“Still may Time hold some golden space

June 1.—The garden in early June! Like a great many other things the idea is very different from the reality. The first of June in the garden represents to the mind’s eye bowers of roses, exuberance in the borders, a riot of colour and fragrance. As a matter of fact, with us, in our late-blooming, high-perched terraces, it means a transition stage, and is annually very exasperating and disappointing to the impatient spirit of the Signora. It is the time when the azaleas look dishevelled, with their delicate blossom hanging depressingly from the stamens. The forget-me-nots have all been cleared away, and in those places where bulbs are preserved against the future spring, masses of yellowing tangled leaf-spikes are an eyesore. The bedding-out plants still look tiny on the raw borders. All our roses, except those climbers against the house, are yet in the bud. There are just the poppies that flaunt in the borders; and even their colour becomes an exasperation, because they would have done so much better to wait and join in the grand symphony, instead of blowing isolated trumpet flourishes, prepared to relapse into sulky silence when the delphiniums strike up their blue music.

There is also another frightful drawback to this first week of leafy June, and that is that it would be easier to separate Pyramus from Thisbe than the gardener from the vegetables. A constant enervating struggle goes on between us on the relative values of cabbages and roses, beans and poppies. We want the roses sprayed, we want the borders staked, we want sustenance in the shape of liquid manure and Clay’s fertilizer copiously administered to our darlings; and he wants to put in “that there other row of scarlet runners and set out them little lettuces.” And when it comes to watering: he doesn’t know, he’s sure, how he’s to get them cabbages seen to as they ought to be seen to; a deal of moisture they want, if they’re to do him any justice.

Meanwhile our terraces are panting. The climbing roses up the house—and this year they would have been glorious—are pale and brittle in petal and foliage, as if they had been actually blasted.

The master of the Villino, after due representations from the Padrona, has seen the necessity of sacrifice, and assiduously waters the garden every evening—and himself! The hose is defective; being war time we cannot afford a new one. Two jets break out at the wrong angle and take you in the eye and down the waistcoat at the most unexpected moments; and though amenable to persuasion, the Padrone’s devotion has its limits, and he positively declines the remanipulation of the tube which will bring it—after having done service in the Dutch garden—to the end of the Lily Walk. So that, as it is two yards short, the deficiency has to be made up by hand watering, and two obsolete bath-cans are produced out of the house, which seems, for some unexplained reason, easier than using the proper garden furniture. These cans are generally left, forgotten, where they were last used, unless the piercing eye of the mistress of the Villino happens to dart in that direction.

Yesterday we had visitors—in eighteenth-century parlance, a General and his Lady—and of course the two cans stood in the middle of the path, confidingly, nose to nose. Being war time nobody minded. It is the blessing and the danger of war time that nobody minds anything. And the General’s Lady, being tactful, kept her eye on the buddleia.

Death having come to the little garden and taken Adam away; and greed of gain having deprived us of Reginald Arthur in favour of the post office; and patriotism having rendered the local young man as precious as he is scarce, we were five weeks—five invaluable, irreplaceable weeks—gardenerless, odd-manless at the Villino. Nothing this year will ever restore the lost time. No amount of pulling and straining will draw the gap together.

Japhet, Adam’s successor, is worn, as the Americans say, very nearly “to a frazzle.” He is a deeply conscientious man, and peas and beans and cabbages are to him the very principles upon which all garden morality is built up. He was much grieved the other day when someone “passed a remark” on the subject of weeds in the back-garden.

Weeds! We should think there were! It was so blatantly self-evident a fact that we wondered that anyone should have thought it worth while to pass a remark upon it. But Japhet was hurt to his very soul: considering his vocation, it would perhaps be more in keeping to say—his marrow.

Professional pride is a very delicate and easily bruised growth. When the Padrona was in her teens the whole of her mother’s orderly establishment was convulsed one June—a hot June it was too—because the professional pride of the family butler had been wounded by the footman’s presuming to hand a dish which it was not his business to touch. His sense of dignity was doubtless sharpened to a very fine edge by the fact that, the June weather being so hot, an unusual amount of cooling beer had been found necessary. This may seem a curious mixture of metaphors, nevertheless the facts are exact.

Reilly—that was his name—was very deeply and, in the opinion of the rest of the household, justifiably incensed when Edmund lifted the entrÉe dish with the obvious intention of offering it to his mistress; and though it was regarded as an exaggeration of sensitiveness for him to knock the footman down immediately after lunch in the seclusion of the pantry, to kneel upon his chest and endeavour to strangle him with his white tie; and though the cook deemed it incumbent upon her to draw the attention of the authorities to the drama by seizing a broom and brushing it backwards and forwards across the row of bells; all the sympathies of the establishment remained with Reilly, and “the mistress” was regarded as extremely hard-hearted for dismissing him from her service. The footman was a shock-headed, snub-nosed youth, and we will never forget his appearance when, released from his assailant, he burst into the dining-room, collarless, his white tie protruding at an acute angle behind his left ear, with a mixture of triumph, importance, and suffering upon his scarlet countenance.

So we were compassionate with Japhet when he waxed plaintive over his underling’s house duties, and even forbore having the windows cleaned for several weeks, and endured tortures at the sight of her spattered panes, out of regard for his difficulties.

The underling is aptly named Fox. He has red hair and long moustaches and a furtive eye and a general air of alertness and slyness which show that if he had ever belonged to the animal kingdom in a previous state of existence, Vulpus he certainly was. But we did not expect him to develop garden susceptibilities too. This, however, it seems he has done.

“I’ve very bad news for you,” said Japhet sombrely to his master last week, when he came into the long, book-lined room to receive his Saturday pay. He has naturally a lugubrious countenance.

His master’s thoughts flew to Zeppelins, spotted fever, and other national dangers.

“Indeed, Japhet. What is it?”

“Fox, he says, he can’t put up with the couch-grass and the docks in the lower garden. They seem to have got on his mind, like. He don’t see how he can go on dealing with them. They ’ave got a strong hold,” concluded Japhet with a sigh, as if he too were overwhelmed by the enemy.

Well, it was tragic enough, for the precious Fox had been caught after long hunting, and had made his own bargain—a foxy one—with every eye to the main chance. We want to keep him, but have a guilty sensation too, he being young and strong, and obviously the right stuff for enlisting; though, indeed, if docks and couch-grass daunt him, how would he stand shrapnel and gas?

The daughter of the house, who is extremely tactful, and who is generally trusted with delicate situations, interviewed him on the spot. She found him in a condition only to be described as one of nerve-shock. His long, red moustaches quivered. All he could reply, in a broken voice, was:

“It don’t do me no credit. It won’t never do me no credit.”

Japhet, consulted, gave it as his opinion that it was not a question of his subordinate’s bettering himself; but said “Fox had always been a sensitive worker.” Nevertheless, we should not be surprised to hear that war prices have something to do with it.

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It is only now, after nearly five years, that we are beginning to reap some benefit of our constant planting. The Signora wonders if her irritable mind had allowed her to leave undisturbed those divers perennials and bushes which she had rooted up after a year’s trial from beds and borders, how might she not now be gathering the reward of longanimity.

The LÉonie Lamesche roses, for instance. She hunted them out of the middle of the Dutch garden; out of the beds before the entrance arches into the rose-garden; into that corner of the kitchen-garden where the derelicts gather. And just now the child of the house has brought into her bunch after bunch of little orange-crimson pompoms, delicious and quaint to look at, and delicious and quaint to smell, with their faint tartness, as of apples, mixed with an aromatic herbiness as of myrtles.

“There’s quantities more,” says the Signorina. Poor little things! they have been allowed to settle and spread their roots, and one would not know them for the nipped, disreputable, guttersnipe objects that hitherto called down the master of the Villino’s scorn.

We do not regret them in the Dutch garden after all. It is too near the house not to have its garland for every season; and the forget-me-nots, hyacinths, and tulips are too precious and beautiful in the spring. But under the rose-arches now there are gaps; and this year, between the loss of our poor Adam and war scruples, these gaps have not been filled.

If the Signora had left LÉonie Lamesche where she was, all those nice varnished green leaves and all those darling rosettes of bloom with their odd colour and fragrance would be in their right place, instead of in the waste ground from which Japhet, with the zeal of the new broom, is already preparing to sweep them next autumn—not, be it said, with any special disapprobation for LÉonie, but because he declares he wants to get rid of all that there stuff which hadn’t no right to be in a vegetable garden at all.

The moral is—as has been said long ago in the “Sentimental Garden”—that chief among the many virtues a garden inculcates is patience. If the Signora had had patience, she would not have turned all the Standard Soleil d’Or and Conrad Meyers out of the Lily Walk, because the shadow of the buddleias interfered with their bloom. For behold! this winter’s snow has cast the great honey-trees sideways, and the united efforts of Japhet and Fox, who pulled and propped and strained in vain, have left them sideways, and sideways, in the opinion of these experts, they will for ever after remain. And the Lily Walk is in full sunshine. Had we but left the standards, who, of course, will be sulky in their new positions for a couple of years more!

June 15.—The complaint begun in the first week of our transitional garden has already been reproved by the mid-month’s splendours. In spite of the drought and the desiccating south-east winds (which by some inscrutable decree of Providence have been sent to us this year when so much depends upon field, orchard, and garden), the roses are magnificent and of unusual promise.

Our peony beds—the mistress of the garden did know that peonies are slow ladies and will take their time—are beginning to reward her forbearance. Such a basketful as came into her bedroom to-day with the Polyantha roses!—those large, pink, scented beauties which are so satisfying to settle in big bowls. We have put them in the chapel against boughs of the service-tree. The effect is all one could wish.

The service-tree bloomed this year as never it bloomed before. It looked like the bridal bouquet of a fairy giantess! We trust this daring hyperbole will enable our readers to represent to themselves something at once immense and ethereal, misty grey, and delicate silver-white. It is of huge size and beautiful shape, and grows a little higher on the slope than the greater of the two beech-trees. For colour effect we know nothing more soul-filling than the way it stands between the ardent tawny glories of the Azalea Walk and the young jewel green of its cousin—the beech above mentioned. Put the shoulder of the moor at the back in its May mantle of coppery mauve heather not yet in bud—that is a picture to gaze upon under a blue sky, thanking God for the loveliness of the earth!

This last May, which will be ever memorable as one of the most tragic months of the war, hazard—or that slithy tove, the alien Hun—provided us with a background approximately macabre for the radiant youthful joy. Our moor has been burnt—five fires started simultaneously one day of high east wind, and the first great swelling hill is covered with a garment as of hell. The scattered fir-trees here and there are of a livid, scorched brown. To look out on the scene and see them stand in the slaty black, casting mysterious shadows under the dome of relentless brightness we have had of late, is like looking upon a circle of Dante’s Inferno, out of one of the cool, bowery regions of his upper Purgatorio. Our daughter finds a wilder beauty in our blossom and verdure against the savage gloom beyond; but not so the Padrona. She laments the tapestry of her peaceful, rolling heights. Now, past mid-June, bracken is creeping slowly through the charred roots of the heather, and she does not want a bracken hill. It is spreading democracy, taking the place of some royal line; the rule of the irresponsible, the coarse, the mediocre; though she grants there will be beauty in the autumn when it all turns golden. And perhaps there’s a lesson to be drawn somewhere, but she will have none of it, for there is nothing so tiresome as the unpalatable moral.

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Fox has condescended to remain another week, so we need not feverishly search garden chronicles for the quite impossible he, who shall be strong, sturdy, ineligible for the army, and willing to take a place as under-gardener at something less than the honorarium of an aniline dye expert! All those who want places are head-gardeners, “under glass”; except “a young Dutchman speaking languages perfectly” who fills our souls with doubt. In every district it is the same story; we wish we could think it was all patriotic ardour, but we are afraid that the high wages offered by camps and greengrocers are responsible for a good deal of the shortage of labour in our part of the world.

One of the Villino quartette—we call ourselves the lucky clover-leaf—writes from Dorset that they have an aged man of past seventy-two who comes in to help in the flowery, bowery old garden of the manor-house where she is staying. In justice to simple rural Dorset, it may be mentioned parenthetically that there the response to the country’s need has been extraordinary in its unanimity. So the superannuated labourers who have grown white and wise over the soil, instead of sitting by the chimney-corner and enjoying their old-age pensions, come tottering forth to do their little bit, in the place of the young stalwartness that has gone out to fight and struggle and perhaps die for England.

Our Dorset clover petal writes: “Old Mason is very sad at having to water the borders. ‘Ye mid water and water for days and days,’ he declares, ‘and it not have the value of a single night’s rain. There, miss, as I did say to my darter last night, my Father, I says, he do water a deal better than I do.’”

Yesterday there came a box of white pinks from that Dorset garden; these have been put all together into an immense cut-glass bowl, with an effect of innocent, white, overflowing freshness that is perfect of its kind. And the scent of them is admirably fitted to the sweet clean wonder of their looks. It is a quintessence of all simple fragrance, a sort of intensified new-mown hay smell. That is another thing the heavenly Father has done very well—the delicate matching of attributes in His flower children. A tea-rose looks her scent, just as does her deep crimson sister.

“How it must have amused Almighty God,” said our daughter one day last winter, lifting the cineraria foliage to show the purple bloom of the lining which exactly matched the note of the starry flower, “how it must have amused Him to do this.”

And surely a violet bears in her little modest face the promise of her insinuating and delicate perfume.

And if the big pink peonies had had bright green instead of shadowy grey foliage they might have been vulgar.

And if you had put lily leaves to an iris instead of their own romantic sword-blades, how awkward and wrong it would have been; whereas the lily-stalk, with its conventional layers, is perfection in support of the queenly head of the Madonna or the Auratum. It is not association, but recognition of a Great Artist, in all reverence be it said: “He hath done all things well.”

To come back to the walled enclosure about the old Dorset manor house. Here, looking down our wind-swept terraces, we sometimes hanker for the sunny seclusion of that walled garden, though apparently all is not perfect even there, for the last message from it says:

“The strong sun takes all the strength out of the pinks after the first day or two. It has been very hot in the early afternoon, and as the garden faces west all the poor little things are drawn in a long slant towards the setting sun. Some of the long-stemmed ones have got positive wriggles in their stalks from so much exercise; it is really bad for their systems.”

In a previous letter she writes less pessimistically:

“I can’t tell you the loveliness of the garden. It is like Venus rising from the sea—Venus and her foam together—roses, pinks, sweet-williams, everything leaping into bloom and over the walls. I have given up trying to harmonize colours. There is nothing so wilful as an old garden. The plants simply walk about, much as our ‘Pekies’ do. I planted nigella last year, which didn’t do very well; however it skipped across a path of its own accord this year, and there is a patch of it in a forbidden corner which shames the sky. One looks on and laughs helplessly, as one does with ‘Pekies.’”

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The Penzance briar hedge dividing the new rosary from the reserve garden promises very well. It is already breaking into many coloured stars, carmine, pink, amber, and the fashionable khaki. Is this the musk-rose of the “Midsummer Night’s Dream”?

To contradict our statement of a page or two back, the Creator has made here one of the exceptions to His rule of rich and delicate balance, and it is the unsuspected fragrance of the sweetbriar that adds so extraordinarily to its attraction in a garden. No one would credit it with the scent, its evanescent fragile bloom gives no indication of it. And, like the perfectly saintly, its fragrance has nothing to do with youth or beauty. You pass an unimportant-looking green bush, and all at once you are assailed with the breath of Heaven. There is a mystery, almost a mysticism, about the perfection of this sweetness, this intangible, invisible beauty. One is reminded of Wordsworth’s lines:

It is the image of a pure soul exhaling itself before God, in a rapture of ecstatic contemplation.

The June scents of the Villino garden are very wonderful, peculiarly so this year, under the searching brilliancy of the unclouded heavens. There is the sweetbriar, and there are the pinks, and there is one long border all of nepeta—against the Dorothy Perkins hedge still only green—with its pungent, wholesome savour. And there is the gum cistus, that smells exactly as did the insides of the crimson Venetian bottles which stood in the great white and blue and gold drawing-room in the Signora’s Irish home. It was an old custom to put a drop of attar of roses at the bottom of these favourite ornaments in those days when the Signora was a little girl, and it was one of her great joys to be allowed to lift the stopper and sniff. The strange far-off Eastern incense that hangs about the rather uncomely straggling shrub—another instance of the Almighty’s exceptions—brings the mistress of the Villino back with a leap to her childhood; to the late Georgian drawing-room, with its immense plate-glass windows hung with curtains of forget-me-not blue brocade which cost a hundred pounds a pair—people spent solid money then for solid worth; the white marble chimney-piece, with its copy of a fraction of the Parthenon frieze—Phaeton driving his wild, tossing horses; the immense cut-glass chandelier sparkling and quivering with a thousand elfin rainbow lights; the white and gold panels, the plastered frieze of curling acanthus leaves; and the smiling face of the adored mother looking down upon the little creature in the stiff piquÉ frock, who was the future Padrona. No child analyzes its mother’s countenance. It is only in later years that the beauty of that smile was recognized by her. It was a beauty that endured to the very last of those eighty-five years of a life that was so well filled. It was a smile of extraordinary sweetness and, to that end, full of youth. That’s what the gum cistus brings back; a fragrance of memory, poignant and beloved. Everyone knows that through the sense of smell the seat of memory is most potently reached. The merest whiff of a long-forgotten odour will bring back so vividly some scene of the past that it is almost painful. It is to be wondered why ghosts do not more often choose this form of return to the world. The story told by Frederick Myers in his “Human Personality” of the phantom scent of thyme by which a poor girl haunted the field where she had been murdered is, we believe, unique; but we know another record. This was not the struggle of any reproachful shade to bring itself back to human recollection, but the ghost of a fragrance itself. The late Bret Harte told the tale to a friend of ours. On a visit to an old English castle he was lodged in a tower room. Every afternoon he used to withdraw for literary labours, and at a certain hour the whole of the old chamber would be filled with the penetrating vapour of incense. He sought in vain for some explanation of the mystery. There was nothing within or without, beneath or above, which could produce such a phenomenon. Then he bethought himself of investigating the past, and found that his room was exactly over what had once been the chapel in the days of our ancient Faith, and that it had been the custom to celebrate Benediction at the hour when the incense—that wraith of a bygone lovely worship—now seemed to surround him.

A few steps beyond the gum cistus the buddleia trees this June have their brief splendour of bloom and their intoxication of perfume. It is as if all the honey of clover and gorse, with something of a dash of clove spice, was burning in a pyre of glory to the sunshine. What wonder that the bees gather there and chant the whole day long! Happy bees, drunk with bliss in the midst of their labour!

It is all very well to speak of bees as a frugal, hard-working community, to hold them up to the perpetual emulation of the young. Few people seem to remember how extremely dissipated they become when they come across a good tap of honey. Who has not seen them—so charged with the luxuriance that they can scarcely stagger out of the calyx—buzz away, blundering, upon inebriated wing?

Greatly favoured by Nature, the bees combine the extreme of laudable activity with the extreme of self-indulgence. Anyone who wants to hear their pÆan of rapture at its height, let him provide them with Buddleia globosa.

We have by no means exhausted the list of scents in the June garden. There are the irises! All Florence is in the sweetness that flows from them: a sweetness, by the way, not adapted to rooms, where, to be unpoetical, it assumes something faintly catty. The way the perfume of irises rolls over Florence in May is something not to be described to anyone who has not breathed it. We were once the guests of a kindly literary couple, who dwelt in one of those charming, quaint, transmogrified farmhouses outside the city that makes us—even we who own the Villino Loki—hanker. It was called Villa Benedetto. One drove out from Florence along a road now only vaguely remembered. It skirted the river, and there were wild slopes on one side and poplar-trees; then one darted aside into the Italian hills and up a steep ascent—this vision is also vague; but we remember the little garden-gate and the narrow brick path and the irises! Irises and China roses! It is a lovely mixture for colour; and as for scent! anyone who knows anything about scent (and we wonder why there are not artists in it, as well as for music and painting) anyone who knows anything about scent, we repeat, is quite aware that orris, the pounded iris root, is the only possible fragrance to keep constantly about. It combines the breath of the mignonette and the subtle delight of the violet. It preserves, too, its adorable freshness of impression. You never sicken of it, you never tire of it. Of course it has the fault of its delicacy, it is evanescent; but, then, it is never stale. Any woman who wishes an atmosphere of poetry should use nothing but orris, the pure pounded root without any addition, and that perpetually renewed. Precious quality, it cannot be overdone.

The odour of the flower itself in the sunshine is a different thing, far more piercing and far more pronounced. It must be enjoyed in the sunshine, or after a spring storm. Those other incomparable banquets to the sense which a bean-field or a clover-meadow will spread for you cannot be captured and refined in the same manner. More’s the pity!

Lafcadio Hearn declares that human beings have lamentably failed to cultivate the rich possibilities of the sense of smell. In this respect, he says, dogs are infinitely superior. Who can tell, he asks, what ecstasy of combination, what chords, what symphonies of harmony and contrast, might we not be able to serve ourselves? But we do not think the idea will bear development, and certainly many suffer enough from an over-sensitiveness of nostril already to prevent them from desiring any further cultivation of its powers.

The Villino in June smells very good, however, and that is gratifying. And to complete the catalogue there are the new pine shoots delicious and aromatic, stimulating and healthy; a perfect aroma on a hot day.

“Tell me your friends and I will tell you what you are,” says the sage; it sounds like a dog, but the Padrona feels that with one sniff she can sum up a character.

When TrÉfle Incarnat, or its last variant, takes you by the throat, you needn’t look to see what kind of young woman is sitting beside you at the theatre.

And when a portly friend, resplendent in gorgeous sables, heralds her approach with a powerful blast of Napthaline, you know the kind of woman she is, and that the word “friend,” just written, is misapplied; for you never could make a friend of anyone so stuffily and stupidly careful.

And when you go to tea with an acquaintance—probably literary, living in Campden Hill and fond of bead blinds—and the smell of joss-stick floats upon the disgusted nostril from the doorway, you know the kind of party you are going to have. Your hostess will have surrounded herself with long-haired and dank-handed young men, the Postlethwaites of the period, and brilliant young females who wear a mauvy powder over rather an unwashed face, and curious garments cut square at the neck, and turquoise matrix ear-rings, very much veined with brown! Besides the joss-sticks there is cigarette smoke, and the atmosphere, morally as well as physically, is fusty!

Then there is the female who produces a bottle of Eau-de-Cologne on board ship. If it isn’t a German governess, it is a heated person with something purple about her and kid gloves—why pursue the horrid theme!

Let us end this divagation by a little anecdote as true as it is charming. It happened to a member of our own family. She was hurrying along one foggy November morning to the Brompton Oratory rather early; and the dreadful acrid vapour and the uncertain struggle of a grimy dawn contended against the glimmer of the gas-lamps. As she approached the steps of the church somebody crossed her, and instantly the whole air was filled with an exquisite fragrance as of violets. Involuntarily she started to look round, and her movement arrested, too, the passer-by. For a second they stood quite close to each other, and to our relative’s astonishment she saw only a small, meek-faced old lady in an Early Victorian bonnet wrapped in a very dowdy dolman.

The old lady gave a little smile and went her way. There was certainly no adornment of real violets about her, and to look at her was enough to be assured that artificial scents could never approach her.

The incident seemed strange enough to be worth making investigations, and the explanation was simple. The little old lady was very well known; mother of priests, a ceaseless worker among the poor; nearly eighty, and every day at seven o’clock Mass. Many people had remarked the scent of violets about her, and her friends thought, laughingly, it was because she was something of a saint.

This sweet-smelling saint died as she had lived. She had received the Last Sacraments; she knew her moments were numbered, but she sat up, propped by pillows, and went on knitting for the poor till the needles fell from her hands.

If the story of the violets had not happened to a member of the family, the Signora would be quite ready to believe it on hearsay, because of the delicious simplicity and certain confidence of that placid deathbed.

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