Sometimes when I am in a critical mood and need all my faith to keep me patient, I shake my head at the unshornness of the garden as gravely as the missionary shook his head at me. The bushes stretch across the paths, and, catching at me as I go by, remind me that they have not been pruned; the teeming plant life rejoices on the lawns free from all interference from men and hoes; the pinks are closely nibbled off at the beginning of each summer by selfish hares intent on their own gratification; most of the beds bear the marks of nocturnal foxes; and the squirrels spend their days wantonly biting off and flinging down the tender young shoots of the firs. Then there is the boy who drives the donkey and water-cart round the garden, and who has an altogether reprehensible habit of whisking round corners and slicing off bits of the lawn as he whisks. “But you can’t alter these things, my good soul,” I say to myself. “If you want to get rid of the hares and foxes, you must consent to have wire-netting, which is odious, right round your garden. And you are always saying you like weeds, so why grumble at your lawns? And it doesn’t hurt you much if the squirrels do break bits off your firs — the firs must have had that happening to them years and years before you were born, yet they still flourish. As for boys, they certainly are revolting creatures. Can’t you catch this one when he isn’t looking and pop him in his own water-barrel and put the lid on?”
I asked the June baby, who had several times noticed with indignation the culpable indifference of this boy in regard to corners, whether she did not think that would be a good way of disposing of him. She is a great disciplinarian, and was loud in her praise of the plan; but the other two demurred. “He might go dead in there,” said the May baby, apprehensively. “And he is such a naughty boy,” said April, who had watched his reckless conduct with special disgust, “that if he once went dead he’d go straight to the Holle and stay all the time with the diable.”
That was the first French word I have heard them say: strange and sulphureous first-fruits of Seraphine’s teaching!
We were going round the garden in a procession, I with a big pair of scissors, and the Three with baskets, into one of which I put fresh flowers, and into the others flowers that were beginning to seed, dead flowers, and seed-pods. The garden was quivering in heat and light; rain in the morning had brought out all the snails and all the sweetness, and we were very happy, as we always are, I when I am knee-deep in flowers, and the babies when they can find new sorts of snails to add to their collections. These collections are carried about in cardboard boxes all day, and at night each baby has hers on the chair beside her bed. Sometimes the snails get out and crawl over the beds, but the babies do not mind. Once when April woke in the morning she was overjoyed by finding a friendly little one on her cheek. Clearly babies of iron nerves and pellucid consciences.
“So you do know some French,” I said as I snipped off poppy-heads; “you have always pretended you don’t.”
“Oh, keep the poppies, mummy,” cried April, as she saw them tumbling into her basket; “if you picks them and just leaves them, then they ripes and is good for such a many things.”
“Tell me about the diable” I said, “and you shall keep the poppies.”
“He isn’t nice, that diable,” she said, starting off at once with breathless eloquence. “Seraphine says there was one time a girl and a boy who went for a walk, and there were two ways, and one way goes where stones is, but it goes to the lieber Gott; and the girl went that way till she came to a door, and the lieber Gott made the door opened and she went in, and that’s the Himmel.”
“And the boy?”
“Oh, he was a naughty boy and went the other way where there is a tree, and on the tree is written, ‘Don’t go this way or you’ll be dead,’ and he said, ‘That is one betise,’ and did go in the way and got to the Holle, and there he gets whippings when he doesn’t make what the diable says.”
“That’s because he was so naughty,” explained the May baby, holding up an impressive finger, “and didn’t want to go to the Himmel and didn’t love glory.”
“All boys are naughty,” said June, “and I don’t love them.”
“Nous allons parler Francais” I announced, desirous of finding out whether their whole stock was represented by diable and betise; “I believe you can all speak it quite well.”
There was no answer. I snipped off sweet-pea pods and began to talk French at a great rate, asking questions as I snipped, and trying to extract answers, and getting none. The silence behind me grew ominous. Presently I heard a faint sniff, and the basket being held up to me began to shake. I bent down quickly and looked under April’s sun-bonnet. She was crying great dreadful tears, and rubbing her eyes hard with her one free hand.
“Why, you most blessed of babies,” I exclaimed, kneeling down and putting my arms round her, “what in the world is the matter?”
She looked at me with grieved and doubting eyes. “Such a mother to talk French to her child!” she sobbed.
I threw down the scissors, picked her up, and carried her up and down the path, comforting her with all the soft words I knew and suppressing my desire to smile. “That’s not French, is it?” I whispered at the end of a long string of endearments, beginning, I believe, with such flights of rhetoric as priceless blessing and angel baby, and ending with a great many kisses.
“No, no,” she answered, patting my face and looking infinitely relieved, “that is pretty, and how mummies always talks. Proper mummies never speak French — only Seraphines.” And she gave me a very tight hug, and a kiss that transferred all her tears to my face; and I set her down and, taking out my handkerchief, tried to wipe off the traces of my attempt at governessing from her cheeks. I wonder how it is that whenever babies cry, streaks of mud immediately appear on their faces. I believe I could cry for a week, and yet produce no mud.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, babies,” I said, anxious to restore complete serenity on such a lovely day, and feeling slightly ashamed of my uncalled-for zeal — indeed, April was right, and proper mothers leave lessons and torments to somebody else, and devote all their energies to petting— “I’ll give a ball after tea.”
“Yes!” shouted three exultant voices, “and invite all the babies!”
“So now you must arrange what you are going to wear. I suppose you’d like the same supper as usual? Run away to Seraphine and tell her to get you ready.”
They seized their baskets and their boxes of snails and rushed off into the bushes, calling for Seraphine with nothing but rapture in their voices, and French and the diable quite forgotten.
These balls are given with great ceremony two or three times a year. They last about an hour, during which I sit at the piano in the library playing cheerful tunes, and the babies dance passionately round the pillar. They refuse to waltz together, which is perhaps a good thing, for if they did there would always be one left over to be a wallflower and gnash her teeth; and when they want to dance squares they are forced by the stubbornness of numbers to dance triangles. At the appointed hour they knock at the door, and come in attired in the garments they have selected as appropriate (at this last ball the April baby wore my shooting coat, the May baby had a muff, and the June baby carried Seraphine’s umbrella), and, curtseying to me, each one makes some remark she thinks suitable to the occasion.
“How’s your husband?” June asked me last time, in the defiant tones she seems to think proper at a ball.
“Very well, thank you.”
“Oh, that is nice.”
“Mine isn’t vely well,” remarked April, cheerfully.
“Indeed?”
“No, he has got some tummy-aches.”
“Dear me!”
“He was coming else, and had such fine twowsers to wear — pink ones with wibbons.”
After a little more graceful conversation of this kind the ball begins, and at the end of an hour’s dancing, supper, consisting of radishes and lemonade, is served on footstools; and when they have cleared it up even to the leaves and
stalks of the radishes, they rise with much dignity, express in proper terms their sense of gratitude for the entertainment, curtsey, and depart to bed, where they spend a night of horror, the prey of the awful dreams naturally resulting from so unusual a combination as radishes and babies. That is why my balls are rare festivals — the babies will insist on having radishes for the supper, and I, as a decent parent with a proper sense of my responsibilities, am forced accordingly to restrict my invitations to two, at the most three, in a year.
When this last one was over I felt considerably exhausted, and had hardly sufficient strength to receive their thanks with civility. An hour’s jig-playing with the thermometer at 90 leaves its marks on the most robust; and when they were in bed, and the supper beginning to do its work, I ordered the carriage and the kettle with a view to seeking repose in the forest, taking the opportunity of escaping before the Man of Wrath should come in to dinner. The weather has been very hot for a long time, but the rain in the morning had had a wonderful effect on my flowers, and as I drove away I could not help noticing how charming the borders in front of the house were looking, with their white hollyhocks, and white snapdragons, and fringe of feathery marigolds. This gardener has already changed the whole aspect of the place, and I believe I have found the right man at last. He is very young for a head gardener, but on that account all the more anxious to please me and keep his situation; and it is a great comfort to have to do with somebody who watches and interprets rightly every expression of one’s face and does not need much talking to. He makes mistakes sometimes in the men he engages, just as I used to when I did the engaging, and he had one poor young man as apprentice who very soon, like the first of my three meek gardeners, went mad. His madness was of a harmless nature and took a literary form; indeed, that was all they had against him, that he would write books. He used to sit in the early morning on my special seats in the garden, and strictly meditate the thankless muse when he ought to have been carting manure; and he made his fellow-apprentices unspeakably wretched by shouting extracts from Schiller at them across the intervening gooseberry bushes. Let me hasten to say that I had never spoken to him, and should not even have known what he was like if he had not worn eyeglasses, so that the Man of Wrath’s insinuation that I affect the sanity of my gardeners is entirely without justification. The eyeglasses struck me as so odd on a gardener that I asked who he was, and was told that he had been studying for the Bar, but could not pass the examinations, and had taken up gardening in the hope of getting back his health and spirits. I thought this a very sensible plan, and was beginning to feel interested in him when one day the post brought me a registered packet containing a manuscript play he had written called “The Lawyer as Gardener,” dedicated to me. The Man of Wrath and I were both in it, the Man of Wrath, however, only in the list of characters, so that he should not feel hurt, I suppose, for he never appeared on the scenes at all. As for me, I was represented as going about quoting Tolstoi in season and out of season to the gardeners — a thing I protest I never did. The young man was sent home to his people, and I have been asking myself ever since what there is about this place that it should so persistently produce books and lunacy?
On the outskirts of the forest, where shafts of dusty sunlight slanted through the trees, children were picking wortleberries for market as I passed last night, with hands and faces and aprons smudged into one blue stain. I had decided to go to a water-mill belonging to the Man of Wrath which lies far away in a clearing, so far away and so lonely and so quiet that the very spirit of peace seems to brood over it for ever; and all the way the wortleberry carpet was thick and unbroken. Never were the pines more pungent than after the long heat, and their rosy stems flushed pinker as I passed. Presently I got beyond the region of wortleberry-pickers, the children not caring to wander too far into the forest so late, and I jolted over the roots into the gathering shadows more and more pervaded by that feeling that so refreshes me, the feeling of being absolutely alone.
A very ancient man lives in the mill and takes care of it, for it has long been unused, a deaf old man with a clean, toothless face, and no wife to worry him. He informed me once that all women are mistakes, especially that aggravated form called wives, and that he was thankful he had never married. I felt a certain delicacy after that about intruding on his solitude with the burden of my sex and wifehood heavy upon me, but he always seems very glad to see me, and runs at once to his fowlhouse to look for fresh eggs for my tea; so perhaps he regards me as a pleasing exception to the rule. On this last occasion he brought a table out to the elm-tree by the mill stream, that I might get what air there was while I ate my supper; and I sat in great peace waiting for the kettle to boil and watching the sun dropping behind the sharp forest me, and all the little pools and currents into which the stream just there breaks as it flows over mud banks, ablaze with the red reflection of the sky. The pools are clothed with water-lilies and inhabited by eels, and I generally take a netful of writhing eels back with me to the Man of Wrath to pacify him after my prolonged absence. In the lily time I get into the miller’s punt and make them an excuse for paddling about among the mud islands, and even adventurously exploring the river as it winds into the forest, and the old man watches me anxiously from under the elm. He regards my feminine desire to pick water-lilies with indulgence, but is clearly uneasy at my affection for mud banks, and once, after I had stuck on one, and he had run up and down in great agitation for half an hour shouting instructions as to getting off again, he said when I was safely back on shore that people with petticoats (his way of expressing woman) were never intended for punts, and their only chance of safety lay in dry land and keeping quiet. I did not this time attempt the punt, for I was tired, and it was half full of water, probably poured into it by a miller weary of the ways of women; and I drank my tea quietly, going on at the same time with my interrupted afternoon reading of the Sorrows of Werther, in which I had reached a part that has a special fascination for me every time I read it — that part where Werther first meets Lotte, and where, after a thunderstorm; they both go to the window, and she is so touched by the beauties of nature that she lays her hand on his and murmurs “Klopstock,” — to the complete dismay of the reader, though not of Werther, for he, we find, was so carried away by the magic word that he flung himself on to her hand and kissed it with tears of rapture.
I looked up from the book at the quiet pools and the black line of trees, above which stars were beginning to twinkle, my ears soothed by the splashing of the mill stream and the hooting somewhere near of a solitary owl, and I wondered whether, if the Man of Wrath were by my side, it would be a relief to my pleasurable feelings to murmur “Klopstock,” and whether if I did he would immediately shed tears of joy over my hand. The name is an unfortunate one as far as music goes, and Goethe’s putting it into his heroine’s mouth just when she was most enraptured, seems to support the view I sometimes adopt in discoursing to the Man of Wrath that he had no sense of humour. But here I am talking about Goethe, our great genius and idol, in a way that no woman should. What do German women know of such things? Quite untrained and uneducated, how are we to judge rightly about anybody or anything? All we can do is to jump at conclusions, and, when we have jumped, receive with meekness the information that we have jumped wrong. Sitting there long after it was too dark to read, I thought of the old miller’s words, and agreed with him that the best thing a woman can do in this world is to keep quiet. He came out once and asked whether he should bring a lamp, and seemed uneasy at my choosing to sit there in the dark. I could see the stars in the black pools, and a line of faint light far away above the pines where the sun had set. Every now and then the hot air from the ground struck up in my face, and afterwards would come a cooler breath from the water. Of what use is it to fight for things and make a noise? Nature is so clear in her teaching that he who has lived with her for any time can be in little doubt as to the “better way.” Keep quiet and say one’s prayers — certainly not merely the be
st, but the only things to do if one would be truly happy; but, ashamed of asking when I have received so much, the only form of prayer I would use would be a form of thanksgiving.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 24