the _Hausfrau_ is as tightly screwed up in them as was ever her
+grandmother’s hair; and though my body comes down mechanically, having
+been trained that way by punctual parents, my soul never thinks of
+beginning to wake up for other people till lunch-time, and never does
+so completely till it has been taken out of doors and aired in the
+sunshine. Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the
+morning? It is the hour of savage instincts and natural tendencies; it
+is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that
+the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but
+in bed.
+
+
+
+
+_November_ 11_th_.—When the gray November weather came, and hung its
+soft dark clouds low and unbroken over the brown of the ploughed fields
+and the vivid emerald of the stretches of winter corn, the heavy
+stillness weighed my heart down to a forlorn yearning after the
+pleasant things of childhood, the petting, the comforting, the warming
+faith in the unfailing wisdom of elders. A great need of something to
+lean on, and a great weariness of independence and responsibility took
+possession of my soul; and looking round for support and comfort in
+that transitory mood, the emptiness of the present and the blankness of
+the future sent me back to the past with all its ghosts. Why should I
+not go and see the place where I was born, and where I lived so long;
+the place where I was so magnificently happy, so exquisitely wretched,
+so close to heaven, so near to hell, always either up on a cloud of
+glory, or down in the depths with the waters of despair closing over my
+head? Cousins live in it now, distant cousins, loved with the exact
+measure of love usually bestowed on cousins who reign in one’s stead;
+cousins of practical views, who have dug up the flower-beds and planted
+cabbages where roses grew; and though through all the years since my
+father’s death I have held my head so high that it hurt, and loftily
+refused to listen to their repeated suggestions that I should revisit
+my old home, something in the sad listlessness of the November days
+sent my spirit back to old times with a persistency that would not be
+set aside, and I woke from my musings surprised to find myself sick
+with longing. It is foolish but natural to quarrel with one’s cousins,
+and especially foolish and natural when they have done nothing, and are
+mere victims of chance. Is it their fault that my not being a boy
+placed the shoes I should otherwise have stepped into at their
+disposal? I know it is not; but their blamelessness does not make me
+love them more. “_Noch ein dummes Frauenzimmer!_” cried my father, on
+my arrival into the world—he had three of them already, and I was his
+last hope,—and a _dummes Frauenzimmer_ I have remained ever since; and
+that is why for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in
+possession, and that is why, the other day, overcome by the tender
+influence of the weather, the purely sentimental longing to join hands
+again with my childhood was enough to send all my pride to the winds,
+and to start me off without warning and without invitation on my
+pilgrimage.
+
+I have always had a liking for pilgrimages, and if I had lived in the
+Middle Ages would have spent most of my time on the way to Rome. The
+pilgrims, leaving all their cares at home, the anxieties of their
+riches or their debts, the wife that worried and the children that
+disturbed, took only their sins with them, and turning their backs on
+their obligations, set out with that sole burden, and perhaps a
+cheerful heart. How cheerful my heart would have been, starting on a
+fine morning, with the smell of the spring in my nostrils, fortified by
+the approval of those left behind, accompanied by the pious blessings
+of my family, with every step getting farther from the suffocation of
+daily duties, out into the wide fresh world, out into the glorious free
+world, so poor, so penitent, and so happy! My dream, even now, is to
+walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from
+place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with
+liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the
+question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks
+on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain
+censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having
+no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my
+plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their
+cry, “How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!” The
+relative of five hundred years back would simply have said, “How holy!”
+
+My father had the same liking for pilgrimages—indeed, it is evident
+that I have it from him—and he encouraged it in me when I was little,
+taking me with him on his pious journeys to places he had lived in as a
+boy. Often have we been together to the school he was at in
+Brandenburg, and spent pleasant days wandering about the old town on
+the edge of one of those lakes that lie in a chain in that wide green
+plain; and often have we been in Potsdam, where he was quartered as a
+lieutenant, the Potsdam pilgrimage including hours in the woods around
+and in the gardens of Sans Souci, with the second volume of Carlyle’s
+Frederick under my father’s arm; and often did we spend long summer
+days at the house in the Mark, at the head of the same blue chain of
+lakes, where his mother spent her young years, and where, though it
+belonged to cousins, like everything else that was worth having, we
+could wander about as we chose, for it was empty, and sit in the deep
+windows of rooms where there was no furniture, and the painted Venuses
+and cupids on the ceiling still smiled irrelevantly and stretched their
+futile wreaths above the emptiness beneath. And while we sat and
+rested, my father told me, as my grandmother had a hundred times told
+him, all that had happened in those rooms in the far-off days when
+people danced and sang and laughed through life, and nobody seemed ever
+to be old or sorry.
+
+There was, and still is, an inn within a stone’s throw of the great
+iron gates, with two very old lime trees in front of it, where we used
+to lunch on our arrival at a little table spread with a red and blue
+check cloth, the lime blossoms dropping into our soup, and the bees
+humming in the scented shadows overhead. I have a picture of the house
+by my side as I write, done from the lake in old times, with a boat
+full of ladies in hoops and powder in the foreground, and a youth
+playing a guitar. The pilgrimages to this place were those I loved the
+best.
+
+But the stories my father told me, sometimes odd enough stories to tell
+a little girl, as we wandered about the echoing rooms, or hung over the
+stone balustrade and fed the fishes in the lake, or picked the pale
+dog-roses in the hedges, or lay in the boat in a shady reed-grown bay
+while he smoked to keep the mosquitoes off, were after all only
+traditions, imparted to me in small doses from time to time, when his
+earnest desire not to raise his remarks above the level of dulness
+supposed to be wholesome for _Backfische_ was neutralised by an impulse
+to share his thoughts with somebody who would laugh; whereas the place
+I was bound for on my latest pilgrimage was filled with living,
+first-hand memories of all the enchanted years that lie between two and
+eighteen. How enchanted those years are is made more and more clear to
+me the older I grow. There has been nothing in the least like them
+since; and though I have forgotten most of what happened six months
+ago, every incident, almost every day of those wonderful long years is
+perfectly distinct in my memory.
+
+But I had been stiffnecked, proud, unpleasant, altogether cousinly in
+my behaviour towards the people in possession. The invitations to
+revisit the old home had ceased. The cousins had grown tired of
+refusals, and had left me alone. I did not even know who lived in it
+now, it was so long since I had had any news. For two days I fought
+against the strong desire to go there that had suddenly seized me, and
+assured myself that I would not go, that it would be absurd to go,
+undignified, sentimental, and silly, that I did not know them and would
+be in an awkward position, and that I was old enough to know better.
+But who can foretell from one hour to the next what a woman will do?
+And when does she ever know better? On the third morning I set out as
+hopefully as though it were the most natural thing in the world to fall
+unexpectedly upon hitherto consistently neglected cousins, and expect
+to be received with open arms.
+
+It was a complicated journey, and lasted several hours. During the
+first part, when it was still dark, I glowed with enthusiasm, with the
+spirit of adventure, with delight at the prospect of so soon seeing the
+loved place again; and thought with wonder of the long years I had
+allowed to pass since last I was there. Of what I should say to the
+cousins, and of how I should introduce myself into their midst, I did
+not think at all: the pilgrim spirit was upon me, the unpractical
+spirit that takes no thought for anything, but simply wanders along
+enjoying its own emotions. It was a quiet, sad morning, and there was a
+thick mist. By the time I was in the little train on the light railway
+that passed through the village nearest my old home, I had got over my
+first enthusiasm, and had entered the stage of critically examining the
+changes that had been made in the last ten years. It was so misty that
+I could see nothing of the familiar country from the carriage windows,
+only the ghosts of pines in the front row of the forests; but the
+railway itself was a new departure, unknown in our day, when we used to
+drive over ten miles of deep, sandy forest roads to and from the
+station, and although most people would have called it an evident and
+great improvement, it was an innovation due, no doubt, to the zeal and
+energy of the reigning cousin; and who was he, thought I, that he
+should require more conveniences than my father had found needful? It
+was no use my telling myself that in my father’s time the era of light
+railways had not dawned, and that if it had, we should have done our
+utmost to secure one; the thought of my cousin, stepping into my shoes,
+and then altering them, was odious to me. By the time I was walking up
+the hill from the station I had got over this feeling too, and had
+entered a third stage of wondering uneasily what in the world I should
+do next. Where was the intrepid courage with which I had started? At
+the top of the first hill I sat down to consider this question in
+detail, for I was very near the house now, and felt I wanted time.
+Where, indeed, was the courage and joy of the morning? It had vanished
+so completely that I could only suppose that it must be lunch time, the
+observations of years having led to the discovery that the higher
+sentiments and virtues fly affrighted on the approach of lunch, and
+none fly quicker than courage. So I ate the lunch I had brought with
+me, hoping that it was what I wanted; but it was chilly, made up of
+sandwiches and pears, and it had to be eaten under a tree at the edge
+of a field; and it was November, and the mist was thicker than ever and
+very wet—the grass was wet with it, the gaunt tree was wet with it, I
+was wet with it, and the sandwiches were wet with it. Nobody’s spirits
+can keep up under such conditions; and as I ate the soaked sandwiches,
+I deplored the headlong courage more with each mouthful that had torn
+me from a warm, dry home where I was appreciated, and had brought me
+first to the damp tree in the damp field, and when I had finished my
+lunch and dessert of cold pears, was going to drag me into the midst of
+a circle of unprepared and astonished cousins. Vast sheep loomed
+through the mist a few yards off. The sheep dog kept up a perpetual,
+irritating yap. In the fog I could hardly tell where I was, though I
+knew I must have played there a hundred times as a child. After the
+fashion of woman directly she is not perfectly warm and perfectly
+comfortable, I began to consider the uncertainty of human life, and to
+shake my head in gloomy approval as lugubrious lines of pessimistic
+poetry suggested themselves to my mind.
+
+Now it is clearly a desirable plan, if you want to do anything, to do
+it in the way consecrated by custom, more especially if you are a
+woman. The rattle of a carriage along the road just behind me, and the
+fact that I started and turned suddenly hot, drove this truth home to
+my soul. The mist hid me, and the carriage, no doubt full of cousins,
+drove on in the direction of the house; but what an absurd position I
+was in! Suppose the kindly mist had lifted, and revealed me lunching in
+the wet on their property, the cousin of the short and lofty letters,
+the _unangenehme Elisabeth!_ “_Die war doch immer verdreht_,” I could
+imagine them hastily muttering to each other, before advancing wreathed
+in welcoming smiles. It gave me a great shock, this narrow escape, and
+I got on to my feet quickly, and burying the remains of my lunch under
+the gigantic molehill on which I had been sitting, asked myself
+nervously what I proposed to do next. Should I walk back to the
+village, go to the _Gasthof_, write a letter craving permission to call
+on my cousins, and wait there till an answer came? It would be a
+discreet and sober course to pursue; the next best thing to having
+written before leaving home. But the _Gasthof_ of a north German
+village is a dreadful place, and the remembrance of one in which I had
+taken refuge once from a thunderstorm was still so vivid that nature
+itself cried out against this plan. The mist, if anything, was growing
+denser. I knew every path and gate in the place. What if I gave up all
+hope of seeing the house, and went through the little door in the wall
+at the bottom of the garden, and confined myself for this once to that?
+In such weather I would be able to wander round as I pleased, without
+the least risk of being seen by or meeting any cousins, and it was
+after all the garden that lay nearest my heart. What a delight it would
+be to creep into it unobserved, and revisit all the corners I so well
+remembered, and slip out again and get away safely without any need of
+explanations, assurances, protestations, displays of affection, without
+any need, in a word, of that exhausting form of conversation, so dear
+to relations, known as _Redensarten!_
+
+The mist tempted me. I think if it had been a fine day I would have
+gone soberly to the _Gasthof_ and written the conciliatory letter; but
+the temptation was too great, it was altogether irresistible, and in
+ten minutes I had found the gate, opened it with some difficulty, and
+was standing with a beating heart in the garden of my childhood.
+
+Now I wonder whether I shall ever again feel thrills of the same
+potency as those that ran through me at that moment. First of all I was
+trespassing, which is in itself thrilling; but how much more thrilling
+when you are trespassing on what might just as well have been your own
+ground, on what actually was for years your own ground, and when you
+are in deadly peril of seeing the rightful owners, whom you have never
+met, but with whom you have quarrelled, appear round the corner, and of
+hearing them remark with an inquiring and awful politeness “I do not
+think I have the pleasure—?” Then the place was unchanged. I was
+standing in the same mysterious tangle of damp little paths that had
+always been just there; they curled away on either side among the
+shrubs, with the brown tracks of recent footsteps in the centre of
+their green stains, just as they did in my day. The overgrown lilac
+bushes still met above my head. The moisture dripped from the same
+ledge in the wall on to the sodden leaves beneath, as it had done all
+through the afternoons of all those past Novembers. This was the place,
+this damp and gloomy tangle, that had specially belonged to me. Nobody
+ever came to it, for in winter it was too dreary, and in summer so full
+of mosquitoes that only a _Backfisch_ indifferent to spots could have
+borne it. But it was a place where I could play unobserved, and where I
+could walk up and down uninterrupted for hours, building castles in the
+air. There was an unwholesome little arbour in one dark corner, much
+frequented by the larger black slug, where I used to pass glorious
+afternoons making plans. I was for ever making plans, and if nothing
+came of them, what did it matter? The mere making had been a joy. To me
+this out-of-the-way corner was always a wonderful and a mysterious
+place, where my castles in the air stood close together in radiant
+rows, and where the strangest and most splendid adventures befell me;
+for the hours I passed in it and the people I met in it were all
+enchanted.
+
+Standing there and looking round with happy eyes, I forgot the
+existence of the cousins. I could have cried for joy at being there
+again. It was the home of my fathers, the home that would have been
+mine if I had been a boy, the home that was mine now by a thousand
+tender and happy and miserable associations, of which the people in
+possession could not dream. They were tenants, but it was my home. I
+threw my arms round the trunk of a very wet fir tree, every branch of
+which I remembered, for had I not climbed it, and fallen from it, and
+torn and bruised myself on it uncountable numbers of times? and I gave
+it such a hearty kiss that my nose and chin were smudged into one green
+stain, and still I did not care. Far from caring, it filled me with a
+reckless, _Backfisch_ pleasure in being dirty, a delicious feeling that
+I had not had for years. Alice in Wonderland, after she had drunk the
+contents of the magic bottle, could not have grown smaller more
+suddenly than I grew younger the moment I passed through that magic
+door. Bad habits cling to us, however, with such persistency that I did
+mechanically pull out my handkerchief and begin to rub off the
+welcoming smudge, a thing I never would have dreamed of doing in the
+glorious old days; but an artful scent of violets clinging to the
+handkerchief brought me to my senses, and with a sudden impulse of
+scorn, the fine scorn for scent of every honest _Backfisch_, I rolled
+it up into a ball and flung it away into the bushes, where I daresay it
+is at this moment. “Away with you,” I cried, “away with you, symbol of
+conventionality, of slavery, of pandering to a desire to please—away
+with you, miserable little lace-edged rag!” And so young had I grown
+within the last few minutes that I did not even feel silly.
+
+As a _Backfisch_ I had never used handkerchiefs—the child of nature
+scorns to blow its nose—though for decency’s sake my governess insisted
+on giving me a clean one of vast size and stubborn texture on Sundays.
+It was stowed away unfolded in the remotest corner of my pocket, where
+it was gradually pressed into a beautiful compactness by the other
+contents, which were knives. After a while, I remember, the
+handkerchief being brought to light on Sundays to make room for a
+successor, and being manifestly perfectly clean, we came to an
+agreement that it should only be changed on the first and third Sundays
+in the month, on condition that I promised to turn it on the other
+Sundays. My governess said that the outer folds became soiled from the
+mere contact with the other things in my pocket, and that visitors
+might catch sight of the soiled side if it was never turned when I
+wished to blow my nose in their presence, and that one had no right to
+give one’s visitors shocks. “But I never do wish——” I began with great
+earnestness. “_Unsinn_,” said my governess, cutting me short.
+
+After the first thrills of joy at being there again had gone, the
+profound stillness of the dripping little shrubbery frightened me. It
+was so still that I was afraid to move; so still, that I could count
+each drop of moisture falling from the oozing wall; so still, that when
+I held my breath to listen, I was deafened by my own heart-beats. I
+made a step forward in the direction where the arbour ought to be, and
+the rustling and jingling of my clothes terrified me into immobility.
+The house was only two hundred yards off; and if any one had been
+about, the noise I had already made opening the creaking door and so
+foolishly apostrophising my handkerchief must have been noticed.
+Suppose an inquiring gardener, or a restless cousin, should presently
+loom through the fog, bearing down upon me? Suppose Fräulein
+Wundermacher should pounce upon me suddenly from behind, coming up
+noiselessly in her galoshes, and shatter my castles with her customary
+triumphant “_Jetzt halte ich dich aber fest!_” Why, what was I thinking
+of? Fräulein Wundermacher, so big and masterful, such an enemy of
+day-dreams, such a friend of _das Praktische_, such a lover of creature
+comforts, had died long ago, had been succeeded long ago by others,
+German sometimes, and sometimes English, and sometimes at intervals
+French, and they too had all in their turn vanished, and I was here a
+solitary ghost. “Come, Elizabeth,” said I to myself impatiently, “are
+you actually growing sentimental over your governesses? If you think
+you are a ghost, be glad at least that you are a solitary one. Would
+you like the ghosts of all those poor women you tormented to rise up
+now in this gloomy place against you? And do you intend to stand here
+till you are caught?” And thus exhorting myself to action, and
+recognising how great was the risk I ran in lingering, I started down
+the little path leading to the arbour and the principal part of the
+garden, going, it is true, on tiptoe, and very much frightened by the
+rustling of my petticoats, but determined to see what I had come to see
+and not to be scared away by phantoms.
+
+How regretfully did I think at that moment of the petticoats of my
+youth, so short, so silent, and so woollen! And how convenient the
+canvas shoes were with the india rubber soles, for creeping about
+without making a sound! Thanks to them I could always run swiftly and
+unheard into my hiding-places, and stay there listening to the garden
+resounding with cries of “Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Come in at once to your
+lessons!” Or, at a different period, “_Où êtes-vous donc, petite
+sotte?_” Or at yet another period, “_Warte nur, wenn ich dich erst
+habe!_” As the voices came round one corner, I whisked in my noiseless
+clothes round the next, and it was only Fräulein Wundermacher, a person
+of resource, who discovered that all she needed for my successful
+circumvention was galoshes. She purchased a pair, wasted no breath
+calling me, and would come up silently, as I stood lapped in a false
+security lost in the contemplation of a squirrel or a robin, and seize
+me by the shoulders from behind, to the grievous unhinging of my
+nerves. Stealing along in the fog, I looked back uneasily once or
+twice, so vivid was this disquieting memory, and could hardly be
+reassured by putting up my hand to the elaborate twists and curls that
+compose what my maid calls my _Frisur_, and that mark the gulf lying
+between the present and the past; for it had happened once or twice,
+awful to relate and to remember, that Fräulein Wundermacher, sooner
+than let me slip through her fingers, had actually caught me by the
+long plait of hair to whose other end I was attached and whose English
+name I had been told was pigtail, just at the instant when I was
+springing away from her into the bushes; and so had led me home
+triumphant, holding on tight to the rope of hair, and muttering with a
+broad smile of special satisfaction, “_Diesmal wirst du mir aber nicht
+entschlüpfen!_” Fräulein Wundermacher, now I came to think of it, must
+have been a humourist. She was certainly a clever and a capable woman.
+But I wished at that moment that she would not haunt me so
+persistently, and that I could get rid of the feeling that she was just
+behind in her galoshes, with her hand stretched out to seize me.
+
+Passing the arbour, and peering into its damp recesses, I started back
+with my heart in my mouth. I thought I saw my grandfather’s stern eyes
+shining in the darkness. It was evident that my anxiety lest the
+cousins should catch me had quite upset my nerves, for I am not by
+nature inclined to see eyes where eyes are not. “Don’t be foolish,
+Elizabeth,” murmured my soul in rather a faint voice, “go in, and make
+sure.” “But I don’t like going in and making sure,” I replied. I did go
+in, however, with a sufficient show of courage, and fortunately the
+eyes vanished. What I should have done if they had not I am altogether
+unable to imagine. Ghosts are things that I laugh at in the daytime and
+fear at night, but I think if I were to meet one I should die. The
+arbour had fallen into great decay, and was in the last stage of
+mouldiness. My grandfather had had it made, and, like other buildings,
+it enjoyed a period of prosperity before being left to the ravages of
+slugs and children, when he came down every afternoon in summer and
+drank his coffee there and read his _Kreuzzeitung_ and dozed, while the
+rest of us went about on tiptoe, and only the birds dared sing. Even
+the mosquitoes that infested the place were too much in awe of him to
+sting him; they certainly never did sting him, and I naturally
+concluded it must be because he had forbidden such familiarities.
+Although I had played there for so many years since his death, my
+memory skipped them all, and went back to the days when it was
+exclusively his. Standing on the spot where his armchair used to be, I
+felt how well I knew him now from the impressions he made then on my
+child’s mind, though I was not conscious of them for more than twenty
+years. Nobody told me about him, and he died when I was six, and yet
+within the last year or two, that strange Indian summer of remembrance
+that comes to us in the leisured times when the children have been born
+and we have time to think, has made me know him perfectly well. It is
+rather an uncomfortable thought for the grown-up, and especially for
+the parent, but of a salutary and restraining nature, that though
+children may not understand what is said and done before them, and have
+no interest in it at the time, and though they may forget it at once
+and for years, yet these things that they have seen and heard and not
+noticed have after all impressed themselves for ever on their minds,
+and when they are men and women come crowding back with surprising and
+often painful distinctness, and away frisk all the cherished little
+illusions in flocks.
+
+I had an awful reverence for my grandfather. He never petted, and he
+often frowned, and such people are generally reverenced. Besides, he
+was a just man, everybody said; a just man who might have been a great
+man if he had chosen, and risen to almost any pinnacle of worldly
+glory. That he had not so chosen was held to be a convincing proof of
+his greatness; for he was plainly too great to be great in the vulgar
+sense, and shrouded himself in the dignity of privacy and
+potentialities. This, at least, as time passed and he still did
+nothing, was the belief of the simple people around. People must
+believe in somebody, and having pinned their faith on my grandfather in
+the promising years that lie round thirty, it was more convenient to
+let it remain there. He pervaded our family life till my sixth year,
+and saw to it that we all behaved ourselves, and then he died, and we
+were glad that he should be in heaven. He was a good German (and when
+Germans are good they are very good) who kept the commandments, voted
+for the Government, grew prize potatoes and bred innumerable sheep,
+drove to Berlin once a year with the wool in a procession of waggons
+behind him and sold it at the annual Wollmarkt, rioted soberly for a
+few days there, and then carried most of the proceeds home, hunted as
+often as possible, helped his friends, punished his children, read his
+Bible, said his prayers, and was genuinely astonished when his wife had
+the affectation to die of a broken heart. I cannot pretend to explain
+this conduct. She ought, of course, to have been happy in the
+possession of so good a man; but good men are sometimes oppressive, and
+to have one in the house with you and to live in the daily glare of his
+goodness must be a tremendous business. After bearing him seven sons
+and three daughters, therefore, my grandmother died in the way
+described, and afforded, said my grandfather, another and a very
+curious proof of the impossibility of ever being sure of your ground
+with women. The incident faded more quickly from his mind than it might
+otherwise have done for its having occurred simultaneously with the
+production of a new kind of potato, of which he was justly proud. He
+called it _Trost in Trauer_, and quoted the text of Scripture _Auge um
+Auge, Zabn um Zahn_, after which he did not again allude to his wife’s
+decease. In his last years, when my father managed the estate, and he
+only lived with us and criticised, he came to have the reputation of an
+oracle. The neighbours sent him their sons at the beginning of any
+important phase in their lives, and he received them in this very
+arbour, administering eloquent and minute advice in the deep voice that
+rolled round the shrubbery and filled me with a vague sense of guilt as
+I played. Sitting among the bushes playing muffled games for fear of
+disturbing him, I supposed he must be reading aloud, so unbroken was
+the monotony of that majestic roll. The young men used to come out
+again bathed in perspiration, much stung by mosquitoes, and looking
+bewildered; and when they had got over the impression made by my
+grandfather’s speech and presence, no doubt forgot all he had said with
+wholesome quickness, and set themselves to the interesting and
+necessary work of gaining their own experience. Once, indeed, a
+dreadful thing happened, whose immediate consequence was the abrupt end
+to the long and close friendship between us and our nearest neighbour.
+His son was brought to the arbour and left there in the usual way, and
+either he must have happened on the critical half hour after the coffee
+and before the _Kreuzzeitung_, when my grandfather was accustomed to
+sleep, or he was more courageous than the others and tried to talk, for
+very shortly, playing as usual near at hand, I heard my grandfather’s
+voice, raised to an extent that made me stop in my game and quake,
+saying with deliberate anger, “_Hebe dich weg von mir, Sohn des
+Satans!_” Which was all the advice this particular young man got, and
+which he hastened to take, for out he came through the bushes, and
+though his face was very pale, there was an odd twist about the corners
+of his mouth that reassured me.
+
+This must have happened quite at the end of my grandfather’s life, for
+almost immediately afterwards, as it now seems to me, he died before he
+need have done because he would eat crab, a dish that never agreed with
+him, in the face of his doctor’s warning that if he did he would surely
+die. “What! am I to be conquered by crabs?” he demanded indignantly of
+the doctor; for apart from loving them with all his heart he had never
+yet been conquered by anything. “Nay, sir, the combat is too unequal—do
+not, I pray you, try it again,” replied the doctor. But my grandfather
+ordered crabs that very night for supper, and went in to table with the
+shining eyes of one who is determined to conquer or die, and the crabs
+conquered, and he died. “He was a just man,” said the neighbours,
+except that nearest neighbour, formerly his best friend, “and might
+have been a great one had he so chosen.” And they buried him with
+profound respect, and the sunshine came into our home life with a
+burst, and the birds were not the only creatures that sang, and the
+arbour, from having been a temple of Delphic utterances, sank into a
+home for slugs.
+
+Musing on the strangeness of life, and on the invariable ultimate
+triumph of the insignificant and small over the important and vast,
+illustrated in this instance by the easy substitution in the arbour of
+slugs for grandfathers, I went slowly round the next bend of the path,
+and came to the broad walk along the south side of the high wall
+dividing the flower garden from the kitchen garden, in which sheltered
+position my father had had his choicest flowers. Here the cousins had
+been at work, and all the climbing roses that clothed the wall with
+beauty were gone, and some very neat fruit trees, tidily nailed up at
+proper intervals, reigned in their stead. Evidently the cousins knew
+the value of this warm aspect, for in the border beneath, filled in my
+father’s time in this month of November with the wallflowers that were
+to perfume the walk in spring, there was a thick crop of—I stooped down
+close to make sure—yes, a thick crop of radishes. My eyes filled with
+tears at the sight of those radishes, and it is probably the only
+occasion on record on which radishes have made anybody cry. My dear
+father, whom I so passionately loved, had in his turn passionately
+loved this particular border, and spent the spare moments of a busy
+life enjoying the flowers that grew in it. He had no time himself for a
+more near acquaintance with the delights of gardening than directing
+what plants were to be used, but found rest from his daily work
+strolling up and down here, or sitting smoking as close to the flowers
+as possible. “It is the Purest of Humane pleasures, it is the Greatest
+Refreshment to the Spirits of Man,” he would quote (for he read other
+things besides the _Kreuzzeitung_), looking round with satisfaction on
+reaching this fragrant haven after a hot day in the fields. Well, the
+cousins did not think so. Less fanciful, and more sensible as they
+probably would have said, their position plainly was that you cannot
+eat flowers. Their spirits required no refreshment, but their bodies
+needed much, and therefore radishes were more precious than
+wallflowers. Nor was my youth wholly destitute of radishes, but they
+were grown in the decent obscurity of odd kitchen garden corners and
+old cucumber frames, and would never have been allowed to come among
+the flowers. And only because I was not a boy here they were profaning
+the ground that used to be so beautiful. Oh, it was a terrible
+misfortune not to have been a boy! And how sad and lonely it was, after
+all, in this ghostly garden. The radish bed and what it symbolised had
+turned my first joy into grief. This walk and border me too much of my
+father reminded, and of all he had been to me. What I knew of good he
+had taught me, and what I had of happiness was through him. Only once
+during all the years we lived together had we been of different
+opinions and fallen out, and it was the one time I ever saw him severe.
+I was four years old, and demanded one Sunday to be taken to church. My
+father said no, for I had never been to church, and the German service
+is long and exhausting. I implored. He again said no. I implored again,
+and showed such a pious disposition, and so earnest a determination to
+behave well, that he gave in, and we went off very happily hand in
+hand. “Now mind, Elizabeth,” he said, turning to me at the church door,
+“there is no coming out again in the middle. Having insisted on being
+brought, thou shalt now sit patiently till the end.” “Oh, yes, oh,
+yes,” I promised eagerly, and went in filled with holy fire. The
+shortness of my legs, hanging helplessly for two hours midway between
+the seat and the floor, was the weapon chosen by Satan for my
+destruction. In German churches you do not kneel, and seldom stand, but
+sit nearly the whole time, praying and singing in great comfort. If you
+are four years old, however, this unchanged position soon becomes one
+of torture. Unknown and dreadful things go on in your legs, strange
+prickings and tinglings and dartings up and down, a sudden terrifying
+numbness, when you think they must have dropped off but are afraid to
+look, then renewed and fiercer prickings, shootings, and burnings. I
+thought I must be very ill, for I had never known my legs like that
+before. My father sitting beside me was engrossed in the singing of a
+chorale that evidently had no end, each verse finished with a
+long-drawn-out hallelujah, after which the organ played by itself for a
+hundred years—by the organist’s watch, which was wrong, two minutes
+exactly—and then another verse began. My father, being the patron of
+the living, was careful to sing and pray and listen to the sermon with
+exemplary attention, aware that every eye in the little church was on
+our pew, and at first I tried to imitate him; but the behaviour of my
+legs became so alarming that after vainly casting imploring glances at
+him and seeing that he continued his singing unmoved, I put out my hand
+and pulled his sleeve.
+
+“Hal-le-lu-jah,” sang my father with deliberation; continuing in a low
+voice without changing the expression of his face, his lips hardly
+moving, and his eyes fixed abstractedly on the ceiling till the
+organist, who was also the postman, should have finished his solo, “Did
+I not tell thee to sit still, Elizabeth?” “Yes, but——” “Then do it.”
+“But I want to go home.”
+
+“_Unsinn_.” And the next verse beginning, my father sang louder than
+ever. What could I do? Should I cry? I began to be afraid I was going
+to die on that chair, so extraordinary were the sensations in my legs.
+What could my father do to me if I did cry? With the quick instinct of
+small children I felt that he could not put me in the corner in church,
+nor would he whip me in public, and that with the whole village looking
+on, he was helpless, and would have to give in. Therefore I tugged his
+sleeve again and more peremptorily, and prepared to demand my immediate
+removal in a loud voice. But my father was ready for me. Without
+interrupting his singing, or altering his devout expression, he put his
+hand slowly down and gave me a hard pinch—not a playful pinch, but a
+good hard unmistakeable pinch, such as I had never imagined possible,
+and then went on serenely to the next hallelujah. For a moment I was
+petrified with astonishment. Was this my indulgent father, my playmate,
+adorer, and friend? Smarting with pain, for I was a round baby, with a
+nicely stretched, tight skin, and dreadfully hurt in my feelings, I
+opened my mouth to shriek in earnest, when my father’s clear whisper
+fell on my ear, each word distinct and not to be misunderstood, his
+eyes as before gazing meditatively into space, and his lips hardly
+moving, “_Elizabeth, wenn du schreist, kneife ich dich bis du platzt_.”
+And he finished the verse with unruffled decorum—
+
+“Will Satan mich verschlingen,
+So lass die Engel singen
+          Hallelujah!”
+
+We never had another difference. Up to then he had been my willing
+slave, and after that I was his.
+
+With a smile and a shiver I turned from the border and its memories to
+the door in the wall leading to the kitchen garden, in a corner of
+which my own little garden used to be. The door was open, and I stood
+still a moment before going through, to hold my breath and listen. The
+silence was as profound as before. The place seemed deserted; and I
+should have thought the house empty and shut up but for the carefully
+tended radishes and the recent footmarks on the green of the path. They
+were the footmarks of a child. I was stooping down to examine a
+specially clear one, when the loud caw of a very bored looking crow
+sitting on the wall just above my head made me jump as I have seldom in
+my life jumped, and reminded me that I was trespassing. Clearly my
+nerves were all to pieces, for I gathered up my skirts and fled through
+the door as though a whole army of ghosts and cousins were at my heels,
+nor did I stop till I had reached the remote corner where my garden
+was. “Are you enjoying yourself, Elizabeth?” asked the mocking sprite
+that calls itself my soul: but I was too much out of breath to answer.
+
+This was really a very safe corner. It was separated from the main
+garden and the house by the wall, and shut in on the north side by an
+orchard, and it was to the last degree unlikely that any one would come
+there on such an afternoon. This plot of ground, turned now as I saw
+into a rockery, had been the scene of my most untiring labours. Into
+the cold earth of this north border on which the sun never shone I had
+dug my brightest hopes. All my pocket money had been spent on it, and
+as bulbs were dear and my weekly allowance small, in a fatal hour I had
+borrowed from Fräulein Wundermacher, selling her my independence,
+passing utterly into her power, forced as a result till my next
+birthday should come round to an unnatural suavity of speech and manner
+in her company, against which my very soul revolted. And after all,
+nothing came up. The labour of digging and watering, the anxious zeal
+with which I pounced on weeds, the poring over gardening books, the
+plans made as I sat on the little seat in the middle gazing admiringly
+and with the eye of faith on the trim surface so soon to be gemmed with
+a thousand flowers, the reckless expenditure of _pfennings_, the
+humiliation of my position in regard to Fräulein Wundermacher,—all, all
+had been in vain. No sun shone there, and nothing grew. The gardener
+who reigned supreme in those days had given me this big piece for that
+sole reason, because he could do nothing with it himself. He was no
+doubt of opinion that it was quite good enough for a child to
+experiment upon, and went his way, when I had thanked him with a
+profuseness of gratitude I still remember, with an unmoved countenance.
+For more than a year I worked and waited, and watched the career of the
+flourishing orchard opposite with puzzled feelings. The orchard was
+only a few yards away, and yet, although my garden was full of manure,
+and water, and attentions that were never bestowed on the orchard, all
+it could show and ever did show were a few unhappy beginnings of growth
+that either remained stationary and did not achieve flowers, or
+dwindled down again and vanished. Once I timidly asked the gardener if
+he could explain these signs and wonders, but he was a busy man with no
+time for answering questions, and told me shortly that gardening was
+not learned in a day. How well I remember that afternoon, and the very
+shape of the lazy clouds, and the smell of spring things, and myself
+going away abashed and sitting on the shaky bench in my domain and
+wondering for the hundredth time what it was that made the difference
+between my bit and the bit of orchard in front of me. The fruit trees,
+far enough away from the wall to be beyond the reach of its cold shade,
+were tossing their flower-laden heads in the sunshine in a carelessly
+well-satisfied fashion that filled my heart with envy. There was a rise
+in the field behind them, and at the foot of its protecting slope they
+luxuriated in the insolent glory of their white and pink perfection. It
+was May, and my heart bled at the thought of the tulips I had put in in
+November, and that I had never seen since. The whole of the rest of the
+garden was on fire with tulips; behind me, on the other side of the
+wall, were rows and rows of them,—cups of translucent loveliness, a
+jewelled ring flung right round the lawn. But what was there not on the
+other side of that wall? Things came up there and grew and flowered
+exactly as my gardening books said they should do; and in front of me,
+in the gay orchard, things that nobody ever troubled about or
+cultivated or noticed throve joyously beneath the trees,—daffodils
+thrusting their spears through the grass, crocuses peeping out
+inquiringly, snowdrops uncovering their small cold faces when the first
+shivering spring days came. Only my piece that I so loved was
+perpetually ugly and empty. And I sat in it thinking of these things on
+that radiant day, and wept aloud.
+
+Then an apprentice came by, a youth who had often seen me busily
+digging, and noticing the unusual tears, and struck perhaps by the
+difference between my garden and the profusion of splendour all around,
+paused with his barrow on the path in front of me, and remarked that
+nobody could expect to get blood out of a stone. The apparent
+irrelevance of this statement made me weep still louder, the bitter
+tears of insulted sorrow; but he stuck to his point, and harangued me
+from the path, explaining the connection between north walls and tulips
+and blood and stones till my tears all dried up again and I listened
+attentively, for the conclusion to be drawn from his remarks was
+plainly that I had been shamefully taken in by the head gardener, who
+was an unprincipled person thenceforward to be for ever mistrusted and
+shunned. Standing on the path from which the kindly apprentice had
+expounded his proverb, this scene rose before me as clearly as though
+it had taken place that very day; but how different everything looked,
+and how it had shrunk! Was this the wide orchard that had seemed to
+stretch away, it and the sloping field beyond, up to the gates of
+heaven? I believe nearly every child who is much alone goes through a
+certain time of hourly expecting the Day of Judgment, and I had made up
+my mind that on that Day the heavenly host would enter the world by
+that very field, coming down the slope in shining ranks, treading the
+daffodils under foot, filling the orchard with their songs of
+exultation, joyously seeking out the sheep from among the goats. Of
+course I was a sheep, and my governess and the head gardener goats, so
+that the results could not fail to be in every way satisfactory. But
+looking up at the slope and remembering my visions, I laughed at the
+smallness of the field I had supposed would hold all heaven.
+
+Here again the cousins had been at work. The site of my garden was
+occupied by a rockery, and the orchard grass with all its treasures had
+been dug up, and the spaces between the trees planted with currant
+bushes and celery in admirable rows; so that no future little cousins
+will be able to dream of celestial hosts coming towards them across the
+fields of daffodils, and will perhaps be the better for being free from
+visions of the kind, for as I grew older, uncomfortable doubts laid
+hold of my heart with cold fingers, dim uncertainties as to the exact
+ultimate position of the gardener and the governess, anxious
+questionings as to how it would be if it were they who turned out after
+all to be sheep, and I who—? For that we all three might be gathered
+into the same fold at the last never, in those days, struck me as
+possible, and if it had I should not have liked it.
+
+“Now what sort of person can that be,” I asked myself, shaking my head,
+as I contemplated the changes before me, “who could put a rockery among
+vegetables and currant bushes? A rockery, of all things in the
+gardening world, needs consummate tact in its treatment. It is easier
+to make mistakes in forming a rockery than in any other garden scheme.
+Either it is a great success, or it is great failure; either it is very
+charming, or it is very absurd. There is no state between the sublime
+and the ridiculous possible in a rockery.” I stood shaking my head
+disapprovingly at the rockery before me, lost in these reflections,
+when a sudden quick pattering of feet coming along in a great hurry
+made me turn round with a start, just in time to receive the shock of a
+body tumbling out of the mist and knocking violently against me.
+
+It was a little girl of about twelve years old.
+
+“Hullo!” said the little girl in excellent English; and then we stared
+at each other in astonishment.
+
+“I thought you were Miss Robinson,” said the little girl, offering no
+apology for having nearly knocked me down. “Who are you?”
+
+“Miss Robinson? Miss Robinson?” I repeated, my eyes fixed on the little
+girl’s face, and a host of memories stirring within me. “Why, didn’t
+she marry a missionary, and go out to some place where they ate him?”
+
+The little girl stared harder. “Ate him? Marry? What, has she been
+married all this time to somebody who’s been eaten and never let on?
+Oh, I say, what a game!” And she threw back her head and laughed till
+the garden rang again.
+
+“O hush, you dreadful little girl!” I implored, catching her by the
+arm, and terrified beyond measure by the loudness of her mirth. “Don’t
+make that horrid noise—we are certain to be caught if you don’t stop——”
+
+The little girl broke off a shriek of laughter in the middle and shut
+her mouth with a snap. Her eyes, round and black and shiny like boot
+buttons, came still further out of her head. “Caught?” she said
+eagerly. “What, are you afraid of being caught too? Well, this _is_ a
+game!” And with her hands plunged deep in the pockets of her coat she
+capered in front of me in the excess of her enjoyment, reminding me of
+a very fat black lamb frisking round the dazed and passive sheep its
+mother.
+
+It was clear that the time had come for me to get down to the gate at
+the end of the garden as quickly as possible, and I began to move away
+in that direction. The little girl at once stopped capering and planted
+herself squarely in front of me. “Who are you?” she said, examining me
+from my hat to my boots with the keenest interest.
+
+I considered this ungarnished manner of asking questions impertinent,
+and, trying to look lofty, made an attempt to pass at the side.
+
+The little girl, with a quick, cork-like movement, was there before me.
+
+“Who are you?” she repeated, her expression friendly but firm. “Oh,
+I—I’m a pilgrim,” I said in desperation.
+
+“A pilgrim!” echoed the little girl. She seemed struck, and while she
+was struck I slipped past her and began to walk quickly towards the
+door in the wall. “A pilgrim!” said the little girl, again, keeping
+close beside me, and looking me up and down attentively. “I don’t like
+pilgrims. Aren’t they people who are always walking about, and have
+things the matter with their feet? Have you got anything the matter
+with your feet?”
+
+“Certainly not,” I replied indignantly, walking still faster.
+
+“And they never wash, Miss Robinson says. You don’t either, do you?”
+
+“Not wash? Oh, I’m afraid you are a very badly brought-up little
+girl—oh, leave me alone—I must run—”
+
+“So must I,” said the little girl, cheerfully, “for Miss Robinson must
+be close behind us. She nearly had me just before I found you.” And she
+started running by my side.
+
+The thought of Miss Robinson close behind us gave wings to my feet,
+and, casting my dignity, of which, indeed, there was but little left,
+to the winds, I fairly flew down the path. The little girl was not to
+be outrun, and though she panted and turned weird colours, kept by my
+side and even talked. Oh, I was tired, tired in body and mind, tired by
+the different shocks I had received, tired by the journey, tired by the
+want of food; and here I was being forced to run because this very
+naughty little girl chose to hide instead of going in to her lessons.
+
+“I say—this is jolly—” she jerked out.
+
+“But why need we run to the same place?” I breathlessly asked, in the
+vain hope of getting rid of her.
+
+“Oh, yes—that’s just—the fun. We’d get on—together—you and I—”
+
+“No, no,” said I, decided on this point, bewildered though I was.
+
+“I can’t stand washing—either—it’s awful—in winter—and makes one
+have—chaps.”
+
+“But I don’t mind it in the least,” I protested faintly, not having any
+energy left.
+
+“Oh, I say!” said the little girl, looking at my face, and making the
+sound known as a guffaw. The familiarity of this little girl was wholly
+revolting.
+
+We had got safely through the door, round the corner past the radishes,
+and were in the shrubbery. I knew from experience how easy it was to
+hide in the tangle of little paths, and stopped a moment to look round
+and listen. The little girl opened her mouth to speak. With great
+presence of mind I instantly put my muff in front of it and held it
+there tight, while I listened. Dead silence, except for the laboured
+breathing and struggles of the little girl.
+
+“I don’t hear a sound,” I whispered, letting her go again. “Now what
+did you want to say?” I added, eyeing her severely.
+
+“I wanted to say,” she panted, “that it’s no good pretending you wash
+with a nose like that.”
+
+“A nose like that! A nose like what?” I exclaimed, greatly offended;
+and though I put up my hand and very tenderly and carefully felt it, I
+could find no difference in it. “I am afraid poor Miss Robinson must
+have a wretched life,” I said, in tones of deep disgust.
+
+The little girl smiled fatuously, as though I were paying her
+compliments. “It’s all green and brown,” she said, pointing. “Is it
+always like that?”
+
+Then I remembered the wet fir tree near the gate, and the enraptured
+kiss it had received, and blushed.
+
+“Won’t it come off?” persisted the little girl.
+
+“Of course it will come off,” I answered, frowning.
+
+“Why don’t you rub it off?”
+
+Then I remembered the throwing away of the handkerchief, and blushed
+again.
+
+“Please lend me your handkerchief,” I said humbly, “I—I have lost
+mine.”
+
+There was a great fumbling in six different pockets, and then a
+handkerchief that made me young again merely to look at it was
+produced. I took it thankfully and rubbed with energy, the little girl,
+intensely interested, watching the operation and giving me advice.
+“There—it’s all right now—a little more on the right—there—now it’s all
+off.”
+
+“Are you sure? No green left?” I anxiously asked.
+
+“No, it’s red all over now,” she replied cheerfully. “Let me get home,”
+thought I, very much upset by this information, “let me get home to my
+dear, uncritical, admiring babies, who accept my nose as an example of
+what a nose should be, and whatever its colour think it beautiful.” And
+thrusting the handkerchief back into the little girl’s hands, I hurried
+away down the path. She packed it away hastily, but it took some
+seconds for it was of the size of a small sheet, and then came running
+after me. “Where are you going?” she asked surprised, as I turned down
+the path leading to the gate.
+
+“Through this gate,” I replied with decision.
+
+“But you mustn’t—we’re not allowed to go through there——”
+
+So strong was the force of old habits in that place that at the words
+_not allowed_ my hand dropped of itself from the latch; and at that
+instant a voice calling quite close to us through the mist struck me
+rigid.
+
+“Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” called the voice, “Come in at once to your
+lessons—Elizabeth! Elizabeth!”
+
+“It’s Miss Robinson,” whispered the little girl, twinkling with
+excitement; then, catching sight of my face, she said once more with
+eager insistence, “Who are you?”
+
+“Oh, I’m a ghost!” I cried with conviction, pressing my hands to my
+forehead and looking round fearfully.
+
+“Pooh,” said the little girl.
+
+It was the last remark I heard her make, for there was a creaking of
+approaching boots in the bushes, and seized by a frightful panic I
+pulled the gate open with one desperate pull, flung it to behind me,
+and fled out and away down the wide, misty fields.
+
+The _Gotha Almanach_ says that the reigning cousin married the daughter
+of a Mr. Johnstone, an Englishman, in 1885, and that in 1886 their only
+child was born, Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+
+_November_ 20_th_.—Last night we had ten degrees of frost (Fahrenheit),
+and I went out the first thing this morning to see what had become of
+the tea-roses, and behold, they were wide awake and quite
+cheerful—covered with rime it is true, but anything but black and
+shrivelled. Even those in boxes on each side of the verandah steps were
+perfectly alive and full of buds, and one in particular, a Bouquet
+d’Or, is a mass of buds, and would flower if it could get the least
+encouragement. I am beginning to think that the tenderness of tea-roses
+is much exaggerated, and am certainly very glad I had the courage to
+try them in this northern garden. But I must not fly too boldly in the
+face of Providence, and have ordered those in the boxes to be taken
+into the greenhouse for the winter, and hope the Bouquet d’Or, in a
+sunny place near the glass, may be induced to open some of those buds.
+The greenhouse is only used as a refuge, and kept at a temperature just
+above freezing, and is reserved entirely for such plants as cannot
+stand the very coldest part of the winter out of doors. I don’t use it
+for growing anything, because I don’t love things that will only bear
+the garden for three or four months in the year and require coaxing and
+petting for the rest of it. Give me a garden full of strong, healthy
+creatures, able to stand roughness and cold without dismally giving in
+and dying. I never could see that delicacy of constitution is pretty,
+either in plants or women. No doubt there are many lovely flowers to be
+had by heat and constant coaxing, but then for each of these there are
+fifty others still lovelier that will gratefully grow in God’s
+wholesome air and are blessed in return with a far greater intensity of
+scent and colour.
+
+We have been very busy till now getting the permanent beds into order
+and planting the new tea-roses, and I am looking forward to next summer
+with more hope than ever in spite of my many failures. I wish the years
+would pass quickly that will bring my garden to perfection! The Persian
+Yellows have gone into their new quarters, and their place is occupied
+by the tea-rose Safrano; all the rose beds are carpeted with pansies
+sown in July and transplanted in October, each bed having a separate
+colour. The purple ones are the most charming and go well with every
+rose, but I have white ones with Laurette Messimy, and yellow ones with
+Safrano, and a new red sort in the big centre bed of red roses. Round
+the semicircle on the south side of the little privet hedge two rows of
+annual larkspurs in all their delicate shades have been sown, and just
+beyond the larkspurs, on the grass, is a semicircle of standard tea and
+pillar roses.
+
+In front of the house the long borders have been stocked with
+larkspurs, annual and perennial, columbines, giant poppies, pinks,
+Madonna lilies, wallflowers, hollyhocks, perennial phloxes, peonies,
+lavender, starworts, cornflowers, Lychnis chalcedonica, and bulbs
+packed in wherever bulbs could go. These are the borders that were so
+hardly used by the other gardener. The spring boxes for the verandah
+steps have been filled with pink and white and yellow tulips. I love
+tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of
+alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a
+wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every
+movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate
+scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more
+charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the
+sun? I have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to me they seem
+modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as
+they can and not afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them
+in the face. On the grass there are two beds of them carpeted with
+forget-me-nots; and in the grass, in scattered groups, are daffodils
+and narcissus. Down the wilder shrubbery walks foxgloves and mulleins
+will (I hope) shine majestic; and one cool corner, backed by a group of
+firs, is graced by Madonna lilies, white foxgloves, and columbines.
+
+In a distant glade I have made a spring garden round an oak tree that
+stands alone in the sun—groups of crocuses, daffodils, narcissus,
+hyacinths, and tulips, among such flowering shrubs and trees as Pirus
+Malus spectabilis, floribunda, and coronaria; Prunus Juliana, Mahaleb,
+serotina, triloba, and Pissardi; Cydonias and Weigelias in every
+colour, and several kinds of Cratægus and other May lovelinesses. If
+the weather behaves itself nicely, and we get gentle rains in due
+season, I think this little corner will be beautiful—but what a big
+“if” it is! Drought is our great enemy, and the two last summers each
+contained five weeks of blazing, cloudless heat when all the ditches
+dried up and the soil was like hot pastry. At such times the watering
+is naturally quite beyond the strength of two men; but as a garden is a
+place to be happy in, and not one where you want to meet a dozen
+curious eyes at every turn, I should not like to have more than these
+two, or rather one and a half—the assistant having stork-like
+proclivities and going home in the autumn to his native Russia,
+returning in the spring with the first warm winds. I want to keep him
+over the winter, as there is much to be done even then, and I sounded
+him on the point the other day. He is the most abject-looking of human
+beings—lame, and afflicted with a hideous eye-disease; but he is a good
+worker and plods along unwearyingly from sunrise to dusk.
+
+“Pray, my good stork,” said I, or German words to that effect, “why
+don’t you stay here altogether, instead of going home and rioting away
+all you have earned?”
+
+“I would stay,” he answered, “but I have my wife there in Russia.”
+
+“Your wife!” I exclaimed, stupidly surprised that the poor deformed
+creature should have found a mate—as though there were not a
+superfluity of mates in the world—“I didn’t know you were married?”
+
+“Yes, and I have two little children, and I don’t know what they would
+do if I were not to come home. But it is a very expensive journey to
+Russia, and costs me every time seven marks.”
+
+“Seven marks!”
+
+“Yes, it is a great sum.”
+
+I wondered whether I should be able to get to Russia for seven marks,
+supposing I were to be seized with an unnatural craving to go there.
+
+All the labourers who work here from March to December are Russians and
+Poles, or a mixture of both. We send a man over who can speak their
+language, to fetch as many as he can early in the year, and they arrive
+with their bundles, men and women and babies, and as soon as they have
+got here and had their fares paid, they disappear in the night if they
+get the chance, sometimes fifty of them at a time, to go and work
+singly or in couples for the peasants, who pay them a _pfenning_ or two
+more a day than we do, and let them eat with the family. From us they
+get a mark and a half to two marks a day, and as many potatoes as they
+can eat. The women get less, not because they work less, but because
+they are women and must not be encouraged. The overseer lives with
+them, and has a loaded revolver in his pocket and a savage dog at his
+heels. For the first week or two after their arrival, the foresters and
+other permanent officials keep guard at night over the houses they are
+put into. I suppose they find it sleepy work; for certain it is that
+spring after spring the same thing happens, fifty of them getting away
+in spite of all our precautions, and we are left with our mouths open
+and much out of pocket. This spring, by some mistake, they arrived
+without their bundles, which had gone astray on the road, and, as they
+travel in their best clothes, they refused utterly to work until their
+luggage came. Nearly a week was lost waiting, to the despair of all in
+authority.
+
+Nor will any persuasions induce them to do anything on Saints’ days,
+and there surely never was a church so full of them as the Russian
+Church. In the spring, when every hour is of vital importance, the work
+is constantly being interrupted by them, and the workers lie sleeping
+in the sun the whole day, agreeably conscious that they are pleasing
+themselves and the Church at one and the same time—a state of
+perfection as rare as it is desirable. Reason unaided by Faith is of
+course exasperated at this waste of precious time, and I confess that
+during the first mild days after the long winter frost when it is
+possible to begin to work the ground, I have sympathised with the gloom
+of the Man of Wrath, confronted in one week by two or three empty days
+on which no man will labour, and have listened in silence to his
+remarks about distant Russian saints.
+
+I suppose it was my own superfluous amount of civilisation that made me
+pity these people when first I came to live among them. They herd
+together like animals and do the work of animals; but in spite of the
+armed overseer, the dirt and the rags, the meals of potatoes washed
+down by weak vinegar and water, I am beginning to believe that they
+would strongly object to soap, I am sure they would not wear new
+clothes, and I hear them coming home from their work at dusk singing.
+They are like little children or animals in their utter inability to
+grasp the idea of a future; and after all, if you work all day in God’s
+sunshine, when evening comes you are pleasantly tired and ready for
+rest and not much inclined to find fault with your lot. I have not yet
+persuaded myself, however, that the women are happy. They have to work
+as hard as the men and get less for it; they have to produce offspring,
+quite regardless of times and seasons and the general fitness of
+things; they have to do this as expeditiously as possible, so that they
+may not unduly interrupt the work in hand; nobody helps them, notices
+them, or cares about them, least of all the husband. It is quite a
+usual thing to see them working in the fields in the morning, and
+working again in the afternoon, having in the interval produced a baby.
+The baby is left to an old woman whose duty it is to look after babies
+collectively. When I expressed my horror at the poor creatures working
+immediately afterwards as though nothing had happened, the Man of Wrath
+informed me that they did not suffer because they had never worn
+corsets, nor had their mothers and grandmothers. We were riding
+together at the time, and had just passed a batch of workers, and my
+husband was speaking to the overseer, when a woman arrived alone, and
+taking up a spade, began to dig. She grinned cheerfully at us as she
+made a curtesy, and the overseer remarked that she had just been back
+to the house and had a baby.
+
+“Poor, _poor_ woman!” I cried, as we rode on, feeling for some occult
+reason very angry with the Man of Wrath. “And her wretched husband
+doesn’t care a rap, and will probably beat her to-night if his supper
+isn’t right. What nonsense it is to talk about the equality of the
+sexes when the women have the babies!”
+
+“Quite so, my dear,” replied the Man of Wrath, smiling condescendingly.
+“You have got to the very root of the matter. Nature, while imposing
+this agreeable duty on the woman, weakens her and disables her for any
+serious competition with man. How can a person who is constantly losing
+a year of the best part of her life compete with a young man who never
+loses any time at all? He has the brute force, and his last word on any
+subject could always be his fist.”
+
+I said nothing. It was a dull, gray afternoon in the beginning of
+November, and the leaves dropped slowly and silently at our horses’
+feet as we rode towards the Hirschwald.
+
+“It is a universal custom,” proceeded the Man of Wrath, “amongst these
+Russians, and I believe amongst the lower classes everywhere, and
+certainly commendable on the score of simplicity, to silence a woman’s
+objections and aspirations by knocking her down. I have heard it said
+that this apparently brutal action has anything but the maddening
+effect tenderly nurtured persons might suppose, and that the patient is
+soothed and satisfied with a rapidity and completeness unattainable by
+other and more polite methods. Do you suppose,” he went on, flicking a
+twig off a tree with his whip as we passed, “that the intellectual
+husband, wrestling intellectually with the chaotic yearnings of his
+intellectual wife, ever achieves the result aimed at? He may and does
+go on wrestling till he is tired, but never does he in the very least
+convince her of her folly; while his brother in the ragged coat has got
+through the whole business in less time than it takes me to speak about
+it. There is no doubt that these poor women fulfil their vocation far
+more thoroughly than the women in our class, and, as the truest:
+happiness consists in finding one’s vocation quickly and continuing in
+it all one’s days, I consider they are to be envied rather than not,
+since they are early taught, by the impossibility of argument with
+marital muscle, the impotence of female endeavour and the blessings of
+content.”
+
+“Pray go on,” I said politely.
+
+“These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all
+praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the
+strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent
+rebukes. In Russia, not only _may_ a man beat his wife, but it is laid
+down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation
+as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or
+not, for the sake of her general health and happiness.”
+
+I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat
+over these castigations.
+
+“Pray, my dear man,” I said, pointing with my whip, “look at that baby
+moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind
+that silver birch; and don’t talk so much about women and things you
+don’t understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and
+whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the
+confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband,
+and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man.”
+
+“And a civilised wife?” he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me
+and putting his arm round my waist, “has she ceased to be a woman?”
+
+“I should think so indeed,—she is a goddess, and can never be
+worshipped and adored enough.”
+
+“It seems to me,” he said, “that the conversation is growing personal.”
+
+I started off at a canter across the short, springy turf. The
+Hirschwald is an enchanted place on such an evening, when the mists lie
+low on the turf, and overhead the delicate, bare branches of the silver
+birches stand out clear against the soft sky, while the little moon
+looks down kindly on the damp November world. Where the trees thicken
+into a wood, the fragrance of the wet earth and rotting leaves kicked
+up by the horses’ hoofs fills my soul with delight. I particularly love
+that smell,—it brings before me the entire benevolence of Nature, for
+ever working death and decay, so piteous in themselves, into the means
+of fresh life and glory, and sending up sweet odours as she works.
+
+
+
+
+_December_ 7_th_.—I have been to England. I went for at least a month
+and stayed a week in a fog and was blown home again in a gale. Twice I
+fled before the fogs into the country to see friends with gardens, but
+it was raining, and except the beautiful lawns (not to be had in the
+Fatherland) and the infinite possibilities, there was nothing to
+interest the intelligent and garden-loving foreigner, for the good
+reason that you cannot be interested in gardens under an umbrella. So I
+went back to the fogs, and after groping about for a few days more
+began to long inordinately for Germany. A terrific gale sprang up after
+I had started, and the journey both by sea and land was full of
+horrors, the trains in Germany being heated to such an extent that it
+is next to impossible to sit still, great gusts of hot air coming up
+under the cushions, the cushions themselves being very hot, and the
+wretched traveller still hotter.
+
+But when I reached my home and got out of the train into the purest,
+brightest snow-atmosphere, the air so still that the whole world seemed
+to be listening, the sky cloudless, the crisp snow sparkling underfoot
+and on the trees, and a happy row of three beaming babies awaiting me,
+I was consoled for all my torments, only remembering them enough to
+wonder why I had gone away at all.
+
+The babies each had a kitten in one hand and an elegant bouquet of pine
+needles and grass in the other, and what with the due presentation of
+the bouquets and the struggles of the kittens, the hugging and kissing
+was much interfered with. Kittens, bouquets, and babies were all
+somehow squeezed into the sleigh, and off we went with jingling bells
+and shrieks of delight. “Directly you comes home the fun begins,” said
+the May baby, sitting very close to me. “How the snow purrs!” cried the
+April baby, as the horses scrunched it up with their feet. The June
+baby sat loudly singing “The King of Love my Shepherd is,” and swinging
+her kitten round by its tail to emphasise the rhythm.
+
+The house, half-buried in the snow, looked the very abode of peace, and
+I ran through all the rooms, eager to take possession of them again,
+and feeling as though I had been away for ever. When I got to the
+library I came to a standstill,—ah, the dear room, what happy times I
+have spent in it rummaging amongst the books, making plans for my
+garden, building castles in the air, writing, dreaming, doing nothing!
+There was a big peat fire blazing half up the chimney, and the old
+housekeeper had put pots of flowers about, and on the writing-table was
+a great bunch of violets scenting the room. “Oh, how _good_ it is to be
+home again!” I sighed in my satisfaction. The babies clung about my
+knees, looking up at me with eyes full of love. Outside the dazzling
+snow and sunshine, inside the bright room and happy faces—I thought of
+those yellow fogs and shivered. The library is not used by the Man of
+Wrath; it is neutral ground where we meet in the evenings for an hour
+before he disappears into his own rooms—a series of very smoky dens in
+the southeast corner of the house. It looks, I am afraid, rather too
+gay for an ideal library; and its colouring, white and yellow, is so
+cheerful as to be almost frivolous. There are white bookcases all round
+the walls, and there is a great fireplace, and four windows, facing
+full south, opening on to my most cherished bit of garden, the bit
+round the sun-dial; so that with so much colour and such a big fire and
+such floods of sunshine it has anything but a sober air, in spite of
+the venerable volumes filling the shelves. Indeed, I should never be
+surprised if they skipped down from their places, and, picking up their
+leaves, began to dance.
+
+With this room to live in, I can look forward with perfect equanimity
+to being snowed up for any time Providence thinks proper; and to go
+into the garden in its snowed-up state is like going into a bath of
+purity. The first breath on opening the door is so ineffably pure that
+it makes me gasp, and I feel a black and sinful object in the midst of
+all the spotlessness. Yesterday I sat out of doors near the sun-dial
+the whole afternoon, with the thermometer so many degrees below
+freezing that it will be weeks finding its way up again; but there was
+no wind, and beautiful sunshine, and I was well wrapped up in furs. I
+even had tea brought out there, to the astonishment of the menials, and
+sat till long after the sun had set, enjoying the frosty air. I had to
+drink the tea very quickly, for it showed a strong inclination to begin
+to freeze. After the sun had gone down the rooks came home to their
+nests in the garden with a great fuss and fluttering, and many
+hesitations and squabbles before they settled on their respective
+trees. They flew over my head in hundreds with a mighty swish of wings,
+and when they had arranged themselves comfortably, an intense hush fell
+upon the garden, and the house began to look like a Christmas card,
+with its white roof against the clear, pale green of the western sky,
+and lamplight shining in the windows.
+
+I had been reading a Life of Luther, lent me by our parson, in the
+intervals between looking round me and being happy. He came one day
+with the book and begged me to read it, having discovered that my
+interest in Luther was not as living as it ought to be; so I took it
+out with me into the garden, because the dullest book takes on a
+certain saving grace if read out of doors, just as bread and butter,
+devoid of charm in the drawing-room, is ambrosia eaten under a tree. I
+read Luther all the afternoon with pauses for refreshing glances at the
+garden and the sky, and much thankfulness in my heart. His struggles
+with devils amazed me; and I wondered whether such a day as that, full
+of grace and the forgiveness of sins, never struck him as something to
+make him relent even towards devils. He apparently never allowed
+himself just to be happy. He was a wonderful man, but I am glad I was
+not his wife.
+
+Our parson is an interesting person, and untiring in his efforts to
+improve himself. Both he and his wife study whenever they have a spare
+moment, and there is a tradition that she stirs her puddings with one
+hand and holds a Latin grammar in the other, the grammar, of course,
+getting the greater share of her attention. To most German _Hausfraus_
+the dinners and the puddings are of paramount importance, and they
+pride themselves on keeping those parts of their houses that are seen
+in a state of perpetual and spotless perfection, and this is
+exceedingly praiseworthy; but, I would humbly inquire, are there not
+other things even more important? And is not plain living and high
+thinking better than the other way about? And all too careful making of
+dinners and dusting of furniture takes a terrible amount of precious
+time, and—and with shame I confess that my sympathies are all with the
+pudding and the grammar. It cannot be right to be the slave of one’s
+household gods, and I protest that if my furniture ever annoyed me by
+wanting to be dusted when I wanted to be doing something else, and
+there was no one to do the dusting for me, I would cast it all into the
+nearest bonfire and sit and warm my toes at the flames with great
+contentment, triumphantly selling my dusters to the very next pedlar
+who was weak enough to buy them. Parsons’ wives have to do the
+housework and cooking themselves, and are thus not only cooks and
+housemaids, but if they have children—and they always do have
+children—they are head and under nurse as well; and besides these
+trifling duties have a good deal to do with their fruit and vegetable
+garden, and everything to do with their poultry. This being so, is it
+not pathetic to find a young woman bravely struggling to learn
+languages and keep up with her husband? If I were that husband, those
+puddings would taste sweetest to me that were served with Latin sauce.
+They are both severely pious, and are for ever engaged in desperate
+efforts to practise what they preach; than which, as we all know,
+nothing is more difficult. He works in his parish with the most noble
+self-devotion, and never loses courage, although his efforts have been
+several times rewarded by disgusting libels pasted up on the
+street-corners, thrown under doors, and even fastened to his own garden
+wall. The peasant hereabouts is past belief low and animal, and a
+sensitive, intellectual parson among them is really a pearl before
+swine. For years he has gone on unflinchingly, filled with the most
+living faith and hope and charity, and I sometimes wonder whether they
+are any better now in his parish than they were under his predecessor,
+a man who smoked and drank beer from Monday morning to Saturday night,
+never did a stroke of work, and often kept the scanty congregation
+waiting on Sunday afternoons while he finished his postprandial nap. It
+is discouraging enough to make most men give in, and leave the parish
+to get to heaven or not as it pleases; but he never seems discouraged,
+and goes on sacrificing the best part of his life to these people when
+all his tastes are literary, and all his inclinations towards the life
+of the student. His convictions drag him out of his little home at all
+hours to minister to the sick and exhort the wicked; they give him no
+rest, and never let him feel he has done enough; and when he comes home
+weary, after a day’s wrestling with his parishioners’ souls, he is
+confronted on his doorstep by filthy abuse pasted up on his own front
+door. He never speaks of these things, but how shall they be hid?
+Everybody here knows everything that happens before the day is over,
+and what we have for dinner is of far greater general interest than the
+most astounding political earthquake. They have a pretty, roomy
+cottage, and a good bit of ground adjoining the churchyard. His
+predecessor used to hang out his washing on the tombstones to dry, but
+then he was a person entirely lost to all sense of decency, and had
+finally to be removed, preaching a farewell sermon of a most
+vituperative description, and hurling invective at the Man of Wrath,
+who sat up in his box drinking in every word and enjoying himself
+thoroughly. The Man of Wrath likes novelty, and such a sermon had never
+been heard before. It is spoken of in the village to this day with
+bated breath and awful joy.
+
+
+
+
+_December_ 22_nd_.—Up to now we have had a beautiful winter. Clear
+skies, frost, little wind, and, except for a sharp touch now and then,
+very few really cold days. My windows are gay with hyacinths and lilies
+of the valley; and though, as I have said, I don’t admire the smell of
+hyacinths in the spring when it seems wanting in youth and chastity
+next to that of other flowers, I am glad enough now to bury my nose in
+their heavy sweetness. In December one cannot afford to be fastidious;
+besides, one is actually less fastidious about everything in the
+winter. The keen air braces soul as well as body into robustness, and
+the food and the perfume disliked in the summer are perfectly welcome
+then.
+
+I am very busy preparing for Christmas, but have often locked myself up
+in a room alone, shutting out my unfinished duties, to study the flower
+catalogues and make my lists of seeds and shrubs and trees for the
+spring. It is a fascinating occupation, and acquires an additional
+charm when you know you ought to be doing something else, that
+Christmas is at the door, that children and servants and farm hands
+depend on you for their pleasure, and that, if you don’t see to the
+decoration of the trees and house, and the buying of the presents,
+nobody else will. The hours fly by shut up with those catalogues and
+with Duty snarling on the other side of the door. I don’t like
+Duty—everything in the least disagreeable is always sure to be one’s
+duty. Why cannot it be my duty to make lists and plans for the dear
+garden? “And so it _is_,” I insisted to the Man of Wrath, when he
+protested against what he called wasting my time upstairs. “No,” he
+replied sagely; “your garden is not your duty, because it is your
+Pleasure.”
+
+What a comfort it is to have such wells of wisdom constantly at my
+disposal! Anybody can have a husband, but to few is it given to have a
+sage, and the combination of both is as rare as it is useful. Indeed,
+in its practical utility the only thing I ever saw to equal it is a
+sofa my neighbour has bought as a Christmas surprise for her husband,
+and which she showed me the last time I called there—a beautiful
+invention, as she explained, combining a bedstead, a sofa, and a chest
+of drawers, and into which you put your clothes, and on top of which
+you put yourself, and if anybody calls in the middle of the night and
+you happen to be using the drawing-room as a bedroom, you just pop the
+bedclothes inside, and there you are discovered sitting on your sofa
+and looking for all the world as though you had been expecting visitors
+for hours.
+
+“Pray, does he wear pyjamas?” I inquired.
+
+But she had never heard of pyjamas.
+
+It takes a long time to make my spring lists. I want to have a border
+all yellow, every shade of yellow from fieriest orange to nearly white,
+and the amount of work and studying of gardening books it costs me will
+only be appreciated by beginners like myself. I have been weeks
+planning it, and it is not nearly finished. I want it to be a
+succession of glories from May till the frosts, and the chief feature
+is to be the number of “ardent marigolds”—flowers that I very tenderly
+love—and nasturtiums. The nasturtiums are to be of every sort and
+shade, and are to climb and creep and grow in bushes, and show their
+lovely flowers and leaves to the best advantage. Then there are to be
+eschscholtzias, dahlias, sunflowers, zinnias, scabiosa, portulaca,
+yellow violas, yellow stocks, yellow sweet-peas, yellow
+lupins—everything that is yellow or that has a yellow variety. The
+place I have chosen for it is a long, wide border in the sun, at the
+foot of a grassy slope crowned with lilacs and pines, and facing
+southeast. You go through a little pine wood, and, turning a corner,
+are to come suddenly upon this bit of captured morning glory. I want it
+to be blinding in its brightness after the dark, cool path through the
+wood.
+
+That is the idea. Depression seizes me when I reflect upon the probable
+difference between the idea and its realisation. I am ignorant, and the
+gardener is, I do believe, still more so; for he was forcing some
+tulips, and they have all shrivelled up and died, and he says he cannot
+imagine why. Besides, he is in love with the cook, and is going to
+marry her after Christmas, and refuses to enter into any of my plans
+with the enthusiasm they deserve, but sits with vacant eye dreamily
+chopping wood from morning till night to keep the beloved one’s kitchen
+fire well supplied. I cannot understand any one preferring cooks to
+marigolds; those future marigolds, shadowy as they are, and whose seeds
+are still sleeping at the seedsman’s, have shone through my winter days
+like golden lamps.
+
+I wish with all my heart I were a man, for of course the first thing I
+should do would be to buy a spade and go and garden, and then I should
+have the delight of doing everything for my flowers with my own hands
+and need not waste time explaining what I want done to somebody else.
+It is dull work giving orders and trying to describe the bright visions
+of one’s brain to a person who has no visions and no brain, and who
+thinks a yellow bed should be calceolarias edged with blue.
+
+I have taken care in choosing my yellow plants to put down only those
+humble ones that are easily pleased and grateful for little, for my
+soil is by no means all that it might be, and to most plants the
+climate is rather trying. I feel really grateful to any flower that is
+sturdy and willing enough to flourish here. Pansies seem to like the
+place and so do sweet-peas; pinks don’t, and after much coaxing gave
+hardly any flowers last summer. Nearly all the roses were a success, in
+spite of the sandy soil, except the tea-rose Adam, which was covered
+with buds ready to open, when they suddenly turned brown and died, and
+three standard Dr. Grills which stood in a row and simply sulked. I had
+been very excited about Dr. Grill, his description in the catalogues
+being specially fascinating, and no doubt I deserved the snubbing I
+got. “Never be excited, my dears, about _anything_,” shall be the
+advice I will give the three babies when the time comes to take them
+out to parties, “or, if you are, don’t show it. If by nature you are
+volcanoes, at least be only smouldering ones. Don’t look pleased, don’t
+look interested, don’t, above all things, look eager. Calm indifference
+should be written on every feature of your faces. Never show that you
+like any one person, or any one thing. Be cool, languid, and reserved.
+If you don’t do as your mother tells you and are just gushing, frisky,
+young idiots, snubs will be your portion. If you do as she tells you,
+you’ll marry princes and live happily ever after.”
+
+Dr. Grill must be a German rose. In this part of the world the more you
+are pleased to see a person the less is he pleased to see you; whereas,
+if you are disagreeable, he will grow pleasant visibly, his countenance
+expanding into wider amiability the more your own is stiff and sour.
+But I was not prepared for that sort of thing in a rose, and was
+disgusted with Dr. Grill. He had the best place in the garden—warm,
+sunny, and sheltered; his holes were prepared with the tenderest care;
+he was given the most dainty mixture of compost, clay, and manure; he
+was watered assiduously all through the drought when more willing
+flowers got nothing; and he refused to do anything but look black and
+shrivel. He did not die, but neither did he live—he just existed; and
+at the end of the summer not one of him had a scrap more shoot or leaf
+than when he was first put in in April. It would have been better if he
+had died straight away, for then I should have known what to do; as it
+is, there he is still occupying the best place, wrapped up carefully
+for the winter, excluding kinder roses, and probably intending to
+repeat the same conduct next year. Well, trials are the portion of
+mankind, and gardeners have their share, and in any case it is better
+to be tried by plants than persons, seeing that with plants you know
+that it is you who are in the wrong, and with persons it is always the
+other way about—and who is there among us who has not felt the pangs of
+injured innocence, and known them to be grievous?
+
+I have two visitors staying with me, though I have done nothing to
+provoke such an infliction, and had been looking forward to a happy
+little Christmas alone with the Man of Wrath and the babies. Fate
+decreed otherwise. Quite regularly, if I look forward to anything, Fate
+steps in and decrees otherwise; I don’t know why it should, but it
+does. I had not even invited these good ladies—like greatness on the
+modest, they were thrust upon me. One is Irais, the sweet singer of the
+summer, whom I love as she deserves, but of whom I certainly thought I
+had seen the last for at least a year, when she wrote and asked if I
+would have her over Christmas, as her husband was out of sorts, and she
+didn’t like him in that state. Neither do I like sick husbands, so,
+full of sympathy, I begged her to come, and here she is. And the other
+is Minora.
+
+Why I have to have Minora I don’t know, for I was not even aware of her
+existence a fortnight ago. Then coming down cheerfully one morning to
+breakfast—it was the very day after my return from England—I found a
+letter from an English friend, who up till then had been perfectly
+innocuous, asking me to befriend Minora. I read the letter aloud for
+the benefit of the Man of Wrath, who was eating _Spickgans_, a delicacy
+much sought after in these parts. “Do, my dear Elizabeth,” wrote my
+friend, “take some notice of the poor thing. She is studying art in
+Dresden, and has nowhere literally to go for Christmas. She is very
+ambitious and hardworking—”
+
+“Then,” interrupted the Man of Wrath, “she is not pretty. Only ugly
+girls work hard.”
+
+“—and she is really very clever—”
+
+“I do not like clever girls, they are so stupid,” again interrupted the
+Man of Wrath.
+
+“—and unless some kind creature like yourself takes pity on her she
+will be very lonely.”
+
+“Then let her be lonely.”
+
+“Her mother is my oldest friend, and would be greatly distressed to
+think that her daughter should be alone in a foreign town at such a
+season.”
+
+“I do not mind the distress of the mother.”
+
+“Oh, dear me,” I exclaimed impatiently, “I shall have to ask her to
+come!”
+
+“If you _should_ be inclined,” the letter went on, “to play the good
+Samaritan, dear Elizabeth, I am positive you would find Minora a
+bright, intelligent companion—”
+
+“Minora?” questioned the Man of Wrath.
+
+The April baby, who has had a nursery governess of an altogether
+alarmingly zealous type attached to her person for the last six weeks,
+looked up from her bread and milk.
+
+“It sounds like islands,” she remarked pensively.
+
+The governess coughed.
+
+“Majora, Minora, Alderney, and Sark,” explained her pupil.
+
+I looked at her severely.
+
+“If you are not careful, April,” I said, “you’ll be a genius when you
+grow up and disgrace your parents.”
+
+Miss Jones looked as though she did not like Germans. I am afraid she
+despises us because she thinks we are foreigners—an attitude of mind
+quite British and wholly to her credit; but we, on the other hand,
+regard _her_ as a foreigner, which, of course, makes things
+complicated.
+
+“Shall I really have to have this strange girl?” I asked, addressing
+nobody in particular and not expecting a reply.
+
+“You need not have her,” said the Man of Wrath composedly, “but you
+will. You will write to-day and cordially invite her, and when she has
+been here twenty-four hours you will quarrel with her. I know you, my
+dear.”
+
+“Quarrel! I? With a little art-student?”
+
+Miss Jones cast down her eyes. She is perpetually scenting a scene, and
+is always ready to bring whole batteries of discretion and tact and
+good taste to bear on us, and seems to know we are disputing in an
+unseemly manner when we would never dream it ourselves but for the
+warning of her downcast eyes. I would take my courage in both hands and
+ask her to go, for besides this superfluity of discreet behaviour she
+is, although only nursery, much too zealous, and inclined to be always
+teaching and never playing; but, unfortunately, the April baby adores
+her and is sure there never was any one so beautiful before. She comes
+every day with fresh accounts of the splendours of her wardrobe, and
+feeling descriptions of her umbrellas and hats; and Miss Jones looks
+offended and purses up her lips. In common with most governesses, she
+has a little dark down on her upper lip, and the April baby appeared
+one day at dinner with her own decorated in faithful imitation, having
+achieved it after much struggling, with the aid of a lead pencil and
+unbounded love. Miss Jones put her in the corner for impertinence. I
+wonder why governesses are so unpleasant. The Man of Wrath says it is
+because they are not married. Without venturing to differ entirely from
+the opinion of experience, I would add that the strain of continually
+having to set an example must surely be very great. It is much easier,
+and often more pleasant, to be a warning than an example, and
+governesses are but women, and women are sometimes foolish, and when
+you want to be foolish it must be annoying to have to be wise.
+
+Minora and Irais arrived yesterday together; or rather, when the
+carriage drove up, Irais got out of it alone, and informed me that
+there was a strange girl on a bicycle a little way behind. I sent back
+the carriage to pick her up, for it was dusk and the roads are
+terrible.
+
+“But why do you have strange girls here at all?” asked Irais rather
+peevishly, taking off her hat in the library before the fire, and
+otherwise making herself very much at home; “I don’t like them. I’m not
+sure that they’re not worse than husbands who are out of order. Who is
+she? She would bicycle from the station, and is, I am sure, the first
+woman who has done it. The little boys threw stones at her.”
+
+“Oh, my dear, that only shows the ignorance of the little boys. Never
+mind her. Let us have tea in peace before she comes.”
+
+“But we should be much happier without her,” she grumbled. “Weren’t we
+happy enough in the summer, Elizabeth—just you and I?”
+
+“Yes, indeed we were,” I answered heartily, putting my arms round her.
+The flame of my affection for Irais burns very brightly on the day of
+her arrival; besides, this time I have prudently provided against her
+sinning with the salt-cellars by ordering them to be handed round like
+vegetable dishes. We had finished tea and she had gone up to her room
+to dress before Minora and her bicycle were got here. I hurried out to
+meet her, feeling sorry for her, plunged into a circle of strangers at
+such a very personal season as Christmas. But she was not very shy;
+indeed, she was less shy than I was, and lingered in the hall, giving
+the servants directions to wipe the snow off the tyres of her machine
+before she lent an attentive ear to my welcoming remarks.
+
+“I couldn’t make your man understand me at the station,” she said at
+last, when her mind was at rest about her bicycle; “I asked him how far
+it was, and what the roads were like, and he only smiled. Is he German?
+But of course he is—how odd that he didn’t understand. You speak
+English very well,—very well indeed, do you know.” By this time we were
+in the library, and she stood on the hearth-rug warming her back while
+I poured her out some tea.
+
+“What a quaint room,” she remarked, looking round, “and the hall is so
+curious too. Very old, isn’t it? There’s a lot of copy here.”
+
+The Man of Wrath, who had been in the hall on her arrival and had come
+in with us, began to look about on the carpet. “Copy?” he inquired,
+“Where’s copy?”
+
+“Oh—material, you know, for a book. I’m just jotting down what strikes
+me in your country, and when I have time shall throw it into book
+form.” She spoke very loud, as English people always do to foreigners.
+
+“My dear,” I said breathlessly to Irais, when I had got into her room
+and shut the door and Minora was safely in hers, “what do you think—she
+writes books!”
+
+“What—the bicycling girl?”
+
+“Yes—Minora—imagine it!”
+
+We stood and looked at each other with awestruck faces.
+
+“How dreadful!” murmured Irais. “I never met a young girl who did that
+before.”
+
+“She says this place is full of copy.”
+
+“Full of what?”
+
+“That’s what you make books with.”
+
+“Oh, my dear, this is worse than I expected! A strange girl is always a
+bore among good friends, but one can generally manage her. But a girl
+who writes books—why, it isn’t respectable! And you can’t snub that
+sort of people; they’re unsnubbable.”
+
+“Oh, but we’ll try!” I cried, with such heartiness that we both
+laughed.
+
+The hall and the library struck Minora most; indeed, she lingered so
+long after dinner in the hall, which is cold, that the Man of Wrath put
+on his fur coat by way of a gentle hint. His hints are always gentle.
+
+She wanted to hear the whole story about the chapel and the nuns and
+Gustavus Adolphus, and pulling out a fat note-book began to take down
+what I said. I at once relapsed into silence.
+
+“Well?” she said.
+
+“That’s all.”
+
+“Oh, but you’ve only just begun.”
+
+“It doesn’t go any further. Won’t you come into the library?”
+
+In the library she again took up her stand before the fire and warmed
+herself, and we sat in a row and were cold. She has a wonderfully good
+profile, which is irritating. The wind, however, is tempered to the
+shorn lamb by her eyes being set too closely together.
+
+Irais lit a cigarette, and leaning back in her chair, contemplated her
+critically beneath her long eyelashes. “You are writing a book?” she
+asked presently.
+
+“Well—yes, I suppose I may say that I am. Just my impressions, you
+know, of your country. Anything that strikes me as curious or amusing—I
+jot it down, and when I have time shall work it up into something, I
+daresay.”
+
+“Are you not studying painting?”
+
+“Yes, but I can’t study that for ever. We have an English proverb:
+‘Life is short and Art is long’—too long, I sometimes think—and writing
+is a great relaxation when I am tired.”
+
+“What shall you call it?”
+
+“Oh, I thought of calling it _Journeyings in Germany_. It sounds well,
+and would be correct. Or _Jottings from German Journeyings_,—I haven’t
+quite decided yet which.”
+
+“By the author of _Prowls in Pomerania_, you might add,” suggested
+Irais.
+
+“And _Drivel from Dresden_,” said I.
+
+“And _Bosh from Berlin_,” added Irais.
+
+Minora stared. “I don’t think those two last ones would do,” she said,
+“because it is not to be a facetious book. But your first one is rather
+a good title,” she added, looking at Irais and drawing out her
+note-book. “I think I’ll just jot that down.”
+
+“If you jot down all we say and then publish it, will it still be your
+book?” asked Irais.
+
+But Minora was so busy scribbling that she did not hear.
+
+“And have _you_ no suggestions to make, Sage?” asked Irais, turning to
+the Man of Wrath, who was blowing out clouds of smoke in silence.
+
+“Oh, do you call him Sage?” cried Minora; “and always in English?”
+
+Irais and I looked at each other. We knew what we did call him, and
+were afraid Minora would in time ferret it out and enter it in her
+note-book. The Man of Wrath looked none too well pleased to be alluded
+to under his very nose by our new guest as “him.”
+
+“Husbands are always sages,” said I gravely.
+
+“Though sages are not always husbands,” said Irais with equal gravity.
+“Sages and husbands—sage and husbands—” she went on musingly, “what
+does that remind you of, Miss Minora?”
+
+“Oh, I know,—how stupid of me!” cried Minora eagerly, her pencil in
+mid-air and her brain clutching at the elusive recollection, “sage
+and,—why,—yes,—no,—yes, of course—oh,” disappointedly, “but that’s
+vulgar—I can’t put it in.”
+
+“What is vulgar?” I asked.
+
+“She thinks sage and onions is vulgar,” said Irais languidly; “but it
+isn’t, it is very good.” She got up and walked to the piano, and,
+sitting down, began, after a little wandering over the keys, to sing.
+
+“Do you play?” I asked Minora.
+
+“Yes, but I am afraid I am rather out of practice.”
+
+I said no more. I know what _that_ sort of playing is.
+
+When we were lighting our bedroom candles Minora began suddenly to
+speak in an unknown tongue. We stared. “What is the matter with her?”
+murmured Irais.
+
+“I thought, perhaps,” said Minora in English, “you might prefer to talk
+German, and as it is all the same to me what I talk—”
+
+“Oh, pray don’t trouble,” said Irais. “We like airing our English—don’t
+we, Elizabeth?”
+
+“I don’t want my German to get rusty though,” said Minora; “I shouldn’t
+like to forget it.”
+
+“Oh, but isn’t there an English song,” said Irais, twisting round her
+neck as she preceded us upstairs, “‘’Tis folly to remember, ’tis wisdom
+to forget’?”
+
+“You are not nervous sleeping alone, I hope,” I said hastily.
+
+“What room is she in?” asked Irais.
+
+“No. 12.”
+
+“Oh!—do you believe in ghosts?”
+
+Minora turned pale.
+
+“What nonsense,” said I; “we have no ghosts here. Good-night. If you
+want anything, mind you ring.”
+
+“And if you see anything curious in that room,” called Irais from her
+bedroom door, “mind you jot it down.”
+
+
+
+
+_December_ 27_th_—It is the fashion, I believe, to regard Christmas as
+a bore of rather a gross description, and as a time when you are
+invited to over-eat yourself, and pretend to be merry without just
+cause. As a matter of fact, it is one of the prettiest and most poetic
+institutions possible, if observed in the proper manner, and after
+having been more or less unpleasant to everybody for a whole year, it
+is a blessing to be forced on that one day to be amiable, and it is
+certainly delightful to be able to give presents without being haunted
+by the conviction that you are spoiling the recipient, and will suffer
+for it afterward. Servants are only big children, and are made just as
+happy as children by little presents and nice things to eat, and, for
+days beforehand, every time the three babies go into the garden they
+expect to meet the Christ Child with His arms full of gifts. They
+firmly believe that it is thus their presents are brought, and it is
+such a charming idea that Christmas would be worth celebrating for its
+sake alone.
+
+As great secrecy is observed, the preparations devolve entirely on me,
+and it is not very easy work, with so many people in our own house and
+on each of the farms, and all the children, big and little, expecting
+their share of happiness. The library is uninhabitable for several days
+before and after, as it is there that we have the trees and presents.
+All down one side are the trees, and the other three sides are lined
+with tables, a separate one for each person in the house. When the
+trees are lighted, and stand in their radiance shining down on the
+happy faces, I forget all the trouble it has been, and the number of
+times I have had to run up and down stairs, and the various aches in
+head and feet, and enjoy myself as much as anybody. First the June baby
+is ushered in, then the others and ourselves according to age, then the
+servants, then come the head inspector and his family, the other
+inspectors from the different farms, the mamsells, the bookkeepers and
+secretaries, and then all the children, troops and troops of them—the
+big ones leading the little ones by the hand and carrying the babies in
+their arms, and the mothers peeping round the door. As many as can get
+in stand in front of the trees, and sing two or three carols; then they
+are given their presents, and go off triumphantly, making room for the
+next batch. My three babies sang lustily too, whether they happened to
+know what was being sung or not. They had on white dresses in honour of
+the occasion, and the June baby was even arrayed in a low-necked and
+short-sleeved garment, after the manner of Teutonic infants, whatever
+the state of the thermometer. Her arms are like miniature
+prize-fighter’s arms—I never saw such things; they are the pride and
+joy of her little nurse, who had tied them up with blue ribbons, and
+kept on kissing them. I shall certainly not be able to take her to
+balls when she grows up, if she goes on having arms like that.
+
+When they came to say good-night, they were all very pale and subdued.
+The April baby had an exhausted-looking Japanese doll with her, which
+she said she was taking to bed, not because she liked him, but because
+she was so sorry for him, he seemed so very tired. They kissed me
+absently, and went away, only the April baby glancing at the trees as
+she passed and making them a curtesy.
+
+“Good-bye, trees,” I heard her say; and then she made the Japanese doll
+bow to them, which he did, in a very languid and blasé fashion.
+“_You’ll_ never see such trees again,” she told him, giving him a
+vindictive shake, “for you’ll be brokened _long_ before next time.”
+
+She went out, but came back as though she had forgotten something.
+
+“Thank the _Christkind_ so _much_, Mummy, won’t you, for all the lovely
+things He brought us. I suppose you’re writing to Him now, isn’t you?”
+
+I cannot see that there was anything gross about our Christmas, and we
+were perfectly merry without any need to pretend, and for at least two
+days it brought us a little nearer together, and made us kind.
+Happiness is so wholesome; it invigorates and warms me into piety far
+more effectually than any amount of trials and griefs, and an
+unexpected pleasure is the surest means of bringing me to my knees. In
+spite of the protestations of some peculiarly constructed persons that
+they are the better for trials, I don’t believe it. Such things must
+sour us, just as happiness must sweeten us, and make us kinder, and
+more gentle. And will anybody affirm that it behoves us to be more
+thankful for trials than for blessings? We were meant to be happy, and
+to accept all the happiness offered with thankfulness—indeed, we are
+none of us ever thankful enough, and yet we each get so much, so very
+much, more than we deserve. I know a woman—she stayed with me last
+summer—who rejoices grimly when those she loves suffer. She believes
+that it is our lot, and that it braces us and does us good, and she
+would shield no one from even unnecessary pain; she weeps with the
+sufferer, but is convinced it is all for the best. Well, let her
+continue in her dreary beliefs; she has no garden to teach her the
+beauty and the happiness of holiness, nor does she in the least desire
+to possess one; her convictions have the sad gray colouring of the
+dingy streets and houses she lives amongst—the sad colour of humanity
+in masses. Submission to what people call their “lot” is simply
+ignoble. If your lot makes you cry and be wretched, get rid of it and
+take another; strike out for yourself; don’t listen to the shrieks of
+your relations, to their gibes or their entreaties; don’t let your own
+microscopic set prescribe your goings-out and comings-in; don’t be
+afraid of public opinion in the shape of the neighbour in the next
+house, when all the world is before you new and shining, and everything
+is possible, if you will only be energetic and independent and seize
+opportunity by the scruff of the neck.
+
+“To hear you talk,” said Irais, “no one would ever imagine that you
+dream away your days in a garden with a book, and that you never in
+your life seized anything by the scruff of its neck. And what is
+scruff? I hope I have not got any on me.” And she craned her neck
+before the glass.
+
+She and Minora were going to help me decorate the trees, but very soon
+Irais wandered off to the piano, and Minora was tired and took up a
+book; so I called in Miss Jones and the babies—it was Miss Jones’s last
+public appearance, as I shall relate—and after working for the best
+part of two days they were finished, and looked like lovely ladies in
+widespreading, sparkling petticoats, holding up their skirts with
+glittering fingers. Minora wrote a long description of them for a
+chapter of her book which is headed _Noel_,—I saw that much, because
+she left it open on the table while she went to talk to Miss Jones.
+They were fast friends from the very first, and though it is said to be
+natural to take to one’s own countrymen, I am unable altogether to
+sympathise with such a reason for sudden affection.
+
+“I wonder what they talk about?” I said to Irais yesterday, when there
+was no getting Minora to come to tea, so deeply was she engaged in
+conversation with Miss Jones.
+
+“Oh, my dear, how can I tell? Lovers, I suppose, or else they think
+they are clever, and then they talk rubbish.”
+
+“Well, of course, Minora thinks she is clever.”
+
+“I suppose she does. What does it matter what she thinks? Why does your
+governess look so gloomy? When I see her at luncheon I always imagine
+she must have just heard that somebody is dead. But she can’t hear that
+every day. What is the matter with her?”
+
+“I don’t think she feels quite as proper as she looks,” I said
+doubtfully; I was for ever trying to account for Miss Jones’s
+expression.
+
+“But that must be rather nice,” said Irais. “It would be awful for her
+if she felt exactly the same as she looks.”
+
+At that moment the door leading into the schoolroom opened softly, and
+the April baby, tired of playing, came in and sat down at my feet,
+leaving the door open; and this is what we heard Miss Jones saying—
+
+“Parents are seldom wise, and the strain the conscientious place upon
+themselves to appear so before their children and governess must be
+terrible. Nor are clergymen more pious than other men, yet they have
+continually to pose before their flock as such. As for governesses,
+Miss Minora, I know what I am saying when I affirm that there is
+nothing more intolerable than to have to be polite, and even humble, to
+persons whose weaknesses and follies are glaringly apparent in every
+word they utter, and to be forced by the presence of children and
+employers to a dignity of manner in no way corresponding to one’s
+feelings. The grave father of a family, who was probably one of the
+least respectable of bachelors, is an interesting study at his own
+table, where he is constrained to assume airs of infallibility merely
+because his children are looking at him. The fact of his being a parent
+does not endow him with any supreme and sudden virtue; and I can assure
+you that among the eyes fixed upon him, not the least critical and
+amused are those of the humble person who fills the post of governess.”
+
+“Oh, Miss Jones, how lovely!” we heard Minora say in accents of
+rapture, while we sat transfixed with horror at these sentiments. “Do
+you mind if I put that down in my book? You say it all so beautifully.”
+
+“Without a few hours of relaxation,” continued Miss Jones, “of private
+indemnification for the toilsome virtues displayed in public, who could
+wade through days of correct behaviour? There would be no reaction, no
+room for better impulses, no place for repentance. Parents, priests,
+and governesses would be in the situation of a stout lady who never has
+a quiet moment in which she can take off her corsets.”
+
+“My dear, what a firebrand!” whispered Irais. I got up and went in.
+They were sitting on the sofa, Minora with clasped hands, gazing
+admiringly into Miss Jones’s face, which wore a very different
+expression from the one of sour and unwilling propriety I have been
+used to seeing.
+
+“May I ask you to come to tea?” I said to Minora. “And I should like to
+have the children a little while.”
+
+She got up very reluctantly, but I waited with the door open until she
+had gone in and the two babies had followed. They had been playing at
+stuffing each other’s ears with pieces of newspaper while Miss Jones
+provided Minora with noble thoughts for her work, and had to be
+tortured afterward with tweezers. I said nothing to Minora, but kept
+her with us till dinner-time, and this morning we went for a long
+sleigh-drive. When we came in to lunch there was no Miss Jones.
+
+“Is Miss Jones ill?” asked Minora.
+
+“She is gone,” I said.
+
+“Gone?”
+
+“Did you never hear of such things as sick mothers?” asked Irais
+blandly; and we talked resolutely of something else.
+
+All the afternoon Minora has moped. She had found a kindred spirit, and
+it has been ruthlessly torn from her arms as kindred spirits so often
+are. It is enough to make her mope, and it is not her fault, poor
+thing, that she should have preferred the society of a Miss Jones to
+that of Irais and myself.
+
+At dinner Irais surveyed her with her head on one side. “You look so
+pale,” she said; “are you not well?”
+
+Minora raised her eyes heavily, with the patient air of one who likes
+to be thought a sufferer. “I have a slight headache,” she replied
+gently.
+
+“I hope you are not going to be ill,” said Irais with great concern,
+“because there is only a cow-doctor to be had here, and though he means
+well, I believe he is rather rough.” Minora was plainly startled. “But
+what do you do if you are ill?” she asked.
+
+“Oh, we are never ill,” said I; “the very knowledge that there would be
+no one to cure us seems to keep us healthy.”
+
+“And if any one takes to her bed,” said Irais, “Elizabeth always calls
+in the cow-doctor.”
+
+Minora was silent. She feels, I am sure, that she has got into a part
+of the world peopled solely by barbarians, and that the only civilised
+creature besides herself has departed and left her at our mercy.
+Whatever her reflections may be her symptoms are visibly abating.
+
+
+
+
+_January_ 1_st_.—The service on New Year’s Eve is the only one in the
+whole year that in the least impresses me in our little church, and
+then the very bareness and ugliness of the place and the ceremonial
+produce an effect that a snug service in a well-lit church never would.
+Last night we took Irais and Minora, and drove the three lonely miles
+in a sleigh. It was pitch-dark, and blowing great guns. We sat wrapped
+up to our eyes in furs, and as mute as a funeral procession.
+
+“We are going to the burial of our last year’s sins,” said Irais, as we
+started; and there certainly was a funereal sort of feeling in the air.
+Up in our gallery pew we tried to decipher our chorales by the light of
+the spluttering tallow candles stuck in holes in the woodwork, the
+flames wildly blown about by the draughts. The wind banged against the
+windows in great gusts, screaming louder than the organ, and
+threatening to blow out the agitated lights together. The parson in his
+gloomy pulpit, surrounded by a framework of dusty carved angels, took
+on an awful appearance of menacing Authority as he raised his voice to
+make himself heard above the clatter. Sitting there in the dark, I felt
+very small, and solitary, and defenceless, alone in a great, big, black
+world. The church was as cold as a tomb; some of the candles guttered
+and went out; the parson in his black robe spoke of death and judgment;
+I thought I heard a child’s voice screaming, and could hardly believe
+it was only the wind, and felt uneasy and full of forebodings; all my
+faith and philosophy deserted me, and I had a horrid feeling that I
+should probably be well punished, though for what I had no precise
+idea. If it had not been so dark, and if the wind had not howled so
+despairingly, I should have paid little attention to the threats
+issuing from the pulpit; but, as it was, I fell to making good
+resolutions. This is always a bad sign,—only those who break them make
+them; and if you simply do as a matter of course that which is right as
+it comes, any preparatory resolving to do so becomes completely
+superfluous. I have for some years past left off making them on New
+Year’s Eve, and only the gale happening as it did reduced me to doing
+so last night; for I have long since discovered that, though the year
+and the resolutions may be new, I myself am not, and it is worse than
+useless putting new wine into old bottles.
+
+“But I am not an old bottle,” said Irais indignantly, when I held forth
+to her to the above effect a few hours later in the library, restored
+to all my philosophy by the warmth and light, “and I find my
+resolutions carry me very nicely into the spring. I revise them at the
+end of each month, and strike out the unnecessary ones. By the end of
+April they have been so severely revised that there are none left.”
+
+“There, you see I am right; if you were not an old bottle your new
+contents would gradually arrange themselves amiably as a part of you,
+and the practice of your resolutions would lose its bitterness by
+becoming a habit.”
+
+She shook her head. “Such things never lose their bitterness,” she
+said, “and that is why I don’t let them cling to me right into the
+summer. When May comes, I give myself up to jollity with all the rest
+of the world, and am too busy being happy to bother about anything I
+may have resolved when the days were cold and dark.”
+
+“And that is just why I love you,” I thought. She often says what I
+feel.
+
+“I wonder,” she went on after a pause, “whether men ever make
+resolutions?”
+
+“I don’t think they do. Only women indulge in such luxuries. It is a
+nice sort of feeling, when you have nothing else to do, giving way to
+endless grief and penitence, and steeping yourself to the eyes in
+contrition; but it is silly. Why cry over things that are done? Why do
+naughty things at all, if you are going to repent afterward? Nobody is
+naughty unless they like being naughty; and nobody ever really repents
+unless they are afraid they are going to be found out.”
+
+“By ‘nobody’ of course you mean women,” said Irais.
+
+“Naturally; the terms are synonymous. Besides, men generally have the
+courage of their opinions.”
+
+“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais in the amiably
+polite tone she assumes whenever she speaks to that young person.
+
+It was getting on towards midnight, and we were sitting round the fire,
+waiting for the New Year, and sipping _Glühwein_, prepared at a small
+table by the Man of Wrath. It was hot, and sweet, and rather nasty, but
+it is proper to drink it on this one night, so of course we did.
+
+Minora does not like either Irais or myself. We very soon discovered
+that, and laugh about it when we are alone together. I can understand
+her disliking Irais, but she must be a perverse creature not to like
+me. Irais has poked fun at her, and I have been, I hope, very kind; yet
+we are bracketed together in her black books. It is also apparent that
+she looks upon the Man of Wrath as an interesting example of an
+ill-used and misunderstood husband, and she is disposed to take him
+under her wing, and defend him on all occasions against us. He never
+speaks to her; he is at all times a man of few words, but, as far as
+Minora is concerned, he might have no tongue at all, and sits
+sphinx-like and impenetrable while she takes us to task about some
+remark of a profane nature that we may have addressed to him. One
+night, some days after her arrival, she developed a skittishness of
+manner which has since disappeared, and tried to be playful with him;
+but you might as well try to be playful with a graven image. The wife
+of one of the servants had just produced a boy, the first after a
+series of five daughters, and at dinner we drank the health of all
+parties concerned, the Man of Wrath making the happy father drink a
+glass off at one gulp, his heels well together in military fashion.
+Minora thought the incident typical of German manners, and not only
+made notes about it, but joined heartily in the health-drinking, and
+afterward grew skittish.
+
+She proposed, first of all, to teach us a dance called, I think, the
+Washington Post, and which was, she said, much danced in England; and,
+to induce us to learn, she played the tune to us on the piano. We
+remained untouched by its beauties, each buried in an easy-chair
+toasting our toes at the fire. Amongst those toes were those of the Man
+of Wrath, who sat peaceably reading a book and smoking. Minora
+volunteered to show us the steps, and as we still did not move, danced
+solitary behind our chairs. Irais did not even turn her head to look,
+and I was the only one amiable or polite enough to do so. Do I deserve
+to be placed in Minora’s list of disagreeable people side by side with
+Irais? Certainly not. Yet I most surely am.
+
+“It wants the music, of course,” observed Minora breathlessly, darting
+in and out between the chairs, apparently addressing me, but glancing
+at the Man of Wrath.
+
+No answer from anybody.
+
+“It is _such_ a pretty dance,” she panted again, after a few more
+gyrations.
+
+No answer.
+
+“And is all the rage at home.”
+
+No answer.
+
+“Do let me teach you. Won’t _you_ try, Herr Sage?”
+
+She went up to him and dropped him a little curtesy. It is thus she
+always addresses him, entirely oblivious to the fact, so patent to
+every one else, that he resents it.
+
+“Oh come, put away that tiresome old book,” she went on gaily, as he
+did not move; “I am certain it is only some dry agricultural work that
+you just nod over. Dancing is much better for you.” Irais and I looked
+at one another quite frightened. I am sure we both turned pale when the
+unhappy girl actually laid hold forcibly of his book, and, with a
+playful little shriek, ran away with it into the next room, hugging it
+to her bosom and looking back roguishly over her shoulder at him as she
+ran. There was an awful pause. We hardly dared raise our eyes. Then the
+Man of Wrath got up slowly, knocked the ashes off the end of his
+cigar, looked at his watch, and went out at the opposite door into his
+own rooms, where he stayed for the rest of the evening. She has never,
+I must say, been skittish since.
+
+“I hope you are listening, Miss Minora,” said Irais, “because this sort
+of conversation is likely to do you good.”
+
+“I always listen when people talk sensibly,” replied Minora, stirring
+her grog.
+
+Irais glanced at her with slightly doubtful eyebrows. “Do you agree
+with our hostess’s description of women?” she asked after a pause.
+
+“As nobodies? No, of course I do not.”
+
+“Yet she is right. In the eye of the law we are literally nobodies in
+our country. Did you know that women are forbidden to go to political
+meetings here?”
+
+“Really?” Out came the note-book.
+
+“The law expressly forbids the attendance at such meetings of women,
+children, and idiots.”
+
+“Children and idiots—I understand that,” said Minora; “but women—and
+classed with children and idiots?”
+
+“Classed with children and idiots,” repeated Irais, gravely nodding her
+head. “Did you know that the law forbids females of any age to ride on
+the top of omnibuses or tramcars?”
+
+“Not really?”
+
+“Do you know why?”
+
+“I can’t imagine.”
+
+“Because in going up and down the stairs those inside might perhaps
+catch a glimpse of the stocking covering their ankles.”
+
+“But what—”
+
+“Did you know that the morals of the German public are in such a shaky
+condition that a glimpse of that sort would be fatal to them?”
+
+“But I don’t see how a stocking—”
+
+“With stripes round it,” said Irais.
+
+“And darns in it,” I added.
+
+“—could possibly be pernicious?”
+
+“‘The Pernicious Stocking; or, Thoughts on the Ethics of Petticoats,’”
+said Irais. “Put that down as the name of your next book on Germany.”
+
+“I never know,” complained Minora, letting her note-book fall, “whether
+you are in earnest or not.”
+
+“Don’t you?” said Irais sweetly.
+
+“Is it true,” appealed Minora to the Man of Wrath, busy with his lemons
+in the background, “that your law classes women with children and
+idiots?”
+
+“Certainly,” he answered promptly, “and a very proper classification,
+too.”
+
+We all looked blank. “That’s rude,” said I at last.
+
+“Truth is always rude, my dear,” he replied complacently. Then he
+added, “If I were commissioned to draw up a new legal code, and had
+previously enjoyed the privilege, as I have been doing lately, of
+listening to the conversation of you three young ladies, I should make
+precisely the same classification.”
+
+Even Minora was incensed at this.
+
+“You are telling us in the most unvarnished manner that we are idiots,”
+said Irais.
+
+“Idiots? No, no, by no means. But children,—nice little agreeable
+children. I very much like to hear you talk together. It is all so
+young and fresh what you think and what you believe, and not of the
+least consequence to any one.”
+
+“Not of the least consequence?” cried Minora. “What we believe is of
+very great consequence indeed to us.”
+
+“Are you jeering at our beliefs?” inquired Irais sternly.
+
+“Not for worlds. I would not on any account disturb or change your
+pretty little beliefs. It is your chief charm that you always believe
+every-thing. How desperate would our case be if young ladies only
+believed facts, and never accepted another person’s assurance, but
+preferred the evidence of their own eyes! They would have no illusions,
+and a woman without illusions is the dreariest and most difficult thing
+to manage possible.”
+
+“Thing?” protested Irais.
+
+The Man of Wrath, usually so silent, makes up for it from time to time
+by holding forth at unnecessary length. He took up his stand now with
+his back to the fire, and a glass of _Glühwein_ in his hand. Minora had
+hardly heard his voice before, so quiet had he been since she came, and
+sat with her pencil raised, ready to fix for ever the wisdom that
+should flow from his lips.
+
+“What would become of poetry if women became so sensible that they
+turned a deaf ear to the poetic platitudes of love? That love does
+indulge in platitudes I suppose you will admit.” He looked at Irais.
+
+“Yes, they all say exactly the same thing,” she acknowledged.
+
+“Who could murmur pretty speeches on the beauty of a common sacrifice,
+if the listener’s want of imagination was such as to enable her only to
+distinguish one victim in the picture, and that one herself?”
+
+Minora took that down word for word,—much good may it do her.
+
+“Who would be brave enough to affirm that if refused he will die, if
+his assurances merely elicit a recommendation to diet himself, and take
+plenty of outdoor exercise? Women are responsible for such lies,
+because they believe them. Their amazing vanity makes them swallow
+flattery so gross that it is an insult, and men will always be ready to
+tell the precise number of lies that a woman is ready to listen to. Who
+indulges more recklessly in glowing exaggerations than the lover who
+hopes, and has not yet obtained? He will, like the nightingale, sing
+with unceasing modulations, display all his talent, untiringly repeat
+his sweetest notes, until he has what he wants, when his song, like the
+nightingale’s, immediately ceases, never again to be heard.”
+
+“Take that down,” murmured Irais aside to Minora—unnecessary advice,
+for her pencil was scribbling as fast as it could.
+
+“A woman’s vanity is so immeasurable that, after having had ninety-nine
+object-lessons in the difference between promise and performance and
+the emptiness of pretty speeches, the beginning of the hundredth will
+find her lending the same willing and enchanted ear to the eloquence of
+flattery as she did on the occasion of the first. What can the
+exhortations of the strong-minded sister, who has never had these
+experiences, do for such a woman? It is useless to tell her she is
+man’s victim, that she is his plaything, that she is cheated,
+down-trodden, kept under, laughed at, shabbily treated in every
+way—that is not a true statement of the case. She is simply the victim
+of her own vanity, and against that, against the belief in her own
+fascinations, against the very part of herself that gives all the
+colour to her life, who shall expect a woman to take up arms?”
+
+“Are you so vain, Elizabeth?” inquired Irais with a shocked face, “and
+had you lent a willing ear to the blandishments of ninety-nine before
+you reached your final destiny?”
+
+“I am one of the sensible ones, I suppose,” I replied, “for nobody ever
+wanted me to listen to blandishments.”
+
+Minora sighed.
+
+“I like to hear you talk together about the position of women,” he went
+on, “and wonder when you will realise that they hold exactly the
+position they are fitted for. As soon as they are fit to occupy a
+better, no power on earth will be able to keep them out of it.
+Meanwhile, let me warn you that, as things now are, only strong-minded
+women wish to see you the equals of men, and the strong-minded are
+invariably plain. The pretty ones would rather see men their slaves
+than their equals.”
+
+“You know,” said Irais, frowning, “that I consider myself
+strong-minded.”
+
+“And never rise till lunch-time?”
+
+Irais blushed. Although I don’t approve of such conduct, it is very
+convenient in more ways than one; I get through my housekeeping
+undisturbed, and whenever she is disposed to lecture me, I begin about
+this habit of hers. Her conscience must be terribly stricken on the
+point, for she is by no means as a rule given to meekness.
+
+“A woman without vanity would be unattackable,” resumed the Man of
+Wrath. “When a girl enters that downward path that leads to ruin, she
+is led solely by her own vanity; for in these days of policemen no
+young woman can be forced against her will from the path of virtue, and
+the cries of the injured are never heard until the destroyer begins to
+express his penitence for having destroyed. If his passion could remain
+at white-heat and he could continue to feed her ear with the
+protestations she loves, no principles of piety or virtue would disturb
+the happiness of his companion; for a mournful experience teaches that
+piety begins only where passion ends, and that principles are strongest
+where temptations are most rare.”
+
+“But what has all this to do with us?” I inquired severely.
+
+“You were displeased at our law classing you as it does, and I merely
+wish to justify it,” he answered. “Creatures who habitually say _yes_
+to everything a man proposes, when no one can oblige them to say it,
+and when it is so often fatal, are plainly not responsible beings.”
+
+“I shall never say it to you again, my dear man,” I said.
+
+“And not only _that_ fatal weakness,” he continued, “but what is there,
+candidly, to distinguish you from children? You are older, but not
+wiser,—really not so wise, for with years you lose the common sense you
+had as children. Have you ever heard a group of women talking
+reasonably together?”
+
+“Yes—we do!” Irais and I cried in a breath.
+
+“It has interested me,” went on the Man of Wrath, “in my idle moments,
+to listen to their talk. It amused me to hear the malicious little
+stories they told of their best friends who were absent, to note the
+spiteful little digs they gave their best friends who were present, to
+watch the utter incredulity with which they listened to the tale of
+some other woman’s conquests, the radiant good faith they displayed in
+connection with their own, the instant collapse into boredom, if some
+topic of so-called general interest, by some extraordinary chance, were
+introduced.”
+
+“You must have belonged to a particularly nice set,” remarked Irais.
+
+“And as for politics,” he said, “I have never heard them mentioned
+among women.”
+
+“Children and idiots are not interested in such things,” I said.
+
+“And we are much too frightened of being put in prison,” said Irais.
+
+“In prison?” echoed Minora.
+
+“Don’t you know,” said Irais, turning to her “that if you talk about
+such things here you run a great risk of being imprisoned?”
+
+“But why?”
+
+“But why? Because, though you yourself may have meant nothing but what
+was innocent, your words may have suggested something less innocent to
+the evil minds of your hearers; and then the law steps in, and calls it
+_dolus eventualis_, and everybody says how dreadful, and off you go to
+prison and are punished as you deserve to be.”
+
+Minora looked mystified.
+
+“That is not, however, your real reason for not discussing them,” said
+the Man of Wrath; “they simply do not interest you. Or it may be, that
+you do not consider your female friends’ opinions worth listening to,
+for you certainly display an astonishing thirst for information when
+male politicians are present. I have seen a pretty young woman, hardly
+in her twenties, sitting a whole evening drinking in the doubtful
+wisdom of an elderly political star, with every appearance of eager
+interest. He was a bimetallic star, and was giving her whole
+pamphletsful of information.”
+
+“She wanted to make up to him for some reason,” said Irais, “and got
+him to explain his hobby to her, and he was silly enough to be taken
+in. Now which was the sillier in that case?”
+
+She threw herself back in her chair and looked up defiantly, beating
+her foot impatiently on the carpet.
+
+“She wanted to be thought clever,” said the Man of Wrath. “What puzzled
+me,” he went on musingly, “was that she went away apparently as serene
+and happy as when she came. The explanation of the principles of
+bimetallism produce, as a rule, a contrary effect.”
+
+“Why, she hadn’t been listening,” cried Irais, “and your simple star
+had been making a fine goose of himself the whole evening.
+
+“Prattle, prattle, simple star,
+Bimetallic, _wunderbar_.
+Though you’re given to describe
+Woman as a _dummes Weib_.
+You yourself are sillier far,
+Prattling, bimetallic star!”
+
+“No doubt she had understood very little,” said the Man of Wrath,
+taking no notice of this effusion.
+
+“And no doubt the gentleman hadn’t understood much either.” Irais was
+plainly irritated.
+
+“Your opinion of woman,” said Minora in a very small voice, “is not a
+high one. But, in the sick chamber, I suppose you agree that no one
+could take her place?”
+
+“If you are thinking of hospital-nurses,” I said, “I must tell you that
+I believe he married chiefly that he might have a wife instead of a
+strange woman to nurse him when he is sick.”
+
+“But,” said Minora, bewildered at the way her illusions were being
+knocked about, “the sick-room is surely the very place of all others in
+which a woman’s gentleness and tact are most valuable.”
+
+“Gentleness and tact?” repeated the Man of Wrath. “I have never met
+those qualities in the professional nurse. According to my experience,
+she is a disagreeable person who finds in private nursing exquisite
+opportunities for asserting her superiority over ordinary and prostrate
+mankind. I know of no more humiliating position for a man than to be in
+bed having his feverish brow soothed by a sprucely-dressed strange
+woman, bristling with starch and spotlessness. He would give half his
+income for his clothes, and probably the other half if she would leave
+him alone, and go away altogether. He feels her superiority through
+every pore; he never before realised how absolutely inferior he is; he
+is abjectly polite, and contemptibly conciliatory; if a friend comes to
+see him, he eagerly praises her in case she should be listening behind
+the screen; he cannot call his soul his own, and, what is far more
+intolerable, neither is he sure that his body really belongs to him; he
+has read of ministering angels and the light touch of a woman’s hand,
+but the day on which he can ring for his servant and put on his socks
+in private fills him with the same sort of wildness of joy that he felt
+as a homesick schoolboy at the end of his first term.”
+
+Minora was silent. Irais’s foot was livelier than ever. The Man of
+Wrath stood smiling blandly down upon us. You can’t argue with a person
+so utterly convinced of his infallibility that he won’t even get angry
+with you; so we sat round and said nothing.
+
+“If,” he went on, addressing Irais, who looked rebellious, “you doubt
+the truth of my remarks, and still cling to the old poetic notion of
+noble, self-sacrificing women tenderly helping the patient over the
+rough places on the road to death or recovery, let me beg you to try
+for yourself, next time any one in your house is ill, whether the
+actual fact in any way corresponds to the picturesque belief. The angel
+who is to alleviate our sufferings comes in such a questionable shape,
+that to the unimaginative she appears merely as an extremely
+self-confident young woman, wisely concerned first of all in securing
+her personal comfort, much given to complaints about her food and to
+helplessness where she should be helpful, possessing an extraordinary
+capacity for fancying herself slighted, or not regarded as the superior
+being she knows herself to be, morbidly anxious lest the servants
+should, by some mistake, treat her with offensive cordiality, pettish
+if the patient gives more trouble than she had expected, intensely
+injured and disagreeable if he is made so courageous by his
+wretchedness as to wake her during the night—an act of desperation of
+which I was guilty once, and once only. Oh, these good women! What sane
+man wants to have to do with angels? And especially do we object to
+having them about us when we are sick and sorry, when we feel in every
+fibre what poor things we are, and when all our fortitude is needed to
+enable us to bear our temporary inferiority patiently, without being
+forced besides to assume an attitude of eager and grovelling politeness
+towards the angel in the house.”
+
+There was a pause.
+
+“I didn’t know you could talk so much, Sage,” said Irais at length.
+
+“What would you have women do, then?” asked Minora meekly. Irais began
+to beat her foot up and down again,—what did it matter what Men of
+Wrath would have us do? “There are not,” continued Minora, blushing,
+“husbands enough for every one, and the rest must do something.”
+
+“Certainly,” replied the oracle. “Study the art of pleasing by dress
+and manner as long as you are of an age to interest us, and above all,
+let all women, pretty and plain, married and single, study the art of
+cookery. If you are an artist in the kitchen you will always be
+esteemed.”
+
+I sat very still. Every German woman, even the wayward Irais, has
+learned to cook; I seem to have been the only one who was naughty and
+wouldn’t.
+
+“Only be careful,” he went on, “in studying both arts, never to forget
+the great truth that dinner precedes blandishments and not
+blandishments dinner. A man must be made comfortable before he will
+make love to you; and though it is true that if you offered him a
+choice between _Spickgans_ and kisses, he would say he would take both,
+yet he would invariably begin with the _Spickgans_, and allow the
+kisses to wait.”
+
+At this I got up, and Irais followed my example. “Your cynicism is
+disgusting,” I said icily.
+
+“You two are always exceptions to anything I may say,” he said, smiling
+amiably.
+
+He stooped and kissed Irais’s hand. She is inordinately vain of her
+hands, and says her husband married her for their sake, which I can
+quite believe. I am glad they are on her and not on Minora, for if
+Minora had had them I should have been annoyed. Minora’s are bony, with
+chilly-looking knuckles, ignored nails, and too much wrist. I feel very
+well disposed towards her when my eye falls on them. She put one
+forward now, evidently thinking it would be kissed too.
+
+“Did you know,” said Irais, seeing the movement, “that it is the custom
+here to kiss women’s hands?”
+
+“But only married women’s,” I added, not desiring her to feel out of
+it, “never young girls’.”
+
+She drew it in again. “It is a pretty custom,” she said with a sigh;
+and pensively inscribed it in her book.
+
+
+
+
+_January_ 15_th_.—The bills for my roses and bulbs and other last
+year’s horticultural indulgences were all on the table when I came down
+to breakfast this morning. They rather frightened me. Gardening is
+expensive, I find, when it has to be paid for out of one’s own private
+pin-money. The Man of Wrath does not in the least want roses, or
+flowering shrubs, or plantations, or new paths, and therefore, he asks,
+why should he pay for them? So he does not and I do, and I have to make
+up for it by not indulging all too riotously in new clothes, which is
+no doubt very chastening. I certainly prefer buying new rose-trees to
+new dresses, if I cannot comfortably have both; and I see a time coming
+when the passion for my garden will have taken such a hold on me that I
+shall not only entirely cease buying more clothes, but begin to sell
+those that I already have. The garden is so big that everything has to
+be bought wholesale; and I fear I shall not be able to go on much
+longer with only one man and a stork, because the more I plant the more
+there will be to water in the inevitable drought, and the watering is a
+serious consideration when it means going backwards and forwards all
+day long to a pump near the house, with a little water-cart. People
+living in England, in almost perpetual mildness and moisture, don’t
+really know what a drought is. If they have some weeks of cloudless
+weather, it is generally preceded and followed by good rains; but we
+have perhaps an hour’s shower every week, and then comes a month or six
+weeks’ drought. The soil is very light, and dries so quickly that,
+after the heaviest thunder-shower, I can walk over any of my paths in
+my thin shoes; and to keep the garden even moderately damp it should
+pour with rain regularly every day for three hours. My only means of
+getting water is to go to the pump near the house, or to the little
+stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the little stream dries up
+too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of times difficult
+to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots. I possess
+one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted with silver
+birches in imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted between
+the birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy—the
+soil for pines and acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what
+love will do—there are more roses in my garden than any other flower!
+Next spring the bare places are to be filled with trees that I have
+ordered: pines behind the delicate acacias, and startling
+mountain-ashes, oaks, copper-beeches, maples, larches,
+juniper-trees—was it not Elijah who sat down to rest under a
+juniper-tree? I have often wondered how he managed to get under it. It
+is a compact little tree, not more than two to three yards high here,
+and all closely squeezed up together. Perhaps they grew more
+aggressively where he was. By the time the babies have grown old and
+disagreeable it will be very pretty here, and then possibly they won’t
+like it; and, if they have inherited the Man of Wrath’s indifference to
+gardens, they will let it run wild and leave it to return to the state
+in which I found it. Or perhaps their three husbands will refuse to
+live in it, or to come to such a lonely place at all, and then of
+course its fate is sealed. My only comfort is that husbands don’t
+flourish in the desert, and that the three will have to wait a long
+time before enough are found to go round. Mothers tell me that it is a
+dreadful business finding one husband; how much more painful then to
+have to look for three at once!—the babies are so nearly the same age
+that they only just escaped being twins. But I won’t look. I can
+imagine nothing more uncomfortable than a son-in-law, and besides, I
+don’t think a husband is at all a good thing for a girl to have. I
+shall do my best in the years at my disposal to train them so to love
+the garden, and out-door life, and even farming, that, if they have a
+spark of their mother in them, they will want and ask for nothing
+better. My hope of success is however exceedingly small, and there is
+probably a fearful period in store for me when I shall be taken every
+day during the winter to the distant towns to balls—a poor old mother
+shivering in broad daylight in her party gown, and being made to start
+after an early lunch and not getting home till breakfast-time next
+morning. Indeed, they have already developed an alarming desire to go
+to “partings” as they call them, the April baby announcing her
+intention of beginning to do so when she is twelve. “Are _you_ twelve,
+Mummy?” she asked.
+
+The gardener is leaving on the first of April, and I am trying to find
+another. It is grievous changing so often—in two years I shall have had
+three—because at each change a great part of my plants and plans
+necessarily suffers. Seeds get lost, seedlings are not pricked out in
+time, places already sown are planted with something else, and there is
+confusion out of doors and despair in my heart. But he was to have
+married the cook, and the cook saw a ghost and immediately left, and he
+is going after her as soon as he can, and meanwhile is wasting visibly
+away. What she saw was doors that are locked opening with a great
+clatter all by themselves _on the hinge-side_, and then somebody
+invisible cursed at her. These phenomena now go by the name of “the
+ghost.” She asked to be allowed to leave at once, as she had never been
+in a place where there was a ghost before. I suggested that she should
+try and get used to it; but she thought it would be wasting time, and
+she looked so ill that I let her go, and the garden has to suffer. I
+don’t know why it should be given to cooks to see such interesting
+things and withheld from me, but I have had two others since she left,
+and they both have seen the ghost. Minora grows very silent as bed-time
+approaches, and relents towards Irais and myself; and, after having
+shown us all day how little she approves us, when the bedroom candles
+are brought she quite begins to cling. She has once or twice anxiously
+inquired whether Irais is sure she does not object to sleeping alone.
+
+“If you are at all nervous, I will come and keep you company,” she
+said; “I don’t mind at all, I assure you.”
+
+But Irais is not to be taken in by such simple wiles, and has told me
+she would rather sleep with fifty ghosts than with one Minora.
+
+Since Miss Jones was so unexpectedly called away to her parent’s
+bedside I have seen a good deal of the babies; and it is so nice
+without a governess that I would put off engaging another for a year or
+two, if it were not that I should in so doing come within the reach of
+the arm of the law, which is what every German spends his life in
+trying to avoid. The April baby will be six next month, and, after her
+sixth birthday is passed, we are liable at any moment to receive a
+visit from a school inspector, who will inquire curiously into the
+state of her education, and, if it is not up to the required standard,
+all sorts of fearful things might happen to the guilty parents,
+probably beginning with fines, and going on _crescendo_ to dungeons if,
+owing to gaps between governesses and difficulties in finding the right
+one, we persisted in our evil courses. Shades of the prison-house begin
+to close here upon the growing boy, and prisons compass the Teuton
+about on every side all through life to such an extent that he has to
+walk very delicately indeed if he would stay outside them and pay for
+their maintenance. Cultured individuals do not, as a rule, neglect to
+teach their offspring to read, and write, and say their prayers, and
+are apt to resent the intrusion of an examining inspector into their
+homes; but it does not much matter after all, and I daresay it is very
+good for us to be worried; indeed, a philosopher of my acquaintance
+declares that people who are not regularly and properly worried are
+never any good for anything. In the eye of the law we are all sinners,
+and every man is held to be guilty until he has proved that he is
+innocent.
+
+Minora has seen so much of the babies that, after vainly trying to get
+out of their way for several days, she thought it better to resign
+herself, and make the best of it by regarding them as copy, and using
+them to fill a chapter in her book. So she took to dogging their
+footsteps wherever they went, attended their uprisings and their lyings
+down, engaged them, if she could, in intelligent conversation, went
+with them into the garden to study their ways when they were sleighing,
+drawn by a big dog, and generally made their lives a burden to them.
+This went on for three days, and then she settled down to write the
+result with the Man of Wrath’s typewriter, borrowed whenever her notes
+for any chapter have reached the state of ripeness necessary for the
+process she describes as “throwing into form.” She writes everything
+with a typewriter, even her private letters.
+
+“Don’t forget to put in something about a mother’s knee,” said Irais;
+“you can’t write effectively about children without that.”
+
+“Oh, of course I shall mention that,” replied Minora.
+
+“And pink toes,” I added. “There are always toes, and they are never
+anything but pink.”
+
+“I have that somewhere,” said Minora, turning over her notes.
+
+“But, after all, babies are not a German speciality,” said Irais, “and
+I don’t quite see why you should bring them into a book of German
+travels. Elizabeth’s babies have each got the fashionable number of
+arms and legs, and are exactly the same as English ones.”
+
+“Oh, but they can’t be _just_ the same, you know,” said Minora, looking
+worried. “It must make a difference living here in this place, and
+eating such odd things, and never having a doctor, and never being ill.
+Children who have never had measles and those things can’t be quite the
+same as other children; it must all be in their systems and can’t get
+out for some reason or other. And a child brought up on chicken and
+rice-pudding must be different to a child that eats _Spickgans_ and
+liver sausages. And they _are_ different; I can’t tell in what way, but
+they certainly are; and I think if I steadily describe them from the
+materials I have collected the last three days, I may perhaps hit on
+the points of difference.”
+
+“Why bother about points of difference?” asked Irais. “I should write
+some little thing, bringing in the usual parts of the picture, such as
+knees and toes, and make it mildly pathetic.”
+
+“But it is by no means an easy thing for me to do,” said Minora
+plaintively; “I have so little experience of children.”
+
+“Then why write it at all?” asked that sensible person Elizabeth.
+
+“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no
+children; but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing
+is easier than to write bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen
+in an hour.”
+
+She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled
+for about five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you
+may have it—pink toes and all complete.”
+
+Minora put on her eye-glasses and read aloud:
+
+“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bed-time my stale
+and battered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd
+into my mind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years
+ago!—of the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her
+arms, and undressed, and put in my cot, without being wakened; of the
+angels I believed in; of little children coming straight from heaven,
+and still being surrounded, so long as they were good, by the shadow of
+white wings,—all the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby is
+learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not an idea of the beauty of
+the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with heavenly
+eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately come from,
+and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At
+two years old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread
+and milk; at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread
+and milk; at ten both bread and milk and angels have been left behind
+in the nursery, and she has already found out that they are luxuries
+not necessary to her everyday life. In later years she may be
+disinclined to accept truths second-hand, insist on thinking for
+herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off exploded traditions, be
+untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moral standard and
+to be strong, and pure, and good—”
+
+“Like tea,” explained Irais.
+
+“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part
+of the charm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids,
+her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to
+come in at bed-time and sit in the window in the setting sunshine
+watching the mysteries of her going to bed. Her mother tubs her, for
+she is far too precious to be touched by any nurse, and then she is
+rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little pink toes peep out;
+and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in her night-dress,
+and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt down
+on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face
+reflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening
+prayer for pity and for peace.”
+
+“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is
+exactly what I was going to say.”
+
+“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can
+copy that if you like.”
+
+“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.
+
+“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied;
+“it will make people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am
+going to take a man’s name.”
+
+“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call
+yourself John Jones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace
+name, to emphasise your uncompromising attitude towards all feminine
+weaknesses, and no one will be taken in.”
+
+“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of
+Minora’s typewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you
+and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say.
+Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees
+are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you?
+But then in my case they were only stepmother’s, and nobody ever sings
+their praises.”
+
+“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say
+my prayers in French.”
+
+“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such
+things were not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no
+tubs; our faces and hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the
+room, and in the summer we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards
+for fear we might catch cold. My stepmother didn’t worry much; she used
+to wear pink dresses all over lace, and the older she got the prettier
+the dresses got. When is she going?”
+
+“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”
+
+“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this.
+She has been here an unconscionable time,—it must be nearly three
+weeks.”
+
+“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.
+
+Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to
+neglect one’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this
+time stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so
+agreeably with me. She has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or
+any other business in the world than just to stay on chatting with me,
+and reading, and singing, and laughing at any one there is to laugh at,
+and kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of Wrath. Naturally I
+love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes in his head must love
+her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month the passages and
+offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have ever whitewashed
+their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in while it
+is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those
+succulent salads full of caraway seeds that she so devotedly loves. I
+shall begin to lead her thoughts gently back to her duties by inquiring
+every day anxiously after her husband’s health. She is not very fond of
+him, because he does not run and hold the door open for her every time
+she gets up to leave the room; and though she has asked him to do so,
+and told him how much she wishes he would, he still won’t. She stayed
+once in a house where there was an Englishman, and his nimbleness in
+regard to doors and chairs so impressed her that her husband has had no
+peace since, and each time she has to go out of a room she is reminded
+of her disregarded wishes, so that a shut door is to her symbolic of
+the failure of her married life, and the very sight of one makes her
+wonder why she was born; at least, that is what she told me once, in a
+burst of confidence. He is quite a nice, harmless little man, pleasant
+to talk to, good-tempered, and full of fun; but he thinks he is too old
+to begin to learn new and uncomfortable ways, and he has that horror of
+being made better by his wife that distinguishes so many righteous men,
+and is shared by the Man of Wrath, who persists in holding his glass in
+his left hand at meals, because if he did not (and I don’t believe he
+particularly likes doing it) his relations might say that marriage has
+improved him, and thus drive the iron into his soul. This habit
+occasions an almost daily argument between one or other of the babies
+and myself.
+
+“April, hold your glass in your right hand.”
+
+“But papa doesn’t.”
+
+“When you are as old as papa you can do as you like.”
+
+Which was embellished only yesterday by Minora adding impressively,
+“And only think how strange it would look if _everybody_ held their
+glasses so.”
+
+April was greatly struck by the force of this proposition.
+
+
+
+
+_January_ 28_th_.—It is very cold,—fifteen degrees of frost _Réaumur_,
+but perfectly delicious, still, bright weather, and one feels jolly and
+energetic and amiably disposed towards everybody. The two young ladies
+are still here, but the air is so buoyant that even they don’t weigh on
+me any longer, and besides, they have both announced their approaching
+departure, so that after all I shall get my whitewashing done in peace,
+and the house will have on its clean pinafore in time to welcome the
+spring.
+
+Minora has painted my portrait, and is going to present it as a parting
+gift to the Man of Wrath; and the fact that I let her do it, and sat
+meekly times innumerable, proves conclusively, I hope, that I am not
+vain. When Irais first saw it she laughed till she cried, and at once
+commissioned her to paint hers, so that she may take it away with her
+and give it to her husband on his birthday, which happens to be early
+in February. Indeed, if it were not for this birthday, I really think
+she would have forgotten to go at all; but birthdays are great and
+solemn festivals with us, never allowed to slip by unnoticed, and
+always celebrated in the presence of a sympathetic crowd of relations
+(gathered from far and near to tell you how well you are wearing, and
+that nobody would ever dream, and that really it is wonderful), who
+stand round a sort of sacrificial altar, on which your years are
+offered up as a burnt-offering to the gods in the shape of lighted pink
+and white candles, stuck in a very large, flat, jammy cake. The cake
+with its candles is the chief feature, and on the table round it lie
+the gifts each person present is more or less bound to give. As my
+birthday falls in the winter I get mittens as well as blotting-books
+and photograph-frames, and if it were in the summer I should get
+photograph-frames and blotting-books and no mittens; but whatever the
+present may be, and by whomsoever given, it has to be welcomed with the
+noisiest gratitude, and loudest exclamations of joy, and such words as
+_entzückend, reizend, herrlich, wundervoll_, and _süss_ repeated over
+and over again, until the unfortunate _Geburtstagskind_ feels indeed
+that another year has gone, and that she has grown older, and wiser,
+and more tired of folly and of vain repetitions. A flag is hoisted, and
+all the morning the rites are celebrated, the cake eaten, healths
+drunk, speeches made, and hands nearly shaken off. The neighbouring
+parsons drive up, and when nobody is looking their wives count the
+candles in the cake; the active lady in the next _Schloss_ spares time
+to send a pot of flowers, and to look up my age in the _Gotha
+Almanach;_ a deputation comes from the farms headed by the chief
+inspector in white kid gloves who invokes Heaven’s blessings on the
+gracious lady’s head; and the babies are enchanted, and sit in a corner
+trying on all the mittens. In the evening there is a dinner for the
+relations and the chief local authorities, with more health-drinking
+and speechifying, and the next morning, when I come downstairs thankful
+to have done with it, I am confronted by the altar still in its place,
+cake crumbs and candle-grease and all, because any hasty removal of it
+would imply a most lamentable want of sentiment, deplorable in anybody,
+but scandalous and disgusting in a tender female. All birthdays are
+observed in this fashion, and not a few wise persons go for a short
+trip just about the time theirs is due, and I think I shall imitate
+them next year; only trips to the country or seaside in December are
+not usually pleasant, and if I go to a town there are sure to be
+relations in it, and then the cake will spring up mushroom-like from
+the teeming soil of their affection.
+
+I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais and
+myself are to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further proof
+were needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both, in defiance of
+tradition, scorn this celebration of birthday rites. Years ago, when
+first I knew her, and long before we were either of us married, I sent
+her a little brass candlestick on her birthday; and when mine followed
+a few months later, she sent me a note-book. No notes were written in
+it, and on her next birthday I presented it to her; she thanked me
+profusely in the customary manner, and when my turn came I received the
+brass candlestick. Since then we alternately enjoy the possession of
+each of these articles, and the present question is comfortably settled
+once and for all, at a minimum of trouble and expense. We never mention
+this little arrangement except at the proper time, when we send a
+letter of fervid thanks.
+
+This radiant weather, when mere living is a joy, and sitting still over
+the fire out of the question, has been going on for more than a week.
+Sleighing and skating have been our chief occupation, especially
+skating, which is more than usually fascinating here, because the place
+is intersected by small canals communicating with a lake and the river
+belonging to the lake, and as everything is frozen black and hard, we
+can skate for miles straight ahead without being obliged to turn round
+and come back again,—at all times an annoying, and even mortifying,
+proceeding. Irais skates beautifully: modesty is the only obstacle to
+my saying the same of myself; but I may remark that all Germans skate
+well, for the simple reason that every year of their lives, for three
+or four months, they may do it as much as they like. Minora was
+astonished and disconcerted by finding herself left behind, and
+arriving at the place where tea meets us half an hour after we had
+finished. In some places the banks of the canals are so high that only
+our heads appear level with the fields, and it is, as Minora noted in
+her book, a curious sight to see three female heads skimming along
+apparently by themselves, and enjoying it tremendously. When the banks
+are low, we appear to be gliding deliciously over the roughest ploughed
+fields, with or without legs according to circumstances. Before we
+start, I fix on the place where tea and a sleigh are to meet us, and we
+drive home again; because skating against the wind is as detestable as
+skating with it is delightful, and an unkind Nature arranges its
+blowing without the smallest regard for our convenience. Yesterday, by
+way of a change, we went for a picnic to the shores of the Baltic,
+ice-bound at this season, and utterly desolate at our nearest point. I
+have a weakness for picnics, especially in winter, when the mosquitoes
+cease from troubling and the ant-hills are at rest; and of all my many
+favourite picnic spots this one on the Baltic is the loveliest and
+best. As it is a three-hours’ drive, the Man of Wrath is loud in his
+lamentations when the special sort of weather comes which means, as
+experience has taught him, this particular excursion. There must be
+deep snow, hard frost, no wind, and a cloudless sky; and when, on
+waking up, I see these conditions fulfilled, then it would need some
+very potent reason to keep me from having out a sleigh and going off.
+It is, I admit, a hard day for the horses; but why have horses if they
+are not to take you where you want to go to, and at the time you want
+to go? And why should not horses have hard days as well as everybody
+else? The Man of Wrath loathes picnics, and has no eye for nature and
+frozen seas, and is simply bored by a long drive through a forest that
+does not belong to him; a single turnip on his own place is more
+admirable in his eyes than the tallest, pinkest, straightest pine that
+ever reared its snow-crowned head against the setting sunlight. Now
+observe the superiority of woman, who sees that both are good, and
+after having gazed at the pine and been made happy by its beauty, goes
+home and placidly eats the turnip. He went once and only once to this
+particular place, and made us feel so small by his _blasé_ behaviour
+that I never invite him now. It is a beautiful spot, endless forest
+stretching along the shore as far as the eye can reach; and after
+driving through it for miles you come suddenly, at the end of an avenue
+of arching trees, upon the glistening, oily sea, with the
+orange-coloured sails of distant fishing-smacks shining in the
+sunlight. Whenever I have been there it has been windless weather, and
+the silence so profound that I could hear my pulses beating. The
+humming of insects and the sudden scream of a jay are the only sounds
+in summer, and in winter the stillness is the stillness of death.
+
+Every paradise has its serpent, however, and this one is so infested by
+mosquitoes during the season when picnics seem most natural, that those
+of my visitors who have been taken there for a treat have invariably
+lost their tempers, and made the quiet shores ring with their wailing
+and lamentations. These despicable but irritating insects don’t seem to
+have anything to do but to sit in multitudes on the sand, waiting for
+any prey Providence may send them; and as soon as the carriage appears
+they rise up in a cloud, and rush to meet us, almost dragging us out
+bodily, and never leave us until we drive away again. The sudden view
+of the sea from the mossy, pine-covered height directly above it where
+we picnic; the wonderful stretch of lonely shore with the forest to the
+water’s edge; the coloured sails in the blue distance; the freshness,
+the brightness, the vastness—all is lost upon the picnickers, and made
+worse than indifferent to them, by the perpetual necessity they are
+under of fighting these horrid creatures. It is nice being the only
+person who ever goes there or shows it to anybody, but if more people
+went, perhaps the mosquitoes would be less lean, and hungry, and
+pleased to see us. It has, however, the advantage of being a suitable
+place to which to take refractory visitors when they have stayed too
+long, or left my books out in the garden all night, or otherwise made
+their presence a burden too grievous to be borne; then one fine hot
+morning when they are all looking limp, I suddenly propose a picnic on
+the Baltic. I have never known this proposal fail to be greeted with
+exclamations of surprise and delight.
+
+“The Baltic! You never told us you were within driving distance? How
+_heavenly_ to get a breath of sea air on a day like this! The very
+_thought_ puts new life into one! And how _delightful_ to see the
+Baltic! Oh, _please_ take us!” And then I take them.
+
+But on a brilliant winter’s day my conscience is as clear as the frosty
+air itself, and yesterday morning we started off in the gayest of
+spirits, even Minora being disposed to laugh immoderately on the least
+provocation. Only our eyes were allowed to peep out from the fur and
+woollen wrappings necessary to our heads if we would come back with our
+ears and noses in the same places they were in when we started, and for
+the first two miles the mirth created by each other’s strange
+appearance was uproarious,—a fact I mention merely to show what an
+effect dry, bright, intense cold produces on healthy bodies, and how
+much better it is to go out in it and enjoy it than to stay indoors and
+sulk. As we passed through the neighbouring village with cracking of
+whip and jingling of bells, heads popped up at the windows to stare,
+and the only living thing in the silent, sunny street was a melancholy
+fowl with ruffled feathers, which looked at us reproachfully, as we
+dashed with so much energy over the crackling snow.
+
+“Oh, foolish bird!” Irais called out as we passed; “you’ll be indeed a
+cold fowl if you stand there motionless, and every one prefers them hot
+in weather like this!”
+
+And then we all laughed exceedingly, as though the most splendid joke
+had been made, and before we had done we were out of the village and in
+the open country beyond, and could see my house and garden far away
+behind, glittering in the sunshine; and in front of us lay the forest,
+with its vistas of pines stretching away into infinity, and a drive
+through it of fourteen miles before we reached the sea. It was a
+hoar-frost day, and the forest was an enchanted forest leading into
+fairyland, and though Irais and I have been there often before, and
+always thought it beautiful, yet yesterday we stood under the final
+arch of frosted trees, struck silent by the sheer loveliness of the
+place. For a long way out the sea was frozen, and then there was a deep
+blue line, and a cluster of motionless orange sails; at our feet a
+narrow strip of pale yellow sand; right and left the line of sparkling
+forest; and we ourselves standing in a world of white and diamond
+traceries. The stillness of an eternal Sunday lay on the place like a
+benediction.
+
+Minora broke the silence by remarking that Dresden was pretty, but she
+thought this beat it almost.
+
+“I don’t quite see,” said Irais in a hushed voice, as though she were
+in a holy place, “how the two can be compared.”
+
+“Yes, Dresden is more convenient, of course,” replied Minora; after
+which we turned away and thought we would keep her quiet by feeding
+her, so we went back to the sleigh and had the horses taken out and
+their cloths put on, and they were walked up and down a distant glade
+while we sat in the sleigh and picnicked. It _is_ a hard day for the
+horses,—nearly thirty miles there and back and no stable in the middle;
+but they are so fat and spoiled that it cannot do them much harm
+sometimes to taste the bitterness of life. I warmed soup in a little
+apparatus I have for such occasions, which helped to take the
+chilliness off the sandwiches,—this is the only unpleasant part of a
+winter picnic, the clammy quality of the provisions just when you most
+long for something very hot. Minora let her nose very carefully out of
+its wrappings, took a mouthful, and covered it up quickly again. She
+was nervous lest it should be frost-nipped, and truth compels me to add
+that her nose is not a bad nose, and might even be pretty on anybody
+else; but she does not know how to carry it, and there is an art in the
+angle at which one’s nose is held just as in everything else, and
+really noses were intended for something besides mere blowing.
+
+It is the most difficult thing in the world to eat sandwiches with
+immense fur and woollen gloves on, and I think we ate almost as much
+fur as anything, and choked exceedingly during the process. Minora was
+angry at this, and at last pulled off her glove, but quickly put it on
+again.
+
+“How very unpleasant,” she remarked after swallowing a large piece of
+fur.
+
+“It will wrap round your pipes, and keep them warm,” said Irais.
+
+“Pipes!” echoed Minora, greatly disgusted by such vulgarity.
+
+“I’m afraid I can’t help you,” I said, as she continued to choke and
+splutter; “we are all in the same case, and I don’t know how to alter
+it.”
+
+“There are such things as forks, I suppose,” snapped Minora.
+
+“That’s true,” said I, crushed by the obviousness of the remedy; but of
+what use are forks if they are fifteen miles off? So Minora had to
+continue to eat her gloves.
+
+By the time we had finished, the sun was already low behind the trees
+and the clouds beginning to flush a faint pink. The old coachman was
+given sandwiches and soup, and while he led the horses up and down with
+one hand and held his lunch in the other, we packed up—or, to be
+correct, I packed, and the others looked on and gave me valuable
+advice.
+
+This coachman, Peter by name, is seventy years old, and was born on the
+place, and has driven its occupants for fifty years, and I am nearly as
+fond of him as I am of the sun-dial; indeed, I don’t know what I should
+do without him, so entirely does he appear to understand and approve of
+my tastes and wishes. No drive is too long or difficult for the horses
+if I want to take it, no place impossible to reach if I want to go to
+it, no weather or roads too bad to prevent my going out if I wish to:
+to all my suggestions he responds with the readiest cheerfulness, and
+smoothes away all objections raised by the Man of Wrath, who rewards
+his alacrity in doing my pleasure by speaking of him as an _alter
+Esel_. In the summer, on fine evenings, I love to drive late and alone
+in the scented forests, and when I have reached a dark part stop, and
+sit quite still, listening to the nightingales repeating their little
+tune over and over again after interludes of gurgling, or if there are
+no nightingales, listening to the marvellous silence, and letting its
+blessedness descend into my very soul. The nightingales in the forests
+about here all sing the same tune, and in the same key of (E flat).
+
+
+I don’t know whether all nightingales do this, or if it is peculiar to
+this particular spot. When they have sung it once, they clear their
+throats a little, and hesitate, and then do it again, and it is the
+prettiest little song in the world. How could I indulge my passion for
+these drives with their pauses without Peter? He is so used to them
+that he stops now at the right moment without having to be told, and he
+is ready to drive me all night if I wish it, with no sign of anything
+but cheerful willingness on his nice old face. The Man of Wrath
+deplores these eccentric tastes, as he calls them, of mine; but has
+given up trying to prevent my indulging them because, while he is
+deploring in one part of the house, I have slipped out at a door in the
+other, and am gone before he can catch me, and have reached and am lost
+in the shadows of the forest by the time he has discovered that I am
+nowhere to be found.
+
+The brightness of Peter’s perfections are sullied however by one spot,
+and that is, that as age creeps upon him, he not only cannot hold the
+horses in if they don’t want to be held in, but he goes to sleep
+sometimes on his box if I have him out too soon after lunch, and has
+upset me twice within the last year—once last winter out of a sleigh,
+and once this summer, when the horses shied at a bicycle, and bolted
+into the ditch on one side of the _chaussée_ (German for high road),
+and the bicycle was so terrified at the horses shying that it shied too
+into the ditch on the other side, and the carriage was smashed, and the
+bicycle was smashed, and we were all very unhappy, except Peter, who
+never lost his pleasant smile, and looked so placid that my tongue
+clave to the roof of my mouth when I tried to make it scold him.
+
+“But I should think he ought to have been _thoroughly_ scolded on an
+occasion like that,” said Minora, to whom I had been telling this story
+as we wandered on the yellow sands while the horses were being put in
+the sleigh; and she glanced nervously up at Peter, whose mild head was
+visible between the bushes above us. “Shall we get home before dark?”
+she asked.
+
+The sun had altogether disappeared behind the pines and only the very
+highest of the little clouds were still pink; out at sea the mists were
+creeping up, and the sails of the fishing-smacks had turned a dull
+brown; a flight of wild geese passed across the disc of the moon with
+loud cacklings.
+
+“Before dark?” echoed Irais, “I should think not. It is dark now nearly
+in the forest, and we shall have the loveliest moonlight drive back.”
+
+“But it is surely very dangerous to let a man who goes to sleep drive
+you,” said Minora apprehensively.
+
+“But he’s such an old dear,” I said.
+
+“Yes, yes, no doubt,” she replied testily; “but there are wakeful old
+dears to be had, and on a box they are preferable.”
+
+Irais laughed. “You are growing quite amusing, Miss Minora,” she said.
+
+“He isn’t on a box to-day,” said I; “and I never knew him to go to
+sleep standing up behind us on a sleigh.” But Minora was not to be
+appeased, and muttered something about seeing no fun in foolhardiness,
+which shows how alarmed she was, for it was rude.
+
+Peter, however, behaved beautifully on the way home, and Irais and I at
+least were as happy as possible driving back, with all the glories of
+the western sky flashing at us every now and then at the end of a long
+avenue as we swiftly passed, and later on, when they had faded, myriads
+of stars in the narrow black strip of sky over our heads. It was
+bitterly cold, and Minora was silent, and not in the least inclined to
+laugh with us as she had been six hours before.
+
+“Have you enjoyed yourself, Miss Minora?’ inquired Irais, as we got out
+of the forest on to the _chaussée_, and the lights of the village
+before ours twinkled in the distance.
+
+“How many degrees do you suppose there are now?” was Minora’s reply to
+this question.
+
+“Degrees?—Of frost? Oh, dear me, are you cold,” cried Irais
+solicitously.
+
+“Well, it isn’t exactly warm, is it?” said Minora sulkily; and Irais
+pinched me. “Well, but think how much colder you would have been
+without all that fur you ate for lunch inside you,” she said.
+
+“And what a nice chapter you will be able to write about the Baltic,”
+said I. “Why, it is practically certain that you are the first English
+person who has ever been to just this part of it.”
+
+“Isn’t there some English poem,” said Irais, “about being the first who
+ever burst—”
+
+“‘Into that silent sea,’” finished Minora hastily. “You can’t quote
+that without its context, you know.”
+
+“But I wasn’t going to,” said Irais meekly; “I only paused to breathe.
+I must breathe, or perhaps I might die.”
+
+The lights from my energetic friend’s _Schloss_ shone brightly down
+upon us as we passed round the base of the hill on which it stands; she
+is very proud of this hill, as well she may be, seeing that it is the
+only one in the whole district.
+
+“Do you never go there?” asked Minora, jerking her head in the
+direction of the house.
+
+“Sometimes. She is a very busy woman, and I should feel I was in the
+way if I went often.”
+
+“It would be interesting to see another North German interior,” said
+Minora; “and I should be obliged if you would take me.”
+
+“But I can’t fall upon her suddenly with a strange girl,” I protested;
+“and we are not at all on such intimate terms as to justify my taking
+all my visitors to see her.”
+
+“What do you want to see another interior for?” asked Irais. “I can
+tell you what it is like; and if you went nobody would speak to you,
+and if you were to ask questions, and began to take notes, the good
+lady would stare at you in the frankest amazement, and think Elizabeth
+had brought a young lunatic out for an airing. _Everybody_ is not as
+patient as Elizabeth,” added Irais, anxious to pay off old scores.
+
+“I would do a great deal for you, Miss Minora,” I said, “but I can’t do
+that.”
+
+“If we went,” said Irais, “Elizabeth and I would be placed with great
+ceremony on a sofa behind a large, polished oval table with a
+crochet-mat in the centre—it _has_ got a crochet-mat in the centre,
+hasn’t it?” I nodded. “And you would sit on one of the four little
+podgy, buttony, tasselly red chairs that are ranged on the other side
+of the table facing the sofa. They _are_ red, Elizabeth?” Again I
+nodded. “The floor is painted yellow, and there is no carpet except a
+rug in front of the sofa. The paper is dark chocolate colour, almost
+black; that is in order that after years of use the dirt may not show,
+and the room need not be done up. Dirt is like wickedness, you see,
+Miss Minora—its being there never matters; it is only when it shows so
+much as to be apparent to everybody that we are ashamed of it. At
+intervals round the high walls are chairs, and cabinets with lamps on
+them, and in one corner is a great white cold stove—or is it majolica?”
+she asked, turning to me.
+
+“No, it is white.”
+
+“There are a great many lovely big windows, all ready to let in the air
+and the sun, but they are as carefully covered with brown lace curtains
+under heavy stuff ones as though a whole row of houses were just
+opposite, with peering eyes at every window trying to look in, instead
+of there only being fields, and trees, and birds. No fire, no sunlight,
+no books, no flowers; but a consoling smell of red cabbage coming up
+under the door, mixed, in due season, with soapsuds.”
+
+“When did you go there?” asked Minora.
+
+“Ah, when did I go there indeed? When did I not go there? I have been
+calling there all my life.”
+
+Minora’s eyes rolled doubtfully first at me then at Irais from the
+depths of her head-wrappings; they are large eyes with long dark
+eyelashes, and far be it from me to deny that each eye taken by itself
+is fine, but they are put in all wrong.
+
+“The only thing you would learn there,” went on Irais, “would be the
+significance of sofa corners in Germany. If we three went there
+together, I should be ushered into the right-hand corner of the sofa,
+because it is the place of honour, and I am the greatest stranger;
+Elizabeth would be invited to seat herself in the left-hand corner, as
+next in importance; the hostess would sit near us in an arm-chair; and
+you, as a person of no importance whatever, would either be left to sit
+where you could, or would be put on a chair facing us, and with the
+entire breadth of the table between us to mark the immense social gulf
+that separates the married woman from the mere virgin. These sofa
+corners make the drawing of nice distinctions possible in a way that
+nothing else could. The world might come to an end, and create less
+sensation in doing it, than you would, Miss Minora, if by any chance
+you got into the right-hand corner of one. That you are put on a chair
+on the other side of the table places you at once in the scale of
+precedence, and exactly defines your social position, or rather your
+complete want of a social position.” And Irais tilted her nose ever so
+little heavenwards.
+
+“Note it,” she added, “as the heading of your next chapter.”
+
+“Note what?” asked Minora impatiently.
+
+“Why, ‘The Subtle Significance of Sofas’, of course,” replied Irais.
+“If,” she continued, as Minora made no reply appreciative of this
+suggestion, “you were to call unexpectedly, the bad luck which pursues
+the innocent would most likely make you hit on a washing-day, and the
+distracted mistress of the house would keep you waiting in the cold
+room so long while she changed her dress, that you would begin to fear
+you were to be left to perish from want and hunger; and when she did
+appear, would show by the bitterness of her welcoming smile the rage
+that was boiling in her heart.”
+
+“But what has the mistress of the house to do with washing?”
+
+“What has she to do with washing? Oh, you sweet innocent—pardon my
+familiarity, but such ignorance of country-life customs is very
+touching in one who is writing a book about them.”
+
+“Oh, I have no doubt I am very ignorant,” said Minora loftily.
+
+“Seasons of washing,” explained Irais, “are seasons set apart by the
+_Hausfrau_ to be kept holy. They only occur every two or three months,
+and while they are going on the whole house is in an uproar, every
+other consideration sacrificed, husband and children sunk into
+insignificance, and no one approaching, or interfering with the
+mistress of the house during these days of purification, but at their
+peril.”
+
+“You don’t really mean,” said Minora, “that you only wash your clothes
+four times a year?”
+
+“Yes, I do mean it,” replied Irais.
+
+“Well, I think that is very disgusting,” said Minora emphatically.
+
+Irais raised those pretty, delicate eyebrows of hers. “Then you must
+take care and not marry a German,” she said.
+
+“But what is the object of it?” went on Minora.
+
+“Why, to clean the linen, I suppose.”
+
+“Yes, yes, but why only at such long intervals?”
+
+“It is an outward and visible sign of vast possessions in the shape of
+linen. If you were to want to have your clothes washed every week, as
+you do in England, you would be put down as a person who only has just
+enough to last that length of time, and would be an object of general
+contempt.”
+
+“But I should be a clean object,” cried Minora, “and my house would not
+be full of accumulated dirt.”
+
+We said nothing—there was nothing to be said.
+
+“It must be a happy land, that England of yours,” Irais remarked after
+a while with a sigh—a beatific vision no doubt presenting itself to her
+mind of a land full of washerwomen and agile gentlemen darting at
+door-handles.
+
+“It is a _clean_ land, at any rate,” replied Minora.
+
+“_I_ don’t want to go and live in it,” I said—for we were driving up to
+the house, and a memory of fogs and umbrellas came into my mind as I
+looked up fondly at its dear old west front, and I felt that what I
+want is to live and die just here, and that there never was such a
+happy woman as Elizabeth.
+
+
+
+
+_April_ 18_th_.—I have been so busy ever since Irais and Minora left
+that I can hardly believe the spring is here, and the garden hurrying
+on its green and flowered petticoat—only its petticoat as yet, for
+though the underwood is a fairyland of tender little leaves, the trees
+above are still quite bare.
+
+February was gone before I well knew that it had come, so deeply was I
+engaged in making hot-beds, and having them sown with petunias,
+verbenas, and nicotina affinis; while no less than thirty are dedicated
+solely to vegetables, it having been borne in upon me lately that
+vegetables must be interesting things to grow, besides possessing solid
+virtues not given to flowers, and that I might as well take the orchard
+and kitchen garden under my wing. So I have rushed in with all the zeal
+of utter inexperience, and my February evenings were spent poring over
+gardening books, and my days in applying the freshly absorbed wisdom.
+Who says that February is a dull, sad, slow month in the country? It
+was of the cheerfullest, swiftest description here, and its mild days
+enabled me to get on beautifully with the digging and manuring, and
+filled my rooms with snowdrops. The longer I live the greater is my
+respect and affection for manure in all its forms, and already, though
+the year is so young, a considerable portion of its pin-money has been
+spent on artificial manure. The Man of Wrath says he never met a young
+woman who spent her money that way before; I remarked that it must be
+nice to have an original wife; and he retorted that the word original
+hardly described me, and that the word eccentric was the one required.
+Very well, I suppose I am eccentric, since even my husband says so; but
+if my eccentricities are of such a practical nature as to result later
+in the biggest cauliflowers and tenderest lettuce in Prussia, why then
+he ought to be the first to rise up and call me blessed.
+
+I sent to England for vegetable-marrow seeds, as they are not grown
+here, and people try and make boiled cucumbers take their place; but
+boiled cucumbers are nasty things, and I don’t see why marrows should
+not do here perfectly well. These, and primrose-roots, are the English
+contributions to my garden. I brought over the roots in a tin box last
+time I came from England, and am anxious to see whether they will
+consent to live here. Certain it is that they don’t exist in the
+Fatherland, so I can only conclude the winter kills them, for surely,
+if such lovely things would grow, they never would have been
+overlooked. Irais is deeply interested in the experiment; she reads so
+many English books, and has heard so much about primroses, and they
+have got so mixed up in her mind with leagues, and dames, and
+Disraelis, that she longs to see this mysterious political flower, and
+has made me promise to telegraph when it appears, and she will come
+over. But they are not going to do anything this year, and I only hope
+those cold days did not send them off to the Paradise of flowers. I am
+afraid their first impression of Germany was a chilly one.
+
+Irais writes about once a week, and inquires after the garden and the
+babies, and announces her intention of coming back as soon as the
+numerous relations staying with her have left,—“which they won’t do,”
+she wrote the other day, “until the first frosts nip them off, when
+they will disappear like belated dahlias—double ones of course, for
+single dahlias are too charming to be compared to relations. I have
+every sort of cousin and uncle and aunt here, and here they have been
+ever since my husband’s birthday—not the same ones exactly, but I get
+so confused that I never know where one ends and the other begins. My
+husband goes off after breakfast to look at his crops, he says, and I
+am left at their mercy. I wish I had crops to go and look at—I should
+be grateful even for one, and would look at it from morning till night,
+and quite stare it out of countenance, sooner than stay at home and
+have the truth told me by enigmatic aunts. Do you know my Aunt Bertha?
+she, in particular, spends her time propounding obscure questions for
+my solution. I get so tired and worried trying to guess the answers,
+which are always truths supposed to be good for me to hear. ‘Why do you
+wear your hair on your forehead?’ she asks,—and that sets me off
+wondering why I _do_ wear it on my forehead, and what she wants to know
+for, or whether she does know and only wants to know if I will answer
+truthfully. ‘I am sure I don’t know, aunt,’ I say meekly, after
+puzzling over it for ever so long; ‘perhaps my maid knows. Shall I ring
+and ask her?’ And then she informs me that I wear it so to hide an ugly
+line she says I have down the middle of my forehead, and that betokens
+a listless and discontented disposition. Well, if she knew, what did
+she ask me for? Whenever I am with them they ask me riddles like that,
+and I simply lead a _dog’s_ life. Oh, my dear, relations are like
+drugs,—useful sometimes, and even pleasant, if taken in small
+quantities and seldom, but dreadfully pernicious on the whole, and the
+truly wise avoid them.”
+
+From Minora I have only had one communication since her departure, in
+which she thanked me for her pleasant visit, and said she was sending
+me a bottle of English embrocation to rub on my bruises after skating;
+that it was wonderful stuff, and she was sure I would like it; and that
+it cost two marks, and would I send stamps. I pondered long over this.
+Was it a parting hit, intended as revenge for our having laughed at
+her? Was she personally interested in the sale of embrocation? Or was
+it merely Minora’s idea of a graceful return for my hospitality? As for
+bruises, nobody who skates decently regards it as a bruise-producing
+exercise, and whenever there were any they were all on Minora; but she
+did happen to turn round once, I remember, just as I was in the act of
+tumbling down for the first and only time, and her delight was but
+thinly veiled by her excessive solicitude and sympathy. I sent her the
+stamps, received the bottle, and resolved to let her drop out of my
+life; I had been a good Samaritan to her at the request of my friend,
+but the best of Samaritans resents the offer of healing oil for his own
+use. But why waste a thought on Minora at Easter, the real beginning of
+the year in defiance of calendars. She belongs to the winter that is
+past, to the darkness that is over, and has no part or lot in the life
+I shall lead for the next six months. Oh, I could dance and sing for
+joy that the spring is here! What a resurrection of beauty there is in
+my garden, and of brightest hope in my heart! The whole of this radiant
+Easter day I have spent out of doors, sitting at first among the
+windflowers and celandines, and then, later, walking with the babies to
+the Hirschwald, to see what the spring had been doing there; and the
+afternoon was so hot that we lay a long time on the turf, blinking up
+through the leafless branches of the silver birches at the soft, fat
+little white clouds floating motionless in the blue. We had tea on the
+grass in the sun, and when it began to grow late, and the babies were
+in bed, and all the little wind-flowers folded up for the night, I
+still wandered in the green paths, my heart full of happiest gratitude.
+It makes one very humble to see oneself surrounded by such a wealth of
+beauty and perfection _anonymously_ lavished, and to think of the
+infinite meanness of our own grudging charities, and how displeased we
+are if they are not promptly and properly appreciated. I do sincerely
+trust that the benediction that is always awaiting me in my garden may
+by degrees be more deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and
+patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy flowers I so much love.
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1327 ***