She tried them in border after border. She set clumps of Auratums under the dining-room between the heliotrope and the Nicotianas, which swing such gushes of fragrance into the little house all the hot summer days. She got monster bulbs of Madonnas from the first specialist in the kingdom, and put them singly between the red and white roses against the upper terrace wall. She ran amok upon luscious spotted darlings; Pardelinum and Monadelphum, Polyphyllum and Parryi, and had them placed in a cool, shady walk against a background of delphiniums. She thrust Harrisi under the drawing-room bow; and the glorious scarlet-trumpeted Thunbergianum where they would flame in the middle distance. They showed many varied forms of disapproval, but were unanimous in declining to remain with us. Some were a little more polite than the others. The great trumpets blew fiercely for one season, almost as with a sound of glorious brass, in their dim nook; and a single exquisite, perfect stem of Krameri rose intact amid a dying sisterhood, and swayed, delicately proud, faintly flushed, a very princess among flowers, one long, golden September fortnight. But such meteors only make our persistent gloom, where lilies are concerned, the more signal.
The pergola had to go the way of so many cherished dreams. Yet there is an exception. With just an occasional threat of disease, there is one border favoured by the tiger-lily. She is not a very choice creature, of course; she has neither the fragrance nor the mystic grace of her cousins; but such as she is, she is welcome in our midst. On our third terrace there is a stretch of turf, curved outwards like a half-moon, against a new yew hedge: we call it the Hemicycle. In spring it is a jocund pleasaunce for crocus and scylla and flowering trees—almond, Pyrus floribunda, and peach; in summer the weeping standards hold the field, set between the pots of climbing geraniums. That is on the outward curve. A rough wall, overhung with Dorothy Perkins, clothed from the base with Rêve d’Or, runs straightly on the inner side. It is in the border underneath this wall that the tiger-ladies condescend to us.
Last year, by a somewhat accidental development of seeds, we had a marvellous post-impressionist effect along the line, for all the stocks there planted, between the Tigrinum, turned out to be purple and mauve. They grew tall, with immense heads of bloom: drawn up by the wall, we think. Over the orange and violet row the Dorothy Perkins showered masses of vivid pink. A narrow ribbon of bright pale yellow violas ran between the border and the turf. To connect this mass of startling colour, an intermediate regiment of lavender-bushes and the cream hues of the Rêve d’Or roses against their grey-green foliage acted very successfully. It is not a scheme that one would perhaps have tried deliberately, but we could not regret it. It does one good sometimes to steep the senses in such a fine tangle of elementary colour. The shock is bracing, as of a sea wave; like the march of a military band, we could enjoy it, in the open air and sunshine, just where it was placed; away from the house, with its distant background of fir-trees and moors.
Yet it is a mistake to use the word “post-impressionist” in connection with our border; for that movement, with all its pretended revival of the old pagan spirit of joy, was only an effort to conceal fundamental misery. The tango is no dance of gods and nymphs, but a dreadful merry-go-round of lost souls. The post-impressionist painting is not a flag of radiant defiance—youth challenging the unbelieved gloom of life—but a kind of outbreak as of disease: something spotty, fungoid, shaped like germs under the microscope.
Let us come back to the lilies. Come out of the fever-room into the garden.
We once tried to make a field of lilies. Our lowest garden has a different kind of soil fortunately from the greensand which makes the upper terrace beds such rapacious devourers of manure and fertilizers, and all the other necessary and unfragrant riches. The Signora took thought with herself and made a kind of nursery plantation at one end of the vegetable garden, to the meek despair of our gardener, who, like all other gardeners, cherishes a cabbage-patch with a passionate preference. She invested in a good three thousand bulbs, among others, hundreds of Candidums. Was it a punishment for her extravagance? Many years of life and experience have taught her that where we sin we are punished, by as inevitable a law as that of cause and effect. Or was it just the cursed spite of those wandering devils who, Indian and Irish folk alike believe, are always hovering ready to pounce upon success? Whether justice or malice, it is immaterial; the result was disaster. They had sent up straight spikes of vivid green, untouched by a trace of the horrible bilious complexion that bespeaks the prevalent disease, when the May frost came and laid them flat and seared.
After all, they would hardly have been much use in that especial spot, as far as garden perspective is concerned; and except for the hall and staircase lilies are not indoor flowers. The Signora loves the warm fragrance to gush up diffused through the house, but in any room it becomes overwhelming, almost gross. She does not even care for them pictorially at close quarters, meaning here the larger kind, including Candidum. They are essentially open-air flowers; they need the sun and the wind about them, background and space. It seems almost blasphemous to say so, but on the nearer sight their appearance becomes like their scent, a little coarse.
On an altar, once again, they assume their proper proportions; and, carved in stone, they are decorative and satisfying. But the Arum lily, which is not a lily at all, long-stemmed, in a vase, with its own gorgeous leaves about it, is something to sit and gaze at with ever-increasing content!
The nearest thing to a field of lilies the Signora ever saw was a whole gardenful at the back of a little house in Brussels. She was only a child at the time, a weary, bored, depressed small person at that, in the uncongenial surroundings of a detested private school. But one Sunday morning, for some unremembered reason, she was taken after Mass by the second mistress (an ugly, angry woman, inappropriately baptized Estelle), and brought out of the dust of the scorching street into this, to all appearance trivial, not to say sordid, little house.
“Would Mademoiselle like to look at my garden?” said its owner.