The Solitary Summer

by Elizabeth von Arnim

To the man of wrathWith 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 oflife. I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time togrow. Nobody shall be invited to stay with me, and if any one calls theywill be told that I am out, or away, or sick. I shall spend the monthsin the garden, and on the plain, and in the forests. I shall watch thethings that happen in my garden, and see where I have made mistakes. Onwet days I will go into the thickest parts of the forests, where thepine needles are everlastingly dry, and when the sun shines I'll lie onthe heath and see how the broom flares against the clouds. I shall beperpetually happy, because there will be no one to worry me. Out thereon the plain there is silence, and where there is silence I havediscovered there is peace. "

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

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

The Man of Wrath sat at the foot of the verandah steps in that placidafter-dinner mood which suffers fools, if not gladly, at leastindulgently, 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 quiteready to admit that though the fields and flowers are always ready toteach, I am not always in the mood to learn, and sometimes my eyes areincapable 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 andwishing he would use longer sentences, and he looked at the sky and didnot 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 havetold me what you think of my idea. Wouldn't a whole lovely summer, quitealone, be delightful? Wouldn't it be perfect to get up every morning forweeks and feel that you belong to yourself and to nobody else?" And Iwent over to him and put a hand on each shoulder and gave him a littleshake, for he persisted in gazing at the stars just as though I had notbeen there. "Please, Man of Wrath, say something long for once, " Ientreated; "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 hedrew 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 youplease, and I never interfere with you. If you do not want to have anyone here this summer you will not have any one, but you will find it avery 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 willswell. "

"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 reallyknows me. Here we have been three years buried in the country, and I ashappy as a bird the whole time. I say as a bird, because other peoplehave used the simile to describe absolute cheerfulness, although I donot believe birds are any happier than any one else, and they quarreldisgracefully. I have been as happy then, we will say, as the best ofbirds, and have had seasons of solitude at intervals before now duringwhich dull is the last word to describe my state of mind. Everybody, itis true, would not like it, and I had some visitors here a fortnight agowho 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; howcan you make a person happy against his will? You can knock a great dealinto him in the way of learning and what the schools call extras, but ifyou try for ever you will not knock any happiness into a being who hasnot got it in him to be happy. The only result probably would be thatyou knock your own out of yourself. Obviously happiness must come fromwithin, and not from without; and judging from my past experience and mypresent sensations, I should say that I have a store just now within memore than sufficient to fill five quiet months. 

"I wonder, " I remarked after a pause, during which I began to suspectthat 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 amnearly 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 whatdoes that matter?) "I grew almost to hate it. Whenever I went into itthere they were, dragging themselves about with faces full of indignantresignation. Do you suppose they saw one of those blue hepaticasoverflowing the shrubberies? And when I drove with them into the woods, where the fairies were so busy just then hanging the branches withlittle green jewels, they talked about Berlin the whole time, and thegood savouries their new chef makes. "

"Well, my dear, no doubt they missed their savouries. Your garden, Iacknowledge, is growing very pretty, but your cook is bad. Poor Schmidtsometimes looked quite ill at dinner, and the beauty of your floralarrangements 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 agreat deal than Kissingen and Carlsbad and Homburg rolled into one, andvery much cheaper. As long as I have her, my dear man, you will becomparatively thin and amiable. Poor Schmidt, as you call him, eats toomuch of those delectable savouries, and then looks at his wife andwonders 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 whetherhe meant it prettily, or whether he was merely thinking of theimprobability of his ever eating too much of the local savouries, Icannot tell. I object, however, to discussing cooks in the garden on astarlight night, so I got off his knee and proposed that we shouldstroll round a little. 

It was such a sweet evening, such a fitting close to a beautiful MayDay, and the flowers shone in the twilight like pale stars, and the airwas full of fragrance, and I envied the bats fluttering through such abath of scent, with the real stars above and the pansy stars beneath, and themselves so fashioned that even if they wanted to they could notmake a noise and disturb the prevailing peace. A great deal that ispoetical has been written by English people about May Day, and theimpression left on the foreign mind is an impression of posies, andgarlands, 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 againstthe windows, and the friends with whom I was staying said it was veryoften so, and that they had never seen any lambs and ribbons. We Germansattach no poetical significance to it at all, and yet we well might, forit is almost invariably beautiful; and as for garlands, I wonder howmany villages full of young people could have been provided with themout of my garden, and nothing be missed. It is to-day a garden ofwallflowers, and I think I have every colour and sort in cultivation. The borders under the south windows of the house, so empty andmelancholy this time last year, are crammed with them, and are finishedoff in front by a broad strip from end to end of yellow and whitepansies. The tea rose beds round the sun-dial facing these borders aresheets of white, and golden, and purple, and wine-red pansies, with thedainty red shoots of the tea roses presiding delicately in their midst. The verandah steps leading down into this pansy paradise have boxes ofwhite, and pink, and yellow tulips all the way up on each side, and onthe lawn, behind the roses, are two big beds of every coloured tuliprising above a carpet of forget-me-nots. How very much more charmingdifferent-coloured tulips are together than tulips in one colour byitself! Last year, on the recommendation of sundry writers aboutgardens, I tried beds of scarlet tulips and forget-me-nots. They werepretty enough; but I wish those writers could see my beds of mixedtulips. I never saw anything so sweetly, delicately gay. The only ones Iexclude are the rose-coloured ones; but scarlet, gold, delicate pink, and white are all there, and the effect is infinitely enchanting. Theforget-me-nots grow taller as the tulips go off, and will presentlytenderly engulf them altogether, and so hide the shame of their decay intheir kindly little arms. They will be left there, clouds of gentleblue, until the tulips are well withered, and then they will be takenaway to make room for the scarlet geraniums that are to occupy these twobeds in the summer and flare in the sun as much as they like. I love anoccasional mass of fiery colour, and these two will make the lilies lookeven whiter and more breathless that are to stand sentinel round thesemicircle containing the precious tea roses. 

The first two years I had this garden, I was determined to do exactly asI chose in it, and to have no arrangements of plants that I had notplanned, and no plants but those I knew and loved; so, fearing that anexperienced gardener would profit by my ignorance, then about asabsolute as it could be, and thrust all his bedding nightmares upon me, and fill the place with those dreadful salad arrangements so often seenin the gardens of the indifferent rich, I would only have a meek man ofsmall 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 afterthe other, and learned what I might long ago have discovered, that theless a person knows, the more certain he is that he is right, and thatno weapons yet invented are of any use in a struggle with stupidity. Thefirst of these three went melancholy mad at the end of a year; thesecond was love-sick, and threw down his tools and gave up his situationto 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 anychance came up, scratched his head, and as this is a sure sign ofineptitude, 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 Icould and make it beautiful; I had refused to have more than an inferiorgardener because of his supposed more perfect obedience, and oneassistant, because of my desire to enjoy the garden undisturbed; I hadstudied diligently all the gardening books I could lay hands on; I wasunder the impression that I am an ordinarily intelligent person, andthat if an ordinarily intelligent person devotes his whole time tostudying a subject he loves, success is very probable; and yet at theend of two years what was my garden like? The failures of the first twosummers had been regarded with philosophy; but that third summer I usedto go into it sometimes and cry. 

As far as I was concerned I had really learned a little, and knew whatto buy, and had fairly correct notions as to when and in what soil tosow and plant what I had bought; but of what use is it to buy good seedsand plants and bulbs if you are forced to hand them over to a gardenerwho listens with ill-concealed impatience to the careful directions yougive him, says Jawohl a great many times, and then goes off and putsthem in in the way he has always done, which is invariably the wrongway? My hands were tied because of the unfortunate circumstance of sex, or I would gladly have changed places with him and requested him to dothe talking while I did the planting, and as he probably would not havetalked much there would have been a distinct gain in the peace of theworld, which would surely be very materially increased if women'stongues were tied instead of their hands, and those that want to couldwork with them without collecting a crowd. And is it not certain thatthe 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 abouttheir pleasant work in the sunshine, turning up the luscious damp earth, raking, weeding, watering, planting, cutting the grass, pruning thetrees--not a thing that they do from the first uncovering of the rosesin the spring to the November bonfires but fills my soul with longing tobe up and doing it too. A great many things will have to happen, however, before such a state of popular large-mindedness as will allowof my digging without creating a sensation is reached, so I have plentyof time for further grumblings; only I do very much wish that thetongues inhabiting this apparently lonely and deserted countryside wouldrestrict their comments to the sins, if any, committed by the indigenousfemales (since sins are fair game for comment) and leave their harmlesseccentricities alone. After having driven through vast tracts of forestand heath for hours, and never meeting a soul or seeing a house, it issurprising to be told that on such a day you took such a drive and wereat such a spot; yet this has happened to me more than once. And if eventhis is watched and noted, with what lightning rapidity would the newsspread that I had been seen stalking down the garden path with a hoeover my shoulder and a basket in my hand, and weeding written large onevery feature! Yet I should love to weed. 

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

But nettles are not to be tolerated. They settled the question on whichI 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 washard to believe that we had ever been doing anything but carefullycultivating them in all their varieties, I walked into the Man ofWrath's den. 

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

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

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

They came in such shoals that half the population must have been headgardeners out of situations. I took all the likely ones round thegarden, and I do not think I ever spent a more chastening week than thatweek of selection. Their remarks were, naturally, of the frankestnature, as I had told them I had had practically only gardeners'assistants since I lived here, and they had no idea, when they werepolitely scoffing at some arrangement, that it happened to be one of myown. The hot-beds in the kitchen garden with which I had taken suchpains were objects of special derision. It appeared that they were allwrong--measurements, preparation, soil, manure, everything that could bewrong, was. Certainly the only crop we had from them was weeds. But Ibegan about half way through the week to grow sceptical, because oncomparing their criticisms I found they seldom agreed, and so tookcourage again. Finally I chose a nice, trim young man, with strikinglyintelligent eyes and quick movements, who had shown himself lessconcerned with the state of chaos existing than with considerations ofwhat might eventually be made of the place. He is very deaf, so hewastes no time in words, and is exceedingly keen on gardening, andknows, as I very soon discovered, a vast amount more than I do, in spiteof my three years' application. Moreover, he is filled with thathumility and eagerness to learn which is only found in those who havealready learned more than their neighbours. He enters into my plans withenthusiasm, and makes suggestions of his own, which, if not always quitein accordance with what are perhaps my peculiar tastes, at least plainlyshow that he understands his business. We had a very busy wintertogether altering all the beds, for they none of them had been given asoil in which plants could grow, and next autumn I intend to have allthe so-called lawns dug up and levelled, and shall see whether I cannothave decent turf here. I told him he must save the daisy and dandelionroots, and he looked rather crestfallen at that, but he is young, andcan 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 shallwant a great many daffodils next spring, " I shouted one day at thebeginning 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'sdaffadowndillies being _modern_, and indignation at hearing exactly thesame adjective applied to them that the woman who sells me my hatsbestows on the most appalling examples of her stock. 

"They are to be in troops on the grass, " I said; whereupon his face grewdoubtful. "That is indeed _sehr modern_, " I shouted. But he had grownsuddenly deafer--a phenomenon I have observed to occur every time myorders are such as he has never been given before. After a time he will, I think, become imbued with my unorthodoxy in these matters; andmeanwhile 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 thepoorest soil, love alone, by itself, will work wonders. 

Down the garden path, past the copse of lilacs with their swelling darkbuds, and the great three-cornered bed of tea roses and pansies in frontof it, between the rows of china roses and past the lily and foxglovegroups, we came last night to the spring garden in the open glade roundthe old oak; and there, the first to flower of the flowering trees, andstanding out like a lovely white naked thing against the dusk of theevening, was a double cherry in full bloom, while close beside it, butnot so visible so late, with all their graceful growth outlined by rosybuds, were two Japanese crab apples. The grass just there is filled withnarcissus, and at the foot of the oak a colony of tulips consoles me forthe 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 tobear their beauty, and the beauty of the starry sky, and the beauty ofthe silence and the scent--"I must be alone, so that I shall not missone of these wonders, and have leisure really to _live_. "

"Very well, my dear, " replied the Man of Wrath, "only do not grumbleafterwards 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 bestto allow a woman to do as she likes if you can, and it saves a good dealof bother. To have what she desired is generally an effectivepunishment. "

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

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

May 15th. --There is a dip in the rye-fields about half a mile from mygarden gate, a little round hollow like a dimple, with water and reedsat the bottom, and a few water-loving trees and bushes on the shelvingground around. Here I have been nearly every morning lately, for itsuits the mood I am in, and I like the narrow footpath to it through therye, and I like its solitary dampness in a place where everything isparched, and when I am lying on the grass and look down I can see thereeds glistening greenly in the water, and when I look up I can see therye-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 inthe long grass beside me; and here I bring my book, and read and dreamaway the profitable morning hours, to the accompaniment of the amorouscroakings of innumerable frogs. 

Thoreau has been my companion for some days past, it having struck me asmore appropriate to bring him out to a pond than to read him, as washitherto my habit, on Sunday mornings in the garden. He is a person wholoves the open air, and will refuse to give you much pleasure if you tryto read him amid the pomp and circumstance of upholstery; but out in thesun, and especially by this pond, he is delightful, and we spend thehappiest hours together, he making statements, and I either agreeingheartily, or just laughing and reserving my opinion till I shall havemore ripely considered the thing. He, of course, does not like me asmuch as I like him, because I live in a cloud of dust and germs producedby wilful superfluity of furniture, and have not the courage to get amatch and set light to it: and every day he sees the door-mat on which Iwipe my shoes on going into the house, in defiance of his having told methat he had once refused the offer of one on the ground that it is bestto avoid even the beginnings of evil. But my philosophy has not yetreached the acute stage that will enable me to see a door-mat in itstrue character as a hinderer of the development of souls, and I like towipe my shoes. Perhaps if I had to live with few servants, or if it werepossible, short of existence in a cave, to do without them altogether, Ishould also do without door-mats, and probably in summer without shoestoo, and wipe my feet on the grass nature no doubt provides for thispurpose; and meanwhile we know that though he went to the woods, Thoreaucame 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 sofatiguing as an ordinary German woman, and never would have deigneddiscourse to me on the themes he loved best; but now his spirit belongsto me, and all he thought, and believed, and felt, and he talks as muchand as intimately to me here in my solitude as ever he did to hisdearest friends years ago in Concord. In the garden he was a pleasantcompanion, but in the lonely dimple he is fascinating, and the morninghours hurry past at a quite surprising rate when he is with me, and itgrieves me to be obliged to interrupt him in the middle of some quaintsentence or beautiful thought just because the sun is touching a certainbush down by the water's edge, which is a sign that it is lunch-time andthat I must be off. Back we go together through the rye, he carefullytucked under one arm, while with the other I brandish a bunch of grassto keep off the flies that appear directly we emerge into the sunshine. "Oh, my dear Thoreau, " I murmur sometimes, overcome by the fierce heatof the little path at noonday and the persistence of the flies, "did youhave flies at Walden to exasperate you? And what became of yourphilosophy then?" But he never notices my plaints, and I know thatinside his covers he is discoursing away like anything on the folly ofallowing oneself to be overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpoolcalled a dinner, which is situated in the meridian shallows, and of thenecessity, if one would keep happy, of sailing by it looking anotherway, tied to the mast like Ulysses. But he gets grimly carried back forall that, and is taken into the house and put on his shelf and leftthere, 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 isright; luncheon is a snare of the tempter, and I would perhaps try tosail 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 arespectable wife and mother sail past any meridian shallows in whichthose dearest to her have stuck? So I stand by them, and am punishedevery day by that two-o'clock-in-the-afternoon feeling to which I somuch object, and yet cannot avoid. It is mortifying, after the sunshinymorning 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 ecstasyof 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 cutletsand asparagus and revengeful sweet things. My morning friend turns hisback on me when I reenter the library; nor do I ever touch him in theafternoon. Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and willnot show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which theyare read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in adrawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in thegrass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his greatfriend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to beentertaining. "Nay, my dear lady, " the great man would say in mightytones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly isthat? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So Iread and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushions and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, withthe drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude somuch disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, it is Bozzy who assertsthat in the country the only things that make one happy are meals. "Iwas happy, " he says, when stranded at a place called Corrichatachin inthe Island of Skye, and unable to get out of it because of the rain, --"Iwas happy when tea came. Such I take it is the state of those who livein the country. Meals are wished for from the cravings of vacuity ofmind, as well as from the desire of eating. " And such is theperverseness of human nature that Boswell's wisdom delights me even morethan Johnson's, though I love them both very heartily. 

In the afternoon I potter in the garden with Goethe. He did not, I amsure, care much really about flowers and gardens, yet he said manylovely things about them that remain in one's memory just aspersistently as though they had been inspired expressions of actualfeelings; and the intellect must indeed have been gigantic that could sobeautifully pretend. Ordinary blunderers have to feel a vast amountbefore 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 coreof the sensation that gave it birth, and what a poor, weak child it isof 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 ofan ice-house, and thus sheltered from the north winds sometimesprevalent in May, and shaded by the low-hanging branches of a greatbeech-tree from more than flickering sunshine. Through these branches Ican see a group of giant poppies just coming into flower, flaming outbeyond the trees on the grass, and farther down a huge silver birch, itsfirst spring green not yet deepened out of delicacy, and looking almostgolden 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; hereI shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here Iwade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before thecomplications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonderand wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in theshade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in theopening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book onthe seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, fromwhich I return greatly benefited, and with a more just conception ofwhat, in this world, is worth bothering about, and what is not. 

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with WaltWhitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautifulspirit 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 thebeatings of that most tender and generous heart. Such great love, suchrapture of jubilant love for nature, and the good green grass, andtrees, and clouds, and sunlight; such aching anguish of love for allthat breathes and is sick and sorry; such passionate longing to help andmend and comfort that which never can be helped and mended andcomforted; such eager looking to death, delicate death, as the onecomplete 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 mydrive to the Baltic shores, and spend the afternoon on the moss beneaththe pines whose pink stems form the framework of the sea, I takeSpenser; 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 isbrought again and again? Who shall follow the dark intricacies of theelementary female mind? It is safer not to attempt to do so, but bysimply cataloguing them collectively under the heading Instinct, havedone with them once and for all. 

What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, andI know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailingreturns as books and a garden. And how easy it would have been to comeinto the world without this, and possessed instead of an all-consumingpassion, say, for hats, perpetually raging round my empty soul! I feel Iowe my forefathers a debt of gratitude, for I suppose the explanation isthat they too did not care for hats. In the centre of my library there isa wooden pillar propping up the ceiling, and preventing it, so I am told, from tumbling about our ears; and round this pillar, from floor toceiling, I have had shelves fixed, and on these shelves are all the booksthat I have read again and again, and hope to read many times more--allthe books, that is, that I love quite the best. In the bookcases roundthe walls are many that I love, but here in the centre of the room, andeasiest to get at, are those I love the _best_--the very elect among myfavourites. They change from time to time as I get older, and with yearssome that are in the bookcases come here, and some that are here go intothe bookcases, and some again are removed altogether, and are placed oncertain shelves in the drawing-room which are reserved for those thathave been weighed in the balance and found wanting, and from whence theyseldom, if ever, return. Carlyle used to be among the elect. That wasyears ago, when my hair was very long, and my skirts very short, and Isat in the paternal groves with _Sartor Resartus_, and felt full ofwisdom and _Weltschmerz_; and even after I was married, when we lived intown, and the noise of his thunderings was almost drowned by the rattleof droschkies over the stones in the street below, he still shone forth abright, particular star. Now, whether it is age creeping upon me, orwhether it is that the country is very still and sound carries, orwhether my ears have grown sensitive, I know not; but the moment I openhim there rushes out such a clatter of denunciation, and vehemence, andwrath, that I am completely deafened; and as I easily get bewildered, andlove peace, and my chief aim is to follow the apostle's advice and studyto be quiet, he has been degraded from his high position round the pillarand has gone into retirement against the wall, where the accident ofalphabet causes him to rest in the soothing society of one Carina, aharmless gentleman, whose book on the _Bagni di Lucca_ is on his left, and a Frenchman of the name of Charlemagne, whose soporific comedywritten at the beginning of the century and called _Le Testament del'Oncle_, _ou Les Lunettes Cassees_, is next to him on his right. Twoworks of his still remain, however, among the elect, though differing inglory--his _Frederick the Great_, fascinating for obvious reasons to thepatriotic German mind, and his _Life of Sterling_, a quiet book on thewhole, a record of an uneventful life, in which the naturalpositions of subject and biographer are reversed, the man of geniuswriting the life of the unimportant friend, and the fact that the friendwas exceedingly lovable in no way lessening one's discomfort in the faceof such an anomaly. Carlyle stands on an eminence altogether removedfrom Sterling, who stands, indeed, on no eminence at all, unless it bean eminence, that (happily) crowded bit of ground, where the bright andcourageous and lovable stand together. We Germans have all heard ofCarlyle, and many of us have read him with due amazement, our admirationoften interrupted by groans at the difficulties his style places in thecandid foreigner's path; but without Carlyle which of us would ever haveheard of Sterling? And even in this comparatively placid book mines ofthe accustomed vehemence are sprung on the shrinking reader. To theprosaic German, nourished on a literature free from thunderings and anymarked acuteness of enthusiasm, Carlyle is an altogether astonishingphenomenon. 

And here I feel constrained to inquire sternly who I am that I shouldtalk in this unbecoming manner of Carlyle? To which I reply that I amonly a humble German seeking after peace, devoid of the least realdesire to criticise anybody, and merely anxious to get out of the way ofgeniuses when they make too much noise. All I want is to read quietlythe books that I at present prefer. Carlyle is shut up now and thereforesilent 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 inhim?

What a medley of books there is round my pillar! Here is Jane Austenleaning against Heine--what would she have said to that, I wonder?--withMiss Mitford and _Cranford_ to keep her in countenance on her otherside. Here is my Goethe, one of many editions I have of him, the onethat has made the acquaintance of the ice-house and the poppies. Hereare Ruskin, Lubbock, White's _Selborne_, Izaak Walton, Drummond, HerbertSpencer (only as much of him as I hope I understand and am afraid I donot), Walter Pater, Matthew Arnold, Thoreau, Lewis Carroll, OliverWendell Holmes, Hawthorne, _Wuthering Heights_, Lamb's _Essays_, Johnson's _Lives_, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Gibbon, the immortalPepys, the egregious Boswell, various American children's books that Iloved as a child and read and love to this day; various Frenchchildren's books, loved for the same reason; whole rows of Germanchildren's books, on which I was brought up, with their charmingwoodcuts of quaint little children in laced bodices, and goodhousemothers cutting bread and butter, and descriptions of theatmosphere of fearful innocence and pure religion and swift judgmentsand rewards in which they lived, and how the _Finger Gottes_ wasimpressed on everything that happened to them; all the poets; most ofthe dramatists; and, I verily believe, every gardening book and bookabout 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 thewindows and read the luscious descriptions of roses and all the othersummer glories is one of my greatest pleasures. And then how well I getto know and love those gardens whose gradual development has beendescribed by their owners, and how happily I wander in fancy down thepaths of certain specially charming ones in Lancashire, Berkshire, Surrey, and Kent, and admire the beautiful arrangement of bed andborder, and the charming bits in unexpected corners, and all theevidences of untiring love! Any book I see advertised that treats ofgardens I immediately buy, and thus possess quite a collection offascinating and instructive garden literature. A few are feeble, and getshunted off into the drawing-room; but the others stay with me winterand summer, and soon lose the gloss of their new coats, and put on thecomfortable look of old friends in every-day clothes, under the frequenttouch of affection. They are such special friends that I can hardly passthem without a nod and a smile at the well-known covers, each of whichhas some pleasant association of time and place to make it still moredear. 

My spirit too has wandered in one or two French gardens, but has not yetheard of a German one loved beyond everything by its owner. It is, ofcourse, possible that my countrymen do love them and keep quiet aboutthem, but many things are possible that are not probable, and experiencecompels me to the opinion that this is one of them. We have the usualrich man who has fine gardens laid out regardless of expense, but thoseare not gardens in the sense I mean; and we have the poor man with hisbit of ground, hardly ever treated otherwise than as a fowl-run or aplace dedicated to potatoes; and as for the middle class, it is too busyhurrying through life to have time or inclination to stop and plant arose. 

How glad I am I need not hurry. What a waste of life, just getting andspending. Sitting by my pansy beds, with the slow clouds floatingleisurely past, and all the clear day before me, I look on at the hotscramble for the pennies of existence and am lost in wonder at thevulgarity that pushes, and cringes, and tramples, untiring andunabashed. And when you have got your pennies, what then? They are onlypennies, after all--unpleasant, battered copper things, without a goldpiece among them, and never worth the degradation of self, and thehatred of those below you who have fewer, and the derision of thoseabove you who have more. And as I perceive I am growing wise, and whatis even worse, allegorical, and as these are tendencies to be foughtagainst as long as possible, I'll go into the garden and play with thebabies, 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 beingdeep. He has prophesied that I will find solitude intolerable, and he isnaturally desirous that his prophecy should be fulfilled. He knows thatcontinuous rain depresses me, and he is awaiting a spell of it to bringme to a confession that I was wrong after all, whereupon he will makethat 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, andshaking his head. If there are any clouds he remarks that they arecoming up, and if there are none he says it is too fine to last. He haseven 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 alldoubt that the weather is breaking up. He studiously keeps out of my wayall day, so that I may have every opportunity of being bored as quicklyas possible, and in the evenings he retires to his den directly afterdinner, muttering something about letters. When he has finallydisappeared, 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 notquite know. As long as it is fine, rainy days in the future do not seemso very terrible, and one, or even two really wet ones are quiteenjoyable when they do come--pleasant times that remind one of the snugwinter now so far off, times of reading, and writing, and paying one'sbills. I never pay bills or write letters on fine summer days. Not forany one will I forego all that such a day rightly spent out of doorsmight give me; so that a wet day at intervals is almost as necessary forme as for my garden. But how would it be if there were many wet days? Ibelieve a week of steady drizzle in summer is enough to make thestoutest heart depressed. It is to be borne in winter by the simpleexpedient of turning your face to the fire; but when you have no fire, and very long days, your cheerfulness slowly slips away, and thedreariness prevailing out of doors comes in and broods in the blankcorners of your heart. I rather fancy, however, that it is a waste ofenergy to ponder over what I should do if we had a wet summer on such aradiant day as this. I prefer sitting here on the verandah and lookingdown through a frame of leaves at all the rosebuds June has put in thebeds round the sun-dial, to ponder over nothing, and just be glad that Iam alive. The verandah at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon is a placein which to be happy and not decide anything, as my friend Thoreau toldme of some other tranquil spot this morning. The chairs are comfortable, there is a table to write on, and the shadows of young leaves flickeracross the paper. On one side a Crimson Rambler is thrusting inquisitiveshoots through the wooden bars, being able this year for the first timesince it was planted to see what I am doing up here, and next to it aJackmanni clematis clings with soft young fingers to anything it thinkslikely to help it up to the goal of its ambition, the roof. I wonderwhich 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, aMarie van Houtte, one of the loveliest of the tea roses, perfect inshape and scent and colour, and in my garden always the first rose toflower; and the first flowers it bears are the loveliest of its ownlovely flowers, as though it felt that the first of its children to seethe sky and the sun and the familiar garden after the winter sleep oughtto put on the very daintiest clothes they can muster for such a festaloccasion. 

Through the open schoolroom windows I can hear the two eldest babies attheir lessons. The village schoolmaster comes over every afternoon andteaches them for two hours, so that we are free from governesses in thehouse, and once those two hours are over they are free for twenty-fourfrom anything in the shape of learning. The schoolroom is next to theverandah, and as two o'clock approaches their excitement becomes moreand more intense, and they flutter up and down the steps, looking intheir white dresses like angels on a Jacob's ladder, or watch eagerlyamong the bushes for a first glimpse of him, like miniature andperfectly proper Isoldes. He is a kind giant with that endless supply ofpatience so often found in giants, especially when they happen to bevillage 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 hecame I was afraid they would be very shy of such a big strange man, andthat he would extract nothing from them but tears; but the moment I leftthem alone together and as I shut the door, I heard them eagerlyinforming him, by way of opening the friendship, that their heads werewashed every Saturday night, and that their hair-ribbons did not matchbecause there had not been enough of the one sort to go round. I wentaway hoping that they would not think it necessary to tell him how oftenmy head is washed, or any other news of a personal nature about me; butI believe by this time that man knows everything there is to know aboutthe details of my morning toilet, which is daily watched with thegreatest interest by the Three. I hope he will be more successful than Iwas in teaching them Bible stories. I never got farther than Noah, atwhich stage their questions became so searching as to completelyconfound me; and as no one likes being confounded, and it is especiallyregrettable when a parent is placed in such a position, I brought thecourse to an abrupt end by assuming that owl-like air of wisdom peculiarto infallibility in a corner, and telling them that they were too youngto understand these things for the present; and they, having a touchingfaith in the truth of every word I say, gave three contented littlepurrs of assent, and proposed that we should play instead at rollingdown the grass bank under the south windows--which I did not do, I amglad to remember. 

But the schoolmaster, after four weeks' teaching, has got them as far asMoses, and safely past the Noah's ark on which I came to grief, and ifglibness is a sign of knowledge then they have learned the story verythoroughly. Yesterday, after he had gone, they emerged into the verandahfresh 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 arush 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, " Ibesought. 

"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 eversupposed 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 thenone 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 andstockings and go in the water and fetch that tiny basket, and then theymade it open, and that _Kind_ did cry and cry and _strampel_ so"--hereboth the babies gave such a vivid illustration of the _strampeln_ thatthe verandah shook--"and see! it is a tiny baby. And they fetchedsomebody 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, andtaking my face in both her hands--one of the many pretty, caressinglittle 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 havingthus been affixed to the legitimacy of their regard for him. To be ofsuch authority that your verdict on every subject under heaven isabsolute and final is without doubt to be in a proud position, but, likeall proud positions, it bristles with pitfalls and drawbacks to theweak-kneed; and most of my conversations with the babies end in a suddenchange of subject made necessary by the tendency of their remarks andthe unanswerableness of their arguments. Happily, yesterday the Mosestalk was brought to an end by the April baby herself, who suddenlyremembered that I had not yet seen and sympathised with her dearestpossession, a Dutch doll called Mary Jane, since a lamentable accidenthad bereft it of both its legs; and she had dived into the schoolroomand fished it out of the dark corner reserved for the mangled and thrustit in my face before I had well done musing on the nature and extent ofmy love for Moses--for I try to be conscientious--and bracing myself tomeet the next question. 

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

I wish they would speak English a little better. The pains I take tocorrect them and weed out the German words that crop up in everysentence are really untiring, and the results discouraging. Indeed, asthey get older the German asserts itself more and more, and isthreatening to swallow up the little English they have left entirely. Italk English steadily with them, but everybody else, including a smallFrench nurse lately imported, nothing but German. Somebody told me thething 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 arequite unaware that they are learning anything at all; whereupon Iimmediately introduced this French girl into the family, forgetting howlittle English they have absorbed, and the result has been that theypass their days delightfully in teaching her German. They wereastonished at first on discovering that she could not understand a wordthey said, and soon set about altering such an uncomfortable state ofthings; and as they are three to one and very zealous, and she is a meeklittle person with a profile like a teapot with a twisted black handleof hair, their success was practically certain from the beginning, andshe is getting on quite nicely with her German, and has at least alreadythoroughly learned all the mistakes. She wanders in the garden with asurprised look on her face as of one who is moving about in worlds notrealised; and the three cling to her skirts and give her enthusiasticlessons all day long. 

Poor Seraphine! What courage to weigh anchor at eighteen and go into aforeign country, to a place where you are among utter strangers, withouta friend, unable to speak a word of the language, and not even surebefore you start whether you will be given enough to eat. Either it isthat saddest of courage forced on the timid by necessity, or, as DoctorJohnson would probably have said, it is stark insensibility; and I amafraid when I look at her I silently agree with the apostle of commonsense, and take it for granted that she is incapable of deep feeling, for the altogether inadequate reason that she has a certain resemblanceto a teapot. Now is it not hard that a person may have a soul asbeautiful as an angel's, a dwelling-place for all sweet sounds andharmonies, and if nature has not thought fit to endow his body with achin the world will have none of him? The vulgar prejudice is in favourof chins, and who shall escape its influence? I, for one, cannot, thoughtheoretically I utterly reject the belief that the body is the likenessof the soul; for has not each of us friends who, we know, love beyondeverything that which is noble and good, and who by no means themselveslook noble and good? And what about all the beautiful persons who lovenothing on earth except themselves? Yet who in the world cares howperfect the nature may be, how humble, how sweet, how gracious, thatdwells in a chinless body? Nobody has time to inquire into natures, andthe chinless must be content to be treated in something of the samegood-natured, tolerant fashion in which we treat our poor relationsuntil such time as they shall have grown a beard; and those who by theirsex are for ever shut out from this glorious possibility will have totake care, should they be of a bright intelligence, how they speak withthe tongues of men and of angels, nothing being more droll than theeffect of high words and poetic ideas issuing from a face that does notmatch 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 beinexpressibly dear to me; I see how beautiful his soul is, how fine hisintellect, how generous his heart, and how he already possesses in greatperfection those qualities of kindness, and patience, and simplicity, after which I have been so long and so vainly striving. It is not Iclothing him with the attributes I love and wandering away insensiblyinto that sweet land of illusions to which our footsteps turn wheneverthey are left to themselves, it is his very self unconsciously writingitself into his letters, the very man as he is without his body. Then Imeet him again, and all illusions go. He is what I had always found himwhen we were together, good and amiable; but some trick of manner, somefeature or attitude that I do not quite like, makes me forget, and betotally unable to remember, what I know from his letters to be true ofhim. He, no doubt, feels the same thing about me, and so between usthere is a thick veil of something fixed, which, dodge as we may, wenever 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 toshoot the squirrels before they had eaten up too many birds, and ofwhose coat-sleeve I had laid hold as he passed, keeping him by me like asecond Wedding Guest, and almost as restless, while I gave expression tothe above sentiments. 

"I don't know, " I replied, "unless it is that the world is very evil andthe 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 mutteringsomething that I could not quite catch, and I am glad I could not, forthe 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, threehave passed, and nothing has been said about going back to town. Norwill anything be said so long as he is not the one to say it, for nothree years of my life can come up to these in happiness, and not eventhose splendid years of childhood that grow brighter as they recede weremore full of delights. The delights are simple, it is true, and of thesort that easily provoke a turning up of the worldling's nose; but whocares for noses that turn up? I am simple myself, and never tire of theblessed liberty from all restraints. Even such apparently indifferentdetails as being able to walk straight out of doors without firstgetting into a hat and gloves and veil are full of a subtle charm thatis ever fresh, and of which I can never have too much. It is clear thatI was born for a placid country life, and placid it certainly is; somuch so that the days are sometimes far more like a dream than anythingreal, the quiet days of reading, and thinking, and watching the changinglights, and the growth and fading of the flowers, the fresh quiet dayswhen life is so full of zest that you cannot stop yourself from singingbecause you are so happy, the warm quiet days lying on the grass in asecluded corner observing the procession of clouds--this being, I admit, a particularly undignified attitude, but think of the edification! Eachmorning the simple act of opening my bedroom windows is the means ofgiving me an ever-recurring pleasure. Just underneath them is a borderof 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 uptheir good morning of scent the moment they see me leaning out, carefulnot to omit the pretty German custom of morning greeting. I call backmine, embellished with many endearing words, and then their fragrancecomes up close, and covers my face with gentlest little kisses. Behindthem, on the other side of the lawn on this west side of the house, is athick hedge of lilac just now at its best, and what that best is I wishall who love lilac could see. A century ago a man lived here who lovedhis garden. He loved, however, in his younger years, travelling as well, but in his travels did not forget this little corner of the earthbelonging to him, and brought back the seeds of many strange trees suchas had never been seen in these parts before, and tried experiments withthem 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 hehad, and how he arranged his beds, no one knows, except that the elevenbeds round the sun-dial were put there by him; and of one thing he seemsto have been inordinately fond, and that was lilac. We have to thank himfor the surprising beauty of the garden in May and early June, for he itwas who planted the great groups of it, and the banks of it, and massedit between the pines and firs. Wherever a lilac bush could go a lilacbush went; and not common sorts, but a variety of good sorts, white, andpurple, and pink, and mauve, and he must have planted it with specialcare and discrimination, for it grows here as nothing else will, andkeeps his memory, in my heart at least, for ever gratefully green. Onthe wall behind our pew in church there is his monument, he having diedhere full of years, in the peace that attends the last hours of a goodman who has loved his garden; and to the long Latin praises of hisvirtues and eminence I add, as I pass beneath it on Sundays, a heartiestAmen. Who would not join in the praises of a man to whom you owe yourlilacs, and your Spanish chestnuts, and your tulip trees, and yourpyramid oaks? "He was a good man, for he loved his garden"--that is theepitaph I would have put on his monument, because it gives one a farclearer sense of his goodness and explains it better than any amount ofsonorous Latinities. How could he be anything _but_ good since he loveda 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, andmore harmless?

June 16th. --Yesterday morning I got up at three o'clock and stolethrough the echoing passages and strange dark rooms, undid withtrembling hands the bolts of the door to the verandah, and passed outinto a wonderful, unknown world. I stood for a few minutes motionless onthe steps, almost frightened by the awful purity of nature when all thesin and ugliness is shut up and asleep, and there is nothing but thebeauty left. It was quite light, yet a bright moon hung in the cloudlessgrey-blue sky; the flowers were all awake, saturating the air withscent; and a nightingale sat on a hornbeam quite close to me, in loudraptures 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 haddropped the night before still lying on the path, but how strange andunfamiliar it all looked, and how holy--as though God must be walkingthere in the cool of the day. I went down the path leading to the streamon the east side of the garden, brushing aside the rockets that werebending across it drowsy with dew, the larkspurs on either side of merearing their spikes of heavenly blue against the steely blue of thesky, and the huge poppies like splashes of blood amongst the greys andblues and faint pearly whites of the innocent, new-born day. On thegarden side of the stream there is a long row of silver birches, and onthe other side a rye-field reaching across in powdery grey waves to thepart of the sky where a solemn glow was already burning. I sat down onthe twisted, half-fallen trunk of a birch and waited, my feet in thelong grass and my slippers soaking in dew. Through the trees I could seethe house with its closed shutters and drawn blinds, the people in itall missing, as I have missed day after day, the beauty of life at thathour. 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 awet truss of blossom and got its first morning washing. It waswonderfully quiet, and the nightingale on the hornbeam had everything toitself as I sat motionless watching that glow in the east burningredder; wonderfully quiet, and so wonderfully beautiful because oneassociates daylight with people, and voices, and bustle, and hurryingsto and fro, and the dreariness of working to feed our bodies, andfeeding our bodies that we may be able to work to feed them again; buthere was the world wide awake and yet only for me, all the fresh pureair only for me, all the fragrance breathed only by me, not a livingsoul hearing the nightingale but me, the sun in a few moments coming upto warm only me, and nowhere a single hard word being spoken, or asingle selfish act being done, nowhere anything that could tarnish theblessed purity of the world as God has given it us. If one believed inangels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep andcannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in everytwenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. Thedoors 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 aspace to our early innocence. Are not our first impulses on wakingalways good? Do we not all know how in times of wretchedness our firstthoughts after the night's sleep are happy? We have been dreaming we arehappy, and we wake with a smile, and stare still smiling for a moment atour stony griefs before with a stab we recognise them. 

There were no clouds, and presently, while I watched, the sun came upquickly out of the rye, a great, bare, red ball, and the grey of thefield turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wetflowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, andintensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, andsuffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and thebeauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needsall our courage--the realisation of the awful solitariness in which eachof us lives and dies. Often I could cry for pity of our forlornness, andof the pathos of our endeavours to comfort ourselves. With what an agonyof patience we build up the theories of consolation that are to protect, in times of trouble, our quivering and naked souls! And how fatallyoften the elaborate machinery refuses to work at the moment the blow isstruck. 

I got up and turned my face away from the unbearable, indifferentbrightness. Myriads of small suns danced before my eyes as I went alongthe 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 inin 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 heapsinto which it had been raked the evening before sparkled with dewdropsas the sun caught them. And over there, how hot the poppies were alreadybeginning to look--blazing back boldly in the face of the sun, flashingback fire for fire. I crossed the wet grass to the hammock under thebeech on the lawn, and lay in it awhile trying to swing in time to thenightingale's tune; and then I walked round the ice-house to see howGoethe's corner looked at such an hour; and then I went down to the firwood at the bottom of the garden where the light was slanting throughgreen stems; and everywhere there was the same mystery, and emptiness, and wonder. When four o'clock drew near I set off home again, notdesiring to meet gardeners and have my little hour of quiet talkedabout, still less my dressing-gown and slippers; so I picked a bunch ofroses and hurried in, and just as I softly bolted the door, dreadfullyafraid of being taken for a burglar, I heard the first water-cart of theday creaking round the corner. Fearfully I crept up to my room, and whenI awoke at eight o'clock and saw the roses in a glass by my side, Iremembered 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 asthough I had taken the world by surprise, and seen it as it really iswhen off its guard--as though I had been quite near to the very core ofthings. The quiet holiness of that hour seems all the more mysteriousnow, because soon after breakfast yesterday the wind began to blow fromthe northwest, and has not left off since, and looking out of the windowI cannot believe that it is the same garden, with the clouds drivingover it in black layers, and angry little showers every now and thenbespattering its harassed and helpless inhabitants, who cannot pulltheir roots up out of the ground and run for their lives, as I am surethey must long to do. How discouraging for a plant to have just proudlyopened its loveliest flowers, the flowers it was dreaming about all thewinter and working at so busily underground during the cold weeks ofspring, and then for a spiteful shower of five minutes' duration to comeand pelt them down, and batter them about, and cover the tender, delicate things with irremediable splashes of mud! Every bed is alreadyfilled with victims of the gale, and those that escape one shower godown before the next; so I must make up my mind, I suppose, to thewholesale destruction of the flowers that had reached perfection--thathead of white rockets among them that washed my face a hundred yearsago--and look forward cheerfully to the development of the youngergeneration 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 thesummer try my temper, and at all seasons try my skin; yet they areprecious because of the beautiful clear light they bring, the intensityof cold blue in the sky and the terrific purple blackness of the cloudsone hour and their divine whiteness the next. They fly screaming overthe plain as though ten thousand devils with whips were after them, andin the sunny intervals there is nothing in any of nature's moods toequal the clear sharpness of the atmosphere, all the mellowness andindistinctness beaten out of it, and every leaf and twig glisteningcoldly bright. It is not becoming, a north-westerly gale; it treats usas it treats the garden, but with opposite results, roughly rubbing thesoftness out of our faces, as I can see when I look at the babies, andavoid the further proof of my own reflection in the glass. But there islife in it, glowing, intense, robust life, and when in October afterweeks of serene weather this gale suddenly pounces on us in all itssavageness, and the cold comes in a gust, and the trees are stripped inan hour, what a bracing feeling it is, the feeling that here is thefirst breath of winter, that it is time to pull ourselves together, thatthe season of work, and discipline, and severity is upon us, the sternseason that forces us to look facts in the face, to put aside our dreamsand languors, and show what stuff we are made of. No one can possiblylove 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 winterapproaches and so cheat the year of half its lessons. It is delightfuland instructive to potter among one's plants, but it is imperative forbody and soul that the pottering should cease for a few months, and thatwe should be made to realise that grim other side of life. A long hardwinter lived through from beginning to end without shirking is one ofthe most salutary experiences in the world. There is no nonsense aboutit; you could not indulge in vapours and the finer sentiments in themidst of its deadly earnest if you tried. The thermometer goes down totwenty degrees of frost Reaumur, and down you go with it to therealities, to that elementary state where everything is big--health andsickness, delight and misery, ecstasy and despair. It makes you rememberyour poorer neighbours, and sends you into their homes to see that theytoo are fitted out with the armour of warmth and food necessary in thelong fight; and in your own home it draws you nearer than ever to eachother. Out of doors it is too cold to walk, so you run, and are rewardedby the conviction that you cannot be more than fifteen; or you get intoyour furs, and dart away in a sleigh over the snow, and are sure therenever was music so charming as that of its bells; or you put on yourskates, and are off to the lake to which you drove so often on Junenights, when it lay rosy in the reflection of the northern glow, and allalive with myriads of wild duck and plovers, and which is now, but forthe swish of your skates, so silent, and but for your warmth andjollity, so forlorn. Nor would I willingly miss the early darkness andthe pleasant firelight tea and the long evenings among my books. It isthen that I am glad I do not live in a cave, as I confess I have in mymore godlike moments wished to do; it is then that I feel most capableof attending to the Man of Wrath's exhortations with an open mind; it isthen that I actually like to hear the shrieks of the wind, and then thatI give my heartiest assent, as I warm my feet at the fire, to the poet'sproposition that all which we behold is full of blessings. 

But what dreariness can equal the dreariness of a cold gale atmidsummer? I have been chilly and dejected all day, shut up behind thestreaming window-panes, and not liking to have a fire because of itsdissipated appearance in the scorching intervals of sunshine. Once ortwice my hand was on the bell and I was going to order one, when outcame the sun and it was June again, and I ran joyfully into thedripping, gleaming garden, only to be driven in five minutes later by ayet fiercer squall. I wandered disconsolately round my pillar of books, looking for the one that would lend itself best to the task ofentertaining me under the prevailing conditions, but they all lookedgloomy, 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 beas well to ask somebody cheerful to come and sit opposite me in allthose other big chairs that were looking so unusually gigantic andempty. When the Man of Wrath came in to tea there were such heavy cloudsthat the room was quite dark, and he peered about for a moment before hesaw me. I suppose in the gloom of the big room I must have looked ratherlonely, and smaller than usual buried in the capacious chair, for whenhe finally discovered me his face widened into an inappropriatelycheerful 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 Imade no reply of any sort. 

"I did not see you at first amongst all these chairs and cushions. Atleast, 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 tomake tea with an icy dignity of demeanour. 

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

"Who is it?" I inquired. And then he told me that it was the leastobjectionable of the candidates for the living here, made vacant by ourown parson having been appointed superintendent, the highest position inthe Lutheran Church; and the gale must have brought me low indeed forthe coming of a solitary parson to give me pleasure. The entire race ofLutheran parsons is unpleasing to me, --whether owing to their fault orto mine, it would ill become me to say, --and the one we are losing isthe only one I have met that I can heartily respect, and admire, andlike. But he is quite one by himself in his extreme godliness, perfectsimplicity, and real humility, and though I knew it was unlikely weshould find another as good, and I despised myself for the eagernesswith which I felt I was looking forward to seeing a new face, I couldnot stop myself from suddenly feeling cheerful. Such is the weakness ofthe 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 theliving, as it is a specially fat one for this part of the country, witha yearly income of six thousand marks, and a good house, and severalacres of land. The Man of Wrath has been distracted by the difficultiesof choice. According to the letters of recommendation, they were allwonderful men with unrivalled powers of preaching, but on closer inquirythere was sure to be some drawback. One was too old, another not oldenough; another had twelve children, and the parsonage only allows foreight; one had a shrewish wife, and another was of Liberal tendencies inpolitics--a fatal objection; one was in money difficulties because hewould spend more than he had, which was not surprising when one heardwhat he did have; and another was disliked in his parish because he andhis 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 nothimself appoint somebody his right to do so would lapse, he had writtento the one who was coming, and invited him down that he might look athim, 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 vowof solitude and fill the house with the frivolous, as I sat listening tothe 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, alife led by the great majority of the German clergy, fat livings beingas rare here as anywhere else. He told us with pleasant frankness allabout himself, how he lived on an income of two thousand marks with awife and six children, and how he was often sorely put to it to keepdecent shoes on their feet. "I am continually drawing up plans ofexpenditure, " he said, "but the shoemaker's bill is always so much morethan I had expected that it throws my calculations completely out. "

His wife, of course, was ailing, but already his eldest child, a girl often, took a great deal of the work off her mother's shoulders, poorbaby. He was perfectly natural, and said in the simplest way that if thechoice were to fall on him it would relieve him of many grindinganxieties; whereupon I privately determined that if the choice did notfall on him the Man of Wrath and I would be strangers from that hour. 

"Have you been worrying him with questions about his principles?" Iasked, buttonholing the Man of Wrath as he came out from a privateconference 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, anddoom that little child to go on taking work off other people'sshoulders?"

"My dear Elizabeth, " he protested, "what has my decision for or againsthim to do with dooming little children to go on doing anything? I reallycannot be governed by sentiment. "

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

When the parson came to say good-night and good-bye, as he was leavingvery 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 ofdevotion and invocations of blessings in such quantities that I began tofeel quite pleased with myself, and as though I had been doing avirtuous 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 inthe way that suited us best, and that we had no cause whatever to lookand feel so benevolent. Still, even now, while the victorious candidateis dreaming of his trebled income and of the raptures of his home-comingto-morrow, the glow has not quite departed, and I am dwelling withsatisfaction on the fact that we have been able to raise eight peopleabove those hideous cares that crush all the colour out of the lives ofthe genteel poor. I am glad he has so many children, because there willbe more to be made happy. They will be rich on the little income, andwill no doubt dismiss the wise and willing eldest baby to appropriatedolls and pinafores; and everybody will have what they never yet havehad, a certain amount of that priceless boon, leisure--leisure to sitdown 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, Imay observe, is a beneficial process wholly impossible on 100 pounds ayear divided by eight. 

But I wonder whether they will be thin-skinned enough ever to discoverthat other and less delightful side of life only seen by those who haveplenty 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 themand are busy from morning till night keeping up appearances, they missalso the burden of those fears, and dreads, and realisations that besethim who has time to think. When in the morning I go into my sausage-roomand give out sausages, I never think of anything but sausages. Myhorizon is bounded by them, every faculty is absorbed by them, and theyengross 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 theyproduce on most of my country-men, they leave me singularly cold; but itis one of my duties to begin the day with sausages, and every morningfor the short time I am in the midst of their shining rows, watching my_Mamsell_ dexterously hooking down the sleekest with an instrument likea boat-hook, I am practically dead to every other consideration inheaven or on earth. What are they to me, Love, Life, Death, all themysteries? The one thing that concerns me is the due distribution to theservants of sausages; and until that is done, all obstinate questioningsand blank misgivings must wait. If I were to spend my days in theirentirety doing such work I should never have time to think, and if Inever thought I should never feel, and if I never felt I should neversuffer or rapturously enjoy, and so I should grow to be something verylike a sausage myself, and not on that account, I do believe, any theless precious to the Man of Wrath. 

I know what I would do if I were both poor and genteel--the gentilityshould 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 concludethat if I did without the things erroneously supposed necessary todecency I might be able to afford a geranium, because I see them sooften in the windows of cottages where there is little else; and if Ipreferred such inexpensive indulgences as thinking and reading andwandering in the fields to the doubtful gratification arising from kept-up appearances (always for the bedazzlement of the people opposite, andtherefore always vulgar), I believe I should have enough left over tobuy a radish to eat with my bread; and if the weather were fine, and Icould eat it under a tree, and give a robin some crumbs in return forhis cheeriness, would there be another creature in the world so happy? Iknow 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 therose. She is safe on her throne, and the only question to decide iswhich are the flowers that one loves next best. This I have been a longwhile deciding, though I believe I knew all the time somewhere deep downin my heart that they were sweet-peas; and every summer when they firstcome out, and every time, going round the garden, that I come acrossthem, I murmur involuntarily, "Oh yes, _you_ are the sweetest, you dear, dear little things. " And what a victory this is, to be ranked next therose even by one person who loves her garden. Think of the wonderfulbeauty triumphed over--the lilies, the irises, the carnations, theviolets, the frail and delicate poppies, the magnificent larkspurs, theburning nasturtiums, the fierce marigolds, the smooth, cool pansies. Ihave a bed at this moment in the full glory of all these things, alittle chosen plot of fertile land, about fifteen yards long and ofirregular breadth, shutting in at its broadest the east end of the walkalong the south front of the house, and sloping away at the back down toa moist, low bit by the side of a very tiny stream, or rather thread oftrickling water, where, in the dampest corner, shining in the sun, butwith their feet kept cool and wet, is a colony of Japanese irises, andnext to them higher on the slope Madonna lilies, so chaste in looks andso voluptuous in smell, and then a group of hollyhocks in tenderestshades of pink, and lemon, and white, and right and left of these whitemarguerites and evening primroses and that most exquisite of poppiescalled Shirley, and a little on one side a group of metallic bluedelphiniums beside a towering white lupin, and in and out and everywheremignonette, and stocks, and pinks, and a dozen other smaller but notless lovely plants. I wish I were a poet, that I might properly describethe beauty of this bit as it sparkles this afternoon in the sunshineafter rain; but of all the charming, delicate, scented groups itcontains, none to my mind is so lovely as the group of sweet-peas in itsnorth-west corner. There is something so utterly gentle and tender aboutsweet-peas, something so endearing in their clinging, winding, yieldinggrowth; and then the long straight stalk, and the perfect little wingedflower at the top, with its soft, pearly texture and wonderful range andcombination of colours--all of them pure, all of them satisfying, not anugly 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 solovely as a bowl of sweet-peas, or a Delf jar filled with them. What amass of glowing, yet delicate colour it is! How prettily, the moment youopen the door, it seems to send its fragrance to meet you! And how youhang over it, and bury your face in it, and love it, and cannot get awayfrom it. I really am sorry for all the people in the world who miss suchkeen pleasure. It is one that each person who opens his eyes and hisheart may have; and indeed, most of the things that are really worthhaving are within everybody's reach. Any one who chooses to take acountry walk, or even the small amount of trouble necessary to get himon to his doorstep and make him open his eyes, may have them, and thereare thousands of them thrust upon us by nature, who is for ever givingand blessing, at every turn as we walk. The sight of the first paleflowers starring the copses; an anemone held up against the blue skywith the sun shining through it towards you; the first fall of snow inthe autumn; the first thaw of snow in the spring; the blustering, busywinds blowing the winter away and scurrying the dead, untidy leaves intothe corners; the hot smell of pines--just like blackberries--when thesun is on them; the first February evening that is fine enough to showhow the days are lengthening, with its pale yellow strip of sky behindthe black trees whose branches are pearled with raindrops; the swiftpang 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 cowslipsthat you kiss and kiss again because it is so perfect, because it is sodivinely sweet, because of all the kisses in the world there is noneother so exquisite--who that has felt the joy of these things wouldexchange them, even if in return he were to gain the whole world, withall its chimney-pots, and bricks, and dust, and dreariness? And we knowthat 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, whosecare it is, I remarked with surprise that she had no sweet-peas. Icalled them _Lathyrus odoratus_, and she, having little Latin, did notunderstand. Then I called them _wohlriechende Wicken_, the Germanrendering of that which sounds so pretty in English, and she said shehad never heard of them. The idea of an existence in a garden yetwithout sweet-peas, so willing, so modest, and so easily grown, hadnever presented itself as possible to my imagination. Ever since I canremember, my summers have been filled with them; and in the days when Isat in my own perambulator and they were three times as tall as I was, Iwell recollect a certain waving hedge of them in the garden of mychildhood, and how I stared up longingly at the flowers so far beyond myreach, inaccessibly tossing against the sky. When I grew bigger and hada small garden of my own, I bought their seeds to the extent of twentypfennings, and trained the plants over the rabbit-hutch that was thechief feature in the landscape. There were other seeds in that gardenseeds on which I had laid out all my savings and round which played myfondest hopes, but the sweet-peas were the only ones that came up. Thesame thing happened here in my first summer, my gardening knowledge nothaving meanwhile kept pace with my years, and of the seeds sown thatfirst season sweet-peas again were the only ones that came up. I shouldsay they were just the things for people with very little time andexperience at their disposal to grow. A garden might be made beautifulwith sweet-peas alone, and, with hardly any labour, except the sweetlabour of picking to prolong the bloom, be turned into a fairy bower ofdelicacy and refinement. Yet the Frau Inspector not only had never heardof 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 redherbaceous peonies growing among her currant bushes, and announced withconviction that they were her favourite flower. It was on the tip of mytongue to point out that in these days of tree-peonies, and peonies solovely in their silvery faint tints that they resemble gigantic roses, it is absolutely wicked to suffer those odious red ones to pervert one'staste; that a person who sees nothing but those every time he looks outof his window very quickly has his nice perception for true beautyblunted; that such a person would do well to visit my garden every dayduring the month of May, and so get himself cured by the sight of mypeony bushes covered with huge scented white and blush flowers; and thathe would, I was convinced, at the end of the cure, go home and pitch hisown on to the dust-heap. But of what earthly use would it have been?Pointing out the difference between what is beautiful and what missesbeauty to a Frau Inspector of forty, whose chief business it is to makebutter, is likely to be singularly unprolific of good results; and, further, experience has taught me that whenever anything is on the tipof my tongue the best thing to do is to keep it there. I wonder why awoman always wants to interfere. 

It is a pity, nevertheless, that this lady should be so wanting in theaesthetic instinct, for her garden is full of possibilities. It lies duesouth, sheltered on the north, east, and west by farm buildings, and isrich in those old fruit-trees and well-seasoned gooseberry bushes thatmake such a good basis for the formation of that most delightful type oflittle garden, the flower-and-fruit-and-vegetable-mixed sort. She has, besides, an inestimable slimy, froggy pond, a perpetual treasure ofmalodorous water, much pined after by thirsty flowers; and then does shenot live in the middle of a farmyard flowing with fertilising propertiesthat 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 tothe 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 theunfortunate accident of the June baby's falling in and being broughtback looking like a green and speckled frog herself, revealed where itwas they had persuaded Seraphine to let them spend their mornings. Thenthere was woe and lamentation, for I was sure they would all havetyphoid fever, and I put them mercilessly to bed, and dosed them, as apreliminary, with castor oil--that oil of sorrow, as Carlyle calls it. It was no use sending for the doctor because there is no doctor withinreach; 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 theexpressive German has it, a _Pickel_, and what parent could resistsending for a doctor when one lived round the corner? But doctors arelike bad habits--once you have shaken them off you discover how muchbetter you are without them; and as for the babies, since they inhabit agarden, prompt bed and the above-mentioned simple remedy have been allthat is necessary to keep them robust. I admit I was frightened when Iheard where they had been playing, for when the wind comes from thatquarter even sitting by my rose beds I have been reminded of theexistence of the pond; and I kept them in bed for three days, anxiouslyawaiting symptoms, and my head full of a dreadful story I had heard of alittle boy who had drunk seltzer water and thereupon been seized withtyphoid fever and had died, and if, I asked myself with a power ofreasoning unusual in a woman, you die after seltzer water, what will younot do after frog-pond? But they did nothing, except be uproarious, andsing at the top of their voices, and clamour for more dinner than I feltwould be appropriate for babies who were going to be dangerously ill ina few hours; and so, after due waiting, they were got up and dressed andturned loose again, and from that day to this no symptoms have appeared. The pond was at first strictly forbidden as a playground, but afterwardsI made concessions, and now they are allowed to go to a deserted littleburying-ground on the west side of it when the wind is in the west; andthere at least they can hear the frogs, and sometimes, if they arepatient, catch a delightful glimpse of them. 

The graveyard is in the middle of a group of pines that bounds the FrauInspector's garden on that side, and has not been used within the memoryof living man. The people here love to make their little burying-groundsin the heart of a wood if they can, and they are often a long way awayfrom the church to which they belong because, while every hamlet has itsburying-ground, three or four hamlets have to share a church; and indeedthe 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, thepaths green from long disuse, the unchecked trees casting black, impenetrable shadows across the poor, meek, pathetic graves. I trysometimes, pushing aside the weeds, to decipher the legend on the almostspeechless headstones; but the voice has been choked out of them byyears of wind, and frost, and snow, and a few stray letters are all thatthey can utter--a last stammering protest against oblivion. 

The Man of Wrath says all women love churchyards. He is fond of sweepingassertions, and is sometimes curiously feminine in his tendency to infera general principle from a particular instance. The deserted littleforest burying-grounds interest and touch me because they are sosolitary, and humble, and neglected, and forgotten, and because so manylong 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 wasdried--dried probably before the gate was reached on the way home--andthey were not missed. Love and sorrow appear to be flowers ofcivilisation, and most to flourish where life has the broadest margin ofleisure and abundance. The primary instincts are always there, and mustfirst be satisfied; and if to obtain the means of satisfying them youhave to work from morning till night without rest, who shall find timeand energy to sit down and lament? I often go with the babies to theenclosure near the Frau Inspector's pond, and it seems just as naturalthat they should play there as that the white butterflies should chaseeach other undisturbed across the shadows. And then the place has asoothing influence on them, and they sober down as we approach it, andon 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 meabout 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 theyseem to have special times and places for certain talk. The first time Itook them there they asked me what the mounds were, and by a series ofadroit questions extracted the information that the people who had beenburied there were now angels (I am not a specialist, and must takerefuge in telling them what I was told in my youth), and ever since thenthey 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 theirbearings, sometimes to my confusion, whenever we go there. 

"But what _are_> angels, mummy?" said the June baby inconsequently thisafternoon, after having assisted at the discussions for several days andapparently 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. Ianswer their questions to the best of my ability and as conscientiouslyas I can, and then, when I hear them talking together afterwards, I amstaggered by the impression they appear to have received. They live in awhole 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 afine day. I never told them so, nor, I am sure, did Seraphine, and stillless Seraphine's predecessor Miss Jones, whose views were whollymaterial; yet if, on bright mornings, I forget to immediately open allthe library windows on coming down, the April baby runs in, and withquite a worried look on her face cries, "Mummy, won't you open thewindows and let the _lieber Gott_ come in?"

If they were less rosy and hungry, or if I were less prosaic, I mighthave gloomy forebodings that such keen interest in things and beingscelestial was prophetic of a short life; and in books, we know, thechildren who talk much on these topics invariably die, after havinggiven their reverential parents a quantity of advice. Fortunately suchchildren are confined to books, and there is nothing of the ministeringchild--surely a very uncomfortable form of infant--about my babies. Indeed, I notice that in their conversations together on such matters ahealthy spirit of contradiction prevails, and this afternoon, afterhaving accepted April's definition of angels with apparent reverence, the June baby electrified the other two (always more orthodox andyielding) by remarking that she hoped she would never go to heaven. Ipretended to be deep in my book and not listening; April and May weresitting on the grass sewing ("needling" they call it) fearful-lookingwoolwork things for Seraphine's birthday, and June was leaning idlyagainst a pine trunk, swinging a headless doll round and round by itsone remaining leg, her heels well dug into the ground, her sun-bonnetoff, 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' startledfaces, "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--andthrowing 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 subjecthad long ago been threshed out and settled between them, "Why, she canplay at ball there with all the _Sternleins_ if she likes!"

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

"But if you break all your dolls, " added April, turning severely toJune, 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 tinyJunes--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 bywhat 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 ofdeep abstraction; and indeed, it is the only way of keeping out oftheological disputes in which I am invariably worsted. 

July 15th. --Yesterday, as it was a cool and windy afternoon and not aspleasant in my garden as it has lately been, I thought I would go intothe village and see how my friends the farm hands were getting on. Philanthropy is intermittent with me as with most people, only they donot say so, and seize me like a cold in the head whenever the weather ischilly. On warm days my bump of benevolence melts away entirely, andgrows bigger in proportion as the thermometer descends. When the wind isin 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 headand look our parson in the face, but during the summer, if I see himcoming my mode of progression in getting out of the way is describedwith perfect accuracy by the verb "to slink. "

The village consists of one street running parallel to the outerbuildings of the farm, and the cottages are one-storied, each with roomsfor 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 tonothing more exhilarating than their own pigstyes. Each family has oneroom and a larder sort of place, and shares the kitchen with the familyon the opposite side of the entrance; but the women prefer doing theircooking at the grate in their own room rather than expose the contentsof their pots to the ill-natured comments of a neighbour. On thefashionable 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 towerabove the drying linen, and fuel, stolen from our woods, is stacked forwinter use; but on the other side you walk straight out of the door onto manure heaps and pigs. 

The street did not look very inviting yesterday, with a lowering skyabove, and the wind blowing dust and bits of straw and paper into myface and preventing me from seeing what I knew to be there, a consolingglimpse of green fields and fir woods down at the other end; but I hadnot been for a long while--we have had such a lovely summer--andsomething 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 gothen? When are you going? Don't you know you _ought_ to go? Don't youfeel you _must_? Elizabeth, pull yourself together and _go_" Strangeeffect of a grey sky and a cool wind! For I protest that if it had beenwarm and sunny my conscience would not have bothered about me at all. Wehad a short fight over it, in which I got all the knocks, as was evidentby the immediate swelling of the bump alluded to above, and then I gavein, and by two o'clock in the afternoon was lifting the latch of thefirst door and asking the woman who lived behind it what she had giventhe family for dinner. This, I was instructed on my first round by theFrau Inspector, is the proper thing to ask; and if you can follow it upby an examination of the contents of the saucepan, and a gentle sniffindicative of your appreciation of their savouriness, so much thebetter. I was diffident at first about this, but the gratification ontheir faces at the interest displayed is so unmistakable that I nevernow omit going through the whole business. This woman, the wife of oneof the men who clean and feed the cows, has arrived at that enviablestage of existence when her children have all been confirmed and can goout to work, leaving her to spend her days in her clean and empty roomin comparative dignity and peace. The children go to school till theyare fourteen, then they are confirmed, are considered grown up, andbegin to work for wages; and her three strapping daughters were out inthe fields yesterday reaping. The mother has a keen, shrewd face, andeverything about her was neat and comfortable. Her floor was freshlystrewn with sand, her cups and saucers and spoons shone bright and cleanfrom behind the glass door of the cupboard, and the two beds, one forherself and her husband and the other for her three daughters, were moremountainous than any I afterwards saw. The size and plumpness of herfeather beds, the Frau Inspector tells me, is a woman's chief claim toconsideration from the neighbours. She who can pile them up nearest tothe ceiling becomes the principal personage in the community, and a flatbed is a social disgrace. It is a mystery to me, when I see thenarrowness of the bedsteads, how so many people can sleep in them. Theyare rather narrower than what are known as single beds, yet father andmother and often a baby manage to sleep very well in one, and three orfour children in the opposite corner of the room in another. Theexplanation no doubt is that they do not know what nerves are, and whatit is to be wakened by the slightest sound or movement in the room andlie for hours afterwards, often the whole night, totally unable to fallasleep again, staring out into the darkness with eyes that refuse toshut. No nerves, and a thick skin--what inestimable blessings to thesepoor people! And they never heard of either. 

I stood a little while talking, not asked to sit down, for that would bethought a liberty, and hearing how they had had potatoes and bacon fordinner, and how the eldest girl Bertha was going to be married atMichaelmas, 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 greatbag of feathers, and there, sure enough, lay a round and placid baby, sleeping as sweetly and looking as cherubic as the most legitimate ofits contemporaries. 

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

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

"It is a pity, " I said, "that the baby did not make its appearance afterMichaelmas 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 awayand carefully covered the cherub again. "They will be very comfortable, "she repeated, seeing that I expected an answer; "he earns eighteen marksa week. "

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

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

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

"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 beforgiven in spite of themselves, that probably they were forgivenwhether they sought it or not, and that you cannot limit things divine;but who can argue with a parson? These people do not seek forgivenessbecause it never enters their heads that they need it. The parson tellsthem so, it is true, but they regard him as a person bound by hisprofession to say that sort of thing, and are sharp enough to see thatthe consequences of their sin, foretold by him with such awfuleloquence, never by any chance come off. No girl is left to languish anddie forsaken by her betrayer, for the betrayer is a worthy young man whomarries her as soon as he possibly can; no finger of scorn is pointed atthe fallen one, for all the fingers in the street are attached to womenwho began life in precisely the same fashion; and as for thatproblematical Day of Judgment of which they hear so much on Sundays, perhaps they feel that that also may be one of the things which afterall 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 tracesof it, except the beautiful eyes, in the little anxious face that I sawfor the first time immediately after the wedding, and just before theweary and harassed parson came in to talk things over. I had never heardof her existence until, about ten days previously, the groom hadappeared, bathed in tears, speechlessly holding out a letter from her inwhich she said she could not bear things any longer and was going tokill herself. The wretched young man was at his wit's end, for he hadnot yet saved enough to buy any furniture and set up housekeeping, andshe was penniless after so many months out of a situation. He did notknow any way out of it, he had no suggestions to offer, no excuses tomake, and just stood there helplessly and sobbed. 

I went to the Man of Wrath, and we laid our heads together. "We do notwant 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 servantswho 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 buywhat is needful and let him have it on condition that he buys it backgradually 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 thegirl back with him and marry her at once. The sooner the better, poorgirl. "

And so within a fortnight they were married, and came hand in hand tome, he proud and happy, holding himself very straight, she in no wiseyet 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 inwhich there still lurked the frightened look caught in the town whereshe had hidden herself, and where fingers of scorn could not have beenwanting, and loud derision, and utter shame, besides the burden ofsickness, and hunger, and miserable pitiful youth. 

They stood hand in hand, she in a decent black dress, and both wearingvery tight white kid gloves that refused to hide entirely the whole ofthe rough red hands, and they looked so ridiculously young, and thewhole thing was so wildly improvident, that no words of exhortationwould come to my lips as I gazed at them in silence, between laughterand tears. I ought to have told them they were sinners; I ought to havetold them they were reckless; I ought to have told them by what a narrowchance they had escaped the just punishment of their iniquity, andinstead of that I found myself stretching out hands that were at onceseized and kissed, and merely saying with a cheerful smile, "_Nun__Kinder_, _liebt Euch_, _und seid brav_. " And so they weredismissed, and then the parson came, in a fever at this latest exampleof deadly sin, while I, with the want of moral sense so often observablein woman, could only think with pity of their childishness. The baby wasborn three days later, and the mother very nearly slipped through ourfingers; but she was a country girl, and she fought round, and by and bygrew young again in the warmth of married respectability; and I met herthe other day airing her baby in the sun, and holding her head as highas 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 tiedup in bandages. The room had not much in it, or it would have beenuntidier; 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 movedher head from side to side on the pillow. I could see she was notundressed, and had crept under her feather bag as she was. I went to thebedside and felt her pulse--a steady pulse, with nothing of feverishnessin it. 

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

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

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

"I have something at home that will cure your headache, " I said, "butthere 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 myconscience, appalled. "You just keep quiet, " I whispered back, "I havehad enough of you for one day. ")--"and I have some grapes I will giveyou 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 awaylaughing, 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 daysago, killed, I honestly believe, by the exceeding love of its mother, which took the form of cherishing it so tenderly that never once duringits 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 ather disposal, but preferring to live and sleep with her four children inone, never going into the other except for the christenings and funeralswhich take place in her family with what I cannot but regard asunnecessary frequency. This baby was born last September in a time ofgolden days and quiet skies, and when it was about three weeks old Isuggested that she should take it out every day while the fine weatherlasted. She pointed out that it had not yet been christened, andremembering that it is the custom in their class for both mother andchild to remain shut up and invisible till after the christening, I saidno more. Three weeks later I was its godmother, and it was safely gotinto the fold of the Church. As I was leaving, I remarked that now shewould 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 afterthe baby, and she began to cry. "It does not thrive, " she wept, "and itsarms are no thicker than my finger. "

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

"Oh, I am so afraid it will catch cold if I take it out, " she cried, herface 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 seemedto me, with superfluous thoroughness. I waited till she had done, andthen 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 moreimportance 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 littlething, perishing in a heap of feathers, in one close room, with fourpeople absorbing what air there was. "I am afraid, " I said, "that if itdoes not soon get some fresh air it will not live. I wonder what wouldhappen to my children if I kept them in one hot room day and night forsix 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 canstand it. "

I was confounded by this way of looking at it, and turned away, afteronce more begging her to take the child out. She plainly regarded theadvice 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 grewthinner every day in spite of all the food it took. A doctor was gotfrom the nearest town, and I went across to hear what he ordered. Heordered bottles at regular intervals instead of the unbroken series ithad been having, and fresh air. He could find nothing the matter withit, except unusual weakness. He asked if it always perspired as it wasdoing then, and himself took off the topmost bag of feathers. Early inJuly it died, and its first outing was to the cemetery in the pine woodsthree miles off. 

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

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

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

There is a great wall of ignorance and prejudice dividing us from thepeople on our place, and in every effort to help them we knock againstit and cannot move it any more than if it were actual stone. Like theparson on the subject of morals, I can talk till I am hoarse on thesubject of health, without at any time producing the faintestimpression. When things are very bad the doctor is brought, directionsare given, medicines made up, and his orders, unless they happen to beapproved of, are simply not carried out. Orders to wash a patient andopen windows are never obeyed, because the whole village would rise upif, later on, the illness ended in death, and accuse the relatives ofmurder. I suppose they regard us and our like who live on the other sideof the dividing wall as persons of fantastic notions which, when carriedinto effect among our own children, do no harm because of the vaststrength of the children accumulated during years of eating in thequantities only possible to the rich. Their idea of happiness is eating, and they naturally suppose that everybody eats as much as he canpossibly afford to buy. Some of them have known hunger, and food andstrength are coupled together in their experience--the more food thegreater the strength; and people who eat roast meat (oh, blissineffable!) every day of their lives can bear an amount of washing andairing that would surely kill such as themselves. But how useless to tryand discover what their views really are. I can imagine what I likeabout them, and am fairly certain to imagine wrong. I have no realconception of their attitude towards life, and all I can do is to talkto them kindly when they are in trouble, and as often as I can give themnice things to eat. Shocked at the horrors that must surround the poorwomen at the birth of their babies, I asked the Man of Wrath to try andmake some arrangement that would ensure their quiet at those times. Heput aside a little cottage at the end of the street as a home for themin their confinements, and I furnished it, and made it clean and brightand pretty. A nurse was permanently engaged, and I thought with delightof the unspeakable blessing and comfort it was going to be. Not a babyhas been born in that cottage, for not a woman has allowed herself to betaken there. At the end of a year it had to be let out again tofamilies, and the nurse dismissed. 

"_Why_ wouldn't they go?" I asked the Frau Inspector, completelypuzzled. She shrugged her shoulders. "They like their husband andchildren round them, " she said, "and are afraid something will be doneto them away from home--that they will be washed too often, perhaps. Thegracious 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. Awoman 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 perambulatorup and down for a moment, to calm the shrieks of the baby inside. On awooden bench at the foot of one of the three beds a very old man sat andblinked at nothing. Crouching in a corner were two small boys of pastycomplexion, playing with a guinea-pig and coughing violently. Theloveliest little girl I have seen for a very long while lay in the bednearest the door, quite silent, with her eyes closed and her mouth shuttight, as though she were trying hard to bear something. As I pulled thedoor open the first thing I saw, right up against it, was this set youngface framed in tossed chestnut hair. "Why, _Frauchen_, " I said to thewoman 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 wasfull 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, washingvigorously. "I'll never take any more of his, nor shall any child ofmine. "

"What medicine was it?"

She wiped her hand on her apron, and reaching across to the cupboardtook 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 onround me. " The bottle had contained opium, and there were explicitdirections written on it as to the number of drops to be taken and thelength 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. Whatgood is it our taking all the trouble we do to send that long distancefor 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 tocure me, the more I took the quicker I ought to have been cured. " Andshe scrubbed and thumped with astounding energy, while Lotte lay withher 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 ofit, and each extra hard maternal thump must have hit the child's headlike a blow from a hammer. She was, you see, only thirteen, and her skinhad 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 thedoctor. "

"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 asthoroughly as you are thumping those unfortunate clothes. " Aloud I saidin 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 firstsight of that tub, but then there was Lotte in her little yellow flannelnight-gown, suffering as only children can suffer, helpless, forced topatience, forced to silent endurance of any banging and vehemence inwhich her mother might choose to indulge. No wonder her mouth was shutlike a clasp and she would not open her eyes. Her eyebrows were reddishlike her hair, and very straight, and her eyelashes lay dusky and longon her white face. At least I had discovered Lotte and could help her alittle, I thought, as I departed down the garden path between the rowsof scarlet-runners; but the help that takes the form of jelly and iceddrinks is not of a lasting nature, and I have but little sympathy with abenevolence that finds its highest expression in gifts of the kind. There have been women within my experience who went down into the graveaccompanied by special pastoral encomiums, and whose claims to lady-bountifulness, on closer inquiry, rested solely on a foundation ofjelly. Yet nothing in the world is easier than ordering jelly to be sentto 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 andrun away with her and nurse her back to health, for she would probablyobject to such a course as strongly as her mother; and later on, whenshe gets well again, she will go back to school, and grow coarse andbouncing and leathery like the others, affording the parson, in three orfour years' time, a fresh occasion for grief over deadly sin. "If onecould only get hold of the children!" I sighed, as I went up the stepsinto the schoolhouse; "catch them young, and put them in a garden, withno older people of their own class for ever teaching them by examplewhat is ugly, and unworthy, and gross. "

Afternoon school was going on, and the assistant teacher was making thechildren read aloud in turns. In winter, when they would be glad of awarm, roomy place in which to spend their afternoons, school is only inthe morning; and in summer, when the thirstiest after knowledge are aptto be less keen, it is both morning and afternoon. The arrangement is somysterious that it must be providential. Herr Schenk, the head master, was away giving my babies their daily lessons, and his assistant, ayouth in spectacles but yet of pugnacious aspect, was sitting in themaster's desk, exercising a pretty turn for sarcasm in his runningcomments on the reading. A more complete waste of breath and brilliancycan hardly be imagined. He is not yet, however, married, and marriage isa great chastener. The children all stood up when I came in, and theteacher ceased sharpening his wits on a dulness that could not feel, andwith many bows put a chair for me and begged me to sit on it. I did siton it, and asked that they might go on with the lesson, as I had onlycome in for a minute on my way down the street. The reading wasaccordingly resumed, but unaccompanied this time by sarcasms. Whatfaces! What dull, apathetic, low, coarse faces! On one side sat thosefrom ten to fourteen, with not a hopeful face among them, and on theother those from six to ten, with one single little boy who looked asthough he could have no business among the rest, so bright was he, soattentive, so curiously dignified. Poor children--what could the parsonhope to make of beings whose expressions told so plainly of the sort ofnature within? Those that did not look dull looked cunning, and all thegirls on the older side had the faces of women. I began to feeldreadfully depressed. "See what you have done, " I whispered angrily tomy conscience--"made me wretched without doing anybody else any good. ""The old woman with the headache is happy in the hopes of grapes, " itreplied, seeking to justify itself, "and Lotte is to have some jelly. ""Grapes! Jelly! Futility unutterable. I can't bear this, and am goinghome. " The teacher inquired whether the children should sing somethingto my graciousness; perhaps he was ashamed of their reading, and indeedI never heard anything like it. "Oh yes, " I said, resigned, butoutwardly smiling kindly with the self-control natural to woman. Theysang, or rather screamed, a hymn, and so frightfully loud and piercinglythat the very windows shook. "My dear, " explained the Man of Wrath, whenI complained one Sunday on our way home from church of the terriblequality and volume of the music, "it frightens Satan away. "

Our numerous godchildren were not in school because, as we have onlylived here three years, they are not yet old enough to share in theblessings of education. I stand godmother to the girls, and the Man ofWrath to the boys, and as all the babies are accordingly named after usthe village swarms with tiny Elizabeths and Boys of Wrath. A hunchbackedwoman, unfit for harder work, looks after the babies during the day in aroom set apart for that purpose, so that the mothers may not be hamperedin their duties at the farm; they have only to carry the babies there inthe morning, and fetch them away again in the evening, and can feel thatthey are safe and well looked after. But many of them, for some reasontoo cryptic to fathom, prefer to lock them up in their room, exposed toall the perils that surround an inquiring child just able to walk, andlast winter one little creature was burnt to death, sacrificed to hermother's stupidity. This mother, a fair type of the intelligenceprevailing in the village, made a great fire in her room before goingout, so that when she came back at noon there would still be some withwhich to cook the dinner, left a baby in a perambulator, and a littleElizabeth of three loose in the room, locked the door, put the key inher pocket, and went off to work. When she came back to get the dinnerready, the baby was still crowing placidly in its perambulator, and thelittle Elizabeth, with all the clothes burnt off her body, was lyingnear the grate dead. Of course the mother was wild with grief, distracted, raving, desperate, and of course all the other women wereshocked and horrified; but point the moral as we might, we could notbring them to see that it was an avoidable misfortune with nothingwhatever to do with the _Finger Gottes_, and the mothers who preferredlocking their babies up alone to sending them to be looked after, wenton doing so as undisturbed as though what had occurred could in no wisebe a lesson to themselves. "Pray, _Herr Lehrer_, why are those twolittle boys sitting over there on that seat all by themselves and notsinging?" 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, "Iam going home. "

"Oh, not yet, " at once protested my unmanageable conscience; "yourfavourite old woman lives in the next cottage, and surely you are notgoing to leave her out?"

"I see plainly, " I replied, "that I shall never be quite comfortabletill 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, andthe women wide--and they all looked more cheerful than seemedreasonable. They stood aside to let me pass, and when I opened the doorI found the room equally full of women, looking equally happy, andtalking eagerly. 

"Why, what is happening?" I asked the nearest one. "Is there a party?"

She turned round, grinning broadly in obvious delight. "The old ladydied in her sleep, " she said, "and was found this morning dead in herbed. I was in here only yesterday, and she said--" I turned abruptly andwent out again. All those gloating women, hovering round the poor bodythat was clothed on a sudden by death with a wonderful dignity andnobleness, made me ashamed of being a woman. Not a man was there, --clearly a superior race of beings. In the entrance I met the FrauInspector coming in to arrange matters, and she turned and walked withme a little way. 

"The old lady was better off than we thought, " she remarked, "and hasleft 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, goodstockings, under-things all trimmed with crochet, real whalebonecorsets, and a quite new pair of white kid gloves. She must have savedfor a long time to have it all so nice. "

"But, " I said, "I don't understand. I have never had anything to do yetwith 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 arenone of us quite so poor as that. "

I glanced down at her as she walked beside me. She is a short woman, andcarries weight. She was smiling almost pityingly at my ignorance of whatis due, even after death, to ourselves and public opinion. 

"The very poorest, " she said, "manage to scrape a whole set of clothestogether for their funerals. A very poor couple came here a few monthsago, and before the man had time to earn anything he died. The wife cameto me (the gracious lady was absent), and on her knees implored me togive her a suit for him--she had only been able to afford the_Sterbehemd_, and was frantic at the thought of what the neighbourswould say if he had nothing on but that, and said she would be hauntedby shame and remorse all the rest of her life. We bought a nice blacksuit, and tie, and gloves, and he really looked very well. She will bedressed to-night, " she went on, as I said nothing; "the dressers comewith the coffin, and it will be a nice funeral. I used to wonder whatshe did with her pension money, and never could persuade her to buyherself a bit of meat. But of course she was saving for this. They arebeautiful corsets. "

"What utter waste!" I ejaculated. 

"Waste?"

"Yes--utter waste and foolishness. Foolishness, not to have bought a fewlittle comforts, waste of the money, and waste of the clothes. Is thereany 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 muchmore now that they know what nice clothes she had bought for herfuneral. Nothing is wanting. I even found a box with a gold brooch init, and a bracelet. "

"I suppose, then, as many of her belongings as will go into the coffinwill be buried too, in order to still further impress the neighbours?" Iasked--"her feather bed, for instance, and anything else of use andvalue?"

"No, only what she has on, and the brushes and combs and towels thatwere 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 themost reassuring promises of devotion, "the gracious lady may be quitecertain that if I am still here she will have on her most beautiful balldress and finest linen, and that the whole neighbourhood shall see forthemselves how well _Herrschaften_ know what is due to them. "

"I shall give directions, " I repeated with increased energy, "that thereis only to be a shroud. "

"Oh no, no, " she protested, smiling as though she were humouring aspoilt and eccentric child, "such a thing could never be permitted. Whatwould our feelings be when we remembered that the gracious lady had notreceived her dues, and what would the neighbours say?"

"I'll have nothing but a shroud!" I cried in great wrath--and thenstopped short, and burst out laughing. "What an absurd and gruesomeconversation, " I said, holding out my hand. "Good-bye, Frau Inspector, Iam sure you are wanted in that cottage. "

She made me a curtsey and turned back. I walked out of the village andthrough the fir wood and the meadow as quickly as I could, opened thegate into my garden, went down the most sheltered path, flung myself onthe grass in a quiet nook, and said aloud "Ugh!"

It is a well-known exclamation of disgust, and is thus inadequatelyexpressed in writing. 

August

August 5th. --August has come, and has clothed the hills with goldenlupins, and filled the grassy banks with harebells. The yellow fields oflupins are so gorgeous on cloudless days that I have neglected theforests lately and drive in the open, so that I may revel in their scentwhile feasting my eyes on their beauty. The slope of a hill clothed withthis orange wonder and seen against the sky is one of those sights whichmake me so happy that it verges on pain. The straight, vigorous flower-spikes are something like hyacinths, but all aglow with a divineintensity of brightness that a yellow hyacinth never yet possessed andnever will; and then they are not waxy, but velvety, and their leavesare not futile drooping things, but delicate, strong sprays of anexquisite grey-green, with a bloom on them that throws a mist over thewhole field; and as for the perfume, it surely is the perfume ofParadise. The plant is altogether lovely--shape, growth, flower, andleaf, 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 fieldsof glory. Not far from here there is a low series of hills running northand south, absolutely without trees, and at the foot of them, on theeast side, is a sort of road, chiefly stones, but yet with patience tobe driven over, and on the other side of this road a plain stretchesaway towards the east and south; and hills and plain are now one sheetof gold. I have driven there at all hours of the day--I cannot keepaway--and I have seen them early in the morning, and at mid-day, and inthe afternoon, and I have seen them in the evening by moonlight, whenall the intensity was washed out of the colour and into the scent; butjust 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 havereached the very gates of heaven. So strong was this feeling the otherday that I actually got out of the carriage, being impulsive, and beganalmost involuntarily to climb the hill, half expecting to see theglories of the New Jerusalem all spread out before me when I shouldreach the top; and it came with quite a shock of disappointment to findthere was nothing there but the prose of potato-fields, and a sandy roadwith home-going calves kicking up its dust, and in the distance ourneighbour'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 whorhapsodizes, and there is no nuisance more intolerable than havingsomebody's rhapsodies thrust upon you when you have no enthusiasm ofyour own that at all corresponds. I know this so well that I generallysucceed in keeping quiet; but sometimes even now, after years of studyin the art of holding my tongue, some stray fragment of what I feel doesoccasionally come out, and then I am at once pulled up and brought to mysenses by the well-known cold stare of utter incomprehension, or thelook of indulgent superiority that awaits any exposure of a feeling notin the least understood. How is it that you should feel so vastlysuperior whenever you do not happen to enter into or understand yourneighbour's thoughts when, as a matter of fact, your not being able todo so is less a sign of folly in your neighbour than of incompletenessin yourself? I am quite sure that if I were to take most or any of myfriends to those pleasant yellow fields they would notice nothing exceptthe exceeding joltiness of the road; and if I were so ill-advised as tolift up a corner of my heart, and let them see how full it was of wonderand delight, they would first look blank, and then decide mentally thatthey were in the unpleasant situation of driving over a stony road withthat 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 ispainful being suppressed for ever and ever, and I believe the tormentsof such a state, when unduly prolonged, are more keenly felt by a womanthan a man, she having, in spite of her protestations, a good deal ofthe ivy nature still left in her, and an unhealthy craving for sympathyand support. When I drive to the lupins and see them all spread out asfar as eye can reach in perfect beauty of colour and scent and bathed inthe mild August sunshine, I feel I must send for somebody to come andlook at them with me, and talk about them to me, and share in thepleasure; and when I run over the list of my friends and try to find onewho would enjoy them, I am frightened once more at the solitariness inwhich 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 afternoonsare not repeated often, and if you are careful not to stir more than thesurface of things, but among them all there is only one who has, roughly, the same tastes that I have; and even her sympathies havelimitations, and she declares for instance with emphasis that she wouldnot at all like to be a goose-girl. I wonder why. Our friendship nearlycame to an end over the goose-girl, so unexpectedly inflaming did thesubject 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 thatcapacity I would like to be a goose-girl, and sit in the greenest offields minding those delightfully plump, placid geese, whiter and moreleisurely than the clouds on a calm summer morning, their very waddle inits lazy deliberation soothing and salutary to a fretted spirit that hasbeen too long on the stretch. The fields geese feed in are so speciallycharming, so green and low-lying, with little clumps of trees andbushes, and a pond or boggy bit of ground somewhere near, and aprofusion of those delicate field flowers that look so lovely growingand are so unsatisfactory and fade so quickly if you try to arrange themin your rooms. For six months of the year I would be happier than anyqueen I ever heard of, minding the fat white things. I would begin inApril with the king-cups, and leave off in September with theblackberries, and I would keep one eye on the geese, and one on thevolume of Wordsworth I should have with me, and I would be present inthis way at the procession of the months, the first three all white andyellow, and the last three gorgeous with the lupin fields and the bluesand purples and crimsons that clothe the hedges and ditches in awonderful variety of shades, and dye the grass near the water in greatpatches. Then in October I would shut up my Wordsworth, go back tocivilised life, and probably assist at the eating of the geese one afterthe other, with a proper thankfulness for the amount of edification Ihad 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 adish loved quite openly and simply by people who would consider that thenumber of their quarterings raises them above any suspicion as to therefinement of their tastes, however many geese they may eat, and howevermuch they may enjoy them; and I remember one lady, whose ancestors, probably all having loved goose, reached back up to a quite giddyantiquity, casting a gloom over a dinner table by removing as much ofthe 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. Nodoubt it was. The misfortune was that it happened also to be thefavourite part of the line of guests who came after her, and who sawthemselves forced by the hard laws of propriety to affect an indifferentdignity of bearing at the very moment when their one feeling was afierce desire to rise up and defend at all costs their right to a shareof skin. She had, I remember, very pretty little white hands like tinyclaws, and wore beautiful rings, and sitting opposite her, and freemyself from any undue passion for goose, I had leisure to watch therapid way in which she disposed of the skin, her rings and the whitenessof her hands flashing up and down as she used her knife and fork withthe awful dexterity only seen in perfection in the Fatherland. I amafraid that as a nation we think rather more of our eating and drinkingthan is reasonable, and this no doubt explains why so many of us, by thetime 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, ofcourse, with the drinking made necessary by its exaggerated indulgence, constitutes the chief happiness of the middle and lower classes. Anystory-book or novel you take up is full of feeling descriptions of whateverybody ate and drank, and there are a great many more meals thankisses; so that the novel-reader who expects a love-tale, finds withdisgust that he is put off with _menus_. The upper classes have so manyother amusements that _das Essen_ ceases to be one, and they are asthin as all the rest of the world; but if the curious wish to see howvery largely it fills the lives, or that part of their lives that theyreserve for pleasure, of the middle classes, it is a good plan to go toseaside places during the months of July and August, when the schoolsclose, and the _bourgeoisie_ realises the dream in which it has beenindulging the whole year, of hotel life with a tremendous dinner everyday at one o'clock. 

The April baby was a weak little creature in her first years, and thedoctor ordered as specially bracing a seaside resort frequented solelyby 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, wasspent in ruminating over the delights of the meal that was eaten, and inpreparing their bodies by gentlest exercise for the delights of the mealthat was to come. They passed their mornings on the sands, the womendoing fancy work in order that they might look busy, and the menstrolling aimlessly about near them with field-glasses, and nauticalcaps, and long cloaks of a very dreadful pattern reaching to their heelsand making them look like large women, called Havelocks, --all of themwaiting with more or less open eagerness for one o'clock, the greatmoment 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 silentsolemnity, a contemplative collectedness, which is best described by theword _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 timethey would begin to straggle out again, flushed and using toothpicks asthey strolled to the tables under the trees, where the exhausted waiterswould presently bring them breakfast-cups of coffee and cakes. Theylingered about an hour over this, and then gradually disappeared totheir rooms, where they slept, I suppose, for from then till about six adeath-like stillness reigned in the place and April and I had it all toourselves. Towards six, slow couples would be seen crawling along thepath by the shore and panting up into the woods, this being the onlyexercise of the day, and necessary if they would eat their suppers withappreciation; and April and I, peering through the bracken out of thenests of moss we used to make in the afternoons, could see them comingup through the trees after the climb up the cliff, the husband with hisHavelock 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 andan umbrella, and very often a small mysterious basket as well to carry, besides holding up her dress, very stout and very uncomfortable and verybreathless, panting along behind; and however much she had to carry, andhowever fat and helpless she was, and however steep the hill, andhowever much dinner she had eaten, the idea that her husband might havetaken her cloak and her umbrella and her basket and carried them for herwould never have struck either of them. If it had by some strange chanceentered his head, he would have reasoned that he was as stout as shewas, 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 hasfascinations, apparently, that are difficult to withstand, and if itgives you so much pleasure that the resulting inability to move withoutgasping is accepted with the meekness of martyrs, who shall say that youare wrong? My not myself liking a large dinner at one o'clock is not areason for my thinking I am superior to those who do. Their excesses, itis true, are not my excesses, but then neither are mine theirs; and whatabout the days of idleness I spend, doing nothing from early till latebut 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 yourselfin another person's place, are not, I am afraid, reliable. I had themdinned into me constantly as a child, and I was constantly trying toobey them, and constantly was astonished at the unexpected results Iarrived at; and now I know that it is a proof of artlessness to supposethat other people will think and feel and hope and enjoy what you do andin the same way that you do. If an officious friend had stood in thatbreathless couple's path and told them in glowing terms how much happierthey would be if they lived their life a little more fully and from itsother sides, how much more delightful to stride along gaily together intheir walks, with wind enough for talk and laughter, how pleasant if theman 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 wouldhave so much as understood him? Cold meat and toast? Instead of whatthey had just been enjoying so intensely? Miss that soup made of theinner mysteries of geese, those eels stewed in beer, the roast pig withred cabbage, the venison basted with sour cream and served with beans invinegar and cranberry jam, the piled-up masses of vanilla ice, thepumpernickel and cheese, the apples and pears on the top of that, andthe 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 makeup for the loss of such a dinner; and besides, might not a wiry wifeturn out to be a questionable blessing? And so they would pity thenimble friend who wasted his life in taking exercise and missed all itspleasures, and the man of toast and early rising would regard them withprofound disgust if simple enough to think himself better than they, and, if he possessed an open mind, would merely return their pity withmore of his own; so that, I suppose, everybody would be pleased, for thecharm 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 bigpearl buttons, and my eyes turned down because I was shy, and my noseturned up because I was impudent, one summer at the seaside with mygoverness we noticed in our walks a solitary lady of dignifiedappearance, who spoke to no one, and seemed for ever wrapped in distantand lofty philosophic speculations. "She's thinking about Kant and thenebular hypothesis, " I decided to myself, having once heard some menwith long beards talking of both those things, and they all had had thatsame 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_, " shereplied 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 criedtriumphantly, "_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 aspunishments 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_, arebut a few examples of her achievements in this particular branch ofdiscipline. 

That very day at the _table d'hote_ the abstracted lady sat next tome. A _ragout_ of some sort was handed round, and after I had taken someshe asked me, before helping herself, what it was. 

"Snails, " I replied promptly, wholly unchastened by the prayers I hadjust been writing out in every tense. 

"Snails! _Ekelig_. " And she waved the waiter loftily away, and looked onwith much superciliousness at the rest of us enjoying ourselves. 

"What! You do not eat this excellent _ragout_?" asked her otherneighbour, a hot man, as he finished clearing his plate and had time toobserve the emptiness of hers. "You do not like calves' tongues andmushrooms? _Sonderbar. _"

I still can see the poor lady's face as she turned on me more like atigress than the impassive person she had been a moment before. "_Sie__unverschamter Backfisch_!" she hissed. "My favourite dish--I have youto thank for spoiling my repast--my day!" And in a frenzy of rage shegripped my arm as though she would have shaken me then and there in theface of the multitude, while I sat appalled at the consequences ofindulging a playful fancy at the wrong time. 

Which story, now I come to think of it, illustrates less the tremendousimportance 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 fromend to end, and not start off in front of the house with fireworks, going off at its farthest limit into sheer sticks. The standard reachedbeneath the windows should at least be kept up, if it cannot besurpassed, right away through, and the German popular plan in thismatter quite discarded of concentrating all the available splendour ofthe establishment into the supreme effort of carpet-bedding and glassballs 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, willinfer an equal magnificence throughout the entire domain; whereas heknows very well all the time that the landscape round the cornerconsists of fowls and dust-bins. Disliking this method, I have tried tomake my garden increase in loveliness, if not in tidiness, the fartheryou get into it; and the visitor who thinks in his innocence as heemerges 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 thinkis the most charming bit, the silver birch and azalea plantation down atthe very end. This is the boundary of my kingdom on the south side, ablaze of colour in May and June, across which you see the placid meadowsstretching away to a distant wood; and from its contemplation the idealvisitor returns to the house a refreshed and better man. That is thesort of person one enjoys taking round--the man (or woman) who, lovinggardens, would go any distance to see one; who comes to appreciate, andcompare, and admire; who has a garden of his own that he lives in andloves; and whose talk and criticisms are as dew to the thirsty gardeningsoul, all too accustomed in this respect to droughts. He knows as wellas I do what work, what patience, what study and watching, what laughterat failures, what fresh starts with undiminished zeal, and what bright, unalterable faith are represented by the flowers in my garden. He knowswhat I have done for it, and he knows what it has done for me, and howit has been and will be more and more a place of joys, a place oflessons, a place of health, a place of miracles, and a place of sure andnever-changing peace. 

Living face to face with nature makes it difficult for one to bediscouraged. Moles and late frosts, both of which are here in abundance, have often grieved and disappointed me, but even these, my worstenemies, have not succeeded in making me feel discouraged. Not once tillnow have I got farther in that direction than the purely negative stateof not being encouraged; and whenever I reach that state I go for abrisk walk in the sunshine and come back cured. It makes one so healthyto live in a garden, so healthy in mind as well as body, and when I saymoles and late frosts are my worst enemies, it only shows how I couldnot now if I tried sit down and brood over my own or my neighbour'ssins, and how the breezes in my garden have blown away all those worriesand vexations and bitternesses that are the lot of those who live in acrowd. The most severe frost that ever nipped the hopes of a year isbetter to my thinking than having to listen to one malignant truth orlie, and I would rather have a mole busy burrowing tunnels under each ofmy rose trees and letting the air get at their roots than face a singlegreeting where no kindness is. How can you help being happy if you arehealthy and in the place you want to be? A man once made it a reproachthat I should be so happy, and told me everybody has crosses, and thatwe live in a vale of woe. I mentioned moles as my principal cross, andpointed to the huge black mounds with which they had decorated thetennis-court, but I could not agree to the vale of woe, and could not beshaken in my belief that the world is a dear and lovely place, witheverything in it to make us happy so long as we walk humbly and dietourselves. He pointed out that sorrow and sickness were sure to come, and seemed quite angry with me when I suggested that they too could beborne perhaps with cheerfulness. "And have not even such things theirsunny side?" I exclaimed. "When I am steeped to the lips in diseases anddoctors, I shall at least have something to talk about that interests mywomen friends, and need not sit as I do now wondering what I shall saynext and wishing they would go. " He replied that all around me laymisery, sin, and suffering, and that every person not absolutely blindedby selfishness must be aware of it and must realise the seriousness andtragedy of existence. I asked him whether my being miserable anddiscontented would help any one or make him less wretched; and he saidthat we all had to take up our burdens. I assured him I would not shrinkfrom mine, though I felt secretly ashamed of it when I remembered thatit was only moles, and he went away with a grave face and a shakinghead, back to his wife and his eleven children. I heard soon afterwardsthat a twelfth baby had been born and his wife had died, and in dyinghad turned her face with a quite unaccountable impatience away from himand to the wall; and the rumour of his piety reached even into mygarden, and how he had said, as he closed her eyes, "It is the Will ofGod. " He was a missionary. 

But of what use is it telling a woman with a garden that she oughtreally to be ashamed of herself for being happy? The fresh air is sobuoyant that it lifts all remarks of that sort away off you and leavesyou laughing. They get wafted away on the scent of the stocks, and youstand in the sun looking round at your cheerful flowers, and more thanever persuaded that it is a good and blessed thing to be thankful. Oh agarden is a sweet, sane refuge to have! Whether I am tired because Ihave enjoyed myself too much, or tired because I have lectured theservants too much, or tired because I have talked to missionaries toomuch, I have only to come down the verandah steps into the garden to beat once restored to quiet, and serenity, and my real and natural self. Icould almost fancy sometimes that as I come down the steps, gentle handsof blessing have been laid on my head. I suppose I feel so because ofthe hush that descends on my soul when I get out of the close, restlesshouse into that silent purity. Sometimes I sit for hours in the southwalk by the verandah just listening and watching. It is so privatethere, though directly beneath the windows, that it is one of myfavourite places. There are no bedrooms on that side of the house, onlythe Man of Wrath's and my day-rooms, so that servants cannot see me as Istand there enjoying myself. If they did or could, I should simply nevergo there, for nothing is so utterly destructive to meditation as to knowthat probably somebody inquisitive is eyeing you from behind a curtain. The loveliest garden I know is spoilt to my thinking by theimpossibility of getting out of sight of the house, which stares down atyou, 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 everadmitted, every dandelion and daisy--those friends of the unaspiring--routed out years ago, the borders exquisite examples of taste, the turfso faultless that you hardly like to walk on it for fear of making itdusty, and the whole quite uninhabitable for people of my solitarytendencies because, go where you will, you are overlooked. Since I havelived in this big straggling place, full of paths and copses where I amsure 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 happyafternoon in that little English paradise, but I came away quitejoyfully, 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 likestars, and where there is so much nature and so little art. It will growI know sweeter every year, but it is too big ever to be perfect and toget to look so immaculate that the diseased imagination conjures upvisions of housemaids issuing forth each morning in troops and dustingevery separate flower with feather brushes. Nature herself is untidy, and in a garden she ought to come first, and Art with her brooms andclipping-shears follow humbly behind. Art has such a good time in thehouse, where she spreads herself over the walls, and hangs herself upgorgeously at the windows, and lurks in the sofa cushions, and breaksout in an eruption of pots wherever pots are possible, that really sheshould be content to take the second place out of doors. And howdreadful to meet a gardener and a wheelbarrow at every turn--which isprecisely what happens to one in the perfect garden. My gardener, whosedeafness is more than compensated for by the keenness of his eyesight, very soon remarked the scowl that distorted my features whenever I metone 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, socompletely have they disappeared, and he only lets them loose when heknows I am driving, or at meals, or in bed. But is it not irritating tobe sitting under your favourite tree, pencil in hand, and eyes turnedskywards expectant of the spark from heaven that never falls, and thento have a man appear suddenly round the corner who immediately beginsquite close to you to tear up the earth with his fangs? No one will everknow the number of what I believe are technically known as winged wordsthat 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 towings. 

Sometimes when I am in a critical mood and need all my faith to keep mepatient, I shake my head at the unshornness of the garden as gravely asthe missionary shook his head at me. The bushes stretch across thepaths, and, catching at me as I go by, remind me that they have not beenpruned; the teeming plant life rejoices on the lawns free from allinterference from men and hoes; the pinks are closely nibbled off at thebeginning of each summer by selfish hares intent on their owngratification; most of the beds bear the marks of nocturnal foxes; andthe squirrels spend their days wantonly biting off and flinging down thetender young shoots of the firs. Then there is the boy who drives thedonkey and water-cart round the garden, and who has an altogetherreprehensible habit of whisking round corners and slicing off bits ofthe 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, youmust consent to have wire-netting, which is odious, right round yourgarden. And you are always saying you like weeds, so why grumble at yourlawns? And it doesn't hurt you much if the squirrels do break bits offyour firs--the firs must have had that happening to them years and yearsbefore you were born, yet they still flourish. As for boys, theycertainly are revolting creatures. Can't you catch this one when heisn'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 indignationthe culpable indifference of this boy in regard to corners, whether shedid not think that would be a good way of disposing of him. She is agreat disciplinarian, and was loud in her praise of the plan; but theother two demurred. "He might go dead in there, " said the May baby, apprehensively. "And he is such a naughty boy, " said April, who hadwatched his reckless conduct with special disgust, "that if he once wentdead 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 andsulphureous first-fruits of Seraphine's teaching!

We were going round the garden in a procession, I with a big pair ofscissors, and the Three with baskets, into one of which I put freshflowers, and into the others flowers that were beginning to seed, deadflowers, and seed-pods. The garden was quivering in heat and light; rainin the morning had brought out all the snails and all the sweetness, andwe 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 theircollections. These collections are carried about in cardboard boxes allday, 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 donot mind. Once when April woke in the morning she was overjoyed byfinding a friendly little one on her cheek. Clearly babies of ironnerves and pellucid consciences. 

"So you do know some French, " I said as I snipped off poppy-heads; "youhave always pretended you don't. "

"Oh, keep the poppies, mummy, " cried April, as she saw them tumblinginto her basket; "if you picks them and just leaves them, then theyripes 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 withbreathless eloquence. "Seraphine says there was one time a girl and aboy who went for a walk, and there were two ways, and one way goes wherestones is, but it goes to the _lieber Gott_; and the girl went thatway till she came to a door, and the _lieber Gott_ made the dooropened 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, ' andhe 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 upan impressive finger, "and didn't want to go to the _Himmel_ and didn'tlove glory. "

"All boys are naughty, " said June, "and I don't love them. "

"_Nous allons parler Francais_" I announced, desirous of findingout 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 talkFrench at a great rate, asking questions as I snipped, and trying toextract answers, and getting none. The silence behind me grew ominous. Presently I heard a faint sniff, and the basket being held up to mebegan 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 herone free hand. 

"Why, you most blessed of babies, " I exclaimed, kneeling down andputting my arms round her, "what in the world is the matter?"

She looked at me with grieved and doubting eyes. "Such a mother to talkFrench to her child!" she sobbed. 

I threw down the scissors, picked her up, and carried her up and downthe path, comforting her with all the soft words I knew and suppressingmy desire to smile. "That's not French, is it?" I whispered at the endof a long string of endearments, beginning, I believe, with such flightsof rhetoric as priceless blessing and angel baby, and ending with agreat many kisses. 

"No, no, " she answered, patting my face and looking infinitely relieved, "that is pretty, and how mummies always talks. Proper mummies neverspeak French--only Seraphines. " And she gave me a very tight hug, and akiss 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 attemptat governessing from her cheeks. I wonder how it is that whenever babiescry, streaks of mud immediately appear on their faces. I believe I couldcry for a week, and yet produce no mud. 

"I'll tell you what I'll do, babies, " I said, anxious to restorecomplete serenity on such a lovely day, and feeling slightly ashamed ofmy uncalled-for zeal--indeed, April was right, and proper mothers leavelessons and torments to somebody else, and devote all their energies topetting--"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'dlike the same supper as usual? Run away to Seraphine and tell her to getyou ready. "

They seized their baskets and their boxes of snails and rushed off intothe bushes, calling for Seraphine with nothing but rapture in theirvoices, 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 libraryplaying cheerful tunes, and the babies dance passionately round thepillar. 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 wallflowerand gnash her teeth; and when they want to dance squares they are forcedby the stubbornness of numbers to dance triangles. At the appointed hourthey knock at the door, and come in attired in the garments they haveselected as appropriate (at this last ball the April baby wore myshooting coat, the May baby had a muff, and the June baby carriedSeraphine's umbrella), and, curtseying to me, each one makes some remarkshe thinks suitable to the occasion. 

"How's your husband?" June asked me last time, in the defiant tones sheseems 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 withwibbons. "

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 andlemonade, is served on footstools; and when they have cleared it up evento 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 preyof the awful dreams naturally resulting from so unusual a combination asradishes and babies. That is why my balls are rare festivals--the babieswill insist on having radishes for the supper, and I, as a decent parentwith a proper sense of my responsibilities, am forced accordingly torestrict my invitations to two, at the most three, in a year. 

When this last one was over I felt considerably exhausted, and hadhardly sufficient strength to receive their thanks with civility. Anhour's jig-playing with the thermometer at 90 leaves its marks on themost robust; and when they were in bed, and the supper beginning to doits work, I ordered the carriage and the kettle with a view to seekingrepose in the forest, taking the opportunity of escaping before the Manof Wrath should come in to dinner. The weather has been very hot for along time, but the rain in the morning had had a wonderful effect on myflowers, and as I drove away I could not help noticing how charming theborders in front of the house were looking, with their white hollyhocks, and white snapdragons, and fringe of feathery marigolds. This gardenerhas already changed the whole aspect of the place, and I believe I havefound the right man at last. He is very young for a head gardener, buton that account all the more anxious to please me and keep hissituation; and it is a great comfort to have to do with somebody whowatches and interprets rightly every expression of one's face and doesnot need much talking to. He makes mistakes sometimes in the men heengages, just as I used to when I did the engaging, and he had one pooryoung man as apprentice who very soon, like the first of my three meekgardeners, went mad. His madness was of a harmless nature and took aliterary form; indeed, that was all they had against him, that he wouldwrite books. He used to sit in the early morning on my special seats inthe garden, and strictly meditate the thankless muse when he ought tohave been carting manure; and he made his fellow-apprentices unspeakablywretched by shouting extracts from Schiller at them across theintervening gooseberry bushes. Let me hasten to say that I had neverspoken to him, and should not even have known what he was like if he hadnot worn eyeglasses, so that the Man of Wrath's insinuation that Iaffect the sanity of my gardeners is entirely without justification. Theeyeglasses 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 passthe examinations, and had taken up gardening in the hope of getting backhis health and spirits. I thought this a very sensible plan, and wasbeginning to feel interested in him when one day the post brought me aregistered packet containing a manuscript play he had written called"The Lawyer as Gardener, " dedicated to me. The Man of Wrath and I wereboth 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 thescenes at all. As for me, I was represented as going about quotingTolstoi in season and out of season to the gardeners--a thing I protestI never did. The young man was sent home to his people, and I have beenasking myself ever since what there is about this place that it shouldso persistently produce books and lunacy?

On the outskirts of the forest, where shafts of dusty sunlight slantedthrough the trees, children were picking wortleberries for market as Ipassed last night, with hands and faces and aprons smudged into one bluestain. I had decided to go to a water-mill belonging to the Man of Wrathwhich lies far away in a clearing, so far away and so lonely and soquiet that the very spirit of peace seems to brood over it for ever; andall the way the wortleberry carpet was thick and unbroken. Never werethe pines more pungent than after the long heat, and their rosy stemsflushed pinker as I passed. Presently I got beyond the region ofwortleberry-pickers, the children not caring to wander too far into theforest so late, and I jolted over the roots into the gathering shadowsmore and more pervaded by that feeling that so refreshes me, the feelingof being absolutely alone. 

A very ancient man lives in the mill and takes care of it, for it haslong been unused, a deaf old man with a clean, toothless face, and nowife to worry him. He informed me once that all women are mistakes, especially that aggravated form called wives, and that he was thankfulhe had never married. I felt a certain delicacy after that aboutintruding on his solitude with the burden of my sex and wifehood heavyupon me, but he always seems very glad to see me, and runs at once tohis fowlhouse to look for fresh eggs for my tea; so perhaps he regardsme as a pleasing exception to the rule. On this last occasion he broughta table out to the elm-tree by the mill stream, that I might get whatair there was while I ate my supper; and I sat in great peace waitingfor the kettle to boil and watching the sun dropping behind the sharpforest me, and all the little pools and currents into which the streamjust there breaks as it flows over mud banks, ablaze with the redreflection of the sky. The pools are clothed with water-lilies andinhabited by eels, and I generally take a netful of writhing eels backwith me to the Man of Wrath to pacify him after my prolonged absence. Inthe lily time I get into the miller's punt and make them an excuse forpaddling about among the mud islands, and even adventurously exploringthe river as it winds into the forest, and the old man watches meanxiously from under the elm. He regards my feminine desire to pickwater-lilies with indulgence, but is clearly uneasy at my affection formud banks, and once, after I had stuck on one, and he had run up anddown in great agitation for half an hour shouting instructions as togetting off again, he said when I was safely back on shore that peoplewith petticoats (his way of expressing woman) were never intended forpunts, and their only chance of safety lay in dry land and keepingquiet. I did not this time attempt the punt, for I was tired, and it washalf full of water, probably poured into it by a miller weary of theways of women; and I drank my tea quietly, going on at the same timewith my interrupted afternoon reading of the _Sorrows of Werther_, in which I had reached a part that has a special fascination for meevery time I read it--that part where Werther first meets Lotte, andwhere, after a thunderstorm; they both go to the window, and she is sotouched by the beauties of nature that she lays her hand on his andmurmurs "Klopstock, "--to the complete dismay of the reader, though notof Werther, for he, we find, was so carried away by the magic word thathe 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 oftrees, above which stars were beginning to twinkle, my ears soothed bythe splashing of the mill stream and the hooting somewhere near of asolitary owl, and I wondered whether, if the Man of Wrath were by myside, it would be a relief to my pleasurable feelings to murmur"Klopstock, " and whether if I did he would immediately shed tears of joyover my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, andGoethe's putting it into his heroine's mouth just when she was mostenraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursingto the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I amtalking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no womanshould. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained anduneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? Allwe can do is to jump at conclusions, and, when we have jumped, receivewith meekness the information that we have jumped wrong. Sitting therelong 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 isto keep quiet. He came out once and asked whether he should bring alamp, and seemed uneasy at my choosing to sit there in the dark. I couldsee the stars in the black pools, and a line of faint light far awayabove the pines where the sun had set. Every now and then the hot airfrom the ground struck up in my face, and afterwards would come a coolerbreath from the water. Of what use is it to fight for things and make anoise? Nature is so clear in her teaching that he who has lived with herfor any time can be in little doubt as to the "better way. " Keep quietand say one's prayers--certainly not merely the best, but the onlythings to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when Ihave received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be aform of thanksgiving. 

September

September 9th--I have been looking in the dictionary for the Englishword for _Einquartierung_, because that is what is happening to us justnow, but I can find nothing satisfactory. My dictionary merely says (1)the quartering, (2) soldiers quartered, and then relapses intoirrelevancy; so that it is obvious English people do without the wordfor the delightful reason that they have not got the thing. We have ithere very badly; an epidemic raging at the end of nearly every summer, when cottages and farms swarm with soldiers and horses, when all thefemale part of the population gets engaged to be married and will notwork, when all the male part is jealous and wants to fight, and when myhouse is crowded with individuals so brilliant and decorative in theirdazzling uniforms that I wish sometimes I might keep a bunch of thetallest and slenderest for ever in a big china vase in a corner of thedrawing-room. 

This year the manoeuvres are up our way, so that we are blest with morethan 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 givenplace to a perpetual running to and fro of officers' servants, to mealsbeing got ready at all hours, to the clanking of spurs and all thoseother mysterious things on an officer that do clank whenever he moves, and to the grievous wailings of my unfortunate menials, who are quitebeside themselves, and know not whither to turn for succour. We have hadone week of it already, and we have yet another before us. There arefive hundred men with their horses quartered at the farm, and thirtyofficers with their servants in our house, besides all those billeted onthe surrounding villages who have to be invited to dinner and cannot beallowed to perish in peasant houses; so that my summer has for a timeentirely ceased to be solitary, and whenever I flee distracted to thefarthest 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 mostexquisite flannels pursue me and want to play tennis with me, a game Ihave always particularly disliked. 

There is no room of course for all those extra men and horses at thefarm, and when a few days before their arrival (sometimes it is onlyone, and sometimes only a few hours) an official appears and informs usof the number to be billeted on us, the Man of Wrath has to havetemporary sheds run up, some as stables, some as sleeping-places, andsome as dining-rooms. Nor is it easy to cook for five hundred peoplemore than usual, and all the ordinary business of the farm comes to astand-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 baseinstruments are in the next village; but that did not deter anenthusiastic young officer from marching his men past our windows ontheir arrival at six in the morning, with colours flying, and what hehad of his band playing their tunes as unconcernedly as though all thosebig things that make such a noise were giving the fabric its accustomedand necessary base. We are paid six pfennings a day for lodging a commonsoldier, and six pfennings for his horse--rather more than a penny inEnglish money for the pair of them; only unfortunately sheds andcarpentry are not quite so cheap. Eighty pfennings a day is added forthe 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 aquarter 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 asguests, and behave accordingly. The thirty we have now do not, as Icould have wished, all go out together in the morning and stay out tillthe evening, but some go out as others come in, and breakfast is notfinished till lunch begins, and lunch drags on till dinner, and all daylong the dining-room is full of meals and officers, and we ceased a weekago 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 Ihave enjoyed up to now is amply compensated for by my present torments. I believe even my stern friend the missionary would be satisfied if hecould know how swiftly his prediction that sorrow and suffering would besure to come, has been fulfilled. All day long I am giving out tablelinen, ordering meals, supporting the feeble knees of servants, makingappropriate and amiable remarks to officers, presiding as gracefully asnature 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 gardenthis golden weather, how the placid hours are slipping by in unchangedpeace, how strong the scent of roses and ripe fruit is, how the sleepybees drone round the flowers, how warmly the sun shines in that cornerwhere the little Spanish chestnut is turning yellow--the first to turn, and never afterwards surpassed in autumn beauty; I know how still it isdown there in my fir wood, where the insects hum undisturbed in thewarm, quiet air; I know what the plain looks like from the seat underthe oak, how beautiful, with its rolling green waves burning to goldunder the afternoon sky; I know how the hawks circle over it, and howthe 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 aretelling me of all the races their horses win as completely as thoughthey did not exist. I want to be out there on that golden grass, andlook up into that endless blue, and feel the ecstasy of that songthrough all my being, and there is a tearing at my heart when I rememberthat I cannot. Yet they are beautiful young men; all are touchinglyamiable, and many of the older ones even charming--how is it, then, thatI so passionately prefer larks?

We have every grade of greatness here, from that innocent being theensign, a creature of apparent modesty and blushes, who is obliged tostand up and drain his glass each time a superior chooses to drink tohim, and who sits on the hardest chairs and looks for the balls while weplay tennis, to the general, invariably delightful, whose brains havecarried him triumphantly through the annual perils of weeding out, whois as distinguished in looks and manners as he is in abilities, and hasthe crowning merit of being manifestly happy in the society of women. Nothing lower than a colonel is to me an object of interest. The loweryou get the more officers there are, and the harder it is to see thepromising ones in the crowd; but once past the rank of major the airgets 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 whoadmires 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 socialpurposes; and a major is a man with a yearly increasing family, forwhose wants his pay is inadequate, a person continually haunted by thefear of approaching weeding, after which his career is ended, he ispoorer than ever, and being no longer young and only used to a soldier'slife, is almost always quite incapable of starting afresh. Even thechildren of light find it difficult to start afresh with any successafter forty, and the retired officer is never a child of light; if hewere, he would not have been weeded out. You meet him everywhere, shornof the glories of his uniform, easily recognisable by the bad fit of hiscivilian clothes, wandering about like a ship without a rudder; and astime goes on he settles down to the inevitable, and passes his days in afourth-floor flat in the suburbs, eats, drinks, sleeps, reads the_Kreuzzeitung_ and nothing else, plays at cards in the day-time, growsgouty, and worries his wife. It would be difficult to count the numberof them that have answered the Man of Wrath's advertisements for book-keepers and secretaries--always vainly, for even if they were fit forthe work, no single person possesses enough tact to cope successfullywith the peculiarities of such a situation. I hear that some Englishpeople of a hopeful disposition indulge in ladies as servants; the casesare parallel, and the tact required to meet both superhuman. 

Of all the officers here the only ones with whom I can find plenty totalk about are the generals. On what subject under heaven could one talkto a lieutenant? I cannot discuss the agility of ballet-dancers or themerits of jockeys with him, because these things are as dust and ashesto me; and when forced for a few moments by my duties as hostess to comewithin range of his conversation I feel chilly and grown old. In theearly spring of this year, in those wonderful days of hope when natureis in a state of suppressed excitement, and when any day the yearlyrecurring miracle may happen of a few hours' warm rain changing thewhole world, we got news that a lieutenant and two men with their horseswere imminent, and would be quartered here for three nights while someoccult military evolutions were going on a few miles off. It wasspecially inopportune, because the Man of Wrath would not be here, buthe comforted me as I bade him good-bye, my face no doubt very blank, bythe assurance that the lieutenant would be away all day, and so worn outwhen he got back in the evening that he probably would not appear atall. But I never met a more wide-awake young man. Not once during thosethree 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 couldpersuade 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 dinnertime, but he came unexpectedly early, while the babies and I were stillat lunch, the door opening to admit the most beautiful specimen of hisclass that I have ever seen, so beautiful indeed in his white uniformthat the babies took him for an angel--visitant of the type that visitedAbraham and Sarah, and began in whispers to argue about wings. He wasnot in the least tired after his long ride he told me, in reply to myanxious inquiries, and, rising to the occasion, at once plunged intoconversation, evidently realising how peculiarly awful prolonged pausesunder the circumstances would be. I took him for a drive in theafternoon, after having vainly urged him to rest, and while he told meabout his horses, and his regiment, and his brother officers, in what atlast grew to be a decidedly intermittent prattle, I amused myself bywondering what he would say if I suddenly began to hold forth on thethemes I love best, and insist that he should note the beauty of thetrees as they stood that afternoon expectant, with all their little budsonly waiting for the one warm shower to burst into the glory of youngsummer. Perhaps he would regard me as the German variety of a hyena inpetticoats--the imagination recoils before the probable fearfulness ofsuch an animal--or, if not quite so bad as that, at any rate a creaturehysterically inclined; and he would begin to feel lonely, and think ofhis comrades, and his pleasant mess, and perhaps even of his mother, forhe was very young and newly fledged. Therefore I held my peace, andrestricted my conversation to things military, of which I know probablyless than any other woman in Germany, so that my remarks must have beento an unusual degree impressive. He talked down to me, and I talked downto him, and we reached home in a state of profoundest exhaustion--atleast I know I did, but when I looked at him he had not visibly turned ahair. I went upstairs trying to hope that he had felt it more than heshowed, and that during the remainder of his stay he would adopt thesuggestion so eagerly offered of spending his spare time in his roomresting. 

At dinner, he and I, quite by ourselves, were both manifestly convincedof the necessity, for the sake of the servants, of not letting theconversation drop. I felt desperate, and would have said anything soonerthan sit opposite him in silence, and with united efforts we got throughthat fairly well. After dinner I tried gossip, and encouraged him totell me some, but he had such an unnatural number of relations thatwhoever 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 hadintended to say had to be turned immediately into loud and unqualifiedpraise; and praising people is frightfully hard work--you give yourselfthe greatest pains over it, and are aware all the time that it is not inthe very least carrying conviction. Does not everybody know that one'snatural impulse is to tear the absent limb from limb? At half-past nineI got up, worn out in mind and body, and told him very firmly that ithad 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 widerawake than ever, but nothing shook me, and I walked away, leaving himstanding on the hearthrug after the manner of my countrymen, who neverdream of opening a door for a woman. 

The next day he went off at five in the morning, and was to be away, ashe had told me, till the evening. I felt as though I had been let out ofprison as I breakfasted joyfully on the verandah, the sun streamingthrough the creeperless trellis on to the little meal, and the firstcuckoo of the year calling to me from the fir wood. Of the dinner andevening before me I would not think; indeed I had a half-formed plan inmy head of going to the forest after lunch with the babies, taking wrapsand provisions, and getting lost till well on towards bedtime; so thatwhen the angel-visitant should return full of renewed strength andconversation, he would find the casket empty and be told the gem hadgone out for a walk. After I had finished breakfast I ran down the stepsinto the garden, intent on making the most of every minute and hardlyable to keep my feet from dancing. Oh, the blessedness of a brightspring morning without a lieutenant! And was there ever such a hopefulbeginning to a day, and so full of promise for the subsequent rightpassing of its hours, as breakfast in the garden, alone with your teapotand your book! Any cobwebs that have clung to your soul from the daybefore are brushed off with a neatness and expedition altogethersurprising; never do tea and toast taste so nice as out there in thesun; never was a book so wise and full of pith as the one lying openbefore you; never was woman so clean outside and in, so refreshed, somorally and physically well-tubbed, as she who can start her day in thisfashion. As I danced down the garden path I began to think cheerfullyeven of lieutenants. It was not so bad; he would be away till dark, andprobably on the morrow as well; I would start off in the afternoon, andby 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 wasso exhilarating that I began to sing. But he came back just as we hadfinished lunch. 

"The _Herr Lieutenant_ is here, " announced the servant, "and has goneto wash his hands. The _Herr Lieutenant_ has not yet lunched, and willbe down in a moment. "

"I want the carriage at once, " I ordered--I could not and would notspend another afternoon _tete-a-tete_ with that young man, --"and you areto 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 lieutenantthrowing things about overhead, and felt there was not a moment to lose. The servant's face showed plainly that he did not believe about thepastor, and the babies looked up at me wonderingly. What is a woman todo when driven into a corner? The father of lies inhabits corners--nodoubt the proper place for such a naughty person. 

We ran upstairs to get ready. There was only one short flight on whichwe could meet the lieutenant, and once past that we were safe; but wemet him on that one short flight. He was coming down in a hurry, givinghis moustache a final hasty twist, and looking fresher, brighter, lovelier, than ever. 

"Oh, good morning. You have got back much sooner than you expected, haveyou not?" I said lamely. 

"Yes, I managed to get through my part quickly, " he said with abriskness 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 guiltby laying stress on the inevitability of the expedition owing to itshaving been planned weeks before. April and May stood on the landingabove, listening with surprised faces, and June, her mind evidentlydwelling on feathers, intently examined his shoulders from the stepimmediately behind. And we did get away, leaving him to think what heliked, and to smoke, or sleep, or wander as he chose, and I could notbut believe he must feel relieved to be rid of me; but the afternoonclouded over, and a sharp wind sprang up, and we were very cold in theforest, and the babies began to sneeze and ask where the parson was, andat last, after driving many miles, I said it was too late to go to theparson's and we would turn back. It struck me as hard that we should beforced to wander in cold forests and leave our comfortable home becauseof 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 saidall we ever meant to say to each other, and had lauded all our relationswith such hearty goodwill that there was nothing whatever to add. I satlistening to the slow ticking of the clock and asking questions aboutthings I did not in the least want to know, such as the daily work andrations and pay of the soldiers in his regiment, and presently--wehaving dined at the early hour usual in the country--the clock struckeight. Could I go to bed at eight? No, I had not the courage, and noexcuse ready. More slow ticking, and more questions and answers aboutrations and pipeclay. What a clock! For utter laziness and dulldeliberation there surely never was its equal--it took longer to get tothe half-hour than any clock I ever met, but it did get there at lastand struck it. Could I go? Could I? No, still no excuse ready. Wedrifted from pipeclay to a discussion on bicycling for women--a drearysubject. Was it becoming? Was it good for them? Was it ladylike? Oughtthey to wear skirts or--? In Paris they all wore--. Our bringing-up hereis so excellent that if we tried we could not induce ourselves to speakof any forked garments to a young man, so we make ourselves understood, when we desire to insinuate such things, by an expressive pause and amodest downward flicker of the eyelids. The clock struck nine. Nothingshould keep me longer. I sprang to my feet and said I was exhaustedbeyond measure by the sharp air driving, and that whenever I had spentan afternoon out, it was my habit to go to bed half an hour earlier thanother evenings. Again he looked surprised, but rather less so than thenight before, and he was, I think, beginning to get used to me. Iretired, firmly determined not to face another such day and to be veryill in the morning and quite unable to rise, he having casually remarkedthat the next one was an off day; and I would remain in bed, that lastrefuge of the wretched, as long as he remained here. 

I sat by the window in my room till late, looking out at the moonlightin the quiet garden, with a feeling as though I were stuffed withsawdust--a very awful feeling--and thinking ruefully of the day that hadbegun so brightly and ended so dismally. What a miserable thing not tobe able to be frank and say simply, "My good young man, you and I neversaw each other before, probably won't see each other again, and have nointerests in common. I mean you to be comfortable in my house, but Iwant to be comfortable too. Let us, therefore, keep out of each other'sway 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 byyour side and making small-talk. I too have to get to heaven, and haveno time to lose. You won't see me again. Good-bye. "

I believe many a harassed _Hausfrau_ would give much to be able to makesome such speech when these young men appear, and surely the young menthemselves would be grateful; but simplicity is apparently quite beyondpeople'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 forits power of removing those mountains that confine our lives and preventour seeing the sky. Certain it is that until we have it, the simplespirit of the little child, we shall in no wise discover our kingdom ofheaven. 

These were my reflections, and many others besides, as I sat weary atthe window that cold spring night, long after the lieutenant who hadoccasioned them was slumbering peacefully on the other side of thehouse. Thoughts of the next day, and enforced bed, and the bowls ofgruel to be disposed of if the servants were to believe in my illness, made my head ache. Eating gruel _pour la galerie_ is a pitiablestate to be reduced to--surely no lower depths of humiliation areconceivable. And then, just as I was drearily remembering how little Iloved gruel, there was a sudden sound of wheels rolling swiftly roundthe corner of the house, a great rattling and trampling in the stillnight over the stones, and tearing open the window and leaning out, there, sitting in a station fly, and apparelled to my glad vision incelestial light, I beheld the Man of Wrath, come home unexpectedly tosave me. 

"Oh, dear Man of Wrath, " I cried, hanging out into the moonlight withoutstretched arms, "how much nicer thou art than lieutenants! I nevermissed 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, Isaid, "Now listen to me, Man of Wrath. "

"Well?" he inquired, looking up at me from the depths of his chair as Istood before him. 

"Do you know that as a prophet you are a failure? Five months ago to-dayyou sat among the wallflowers and scoffed at the idea of my being ableto 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 spenta 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 forwishing to be solitary was that your soul might have time to grow. May Iask 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 herat 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 andthankful to have got one of her always with you. "

"But am I not?" he asked, putting his arm round me and lookingaffectionate; 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, myhead resting on his shoulder, and his arm encircling my waist; and whatcould possibly be more proper, more praiseworthy, or more picturesque?