END OF SPRING, SUMMER PLANS

The last day of May. After the usual “contrariness” of life we have spent the hot span in London, and returned here to find that ungenial nor’west wind blowing in upon us apparently over the same icebergs as a month ago. We think with wails of regret of the long, golden, balmy garden-days we missed; of the full glory of the Azaleas; of those splendours of Rose Tulips which we should have enjoyed, radiant in the sunshine, instead of seeing them yawn their lives away in a hot town drawing-room. And the Florentina Alba Irises, those delicate, fragrant, stately things that look as if they were compounded of cobweb and spun crystal and moonlit snow—it takes but a day to show them in their beauty and another to wilt them—we have missed their lovely hour too, of course. On long, long stems, the Iris Siberica are congregating a little grove of buds in the Blue Border; only two curving purple darlings having outrun the rest. We shall miss them, for the fates have decreed that we are to leave the Earthly Paradise in a day or two once more, and that for the flat horizons of Lancashire. Well, the best of the Spring, early and late, is over, and we do not grudge these intermediary days so much, though we wonder how the bedding out will get on without our stimulating presence. We shall not even have a finger in the “Cherry-Pie.” Lengthy plans will have to be made. The “Miss Wilmott” Verbena must replace, by their delicate rose, the blue of the Myosotis carpet as well as the wonders of the many-hued Darwins, in the two centre beds of the Dutch Garden. And in the border beds we project a fine gathering of Antirrhinums shading from crimson, through Firefly and Rose-DorÉe, to palest pink.

The terrace immediately under the house runs, according to our invariable summer programme, to cool colours and sweet scents. Under the dining-room and drawing-room windows, besides the transient prospect of the White Lilies, there are to bloom until the frost lays waste Heliotrope and Nicotiana, with pale pink Ivy-leaf Geranium to contrast with the mauve and purple, and blue Lobelia to rim the outer border of White Pinks. Against the terrace wall, between the tall Madonna Lilies, which show good promise, and the Polyantha Roses, red and white, with the thick edging of “Mrs. Sinkins,” Lobelia and Petunia shall spread. The pots will bear their customary summer burthen of rose Ivy-leaf Geraniums, with Lobelia too, and the Zonals. We like them to flaunt against the moor.

Below, in the Blue Border, the Delphiniums and the Anchusas, the great old-established White Rose bushes, the steel blue Thistle, must make what show they can over the annuals—Nigella, Gypsophila and Nemophila—not forgetting the kind Campanulas, so dear, so faithful, so hardy! In fine contrast, on the other side of the grass walk, the Dorothy Perkins hedge will spread its vivid masses, and fling out its irrepressible garlands over the border of bright blue Nemophila we have had the audacity to sow.

And below, in the Hemicycle, the colours are to grow cool again, with Heliotrope between the Lilies, the Lavenders, and the Monthly Roses, and Fortune’s Yellow and RÊve d’Or running up the supporting wall.

The beauty of the ancient woods in that Lancashire home from which we have just returned lingers in our memory. Outside the park walls, the flat fields lie that would have a charm of their own if the encroachment of the peculiarly unlovely brick and mortar prosperity of the district did not catch the eye on almost every side; but within there is a sense of wonderful peace and mystery, in the old, old woods with their Rhododendron glades. The astonishing height of the trees seems to keep modernity at bay, and tells stories still of the simple, proud, God-fearing race which has become so associated with the very spot of earth that has borne and nurtured them for many centuries, that, like one or two other families in England, their name in absolute legality is not complete without the territorial appendage.

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We hear every day that “the Squire” is a being of the past. We know that every effort of present-day legislation is to abolish what was once the strength of England; what might still be its strength, if the restless and destructive spirit of the age would permit it.

The young owner of those old lands who has just been our host is one who will, we hope, keep up the traditions—so fast dying out, or being stamped out—a little longer. He is, as his grandfather was, the centre of his own people, the shepherd of his flock. Not quite to the same extent, perhaps: we do not suppose, for instance, that he is both maker and depository of their wills, or that he is summoned to every tenant’s deathbed as was that kindly, sturdy old Lancastrian his grandsire.

“Hurry, Jimmy, hurry!” the afflicted wife and mother would say. “Run oop to the Hall and tell Squoire to coom along quick, for feyther’s at his last!”

Neither would he undertake to mend the broken leg; or patch up the conjugal quarrel. But the young Squire will still hear such a phrase as this at election time: “What we wants to know is which way Squoire’s voting? Squoire’s man is the man for we!”

He will let his cottages at eighteen pence a week; and the larger the family is the smaller will be the rent. And the claims of the tenant will be attended to before his own. He seems as much part of them as they are part of him. Has anyone ever heard of a labourer on a large estate being in destitution? We never have. Our great landowners do more to provide for their own dependents and keep down pauperism than any frantic legislator or wholesale philanthropist. But the system is to go; we have the best authority for it, the authority of those in power. God help England and England’s poor peasants, say we, when they have their way!

We can speak with examples under our eyes. Every time a bit of an estate is sold, hereabouts, the cottages thereon are purchased by the local grocer or butcher: and up goes the rent that had been three and six or four shillings a week to seven and six and ten shillings. Here, where we live, there are practically no important landowners, and what is the result? Not the most miserable cottage to be had under seven and six a week, a rent liable to be raised at a moment’s notice. The butcher, the baker, these are the “landlords,” and the rent they exact is exactly what they know they can extract out of the unfortunate tenant, in the present state of cottage scarcity. We ourselves have spent weeks in striving to secure a roof for a wretched woman with three little children, whose husband had attempted to murder her and after her escape had danced upon all her furniture, and burnt the remnants. We had to engage a cottage three months in advance, and then the rent was eight and six a week! She was a stupid poor goose of a woman, who couldn’t do anything for her living except an occasional day’s charing or rough washing. Of course we ought to have let her go to the workhouse; but we didn’t. We guaranteed the rent instead and took in the eldest boy as an unneeded garden assistant. He is rather like a garden slug, so we thought he ought to be at home in the borders! The other day a local tradesman raised the rent of a cottage sixpence a week upon the hard-working mother of a large family, who occasionally comes in “to oblige” at Villino Loki; and when she remonstrated he humorously remarked that Mr. Lloyd George was “driving him to it!”

There is a proverb that “good wine needs no bush.” The Chancellor’s efforts to convince his victims of the comfort of the plaster which is blistering them are almost pathetic. But surely it is another proof, if one were needed, of the weakness of his cause. A local laundry owner has been receiving six pounds a week, lecturing, in Devonshire of all places, on the blessedness of the Act as experienced by himself and staff. One of our district nurses, a delightful sturdy North Country woman, was “approached” as to whether she would undertake, for a consideration, to use her persuasiveness with her patients and make them see how much they were benefited by the stamp tax. She declined with a heat that may have astonished the emissary.

It must indeed be a little difficult to make, say, a struggling greengrocer understand the debt of gratitude he owes to the law which constrains him to pay fourpence a week for the assistant he can so ill afford as it is and mulct that discontented youth of threepence! More especially when baker and grocer charge him more to cover their own losses.

The obvious remedy, says Mr. Lloyd George, is for the greengrocer to raise the prices in his town! He does; and somehow it doesn’t work. Being in a poor district and all his patrons being poor, they buy less from him, and he buys less from them.

“But look at the comfort in sickness!” It is tiresome, it almost seems like putting bad will into it, that the greengrocer’s wife should develop consumption before the first stone of any sanatorium is ready!

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Now, that prosperous, contented class, the labourer on the great estate, a man who lives on his lord’s lands, if not rent free, very nearly so, with wood and garden produce, potatoes, milk and what not, and steady employment all the year round, he is to be benefited—save the mark! A “minimum wage,” cheap housing, the fixed hours, the sacred half-holiday, it sounds so plausible! The propagandist is volubly at work. “No wonder,” as the young Squire we have recently visited once ruefully said to us, “my decent, contented, God-fearing villagers were turned in a couple of hours into shrieking, blaspheming lunatics by such a gospel, preached with forcible arguments in the public-house.”

Of course they will get their demands. Striking, with “peaceful picketing,” generally gets its way, even if not backed up by Government emissaries and the glorious visions flash-lighted by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. But what will be the result? Half the amount of employment on the estates of those who can still afford to keep them, and no all-the-year-round engagements. When the work is slack the over-paid and inimical labourer will naturally be discharged. We say inimical, for how can friendly relations be maintained if the old solidarity is destroyed? This, of course, is what is aimed at; and the quack remedy, the patent pill alluringly held aloft, is—State ownership of land! The land is to be managed like the Workhouse, the Prison, and the Reformatory, of which, we are all aware, the British State makes such a brilliant success. We know how the poor love the Workhouse, and how happy they are in it; yet one can scarcely take up a police report without finding some desperate pauper sentenced for revolt. Oh, no doubt it will be a Merry England when these disinterested and dashing tinkers get their way.

We have known, in parenthesis, a pauper establishment, run by voluntary effort, in which a hundred and fifty old men and ninety old women were kept happy and contented by a handful of soft-voiced nuns. No need to call in the policeman, in Portobello Road; for there old age is reverenced at once and pitied, and the double aspect of the most natural of all the commandments is put into every-day practice, so unobtrusively and simply that no one can guess how heroically.

But the religious question will soon be treated in the same way as the land question; so no invidious comparisons need be drawn. Little boys and little girls are to be taught that the State is henceforth to take the place of God in their infant minds. How comfortable and warm a creed! How it will strengthen their character for living, and ease the thoughts of the dying. There is no God: but there is a Chancellor of the Exchequer and a dashing gentleman at the Home Office. You have not been created or redeemed, little boy! We have no prayers to teach you. There are no divine commandments which you need obey—naturally, since there is no Divine Father. There are no sacraments to sustain and elevate your soul—for little boys and girls have no souls! But cheer ye: you were evolved by a natural process, and the State is here to cradle and instruct you and to make life beautiful for you. Behold, dear children, the Book of the Laws. These laws which you are bound to keep—unless, of course, you go on strike, become a Suffragette, or organize political vote catching. And this is a picture of a Jail for people who are so blind as to refuse Insurance blessings; behold that inspired countenance. That is the head of the Government! And for Sunday amusements there is the Cinema—the Crippen case, dear children; the Houndsditch Burglary and the Train Smash.... And when the new theories have developed and matured, there will be no such thing as private property in anything to constrain the free mind of emancipated man—A house of your own, a wife to yourself!—fie!

“Surely, surely,” said a young Liberal M.P., “no sanely thinking person would continue to advise religious education in the schools. What is the inevitable result—see the case in your own Church” he was speaking to a Catholic “the law commands one thing, and the Church another! Take divorce, for instance. Surely, surely—”

“Dear me,” said the Catholic. “We had not looked at it in that light. The laws man made are, then, above the laws God made?”

“Surely, surely you would not teach little children to disobey a law of the land made for their benefit?”

We ventured to say that the ten commandments had forestalled—

His pitying smile arrested us; so infinitely was he above the ten commandments.