There is also another frightful drawback to this first week of leafy June, and that is that it would be easier to separate Pyramus from Thisbe than the gardener from the vegetables. A constant enervating struggle goes on between us on the relative values of cabbages and roses, beans and poppies. We want the roses sprayed, we want the borders staked, we want sustenance in the shape of liquid manure and Clay’s fertilizer copiously administered to our darlings; and he wants to put in “that there other row of scarlet runners and set out them little lettuces.” And when it comes to watering: he doesn’t know, he’s sure, how he’s to get them cabbages seen to as they ought to be seen to; a deal of moisture they want, if they’re to do him any justice.
Meanwhile our terraces are panting. The climbing roses up the house—and this year they would have been glorious—are pale and brittle in petal and foliage, as if they had been actually blasted.
The master of the Villino, after due representations from the Padrona, has seen the necessity of sacrifice, and assiduously waters the garden every evening—and himself! The hose is defective; being war time we cannot afford a new one. Two jets break out at the wrong angle and take you in the eye and down the waistcoat at the most unexpected moments; and though amenable to persuasion, the Padrone’s devotion has its limits, and he positively declines the remanipulation of the tube which will bring it—after having done service in the Dutch garden—to the end of the Lily Walk. So that, as it is two yards short, the deficiency has to be made up by hand watering, and two obsolete bath-cans are produced out of the house, which seems, for some unexplained reason, easier than using the proper garden furniture. These cans are generally left, forgotten, where they were last used, unless the piercing eye of the mistress of the Villino happens to dart in that direction.
Yesterday we had visitors—in eighteenth-century parlance, a General and his Lady—and of course the two cans stood in the middle of the path, confidingly, nose to nose. Being war time nobody minded. It is the blessing and the danger of war time that nobody minds anything. And the General’s Lady, being tactful, kept her eye on the buddleia.
Death having come to the little garden and taken Adam away; and greed of gain having deprived us of Reginald Arthur in favour of the post office; and patriotism having rendered the local young man as precious as he is scarce, we were five weeks—five invaluable, irreplaceable weeks—gardenerless, odd-manless at the Villino. Nothing this year will ever restore the lost time. No amount of pulling and straining will draw the gap together.
Japhet, Adam’s successor, is worn, as the Americans say, very nearly “to a frazzle.” He is a deeply conscientious man, and peas and beans and cabbages are to him the very principles upon which all garden morality is built up. He was much grieved the other day when someone “passed a remark” on the subject of weeds in the back-garden.
Weeds! We should think there were! It was so blatantly self-evident a fact that we wondered that anyone should have thought it worth while to pass a remark upon it. But Japhet was hurt to his very soul: considering his vocation, it would perhaps be more in keeping to say—his marrow.
Professional pride is a very delicate and easily bruised growth. When the Padrona was in her teens the whole of her mother’s orderly establishment was convulsed one June—a hot June it was too—because the professional pride of the family butler had been wounded by the footman’s presuming to hand a dish which it was not his business to touch. His sense of dignity was doubtless sharpened to a very fine edge by the fact that, the June weather being so hot, an unusual amount of cooling beer had been found necessary. This may seem a curious mixture of metaphors, nevertheless the facts are exact.