initial commit of ebook 5991HEADmain

1 files changed, 3925 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/5991.txt b/5991.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..ba82af8
--- /dev/null
+++ b/5991.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3925 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Solitary Summer, by Elizabeth von Arnim
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
+
+This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
+Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
+header without written permission.
+
+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
+eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
+important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
+how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
+donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
+
+
+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Solitary Summer
+
+Author: Elizabeth von Arnim
+
+Release Date: June, 2004 [EBook #5991]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 9, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOLITARY SUMMER ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Aaron Cannon, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+The Solitary Summer
+
+by Elizabeth von Arnim
+
+
+To the man of wrath
+With some apologies and much love
+
+
+
+May
+
+
+May 2nd.--Last night after dinner, when we were in the garden, I said,
+"I want to be alone for a whole summer, and get to the very dregs of
+life. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to
+grow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls they
+will be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the months
+in the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch the
+things that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. On
+wet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where the
+pine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie on
+the heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall be
+perpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out there
+on the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I have
+discovered there is peace."
+
+"Mind you do not get your feet damp," said the Man of Wrath, removing
+his cigar.
+
+It was the evening of May Day, and the spring had taken hold of me body
+and soul. The sky was full of stars, and the garden of scents, and the
+borders of wallflowers and sweet, sly pansies. All day there had been a
+breeze, and all day slow masses of white clouds had been sailing across
+the blue. Now it was so still, so motionless, so breathless, that it
+seemed as though a quiet hand had been laid on the garden, soothing and
+hushing it into silence.
+
+The Man of Wrath sat at the foot of the verandah steps in that placid
+after-dinner mood which suffers fools, if not gladly, at least
+indulgently, and I stood in front of him, leaning against the sun-dial.
+
+"Shall you take a book with you?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, I shall," I replied, slightly nettled by his tone. "I am quite
+ready to admit that though the fields and flowers are always ready to
+teach, I am not always in the mood to learn, and sometimes my eyes are
+incapable of seeing things that at other times are quite plain."
+
+"And then you read?"
+
+"And then I read. Well, dear Sage, what of that?"
+
+But he smoked in silence, and seemed suddenly absorbed by the stars.
+
+"See," he said, after a pause, during which I stood looking at him and
+wishing he would use longer sentences, and he looked at the sky and did
+not think about me at all, "see how bright the stars are to-night.
+Almost as though it might freeze."
+
+"It isn't going to freeze, and I won't look at anything until you have
+told me what you think of my idea. Wouldn't a whole lovely summer, quite
+alone, be delightful? Wouldn't it be perfect to get up every morning for
+weeks and feel that you belong to yourself and to nobody else?" And I
+went over to him and put a hand on each shoulder and gave him a little
+shake, for he persisted in gazing at the stars just as though I had not
+been there. "Please, Man of Wrath, say something long for once," I
+entreated; "you haven't said a good long sentence for a week."
+
+He slowly brought his gaze from the stars down to me and smiled. Then he
+drew me on to his knee.
+
+"Don't get affectionate," I urged; "it is words, not deeds, that I want.
+But I'll stay here if you'll talk."
+
+"Well then, I will talk. What am I to say? You know you do as you
+please, and I never interfere with you. If you do not want to have any
+one here this summer you will not have any one, but you will find it a
+very long summer."
+
+"No, I won't."
+
+"And if you lie on the heath all day, people will think you are mad."
+
+"What do I care what people think?"
+
+"No, that is true. But you will catch cold, and your little nose will
+swell."
+
+"Let it swell."
+
+"And when it is hot you will be sunburnt and your skin spoilt."
+
+"I don't mind my skin."
+
+"And you will be dull."
+
+"Dull?"
+
+It often amuses me to reflect how very little the Man of Wrath really
+knows me. Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I as
+happy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other people
+have used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I do
+not believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarrel
+disgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best of
+birds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now during
+which dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, it
+is true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight ago
+who left after staying about a week and clearly not enjoying themselves.
+They found it dull, I know, but that of course was their own fault; how
+can you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great deal
+into him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but if
+you try for ever you will not knock any happiness into a being who has
+not got it in him to be happy. The only result probably would be that
+you knock your own out of yourself. Obviously happiness must come from
+within, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and my
+present sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within me
+more than sufficient to fill five quiet months.
+
+"I wonder," I remarked after a pause, during which I began to suspect
+that I too must belong to the serried ranks of the femmes incomprises,
+"why you think I shall be dull. The garden is always beautiful, and I am
+nearly always in the mood to enjoy it. Not quite always, I must confess,
+for when those Schmidts were here" (their name was not Schmidt, but what
+does that matter?) "I grew almost to hate it. Whenever I went into it
+there they were, dragging themselves about with faces full of indignant
+resignation. Do you suppose they saw one of those blue hepaticas
+overflowing the shrubberies? And when I drove with them into the woods,
+where the fairies were so busy just then hanging the branches with
+little green jewels, they talked about Berlin the whole time, and the
+good savouries their new chef makes."
+
+"Well, my dear, no doubt they missed their savouries. Your garden, I
+acknowledge, is growing very pretty, but your cook is bad. Poor Schmidt
+sometimes looked quite ill at dinner, and the beauty of your floral
+arrangements in no way made up for the inferior quality of the food.
+Send her away."
+
+"Send her away? Be thankful you have her. A bad cook is more effectual a
+great deal than Kissingen and Carlsbad and Homburg rolled into one, and
+very much cheaper. As long as I have her, my dear man, you will be
+comparatively thin and amiable. Poor Schmidt, as you call him, eats too
+much of those delectable savouries, and then looks at his wife and
+wonders why he married her. Don't let me catch you doing that."
+
+"I do not think it is very likely," said the Man of Wrath; but whether
+he meant it prettily, or whether he was merely thinking of the
+improbability of his ever eating too much of the local savouries, I
+cannot tell. I object, however, to discussing cooks in the garden on a
+starlight night, so I got off his knee and proposed that we should
+stroll round a little.
+
+It was such a sweet evening, such a fitting close to a beautiful May
+Day, and the flowers shone in the twilight like pale stars, and the air
+was full of fragrance, and I envied the bats fluttering through such a
+bath of scent, with the real stars above and the pansy stars beneath,
+and themselves so fashioned that even if they wanted to they could not
+make a noise and disturb the prevailing peace. A great deal that is
+poetical has been written by English people about May Day, and the
+impression left on the foreign mind is an impression of posies, and
+garlands, and village greens, and youths and maidens much be-ribboned,
+and lambs, and general friskiness. I was in England once on a May Day,
+and we sat over the fire shivering and listening blankly to the north-
+east wind tearing down the street and the rattling of the hail against
+the windows, and the friends with whom I was staying said it was very
+often so, and that they had never seen any lambs and ribbons. We Germans
+attach no poetical significance to it at all, and yet we well might, for
+it is almost invariably beautiful; and as for garlands, I wonder how
+many villages full of young people could have been provided with them
+out of my garden, and nothing be missed. It is to-day a garden of
+wallflowers, and I think I have every colour and sort in cultivation.
+The borders under the south windows of the house, so empty and
+melancholy this time last year, are crammed with them, and are finished
+off in front by a broad strip from end to end of yellow and white
+pansies. The tea rose beds round the sun-dial facing these borders are
+sheets of white, and golden, and purple, and wine-red pansies, with the
+dainty red shoots of the tea roses presiding delicately in their midst.
+The verandah steps leading down into this pansy paradise have boxes of
+white, and pink, and yellow tulips all the way up on each side, and on
+the lawn, behind the roses, are two big beds of every coloured tulip
+rising above a carpet of forget-me-nots. How very much more charming
+different-coloured tulips are together than tulips in one colour by
+itself! Last year, on the recommendation of sundry writers about
+gardens, I tried beds of scarlet tulips and forget-me-nots. They were
+pretty enough; but I wish those writers could see my beds of mixed
+tulips. I never saw anything so sweetly, delicately gay. The only ones I
+exclude are the rose-coloured ones; but scarlet, gold, delicate pink,
+and white are all there, and the effect is infinitely enchanting. The
+forget-me-nots grow taller as the tulips go off, and will presently
+tenderly engulf them altogether, and so hide the shame of their decay in
+their kindly little arms. They will be left there, clouds of gentle
+blue, until the tulips are well withered, and then they will be taken
+away to make room for the scarlet geraniums that are to occupy these two
+beds in the summer and flare in the sun as much as they like. I love an
+occasional mass of fiery colour, and these two will make the lilies look
+even whiter and more breathless that are to stand sentinel round the
+semicircle containing the precious tea roses.
+
+The first two years I had this garden, I was determined to do exactly as
+I chose in it, and to have no arrangements of plants that I had not
+planned, and no plants but those I knew and loved; so, fearing that an
+experienced gardener would profit by my ignorance, then about as
+absolute as it could be, and thrust all his bedding nightmares upon me,
+and fill the place with those dreadful salad arrangements so often seen
+in the gardens of the indifferent rich, I would only have a meek man of
+small pretensions, who would be easily persuaded that I knew as much as,
+or more than, he did himself. I had three of these meek men one after
+the other, and learned what I might long ago have discovered, that the
+less a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and that
+no weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity. The
+first of these three went melancholy mad at the end of a year; the
+second was love-sick, and threw down his tools and gave up his situation
+to wander after the departed siren who had turned his head; the third,
+when I inquired how it was that the things he had sown never by any
+chance came up, scratched his head, and as this is a sure sign of
+ineptitude, I sent him away.
+
+Then I sat down and thought. I had been here two years and worked hard,
+through these men, at the garden; I had done my best to learn all I
+could and make it beautiful; I had refused to have more than an inferior
+gardener because of his supposed more perfect obedience, and one
+assistant, because of my desire to enjoy the garden undisturbed; I had
+studied diligently all the gardening books I could lay hands on; I was
+under the impression that I am an ordinarily intelligent person, and
+that if an ordinarily intelligent person devotes his whole time to
+studying a subject he loves, success is very probable; and yet at the
+end of two years what was my garden like? The failures of the first two
+summers had been regarded with philosophy; but that third summer I used
+to go into it sometimes and cry.
+
+As far as I was concerned I had really learned a little, and knew what
+to buy, and had fairly correct notions as to when and in what soil to
+sow and plant what I had bought; but of what use is it to buy good seeds
+and plants and bulbs if you are forced to hand them over to a gardener
+who listens with ill-concealed impatience to the careful directions you
+give him, says Jawohl a great many times, and then goes off and puts
+them in in the way he has always done, which is invariably the wrong
+way? My hands were tied because of the unfortunate circumstance of sex,
+or I would gladly have changed places with him and requested him to do
+the talking while I did the planting, and as he probably would not have
+talked much there would have been a distinct gain in the peace of the
+world, which would surely be very materially increased if women's
+tongues were tied instead of their hands, and those that want to could
+work with them without collecting a crowd. And is it not certain that
+the more one's body works the fainter grow the waggings of one's tongue?
+I sometimes literally ache with envy as I watch the men going about
+their pleasant work in the sunshine, turning up the luscious damp earth,
+raking, weeding, watering, planting, cutting the grass, pruning the
+trees--not a thing that they do from the first uncovering of the roses
+in the spring to the November bonfires but fills my soul with longing to
+be up and doing it too. A great many things will have to happen,
+however, before such a state of popular large-mindedness as will allow
+of my digging without creating a sensation is reached, so I have plenty
+of time for further grumblings; only I do very much wish that the
+tongues inhabiting this apparently lonely and deserted countryside would
+restrict their comments to the sins, if any, committed by the indigenous
+females (since sins are fair game for comment) and leave their harmless
+eccentricities alone. After having driven through vast tracts of forest
+and heath for hours, and never meeting a soul or seeing a house, it is
+surprising to be told that on such a day you took such a drive and were
+at such a spot; yet this has happened to me more than once. And if even
+this is watched and noted, with what lightning rapidity would the news
+spread that I had been seen stalking down the garden path with a hoe
+over my shoulder and a basket in my hand, and weeding written large on
+every feature! Yet I should love to weed.
+
+I think it was the way the weeds flourished that put an end at last to
+my hesitations about taking an experienced gardener and giving him a
+reasonable number of helpers, for I found that much as I enjoyed
+privacy, I yet detested nettles more, and the nettles appeared really to
+pick out those places to grow in where my sweetest things were planted,
+and utterly defied the three meek men when they made periodical and
+feeble efforts to get rid of them. I have a large heart in regard to
+things that grow, and many a weed that would not be tolerated anywhere
+else is allowed to live and multiply undisturbed in my garden. They are
+such pretty things, some of them, such charmingly audacious things, and
+it is so particularly nice of them to do all their growing, and
+flowering, and seed-bearing without any help or any encouragement. I
+admit I feel vexed if they are so officious as to push up among my tea
+roses and pansies, and I also prefer my paths without them; but on the
+grass, for instance, why not let the poor little creatures enjoy
+themselves quietly, instead of going out with a dreadful instrument and
+viciously digging them up one by one? Once I went into the garden just
+as the last of the three inept ones had taken up his stand, armed with
+this implement, in the middle of the sheet of gold and silver that is
+known for convenience' sake as the lawn, and was scratching his head, as
+he looked round, in a futile effort to decide where he should begin. I
+saved the dandelions and daisies on that occasion, and I like to believe
+they know it. They certainly look very jolly when I come out, and I
+rather fancy the dandelions dig each other in their little ribs when
+they see me, and whisper, "Here comes Elizabeth; she's a good sort,
+ain't she?"--for of course dandelions do not express themselves very
+elegantly.
+
+But nettles are not to be tolerated. They settled the question on which
+I had been turning my back for so long, and one fine August morning,
+when there seemed to be nothing in the garden but nettles, and it was
+hard to believe that we had ever been doing anything but carefully
+cultivating them in all their varieties, I walked into the Man of
+Wrath's den.
+
+"My dear man," I began, in the small caressing voice of one who has long
+been obstinate and is in the act of giving in, "will you kindly
+advertise for a head gardener and a proper number of assistants? Nearly
+all the bulbs and seeds and plants I have squandered my money and my
+hopes on have turned out to be nettles, and I don't like them. I have
+had a wretched summer, and never want to see a meek gardener again."
+
+"My dear Elizabeth," he replied, "I regret that you did not take my
+advice sooner. How often have I pointed out the folly of engaging one
+incapable person after the other? The vegetables, when we get any, are
+uneatable, and there is never any fruit. I do not in the least doubt
+your good intentions, but you are wanting in judgment. When will you
+learn to rely on my experience?"
+
+I hung my head; for was he not in the pleasant position of being able to
+say, "I told you so"?--which indeed he has been saying for the last two
+years. "I don't like relying," I murmured, "and have rather a prejudice
+against somebody else's experience. Please will you send the
+advertisement to-day?"
+
+They came in such shoals that half the population must have been head
+gardeners out of situations. I took all the likely ones round the
+garden, and I do not think I ever spent a more chastening week than that
+week of selection. Their remarks were, naturally, of the frankest
+nature, as I had told them I had had practically only gardeners'
+assistants since I lived here, and they had no idea, when they were
+politely scoffing at some arrangement, that it happened to be one of my
+own. The hot-beds in the kitchen garden with which I had taken such
+pains were objects of special derision. It appeared that they were all
+wrong--measurements, preparation, soil, manure, everything that could be
+wrong, was. Certainly the only crop we had from them was weeds. But I
+began about half way through the week to grow sceptical, because on
+comparing their criticisms I found they seldom agreed, and so took
+courage again. Finally I chose a nice, trim young man, with strikingly
+intelligent eyes and quick movements, who had shown himself less
+concerned with the state of chaos existing than with considerations of
+what might eventually be made of the place. He is very deaf, so he
+wastes no time in words, and is exceedingly keen on gardening, and
+knows, as I very soon discovered, a vast amount more than I do, in spite
+of my three years' application. Moreover, he is filled with that
+humility and eagerness to learn which is only found in those who have
+already learned more than their neighbours. He enters into my plans with
+enthusiasm, and makes suggestions of his own, which, if not always quite
+in accordance with what are perhaps my peculiar tastes, at least plainly
+show that he understands his business. We had a very busy winter
+together altering all the beds, for they none of them had been given a
+soil in which plants could grow, and next autumn I intend to have all
+the so-called lawns dug up and levelled, and shall see whether I cannot
+have decent turf here. I told him he must save the daisy and dandelion
+roots, and he looked rather crestfallen at that, but he is young, and
+can learn to like what I like, and get rid of his only fault, a nursery-
+gardener attitude towards all flowers that are not the fashion. "I shall
+want a great many daffodils next spring," I shouted one day at the
+beginning of our acquaintance.
+
+His eyes gleamed. "Ah yes," he said with immediate approval, "they are
+_sehr modern."
+
+I was divided between amusement at the notion of Spenser's
+daffadowndillies being _modern_, and indignation at hearing exactly the
+same adjective applied to them that the woman who sells me my hats
+bestows on the most appalling examples of her stock.
+
+"They are to be in troops on the grass," I said; whereupon his face grew
+doubtful. "That is indeed _sehr modern_," I shouted. But he had grown
+suddenly deafer--a phenomenon I have observed to occur every time my
+orders are such as he has never been given before. After a time he will,
+I think, become imbued with my unorthodoxy in these matters; and
+meanwhile he has the true gardening spirit and loves his work, and love,
+after all, is the chief thing. I know of no compost so good. In the
+poorest soil, love alone, by itself, will work wonders.
+
+Down the garden path, past the copse of lilacs with their swelling dark
+buds, and the great three-cornered bed of tea roses and pansies in front
+of it, between the rows of china roses and past the lily and foxglove
+groups, we came last night to the spring garden in the open glade round
+the old oak; and there, the first to flower of the flowering trees, and
+standing out like a lovely white naked thing against the dusk of the
+evening, was a double cherry in full bloom, while close beside it, but
+not so visible so late, with all their graceful growth outlined by rosy
+buds, were two Japanese crab apples. The grass just there is filled with
+narcissus, and at the foot of the oak a colony of tulips consoles me for
+the loss of the purple crocus patches, so lovely a little while since.
+
+"I must be by myself for once a whole summer through," I repeated,
+looking round at these things with a feeling of hardly being able to
+bear their beauty, and the beauty of the starry sky, and the beauty of
+the silence and the scent--"I must be alone, so that I shall not miss
+one of these wonders, and have leisure really to _live_."
+
+"Very well, my dear," replied the Man of Wrath, "only do not grumble
+afterwards when you find it dull. You shall be solitary if you choose,
+and, as far as I am concerned, I will invite no one. It is always best
+to allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good deal
+of bother. To have what she desired is generally an effective
+punishment."
+
+"Dear Sage," I cried, slipping my hand through his arm, "don't be so
+wise! I promise you that I won't be dull, and I won't be punished, and I
+will be happy."
+
+And we sauntered slowly back to the house in great contentment,
+discussing the firmament and such high things, as though we knew all
+about them.
+
+May 15th.--There is a dip in the rye-fields about half a mile from my
+garden gate, a little round hollow like a dimple, with water and reeds
+at the bottom, and a few water-loving trees and bushes on the shelving
+ground around. Here I have been nearly every morning lately, for it
+suits the mood I am in, and I like the narrow footpath to it through the
+rye, and I like its solitary dampness in a place where everything is
+parched, and when I am lying on the grass and look down I can see the
+reeds glistening greenly in the water, and when I look up I can see the
+rye-fringe brushing the sky. All sorts of beasts come and stare at me,
+and larks sing above me, and creeping things crawl over me, and stir in
+the long grass beside me; and here I bring my book, and read and dream
+away the profitable morning hours, to the accompaniment of the amorous
+croakings of innumerable frogs.
+
+Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me as
+more appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as was
+hitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person who
+loves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you try
+to read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in the
+sun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend the
+happiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeing
+heartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall have
+more ripely considered the thing. He, of course, does not like me as
+much as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs produced
+by wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get a
+match and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which I
+wipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told me
+that he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is best
+to avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yet
+reached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in its
+true character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like to
+wipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it were
+possible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, I
+should also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoes
+too, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for this
+purpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreau
+came back again, and lived for the rest of his days like other people.
+During his life, I imagine he would have refused to notice anything so
+fatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigned
+discourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongs
+to me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as much
+and as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to his
+dearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasant
+companion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morning
+hours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and it
+grieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaint
+sentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certain
+bush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time and
+that I must be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefully
+tucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grass
+to keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine.
+"Oh, my dear Thoreau," I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heat
+of the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did you
+have flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of your
+philosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know that
+inside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly of
+allowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool
+called a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of the
+necessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking another
+way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back for
+all that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and left
+there, because I still happen to have a body attached to my spirit,
+which, if not fed at the ordinary time, becomes a nuisance. Yet he is
+right; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try to
+sail by it like Ulysses if I had a biscuit in my pocket to comfort me,
+but there are the babies to be fed, and the Man of Wrath, and how can a
+respectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in which
+those dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punished
+every day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I so
+much object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshiny
+morning hours at my pond, when I feel as though I were almost a poet,
+and very nearly a philosopher, and wholly a joyous animal in an ecstasy
+of love with life, to come back and live through those dreary luncheon-
+ridden hours, when the soul is crushed out of sight and sense by cutlets
+and asparagus and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns his
+back on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in the
+afternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will
+not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they
+are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a
+drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the
+grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great
+friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be
+entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty
+tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is
+that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I
+read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit,
+buried in cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with
+the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so
+much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who asserts
+that in the country the only things that make one happy are meals. "I
+was happy," he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin in
+the Island of Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain,--"I
+was happy when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who live
+in the country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity of
+mind, as well as from the desire of eating." And such is the
+perverseness of human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even more
+than Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily.
+
+In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I am
+sure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said many
+lovely things about them that remain in one's memory just as
+persistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actual
+feelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could so
+beautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amount
+before they can painfully stammer out a sentence that will describe it;
+and when they have got it out, how it seems to have just missed the core
+of the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it is
+of what was perhaps a mighty feeling! I read Goethe on a special seat,
+never departed from when he accompanies me, a seat on the south side of
+an ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimes
+prevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a great
+beech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches I
+can see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming out
+beyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, its
+first spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almost
+golden backed by a solemn cluster of firs. Here I read Goethe--
+everything I have of his, both what is well known and what is not; here
+I shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I
+wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the
+complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder
+and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the
+shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the
+opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on
+the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from
+which I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception of
+what, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not.
+
+In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt
+Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful
+spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky,
+silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the
+beatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, such
+rapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, and
+trees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for all
+that breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help and
+mend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended and
+comforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the one
+complete and final consolation--before this revelation of yearning,
+universal pity, every-day selfishness stands awe-struck and ashamed.
+
+When I drive in the forests, Keats goes with me; and if I extend my
+drive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneath
+the pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I take
+Spenser; and presently the blue waves are the ripples of the Idle Lake,
+and a tiny white sail in the distance is Phaedria's shallow ship,
+bearing Cymochles swiftly away to her drowsy little nest of delights.
+How can I tell why Keats has never been brought here, and why Spenser is
+brought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of the
+elementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but by
+simply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, have
+done with them once and for all.
+
+What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and
+I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing
+returns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have been to come
+into the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consuming
+passion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul! I feel I
+owe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation is
+that they too did not care for hats. In the centre of my library there is
+a wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told,
+from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor to
+ceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the books
+that I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more--all
+the books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases round
+the walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, and
+easiest to get at, are those I love the _best_--the very elect among my
+favourites. They change from time to time as I get older, and with years
+some that are in the bookcases come here, and some that are here go into
+the bookcases, and some again are removed altogether, and are placed on
+certain shelves in the drawing-room which are reserved for those that
+have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and from whence they
+seldom, if ever, return. Carlyle used to be among the elect. That was
+years ago, when my hair was very long, and my skirts very short, and I
+sat in the paternal groves with _Sartor Resartus_, and felt full of
+wisdom and _Weltschmerz_; and even after I was married, when we lived in
+town, and the noise of his thunderings was almost drowned by the rattle
+of droschkies over the stones in the street below, he still shone forth a
+bright, particular star. Now, whether it is age creeping upon me, or
+whether it is that the country is very still and sound carries, or
+whether my ears have grown sensitive, I know not; but the moment I open
+him there rushes out such a clatter of denunciation, and vehemence, and
+wrath, that I am completely deafened; and as I easily get bewildered, and
+love peace, and my chief aim is to follow the apostle's advice and study
+to be quiet, he has been degraded from his high position round the pillar
+and has gone into retirement against the wall, where the accident of
+alphabet causes him to rest in the soothing society of one Carina, a
+harmless gentleman, whose book on the _Bagni di Lucca_ is on his left,
+and a Frenchman of the name of Charlemagne, whose soporific comedy
+written at the beginning of the century and called _Le Testament de
+l'Oncle_, _ou Les Lunettes Cassees_, is next to him on his right. Two
+works of his still remain, however, among the elect, though differing in
+glory--his _Frederick the Great_, fascinating for obvious reasons to the
+patriotic German mind, and his _Life of Sterling_, a quiet book on the
+whole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the natural
+positions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of genius
+writing the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friend
+was exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the face
+of such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether removed
+from Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence at all, unless it be
+an eminence, that (happily) crowded bit of ground, where the bright and
+courageous and lovable stand together. We Germans have all heard of
+Carlyle, and many of us have read him with due amazement, our admiration
+often interrupted by groans at the difficulties his style places in the
+candid foreigner's path; but without Carlyle which of us would ever have
+heard of Sterling? And even in this comparatively placid book mines of
+the accustomed vehemence are sprung on the shrinking reader. To the
+prosaic German, nourished on a literature free from thunderings and any
+marked acuteness of enthusiasm, Carlyle is an altogether astonishing
+phenomenon.
+
+And here I feel constrained to inquire sternly who I am that I should
+talk in this unbecoming manner of Carlyle? To which I reply that I am
+only a humble German seeking after peace, devoid of the least real
+desire to criticise anybody, and merely anxious to get out of the way of
+geniuses when they make too much noise. All I want is to read quietly
+the books that I at present prefer. Carlyle is shut up now and therefore
+silent on his comfortable shelf; yet who knows but what in my old age,
+when I begin to feel really young, I may not once again find comfort in
+him?
+
+What a medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austen
+leaning against Heine--what would she have said to that, I wonder?--with
+Miss Mitford and _Cranford_ to keep her in countenance on her other
+side. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the one
+that has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Here
+are Ruskin, Lubbock, White's _Selborne_, Izaak Walton, Drummond, Herbert
+Spencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I do
+not), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, Oliver
+Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, _Wuthering Heights_, Lamb's _Essays_,
+Johnson's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortal
+Pepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that I
+loved as a child and read and love to this day; various French
+children's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of German
+children's books, on which I was brought up, with their charming
+woodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and good
+housemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of the
+atmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgments
+and rewards in which they lived, and how the _Finger Gottes_ was
+impressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most of
+the dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and book
+about gardens that has been published of late years.
+
+These gardening books are an unfailing delight, especially in winter,
+when to sit by my blazing peat fire with the snow driving past the
+windows and read the luscious descriptions of roses and all the other
+summer glories is one of my greatest pleasures. And then how well I get
+to know and love those gardens whose gradual development has been
+described by their owners, and how happily I wander in fancy down the
+paths of certain specially charming ones in Lancashire, Berkshire,
+Surrey, and Kent, and admire the beautiful arrangement of bed and
+border, and the charming bits in unexpected corners, and all the
+evidences of untiring love! Any book I see advertised that treats of
+gardens I immediately buy, and thus possess quite a collection of
+fascinating and instructive garden literature. A few are feeble, and get
+shunted off into the drawing-room; but the others stay with me winter
+and summer, and soon lose the gloss of their new coats, and put on the
+comfortable look of old friends in every-day clothes, under the frequent
+touch of affection. They are such special friends that I can hardly pass
+them without a nod and a smile at the well-known covers, each of which
+has some pleasant association of time and place to make it still more
+dear.
+
+My spirit too has wandered in one or two French gardens, but has not yet
+heard of a German one loved beyond everything by its owner. It is, of
+course, possible that my countrymen do love them and keep quiet about
+them, but many things are possible that are not probable, and experience
+compels me to the opinion that this is one of them. We have the usual
+rich man who has fine gardens laid out regardless of expense, but those
+are not gardens in the sense I mean; and we have the poor man with his
+bit of ground, hardly ever treated otherwise than as a fowl-run or a
+place dedicated to potatoes; and as for the middle class, it is too busy
+hurrying through life to have time or inclination to stop and plant a
+rose.
+
+How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting and
+spending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floating
+leisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hot
+scramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at the
+vulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring and
+unabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are only
+pennies, after all--unpleasant, battered copper things, without a gold
+piece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and the
+hatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of those
+above you who have more. And as I perceive I am growing wise, and what
+is even worse, allegorical, and as these are tendencies to be fought
+against as long as possible, I'll go into the garden and play with the
+babies, who at this moment are sitting in a row on the buttercups,
+singing what appear to be selections from popular airs.
+
+
+
+June
+
+
+June 3rd.--The Man of Wrath, I observe, is laying traps for me and being
+deep. He has prophesied that I will find solitude intolerable, and he is
+naturally desirous that his prophecy should be fulfilled. He knows that
+continuous rain depresses me, and he is awaiting a spell of it to bring
+me to a confession that I was wrong after all, whereupon he will make
+that remark so precious to the married heart, "My dear, I told you so."
+He begins the day by tapping the barometer, looking at the sky, and
+shaking his head. If there are any clouds he remarks that they are
+coming up, and if there are none he says it is too fine to last. He has
+even gone the length once or twice of starting off to the farm on hot,
+sunny mornings in his mackintosh, in order to impress on me beyond all
+doubt that the weather is breaking up. He studiously keeps out of my way
+all day, so that I may have every opportunity of being bored as quickly
+as possible, and in the evenings he retires to his den directly after
+dinner, muttering something about letters. When he has finally
+disappeared, I go out to the stars and laugh at his transparent wiles.
+
+But how would it be if we did have a spell of wet weather? I do not
+quite know. As long as it is fine, rainy days in the future do not seem
+so very terrible, and one, or even two really wet ones are quite
+enjoyable when they do come--pleasant times that remind one of the snug
+winter now so far off, times of reading, and writing, and paying one's
+bills. I never pay bills or write letters on fine summer days. Not for
+any one will I forego all that such a day rightly spent out of doors
+might give me; so that a wet day at intervals is almost as necessary for
+me as for my garden. But how would it be if there were many wet days? I
+believe a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make the
+stoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simple
+expedient of turning your face to the fire; but when you have no fire,
+and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and the
+dreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blank
+corners of your heart. I rather fancy, however, that it is a waste of
+energy to ponder over what I should do if we had a wet summer on such a
+radiant day as this. I prefer sitting here on the verandah and looking
+down through a frame of leaves at all the rosebuds June has put in the
+beds round the sun-dial, to ponder over nothing, and just be glad that I
+am alive. The verandah at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon is a place
+in which to be happy and not decide anything, as my friend Thoreau told
+me of some other tranquil spot this morning. The chairs are comfortable,
+there is a table to write on, and the shadows of young leaves flicker
+across the paper. On one side a Crimson Rambler is thrusting inquisitive
+shoots through the wooden bars, being able this year for the first time
+since it was planted to see what I am doing up here, and next to it a
+Jackmanni clematis clings with soft young fingers to anything it thinks
+likely to help it up to the goal of its ambition, the roof. I wonder
+which of the two will get there first. Down there in the rose beds,
+among the hundreds of buds there is only one full-blown rose as yet, a
+Marie van Houtte, one of the loveliest of the tea roses, perfect in
+shape and scent and colour, and in my garden always the first rose to
+flower; and the first flowers it bears are the loveliest of its own
+lovely flowers, as though it felt that the first of its children to see
+the sky and the sun and the familiar garden after the winter sleep ought
+to put on the very daintiest clothes they can muster for such a festal
+occasion.
+
+Through the open schoolroom windows I can hear the two eldest babies at
+their lessons. The village schoolmaster comes over every afternoon and
+teaches them for two hours, so that we are free from governesses in the
+house, and once those two hours are over they are free for twenty-four
+from anything in the shape of learning. The schoolroom is next to the
+verandah, and as two o'clock approaches their excitement becomes more
+and more intense, and they flutter up and down the steps, looking in
+their white dresses like angels on a Jacob's ladder, or watch eagerly
+among the bushes for a first glimpse of him, like miniature and
+perfectly proper Isoldes. He is a kind giant with that endless supply of
+patience so often found in giants, especially when they happen to be
+village schoolmasters, and judging from the amount of laughter I hear,
+the babies seem to enjoy their lessons in a way they never did before.
+Every day they prepare bouquets for him, and he gets more of them than a
+_prima donna_, or at any rate a more regular supply. The first day he
+came I was afraid they would be very shy of such a big strange man, and
+that he would extract nothing from them but tears; but the moment I left
+them alone together and as I shut the door, I heard them eagerly
+informing him, by way of opening the friendship, that their heads were
+washed every Saturday night, and that their hair-ribbons did not match
+because there had not been enough of the one sort to go round. I went
+away hoping that they would not think it necessary to tell him how often
+my head is washed, or any other news of a personal nature about me; but
+I believe by this time that man knows everything there is to know about
+the details of my morning toilet, which is daily watched with the
+greatest interest by the Three. I hope he will be more successful than I
+was in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, at
+which stage their questions became so searching as to completely
+confound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especially
+regrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought the
+course to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiar
+to infallibility in a corner, and telling them that they were too young
+to understand these things for the present; and they, having a touching
+faith in the truth of every word I say, gave three contented little
+purrs of assent, and proposed that we should play instead at rolling
+down the grass bank under the south windows--which I did not do, I am
+glad to remember.
+
+But the schoolmaster, after four weeks' teaching, has got them as far as
+Moses, and safely past the Noah's ark on which I came to grief, and if
+glibness is a sign of knowledge then they have learned the story very
+thoroughly. Yesterday, after he had gone, they emerged into the verandah
+fresh from Moses and bursting with eagerness to tell me all about it.
+
+"Herr Schenk told us to-day about Moses," began the April baby, making a
+rush at me.
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"Yes, and a _boser_, _boser Konig_ who said every boy must be deaded,
+and Moses was the _allerliebster_."
+
+"Talk English, my _dear_ baby, and not such a dreadful mixture," I
+besought.
+
+"He wasn't a cat."
+
+"A cat?"
+
+"Yes, he wasn't a cat, that Moses--a boy was he."
+
+"But of course he wasn't a cat," I said with some severity; "no one ever
+supposed he was."
+
+"Yes, but mummy," she explained eagerly, with much appropriate hand-
+action, "the cook's Moses _is_ a cat."
+
+"Oh, I see. Well?"
+
+"And he was put in a basket in the water, and that did swim. And then
+one time they comed, and she said--"
+
+"Who came? And who said?"
+
+"Why, the ladies; and the _Konigstochter_ said, _'Ach hormal_, _da_
+_schreit so etwas_.'"
+
+"In German?"
+
+"Yes, and then they went near, and one must take off her shoes and
+stockings and go in the water and fetch that tiny basket, and then they
+made it open, and that _Kind_ did cry and cry and _strampel_ so"--here
+both the babies gave such a vivid illustration of the _strampeln_ that
+the verandah shook--"and see! it is a tiny baby. And they fetched
+somebody to give it to eat, and the _Konigstochter_ can keep that boy,
+and further it doesn't go."
+
+"Do you love Moses, mummy?" asked the May baby, jumping into my lap, and
+taking my face in both her hands--one of the many pretty, caressing
+little ways of a very pretty, caressing little creature.
+
+"Yes," I replied bravely, "I love him."
+
+"Then I too!" they cried with simultaneous gladness, the seal having
+thus been affixed to the legitimacy of their regard for him. To be of
+such authority that your verdict on every subject under heaven is
+absolute and final is without doubt to be in a proud position, but, like
+all proud positions, it bristles with pitfalls and drawbacks to the
+weak-kneed; and most of my conversations with the babies end in a sudden
+change of subject made necessary by the tendency of their remarks and
+the unanswerableness of their arguments. Happily, yesterday the Moses
+talk was brought to an end by the April baby herself, who suddenly
+remembered that I had not yet seen and sympathised with her dearest
+possession, a Dutch doll called Mary Jane, since a lamentable accident
+had bereft it of both its legs; and she had dived into the schoolroom
+and fished it out of the dark corner reserved for the mangled and thrust
+it in my face before I had well done musing on the nature and extent of
+my love for Moses--for I try to be conscientious--and bracing myself to
+meet the next question.
+
+"See this poor Mary Jane," she said, her voice and hand quivering with
+tenderness as she lifted its petticoats to show me the full extent of
+the calamity, "see, mummy, no legs--only twowsers and nothing further."
+
+I wish they would speak English a little better. The pains I take to
+correct them and weed out the German words that crop up in every
+sentence are really untiring, and the results discouraging. Indeed, as
+they get older the German asserts itself more and more, and is
+threatening to swallow up the little English they have left entirely. I
+talk English steadily with them, but everybody else, including a small
+French nurse lately imported, nothing but German. Somebody told me the
+thing to do was to let children pick up languages when they were babies,
+at which period they absorb them as easily as food and drink, and are
+quite unaware that they are learning anything at all; whereupon I
+immediately introduced this French girl into the family, forgetting how
+little English they have absorbed, and the result has been that they
+pass their days delightfully in teaching her German. They were
+astonished at first on discovering that she could not understand a word
+they said, and soon set about altering such an uncomfortable state of
+things; and as they are three to one and very zealous, and she is a meek
+little person with a profile like a teapot with a twisted black handle
+of hair, their success was practically certain from the beginning, and
+she is getting on quite nicely with her German, and has at least already
+thoroughly learned all the mistakes. She wanders in the garden with a
+surprised look on her face as of one who is moving about in worlds not
+realised; and the three cling to her skirts and give her enthusiastic
+lessons all day long.
+
+Poor Seraphine! What courage to weigh anchor at eighteen and go into a
+foreign country, to a place where you are among utter strangers, without
+a friend, unable to speak a word of the language, and not even sure
+before you start whether you will be given enough to eat. Either it is
+that saddest of courage forced on the timid by necessity, or, as Doctor
+Johnson would probably have said, it is stark insensibility; and I am
+afraid when I look at her I silently agree with the apostle of common
+sense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling,
+for the altogether inadequate reason that she has a certain resemblance
+to a teapot. Now is it not hard that a person may have a soul as
+beautiful as an angel's, a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds and
+harmonies, and if nature has not thought fit to endow his body with a
+chin the world will have none of him? The vulgar prejudice is in favour
+of chins, and who shall escape its influence? I, for one, cannot, though
+theoretically I utterly reject the belief that the body is the likeness
+of the soul; for has not each of us friends who, we know, love beyond
+everything that which is noble and good, and who by no means themselves
+look noble and good? And what about all the beautiful persons who love
+nothing on earth except themselves? Yet who in the world cares how
+perfect the nature may be, how humble, how sweet, how gracious, that
+dwells in a chinless body? Nobody has time to inquire into natures, and
+the chinless must be content to be treated in something of the same
+good-natured, tolerant fashion in which we treat our poor relations
+until such time as they shall have grown a beard; and those who by their
+sex are for ever shut out from this glorious possibility will have to
+take care, should they be of a bright intelligence, how they speak with
+the tongues of men and of angels, nothing being more droll than the
+effect of high words and poetic ideas issuing from a face that does not
+match them.
+
+I wish we were not so easily affected by each other's looks. Sometimes,
+during the course of a long correspondence with a friend, he grows to be
+inexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine his
+intellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in great
+perfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity,
+after which I have been so long and so vainly striving. It is not I
+clothing him with the attributes I love and wandering away insensibly
+into that sweet land of illusions to which our footsteps turn whenever
+they are left to themselves, it is his very self unconsciously writing
+itself into his letters, the very man as he is without his body. Then I
+meet him again, and all illusions go. He is what I had always found him
+when we were together, good and amiable; but some trick of manner, some
+feature or attitude that I do not quite like, makes me forget, and be
+totally unable to remember, what I know from his letters to be true of
+him. He, no doubt, feels the same thing about me, and so between us
+there is a thick veil of something fixed, which, dodge as we may, we
+never can get round.
+
+"Well, and what do you conclude from all that?" said the Man of Wrath,
+who had been going out by the verandah door with his gun and his dogs to
+shoot the squirrels before they had eaten up too many birds, and of
+whose coat-sleeve I had laid hold as he passed, keeping him by me like a
+second Wedding Guest, and almost as restless, while I gave expression to
+the above sentiments.
+
+"I don't know," I replied, "unless it is that the world is very evil and
+the times are waxing late, but that doesn't explain anything either,
+because it isn't true."
+
+And he went down the steps laughing and shaking his head and muttering
+something that I could not quite catch, and I am glad I could not, for
+the two words I did hear were women and nonsense.
+
+He has developed an unexpected passion for farming, much to my relief,
+and though we came down here at first only tentatively for a year, three
+have passed, and nothing has been said about going back to town. Nor
+will anything be said so long as he is not the one to say it, for no
+three years of my life can come up to these in happiness, and not even
+those splendid years of childhood that grow brighter as they recede were
+more full of delights. The delights are simple, it is true, and of the
+sort that easily provoke a turning up of the worldling's nose; but who
+cares for noses that turn up? I am simple myself, and never tire of the
+blessed liberty from all restraints. Even such apparently indifferent
+details as being able to walk straight out of doors without first
+getting into a hat and gloves and veil are full of a subtle charm that
+is ever fresh, and of which I can never have too much. It is clear that
+I was born for a placid country life, and placid it certainly is; so
+much so that the days are sometimes far more like a dream than anything
+real, the quiet days of reading, and thinking, and watching the changing
+lights, and the growth and fading of the flowers, the fresh quiet days
+when life is so full of zest that you cannot stop yourself from singing
+because you are so happy, the warm quiet days lying on the grass in a
+secluded corner observing the procession of clouds--this being, I admit,
+a particularly undignified attitude, but think of the edification! Each
+morning the simple act of opening my bedroom windows is the means of
+giving me an ever-recurring pleasure. Just underneath them is a border
+of rockets in full flower, at that hour in the shadow of the house,
+whose gables lie sharply defined on the grass beyond, and they send up
+their good morning of scent the moment they see me leaning out, careful
+not to omit the pretty German custom of morning greeting. I call back
+mine, embellished with many endearing words, and then their fragrance
+comes up close, and covers my face with gentlest little kisses. Behind
+them, on the other side of the lawn on this west side of the house, is a
+thick hedge of lilac just now at its best, and what that best is I wish
+all who love lilac could see. A century ago a man lived here who loved
+his garden. He loved, however, in his younger years, travelling as well,
+but in his travels did not forget this little corner of the earth
+belonging to him, and brought back the seeds of many strange trees such
+as had never been seen in these parts before, and tried experiments with
+them in the uncongenial soil, and though many perished, a few took hold,
+and grew, and flourished, and shade me now at tea-time. What flowers he
+had, and how he arranged his beds, no one knows, except that the eleven
+beds round the sun-dial were put there by him; and of one thing he seems
+to have been inordinately fond, and that was lilac. We have to thank him
+for the surprising beauty of the garden in May and early June, for he it
+was who planted the great groups of it, and the banks of it, and massed
+it between the pines and firs. Wherever a lilac bush could go a lilac
+bush went; and not common sorts, but a variety of good sorts, white, and
+purple, and pink, and mauve, and he must have planted it with special
+care and discrimination, for it grows here as nothing else will, and
+keeps his memory, in my heart at least, for ever gratefully green. On
+the wall behind our pew in church there is his monument, he having died
+here full of years, in the peace that attends the last hours of a good
+man who has loved his garden; and to the long Latin praises of his
+virtues and eminence I add, as I pass beneath it on Sundays, a heartiest
+Amen. Who would not join in the praises of a man to whom you owe your
+lilacs, and your Spanish chestnuts, and your tulip trees, and your
+pyramid oaks? "He was a good man, for he loved his garden"--that is the
+epitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a far
+clearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount of
+sonorous Latinities. How could he be anything _but_ good since he loved
+a garden--that divine filter that filters all the grossness out of us,
+and leaves us, each time we have been in it, clearer, and purer, and
+more harmless?
+
+
+June 16th.--Yesterday morning I got up at three o'clock and stole
+through the echoing passages and strange dark rooms, undid with
+trembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah, and passed out
+into a wonderful, unknown world. I stood for a few minutes motionless on
+the steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all the
+sin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but the
+beauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudless
+grey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air with
+scent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loud
+raptures at the coming of the sun. There in front of me was the sun-
+dial, there were the rose bushes, there was the bunch of pansies I had
+dropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange and
+unfamiliar it all looked, and how holy--as though God must be walking
+there in the cool of the day. I went down the path leading to the stream
+on the east side of the garden, brushing aside the rockets that were
+bending across it drowsy with dew, the larkspurs on either side of me
+rearing their spikes of heavenly blue against the steely blue of the
+sky, and the huge poppies like splashes of blood amongst the greys and
+blues and faint pearly whites of the innocent, new-born day. On the
+garden side of the stream there is a long row of silver birches, and on
+the other side a rye-field reaching across in powdery grey waves to the
+part of the sky where a solemn glow was already burning. I sat down on
+the twisted, half-fallen trunk of a birch and waited, my feet in the
+long grass and my slippers soaking in dew. Through the trees I could see
+the house with its closed shutters and drawn blinds, the people in it
+all missing, as I have missed day after day, the beauty of life at that
+hour. Just behind me the border of rockets and larkspurs came to an end,
+and, turning my head to watch a stealthy cat, my face brushed against a
+wet truss of blossom and got its first morning washing. It was
+wonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything to
+itself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burning
+redder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because one
+associates daylight with people, and voices, and bustle, and hurryings
+to and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, and
+feeding our bodies that we may be able to work to feed them again; but
+here was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pure
+air only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a living
+soul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming up
+to warm only me, and nowhere a single hard word being spoken, or a
+single selfish act being done, nowhere anything that could tarnish the
+blessed purity of the world as God has given it us. If one believed in
+angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and
+cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every
+twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The
+doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent,
+and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave,
+judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless,
+and forgiven. And see the blessedness of sleep, that sends us back for a
+space to our early innocence. Are not our first impulses on waking
+always good? Do we not all know how in times of wretchedness our first
+thoughts after the night's sleep are happy? We have been dreaming we are
+happy, and we wake with a smile, and stare still smiling for a moment at
+our stony griefs before with a stab we recognise them.
+
+There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came up
+quickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of the
+field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet
+flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and
+intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and
+suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the
+beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs
+all our courage--the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each
+of us lives and dies. Often I could cry for pity of our forlornness, and
+of the pathos of our endeavours to comfort ourselves. With what an agony
+of patience we build up the theories of consolation that are to protect,
+in times of trouble, our quivering and naked souls! And how fatally
+often the elaborate machinery refuses to work at the moment the blow is
+struck.
+
+I got up and turned my face away from the unbearable, indifferent
+brightness. Myriads of small suns danced before my eyes as I went along
+the edge of the stream to the seat round the oak in my spring garden,
+where I sat a little, looking at the morning from there, drinking it in
+in long breaths, and determining to think of nothing but just be happy.
+What a smell of freshly mown grass there was, and how the little heaps
+into which it had been raked the evening before sparkled with dewdrops
+as the sun caught them. And over there, how hot the poppies were already
+beginning to look--blazing back boldly in the face of the sun, flashing
+back fire for fire. I crossed the wet grass to the hammock under the
+beech on the lawn, and lay in it awhile trying to swing in time to the
+nightingale's tune; and then I walked round the ice-house to see how
+Goethe's corner looked at such an hour; and then I went down to the fir
+wood at the bottom of the garden where the light was slanting through
+green stems; and everywhere there was the same mystery, and emptiness,
+and wonder. When four o'clock drew near I set off home again, not
+desiring to meet gardeners and have my little hour of quiet talked
+about, still less my dressing-gown and slippers; so I picked a bunch of
+roses and hurried in, and just as I softly bolted the door, dreadfully
+afraid of being taken for a burglar, I heard the first water-cart of the
+day creaking round the corner. Fearfully I crept up to my room, and when
+I awoke at eight o'clock and saw the roses in a glass by my side, I
+remembered what had happened as though it had been years ago.
+
+Now here I have had an experience that I shall not soon forget,
+something very precious, and private, and close to my soul; a feeling as
+though I had taken the world by surprise, and seen it as it really is
+when off its guard--as though I had been quite near to the very core of
+things. The quiet holiness of that hour seems all the more mysterious
+now, because soon after breakfast yesterday the wind began to blow from
+the northwest, and has not left off since, and looking out of the window
+I cannot believe that it is the same garden, with the clouds driving
+over it in black layers, and angry little showers every now and then
+bespattering its harassed and helpless inhabitants, who cannot pull
+their roots up out of the ground and run for their lives, as I am sure
+they must long to do. How discouraging for a plant to have just proudly
+opened its loveliest flowers, the flowers it was dreaming about all the
+winter and working at so busily underground during the cold weeks of
+spring, and then for a spiteful shower of five minutes' duration to come
+and pelt them down, and batter them about, and cover the tender,
+delicate things with irremediable splashes of mud! Every bed is already
+filled with victims of the gale, and those that escape one shower go
+down before the next; so I must make up my mind, I suppose, to the
+wholesale destruction of the flowers that had reached perfection--that
+head of white rockets among them that washed my face a hundred years
+ago--and look forward cheerfully to the development of the younger
+generation of buds which cannot yet be harmed.
+
+I know these gales. We get them quite suddenly, always from the north-
+west, and always cold. They ruin my garden for a day or two, and in the
+summer try my temper, and at all seasons try my skin; yet they are
+precious because of the beautiful clear light they bring, the intensity
+of cold blue in the sky and the terrific purple blackness of the clouds
+one hour and their divine whiteness the next. They fly screaming over
+the plain as though ten thousand devils with whips were after them, and
+in the sunny intervals there is nothing in any of nature's moods to
+equal the clear sharpness of the atmosphere, all the mellowness and
+indistinctness beaten out of it, and every leaf and twig glistening
+coldly bright. It is not becoming, a north-westerly gale; it treats us
+as it treats the garden, but with opposite results, roughly rubbing the
+softness out of our faces, as I can see when I look at the babies, and
+avoid the further proof of my own reflection in the glass. But there is
+life in it, glowing, intense, robust life, and when in October after
+weeks of serene weather this gale suddenly pounces on us in all its
+savageness, and the cold comes in a gust, and the trees are stripped in
+an hour, what a bracing feeling it is, the feeling that here is the
+first breath of winter, that it is time to pull ourselves together, that
+the season of work, and discipline, and severity is upon us, the stern
+season that forces us to look facts in the face, to put aside our dreams
+and languors, and show what stuff we are made of. No one can possibly
+love the summer, the dear time of dreams, more passionately than I do;
+yet I have no desire to prolong it by running off south when the winter
+approaches and so cheat the year of half its lessons. It is delightful
+and instructive to potter among one's plants, but it is imperative for
+body and soul that the pottering should cease for a few months, and that
+we should be made to realise that grim other side of life. A long hard
+winter lived through from beginning to end without shirking is one of
+the most salutary experiences in the world. There is no nonsense about
+it; you could not indulge in vapours and the finer sentiments in the
+midst of its deadly earnest if you tried. The thermometer goes down to
+twenty degrees of frost Reaumur, and down you go with it to the
+realities, to that elementary state where everything is big--health and
+sickness, delight and misery, ecstasy and despair. It makes you remember
+your poorer neighbours, and sends you into their homes to see that they
+too are fitted out with the armour of warmth and food necessary in the
+long fight; and in your own home it draws you nearer than ever to each
+other. Out of doors it is too cold to walk, so you run, and are rewarded
+by the conviction that you cannot be more than fifteen; or you get into
+your furs, and dart away in a sleigh over the snow, and are sure there
+never was music so charming as that of its bells; or you put on your
+skates, and are off to the lake to which you drove so often on June
+nights, when it lay rosy in the reflection of the northern glow, and all
+alive with myriads of wild duck and plovers, and which is now, but for
+the swish of your skates, so silent, and but for your warmth and
+jollity, so forlorn. Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness and
+the pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books. It is
+then that I am glad I do not live in a cave, as I confess I have in my
+more godlike moments wished to do; it is then that I feel most capable
+of attending to the Man of Wrath's exhortations with an open mind; it is
+then that I actually like to hear the shrieks of the wind, and then that
+I give my heartiest assent, as I warm my feet at the fire, to the poet's
+proposition that all which we behold is full of blessings.
+
+But what dreariness can equal the dreariness of a cold gale at
+midsummer? I have been chilly and dejected all day, shut up behind the
+streaming window-panes, and not liking to have a fire because of its
+dissipated appearance in the scorching intervals of sunshine. Once or
+twice my hand was on the bell and I was going to order one, when out
+came the sun and it was June again, and I ran joyfully into the
+dripping, gleaming garden, only to be driven in five minutes later by a
+yet fiercer squall. I wandered disconsolately round my pillar of books,
+looking for the one that would lend itself best to the task of
+entertaining me under the prevailing conditions, but they all looked
+gloomy, and reserved, and forbidding. So I sat down in a very big chair,
+and reflected that if there were to be many days like this it might be
+as well to ask somebody cheerful to come and sit opposite me in all
+those other big chairs that were looking so unusually gigantic and
+empty. When the Man of Wrath came in to tea there were such heavy clouds
+that the room was quite dark, and he peered about for a moment before he
+saw me. I suppose in the gloom of the big room I must have looked rather
+lonely, and smaller than usual buried in the capacious chair, for when
+he finally discovered me his face widened into an inappropriately
+cheerful smile.
+
+"Well, my dear," he said genially, "how very cold it is."
+
+"Did you come in to say that?" I asked.
+
+"This tempest is very unusual in the summer," he proceeded; to which I
+made no reply of any sort.
+
+"I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. At
+least, I saw you, but it is so dark I thought you were a cushion."
+
+Now no woman likes to be taken for a cushion, so I rose and began to
+make tea with an icy dignity of demeanour.
+
+"I am afraid I shall be forced to break my promise not to invite any one
+here," he said, watching my face as he spoke. My heart gave a distinct
+leap--so small is the constancy and fortitude of woman. "But it will
+only be for one night." My heart sank down as though it were lead. "And
+I have just received a telegram that it will be to-night." Up went my
+heart with a cheerful bound.
+
+"Who is it?" I inquired. And then he told me that it was the least
+objectionable of the candidates for the living here, made vacant by our
+own parson having been appointed superintendent, the highest position in
+the Lutheran Church; and the gale must have brought me low indeed for
+the coming of a solitary parson to give me pleasure. The entire race of
+Lutheran parsons is unpleasing to me,--whether owing to their fault or
+to mine, it would ill become me to say,--and the one we are losing is
+the only one I have met that I can heartily respect, and admire, and
+like. But he is quite one by himself in his extreme godliness, perfect
+simplicity, and real humility, and though I knew it was unlikely we
+should find another as good, and I despised myself for the eagerness
+with which I felt I was looking forward to seeing a new face, I could
+not stop myself from suddenly feeling cheerful. Such is the weakness of
+the female mind, and such the unexpected consequences of two months'
+complete solitude with forty-eight hours' gale at the end of them.
+
+We have had countless applications during the last few weeks for the
+living, as it is a specially fat one for this part of the country, with
+a yearly income of six thousand marks, and a good house, and several
+acres of land. The Man of Wrath has been distracted by the difficulties
+of choice. According to the letters of recommendation, they were all
+wonderful men with unrivalled powers of preaching, but on closer inquiry
+there was sure to be some drawback. One was too old, another not old
+enough; another had twelve children, and the parsonage only allows for
+eight; one had a shrewish wife, and another was of Liberal tendencies in
+politics--a fatal objection; one was in money difficulties because he
+would spend more than he had, which was not surprising when one heard
+what he did have; and another was disliked in his parish because he and
+his wife were too close-fisted and would not spend at all; and at last,
+the Man of Wrath explained, the moment having arrived when if he did not
+himself appoint somebody his right to do so would lapse, he had written
+to the one who was coming, and invited him down that he might look at
+him, and ask him searching questions as to the faith which is in him.
+
+I forgot my gloom, and my half-formed desperate resolve to break my vow
+of solitude and fill the house with the frivolous, as I sat listening to
+the cheerful talk of the little parson this evening. He was so cheerful,
+yet it was hard to see any cause for it in the life he was leading, a
+life led by the great majority of the German clergy, fat livings being
+as rare here as anywhere else. He told us with pleasant frankness all
+about himself, how he lived on an income of two thousand marks with a
+wife and six children, and how he was often sorely put to it to keep
+decent shoes on their feet. "I am continually drawing up plans of
+expenditure," he said, "but the shoemaker's bill is always so much more
+than I had expected that it throws my calculations completely out."
+
+His wife, of course, was ailing, but already his eldest child, a girl of
+ten, took a great deal of the work off her mother's shoulders, poor
+baby. He was perfectly natural, and said in the simplest way that if the
+choice were to fall on him it would relieve him of many grinding
+anxieties; whereupon I privately determined that if the choice did not
+fall on him the Man of Wrath and I would be strangers from that hour.
+
+"Have you been worrying him with questions about his principles?" I
+asked, buttonholing the Man of Wrath as he came out from a private
+conference with him.
+
+"Principles? My dear Elizabeth, how can he have any on that income?"
+
+"If he is not a Conservative will you let that stand in his way, and
+doom that little child to go on taking work off other people's
+shoulders?"
+
+"My dear Elizabeth," he protested, "what has my decision for or against
+him to do with dooming little children to go on doing anything? I really
+cannot be governed by sentiment."
+
+"If you don't give it to him--" and I held up an awful finger of warning
+as he retreated, at which he only laughed.
+
+When the parson came to say good-night and good-bye, as he was leaving
+very early in the morning, I saw at once by his face that all was right.
+He bent over my hand, stammering out words of thanks and promises of
+devotion and invocations of blessings in such quantities that I began to
+feel quite pleased with myself, and as though I had been doing a
+virtuous deed. This feeling I saw reflected on the Man of Wrath's face,
+which made me consider that all we had done was to fill the living in
+the way that suited us best, and that we had no cause whatever to look
+and feel so benevolent. Still, even now, while the victorious candidate
+is dreaming of his trebled income and of the raptures of his home-coming
+to-morrow, the glow has not quite departed, and I am dwelling with
+satisfaction on the fact that we have been able to raise eight people
+above those hideous cares that crush all the colour out of the lives of
+the genteel poor. I am glad he has so many children, because there will
+be more to be made happy. They will be rich on the little income, and
+will no doubt dismiss the wise and willing eldest baby to appropriate
+dolls and pinafores; and everybody will have what they never yet have
+had, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure--leisure to sit
+down and look at themselves, and inquire what it is they really mean,
+and really want, and really intend to do with their lives. And this, I
+may observe, is a beneficial process wholly impossible on 100 pounds a
+year divided by eight.
+
+But I wonder whether they will be thin-skinned enough ever to discover
+that other and less delightful side of life only seen by those who have
+plenty of leisure. Sordid cares may be very terrible to the sensitive,
+and make them miss the best of everything, but as long as they have them
+and are busy from morning till night keeping up appearances, they miss
+also the burden of those fears, and dreads, and realisations that beset
+him who has time to think. When in the morning I go into my sausage-room
+and give out sausages, I never think of anything but sausages. My
+horizon is bounded by them, every faculty is absorbed by them, and they
+engross me, while I am with them, to the exclusion of the whole world.
+Not that I love them; as far as that goes, unlike the effect they
+produce on most of my country-men, they leave me singularly cold; but it
+is one of my duties to begin the day with sausages, and every morning
+for the short time I am in the midst of their shining rows, watching my
+_Mamsell_ dexterously hooking down the sleekest with an instrument like
+a boat-hook, I am practically dead to every other consideration in
+heaven or on earth. What are they to me, Love, Life, Death, all the
+mysteries? The one thing that concerns me is the due distribution to the
+servants of sausages; and until that is done, all obstinate questionings
+and blank misgivings must wait. If I were to spend my days in their
+entirety doing such work I should never have time to think, and if I
+never thought I should never feel, and if I never felt I should never
+suffer or rapturously enjoy, and so I should grow to be something very
+like a sausage myself, and not on that account, I do believe, any the
+less precious to the Man of Wrath.
+
+I know what I would do if I were both poor and genteel--the gentility
+should go to the place of all good ilities, including utility,
+respectability, and imbecility, and I would sit, quite frankly poor,
+with a piece of bread, and a pot of geraniums, and a book. I conclude
+that if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary to
+decency I might be able to afford a geranium, because I see them so
+often in the windows of cottages where there is little else; and if I
+preferred such inexpensive indulgences as thinking and reading and
+wandering in the fields to the doubtful gratification arising from kept-
+up appearances (always for the bedazzlement of the people opposite, and
+therefore always vulgar), I believe I should have enough left over to
+buy a radish to eat with my bread; and if the weather were fine, and I
+could eat it under a tree, and give a robin some crumbs in return for
+his cheeriness, would there be another creature in the world so happy? I
+know there would not.
+
+
+
+JULY
+
+
+July 1st.--I think that after roses sweet-peas are my favourite flowers.
+Nobody, except the ultra-original, denies the absolute supremacy of the
+rose. She is safe on her throne, and the only question to decide is
+which are the flowers that one loves next best. This I have been a long
+while deciding, though I believe I knew all the time somewhere deep down
+in my heart that they were sweet-peas; and every summer when they first
+come out, and every time, going round the garden, that I come across
+them, I murmur involuntarily, "Oh yes, _you_ are the sweetest, you dear,
+dear little things." And what a victory this is, to be ranked next the
+rose even by one person who loves her garden. Think of the wonderful
+beauty triumphed over--the lilies, the irises, the carnations, the
+violets, the frail and delicate poppies, the magnificent larkspurs, the
+burning nasturtiums, the fierce marigolds, the smooth, cool pansies. I
+have a bed at this moment in the full glory of all these things, a
+little chosen plot of fertile land, about fifteen yards long and of
+irregular breadth, shutting in at its broadest the east end of the walk
+along the south front of the house, and sloping away at the back down to
+a moist, low bit by the side of a very tiny stream, or rather thread of
+trickling water, where, in the dampest corner, shining in the sun, but
+with their feet kept cool and wet, is a colony of Japanese irises, and
+next to them higher on the slope Madonna lilies, so chaste in looks and
+so voluptuous in smell, and then a group of hollyhocks in tenderest
+shades of pink, and lemon, and white, and right and left of these white
+marguerites and evening primroses and that most exquisite of poppies
+called Shirley, and a little on one side a group of metallic blue
+delphiniums beside a towering white lupin, and in and out and everywhere
+mignonette, and stocks, and pinks, and a dozen other smaller but not
+less lovely plants. I wish I were a poet, that I might properly describe
+the beauty of this bit as it sparkles this afternoon in the sunshine
+after rain; but of all the charming, delicate, scented groups it
+contains, none to my mind is so lovely as the group of sweet-peas in its
+north-west corner. There is something so utterly gentle and tender about
+sweet-peas, something so endearing in their clinging, winding, yielding
+growth; and then the long straight stalk, and the perfect little winged
+flower at the top, with its soft, pearly texture and wonderful range and
+combination of colours--all of them pure, all of them satisfying, not an
+ugly one, or even a less beautiful one among them. And in the house,
+next to a china bowl of roses, there is no arrangement of flowers so
+lovely as a bowl of sweet-peas, or a Delf jar filled with them. What a
+mass of glowing, yet delicate colour it is! How prettily, the moment you
+open the door, it seems to send its fragrance to meet you! And how you
+hang over it, and bury your face in it, and love it, and cannot get away
+from it. I really am sorry for all the people in the world who miss such
+keen pleasure. It is one that each person who opens his eyes and his
+heart may have; and indeed, most of the things that are really worth
+having are within everybody's reach. Any one who chooses to take a
+country walk, or even the small amount of trouble necessary to get him
+on to his doorstep and make him open his eyes, may have them, and there
+are thousands of them thrust upon us by nature, who is for ever giving
+and blessing, at every turn as we walk. The sight of the first pale
+flowers starring the copses; an anemone held up against the blue sky
+with the sun shining through it towards you; the first fall of snow in
+the autumn; the first thaw of snow in the spring; the blustering, busy
+winds blowing the winter away and scurrying the dead, untidy leaves into
+the corners; the hot smell of pines--just like blackberries--when the
+sun is on them; the first February evening that is fine enough to show
+how the days are lengthening, with its pale yellow strip of sky behind
+the black trees whose branches are pearled with raindrops; the swift
+pang of realisation that the winter is gone and the spring is coming;
+the smell of the young larches a few weeks later; the bunch of cowslips
+that you kiss and kiss again because it is so perfect, because it is so
+divinely sweet, because of all the kisses in the world there is none
+other so exquisite--who that has felt the joy of these things would
+exchange them, even if in return he were to gain the whole world, with
+all its chimney-pots, and bricks, and dust, and dreariness? And we know
+that the gain of a world never yet made up for the loss of a soul.
+
+One day, in going round the head inspector's garden with his wife, whose
+care it is, I remarked with surprise that she had no sweet-peas. I
+called them _Lathyrus odoratus_, and she, having little Latin, did not
+understand. Then I called them _wohlriechende Wicken_, the German
+rendering of that which sounds so pretty in English, and she said she
+had never heard of them. The idea of an existence in a garden yet
+without sweet-peas, so willing, so modest, and so easily grown, had
+never presented itself as possible to my imagination. Ever since I can
+remember, my summers have been filled with them; and in the days when I
+sat in my own perambulator and they were three times as tall as I was, I
+well recollect a certain waving hedge of them in the garden of my
+childhood, and how I stared up longingly at the flowers so far beyond my
+reach, inaccessibly tossing against the sky. When I grew bigger and had
+a small garden of my own, I bought their seeds to the extent of twenty
+pfennings, and trained the plants over the rabbit-hutch that was the
+chief feature in the landscape. There were other seeds in that garden
+seeds on which I had laid out all my savings and round which played my
+fondest hopes, but the sweet-peas were the only ones that came up. The
+same thing happened here in my first summer, my gardening knowledge not
+having meanwhile kept pace with my years, and of the seeds sown that
+first season sweet-peas again were the only ones that came up. I should
+say they were just the things for people with very little time and
+experience at their disposal to grow. A garden might be made beautiful
+with sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweet
+labour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower of
+delicacy and refinement. Yet the Frau Inspector not only had never heard
+of them, but, on my showing her a bunch, was not in the least impressed,
+and led me in her garden to a number of those exceedingly vulgar red
+herbaceous peonies growing among her currant bushes, and announced with
+conviction that they were her favourite flower. It was on the tip of my
+tongue to point out that in these days of tree-peonies, and peonies so
+lovely in their silvery faint tints that they resemble gigantic roses,
+it is absolutely wicked to suffer those odious red ones to pervert one's
+taste; that a person who sees nothing but those every time he looks out
+of his window very quickly has his nice perception for true beauty
+blunted; that such a person would do well to visit my garden every day
+during the month of May, and so get himself cured by the sight of my
+peony bushes covered with huge scented white and blush flowers; and that
+he would, I was convinced, at the end of the cure, go home and pitch his
+own on to the dust-heap. But of what earthly use would it have been?
+Pointing out the difference between what is beautiful and what misses
+beauty to a Frau Inspector of forty, whose chief business it is to make
+butter, is likely to be singularly unprolific of good results; and,
+further, experience has taught me that whenever anything is on the tip
+of my tongue the best thing to do is to keep it there. I wonder why a
+woman always wants to interfere.
+
+It is a pity, nevertheless, that this lady should be so wanting in the
+aesthetic instinct, for her garden is full of possibilities. It lies due
+south, sheltered on the north, east, and west by farm buildings, and is
+rich in those old fruit-trees and well-seasoned gooseberry bushes that
+make such a good basis for the formation of that most delightful type of
+little garden, the flower-and-fruit-and-vegetable-mixed sort. She has,
+besides, an inestimable slimy, froggy pond, a perpetual treasure of
+malodorous water, much pined after by thirsty flowers; and then does she
+not live in the middle of a farmyard flowing with fertilising properties
+that only require a bucket and a shovel to transform them into roses?
+The way in which people miss their opportunities is melancholy.
+
+This pond of hers, by the way, is an object of the liveliest interest to
+the babies. They do not seem to mind the smell, and they love the slime,
+and they had played there for several days in great peace before the
+unfortunate accident of the June baby's falling in and being brought
+back looking like a green and speckled frog herself, revealed where it
+was they had persuaded Seraphine to let them spend their mornings. Then
+there was woe and lamentation, for I was sure they would all have
+typhoid fever, and I put them mercilessly to bed, and dosed them, as a
+preliminary, with castor oil--that oil of sorrow, as Carlyle calls it.
+It was no use sending for the doctor because there is no doctor within
+reach; a fact which simplifies life amazingly when you have children.
+During the time we lived in town the doctor was never out of the house.
+Hardly a day passed but one or other of the Three had a spot, or, as the
+expressive German has it, a _Pickel_, and what parent could resist
+sending for a doctor when one lived round the corner? But doctors are
+like bad habits--once you have shaken them off you discover how much
+better you are without them; and as for the babies, since they inhabit a
+garden, prompt bed and the above-mentioned simple remedy have been all
+that is necessary to keep them robust. I admit I was frightened when I
+heard where they had been playing, for when the wind comes from that
+quarter even sitting by my rose beds I have been reminded of the
+existence of the pond; and I kept them in bed for three days, anxiously
+awaiting symptoms, and my head full of a dreadful story I had heard of a
+little boy who had drunk seltzer water and thereupon been seized with
+typhoid fever and had died, and if, I asked myself with a power of
+reasoning unusual in a woman, you die after seltzer water, what will you
+not do after frog-pond? But they did nothing, except be uproarious, and
+sing at the top of their voices, and clamour for more dinner than I felt
+would be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill in
+a few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed and
+turned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared.
+The pond was at first strictly forbidden as a playground, but afterwards
+I made concessions, and now they are allowed to go to a deserted little
+burying-ground on the west side of it when the wind is in the west; and
+there at least they can hear the frogs, and sometimes, if they are
+patient, catch a delightful glimpse of them.
+
+The graveyard is in the middle of a group of pines that bounds the Frau
+Inspector's garden on that side, and has not been used within the memory
+of living man. The people here love to make their little burying-grounds
+in the heart of a wood if they can, and they are often a long way away
+from the church to which they belong because, while every hamlet has its
+burying-ground, three or four hamlets have to share a church; and indeed
+the need for churches is not so urgent as that for graves, seeing that,
+though we may not all go to church, we all of us die and must be buried.
+Some of these little cemeteries are not even anywhere near a village,
+and you come upon them unexpectedly in your drives through the woods--
+bits of fenced-in forest, the old gates dropping off their hinges, the
+paths green from long disuse, the unchecked trees casting black,
+impenetrable shadows across the poor, meek, pathetic graves. I try
+sometimes, pushing aside the weeds, to decipher the legend on the almost
+speechless headstones; but the voice has been choked out of them by
+years of wind, and frost, and snow, and a few stray letters are all that
+they can utter--a last stammering protest against oblivion.
+
+The Man of Wrath says all women love churchyards. He is fond of sweeping
+assertions, and is sometimes curiously feminine in his tendency to infer
+a general principle from a particular instance. The deserted little
+forest burying-grounds interest and touch me because they are so
+solitary, and humble, and neglected, and forgotten, and because so many
+long years have passed since tears were shed over the newly made graves.
+Nobody cries now for the husband, or father, or brother buried there;
+years and years ago the last tear that would ever be shed for them was
+dried--dried probably before the gate was reached on the way home--and
+they were not missed. Love and sorrow appear to be flowers of
+civilisation, and most to flourish where life has the broadest margin of
+leisure and abundance. The primary instincts are always there, and must
+first be satisfied; and if to obtain the means of satisfying them you
+have to work from morning till night without rest, who shall find time
+and energy to sit down and lament? I often go with the babies to the
+enclosure near the Frau Inspector's pond, and it seems just as natural
+that they should play there as that the white butterflies should chase
+each other undisturbed across the shadows. And then the place has a
+soothing influence on them, and they sober down as we approach it, and
+on hot afternoons sit quietly enough as close to the pond as they may,
+content to watch for the chance appearance of a frog while talking to me
+about angels.
+
+This is their favourite topic of conversation in this particular place.
+Just as I have special times and places for certain books, so do they
+seem to have special times and places for certain talk. The first time I
+took them there they asked me what the mounds were, and by a series of
+adroit questions extracted the information that the people who had been
+buried there were now angels (I am not a specialist, and must take
+refuge in telling them what I was told in my youth), and ever since then
+they refuse to call it a graveyard, and have christened it the angel-
+yard, and so have got into the way of discussing angels in all their
+bearings, sometimes to my confusion, whenever we go there.
+
+"But what _are_> angels, mummy?" said the June baby inconsequently this
+afternoon, after having assisted at the discussions for several days and
+apparently listening with attention.
+
+"_Such_ a silly baby!" cried April, turning upon her with contempt,
+"don't you know they are _lieber Gott's_ little girls?"
+
+Now I protest I had never told those babies anything of the sort. I
+answer their questions to the best of my ability and as conscientiously
+as I can, and then, when I hear them talking together afterwards, I am
+staggered by the impression they appear to have received. They live in a
+whole world of independent ideas in regard to heaven and the angels,
+ideas quite distinct from other people's, and, as far as I can make out,
+believe that the Being they call _lieber Gott_ pervades the garden,
+and is identical with, among other things, the sunshine and the air on a
+fine day. I never told them so, nor, I am sure, did Seraphine, and still
+less Seraphine's predecessor Miss Jones, whose views were wholly
+material; yet if, on bright mornings, I forget to immediately open all
+the library windows on coming down, the April baby runs in, and with
+quite a worried look on her face cries, "Mummy, won't you open the
+windows and let the _lieber Gott_ come in?"
+
+If they were less rosy and hungry, or if I were less prosaic, I might
+have gloomy forebodings that such keen interest in things and beings
+celestial was prophetic of a short life; and in books, we know, the
+children who talk much on these topics invariably die, after having
+given their reverential parents a quantity of advice. Fortunately such
+children are confined to books, and there is nothing of the ministering
+child--surely a very uncomfortable form of infant--about my babies.
+Indeed, I notice that in their conversations together on such matters a
+healthy spirit of contradiction prevails, and this afternoon, after
+having accepted April's definition of angels with apparent reverence,
+the June baby electrified the other two (always more orthodox and
+yielding) by remarking that she hoped she would never go to heaven. I
+pretended to be deep in my book and not listening; April and May were
+sitting on the grass sewing ("needling" they call it) fearful-looking
+woolwork things for Seraphine's birthday, and June was leaning idly
+against a pine trunk, swinging a headless doll round and round by its
+one remaining leg, her heels well dug into the ground, her sun-bonnet
+off, and all the yellow tangles of her hair falling across her sunburnt,
+grimy little face.
+
+"No," she repeated firmly, with her eyes fixed on her sisters' startled
+faces, "I don't want to. There's nothing there for babies to play with."
+
+"Nothing to play with?" exclaimed the other two in a breath--and
+throwing down their needle-work they made a simultaneous rush for me.
+
+"Mummy, did you hear? June says she doesn't want to go into the
+_Himmel_!" cried April, horror-stricken.
+
+"Because there's nothing to play with there, she says," cried May,
+breathlessly; and then they added with one voice, as though the subject
+had long ago been threshed out and settled between them, "Why, she can
+play at ball there with all the _Sternleins_ if she likes!"
+
+The idea of the June baby striding across the firmament and hurling the
+stars about as carelessly as though they were tennis-balls was so
+magnificent that it sent shivers of awe through me as I read.
+
+"But if you break all your dolls," added April, turning severely to
+June, and eyeing the distorted remains in her hand, "I don't think
+_lieber Gott_ will let you in at all. When you're big and have tiny
+Junes--real live Junes--I think you'll break them too, and _lieber_
+_Gott_ doesn't love mummies what breaks their babies."
+
+"But I _must_ break my dolls," cried June, stung into indignation by
+what she evidently regarded as celestial injustice; "_lieber Gott_
+made me that way, so I can't help doing it, can I, mummy?"
+
+On these occasions I keep my eyes fixed on my book, and put on an air of
+deep abstraction; and indeed, it is the only way of keeping out of
+theological disputes in which I am invariably worsted.
+
+
+July 15th.--Yesterday, as it was a cool and windy afternoon and not as
+pleasant in my garden as it has lately been, I thought I would go into
+the village and see how my friends the farm hands were getting on.
+Philanthropy is intermittent with me as with most people, only they do
+not say so, and seize me like a cold in the head whenever the weather is
+chilly. On warm days my bump of benevolence melts away entirely, and
+grows bigger in proportion as the thermometer descends. When the wind is
+in the east it is quite a decent size, and about January, in a north-
+easterly snowstorm, it is plainly visible to the most casual observer.
+For a few weeks from then to the end of February I can hold up my head
+and look our parson in the face, but during the summer, if I see him
+coming my mode of progression in getting out of the way is described
+with perfect accuracy by the verb "to slink."
+
+The village consists of one street running parallel to the outer
+buildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with rooms
+for four families--two in front, looking on to the wall of the farmyard,
+which is the fashionable side, and two at the back, looking on to
+nothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has one
+room and a larder sort of place, and shares the kitchen with the family
+on the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing their
+cooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contents
+of their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On the
+fashionable side there is a little fenced-in garden for every family,
+where fowls walk about pensively and meditate beneath the scarlet-
+runners (for all the world like me in my garden), and hollyhocks tower
+above the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked for
+winter use; but on the other side you walk straight out of the door on
+to manure heaps and pigs.
+
+The street did not look very inviting yesterday, with a lowering sky
+above, and the wind blowing dust and bits of straw and paper into my
+face and preventing me from seeing what I knew to be there, a consoling
+glimpse of green fields and fir woods down at the other end; but I had
+not been for a long while--we have had such a lovely summer--and
+something inside me had kept on saying aggressively all the morning,
+"Elizabeth, don't you know you are due in the village? Why don't you go
+then? When are you going? Don't you know you _ought_ to go? Don't you
+feel you _must_? Elizabeth, pull yourself together and _go_" Strange
+effect of a grey sky and a cool wind! For I protest that if it had been
+warm and sunny my conscience would not have bothered about me at all. We
+had a short fight over it, in which I got all the knocks, as was evident
+by the immediate swelling of the bump alluded to above, and then I gave
+in, and by two o'clock in the afternoon was lifting the latch of the
+first door and asking the woman who lived behind it what she had given
+the family for dinner. This, I was instructed on my first round by the
+Frau Inspector, is the proper thing to ask; and if you can follow it up
+by an examination of the contents of the saucepan, and a gentle sniff
+indicative of your appreciation of their savouriness, so much the
+better. I was diffident at first about this, but the gratification on
+their faces at the interest displayed is so unmistakable that I never
+now omit going through the whole business. This woman, the wife of one
+of the men who clean and feed the cows, has arrived at that enviable
+stage of existence when her children have all been confirmed and can go
+out to work, leaving her to spend her days in her clean and empty room
+in comparative dignity and peace. The children go to school till they
+are fourteen, then they are confirmed, are considered grown up, and
+begin to work for wages; and her three strapping daughters were out in
+the fields yesterday reaping. The mother has a keen, shrewd face, and
+everything about her was neat and comfortable. Her floor was freshly
+strewn with sand, her cups and saucers and spoons shone bright and clean
+from behind the glass door of the cupboard, and the two beds, one for
+herself and her husband and the other for her three daughters, were more
+mountainous than any I afterwards saw. The size and plumpness of her
+feather beds, the Frau Inspector tells me, is a woman's chief claim to
+consideration from the neighbours. She who can pile them up nearest to
+the ceiling becomes the principal personage in the community, and a flat
+bed is a social disgrace. It is a mystery to me, when I see the
+narrowness of the bedsteads, how so many people can sleep in them. They
+are rather narrower than what are known as single beds, yet father and
+mother and often a baby manage to sleep very well in one, and three or
+four children in the opposite corner of the room in another. The
+explanation no doubt is that they do not know what nerves are, and what
+it is to be wakened by the slightest sound or movement in the room and
+lie for hours afterwards, often the whole night, totally unable to fall
+asleep again, staring out into the darkness with eyes that refuse to
+shut. No nerves, and a thick skin--what inestimable blessings to these
+poor people! And they never heard of either.
+
+I stood a little while talking, not asked to sit down, for that would be
+thought a liberty, and hearing how they had had potatoes and bacon for
+dinner, and how the eldest girl Bertha was going to be married at
+Michaelmas, and how well her baby was getting through its teething.
+
+"Her baby?" I echoed, "I have not heard of a baby?"
+
+The woman went to one of the beds and lifted up a corner of the great
+bag of feathers, and there, sure enough, lay a round and placid baby,
+sleeping as sweetly and looking as cherubic as the most legitimate of
+its contemporaries.
+
+"And he is going to marry her at Michaelmas?" I asked, looking as
+sternly as I could at the grandmother.
+
+"Oh yes," she replied, "he is a good young man, and earns eighteen marks
+a week. They will be very comfortable."
+
+"It is a pity," I said, "that the baby did not make its appearance after
+Michaelmas instead of before. Don't you see yourself what a pity it is,
+and how everything has been spoilt?"
+
+She stared at me for a moment with a puzzled look, and then turned away
+and carefully covered the cherub again. "They will be very comfortable,"
+she repeated, seeing that I expected an answer; "he earns eighteen marks
+a week."
+
+What was there to be said? If I had told her her daughter was a grievous
+sinner she might perhaps have felt transiently uncomfortable, but as
+soon as I had gone would have seen for herself, with those shrewd eyes
+of hers, that nothing had been changed by my denunciations, that there
+lay the baby, dimpled and healthy, that her daughter was making a good
+match, that none of her set saw anything amiss, and that all the young
+couples in the district had prefaced their marriages in this way.
+
+Our parson is troubled to the depths of his sensitive soul by this
+custom. He preaches, he expostulates, he denounces, he implores, and
+they listen with square stolid faces and open mouths, and go back to
+their daily work among their friends and acquaintances, with no feeling
+of shame, because everybody does it, and public opinion, the only force
+that could stop it, is on their side. The parson looks on with
+unutterable sadness at the futility of his efforts; but the material is
+altogether too raw for successful manipulation by delicate fingers.
+
+"Poor things," I said one day, in answer to an outburst of indignation
+from him, after he had been marrying one of our servants at the eleventh
+hour, "I am so sorry for them. It is so pitiful that they should always
+have to be scolded on their wedding day. Such children--so ignorant, so
+uncontrolled, so frankly animal--what do they know about social laws?
+They only know and follow nature, and I would from my heart forgive them
+all."
+
+"It is _sin_" he said shortly.
+
+"Then the forgiveness is sure."
+
+"Not if they do not seek it."
+
+I was silent, for I wished to reply that I believed they would be
+forgiven in spite of themselves, that probably they were forgiven
+whether they sought it or not, and that you cannot limit things divine;
+but who can argue with a parson? These people do not seek forgiveness
+because it never enters their heads that they need it. The parson tells
+them so, it is true, but they regard him as a person bound by his
+profession to say that sort of thing, and are sharp enough to see that
+the consequences of their sin, foretold by him with such awful
+eloquence, never by any chance come off. No girl is left to languish and
+die forsaken by her betrayer, for the betrayer is a worthy young man who
+marries her as soon as he possibly can; no finger of scorn is pointed at
+the fallen one, for all the fingers in the street are attached to women
+who began life in precisely the same fashion; and as for that
+problematical Day of Judgment of which they hear so much on Sundays,
+perhaps they feel that that also may be one of the things which after
+all do not happen.
+
+The servant who had been married and scolded that morning was a groom,
+aged twenty, and he had met his little wife, she being then seventeen,
+in the place he was in before he came to us. She was a housemaid there,
+and must have been a pretty thing, though there were few enough traces
+of it, except the beautiful eyes, in the little anxious face that I saw
+for the first time immediately after the wedding, and just before the
+weary and harassed parson came in to talk things over. I had never heard
+of her existence until, about ten days previously, the groom had
+appeared, bathed in tears, speechlessly holding out a letter from her in
+which she said she could not bear things any longer and was going to
+kill herself. The wretched young man was at his wit's end, for he had
+not yet saved enough to buy any furniture and set up housekeeping, and
+she was penniless after so many months out of a situation. He did not
+know any way out of it, he had no suggestions to offer, no excuses to
+make, and just stood there helplessly and sobbed.
+
+I went to the Man of Wrath, and we laid our heads together. "We do not
+want another married servant," he said.
+
+"No, of course we don't," said I.
+
+"And there is not a room empty in the village."
+
+"No, not one."
+
+"And how can we give him furniture? It is not fair to the other servants
+who remain virtuous, and wait till they can buy their own."
+
+"No, certainly it isn't fair."
+
+There was a pause.
+
+"He is a good boy," I murmured presently.
+
+"A very good boy."
+
+"And she will be quite ruined unless somebody--"
+
+"I'll tell you what we can do, Elizabeth," he interrupted; "we can buy
+what is needful and let him have it on condition that he buys it back
+gradually by some small monthly payment."
+
+"So we can."
+
+"And I think there is a room over the stables that is empty."
+
+"So there is."
+
+"And he can go to town and get what furniture he needs and bring the
+girl back with him and marry her at once. The sooner the better, poor
+girl."
+
+And so within a fortnight they were married, and came hand in hand to
+me, he proud and happy, holding himself very straight, she in no wise
+yet recovered from the shock and misery of the last few hopeless months,
+looking up at me with eyes grown much too big for her face, eyes in
+which there still lurked the frightened look caught in the town where
+she had hidden herself, and where fingers of scorn could not have been
+wanting, and loud derision, and utter shame, besides the burden of
+sickness, and hunger, and miserable pitiful youth.
+
+They stood hand in hand, she in a decent black dress, and both wearing
+very tight white kid gloves that refused to hide entirely the whole of
+the rough red hands, and they looked so ridiculously young, and the
+whole thing was so wildly improvident, that no words of exhortation
+would come to my lips as I gazed at them in silence, between laughter
+and tears. I ought to have told them they were sinners; I ought to have
+told them they were reckless; I ought to have told them by what a narrow
+chance they had escaped the just punishment of their iniquity, and
+instead of that I found myself stretching out hands that were at once
+seized and kissed, and merely saying with a cheerful smile, "_Nun_
+_Kinder_, _liebt Euch_, _und seid brav_." And so they were
+dismissed, and then the parson came, in a fever at this latest example
+of deadly sin, while I, with the want of moral sense so often observable
+in woman, could only think with pity of their childishness. The baby was
+born three days later, and the mother very nearly slipped through our
+fingers; but she was a country girl, and she fought round, and by and by
+grew young again in the warmth of married respectability; and I met her
+the other day airing her baby in the sun, and holding her head as high
+as though she were conscious of a whole row of feather beds at home,
+every one of which touched the ceiling.
+
+In the next room I went into an old woman lay in bed with her head tied
+up in bandages. The room had not much in it, or it would have been
+untidier; it looked neglected and gloomy, and some dirty plates,
+suggestive of long-past dinners, were piled on the table.
+
+"Oh, such headaches!" groaned the old woman when she saw me, and moved
+her head from side to side on the pillow. I could see she was not
+undressed, and had crept under her feather bag as she was. I went to the
+bedside and felt her pulse--a steady pulse, with nothing of feverishness
+in it.
+
+"Oh, such draughts!" moaned the old woman, when she saw I had left the
+door open.
+
+"A little air will make you feel better," I said; the atmosphere in the
+shut-up room was so indescribable that my own head had begun to throb.
+
+"Oh, oh!" she moaned, in visible indignation at being forced for a
+moment to breathe the pure summer air.
+
+"I have something at home that will cure your headache," I said, "but
+there is nobody I can send with it to-day. If you feel better later on,
+come round and fetch it. I always take it when I have a headache"--
+("Why, Elizabeth, you know you never have such things!" whispered my
+conscience, appalled. "You just keep quiet," I whispered back, "I have
+had enough of you for one day.")--"and I have some grapes I will give
+you when you come, so that if you possibly can, do."
+
+"Oh, I can't move," groaned the old woman, "oh, oh, oh!" But I went away
+laughing, for I knew she would appear punctually to fetch the grapes,
+and a walk in the air was all she needed to cure her.
+
+How the whole village hates and dreads fresh air! A baby died a few days
+ago, killed, I honestly believe, by the exceeding love of its mother,
+which took the form of cherishing it so tenderly that never once during
+its little life was a breath of air allowed to come anywhere near it.
+She is the watchman's wife, a gentle, flabby woman, with two rooms at
+her disposal, but preferring to live and sleep with her four children in
+one, never going into the other except for the christenings and funerals
+which take place in her family with what I cannot but regard as
+unnecessary frequency. This baby was born last September in a time of
+golden days and quiet skies, and when it was about three weeks old I
+suggested that she should take it out every day while the fine weather
+lasted. She pointed out that it had not yet been christened, and
+remembering that it is the custom in their class for both mother and
+child to remain shut up and invisible till after the christening, I said
+no more. Three weeks later I was its godmother, and it was safely got
+into the fold of the Church. As I was leaving, I remarked that now she
+would be able to take it out as much as she liked. The following March,
+on a day that smelt of violets, I met her near the house. I asked after
+the baby, and she began to cry. "It does not thrive," she wept, "and its
+arms are no thicker than my finger."
+
+"Keep it out in the sun as much as you can," I said; "this is the very
+weather to turn weak babies into strong ones."
+
+"Oh, I am so afraid it will catch cold if I take it out," she cried, her
+face buried in what was once a pocket-handkerchief.
+
+"When was it out last?"
+
+"Oh--" she stopped to blow her nose, very violently, and, as it seemed
+to me, with superfluous thoroughness. I waited till she had done, and
+then repeated my question.
+
+"Oh--" a fresh burst of tears, and renewed exhaustive nose-blowing.
+
+I began to suspect that my question, put casually, was of more
+importance than I had thought, and repeated it once more.
+
+"I--can't t-take it out," she sobbed, "I know it--it would die."
+
+"But has it not been out at all, then?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"Not once since it was born? Six months ago?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"_Poor_ baby!" I exclaimed; and indeed from my heart I pitied the little
+thing, perishing in a heap of feathers, in one close room, with four
+people absorbing what air there was. "I am afraid," I said, "that if it
+does not soon get some fresh air it will not live. I wonder what would
+happen to my children if I kept them in one hot room day and night for
+six months. You see how they are out all day, and how well they are."
+
+"They are so strong," she said, with a doleful sniff, "that they can
+stand it."
+
+I was confounded by this way of looking at it, and turned away, after
+once more begging her to take the child out. She plainly regarded the
+advice as brutal, and I heard her blowing her nose all down the drive.
+In June the father told me he would like the doctor; the child grew
+thinner every day in spite of all the food it took. A doctor was got
+from the nearest town, and I went across to hear what he ordered. He
+ordered bottles at regular intervals instead of the unbroken series it
+had been having, and fresh air. He could find nothing the matter with
+it, except unusual weakness. He asked if it always perspired as it was
+doing then, and himself took off the topmost bag of feathers. Early in
+July it died, and its first outing was to the cemetery in the pine woods
+three miles off.
+
+"I took such care of it," moaned the mother, when I went to try and
+comfort her after the funeral; "it would never have lived so long but
+for the care I took of it."
+
+"And what the doctor ordered did no good?" I ventured to ask, as gently
+as I could.
+
+"Oh, I did not take it out--how could I--it would have killed it at
+once--at least I have kept it alive till now." And she flung her arms
+across the table, and burying her head in them wept bitterly.
+
+There is a great wall of ignorance and prejudice dividing us from the
+people on our place, and in every effort to help them we knock against
+it and cannot move it any more than if it were actual stone. Like the
+parson on the subject of morals, I can talk till I am hoarse on the
+subject of health, without at any time producing the faintest
+impression. When things are very bad the doctor is brought, directions
+are given, medicines made up, and his orders, unless they happen to be
+approved of, are simply not carried out. Orders to wash a patient and
+open windows are never obeyed, because the whole village would rise up
+if, later on, the illness ended in death, and accuse the relatives of
+murder. I suppose they regard us and our like who live on the other side
+of the dividing wall as persons of fantastic notions which, when carried
+into effect among our own children, do no harm because of the vast
+strength of the children accumulated during years of eating in the
+quantities only possible to the rich. Their idea of happiness is eating,
+and they naturally suppose that everybody eats as much as he can
+possibly afford to buy. Some of them have known hunger, and food and
+strength are coupled together in their experience--the more food the
+greater the strength; and people who eat roast meat (oh, bliss
+ineffable!) every day of their lives can bear an amount of washing and
+airing that would surely kill such as themselves. But how useless to try
+and discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I like
+about them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no real
+conception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talk
+to them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give them
+nice things to eat. Shocked at the horrors that must surround the poor
+women at the birth of their babies, I asked the Man of Wrath to try and
+make some arrangement that would ensure their quiet at those times. He
+put aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for them
+in their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and bright
+and pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delight
+of the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be. Not a baby
+has been born in that cottage, for not a woman has allowed herself to be
+taken there. At the end of a year it had to be let out again to
+families, and the nurse dismissed.
+
+"_Why_ wouldn't they go?" I asked the Frau Inspector, completely
+puzzled. She shrugged her shoulders. "They like their husband and
+children round them," she said, "and are afraid something will be done
+to them away from home--that they will be washed too often, perhaps. The
+gracious lady will never get them to leave their homes."
+
+"The gracious lady gives it up," I muttered.
+
+When I opened the next door I was bewildered by the crowd in the room. A
+woman stood in the middle at a wash-tub which took up most of the space.
+Every now and then she put out a dripping hand and jerked a perambulator
+up and down for a moment, to calm the shrieks of the baby inside. On a
+wooden bench at the foot of one of the three beds a very old man sat and
+blinked at nothing. Crouching in a corner were two small boys of pasty
+complexion, playing with a guinea-pig and coughing violently. The
+loveliest little girl I have seen for a very long while lay in the bed
+nearest the door, quite silent, with her eyes closed and her mouth shut
+tight, as though she were trying hard to bear something. As I pulled the
+door open the first thing I saw, right up against it, was this set young
+face framed in tossed chestnut hair. "Why, _Frauchen_," I said to the
+woman at the tub, "so many of you at home to-day? Are you all ill?"
+There was hardly standing room for an extra person, and the room was
+full of steam.
+
+"They have all got the cough I had," she answered, without looking up,
+"and Lotte there is very bad."
+
+I took Lotte's rough little hand--so different from the delicate face--
+and found she was in a fever.
+
+"We must get the doctor," I said.
+
+"Oh, the doctor--" said the mother with a shrug, "he's no use."
+
+"You must do what he tells you, or he cannot help you."
+
+"That last medicine he sent me all but killed me," she said, washing
+vigorously. "I'll never take any more of his, nor shall any child of
+mine."
+
+"What medicine was it?"
+
+She wiped her hand on her apron, and reaching across to the cupboard
+took out a little bottle. "I was in bed two days after it," she said,
+handing it to me--"as though I were dead, not knowing what was going on
+round me." The bottle had contained opium, and there were explicit
+directions written on it as to the number of drops to be taken and the
+length of the intervals between the taking.
+
+"Did you do exactly what is written here?" I asked.
+
+"I took it all at once. There wasn't much of it, and I was feeling bad."
+
+"But then of course it nearly killed you. I wonder it didn't quite. What
+good is it our taking all the trouble we do to send that long distance
+for the doctor if you don't do as he orders?"
+
+"I'll take no more of his medicine. If it had been any good and able to
+cure me, the more I took the quicker I ought to have been cured." And
+she scrubbed and thumped with astounding energy, while Lotte lay with
+her little ashen face a shade more set and suffering. The wash-tub,
+though in the middle of the room, was quite close to Lotte's bed,
+because the middle of the room was quite close to every other part of
+it, and each extra hard maternal thump must have hit the child's head
+like a blow from a hammer. She was, you see, only thirteen, and her skin
+had not had time to turn into leather.
+
+"Has this child eaten anything to-day?"
+
+"She won't."
+
+"Is she not thirsty?"
+
+"She won't drink coffee or milk."
+
+"I'll send her something she may like, and I shall send, too, for the
+doctor."
+
+"I'll not give her his stuff."
+
+"Let me beg you to do as he tells you."
+
+"I'll not give her his stuff."
+
+"Was it absolutely necessary to wash to-day?"
+
+"It's the day."
+
+"My good woman," said I to myself, gazing at her with outward blandness,
+"I'd like exceedingly to tip you up into your wash-tub and thump you as
+thoroughly as you are thumping those unfortunate clothes." Aloud I said
+in flute-like tones of conciliation, "Good afternoon."
+
+"Good afternoon," said she without looking up.
+
+Washing days always mean tempers, and I ought to have fled at the first
+sight of that tub, but then there was Lotte in her little yellow flannel
+night-gown, suffering as only children can suffer, helpless, forced to
+patience, forced to silent endurance of any banging and vehemence in
+which her mother might choose to indulge. No wonder her mouth was shut
+like a clasp and she would not open her eyes. Her eyebrows were reddish
+like her hair, and very straight, and her eyelashes lay dusky and long
+on her white face. At least I had discovered Lotte and could help her a
+little, I thought, as I departed down the garden path between the rows
+of scarlet-runners; but the help that takes the form of jelly and iced
+drinks is not of a lasting nature, and I have but little sympathy with a
+benevolence that finds its highest expression in gifts of the kind.
+There have been women within my experience who went down into the grave
+accompanied by special pastoral encomiums, and whose claims to lady-
+bountifulness, on closer inquiry, rested solely on a foundation of
+jelly. Yet nothing in the world is easier than ordering jelly to be sent
+to the sick, except refraining from ordering it. What more, however,
+could I do for Lotte than this? I could not take her up in my arms and
+run away with her and nurse her back to health, for she would probably
+object to such a course as strongly as her mother; and later on, when
+she gets well again, she will go back to school, and grow coarse and
+bouncing and leathery like the others, affording the parson, in three or
+four years' time, a fresh occasion for grief over deadly sin. "If one
+could only get hold of the children!" I sighed, as I went up the steps
+into the schoolhouse; "catch them young, and put them in a garden, with
+no older people of their own class for ever teaching them by example
+what is ugly, and unworthy, and gross."
+
+Afternoon school was going on, and the assistant teacher was making the
+children read aloud in turns. In winter, when they would be glad of a
+warm, roomy place in which to spend their afternoons, school is only in
+the morning; and in summer, when the thirstiest after knowledge are apt
+to be less keen, it is both morning and afternoon. The arrangement is so
+mysterious that it must be providential. Herr Schenk, the head master,
+was away giving my babies their daily lessons, and his assistant, a
+youth in spectacles but yet of pugnacious aspect, was sitting in the
+master's desk, exercising a pretty turn for sarcasm in his running
+comments on the reading. A more complete waste of breath and brilliancy
+can hardly be imagined. He is not yet, however, married, and marriage is
+a great chastener. The children all stood up when I came in, and the
+teacher ceased sharpening his wits on a dulness that could not feel, and
+with many bows put a chair for me and begged me to sit on it. I did sit
+on it, and asked that they might go on with the lesson, as I had only
+come in for a minute on my way down the street. The reading was
+accordingly resumed, but unaccompanied this time by sarcasms. What
+faces! What dull, apathetic, low, coarse faces! On one side sat those
+from ten to fourteen, with not a hopeful face among them, and on the
+other those from six to ten, with one single little boy who looked as
+though he could have no business among the rest, so bright was he, so
+attentive, so curiously dignified. Poor children--what could the parson
+hope to make of beings whose expressions told so plainly of the sort of
+nature within? Those that did not look dull looked cunning, and all the
+girls on the older side had the faces of women. I began to feel
+dreadfully depressed. "See what you have done," I whispered angrily to
+my conscience--"made me wretched without doing anybody else any good."
+"The old woman with the headache is happy in the hopes of grapes," it
+replied, seeking to justify itself, "and Lotte is to have some jelly."
+"Grapes! Jelly! Futility unutterable. I can't bear this, and am going
+home." The teacher inquired whether the children should sing something
+to my graciousness; perhaps he was ashamed of their reading, and indeed
+I never heard anything like it. "Oh yes," I said, resigned, but
+outwardly smiling kindly with the self-control natural to woman. They
+sang, or rather screamed, a hymn, and so frightfully loud and piercingly
+that the very windows shook. "My dear," explained the Man of Wrath, when
+I complained one Sunday on our way home from church of the terrible
+quality and volume of the music, "it frightens Satan away."
+
+Our numerous godchildren were not in school because, as we have only
+lived here three years, they are not yet old enough to share in the
+blessings of education. I stand godmother to the girls, and the Man of
+Wrath to the boys, and as all the babies are accordingly named after us
+the village swarms with tiny Elizabeths and Boys of Wrath. A hunchbacked
+woman, unfit for harder work, looks after the babies during the day in a
+room set apart for that purpose, so that the mothers may not be hampered
+in their duties at the farm; they have only to carry the babies there in
+the morning, and fetch them away again in the evening, and can feel that
+they are safe and well looked after. But many of them, for some reason
+too cryptic to fathom, prefer to lock them up in their room, exposed to
+all the perils that surround an inquiring child just able to walk, and
+last winter one little creature was burnt to death, sacrificed to her
+mother's stupidity. This mother, a fair type of the intelligence
+prevailing in the village, made a great fire in her room before going
+out, so that when she came back at noon there would still be some with
+which to cook the dinner, left a baby in a perambulator, and a little
+Elizabeth of three loose in the room, locked the door, put the key in
+her pocket, and went off to work. When she came back to get the dinner
+ready, the baby was still crowing placidly in its perambulator, and the
+little Elizabeth, with all the clothes burnt off her body, was lying
+near the grate dead. Of course the mother was wild with grief,
+distracted, raving, desperate, and of course all the other women were
+shocked and horrified; but point the moral as we might, we could not
+bring them to see that it was an avoidable misfortune with nothing
+whatever to do with the _Finger Gottes_, and the mothers who preferred
+locking their babies up alone to sending them to be looked after, went
+on doing so as undisturbed as though what had occurred could in no wise
+be a lesson to themselves. "Pray, _Herr Lehrer_, why are those two
+little boys sitting over there on that seat all by themselves and not
+singing?" I asked at the conclusion of the hymn.
+
+"That, gracious lady, is the vermin bench. It is necessary to keep--"
+
+"Oh yes, yes--I quite understand--good afternoon. Good-bye, children,
+you have sung very nicely indeed."
+
+"Now," said I to myself, when I was safely out in the street again, "I
+am going home."
+
+"Oh, not yet," at once protested my unmanageable conscience; "your
+favourite old woman lives in the next cottage, and surely you are not
+going to leave her out?"
+
+"I see plainly," I replied, "that I shall never be quite comfortable
+till I have got rid of _you_" and in I went to the next house.
+
+The entrance was full of three women--the entrances here are narrow, and
+the women wide--and they all looked more cheerful than seemed
+reasonable. They stood aside to let me pass, and when I opened the door
+I found the room equally full of women, looking equally happy, and
+talking eagerly.
+
+"Why, what is happening?" I asked the nearest one. "Is there a party?"
+
+She turned round, grinning broadly in obvious delight. "The old lady
+died in her sleep," she said, "and was found this morning dead in her
+bed. I was in here only yesterday, and she said--" I turned abruptly and
+went out again. All those gloating women, hovering round the poor body
+that was clothed on a sudden by death with a wonderful dignity and
+nobleness, made me ashamed of being a woman. Not a man was there,--
+clearly a superior race of beings. In the entrance I met the Frau
+Inspector coming in to arrange matters, and she turned and walked with
+me a little way.
+
+"The old lady was better off than we thought," she remarked, "and has
+left a very good black silk dress to be buried in."
+
+"A black silk dress?" I repeated.
+
+"And everything to match in goodness--nice leather shoes, good
+stockings, under-things all trimmed with crochet, real whalebone
+corsets, and a quite new pair of white kid gloves. She must have saved
+for a long time to have it all so nice."
+
+"But," I said, "I don't understand. I have never had anything to do yet
+with death, and have not thought of these things. Are not people, then,
+just buried in a shroud?"
+
+"A shroud?" It was her turn not to understand.
+
+"A sheet sort of thing."
+
+She smiled in a highly superior manner. "Oh dear, no," she said, "we are
+none of us quite so poor as that."
+
+I glanced down at her as she walked beside me. She is a short woman, and
+carries weight. She was smiling almost pityingly at my ignorance of what
+is due, even after death, to ourselves and public opinion.
+
+"The very poorest," she said, "manage to scrape a whole set of clothes
+together for their funerals. A very poor couple came here a few months
+ago, and before the man had time to earn anything he died. The wife came
+to me (the gracious lady was absent), and on her knees implored me to
+give her a suit for him--she had only been able to afford the
+_Sterbehemd_, and was frantic at the thought of what the neighbours
+would say if he had nothing on but that, and said she would be haunted
+by shame and remorse all the rest of her life. We bought a nice black
+suit, and tie, and gloves, and he really looked very well. She will be
+dressed to-night," she went on, as I said nothing; "the dressers come
+with the coffin, and it will be a nice funeral. I used to wonder what
+she did with her pension money, and never could persuade her to buy
+herself a bit of meat. But of course she was saving for this. They are
+beautiful corsets."
+
+"What utter waste!" I ejaculated.
+
+"Waste?"
+
+"Yes--utter waste and foolishness. Foolishness, not to have bought a few
+little comforts, waste of the money, and waste of the clothes. Is there
+any meaning, sense, or use whatever in burying a good black silk dress?"
+
+"It would be a scandal not to be buried decently," she replied,
+manifestly surprised at my warmth, "and the neighbours respect her much
+more now that they know what nice clothes she had bought for her
+funeral. Nothing is wanting. I even found a box with a gold brooch in
+it, and a bracelet."
+
+"I suppose, then, as many of her belongings as will go into the coffin
+will be buried too, in order to still further impress the neighbours?" I
+asked--"her feather bed, for instance, and anything else of use and
+value?"
+
+"No, only what she has on, and the brushes and combs and towels that
+were used in dressing her."
+
+"How ugly and how useless!" I said with a shiver of disgust.
+
+"It is the custom," was her tranquil reply.
+
+Suddenly an unpleasant thought struck me, and I burst out emphatically,
+"Nothing but a shroud is to be put on me."
+
+"Oh no," she said, looking up at me with a face meant to be full of the
+most reassuring promises of devotion, "the gracious lady may be quite
+certain that if I am still here she will have on her most beautiful ball
+dress and finest linen, and that the whole neighbourhood shall see for
+themselves how well _Herrschaften_ know what is due to them."
+
+"I shall give directions," I repeated with increased energy, "that there
+is only to be a shroud."
+
+"Oh no, no," she protested, smiling as though she were humouring a
+spoilt and eccentric child, "such a thing could never be permitted. What
+would our feelings be when we remembered that the gracious lady had not
+received her dues, and what would the neighbours say?"
+
+"I'll have nothing but a shroud!" I cried in great wrath--and then
+stopped short, and burst out laughing. "What an absurd and gruesome
+conversation," I said, holding out my hand. "Good-bye, Frau Inspector, I
+am sure you are wanted in that cottage."
+
+She made me a curtsey and turned back. I walked out of the village and
+through the fir wood and the meadow as quickly as I could, opened the
+gate into my garden, went down the most sheltered path, flung myself on
+the grass in a quiet nook, and said aloud "Ugh!"
+
+It is a well-known exclamation of disgust, and is thus inadequately
+expressed in writing.
+
+
+
+August
+
+
+August 5th.--August has come, and has clothed the hills with golden
+lupins, and filled the grassy banks with harebells. The yellow fields of
+lupins are so gorgeous on cloudless days that I have neglected the
+forests lately and drive in the open, so that I may revel in their scent
+while feasting my eyes on their beauty. The slope of a hill clothed with
+this orange wonder and seen against the sky is one of those sights which
+make me so happy that it verges on pain. The straight, vigorous flower-
+spikes are something like hyacinths, but all aglow with a divine
+intensity of brightness that a yellow hyacinth never yet possessed and
+never will; and then they are not waxy, but velvety, and their leaves
+are not futile drooping things, but delicate, strong sprays of an
+exquisite grey-green, with a bloom on them that throws a mist over the
+whole field; and as for the perfume, it surely is the perfume of
+Paradise. The plant is altogether lovely--shape, growth, flower, and
+leaf, and the horses have to wait very patiently once we get among them,
+for I can never have enough of sitting quite still in those fair fields
+of glory. Not far from here there is a low series of hills running north
+and south, absolutely without trees, and at the foot of them, on the
+east side, is a sort of road, chiefly stones, but yet with patience to
+be driven over, and on the other side of this road a plain stretches
+away towards the east and south; and hills and plain are now one sheet
+of gold. I have driven there at all hours of the day--I cannot keep
+away--and I have seen them early in the morning, and at mid-day, and in
+the afternoon, and I have seen them in the evening by moonlight, when
+all the intensity was washed out of the colour and into the scent; but
+just as the sun drops behind the little hills is the supreme moment,
+when the splendour is so dazzling that you feel as though you must have
+reached the very gates of heaven. So strong was this feeling the other
+day that I actually got out of the carriage, being impulsive, and began
+almost involuntarily to climb the hill, half expecting to see the
+glories of the New Jerusalem all spread out before me when I should
+reach the top; and it came with quite a shock of disappointment to find
+there was nothing there but the prose of potato-fields, and a sandy road
+with home-going calves kicking up its dust, and in the distance our
+neighbour's _Schloss_, and the New Jerusalem just as far off as ever.
+
+It is a relief to me to write about these things that I so much love,
+for I do not talk of them lest I should be regarded as a person who
+rhapsodizes, and there is no nuisance more intolerable than having
+somebody's rhapsodies thrust upon you when you have no enthusiasm of
+your own that at all corresponds. I know this so well that I generally
+succeed in keeping quiet; but sometimes even now, after years of study
+in the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel does
+occasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to my
+senses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or the
+look of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling not
+in the least understood. How is it that you should feel so vastly
+superior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand your
+neighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able to
+do so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompleteness
+in yourself? I am quite sure that if I were to take most or any of my
+friends to those pleasant yellow fields they would notice nothing except
+the exceeding joltiness of the road; and if I were so ill-advised as to
+lift up a corner of my heart, and let them see how full it was of wonder
+and delight, they would first look blank, and then decide mentally that
+they were in the unpleasant situation of driving over a stony road with
+that worst form of idiot, a bore, and so fall into the mood of self-
+commiseration which is such a solace to us in our troubles. Yet it is
+painful being suppressed for ever and ever, and I believe the torments
+of such a state, when unduly prolonged, are more keenly felt by a woman
+than a man, she having, in spite of her protestations, a good deal of
+the ivy nature still left in her, and an unhealthy craving for sympathy
+and support. When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out as
+far as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed in
+the mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come and
+look at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in the
+pleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find one
+who would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness in
+which we each of us live. I have, it is true, a great many friends--
+people with whom it is pleasant to spend an afternoon if such afternoons
+are not repeated often, and if you are careful not to stir more than the
+surface of things, but among them all there is only one who has,
+roughly, the same tastes that I have; and even her sympathies have
+limitations, and she declares for instance with emphasis that she would
+not at all like to be a goose-girl. I wonder why. Our friendship nearly
+came to an end over the goose-girl, so unexpectedly inflaming did the
+subject turn out to be. Of all professions, if I had liberty of choice,
+I would choose to be a gardener, and if nobody would have me in that
+capacity I would like to be a goose-girl, and sit in the greenest of
+fields minding those delightfully plump, placid geese, whiter and more
+leisurely than the clouds on a calm summer morning, their very waddle in
+its lazy deliberation soothing and salutary to a fretted spirit that has
+been too long on the stretch. The fields geese feed in are so specially
+charming, so green and low-lying, with little clumps of trees and
+bushes, and a pond or boggy bit of ground somewhere near, and a
+profusion of those delicate field flowers that look so lovely growing
+and are so unsatisfactory and fade so quickly if you try to arrange them
+in your rooms. For six months of the year I would be happier than any
+queen I ever heard of, minding the fat white things. I would begin in
+April with the king-cups, and leave off in September with the
+blackberries, and I would keep one eye on the geese, and one on the
+volume of Wordsworth I should have with me, and I would be present in
+this way at the procession of the months, the first three all white and
+yellow, and the last three gorgeous with the lupin fields and the blues
+and purples and crimsons that clothe the hedges and ditches in a
+wonderful variety of shades, and dye the grass near the water in great
+patches. Then in October I would shut up my Wordsworth, go back to
+civilised life, and probably assist at the eating of the geese one after
+the other, with a proper thankfulness for the amount of edification I
+had from first to last extracted from them.
+
+I believe in England goose eating is held to be of doubtful refinement,
+and is left to one's servants. Here roast goose stuffed with apples is a
+dish loved quite openly and simply by people who would consider that the
+number of their quarterings raises them above any suspicion as to the
+refinement of their tastes, however many geese they may eat, and however
+much they may enjoy them; and I remember one lady, whose ancestors,
+probably all having loved goose, reached back up to a quite giddy
+antiquity, casting a gloom over a dinner table by removing as much of
+the skin or crackling of the goose as she could when it came to her,
+remarking, amidst a mournful silence, that it was her favourite part. No
+doubt it was. The misfortune was that it happened also to be the
+favourite part of the line of guests who came after her, and who saw
+themselves forced by the hard laws of propriety to affect an indifferent
+dignity of bearing at the very moment when their one feeling was a
+fierce desire to rise up and defend at all costs their right to a share
+of skin. She had, I remember, very pretty little white hands like tiny
+claws, and wore beautiful rings, and sitting opposite her, and free
+myself from any undue passion for goose, I had leisure to watch the
+rapid way in which she disposed of the skin, her rings and the whiteness
+of her hands flashing up and down as she used her knife and fork with
+the awful dexterity only seen in perfection in the Fatherland. I am
+afraid that as a nation we think rather more of our eating and drinking
+than is reasonable, and this no doubt explains why so many of us, by the
+time we are thirty, have lost the original classicality of our contour.
+Walking in the streets of a town you are almost sure to catch the word
+_essen_ in the talk of the passers-by; and _das Essen_, combined, of
+course, with the drinking made necessary by its exaggerated indulgence,
+constitutes the chief happiness of the middle and lower classes. Any
+story-book or novel you take up is full of feeling descriptions of what
+everybody ate and drank, and there are a great many more meals than
+kisses; so that the novel-reader who expects a love-tale, finds with
+disgust that he is put off with _menus_. The upper classes have so many
+other amusements that _das Essen_ ceases to be one, and they are as
+thin as all the rest of the world; but if the curious wish to see how
+very largely it fills the lives, or that part of their lives that they
+reserve for pleasure, of the middle classes, it is a good plan to go to
+seaside places during the months of July and August, when the schools
+close, and the _bourgeoisie_ realises the dream in which it has been
+indulging the whole year, of hotel life with a tremendous dinner every
+day at one o'clock.
+
+The April baby was a weak little creature in her first years, and the
+doctor ordered as specially bracing a seaside resort frequented solely
+by the middle classes, and there for three succeeding years I took her;
+and while she rolled on the sands and grew brown and lusty, I was dull,
+and fell to watching the other tourists. Their time, it appeared, was
+spent in ruminating over the delights of the meal that was eaten, and in
+preparing their bodies by gentlest exercise for the delights of the meal
+that was to come. They passed their mornings on the sands, the women
+doing fancy work in order that they might look busy, and the men
+strolling aimlessly about near them with field-glasses, and nautical
+caps, and long cloaks of a very dreadful pattern reaching to their heels
+and making them look like large women, called Havelocks,--all of them
+waiting with more or less open eagerness for one o'clock, the great
+moment to which they had been looking forward ever since the day before,
+to arrive. They used to file in when the bell rang with a sort of silent
+solemnity, a contemplative collectedness, which is best described by the
+word _recueillement_, and ate all the courses, however many there were,
+in a hot room full of flies and sunlight.
+
+The dinner lasted a good hour and a half, and at the end of that time
+they would begin to straggle out again, flushed and using toothpicks as
+they strolled to the tables under the trees, where the exhausted waiters
+would presently bring them breakfast-cups of coffee and cakes. They
+lingered about an hour over this, and then gradually disappeared to
+their rooms, where they slept, I suppose, for from then till about six a
+death-like stillness reigned in the place and April and I had it all to
+ourselves. Towards six, slow couples would be seen crawling along the
+path by the shore and panting up into the woods, this being the only
+exercise of the day, and necessary if they would eat their suppers with
+appreciation; and April and I, peering through the bracken out of the
+nests of moss we used to make in the afternoons, could see them coming
+up through the trees after the climb up the cliff, the husband with his
+Havelock over his arm, a little in front, wiping his face and gasping,
+the wife in her tight silk dress, her bonnet strings undone, a cloak and
+an umbrella, and very often a small mysterious basket as well to carry,
+besides holding up her dress, very stout and very uncomfortable and very
+breathless, panting along behind; and however much she had to carry, and
+however fat and helpless she was, and however steep the hill, and
+however much dinner she had eaten, the idea that her husband might have
+taken her cloak and her umbrella and her basket and carried them for her
+would never have struck either of them. If it had by some strange chance
+entered his head, he would have reasoned that he was as stout as she
+was, that he had eaten as much dinner, that he was several years older,
+and that it was her cloak. Logic is so irresistible.
+
+To go on eating long after you have ceased to be hungry has
+fascinations, apparently, that are difficult to withstand, and if it
+gives you so much pleasure that the resulting inability to move without
+gasping is accepted with the meekness of martyrs, who shall say that you
+are wrong? My not myself liking a large dinner at one o'clock is not a
+reason for my thinking I am superior to those who do. Their excesses, it
+is true, are not my excesses, but then neither are mine theirs; and what
+about the days of idleness I spend, doing nothing from early till late
+but lie on the grass watching clouds? If I were to murmur gluttons,
+could not they, from their point of view, retort with conviction fool?
+All those maxims about judging others by yourself, and putting yourself
+in another person's place, are not, I am afraid, reliable. I had them
+dinned into me constantly as a child, and I was constantly trying to
+obey them, and constantly was astonished at the unexpected results I
+arrived at; and now I know that it is a proof of artlessness to suppose
+that other people will think and feel and hope and enjoy what you do and
+in the same way that you do. If an officious friend had stood in that
+breathless couple's path and told them in glowing terms how much happier
+they would be if they lived their life a little more fully and from its
+other sides, how much more delightful to stride along gaily together in
+their walks, with wind enough for talk and laughter, how pleasant if the
+man were muscular and in good condition and the woman brisk and wiry,
+and that they only had to do as he did and live on cold meat and toast,
+and drink nothing, to be as blithe as birds, do you think they would
+have so much as understood him? Cold meat and toast? Instead of what
+they had just been enjoying so intensely? Miss that soup made of the
+inner mysteries of geese, those eels stewed in beer, the roast pig with
+red cabbage, the venison basted with sour cream and served with beans in
+vinegar and cranberry jam, the piled-up masses of vanilla ice, the
+pumpernickel and cheese, the apples and pears on the top of that, and
+the big cups of coffee and cakes on the top of the apples and pears?
+Really a quick walk over the heather with a wiry wife would hardly make
+up for the loss of such a dinner; and besides, might not a wiry wife
+turn out to be a questionable blessing? And so they would pity the
+nimble friend who wasted his life in taking exercise and missed all its
+pleasures, and the man of toast and early rising would regard them with
+profound disgust if simple enough to think himself better than they,
+and, if he possessed an open mind, would merely return their pity with
+more of his own; so that, I suppose, everybody would be pleased, for the
+charm of pitying one's neighbour, though subtle, is undeniable.
+
+I remember when I was at the age when people began to call me
+_Backfisch_, and my mother dressed me in a little scarlet coat with big
+pearl buttons, and my eyes turned down because I was shy, and my nose
+turned up because I was impudent, one summer at the seaside with my
+governess we noticed in our walks a solitary lady of dignified
+appearance, who spoke to no one, and seemed for ever wrapped in distant
+and lofty philosophic speculations. "She's thinking about Kant and the
+nebular hypothesis," I decided to myself, having once heard some men
+with long beards talking of both those things, and they all had had that
+same far-away look in their eyes. "_Qu'est-ce que c'est une_
+_hypothese nebuleuse_, _Mademoiselle_?" I said aloud.
+
+"_Tenez-vous bien_, _et marchez d'une facon convenable_," she
+replied sharply.
+
+"_Qu'est-ce que c'est une hypothese_--"
+
+"_Vous etes trap jeune pour comprendre ces choses_."
+
+"_Oh alors vous ne savez pas vous-meme_!" I cried
+triumphantly, "_Sans cela vous me diriez_."
+
+"_Elisabeth_, _vous ecrirez_, _des que nous rentrons_, _leverbe_
+_Prier le bon Dieu de m'Aider a ne plus Etre si_
+_Impertinente_."
+
+She was an ingenious young woman, and the verbs I had to write as
+punishments were of the most elaborate and complicated nature--
+_Demander pardon pour Avoir Siffle comme un Gamin_
+_quelconque_, _Vouloir ne plus Oublier de Nettoyer mes_
+_Ongles_, _Essayer de ne pas tant Aimer les Poudings_, are
+but a few examples of her achievements in this particular branch of
+discipline.
+
+That very day at the _table d'hote_ the abstracted lady sat next to
+me. A _ragout_ of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken some
+she asked me, before helping herself, what it was.
+
+"Snails," I replied promptly, wholly unchastened by the prayers I had
+just been writing out in every tense.
+
+"Snails! _Ekelig_." And she waved the waiter loftily away, and looked on
+with much superciliousness at the rest of us enjoying ourselves.
+
+"What! You do not eat this excellent _ragout_?" asked her other
+neighbour, a hot man, as he finished clearing his plate and had time to
+observe the emptiness of hers. "You do not like calves' tongues and
+mushrooms? _Sonderbar._"
+
+I still can see the poor lady's face as she turned on me more like a
+tigress than the impassive person she had been a moment before. "_Sie_
+_unverschamter Backfisch_!" she hissed. "My favourite dish--I have you
+to thank for spoiling my repast--my day!" And in a frenzy of rage she
+gripped my arm as though she would have shaken me then and there in the
+face of the multitude, while I sat appalled at the consequences of
+indulging a playful fancy at the wrong time.
+
+Which story, now I come to think of it, illustrates less the tremendous
+importance of food in our country than the exceeding odiousness of
+_Backfisch_ in scarlet coats.
+
+
+August 10th.--My idea of a garden is that it should be beautiful from
+end to end, and not start off in front of the house with fireworks,
+going off at its farthest limit into sheer sticks. The standard reached
+beneath the windows should at least be kept up, if it cannot be
+surpassed, right away through, and the German popular plan in this
+matter quite discarded of concentrating all the available splendour of
+the establishment into the supreme effort of carpet-bedding and glass
+balls on pedestals in front of the house, in the hope that the stranger,
+carefully kept in that part, and on no account allowed to wander, will
+infer an equal magnificence throughout the entire domain; whereas he
+knows very well all the time that the landscape round the corner
+consists of fowls and dust-bins. Disliking this method, I have tried to
+make my garden increase in loveliness, if not in tidiness, the farther
+you get into it; and the visitor who thinks in his innocence as he
+emerges from the shade of the verandah that he sees the best before him,
+is artfully conducted from beauty to beauty till he beholds what I think
+is the most charming bit, the silver birch and azalea plantation down at
+the very end. This is the boundary of my kingdom on the south side, a
+blaze of colour in May and June, across which you see the placid meadows
+stretching away to a distant wood; and from its contemplation the ideal
+visitor returns to the house a refreshed and better man. That is the
+sort of person one enjoys taking round--the man (or woman) who, loving
+gardens, would go any distance to see one; who comes to appreciate, and
+compare, and admire; who has a garden of his own that he lives in and
+loves; and whose talk and criticisms are as dew to the thirsty gardening
+soul, all too accustomed in this respect to droughts. He knows as well
+as I do what work, what patience, what study and watching, what laughter
+at failures, what fresh starts with undiminished zeal, and what bright,
+unalterable faith are represented by the flowers in my garden. He knows
+what I have done for it, and he knows what it has done for me, and how
+it has been and will be more and more a place of joys, a place of
+lessons, a place of health, a place of miracles, and a place of sure and
+never-changing peace.
+
+Living face to face with nature makes it difficult for one to be
+discouraged. Moles and late frosts, both of which are here in abundance,
+have often grieved and disappointed me, but even these, my worst
+enemies, have not succeeded in making me feel discouraged. Not once till
+now have I got farther in that direction than the purely negative state
+of not being encouraged; and whenever I reach that state I go for a
+brisk walk in the sunshine and come back cured. It makes one so healthy
+to live in a garden, so healthy in mind as well as body, and when I say
+moles and late frosts are my worst enemies, it only shows how I could
+not now if I tried sit down and brood over my own or my neighbour's
+sins, and how the breezes in my garden have blown away all those worries
+and vexations and bitternesses that are the lot of those who live in a
+crowd. The most severe frost that ever nipped the hopes of a year is
+better to my thinking than having to listen to one malignant truth or
+lie, and I would rather have a mole busy burrowing tunnels under each of
+my rose trees and letting the air get at their roots than face a single
+greeting where no kindness is. How can you help being happy if you are
+healthy and in the place you want to be? A man once made it a reproach
+that I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and that
+we live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, and
+pointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated the
+tennis-court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not be
+shaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, with
+everything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and diet
+ourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come,
+and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could be
+borne perhaps with cheerfulness. "And have not even such things their
+sunny side?" I exclaimed. "When I am steeped to the lips in diseases and
+doctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests my
+women friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall say
+next and wishing they would go." He replied that all around me lay
+misery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blinded
+by selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness and
+tragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable and
+discontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he said
+that we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrink
+from mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered that
+it was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shaking
+head, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwards
+that a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dying
+had turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from him
+and to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into my
+garden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, "It is the Will of
+God." He was a missionary.
+
+But of what use is it telling a woman with a garden that she ought
+really to be ashamed of herself for being happy? The fresh air is so
+buoyant that it lifts all remarks of that sort away off you and leaves
+you laughing. They get wafted away on the scent of the stocks, and you
+stand in the sun looking round at your cheerful flowers, and more than
+ever persuaded that it is a good and blessed thing to be thankful. Oh a
+garden is a sweet, sane refuge to have! Whether I am tired because I
+have enjoyed myself too much, or tired because I have lectured the
+servants too much, or tired because I have talked to missionaries too
+much, I have only to come down the verandah steps into the garden to be
+at once restored to quiet, and serenity, and my real and natural self. I
+could almost fancy sometimes that as I come down the steps, gentle hands
+of blessing have been laid on my head. I suppose I feel so because of
+the hush that descends on my soul when I get out of the close, restless
+house into that silent purity. Sometimes I sit for hours in the south
+walk by the verandah just listening and watching. It is so private
+there, though directly beneath the windows, that it is one of my
+favourite places. There are no bedrooms on that side of the house, only
+the Man of Wrath's and my day-rooms, so that servants cannot see me as I
+stand there enjoying myself. If they did or could, I should simply never
+go there, for nothing is so utterly destructive to meditation as to know
+that probably somebody inquisitive is eyeing you from behind a curtain.
+The loveliest garden I know is spoilt to my thinking by the
+impossibility of getting out of sight of the house, which stares down at
+you, Argus-eyed and unblinking, into whatever corner you may shuffle.
+Perfect house and perfect garden, lying in that land of lovely gardens,
+England, the garden just the right size for perfection, not a weed ever
+admitted, every dandelion and daisy--those friends of the unaspiring--
+routed out years ago, the borders exquisite examples of taste, the turf
+so faultless that you hardly like to walk on it for fear of making it
+dusty, and the whole quite uninhabitable for people of my solitary
+tendencies because, go where you will, you are overlooked. Since I have
+lived in this big straggling place, full of paths and copses where I am
+sure of being left alone, with wide fields and heath and forests beyond,
+and so much room to move and breathe in, I feel choked, oppressed,
+suffocated, in anything small and perfect. I spent a very happy
+afternoon in that little English paradise, but I came away quite
+joyfully, and with many a loving thought of my own dear ragged garden,
+and all the corners in it where the anemones twinkle in the spring like
+stars, and where there is so much nature and so little art. It will grow
+I know sweeter every year, but it is too big ever to be perfect and to
+get to look so immaculate that the diseased imagination conjures up
+visions of housemaids issuing forth each morning in troops and dusting
+every separate flower with feather brushes. Nature herself is untidy,
+and in a garden she ought to come first, and Art with her brooms and
+clipping-shears follow humbly behind. Art has such a good time in the
+house, where she spreads herself over the walls, and hangs herself up
+gorgeously at the windows, and lurks in the sofa cushions, and breaks
+out in an eruption of pots wherever pots are possible, that really she
+should be content to take the second place out of doors. And how
+dreadful to meet a gardener and a wheelbarrow at every turn--which is
+precisely what happens to one in the perfect garden. My gardener, whose
+deafness is more than compensated for by the keenness of his eyesight,
+very soon remarked the scowl that distorted my features whenever I met
+one of his assistants in my favourite walks, and I never meet them now.
+I think he must keep them chained up to the cucumber-frames, so
+completely have they disappeared, and he only lets them loose when he
+knows I am driving, or at meals, or in bed. But is it not irritating to
+be sitting under your favourite tree, pencil in hand, and eyes turned
+skywards expectant of the spark from heaven that never falls, and then
+to have a man appear suddenly round the corner who immediately begins
+quite close to you to tear up the earth with his fangs? No one will ever
+know the number of what I believe are technically known as winged words
+that I have missed bringing down through interruptions of this kind.
+Indeed, as I look through these pages I see I must have missed them all,
+for I can find nothing anywhere with even a rudimentary approach to
+wings.
+
+Sometimes when I am in a critical mood and need all my faith to keep me
+patient, I shake my head at the unshornness of the garden as gravely as
+the missionary shook his head at me. The bushes stretch across the
+paths, and, catching at me as I go by, remind me that they have not been
+pruned; the teeming plant life rejoices on the lawns free from all
+interference from men and hoes; the pinks are closely nibbled off at the
+beginning of each summer by selfish hares intent on their own
+gratification; most of the beds bear the marks of nocturnal foxes; and
+the squirrels spend their days wantonly biting off and flinging down the
+tender young shoots of the firs. Then there is the boy who drives the
+donkey and water-cart round the garden, and who has an altogether
+reprehensible habit of whisking round corners and slicing off bits of
+the lawn as he whisks. "But you can't alter these things, my good soul,"
+I say to myself. "If you want to get rid of the hares and foxes, you
+must consent to have wire-netting, which is odious, right round your
+garden. And you are always saying you like weeds, so why grumble at your
+lawns? And it doesn't hurt you much if the squirrels do break bits off
+your firs--the firs must have had that happening to them years and years
+before you were born, yet they still flourish. As for boys, they
+certainly are revolting creatures. Can't you catch this one when he
+isn't looking and pop him in his own water-barrel and put the lid on?"
+
+I asked the June baby, who had several times noticed with indignation
+the culpable indifference of this boy in regard to corners, whether she
+did not think that would be a good way of disposing of him. She is a
+great disciplinarian, and was loud in her praise of the plan; but the
+other two demurred. "He might go dead in there," said the May baby,
+apprehensively. "And he is such a naughty boy," said April, who had
+watched his reckless conduct with special disgust, "that if he once went
+dead he'd go straight to the _Holle_ and stay all the time with the
+_diable_."
+
+That was the first French word I have heard them say: strange and
+sulphureous first-fruits of Seraphine's teaching!
+
+We were going round the garden in a procession, I with a big pair of
+scissors, and the Three with baskets, into one of which I put fresh
+flowers, and into the others flowers that were beginning to seed, dead
+flowers, and seed-pods. The garden was quivering in heat and light; rain
+in the morning had brought out all the snails and all the sweetness, and
+we were very happy, as we always are, I when I am knee-deep in flowers,
+and the babies when they can find new sorts of snails to add to their
+collections. These collections are carried about in cardboard boxes all
+day, and at night each baby has hers on the chair beside her bed.
+Sometimes the snails get out and crawl over the beds, but the babies do
+not mind. Once when April woke in the morning she was overjoyed by
+finding a friendly little one on her cheek. Clearly babies of iron
+nerves and pellucid consciences.
+
+"So you do know some French," I said as I snipped off poppy-heads; "you
+have always pretended you don't."
+
+"Oh, keep the poppies, mummy," cried April, as she saw them tumbling
+into her basket; "if you picks them and just leaves them, then they
+ripes and is good for such a many things."
+
+"Tell me about the _diable_" I said, "and you shall keep the poppies."
+
+"He isn't nice, that _diable_," she said, starting off at once with
+breathless eloquence. "Seraphine says there was one time a girl and a
+boy who went for a walk, and there were two ways, and one way goes where
+stones is, but it goes to the _lieber Gott_; and the girl went that
+way till she came to a door, and the _lieber Gott_ made the door
+opened and she went in, and that's the _Himmel_."
+
+"And the boy?"
+
+"Oh, he was a naughty boy and went the other way where there is a tree,
+and on the tree is written, 'Don't go this way or you'll be dead,' and
+he said, 'That is one _betise_,' and did go in the way and got to the
+_Holle_, and there he gets whippings when he doesn't make what the
+_diable_ says."
+
+"That's because he was so naughty," explained the May baby, holding up
+an impressive finger, "and didn't want to go to the _Himmel_ and didn't
+love glory."
+
+"All boys are naughty," said June, "and I don't love them."
+
+"_Nous allons parler Francais_" I announced, desirous of finding
+out whether their whole stock was represented by _diable_ and _betise_;
+"I believe you can all speak it quite well."
+
+There was no answer. I snipped off sweet-pea pods and began to talk
+French at a great rate, asking questions as I snipped, and trying to
+extract answers, and getting none. The silence behind me grew ominous.
+Presently I heard a faint sniff, and the basket being held up to me
+began to shake. I bent down quickly and looked under April's sun-bonnet.
+She was crying great dreadful tears, and rubbing her eyes hard with her
+one free hand.
+
+"Why, you most blessed of babies," I exclaimed, kneeling down and
+putting my arms round her, "what in the world is the matter?"
+
+She looked at me with grieved and doubting eyes. "Such a mother to talk
+French to her child!" she sobbed.
+
+I threw down the scissors, picked her up, and carried her up and down
+the path, comforting her with all the soft words I knew and suppressing
+my desire to smile. "That's not French, is it?" I whispered at the end
+of a long string of endearments, beginning, I believe, with such flights
+of rhetoric as priceless blessing and angel baby, and ending with a
+great many kisses.
+
+"No, no," she answered, patting my face and looking infinitely relieved,
+"that is pretty, and how mummies always talks. Proper mummies never
+speak French--only Seraphines." And she gave me a very tight hug, and a
+kiss that transferred all her tears to my face; and I set her down and,
+taking out my handkerchief, tried to wipe off the traces of my attempt
+at governessing from her cheeks. I wonder how it is that whenever babies
+cry, streaks of mud immediately appear on their faces. I believe I could
+cry for a week, and yet produce no mud.
+
+"I'll tell you what I'll do, babies," I said, anxious to restore
+complete serenity on such a lovely day, and feeling slightly ashamed of
+my uncalled-for zeal--indeed, April was right, and proper mothers leave
+lessons and torments to somebody else, and devote all their energies to
+petting--"I'll give a ball after tea."
+
+"_Yes_!" shouted three exultant voices, "and invite all the babies!"
+
+"So now you must arrange what you are going to wear. I suppose you'd
+like the same supper as usual? Run away to Seraphine and tell her to get
+you ready."
+
+They seized their baskets and their boxes of snails and rushed off into
+the bushes, calling for Seraphine with nothing but rapture in their
+voices, and French and the _diable_ quite forgotten.
+
+These balls are given with great ceremony two or three times a year.
+They last about an hour, during which I sit at the piano in the library
+playing cheerful tunes, and the babies dance passionately round the
+pillar. They refuse to waltz together, which is perhaps a good thing,
+for if they did there would always be one left over to be a wallflower
+and gnash her teeth; and when they want to dance squares they are forced
+by the stubbornness of numbers to dance triangles. At the appointed hour
+they knock at the door, and come in attired in the garments they have
+selected as appropriate (at this last ball the April baby wore my
+shooting coat, the May baby had a muff, and the June baby carried
+Seraphine's umbrella), and, curtseying to me, each one makes some remark
+she thinks suitable to the occasion.
+
+"How's your husband?" June asked me last time, in the defiant tones she
+seems to think proper at a ball.
+
+"Very well, thank you."
+
+"Oh, that is nice."
+
+"Mine isn't vely well," remarked April, cheerfully.
+
+"Indeed?"
+
+"No, he has got some tummy-aches."
+
+"Dear me!"
+
+"He was coming else, and had such fine twowsers to wear--pink ones with
+wibbons."
+
+After a little more graceful conversation of this kind the ball begins,
+and at the end of an hour's dancing, supper, consisting of radishes and
+lemonade, is served on footstools; and when they have cleared it up even
+to the leaves and stalks of the radishes, they rise with much dignity,
+express in proper terms their sense of gratitude for the entertainment,
+curtsey, and depart to bed, where they spend a night of horror, the prey
+of the awful dreams naturally resulting from so unusual a combination as
+radishes and babies. That is why my balls are rare festivals--the babies
+will insist on having radishes for the supper, and I, as a decent parent
+with a proper sense of my responsibilities, am forced accordingly to
+restrict my invitations to two, at the most three, in a year.
+
+When this last one was over I felt considerably exhausted, and had
+hardly sufficient strength to receive their thanks with civility. An
+hour's jig-playing with the thermometer at 90 leaves its marks on the
+most robust; and when they were in bed, and the supper beginning to do
+its work, I ordered the carriage and the kettle with a view to seeking
+repose in the forest, taking the opportunity of escaping before the Man
+of Wrath should come in to dinner. The weather has been very hot for a
+long time, but the rain in the morning had had a wonderful effect on my
+flowers, and as I drove away I could not help noticing how charming the
+borders in front of the house were looking, with their white hollyhocks,
+and white snapdragons, and fringe of feathery marigolds. This gardener
+has already changed the whole aspect of the place, and I believe I have
+found the right man at last. He is very young for a head gardener, but
+on that account all the more anxious to please me and keep his
+situation; and it is a great comfort to have to do with somebody who
+watches and interprets rightly every expression of one's face and does
+not need much talking to. He makes mistakes sometimes in the men he
+engages, just as I used to when I did the engaging, and he had one poor
+young man as apprentice who very soon, like the first of my three meek
+gardeners, went mad. His madness was of a harmless nature and took a
+literary form; indeed, that was all they had against him, that he would
+write books. He used to sit in the early morning on my special seats in
+the garden, and strictly meditate the thankless muse when he ought to
+have been carting manure; and he made his fellow-apprentices unspeakably
+wretched by shouting extracts from Schiller at them across the
+intervening gooseberry bushes. Let me hasten to say that I had never
+spoken to him, and should not even have known what he was like if he had
+not worn eyeglasses, so that the Man of Wrath's insinuation that I
+affect the sanity of my gardeners is entirely without justification. The
+eyeglasses struck me as so odd on a gardener that I asked who he was,
+and was told that he had been studying for the Bar, but could not pass
+the examinations, and had taken up gardening in the hope of getting back
+his health and spirits. I thought this a very sensible plan, and was
+beginning to feel interested in him when one day the post brought me a
+registered packet containing a manuscript play he had written called
+"The Lawyer as Gardener," dedicated to me. The Man of Wrath and I were
+both in it, the Man of Wrath, however, only in the list of characters,
+so that he should not feel hurt, I suppose, for he never appeared on the
+scenes at all. As for me, I was represented as going about quoting
+Tolstoi in season and out of season to the gardeners--a thing I protest
+I never did. The young man was sent home to his people, and I have been
+asking myself ever since what there is about this place that it should
+so persistently produce books and lunacy?
+
+On the outskirts of the forest, where shafts of dusty sunlight slanted
+through the trees, children were picking wortleberries for market as I
+passed last night, with hands and faces and aprons smudged into one blue
+stain. I had decided to go to a water-mill belonging to the Man of Wrath
+which lies far away in a clearing, so far away and so lonely and so
+quiet that the very spirit of peace seems to brood over it for ever; and
+all the way the wortleberry carpet was thick and unbroken. Never were
+the pines more pungent than after the long heat, and their rosy stems
+flushed pinker as I passed. Presently I got beyond the region of
+wortleberry-pickers, the children not caring to wander too far into the
+forest so late, and I jolted over the roots into the gathering shadows
+more and more pervaded by that feeling that so refreshes me, the feeling
+of being absolutely alone.
+
+A very ancient man lives in the mill and takes care of it, for it has
+long been unused, a deaf old man with a clean, toothless face, and no
+wife to worry him. He informed me once that all women are mistakes,
+especially that aggravated form called wives, and that he was thankful
+he had never married. I felt a certain delicacy after that about
+intruding on his solitude with the burden of my sex and wifehood heavy
+upon me, but he always seems very glad to see me, and runs at once to
+his fowlhouse to look for fresh eggs for my tea; so perhaps he regards
+me as a pleasing exception to the rule. On this last occasion he brought
+a table out to the elm-tree by the mill stream, that I might get what
+air there was while I ate my supper; and I sat in great peace waiting
+for the kettle to boil and watching the sun dropping behind the sharp
+forest me, and all the little pools and currents into which the stream
+just there breaks as it flows over mud banks, ablaze with the red
+reflection of the sky. The pools are clothed with water-lilies and
+inhabited by eels, and I generally take a netful of writhing eels back
+with me to the Man of Wrath to pacify him after my prolonged absence. In
+the lily time I get into the miller's punt and make them an excuse for
+paddling about among the mud islands, and even adventurously exploring
+the river as it winds into the forest, and the old man watches me
+anxiously from under the elm. He regards my feminine desire to pick
+water-lilies with indulgence, but is clearly uneasy at my affection for
+mud banks, and once, after I had stuck on one, and he had run up and
+down in great agitation for half an hour shouting instructions as to
+getting off again, he said when I was safely back on shore that people
+with petticoats (his way of expressing woman) were never intended for
+punts, and their only chance of safety lay in dry land and keeping
+quiet. I did not this time attempt the punt, for I was tired, and it was
+half full of water, probably poured into it by a miller weary of the
+ways of women; and I drank my tea quietly, going on at the same time
+with my interrupted afternoon reading of the _Sorrows of Werther_,
+in which I had reached a part that has a special fascination for me
+every time I read it--that part where Werther first meets Lotte, and
+where, after a thunderstorm; they both go to the window, and she is so
+touched by the beauties of nature that she lays her hand on his and
+murmurs "Klopstock,"--to the complete dismay of the reader, though not
+of Werther, for he, we find, was so carried away by the magic word that
+he flung himself on to her hand and kissed it with tears of rapture.
+
+I looked up from the book at the quiet pools and the black line of
+trees, above which stars were beginning to twinkle, my ears soothed by
+the splashing of the mill stream and the hooting somewhere near of a
+solitary owl, and I wondered whether, if the Man of Wrath were by my
+side, it would be a relief to my pleasurable feelings to murmur
+"Klopstock," and whether if I did he would immediately shed tears of joy
+over my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, and
+Goethe's putting it into his heroine's mouth just when she was most
+enraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursing
+to the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I am
+talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no woman
+should. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained and
+uneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? All
+we can do is to jump at conclusions, and, when we have jumped, receive
+with meekness the information that we have jumped wrong. Sitting there
+long after it was too dark to read, I thought of the old miller's words,
+and agreed with him that the best thing a woman can do in this world is
+to keep quiet. He came out once and asked whether he should bring a
+lamp, and seemed uneasy at my choosing to sit there in the dark. I could
+see the stars in the black pools, and a line of faint light far away
+above the pines where the sun had set. Every now and then the hot air
+from the ground struck up in my face, and afterwards would come a cooler
+breath from the water. Of what use is it to fight for things and make a
+noise? Nature is so clear in her teaching that he who has lived with her
+for any time can be in little doubt as to the "better way." Keep quiet
+and say one's prayers--certainly not merely the best, but the only
+things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I
+have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a
+form of thanksgiving.
+
+
+
+September
+
+
+September 9th--I have been looking in the dictionary for the English
+word for _Einquartierung_, because that is what is happening to us just
+now, but I can find nothing satisfactory. My dictionary merely says (1)
+the quartering, (2) soldiers quartered, and then relapses into
+irrelevancy; so that it is obvious English people do without the word
+for the delightful reason that they have not got the thing. We have it
+here very badly; an epidemic raging at the end of nearly every summer,
+when cottages and farms swarm with soldiers and horses, when all the
+female part of the population gets engaged to be married and will not
+work, when all the male part is jealous and wants to fight, and when my
+house is crowded with individuals so brilliant and decorative in their
+dazzling uniforms that I wish sometimes I might keep a bunch of the
+tallest and slenderest for ever in a big china vase in a corner of the
+drawing-room.
+
+This year the manoeuvres are up our way, so that we are blest with more
+than our usual share of attention, and wherever you go you see soldiers,
+and the holy calm that has brooded over us all the summer has given
+place to a perpetual running to and fro of officers' servants, to meals
+being got ready at all hours, to the clanking of spurs and all those
+other mysterious things on an officer that do clank whenever he moves,
+and to the grievous wailings of my unfortunate menials, who are quite
+beside themselves, and know not whither to turn for succour. We have had
+one week of it already, and we have yet another before us. There are
+five hundred men with their horses quartered at the farm, and thirty
+officers with their servants in our house, besides all those billeted on
+the surrounding villages who have to be invited to dinner and cannot be
+allowed to perish in peasant houses; so that my summer has for a time
+entirely ceased to be solitary, and whenever I flee distracted to the
+farthest recesses of my garden and begin to muse, according to my habit,
+on Man, on Nature, and on Human Life, lieutenants got up in the most
+exquisite flannels pursue me and want to play tennis with me, a game I
+have always particularly disliked.
+
+There is no room of course for all those extra men and horses at the
+farm, and when a few days before their arrival (sometimes it is only
+one, and sometimes only a few hours) an official appears and informs us
+of the number to be billeted on us, the Man of Wrath has to have
+temporary sheds run up, some as stables, some as sleeping-places, and
+some as dining-rooms. Nor is it easy to cook for five hundred people
+more than usual, and all the ordinary business of the farm comes to a
+stand-still while the hands prepare barrowfuls of bacon and potatoes,
+and stir up the coffee and milk and sugar together with a pole in a tub.
+Part of the regimental band is here, the upper part. The base
+instruments are in the next village; but that did not deter an
+enthusiastic young officer from marching his men past our windows on
+their arrival at six in the morning, with colours flying, and what he
+had of his band playing their tunes as unconcernedly as though all those
+big things that make such a noise were giving the fabric its accustomed
+and necessary base. We are paid six pfennings a day for lodging a common
+soldier, and six pfennings for his horse--rather more than a penny in
+English money for the pair of them; only unfortunately sheds and
+carpentry are not quite so cheap. Eighty pfennings a day is added for
+the soldier's food, and for this he has to receive two pounds of bread,
+half a pound of meat, a quarter of a pound of bacon, and either a
+quarter of a pound of rice or barley or three pounds of potatoes.
+Officers are paid for at the rate of two marks fifty a day without wine;
+we are not obliged to give them wine, and if we do they are regarded as
+guests, and behave accordingly. The thirty we have now do not, as I
+could have wished, all go out together in the morning and stay out till
+the evening, but some go out as others come in, and breakfast is not
+finished till lunch begins, and lunch drags on till dinner, and all day
+long the dining-room is full of meals and officers, and we ceased a week
+ago to have the least feeling that the place, after all, belongs to us.
+
+Now really it seems to me that I am a much-tried woman, and any peace I
+have enjoyed up to now is amply compensated for by my present torments.
+I believe even my stern friend the missionary would be satisfied if he
+could know how swiftly his prediction that sorrow and suffering would be
+sure to come, has been fulfilled. All day long I am giving out table
+linen, ordering meals, supporting the feeble knees of servants, making
+appropriate and amiable remarks to officers, presiding as gracefully as
+nature permits at meals, and trying to look as though I were happy;
+while out in the garden--oh, I know how it is looking out in the garden
+this golden weather, how the placid hours are slipping by in unchanged
+peace, how strong the scent of roses and ripe fruit is, how the sleepy
+bees drone round the flowers, how warmly the sun shines in that corner
+where the little Spanish chestnut is turning yellow--the first to turn,
+and never afterwards surpassed in autumn beauty; I know how still it is
+down there in my fir wood, where the insects hum undisturbed in the
+warm, quiet air; I know what the plain looks like from the seat under
+the oak, how beautiful, with its rolling green waves burning to gold
+under the afternoon sky; I know how the hawks circle over it, and how
+the larks sing above it, and I edge as near to the open window as I can,
+straining my ears to hear them, and forgetting the young men who are
+telling me of all the races their horses win as completely as though
+they did not exist. I want to be out there on that golden grass, and
+look up into that endless blue, and feel the ecstasy of that song
+through all my being, and there is a tearing at my heart when I remember
+that I cannot. Yet they are beautiful young men; all are touchingly
+amiable, and many of the older ones even charming--how is it, then, that
+I so passionately prefer larks?
+
+We have every grade of greatness here, from that innocent being the
+ensign, a creature of apparent modesty and blushes, who is obliged to
+stand up and drain his glass each time a superior chooses to drink to
+him, and who sits on the hardest chairs and looks for the balls while we
+play tennis, to the general, invariably delightful, whose brains have
+carried him triumphantly through the annual perils of weeding out, who
+is as distinguished in looks and manners as he is in abilities, and has
+the crowning merit of being manifestly happy in the society of women.
+Nothing lower than a colonel is to me an object of interest. The lower
+you get the more officers there are, and the harder it is to see the
+promising ones in the crowd; but once past the rank of major the air
+gets very much cleared by the merciless way they have been weeded out,
+and the higher officers are the very flower of middle-aged German males.
+As for those below, a lieutenant is a bright and beautiful being who
+admires no one so much as himself; a captain is generally newly married,
+having reached the stage of increased pay which makes a wife possible,
+and, being often still in love with her, is ineffective for social
+purposes; and a major is a man with a yearly increasing family, for
+whose wants his pay is inadequate, a person continually haunted by the
+fear of approaching weeding, after which his career is ended, he is
+poorer than ever, and being no longer young and only used to a soldier's
+life, is almost always quite incapable of starting afresh. Even the
+children of light find it difficult to start afresh with any success
+after forty, and the retired officer is never a child of light; if he
+were, he would not have been weeded out. You meet him everywhere, shorn
+of the glories of his uniform, easily recognisable by the bad fit of his
+civilian clothes, wandering about like a ship without a rudder; and as
+time goes on he settles down to the inevitable, and passes his days in a
+fourth-floor flat in the suburbs, eats, drinks, sleeps, reads the
+_Kreuzzeitung_ and nothing else, plays at cards in the day-time, grows
+gouty, and worries his wife. It would be difficult to count the number
+of them that have answered the Man of Wrath's advertisements for book-
+keepers and secretaries--always vainly, for even if they were fit for
+the work, no single person possesses enough tact to cope successfully
+with the peculiarities of such a situation. I hear that some English
+people of a hopeful disposition indulge in ladies as servants; the cases
+are parallel, and the tact required to meet both superhuman.
+
+Of all the officers here the only ones with whom I can find plenty to
+talk about are the generals. On what subject under heaven could one talk
+to a lieutenant? I cannot discuss the agility of ballet-dancers or the
+merits of jockeys with him, because these things are as dust and ashes
+to me; and when forced for a few moments by my duties as hostess to come
+within range of his conversation I feel chilly and grown old. In the
+early spring of this year, in those wonderful days of hope when nature
+is in a state of suppressed excitement, and when any day the yearly
+recurring miracle may happen of a few hours' warm rain changing the
+whole world, we got news that a lieutenant and two men with their horses
+were imminent, and would be quartered here for three nights while some
+occult military evolutions were going on a few miles off. It was
+specially inopportune, because the Man of Wrath would not be here, but
+he comforted me as I bade him good-bye, my face no doubt very blank, by
+the assurance that the lieutenant would be away all day, and so worn out
+when he got back in the evening that he probably would not appear at
+all. But I never met a more wide-awake young man. Not once during those
+three days did he respond to my pressing entreaties to go and lie down,
+and not all the desperate eloquence of a woman at her wit's end could
+persuade him that he was very tired and ought to try and get some sleep.
+I had intended to be out when he arrived, and to remain out till dinner
+time, but he came unexpectedly early, while the babies and I were still
+at lunch, the door opening to admit the most beautiful specimen of his
+class that I have ever seen, so beautiful indeed in his white uniform
+that the babies took him for an angel--visitant of the type that visited
+Abraham and Sarah, and began in whispers to argue about wings. He was
+not in the least tired after his long ride he told me, in reply to my
+anxious inquiries, and, rising to the occasion, at once plunged into
+conversation, evidently realising how peculiarly awful prolonged pauses
+under the circumstances would be. I took him for a drive in the
+afternoon, after having vainly urged him to rest, and while he told me
+about his horses, and his regiment, and his brother officers, in what at
+last grew to be a decidedly intermittent prattle, I amused myself by
+wondering what he would say if I suddenly began to hold forth on the
+themes I love best, and insist that he should note the beauty of the
+trees as they stood that afternoon expectant, with all their little buds
+only waiting for the one warm shower to burst into the glory of young
+summer. Perhaps he would regard me as the German variety of a hyena in
+petticoats--the imagination recoils before the probable fearfulness of
+such an animal--or, if not quite so bad as that, at any rate a creature
+hysterically inclined; and he would begin to feel lonely, and think of
+his comrades, and his pleasant mess, and perhaps even of his mother, for
+he was very young and newly fledged. Therefore I held my peace, and
+restricted my conversation to things military, of which I know probably
+less than any other woman in Germany, so that my remarks must have been
+to an unusual degree impressive. He talked down to me, and I talked down
+to him, and we reached home in a state of profoundest exhaustion--at
+least I know I did, but when I looked at him he had not visibly turned a
+hair. I went upstairs trying to hope that he had felt it more than he
+showed, and that during the remainder of his stay he would adopt the
+suggestion so eagerly offered of spending his spare time in his room
+resting.
+
+At dinner, he and I, quite by ourselves, were both manifestly convinced
+of the necessity, for the sake of the servants, of not letting the
+conversation drop. I felt desperate, and would have said anything sooner
+than sit opposite him in silence, and with united efforts we got through
+that fairly well. After dinner I tried gossip, and encouraged him to
+tell me some, but he had such an unnatural number of relations that
+whoever I began to talk about happened to be his cousin, or his brother-
+in-law, or his aunt, as he hastily informed me, so that what I had
+intended to say had to be turned immediately into loud and unqualified
+praise; and praising people is frightfully hard work--you give yourself
+the greatest pains over it, and are aware all the time that it is not in
+the very least carrying conviction. Does not everybody know that one's
+natural impulse is to tear the absent limb from limb? At half-past nine
+I got up, worn out in mind and body, and told him very firmly that it
+had been a custom in my family from time immemorial to be in bed by ten,
+and that I was accordingly going there. He looked surprised and wider
+awake than ever, but nothing shook me, and I walked away, leaving him
+standing on the hearthrug after the manner of my countrymen, who never
+dream of opening a door for a woman.
+
+The next day he went off at five in the morning, and was to be away, as
+he had told me, till the evening. I felt as though I had been let out of
+prison as I breakfasted joyfully on the verandah, the sun streaming
+through the creeperless trellis on to the little meal, and the first
+cuckoo of the year calling to me from the fir wood. Of the dinner and
+evening before me I would not think; indeed I had a half-formed plan in
+my head of going to the forest after lunch with the babies, taking wraps
+and provisions, and getting lost till well on towards bedtime; so that
+when the angel-visitant should return full of renewed strength and
+conversation, he would find the casket empty and be told the gem had
+gone out for a walk. After I had finished breakfast I ran down the steps
+into the garden, intent on making the most of every minute and hardly
+able to keep my feet from dancing. Oh, the blessedness of a bright
+spring morning without a lieutenant! And was there ever such a hopeful
+beginning to a day, and so full of promise for the subsequent right
+passing of its hours, as breakfast in the garden, alone with your teapot
+and your book! Any cobwebs that have clung to your soul from the day
+before are brushed off with a neatness and expedition altogether
+surprising; never do tea and toast taste so nice as out there in the
+sun; never was a book so wise and full of pith as the one lying open
+before you; never was woman so clean outside and in, so refreshed, so
+morally and physically well-tubbed, as she who can start her day in this
+fashion. As I danced down the garden path I began to think cheerfully
+even of lieutenants. It was not so bad; he would be away till dark, and
+probably on the morrow as well; I would start off in the afternoon, and
+by coming back very late would not see him at all that day--might not,
+if Providence were kind, see him again ever; and this last thought was
+so exhilarating that I began to sing. But he came back just as we had
+finished lunch.
+
+"The _Herr Lieutenant_ is here," announced the servant, "and has gone
+to wash his hands. The _Herr Lieutenant_ has not yet lunched, and will
+be down in a moment."
+
+"I want the carriage at once," I ordered--I could not and would not
+spend another afternoon _tete-a-tete_ with that young man,--"and you are
+to tell the _Herr Lieutenant_ that I am sorry I was obliged to go out,
+but I had promised the pastor to take the children there this afternoon.
+See that he has everything he wants."
+
+I gathered the babies together and fled. I could hear the lieutenant
+throwing things about overhead, and felt there was not a moment to lose.
+The servant's face showed plainly that he did not believe about the
+pastor, and the babies looked up at me wonderingly. What is a woman to
+do when driven into a corner? The father of lies inhabits corners--no
+doubt the proper place for such a naughty person.
+
+We ran upstairs to get ready. There was only one short flight on which
+we could meet the lieutenant, and once past that we were safe; but we
+met him on that one short flight. He was coming down in a hurry, giving
+his moustache a final hasty twist, and looking fresher, brighter,
+lovelier, than ever.
+
+"Oh, good morning. You have got back much sooner than you expected, have
+you not?" I said lamely.
+
+"Yes, I managed to get through my part quickly," he said with a
+briskness I did not like.
+
+"But you started so early--you must be very tired?"
+
+"Oh, not in the least, thank you."
+
+Then I repeated the story about the expectant parson, adding to my guilt
+by laying stress on the inevitability of the expedition owing to its
+having been planned weeks before. April and May stood on the landing
+above, listening with surprised faces, and June, her mind evidently
+dwelling on feathers, intently examined his shoulders from the step
+immediately behind. And we did get away, leaving him to think what he
+liked, and to smoke, or sleep, or wander as he chose, and I could not
+but believe he must feel relieved to be rid of me; but the afternoon
+clouded over, and a sharp wind sprang up, and we were very cold in the
+forest, and the babies began to sneeze and ask where the parson was, and
+at last, after driving many miles, I said it was too late to go to the
+parson's and we would turn back. It struck me as hard that we should be
+forced to wander in cold forests and leave our comfortable home because
+of a lieutenant, and I went back with my heart hardened against him.
+
+That second evening was worse a great deal than the first. We had said
+all we ever meant to say to each other, and had lauded all our relations
+with such hearty goodwill that there was nothing whatever to add. I sat
+listening to the slow ticking of the clock and asking questions about
+things I did not in the least want to know, such as the daily work and
+rations and pay of the soldiers in his regiment, and presently--we
+having dined at the early hour usual in the country--the clock struck
+eight. Could I go to bed at eight? No, I had not the courage, and no
+excuse ready. More slow ticking, and more questions and answers about
+rations and pipeclay. What a clock! For utter laziness and dull
+deliberation there surely never was its equal--it took longer to get to
+the half-hour than any clock I ever met, but it did get there at last
+and struck it. Could I go? Could I? No, still no excuse ready. We
+drifted from pipeclay to a discussion on bicycling for women--a dreary
+subject. Was it becoming? Was it good for them? Was it ladylike? Ought
+they to wear skirts or--? In Paris they all wore--. Our bringing-up here
+is so excellent that if we tried we could not induce ourselves to speak
+of any forked garments to a young man, so we make ourselves understood,
+when we desire to insinuate such things, by an expressive pause and a
+modest downward flicker of the eyelids. The clock struck nine. Nothing
+should keep me longer. I sprang to my feet and said I was exhausted
+beyond measure by the sharp air driving, and that whenever I had spent
+an afternoon out, it was my habit to go to bed half an hour earlier than
+other evenings. Again he looked surprised, but rather less so than the
+night before, and he was, I think, beginning to get used to me. I
+retired, firmly determined not to face another such day and to be very
+ill in the morning and quite unable to rise, he having casually remarked
+that the next one was an off day; and I would remain in bed, that last
+refuge of the wretched, as long as he remained here.
+
+I sat by the window in my room till late, looking out at the moonlight
+in the quiet garden, with a feeling as though I were stuffed with
+sawdust--a very awful feeling--and thinking ruefully of the day that had
+begun so brightly and ended so dismally. What a miserable thing not to
+be able to be frank and say simply, "My good young man, you and I never
+saw each other before, probably won't see each other again, and have no
+interests in common. I mean you to be comfortable in my house, but I
+want to be comfortable too. Let us, therefore, keep out of each other's
+way while you are obliged to be here. Do as you like, go where you like,
+and order what you like, but don't expect me to waste my time sitting by
+your side and making small-talk. I too have to get to heaven, and have
+no time to lose. You won't see me again. Good-bye."
+
+I believe many a harassed _Hausfrau_ would give much to be able to make
+some such speech when these young men appear, and surely the young men
+themselves would be grateful; but simplicity is apparently quite beyond
+people's strength. It is, of all the virtues, the one I prize the most;
+it is undoubtedly the most lovable of any, and unspeakably precious for
+its power of removing those mountains that confine our lives and prevent
+our seeing the sky. Certain it is that until we have it, the simple
+spirit of the little child, we shall in no wise discover our kingdom of
+heaven.
+
+These were my reflections, and many others besides, as I sat weary at
+the window that cold spring night, long after the lieutenant who had
+occasioned them was slumbering peacefully on the other side of the
+house. Thoughts of the next day, and enforced bed, and the bowls of
+gruel to be disposed of if the servants were to believe in my illness,
+made my head ache. Eating gruel _pour la galerie_ is a pitiable
+state to be reduced to--surely no lower depths of humiliation are
+conceivable. And then, just as I was drearily remembering how little I
+loved gruel, there was a sudden sound of wheels rolling swiftly round
+the corner of the house, a great rattling and trampling in the still
+night over the stones, and tearing open the window and leaning out,
+there, sitting in a station fly, and apparelled to my glad vision in
+celestial light, I beheld the Man of Wrath, come home unexpectedly to
+save me.
+
+"Oh, dear Man of Wrath," I cried, hanging out into the moonlight with
+outstretched arms, "how much nicer thou art than lieutenants! I never
+missed thee more--I never longed for thee more--I never loved thee more
+--come up here quickly that I may kiss thee!--"
+
+
+
+October 1st.--Last night after dinner, when we were in the library, I
+said, "Now listen to me, Man of Wrath."
+
+"Well?" he inquired, looking up at me from the depths of his chair as I
+stood before him.
+
+"Do you know that as a prophet you are a failure? Five months ago to-day
+you sat among the wallflowers and scoffed at the idea of my being able
+to enjoy myself alone a whole summer through. Is the summer over?"
+
+"It is," he assented, as he heard the rain beating against the windows.
+
+"And have I invited any one here?"
+
+"No, but there were all those officers."
+
+"They have nothing whatever to do with it."
+
+"They helped you through one fortnight."
+
+"They didn't. It was a fortnight of horror."
+
+"Well. Go on."
+
+"You said I would be punished by being dull. Have I been dull?"
+
+"My dear, as though if you had been you would ever confess it."
+
+"That's true. But as a matter of fact let me tell you that I never spent
+a happier summer."
+
+He merely looked at me out of the corners of his eyes.
+
+"If I remember rightly," he said, after a pause, "your chief reason for
+wishing to be solitary was that your soul might have time to grow. May I
+ask if it did?"
+
+"Not a bit."
+
+He laughed, and, getting up, came and stood by my side before the fire.
+"At least you are honest," he said, drawing my hand through his arm.
+
+"It is an estimable virtue."
+
+"And strangely rare in woman."
+
+"Now leave woman alone. I have discovered you know nothing really of her
+at all. But _I_ know all about her."
+
+"You do? My dear, one woman can never judge the others."
+
+"An exploded tradition, dear Sage."
+
+"Her opinions are necessarily biassed."
+
+"Venerable nonsense, dear Sage."
+
+"Because women are each other's natural enemies."
+
+"Obsolete jargon, dear Sage."
+
+"Well, what do you make of her?"
+
+"Why, that she's a DEAR, and that you ought to be very happy and
+thankful to have got one of her always with you."
+
+"But am I not?" he asked, putting his arm round me and looking
+affectionate; and when people begin to look affectionate I, for one,
+cease to take any further interest in them.
+
+And so the Man of Wrath and I fade away into dimness and muteness, my
+head resting on his shoulder, and his arm encircling my waist; and what
+could possibly be more proper, more praiseworthy, or more picturesque?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Solitary Summer, by Elizabeth von Arnim
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOLITARY SUMMER ***
+
+This file should be named 5991.txt or 5991.zip
+
+Produced by Aaron Cannon, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
+of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
+Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
+even years after the official publication date.
+
+Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
+midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
+The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
+Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
+preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
+and editing by those who wish to do so.
+
+Most people start at our Web sites at:
+https://gutenberg.org or
+http://promo.net/pg
+
+These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
+Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
+eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).
+
+
+Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
+can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
+also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
+indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
+announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
+
+http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
+ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03
+
+Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90
+
+Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
+as it appears in our Newsletters.
+
+
+Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)
+
+We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
+time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
+to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
+searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
+projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
+per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
+million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
+files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
+We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
+If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
+will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.
+
+The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
+This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
+which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.
+
+Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):
+
+eBooks Year Month
+
+    1  1971 July
+   10  1991 January
+  100  1994 January
+ 1000  1997 August
+ 1500  1998 October
+ 2000  1999 December
+ 2500  2000 December
+ 3000  2001 November
+ 4000  2001 October/November
+ 6000  2002 December*
+ 9000  2003 November*
+10000  2004 January*
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
+to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
+and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
+Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
+Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
+Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
+Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
+Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
+Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
+Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
+
+We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
+that have responded.
+
+As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
+will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
+Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.
+
+In answer to various questions we have received on this:
+
+We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
+request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
+you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
+just ask.
+
+While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
+not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
+donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
+donate.
+
+International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
+how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
+deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
+ways.
+
+Donations by check or money order may be sent to:
+
+Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+PMB 113
+1739 University Ave.
+Oxford, MS 38655-4109
+
+Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
+method other than by check or money order.
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
+the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
+[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
+tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
+requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
+made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.
+
+We need your donations more than ever!
+
+You can get up to date donation information online at:
+
+https://www.gutenberg.org/donation.html
+
+
+***
+
+If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
+you can always email directly to:
+
+Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>
+
+Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.
+
+We would prefer to send you information by email.
+
+
+**The Legal Small Print**
+
+
+(Three Pages)
+
+***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
+Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
+They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
+your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
+someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
+fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
+disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
+you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.
+
+*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
+By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
+eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
+this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
+a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
+sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
+you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
+medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.
+
+ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
+This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
+is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
+through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
+Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
+on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
+distribute it in the United States without permission and
+without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
+below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
+under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.
+
+Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
+any commercial products without permission.
+
+To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
+efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
+works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
+medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
+things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
+intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
+disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
+codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.
+
+LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
+But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
+[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
+receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
+all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
+legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
+UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
+INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
+OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
+POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
+
+If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
+receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
+you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
+time to the person you received it from. If you received it
+on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
+such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
+copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
+choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
+receive it electronically.
+
+THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
+TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
+LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
+PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
+
+Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
+the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
+above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
+may have other legal rights.
+
+INDEMNITY
+You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
+and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
+with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
+texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
+legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
+following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
+[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
+or [3] any Defect.
+
+DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
+You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
+disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
+"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
+or:
+
+[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
+     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
+     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
+     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
+     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
+     including any form resulting from conversion by word
+     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
+     *EITHER*:
+
+     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
+          does *not* contain characters other than those
+          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
+          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
+          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
+          author, and additional characters may be used to
+          indicate hypertext links; OR
+
+     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
+          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
+          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
+          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
+          OR
+
+     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
+          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
+          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
+          or other equivalent proprietary form).
+
+[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
+     "Small Print!" statement.
+
+[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
+     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
+     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
+     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
+     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
+     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
+     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
+     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
+     let us know your plans and to work out the details.
+
+WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
+Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
+public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
+in machine readable form.
+
+The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
+public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
+Money should be paid to the:
+"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
+software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
+hart@pobox.com
+
+[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
+when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
+Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
+used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
+they hardware or software or any other related product without
+express permission.]
+
+*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*
+