Chapter II: Part 2

I wonder if any of those who perchance read this know of any formula, Christian, pagan, even Christian Scientist, which insures, or has any chance of insuring, decent habit of body or mind during an attack of lumbago. I have been trying my best in all three; that is to say, as a Christian I have tried to be cheerful, to wear a helpful sort of smile, and have said to myself, ‘Think of the early Christian martyrs, the boiling oil, and the lions, and those horrors.’ But myself has said to me, ‘That was for a good cause; besides, they soon died.’ Now, lumbago does not kill anybody, and, as far as I am aware, it is an invention of the devil. Thus Christianity failed to help me.

Then I tried paganism. In other words, I swore. It did not do the slightest good.

Then I tried Christian Science. I said: ‘There is no such thing as pain--ow!---- Moral mind refuses to recognise the existence of mortal mind. There is nothing material; all material is mortal mind, and there isn’t any. Therefore I have no back, and consequently no small of it. It is all a false claim. Thus, as there isn’t any, it is perfectly ridiculous to think I have a shooting pain there, for there is no such thing as either (i.) the small of my back, (ii.) pain, either there or anywhere else. I will therefore smile, and get up with a firm, brisk movement.’ I did.

Oh, Mrs. Eddy! The false claim was more than usually clamant.

In fact, for two days I have felt myself such a martyr that I am now, happily, beginning to feel that I cannot possibly be a martyr at all. Nobody can conceivably have suffered such agonies as I have been thinking I suffered and survived. All the same----

I was riding down Davies Street on my bicycle two mornings ago, in the very best of health and spirits. Where Grosvenor Street crosses it, a fool of a cabman (though I had rung my bell) drove slowly across my path, and I had to dismount. I exchanged a pleasantry or two with him of a bitingly high-spirited nature, and essayed to get on again. At that moment, so it seemed, I was stabbed in the back, and I heard the cabman say, ‘Comin’ over me like that, and drunk at this hour of the morning’--continuing, you will have seen, our previous conversation. Bad, untrue, unkind as it was, it was the last word, and so is entitled to a certain respect. But next time I see No. 24,304 I will see if I cannot give him lumbago. (This, evidently, is the pagan mood returning.)

Since that moment the joy of life has vanished. It--I cannot write the word again, and I will only remark that it sounds like a second-rate Spanish watering-place--has known my down-sitting and mine uprising, and has smirched my days. I have eaten no meat, I have drunk no wine, I have been incapable of taking part in all social and pleasant affairs. I was told that exercise was good, and went to skate at Niagara, and retired after one stroke with a cold-dewed brow. I was told a Turkish bath was good, and caught a cold in the head on the top of it. I was told not to think about it--this was the Christian Science treatment, more or less--and the effect was that the Spanish watering-place thought the more of me. Only two hours ago, dressing for dinner--I dined alone in my horrid room--I dropped a sovereign on the floor, seriously considered whether it was worth picking up, and decided it was not. At that moment any tramp could have had it. Then by pure chance my servant came in, and I regained it. I was told to take Lithia Varalettes: the only effect, as far as I am aware, is that I am lowered for life. I even went so far as to see a doctor, who asked me whether I had done anything which might have produced a chill. Thank goodness, I had the face to say ‘No.’ In consequence he talked of the functions of certain internal organs; into these regions I did not attempt to follow him.

Now, all that I have written with regard to the second-rate Spanish watering-place is literally true. All the things which I am conscious of enjoying every day, such as reading, food, silly conversation, proper wine, violent physical exertion, cold baths, grew pale or impossible. But looking back even from the middle of it all--for to-night it is, if anything, a little more acute--I begin to see that nothing on the whole matters less than physical pain. Once before in my life, when I was eight years old, I had bad earache, so my family assure me. Of that I can remember nothing whatever, except that in consequence I went to stay near Dartmouth for change of air. But of Dartmouth I remember much. There was an aloe in the garden, and one of its great fibrous leaves projected across the path, and was cut off. This had to be done by a strong gardener with a saw. A leaf cut by a saw! There were also rock pools in the estuary, with strawberry anemones--so we called them--waving in the water; steamers passed, visible through a telescope, that would go straight on, self-contained, unhelped till they reached America. _Ruta-muraria_, a small mean fern (I cannot even remember hearing its name except then), grew in crevices in the garden wall; it was rare, and began and ended my collection of ferns. That is what remains to me of the earache. Once again I had a tooth out. That was half a crown.

And now I have lumbago, and from analogy I see that a fortnight hence, and a week hence (I hope), and a year hence, I shall remember nothing of it, except that for a few days I stopped indoors mostly, wrote notes of regret, and read a variety of delightful books. ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ I have read; I have quaked with Hyde, and shuddered with Jekyll: I have been down the Sambre canalized; I have been sucked under the fallen tree on the Oise; I have understood why Mr. Crummles deluded himself into thinking the Phenomenon was a phenomenon; I have admired the moral valour of Mrs. Nickleby when she convinced herself about the previous sanity of the gentleman in small-clothes and gray stockings; I have killed the Red Dhole from the Deccan, and have sat (a remarkable feat) with Princess Napraxine in a temperature of over 130° Fahrenheit. But for the lumbago, I should probably have done none of these delightful things. Also I have learned (I shall have to learn it again and again) that the moment is always tolerable. Even this tiny pin-prick of a pain can teach one that. ‘Circumscribe the moment’ as Marcus Aurelius said. You can get along all right for the moment (unless you die, and then the trouble is solved): why think of the moments to come? When they come, deal with them. And I hope that if I ever suffer from carcinomato-cerebrospinal sciatica, I may think of that.

Besides--I must justify my conscience with respect to the doctor--I do not think it proved that my night adventure had anything to do with the lumbago. Thus, it would have been unfair to cast it, like bread on the waters, to a suspicious physician. And even if it had, it was well worth it. I would do it again to-morrow night, if the mood only could come again.

I wonder how the writing and the subsequent publication of any book, the meanest, affects the average author? No doubt the great powers in authorship, so to speak, care as little when another volume is launched as does the Empire at large when another battleship leaves the slips to join its mighty brothers. But for the majority--those of us, in fact, who hope some day (however vainglorious the hope, we all cling to it) to produce a book which may rouse laughter or tears or interest twenty years hence--I imagine that there is scarcely any excitement, depression, exaltation or misgiving that we have ever felt which is comparable to those attendant on the writing and launching of our little paper fleets. And as I have just launched another little paper boat to go and look after its drowned brothers, and the memory of all the emotions attendant on it is consequently keen, it may be of interest, in however small a degree, to others to read what even so uneminent an author as myself experiences in these times.

Birds, perhaps, give one the only simile possible for the first period. For the idea of the book, its scope, its aim, its plot, and, to a certain degree, its characters, all exist, in my case, before I put a word down on paper. When these are complete, we may say that the egg is there. The writing it, to my mind, is equivalent to the hatching only; but the definite production of the egg--of that which contains potential vitality--is over and complete at the moment the writing begins. If there is no potential vitality in it then, there never will be. When I begin to write, I am sitting on my egg.

Now, this first period--here we dismiss the simile of the egg, and take that of disease--lasts for a very ill-defined period. During it the patient is continually conscious of an abnormality of condition. His spirits are very variable: sometimes for days together the appetite will be good (mine always is), and the only symptom of the malady is a slightly increased vividness. Speech is coherent, but rather more fluent than usual; he tends to talk nonsense (this must not be confused with the subsequent wandering). Then, without apparent cause, stages of depression, irritability, and general peevishness ensue: he will decry his favourite pursuits, particularly authorship, and express audibly a desire for a large and settled income in Consols. Shortly before the crisis approaches (_i.e._, the first dip of the pen in ink) a period of febrile excitement ensues; he will put sudden problems to his nurses as to how A would act given B, C, and D did so-and-so, and, whatever the answers given him, he will certainly take exception to them. This is the period of wandering alluded to above. Both the period of excitement previous to this and the period of depression are marked by a certain listlessness with regard to other pursuits; the patient takes nothing, except his malady, quite seriously, and though he performs the ordinary routine of life with correctness, he performs it somehow subaqueously. Indeed, he is never quite himself from the time the seeds of the malady first attack him.

All these symptoms are temporarily ameliorated when, to go back to our first simile, the egg is laid. For a time the nurses are encouraged to hope that the worst is over. Large quantities of what is known as ‘sermon-paper’ should be given without stint, and special care taken that there should be in every room, where the patient can possibly desire to sit, plenty of black ink and suitable pens. For a day or two he may refuse to go out altogether, or play any game, and here it is a mistake on the part of the nurses to urge him to do so. He may, in fact, be entirely left to himself. Probably these favourable symptoms will last for a week or two (during which the supply of sermon-paper should be renewed), and then a change for the worse comes over the patient. The irritability returns, and with it an attack, more or less severe, of complete idleness and indescribable misgivings. He again expresses a wish for a settled income in Consols, and often goes suddenly to stay with his friends, or, if the disease is not so acute, merely lunches and dines out every day, and seems to fear being left alone. Then the malady becomes spasmodic, the periods of inaction alternate with periods of feverish industry, to which succeeds an attack of apparent coma with regard to everything except the disease itself, which is now confluent and completely encompasses him. A series of absolutely happy days ensue, accompanied by great mental activity and enormous consumption of sermon-paper. As soon as this definitely sets in, the nurses may make themselves quite happy for the time being. All fears of suicide may be considered over, and there is no allusion to Consols. And thus the egg is hatched in a blaze of hypertrophied glory.

It is hatched. That is to say, the MS.--such as it is--is complete, and personally one is completely happy for about a week. Then ensues a very tedious period, which is at times brightened by finding that something is better than one thought, but oftener darkened by finding that something is worse than one thought. In other words, after a week of idleness, I sit laboriously down, and copy out the whole thing from beginning to end. Other patients at this point, I believe, use a typewriter, but personally, on the one occasion when I did so, I found that the corrections were not compassable even in triple-spaced type. So now, when the first MS. is complete, I begin from the beginning, and write the whole story out again. Chapters are often excised, and chapters (more rarely) inserted, since in my first MS. I find that I much more commonly say too much than too little. (Here is an opening for critics to point out how extraordinarily superfluous the first MS. must have been.) This period is the tiresome part of the hatching of the egg. The writing of the first MS., astounding though it may appear, was attended by a certain excitement: whereas the writing of the second is due to the desire, shall we call it? to catch one’s self tripping, to detect, by the painful process of copying, one, perhaps, of the hundred absurdities that one has committed. Yet there is a certain delight even in this, for since one would not set pen to paper at all unless one thought that one had an idea of some kind, it is mildly pleasant even now, when the first excitement is over, to see in cool blood what the idea was, to emphasize what appear to be its decent points, to suppress its bad ones. After that the second MS. goes to the typewriter, and peace again reigns.

Now, during the first writing of the MS. a curious thing has more than once happened to me; that is to say, a character, or a situation, or even the story itself, takes the bit between its teeth, and, as far as I know, bolts. One had meant to do and to say something different, but whether it is that even in the meanest-imagined character one, so to speak, raises the devil, and cannot be held responsible for his subsequent action, or whatever the cause, this phenomenon occurs. In the terms of our first simile, this is the cuckoo’s egg in the hedge-sparrow’s nest. One sits on the thing--writes it, that is--but it is not going to be a hedge-sparrow at all, but something quite different. This has happened to me more than once, in ---- and ---- (my egotism does not go quite so far as to write the names of these obscure tales), I had definitely meant to give a different outcome. I had meant a character to be different in character, and thus to play another part. But writing I found it was not so. That character would go another way. And did. I followed faint but pursuing.

To resume. The MS. comes back from the typewriter’s, and the sickening part of the work begins. In print, somehow, the degrading stuff looks even more degraded; for print, as Hazlitt said, in more senses than one, had he known it, ‘print settles it.’ What one suspected was rather sketchy and amateur becomes indubitably so. What one thought was somewhat workmanlike appears merely slip-shod carpentering, unplaned, out of line, with screws and nails not driven home. One taps here, one whacks there; one planes down, and finds one has planed too much; one planes down, and finds one has to plane more. One thinks--and this is, perhaps, the worst of all--that A rather resembles one’s dear friend, John Smith, and ruthlessly takes all the stuff out of him, leaving an enfeebled marionette. Then, like a pin-prick to a man on fire, come the inevitable typewriter’s errors, necessitating reference to the MS. Some typewriters omit whole sentences, because they are not certain (no wonder); others rush in where angels fear to tread, with brilliant repartees of a sort undreamed of; others spell a name wrong throughout; others--and they are worse--spell it wrong occasionally. When I have time I will write an article on typewriters. They will not, after that, hold their heads so high.

Then comes the last step. When the typoscript (an awful word) has been corrected, and if necessary another made, and also corrected, the whole thing goes to the publisher, and in course of time come proofs. Proofs are of two kinds--galley proofs and page proofs. Galley proofs are interminable strips of paper which slide off one’s desk, get mixed, and are altogether impossible. Page proofs, though depressing, are manageable, because they come in folded sheets of sixteen pages. Then once again are all weak points glaringly emphasized, the indescribable misgivings return with redoubled vigour, and invariably I long to live the last year, or whatever it may be, over again, in order to have profited by my previous experience and do better. Usually at this stage--perhaps because I am used to it--the ‘idea’ does not seem to me so bad. It is only everything else that is wrong. Yet even then come sanguine moments. Quite suddenly I find myself thinking it is extremely good. How delicate, for instance, is the way in which Y behaves, how subtle and correct is Z’s induction. Back swings the pendulum: over go these unstable ninepins.

There is probably a revise--there may be two--and the bread is cast upon the waters. As the date for publication approaches I feel ill. If I could, I would recall it all. One has felt a certain situation, or a certain character, keenly; was it not enough to have felt it, without throwing it, like early Christians, to the public? They will tear it into shreds, and probably refuse to swallow it.

But just then--when, in my experience, the darkest hour is on one, when one distrusts utterly all one has done, when one is afraid that that which is to one’s self a chiefest joy of life is to everyone else just a mud-pie made by a child in a populous roadway, to be carefully stepped over by three-quarters of the passers-by, to be stepped into by the remaining quarter, who, with a careless cuff to the maker of it, will pass on, remembering it only as they would remember some tiny untowardness in the menu at dinner--then comes quite suddenly the remembrance of an exceeding unexpected joy. A man or a woman, otherwise quite unknown to one, has on the last occasion of this kind thought it worth while to send a line, it may be a postcard only, to say ‘thank you.’ Once this ‘thank you’ arrived to me from New Zealand, and was accompanied by two frozen sheep bred on the reader’s farm. The letter said, ‘Please do not answer this, or you will think I am wanting an autograph.’ Or, again, it may be just a press-cutting from a provincial paper, that shows me that someone whom I have never seen, and probably will never see, has understood something of what made me so happy when I thought of it. And that--unreasonably, perhaps--more than counterbalances the vituperation or the scorn of those who either do not or will not see. For a friend concerns me very much: an enemy, or, if that is too big a word, an acquaintance to whom I am antipathetic, concerns me not at all. He is a negative quantity, and in this life of ours the negative quantities do not matter, for the man who has one friend is infinitely better off than the man who has no enemies and a million acquaintances.

Acquaintances! They are the bane and the absurdity of life, and especially of ordinary London life. How often has one heard it said, and, indeed, said one’s self, ‘Such a bore! I’ve got to go and call on So-and-so.’ For if one finds it a burden to go and talk to anybody, for social reasons, it shows a very unbecoming conceit if one imagines that one’s hostess will fail to find it a bore too. The custom, for instance, of calling after one has dined at a house is a very sensible and pleasant one, but it presumes that you have been dining with a friend. In this case the call will not bore you. But if the call bores you, it is probable that the dinner bored you too, in which case, unless you dined there for the sake of being fed gratis, why did you dine there at all? Again, a step further, how often have you exclaimed, ‘What a bore! I’ve got to dine with ---- to-night.’ And if you say that, you have no business to eat ----’s cutlet.

Of course, there is another side to the question--for questions with only one side to them have ceased to be questions at all--and that is, that at any such house you may meet a friend, or you may meet someone who will eventually become a friend. Then, I grant, it were worth while trudging there a hundred miles on foot, for from pole to pole, if you search the earth, you will find nothing better than a friend. How many have you? I have nine, and consider myself most fortunate. Or, again, you may find the very fact of meeting a certain number of people, though they are the barest acquaintances, stimulating, just as there are certain plants which thrive better with others of their species than alone. That, again, is a good reason: only when social etiquette demands a call of you, do not say, ‘What a bore!’ You have received a benefit: pay the current coin for it and don’t grumble.

Now, this herding together of human beings with wealth and leisure into London for several months every year--there to meet their friends, of course, but also a whole host of people who will never, and can never, be more than acquaintances--is a very curious modern phenomenon. London--in this sense of the word--was born not so many decades ago, and since then has grown, and is growing, in a manner perfectly amazing. There was a time, say eighty years ago, when London in this sense practically did not exist; the ‘season’ was enjoyed by those who now go to London in a dozen country towns, to which the rank and fashion of the country flocked, and there made gay on their native pavements. And, by all accounts, they _did_ make gay. Then, by degrees, this remarkable monster of London began growing. People of leisure--or so I take it--began to weary of that priceless benefit, and in a couple of generations have turned themselves into perfect galley-slaves in the barque which they term, some of them mistakenly, ‘Pleasure.’ Means of travel got easier, quicker, and cheaper; more families every year, who had no business, either political or of money-making, took to going to London, where they found twenty theatres instead of one, a million people to move among instead of a thousand. Intimacies, it is true, were less common there than in the friendly and less populous streets of their county town, but, instead, they might in the streets or at the houses of their acquaintances behold, in _propriâ personâ_, the man or woman with whose name at the moment the world was ringing; or a new play claimed their attention and provided an easy subject of conversation--for conversation, unless they were people of brains, and many excellent folk are not, began, perhaps, to wear a little thin in the sixth week of their season at York or Winchester. But it would be impossible to be in London in the autumn or winter, during the months of shooting and hunting, and so, by common consent, the London season--a unique fact--was fixed for the months May, June, and July--a time when air in town is scarce, and suns are sultry, but a time in the country when Nature holds high festival, and all who have eyes to see and ears to hear are equally honoured at her banquet. But--and this could only happen in the Anglo-Saxon race, and it is symptomatic of the strength, and possibly, in years to come, of its weakness--Sport said the final word. Half-fledged pheasants are not shootable, and foxes, that strange breed, which would have been exterminated long ago were it not for the ordinance that they shall be killed in one way only, were busy with the propagation of their species. And thus, though Nature spreads her feast, but sits alone at her empty board, she still has the last compelling word on the subject.

In fact, during the last half-dozen decades a new feverish and nervous disease has spread over England in a terrifying manner. We may call it Turbamania, or the passion for crowds, and, like the influenza, it attacks the upper classes more, it would appear, than the lower. No cure for it has yet been found, and it has not received, as a specific disease, the attention it deserves. This is curious: for in this inquisitive age, though it was a disease that only manifested itself in, let us say, slight redness of the little finger, and was perfectly harmless, we should probably by this time be possessed of a hospital for treatment of the cases, and dozens of savants squinting themselves purblind in the hope of discovering its bacillus. Many daily, and especially weekly, papers have columns devoted to its symptoms, though they apparently do not know that they are speaking of it. But whenever I see that the Marquis of ---- entertained the following distinguished company to dinner, I recognise Turbamania. For whom (except the sufferers from this distressing malady) can such an announcement concern? Not the diners, surely, for they were aware of it before. Nor, as far as I can see, those who were not asked, for the simple reason that they were not asked. Or who (except Turbamaniacs) care to hear how Lady ---- was dressed? She herself, those who saw her, or those who did not see her? For the life of me I cannot tell. Yet how great must be the demand for such information, if we consider in what enormous quantities it is supplied! It must be read and looked for by thousands who do not know Lady ---- by sight. Her mother, her sister, her daughter perhaps, if in India, might have gentle emotions raised by the knowledge of how she was dressed. But who else?

The theme is not worth consideration, except from my own standpoint, my own private view of it, which at this moment occupies me enormously. Six months ago I decided to leave London, that most jealous of all mistresses, who exacts from us not merely our conscious thoughts, but pervades us in a way that no Cleopatra ever did yet. To anyone who has not known London the idea is unintelligible; to anyone who has, all explanations fall short of what he knows.

Think of it! Five million people, awake or asleep, round one--five million, each of whom is as important to himself as I to me, stealing about like thoughts in the brain of this busy city, intent, alert, as are no other five million people in the world. My God! how I love the sense of it! how each street is to me a room, a passage, in a great house to which I have but lately succeeded, and is crammed with treasures, some few of which I know by sight, but of which as yet I do not know the thousandth part. What are they? Men and women, that is all; and is that not enough?

What is it? What is it, I vainly ask myself, that stirs me so? Me, who know unconsciously the drone of the four-wheeler as it passes up this huge beating artery of life, and, without distraction of thought, can distinguish it from the quick cloop-cloop of the hansom, and can recognise the boom of the omnibus, and divine the meaning of a hundred noises in the street without raising my eyes or losing the thread of what I am doing. Life, jostling, vulgar, crowded, commonplace (God forgive me!) life. Oh, how excellent! I do not look at the placards of the latest news; I look at the seedy man who carries them about like a plaster on his usually weak chest. How can I convey it all? The wet asphalt of the roadway, the streaked mud of the roadway, the smell of the Twopenny Tube, the reek from the restaurant next door, the reprints of Cosway in the shop-window adjoining, my own door with a circling lock, which is always upside down to my key. What does it all mean to the person who does not know what it means? and what can that which I say mean to the person who does know?

Yet, drunk as I am with crowds (here indeed is Turbamania), I propose to-morrow to go forth to a house in a sleepy county town, where no one is ever in a hurry, though many have the impression that they are, and there are oiled wheels of existence continually gently turning, which, as far as I know at present, find no particular grist, instead of these grating, roaring, spinning fly-wheels of the world. There is a hotel bus there, and no hansoms; no vomiting of crowds from embowelled stations, no--no anything, as it seems to me this moment, except--and this is in the main the reason for which I go--there is as much time there as in London (all the time there is, in fact), and less to do in it. I want, in fact, to arrive at a greater simplicity of life than seems to me possible in London, to get into what I believe to be more normal and healthy conditions, instead of living an existence which, however delightful and absorbing, is yet slightly feverish. I want to get out of the habit of thinking of the next delightful thing I am going to do in the course of the one which I am doing, and so largely missing its point--not to be in a hurry, not to clutch so much at pleasures.

Also, in spite of my passion for crowds, I have desired all this last year, with a haunting intensity which I cannot hope to convey, to watch the bursting of the spring, to see it mix into the great triumph of the summer, to follow step by step the fruition of the sun, and, to round the perfect circle, see the accomplished and completed year fall to sleep again in the arms of winter--the year which, since the beginning of time, has been waiting among the crowds of the uncounted centuries for its turn to give to the sons of men sweet and bitter, ecstasy, and life and death, as God has ordained.

APRIL

I have been here nearly a month without spending a single night away--that in itself is a sign of improvement, for I suppose (to my shame I own it) that it must be years since I have slept thirty consecutive nights in the same bed. And what I believe is a greater sign of improvement is that I have not wanted to go away, and I do not want to go away. I like these level, uneventful days: these mornings of work, followed by a few hours of out-of-doors, and in the evening ‘the face of a friend,’ in this house or another. How dull I should have thought it, not long ago; how antipodal to dull I find it!

I said ‘uneventful’ just now--that was a mistake. I have been through fiery trials, in the shape of a cook, who could not only not cook decently, but could not cook at all. In any case, she didn’t, and I have eaten raw flesh on the altar of rusticity. Then there was a personage who represented herself as a charwoman. Though I cannot say she was a housebreaker, she was certainly nearer that than anything else; for though she did not actually break the house, she broke everything inside it. She began ‘cleaning,’ as she called it, before it was yet day, and till nightfall the house was resonant with fracture. When there was nothing left to break, she upset her washpail over anything that came handy, brocade for choice. She upset, also, permanganate of potash, with which I was staining a floor, over a green carpet, and one evening I found her eating asparagus (my asparagus, too!) in the scullery. Thereupon I said ‘Board-wages,’ and it is my belief that she simply added board-wages to her ordinary diet, which she ate at my expense. Otherwise, there is no possible way of accounting for the fact that a sirloin of beef, which had come in in the morning---- Enough! She is gone.

Stevenson recommends weeding and cacao-seed planting as a suitable pursuit for anyone who thinks he can make his living out of writing ‘measly yarns.’ But now I have one advantage over that divine author: I know a far better employment. It is to paint floors with permanganate of potash (otherwise known as Condy’s fluid; but you can get much more of it for your money, though it is cheap anyhow, if you buy it in the raw). For a shilling you get enough to stain all the floors in your house (unless you live in an exceptionally large one) the most beautiful brown. The very process reminds one of the scene of the powder-mixing in ‘Jekyll and Hyde.’ It is laid on dark purple; before your eyes it changes to a livid angry green, and while yet it is wet it becomes a dark brown. You lay it on with a large paste-brush, and feel you are saving money. Incidentally you get a quantity on to your hands, and it is apparently indelible. Then you rub it with beeswax, and your deal floor becomes positively ancestral. A few Persian rugs on the top bring you back from a villa to the gorgeous East.

But even before I stained the floors I bought seeds, and planted sweet-peas and nasturtiums broadcast, also (these in seedlings) Jackmanni,[A] and tropæolum and tobacco-plant, and two Crimson Ramblers. Then, on a day to be marked with red in the annals of scarification, I took a trowel and a pocket-knife, and went into the highways and hedges to cut standards for rose-trees. But I took no gloves. _Hinc illæ lacrimæ._ Anyhow, I cut seven standards. This is the way _not_ to do it.

[A] Purple clematis.

I started cheerfully along an unfrequented lane. Larks hovered trilling: spring was bursting in numberless buds, and the green mist of leaves hung round the hedgerows. Before long I saw in the hedge by which I went a suitable standard. It was rather inaccessible, but the lust of the gardener burned in me, and I took a sort of header into the hedge. A shoot from the coveted standard playfully retained my cap, another took one arm in keeping, a third gently fixed itself to my left hand. That had to be very carefully disengaged, since the thorns were encompassing it, and in disengaging it I dropped the trowel. An incautious recovery of the trowel drew the first blood. Then I began.

It is necessary in cutting a standard to get a piece of real root. This particular standard, however, seemed to have no particular roots. It went on and on below ground without object, so far as I could judge; infirm of purpose, it could not begin. When it did begin, it was already mixed up with a bramble, the thorns of which were set on the parent stem on a perfectly different principle, and I did not want the bramble. But, with a totally undeserved popularity on my part, the bramble wanted me. It got me--in pieces which I hope were no use to it; and I began to see that, under certain circumstances and to a certain extent, as Mr. Gladstone might have said, gloves were, if not necessary to human life, at any rate a protective agent against possibly fatal hæmorrhage. Just then the root began.

I destroyed the bramble, root and branch; I destroyed a hazel (branch), and I destroyed the standard (root). That was all at present.

Clearly this would not do: I was as far from standards as ever, but I was bleeding like a pig. So I went home, got some gloves, and became successful. But to be successful in a tale of adventure is to become dull, and with a view to avoiding this as much as is possible, short of not writing at all, I will merely say that I cut seven standards on that divine afternoon, and--but that I can’t sing--went home singing.

The cat next door, so it appeared, had observed the planting of the Jackmanni with a disapproving eye, and even as I went into the garden with my seven standards (like a Roman Emperor) I saw a stealthy form moving slowly away from the corner where I had put one of them. Now, I know something about cats, though nothing, it appears, about standards, and, without the least hurry, I walked into the garden and said ‘Poor puss,’ and saw, out of the corner of my eye (I dared not look honestly round for fear ‘Poor puss’ should see), that my Jackmanni was entirely disinterred, and a scurry of freshly-dug earth lay round it. There were therefore two courses open to me: either the direct, which lay in taking the cat, which (with the shallow diplomacy of its species) had advanced towards me, straight to the disinterred Jackmanni and there slapping it, or the subtle course. I chose the subtle. The cat was a knave--I knew that perfectly well--I chose to be the knave set to catch it. So I said ‘Poor puss’ again, and went to the uprooted Jackmanni and planted it again in the sight of ‘Poor puss.’ Then I went slowly indoors, a very Bismarck. Once arrived inside, I flew to the lumber-room, and with feverish hands unearthed a large garden squirt, and, filling it with cold water (I wish it had been iced), flew to what we may call the wing of the house--it consists merely of a bootroom, which commands, strategically speaking, the Jackmanni. The window was open, and with great caution I advanced to it and looked out. Already, once more that very stupid knave of a cat was busy in the bed. I took careful aim, and the cold water drenched the knave. I will teach it--at least, I think I have taught it--that I do _not_ plant Jackmanni merely to give it a few moments’ senseless amusement. Besides, to-morrow I shall have a fox-terrier; so the garden squirt was the kindest sort of cruelty.

I am afraid that, in talking thus vaguely of ‘the house’ and ‘the garden,’ the reader may have formed a totally erroneous impression of scale, and I must inform him at once that ‘the house’ is the kind of house which is called The Cedars, because, apparently, it has one withered furze-bush in the garden. It is semi-detached, stands on the outskirts of the town, and is of an external appearance which is better forgotten. Inside, however, the rooms are good, high and airy, and, anyhow, it suits me. There is a small strip of garden in front, in which at present I take no interest, and a square of garden behind measuring some sixty or seventy feet by thirty, encompassed by a wall of old and very large brick. A strip of border, sown from end to end with sweet-peas, runs up one side. At the far end is a small raised terrace of grass, on which grow an apple-tree and a plum-tree, by which I have planted the Crimson Ramblers. The seven standards, to be budded in June, stand in a formal row below the terrace, and parallel to the border of sweet-peas stand half a dozen tubs, in which are sown nasturtiums of the large climbing kind. This leaves a space of grass, twenty feet by forty, and on this is being now erected ‘the shelter,’ a wooden room with trellis on two sides, match-boarding on one, and entirely open on the other. Felt will be laid down over the grass, and over the felt rugs. There will be a couple of basket-chairs there, an old French mattress covered with rugs, a writing-table, and a small dining-table, with four chairs. There I propose to live as soon as the summer comes. Over one side the nasturtiums in the tubs will trail their green and ruddy arms, and I shall look towards the seven standards and the Scarlet Ramblers. In the evening an Arab lamp with electric light, brought on a long cord from the house, will illuminate it.

The very planning of ‘the shelter’ was an absorbing joy; absorbing, too, is it to see it rise, smelling clean of freshly-chiselled wood. Then it will be painted green, and ready for habitation. In front of it, towards the terrace, will stand a sundial, which will not get, as far as I can see, any sun at all, since the stately shelter will entirely shade it. However, I dare say it will do better in the shade, like lilies of the valley. Besides, one never uses a sundial in order to tell the time.

I often wonder how large an area of house and garden it is possible to get really fond of. The fact of broad acres and limitless corridors may be, and often is, delightful to the possessor, especially if they are of long-standing possession; but to be fond of a place in the way that I mean implies to be intimate with every square inch of it. Your own niche, your own particular _angulus terræ_, must, I think, be small; the great reception-rooms, the huge lawns, are delightful to have, but you will often find the owner of such choosing a small room for himself to work in and live in, and making perfect, according to his own taste, some sequestered angle of his garden, shut out from vastness, and brought within the scope of his invention. The great lawns and shrubberies he may plan and take pleasure in, but he will not be fond of them with the personal affection he feels for his own room, his own garden corner. And it is the personal aroma, the definite impress of an individual taste on rooms and gardens, that makes them alive with their own individual entity: they are parasitic, like mistletoe, drawing their life from a parent stem. The large rooms, the rows of marbles, the acres of signed canvas, are beautiful and wonderful things; but no one man can appropriate them and fashion them to himself, or himself to them, for they are too large, and are the setting not for one person, but for the brilliant crowd. But his own ‘den,’ where he has the books he wants, the chair he likes, the few pictures he loves, it is there that he is _chez lui_--at home. That is the good part; to have the other is enviable, no doubt, but one does not envy it with the sense of need. Of course, no two people may have the same idea of a _chez lui_; and it is always with a certain anxiety that one awaits the arrival of a friend who has not seen one’s own. He may easily not like it at all (as I have said, the appearance of the house outside is among the things to be forgotten), and if he does not, it is part of me he does not like. But it takes all sorts to make a world; if it were not so, the world would be infinitely less entertaining than it is and infinitely less lovable.

Almost exactly opposite my windows is an old graveyard, the stones in which are for the most part mossed and gray. A gravel path winds in and out of the sleeping-places of men long dead, and round it stand a half-dozen of fine elms. It borders on the road, and is separated from it by only a low paling. And looking out of my window this morning, I saw here one of those very simple little common things that give the lie to cynics. It was a fine sunshiny morning and the road was populous, and among others there came down it two big, strapping privates out of the regiment that is stationed here, all trappings and scarlet, while between them, with a hand in the arm of each, walked a little old lady dressed in black. Each of the two men carried a cross of white flowers, and they walked very slowly, hanging on their steps, and suiting their pace to the woman. All three passed in at the cemetery gate, and went across the grass to a tomb which lay underneath the elms, and had an old weatherworn stone to mark it. On it the two soldiers laid down their crosses, and took off their forage-caps, and all three knelt side by side for a couple of minutes, it may be, at the foot of the grave, close by the road. Then they rose, and the old lady kissed her tall sons very tenderly, and stood with them there a minute more, a hand clasped by each, while they talked together, I suppose of the dead. Then they passed out of the cemetery gate again, and, for aught I know, out of my life. But a little later I went across the road, and to the grave where the crosses of lilies lay. The stone, as I had seen, was of old standing, and I read that it was in memory of a man who had died in the year 1880, on April 17, so that to-day was the twenty-second anniversary of his death. Two days afterwards I happened to ask the Colonel of that regiment whether there were two privates of a certain name among the men.

‘Yes,’ said he, ‘excellent steady fellows; they look after their old mother, who lives here.’

So the reconstruction was simple enough. The father must have died while the two sons were still boys of five or six; yet on the anniversary of his death, so it seems, they still go to the grave with their mother, quite simply and naturally, and say a prayer there with her. The grass, too, on the grave itself was, I noticed, kept short and carefully tended, so I suppose they go there not infrequently. I think the man who lies there must have been a good husband. God keep all our memories as green in loving hearts!

Meantime April is here, and it is good to be in England, for in no other country that I have ever seen is the rush of colour more jubilant. Flowers you may get in plenty on the Grecian hills when ‘blossom by blossom the spring begins,’ but nowhere do you get such green as that in which here April hangs the trees and hedgerows. Star-like the pink petalled daisies shine in the grass of the water-meadows, and soon the yellow shower of buttercups will make Danaë of the earth. In lonely places the daffodils dance together for the joy of their renewed life, and the warm wind shakes the snow of almond and apple-blossom on to the thick-bladed turf. Morning by morning fresh spears of living stuff have pierced the earth, rising upwards in obedience to the great law that moves all life, to look on the kingdom of the sun; and every day the sap of growth hums and tingles to the end of twig and tree, bursting forth through pink-sheathed bud into stars and crescents of leaf and blossom. On the great downs the grass of last year already shows gray and withered by the newness of the excellent emerald, soon to be wrought with tapestries of thyme, where the bee scrambles heavy-legged with the pollen of its fragrant labour, and the chimes of the harebells, to which, so the legend of the countryside has it, the fairies dance, leaving a deeper green where their feet have trod.

Brimful from bank to grassy bank the chalk-streams drawn from the cool deep brain of the downs hurry steadfastly through the meadows, setting the reeds quivering and jerking. Here their courses lie over beds of white chalk and gravel, each pebble shining lucently, jewel-like; here the water-weeds, growing thickly from bank to bank, are combed and waved by the passage of the water; here the stream is set on a more industrious and earnest purpose, as it twirls itself together in the bricked and narrowed passage that leads to the melodious thunder of a mill, from which, having accomplished its work without any loss or fatigue, it emerges in a soda-water of bubble from the dripping sides of the sluice and the mist of its own outpouring. There in the pool below lie its great mysterious citizens, the aldermen of the river, for whom on many days I shall, with my heart in my mouth, cast flies upon the water. Think, if I should catch the Lord Mayor himself--an eight-pounder at least, so the miller tells me, who has broken as many lines, it appears, as there are bubbles in the stream, or heads of racing thistledown in a windy meadow. And if, as is highly probable, the lord of the stream defends his own, and will put such slight wisdom into the heads of his fish that not even the least cautious stripling among them is lured by me, yet he cannot wean me from that fond hope that this cast or this will meet its reward, or when evening comes, and the creel is still unburdened, take away from me the benefit of those waterside hours, the combing of the water-weeds, the translucency of sun-smitten ripples, the infinite refreshment of companionship with things that are quiet and alive. Nor at the end of the day will my machinations against his citizens debar me from becoming for a moment one of them, and dividing the frothy waters of his deepest pool.

MAY

May has come in with gleams of sunshine and gusty fits of tears: half the time that one is out-of-doors, one is being soaked; the other half, being dried by the sun and the boisterousness of west wind. The heavens, indeed, are like some wayward woman, scolding and stormy, then suddenly showing the divinest tenderness. ‘I didn’t mean it,’ say the sun and the west wind. ‘I only wet you for fun. Oh, don’t go indoors and change; I will make you quite dry in a minute.’

But for as long as I live, I think, every May that comes round in the circle of months will be to me, not the May of the year whose course is now running, but the May of three years ago. So, too, when we come to June, you will find the June of two years ago. For to me now, and to me always, as I think, May will mean the things that happened then, and June will mean the things that happened thirteen months later. I will tell you that story. It concerns three people only, and two of them are dead.