<p>May 14th.—To-day I am writing on the verandah with the three babies,
more persistent than mosquitoes, raging round me, and already several of
the thirty fingers have been in the ink-pot and the owners consoled when
duty pointed to rebukes. But who can rebuke such penitent and drooping
sunbonnets? I can see nothing but sunbonnets and pinafores and nimble
black legs.</p>
<p>These three, their patient nurse, myself, the gardener, and the gardener's
assistant, are the only people who ever go into my garden, but then
neither are we ever out of it. The gardener has been here a year and has
given me notice regularly on the first of every month, but up to now has
been induced to stay on. On the first of this month he came as usual, and
with determination written on every feature told me he intended to go in
June, and that nothing should alter his decision. I don't think he knows
much about gardening, but he can at least dig and water, and some of the
things he sows come up, and some of the plants he plants grow, besides
which he is the most unflaggingly industrious person I ever saw, and has
the great merit of never appearing to take the faintest interest in what
we do in the garden. So I have tried to keep him on, not knowing what the
next one may be like, and when I asked him what he had to complain of and
he replied "Nothing," I could only conclude that he has a personal
objection to me because of my eccentric preference for plants in groups
rather than plants in lines. Perhaps, too, he does not like the extracts
from gardening books I read to him sometimes when he is planting or sowing
something new. Being so helpless myself, I thought it simpler, instead of
explaining, to take the book itself out to him and let him have wisdom at
its very source, administering it in doses while he worked. I quite
recognise that this must be annoying, and only my anxiety not to lose a
whole year through some stupid mistake has given me the courage to do it.
I laugh sometimes behind the book at his disgusted face, and wish we could
be photographed, so that I may be reminded in twenty years' time, when the
garden is a bower of loveliness and I learned in all its ways, of my first
happy struggles and failures.</p>
<p>All through April he was putting the perennials we had sown in the autumn
into their permanent places, and all through April he went about with a
long piece of string making parallel lines down the borders of beautiful
exactitude and arranging the poor plants like soldiers at a review. Two
long borders were done during my absence one day, and when I explained
that I should like the third to have plants in groups and not in lines,
and that what I wanted was a natural effect with no bare spaces of earth
to be seen, he looked even more gloomily hopeless than usual; and on my
going out later on to see the result, I found he had planted two long
borders down the sides of a straight walk with little lines of five plants
in a row—first five pinks, and next to them five rockets, and behind
the rockets five pinks, and behind the pinks five rockets, and so on with
different plants of every sort and size down to the end. When I protested,
he said he had only carried out my orders and had known it would not look
well; so I gave in, and the remaining borders were done after the pattern
of the first two, and I will have patience and see how they look this
summer, before digging them up again; for it becomes beginners to be
humble.</p>
<p>If I could only dig and plant myself! How much easier, besides being so
fascinating, to make your own holes exactly where you want them and put in
your plants exactly as you choose instead of giving orders that can only
be half understood from the moment you depart from the lines laid down by
that long piece of string! In the first ecstasy of having a garden all my
own, and in my burning impatience to make the waste places blossom like a
rose, I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants'
dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner,
slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of
ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea, and run back very
hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair and behind a book and
look languid just in time to save my reputation. And why not? It is not
graceful, and it makes one hot; but it is a blessed sort of work, and if
Eve had had a spade in Paradise and known what to do with it, we should
not have had all that sad business of the apple.</p>
<p>What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and
flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances
look upon it as imprisonment, and burying, and I don't know what besides,
and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life.
Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to
find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun
always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day.
And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the
delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting
alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches
all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the
beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of
distant frogs and hooting of owls? A cockchafer darting by close to my ear
with a loud hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the
reminder of past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught in
my hair. The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be
killed. I would rather get the killing done at the end of the summer and
not crush them out of such a pretty world at the very beginning of all the
fun.</p>
<p>This has been quite an eventful afternoon. My eldest baby, born in April,
is five years old, and the youngest, born in June, is three; so that the
discerning will at once be able to guess the age of the remaining middle
or May baby. While I was stooping over a group of hollyhocks planted on
the top of the only thing in the shape of a hill the garden possesses, the
April baby, who had been sitting pensive on a tree stump close by, got up
suddenly and began to run aimlessly about, shrieking and wringing her
hands with every symptom of terror. I stared, wondering what had come to
her; and then I saw that a whole army of young cows, pasturing in a field
next to the garden, had got through the hedge and were grazing perilously
near my tea-roses and most precious belongings. The nurse and I managed to
chase them away, but not before they had trampled down a border of pinks
and lilies in the cruellest way, and made great holes in a bed of China
roses, and even begun to nibble at a Jackmanni clematis that I am trying
to persuade to climb up a tree trunk. The gloomy gardener happened to be
ill in bed, and the assistant was at vespers—as Lutheran Germany
calls afternoon tea or its equivalent—so the nurse filled up the
holes as well as she could with mould, burying the crushed and mangled
roses, cheated for ever of their hopes of summer glory, and I stood by
looking on dejectedly. The June baby, who is two feet square and valiant
beyond her size and years, seized a stick much bigger than herself and
went after the cows, the cowherd being nowhere to be seen. She planted
herself in front of them brandishing her stick, and they stood in a row
and stared at her in great astonishment; and she kept them off until one
of the men from the farm arrived with a whip, and having found the cowherd
sleeping peacefully in the shade, gave him a sound beating. The cowherd is
a great hulking young man, much bigger than the man who beat him, but he
took his punishment as part of the day's work and made no remark of any
sort. It could not have hurt him much through his leather breeches, and I
think he deserved it; but it must be demoralising work for a strong young
man with no brains looking after cows. Nobody with less imagination than a
poet ought to take it up as a profession.</p>
<p>After the June baby and I had been welcomed back by the other two with as
many hugs as though we had been restored to them from great perils, and
while we were peacefully drinking tea under a beech tree, I happened to
look up into its mazy green, and there, on a branch quite close to my
head, sat a little baby owl. I got on the seat and caught it easily, for
it could not fly, and how it had reached the branch at all is a mystery.
It is a little round ball of gray fluff, with the quaintest, wisest,
solemn face. Poor thing! I ought to have let it go, but the temptation to
keep it until the Man of Wrath, at present on a journey, has seen it was
not to be resisted, as he has often said how much he would like to have a
young owl and try and tame it. So I put it into a roomy cage and slung it
up on a branch near where it had been sitting, and which cannot be far
from its nest and its mother. We had hardly subsided again to our tea when
I saw two more balls of fluff on the ground in the long grass and scarcely
distinguishable at a little distance from small mole-hills. These were
promptly united to their relation in the cage, and now when the Man of
Wrath comes home, not only shall he be welcomed by a wife decked with the
orthodox smiles, but by the three little longed-for owls. Only it seems
wicked to take them from their mother, and I know that I shall let them go
again some day—perhaps the very next time the Man of Wrath goes on a
journey. I put a small pot of water in the cage, though they never could
have tasted water yet unless they drink the raindrops off the beech
leaves. I suppose they get all the liquid they need from the bodies of the
mice and other dainties provided for them by their fond parents. But the
raindrop idea is prettier.</p>
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