It is one of those Calendars that has a little text for every day, and on July 14th it says, quite quietly and simply:
“If Seedling Turnips are attacked by fly, dust with soot when the dew is on the leaf.”
What a train of thought the whole thing rouses! The Seedling Turnips attacked by fly — (the Calendar, I think, means flies, not only just one fly, but “fly” reads more dramatically) — and the owner, warned by some mysterious instinct, hastening to collect soot. What happens if there is no soot? It is July — all the fires may be out. Probably, however, true gardeners have reserves of soot that ordinary people do not know about. They collect the soot, therefore, and dust either the Seedling Turnips or the Fly, or both — whichever the Calendar means— “when the dew is on the leaf”.
Of all the pretty touches! It reminds one of “When the bloom is on the rye”.
Non-gardeners do not so much as know what the dew looks like, on the leaf of the Seedling Turnip. But it is easy to imagine what the garden-lover looks like, crawling out of bed before the sun has had time to interfere with the dew on the leaf, and dusting the soot about all over the place.
Then again: “Onions should be ready to pull and dry in the sun”, says the Calendar, rather peremptorily. Onions should be ready. If they aren’t, the whole thing is evidently all off, because the very next day we dash off into:
“Continue to bud Roses”, and nothing more is ever said about giving the Onions a second chance.
Naturally, with 365 days in the year, it is almost impossible for the Calendar to assign a definite task to every one of them, so sometimes it just says things like:
“Stocks and Pansies will be ripening their seed” (which has a Biblical flavour), and “Geranium Cuttings will not strike freely in open ground”.
The gardener-born, on reading this, looks at once to the Geranium Cuttings, and if by any frightful chance they are striking freely in open ground, knows that something is wrong somewhere and rushes them all away to whatever is the opposite of open ground.
Much later on — for it is impossible to resist looking on ahead — a faintly reproachful note is sounded:
“If not yet done, sow Onions to stand the Winter”.
There is something about “if not yet done” that should strike a chill to the heart of anyone who has put off this business of sowing the Onions to stand the winter. They will obviously only have themselves to thank if the Onions break down at sight of the first snowflake.
There is something more hopeful about “Celery may still be planted”, on August 21st. There has been procrastination, and even slackness, the Calendar means, but it isn’t too late.
“Dis-bud Chrysanthemums” has an element of Dr. Marie Stopes about it that makes one unwilling to dwell upon the topic.
It is depressingly followed by the command to “Sow Cabbage for winter and spring supply”. Winter and spring! Will one have to eat cabbage for months and months?
Evidently one will.
“Lift Potatoes as soon as the Haulm has died back” leaves me cold. For one thing, I have no idea what the haulm is, or how I can tell when it has died back; and for another, I do not want to lift the potatoes, then or ever, for I do not know where, or to what heights, the Calendar means them to be lifted. For once, it has overreached itself, and I shall do nothing.
“Gather Tomato fruit as it ripens” is much simpler, and might almost be called obvious, but “Mulch and earth up Celery” is not, unless one has a previous acquaintance, which I unhappily have not, with the verb To Mulch.
Quite late in September is the briefest entry of all: “Harvest Onions”. Not Harvest Home, but Harvest Onions.
The Calendar, in fact, has a weakness for Onions. They get more texts to themselves than any other product of the vegetable world.
The most engaging one of all comes in August: “Bend down the heads of well-grown Onions to help the development of the bulb”.
Perhaps garden-lovers have always known about this, but for my part it would never have entered my mind to set about bending down the heads of my well-grown Onions to help the development of the bulb. But it strikes me as a very pretty, gracious, and generous action, symbolical of the strong helping the weak, and many other things of the same kind.
Right at the end of the Calendar, as far as I can see without tearing, I think it rather slacks off, with generalizations, such as “Violets will need careful attention”, which simply makes one anxious about them, without giving one a lead.
And “Leave Parsnips in the Ground” on November 13th is ridiculous, since I shouldn’t ever have thought of moving them, if the Calendar hadn’t said anything.
One is also inclined to carp at “Rock Gardens may now be made” with its casual plural. However, “Dig and Manure all vacant ground” is much worse, and opens up unlimited fields of really hard labour. One turns with relief to “Watch the ventilation of your greenhouse”, which is, anyway, a passive, quiet way of spending the time.
On the whole, the Gardening Calendar is calculated to brighten the day of the non-gardener. All its mysterious counsels are probably as clear as daylight to the real garden-lovers, who take all this thinning, and dis-budding, and covering of crowns, and lifting of crops, in their stride.
The non-gardener, however, in a quiet way, can extract quite a lot of clean, healthy English fun out of trying to guess what it all means.
LOOKING AT THE CLASSICS
Experienced writers are always being asked to advise inexperienced writers — without receiving any fee for doing so, and usually at a vast expenditure of valuable time and energy — and one of their favourite — because one of the shortest — ways of doing it, is to say: Look at the Classics! Read your Shakespeare! Go to the Great Masters! — and things like that.
Very well — one goes to the Great Masters — one looks at one’s Shakespeare. Or one would, if there was ever time. And the result would be perfectly extraordinary.
We will suppose that a young gentleman called Vavasour is writing a play, and has been told, by three out of the eight experienced playwrights whom he has already pestered, to Read his Shakespeare. Vavasour has done this (and had the usual shock on discovering that his Shakespeare is responsible for various sayings that Vavasour had always attributed to his aunt), and having completely soaked himself in the Classics, sits down to his own rather elusive masterpiece.
Construction, hitherto, has presented difficulties. But Vavasour’s visit to the Classics has simplified all that.
For the purposes of his plot, A has to overhear a conversation between C and B. Does Vavasour rack his brains for a plausible situation by which A can, without the vulgarity of deliberate eavesdropping, assist unseen at the tête-à-tête between C and B? Not at all. He evolves a garden scene, with C and B making love, or plotting an assassination, or arranging a practical joke, on a rustic bench. Whilst they are in the midst of it he brings on A, who strolls behind a little hedge, right-centre, and remains there, continually looking round it, above it, through it, or — if practicable — underneath it — without ever being observed by C and B, who are, indeed, particularly careful not to glance in that direction. They just continue to plot, or to make love, or both, at the tops of their voices, and A says Ha! or Foul hypocrites! or anything else he likes, and is not, apparently, heard by anybody except the audience.
Again, the subtleties of psychology are much modified by the Great Masters. Mrs. B and Major C, in a triangle play, are in love, but young Vavasour, anxious to score a popular success, rightly sees that by the end of the Third Act it will be advisable for Mrs. B’s affections to have reverted to her lawful husband. Is it necessary to indicate the dawnings of this change of heart through pages and pages of dialogue? Not if he continues steadily and faithfully to Look at the Classics. He waits till five minutes before the last curtain, and lets passion ramp to the very furthest of the limits imposed by the Censor and then — quite suddenly — introduces a bran-new character. Say an innocent young girl, br
inging home the washing or something. Major C observes her, falls in love with her on the spot, and says so. Mrs. B says What! Faithless? and instantly realizes that the only person she herself really loves is her own husband. At the same moment, the husband, who has been away at the North Pole, returns quite unexpectedly by aeroplane, and enters the drawing-room. In less time than it takes to get one’s hat out from under the stall of the theatre, the four characters are happily paired off, and the best classical traditions have been followed.
But supposing Vavasour to be a reactionary, and romantic. He is determined to have a happy ending. Major C and Mrs. B love each other, so do Major C’s wife and Mrs. B’s husband. So do hosts of other minor characters, all more or less mismated. After engineering the most desperate complications, young Vavasour remembers the Great Masters. As a result, in Act III. the butler comes into the room where all these agitated people are gathered together and announces quietly that Major C’s wife has just fallen into a river which has risen in flood and has been drowned, and that Mrs. B’s husband, who was just then passing, has been thrown by his horse and killed, and that several minor characters who happened to be playing golf on the adjoining links were so upset at these occurrences that half of them collapsed and died, while the remainder decided to emigrate and have already left to catch the boat at Tilbury.
Thus is the coast cleared for Major C and Mrs. B.
Nor do the Great Masters fail their disciple when it comes to those delicate and difficult pieces of psychology without which young Vavasour knows well that his play can never be acclaimed as the remarkable Human Document that it really is.
Vavasour has created the figure of X — a morbid and perverted creature, in whom Vavasour has let loose all the strange impulses that he can himself never indulge in because if he did he would probably be kicked out of his Club, and so on.
X, throughout Three Acts, has wrought untold damage and messed up the lives of everybody within reach. His only logical destination is either the asylum or five years’ hard. But will the Box Office stand for that? It will not. Young Vavasour again flies to his Shakespeare. He comes back quite calm, and resumes Page One hundred and thirty-five. The situation is as involved as possible: all is gloom, impropriety, and horror.
But X walks on, practicable door O.P., and informs all the other characters in the play — who have suddenly foregathered from the four corners of the earth for the purpose of hearing him — that he has been asleep in the garden, and awakened with a complete change of heart. It has quite suddenly come over him that all this wickedness is a mistake. There is to be no more of it. He is, in fact, going into a monastery in two hours’ time. But meanwhile, he will make his will. (The man who has come to wind the clocks, by a coincidence, here turns out to be the family solicitor, who just disguised himself for a joke, and has a Will-form in his pocket.) X distributes the whole of his fortune amongst the people who need it, to make them happy — and the Classics, once more, have done their job.
The only thing that really remains to be seen is whether the managers to whom young Vavasour submits the result of so much thought and effort will fully appreciate the example from which all these inspirations have been drawn.
Even if they do, there will still be the public to reckon with. And if they do not, the whole fabric of classical literature as an example more or less crumbles to the ground, surely... ... ...?
Now let us look at the Classics again — this time not so much for what we can get out of them in the way of actual construction, as for ideas in regard to plot.
(It is a well-established convention amongst writers that to lift a plot wholesale out of the Classics and use it does not constitute plagiarism. No writer has ever yet been misguided enough to try to find out on exactly what basis it is that this convention is so well established.)
*
Let us assume that young Cathcart-Symington — as we will, for the sake of convenience, call our dramatist — has it in mind to write a rather brilliant comedy, of the kind that is likely to appeal to a London audience. Of course, one must realize that plenty of other people beside Cathcart-Symington have exactly the same scheme in mind, but most of them haven’t actually tried to write a play, on the grounds that they haven’t got time, so for the purpose of this article they will be ignored. We can write another one for them, on totally different lines, as soon as they have really got down to the writing-table — if they ever do.
Cathcart-Symington is one of those authors — there are many such — who can write reasonably sparkling dialogue with comparative ease, and who can also create reasonably convincing characters, that he vows aren’t taken from any persons now living — but to whom the invention of a plot presents the most appalling difficulty.
Let us suppose that Act I. Scene 2: Lady Isobel’s Drawing-Room in Mayfair is already inscribed on Cathcart-Symington’s typescript. He has gone so far as to add: Enter Harris Faulkener, M.P. — and there is little doubt in his mind, or indeed in ours, that Lady Isobel and Harris Faulkener are about to have a terrific scene together. The author can handle terrific scenes perfectly all right, and audiences simply love them — but the drawback to a terrific scene is that it has got to be about something. It must have a raison d’être, a cause célèbre, a modus operandi — anything of that kind.
This is the moment for going to the Classics. The Classics abound in everything of that sort.
Cathcart-Symington goes to them. And What, reader, does he find?
He finds that Lady Isobel and Mr. Harris Faulkener are passionately in love with one another, but have just made the frightful discovery that they are really, owing to the indiscretion of an earlier generation, Grandmother and Grandson. Unfortunately, when they find this out, it is already —— Well, anyway, it would have been a great deal better — although less poignant — if they had found it out several months earlier.
As, however, they didn’t, Harris Faulkener has the classically sound idea that it will improve the situation very much for Lady Isobel, blindfolded and with flowers in her hair, to be burnt alive in the courtyard, and for himself, after watching her die, to make the chauffeur drive over him at full speed in the largest and heaviest car to be found in the garage.
And there you have a plot straight from the Classics.
*
Of course, one has to pause and think. Cathcart-Symington may have in his mind what Judges call a reasonable doubt as to the reception awaiting this masterpiece from a first-night audience. He may have in his mind something resembling a reasonable certainty, rather than a reasonable doubt, as to whether it will ever have any audience but a first-night audience.
He may even feel that the Censor will care but little for the central situation of his play. Censors will allow almost anything to be said or done on the stage by characters named Cassio and Herodeta — but they take a very different view if the characters wear ordinary evening-dress, instead of wreaths and togas, and are called by ordinary English names.
So that Cathcart-Symington, perhaps, may wonder whether this plot is absolutely the happiest selection that could have been made. He may try again, and the result of his second effort may be quite as odd as that of his first. The Classics are nothing if not odd.
*
This time Harris Faulkener is again passionately in love with Lady Isobel, but she is not in the least in love with him. Some people, not classical writers, might think this is all to the good, because Harris Faulkener and Lady Isobel are each of them married to somebody else.
The husband of Lady Isobel is ninety years old, and has, as the euphemistic saying is, lived his life to the full. The wife of Harris Faulkener is young, and rather inclined to talk about Taking the Veil — which, as a matter of fact, is far more easily said than done, especially in the case of married women.
Well, Lady Isobel is definitely sorry for Mrs. Harris Faulkener, and also terribly wants to teach Harris Faulkener a lesson, and get rid of him once and for all. So she chooses a large, open terrace
, with plenty of marble pillars about, and Mrs. Harris Faulkener meets her there, and they have a cosy little talk about it all, and finally decide that Lady Isobel is to pretend to be in love with Harris, and that she and Mrs. Harris Faulkener are to change bedrooms that very night, and then ... Well, they go into all sorts of details that wouldn’t be at all suitable for these pages and not only do they go into them, but in the next act the bedroom actually appears on the stage, and so do Lady Isobel and Mr. Harris Faulkener, and it is difficult indeed to say whether this scene should or should not be played in pitch darkness.
All is additionally complicated by the fact that the ninety-year-old husband has hidden himself — not for any sound reason, but by a mere caprice of senility — in a large cupboard in a corner of the room. By a coincidence, Mrs. Harris Faulkener has had exactly the same idea, and there they both are ... and if the classical tradition is really to be followed faithfully, the results should indeed prove singular.
*
There are several possible dénouements to this strange situation, although at least two of them, unfortunately, cannot possibly be detailed here. But it would be quite in keeping with classical tradition to have either a happy, or an extremely unhappy, ending.
In the former case, the nonagenarian can fall in love with Mrs. Harris Faulkener, and Mrs. Harris Faulkener, after a very short attack of coyness, returns his passion, and suddenly explains that she and her husband have never been really married at all, and, therefore, she is perfectly free. Meanwhile Lady Isobel realizes that Harris Faulkener ... Exactly what she realizes is, as a matter of fact, rather difficult to explain, but, anyway, she sees that she hasn’t ever done him justice before, and they call in the chaplain, who is always on the premises, day and night, for just this kind of emergency, — and all get married then and there.
The alternative, or unhappy, ending starts with the murder of the nonagenarian by Mrs. Harris Faulkener, who accomplishes her purpose with the help of red-hot branding-irons, kept on the landing because the Harris Faulkeners own a sheep farm in Australia — and immediately afterwards throws herself out of the window.
Collected Works of E M Delafield Page 605