I
F course it is a horrid little garden, but one gets so fond of one’s own things, even when they are horrid,” said Miss Edith Glover, with her gentle deprecatory laugh.
She stood with her friend at the door of the conservatory that led from the sitting-room to the oblong plot of garden—a small, middle-aged woman, with soft brown eyes, and hair the colour of a faded leaf; her wasted throat and transparent temples and faint yet feverish flush marking her already with menacing symptoms.
The conservatory was of the sort that crops out irrelevantly at the back of the many suburban houses, like glaucous fungi; but in Miss Glover’s little establishment, its shelves filled with neatly ranged boxes of seedlings, with bundles of raffia, tidy baskets, and carefully garnered labels, it was completely utilitarian, with never a fern or begonia to recall its usual state. Miss Glover’s house was suburban, or nearly so, for though it stood in secure detachment from other villas on the southern slopes of a small Surrey town, the town, on its northern side, spread into ugly patches of red brick that devoured the woods and fields and ran long tentacles almost up to London. Acacia Road was removed from this peril of vitality, and its upper windows looked over pleasant stretches of untouched hill and meadow.
The Nook had been left to Miss Glover by an aunt five years ago, and to her it was, from its porch before to its garden behind, a paradise pure and simple, though she described her garden now, in showing it to Florrie Lennard, so disparagingly. If she called it horrid, however, it was only because, with her strong sense of other people’s claims and opinions, she recognized that to Florrie, accustomed to grand week-ends at big country-places, it must, qua garden, look very dim and meagre. That it must also look, in its humility, very lovely, she took for granted.
Mrs. Lennard, however, standing with her on the conservatory step, her robust silken arm protectingly and benevolently laid within hers, did not contradict her, though her cheerful eyes roamed kindly over the borders of pansies, the beds of mignonette, and the clumps of sweet peas in the corners; but her kindness was for her friend rather than for the garden, and she said, “You haven’t had strength, I expect, for doing more with it.”
“I’ve never had much strength,” said Miss Glover. “It doesn’t want much hard work, luckily. The pansies go on from year to year and only need dividing in the autumn, and then there are the bulbs, of course, in spring; I have crocuses and daffodils and narcissi and some beautiful tulips. The rest I do with penny packets. All those sweet peas and all that mignonette came from two penny packets.” “You can’t expect much for a penny, can you?” said Mrs. Lennard with her rather jovial air; and now she stepped down onto the narrow strip of lawn that had a bird-bath sunken in the middle and a rose-bush at each corner, of the kind now seldom seen, known as Prince Charlie or Maiden’s Blush—dark and small of foliage, with flat flowers that would be snowy were they not tinged with a cold pink. They always made Miss Glover think of an old Scotch ballad. Their flowering season was over, now, however. The old Pyrus japonica that grew against the wall was also, long since, over, though its fresh, vigorous green embossed the dull bricks; but on the wall opposite, a Madame Alfred Carrière was throwing out a second blooming, dreamy, melancholy and romantic as only she could be. Madame Alfred Carrière made Miss Glover think of a Chopin waltz, and she hoped that Florrie might at all events remark favourably on her abundance. But Florrie hardly glanced at her. Pausing, as they paced the lawn, to look with tolerant interest at the bird-bath, she observed,
"I’ve just been staying with the Isaacsons in Hertfordshire. Such a lovely place. They’ve a broad sanded walk leading from the house to the rose-garden, as long as—well, to the end of this road, and it’s arched with roses all the way, a regular roof of roses, the latest climbers; I never saw such a sight. And their herbaceous border, even now, is a blaze of colour. I wish you could see it. It would do you good. It did me good, I know. I told Mrs. Isaacson I always feel a better woman after a week-end in her garden. Flowers mean so much to me. I can’t get on without them. I run down to the Isaacsons whenever, as I say to her, I need an æsthetic cocktail. Of course they’ve half a dozen gardeners working from dawn till dewy eve. You can do pretty much what you want in the way of gardens when you’re as rich as the Isaacsons. What it must have cost them to make that sunken rose-garden!—all flagged between the beds, with a sun-dial, and a fountain in the middle and bowers of roses all about. They terraced the lawns, too, with flights of stone steps leading down one from the other, and great white stone vases on the pilasters simply foaming over, my dear, with pink geraniums. Against the blue sky it’s dazzling.
"Such nice people they are, too, the Isaacsons. Di, the eldest girl, is marrying Lord Haymouth next week, you know. People says it’s a mariage de convenance, of course, for she’s to have £50,000 and he’s without the proverbial penny. But I happen to know it’s a love match: love at first sight; a regular coup de foudre. I was with the Isaacsons at Ascot this spring when they met, and I saw in a moment that Di’s fate was sealed. Do you remember the big photo of Di in court dress on the piano in the flat? No? Well, I should have thought it couldn’t have escaped notice. Such a splendid young creature; dark, proud, glowing beauty. I think, when they’re young, there’s nothing to beat a beautiful Jewess. She has a gorgeous voice, too, Di; could have made her fortune in grand opera. I’ve given her a gold cigarette-case with her monogram in diamonds and rubies. It nearly broke me; but they’ve always been simply sweet to me. She’s very fond of smoking. Smokes too much, her mother and I tell her, though I’m afraid I’m not a very good example to set before the young!"
Mrs. Lennard’s face, while she thus spoke, expressed her contentment with the Isaacsons, with herself, the cigarette-case, and life in general. It was large and ruddy and masterful, with aquiline nose and small, jocund mouth creasing to the chin in a deep line that spoke of good nature and ingenuous sensuality; the full throat supported by a high lace collar, well boned up behind the ears; the prominent blue eyes at once bland and beaming. She was tall, of a fine presence, her handsome bosom thickly decorated with turquoise ornaments, her shoes of glittering patent leather; and from her wrist dangled a purse of fringed and woven gold—an offering to her from the proprietor of the lady’s paper that, for many years, she had edited with so much flair and ability.
She had made a very good thing of her life, had Mrs. Lennard; and, nearing the fifties as she was, she had amassed a small but secure income and a large number of affluent friends; friends always engaged in vigorous and costly pursuits that involved many rich toilettes, meals to the sound of orchestras in sumptuous restaurants and constant motoring from place to place. Among such friends poor Edie Glover had not counted. She and Mrs. Lennard had been schoolmates in early days when their fortunes, one as the daughter of a poor parson and one of a poor doctor, were equally unpromising. But Florrie had married an ambitious young journalist, typified always, in Miss Glover’s memory, from her one rather dazed and shrinking impression of him, by extraordinarily smart mustard-coloured spats and the weighty and imposing seal ring on his finger; and, though early widowed, Florrie had followed along the paths where he had set her feet with an energy and shrewdness that he could not have bettered.
Meanwhile, poor Edie—for so Mrs. Lennard always thought of her—struggled through many years of waning youth to make her living, and support her mother, as a music-teacher in London. Mrs. Lennard, even when the tides of her own fortune ran low, never lost sight of her. She had always been the kindest of friends, sowing the Glovers' dun-coloured days with “complimentary” theatre or concert tickets and asking them frequently to tea with her at her club. Even after Edie, now alone in the world, had retired to Acacia Road and left youth and London behind her, Mrs. Lennard, who had the air of fully possessing both, kept constantly in touch. She had never before managed, it was true, but for one half hour as she motored by on a winter’s day, to visit Acacia Road; but it was to her flat in Victoria Street that Miss Glover always came when called to London by mild necessities or pleasures. Florrie insisted on it; and though, in some ways, Miss Glover would have preferred the house of her cousin in Bayswater,—overflowing with children as it was, and offering only the tiniest of back bedrooms on the top floor,—or the villa of a school-mistress friend at Golder’s Green, it had always been impossible to resist Florrie’s determined benevolence.
“Nonsense, my dear Edie,” she would say. “Your cousin can’t want you. You’ll only be in the way, with those dozens of children. And as for Golder’s Green, what can you see of London from Golder’s Green?” (Florrie overlooked the fact that for forty-odd years Miss Glover had done nothing but “see” London.) “You’ll be worn out with tubes and motor-buses if you go to Golder’s Green. Whereas with me you are ten minutes from everywhere, be it dentist or dressmaker or concert, and your bedroom’s waiting for you—Muriel Lestrange left me only last Monday; and you can’t make me believe you’d not rather have your bath in my lovely porcelain tub, with steaming hot water day and night, than in one of those awful, antediluvian, blistered monsters, that fold you up like a jack-knife—and the tin of tepid water hauled up four flights by a slavey. I know my London, my dear, through and through, and any pleasure here depends upon how you start your day; upon your bath and your breakfast. I can’t offer much, but I can offer both of those, A number one.”
So she could. Miss Glover could not deny it, though loyally and unheededly murmuring that the villa at Golder’s Green had also its bathroom. It couldn’t, however, compare with Florrie’s, all snowy tiles and glittering taps and ranged jars and bottles of salts and scents. Florrie’s bathroom seemed to her always to be the very centre and symbol of Florrie’s life—modern, invigorating, rejuvenating, at once utilitarian and decorative. It was a sort of brilliant magician’s cave from which all the rest radiated: the compact yet so sumptuous little drawing-room with its baby-grand and its palm, its silver-framed photographs, frilled crétonnes, and rose-coloured carpet; the dining-room, even more compact, yet, in its sobriety, as sumptuous—where the breakfasts always, in spite of familiarity, broke upon Miss Glover as revelations of what coffee and rolls and kidneys and bacon could be in the way of strength and heat and crispness; even the pink silk quilt beneath which she crept at night, and the little maid who brought her early tea, looking, in her fluted caps and aprons, as though she belonged to a theatrical troupe—all seemed emanations of that magic centre where Florrie lay of a morning in hot, scented water and read the paper and smoked a cigarette before emerging armed and panoplied for the avocations and gaieties of the day.
Yet it was not so much Florrie’s bathroom and breakfasts, or even Florrie’s kindness, that overbore her protests as Florrie’s determination, her way of knowing so much better than you yourself could know what was not only good, but happy for you. There was never an answer to be found to her; and though Florrie’s flat, with all its sumptuousness, dazed and even tired Miss Glover a little, just as dear Florrie herself sometimes dazed and tired her, she found herself installed there always, feeling her own pursuits, her little tea-parties, her concerts, her timid, bewildered shopping, to be very humdrum and inappropriate as issuing from such a base of operations. The only return she was able to make was to emboss Florrie’s sheets and towels and table-linen with beautifully embroidered monograms, and she had always a slight and pleasant sense of being, at all events, a country mouse who had contributed its little offering of grain or honey when she recognized these trophies of her craft on her bed and on the table and in the bathroom.
But the last time she had gone up that summer, only, now, three weeks ago, she had found herself suddenly of a significance almost as great as that of any of Florrie’s brilliant friends. To become significant to Florrie one had either to be brilliant or piteous, and she was piteous. Florrie had gone with her to the doctor’s, and it was Florrie, kind Florrie, an arm about her shoulders and a breast spread to her tired head, who had broken to her the verdict.
She was menaced, gravely menaced.—Yes; it did not surprise her—she had thought it might be that. She had seen her father and two sisters die of it—And unless she could go away and spend a year in a Swiss open-air cure, the doctor didn’t think she’d live through the winter.
Seated on Florrie’s frilled sofa, while Florrie, all encompassing tact and urgency, passed on the verdict, it was not of it that she first thought. Her mind, perhaps in an instinctive recoil, fixed itself upon the oddly insistent impression of pinkness that she was aware, suddenly, of receiving. Florrie’s blouse, under her cheek, was a bright blur of pink; and when she turned her eyes away from that they met, everywhere, garlands of roses looped with knots of blue ribbon on a background of white and pink stripes. Too much pink: this was the absurdly irrelevant criticism that, dimly, but as if culminatingly, emerged. She must have felt it as too pink for many years, but only now was she aware of it. And then, with a sense of refuge, came the vision of her pansies: those borders of white and purple pansies under the dull brick wall that she had looked at so fondly that morning before starting for her journey. But she would have to leave her pansies, then; not only for a season; perhaps forever.
It was in this form and in this roundabout way that the thought of death became real to her; with pathos rather than poignancy and with yearning regret rather than fear. She did not feel afraid of dying. Her quiet little faith that, though so still, was deep enough for all her needs, had sunken wells of wordless security in her. She was not afraid; but the thought of leaving her flowers, her garden, the skyey view from her bedroom window, symbolized for her all the sadness of death. There was, indeed, nothing else to regret much. Every one she had loved most dearly was gone; and when all was said and done, and in spite of the peace of the last five years, she was a battered, tired little creature, with few of the springs of desire left in her. Her life, as she looked back on it, seemed to have been spent, for the most part, in crowded buses on wet evenings, with not enough lunch behind and not enough dinner before her; in those, and in going up and down steps of strangers' houses. There had been, of course, more than that; she had never, except when her dearest young sister died, been very unhappy, and there had been interests and alleviations always—beautiful evening walks across the Park and relaxations over tea with a book before the fire in her lodging-house sitting-room; but the past, when she called it up in an image, seemed always to crumple into that jolting, rattling, wet, and crowded omnibus. So there was not much strength now left in her for resistance or regret; but she would do her best to live, and that really meant that she would do her best not yet to leave her garden.
When she was older, too old to dig a little, divide the pansies in autumn and sow the penny packets in spring, too old to care for the Madame Alfred Carrière or the Pyrus japonica, would be time enough to go. But in coming back to it that evening, she knew how deeply, how tenaciously she loved her garden. It was the only thing she had ever owned in her life, the only thing she had ever made: her work and creation; its roots seemed to go down into her heart; and she could not feel that in heaven there would be old white roses and white and purple pansies and mignonette and sweet peas that one had sown one’s self from penny packets.