Christmas Roses and Other Stories

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

This year the change in the foxgloves had come as a complete surprise; he was still a novice at gardening. He had left his beloved garden for a week; regretfully, for he could not bear to lose a day of it—he was like a lover with a bride, long pined for, who each day grows dearer and lovelier; but he had gone, because it seemed churlish to refuse the old don friend at Cambridge—and when he returned, at evening, and had walked down to the copse and had seen them standing there, so delicately yet so decisively altered, the shock of the surprise had seemed all delight. He had intended white foxgloves to rise, always, against the copse; but then he had not known how lovely pink foxgloves could be. He had never seen them of such a shade, each bell of palest rose brimmed with shadows of mauve, and finely freaked within. Regiments of the white flowers had remained steadfast, so that there could be no sense of loss, and he had picked an armful of the pink ones and carried them back to the house, feeling, as he looked at them against his shoulder, that he would have liked to kiss them. He spent the remaining hours of dusk in arranging them. He never allowed the parlourmaid to arrange the flowers. That she saw him, tolerantly, if with a flavour of irony, as a very eccentric gentleman, he was aware, just as he was aware, quite cheerfully, that many of his kind neighbours found him a rather absurd one. But one of the deepest joys this new life afforded him, after the paternal bliss of seeing the darlings grow, was in disposing them about the rooms, with a loving discrimination that Ridley’s skilled but cold and conventional hands could never have accomplished.

This evening he put the foxgloves in the drawing-room, a tall jar on the bureau, a taller jar on the piano, and a group in the vast white Chinese bowl, wedged cunningly into place with stones among the stems. Here he could look at them next morning as he worked at his history. He always worked in the drawing-room, for there he had the morning sun, and, if he could not see his massed and tiered herbaceous border, could look out at the cherry tree and at the tiny squares of terraced lawns, dropping from level to level, with their stone steps and low stone walls and narrow jewelled bordering of flowers.

There was a very nice little study behind the dining-room—it was from the dining-room that one saw the herbaceous border, and he could meditate future rearrangements and harmonies while he ate his breakfast—but the study looked out on the stable shrubberies. He liked, too, to feel himself encompassed by his treasures, old and new, while he wrote of mediæval customs; his mother’s incompetent but loveable water-colours, sketches of her old home, the grey, ancient, gabled house among just such Cotswold slopes and uplands as his western windows looked out upon, though his mother’s old home, passed long since to alien hands, lay on the other side of the county; and his father’s seafaring trophies, from China and Japan and far Pacific islands, and all the lately acquired delightful solidities of Jacobean oak, and his maturest choice in printed linen. Here, on their background of mullioned window or dark wainscoting—such a gem of a little Jacobean house it was—the pink foxgloves greeted him next morning, set among feathery heads and sharp green spears of meadow grass, glimmering and poised on tiptoe, like groups of softly blushing nymphs, and he stood for a long time looking at them, his hands clasped behind his back.

He was forty-six, a fragile little man, blanched and stooping from the long years of imprisonment in the Government office, from which the undreamed-of inheritance had released him only three years ago, with faded gold hair hanging across his forehead and a gentle face of stifled dreams, the mouth slightly puckering as if in intentness on some task. The eyes, of a dim yet dense pastel blue that told darkly in his faded face, were intent, too, but not acute; they dwelt; they did not penetrate. He wore a small, short moustache, and a pair of gold pince-nez dangled at his coat button.

Delicate as he had always been, and ineffectual, as he had always so dejectedly been aware of being, he, too, with all his relatives, had thought it very fortunate when, on leaving the university, he had secured the tiny post in the Civil Service. There, he knew, he would stay; he was not of the type that rises, and he had never during the long years that followed rebelled consciously against his fate. He was, he often told himself reproachfully, so very fortunate compared with men far abler and more deserving than himself. He found that he could not write, as he had hoped to do, after the conscientious hours at the office. He read a great deal, and crept away to the country for every week-end, sitting by meadow or river, like a dusty mouse let loose from its trap and softly panting in the sunlight. He was often ill, and the doctors always recommended a country life, but it was not on hygienic grounds that he pined for limpid spaces and starry solitudes. There was a soft passion in his blood, inherited from the mother whom he so much resembled, for the sights and sounds and occupations of rurality. He adored flowers. He often dreamed of them at night, and in waking hours the thought of a garden of his own haunted him. Sometimes he went to stay with friends in their gardens; but this was an ambiguous joy; it was like seeing the pink and white babies playing about their nurses and perambulators in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens, and having no claim to kiss any of them. He loved children, too.

And now he found himself transplanted to this wonderful fairy tale by Uncle Percy’s legacy. He still, often, could hardly realize it. There was a haze of dizzy delight over all the memory of the last three years; the search for a house, the securing of Meadows, the furnishing and ordering of his household—he who had lived in rooms in Kensington for twenty-four years, ruled over by a flawlessly honest but relentless landlady! To think that he could have other fish for breakfast than finnan haddock, and other vegetables in winter than cabbage! This was a minor but an emphatic pleasure.

But above all, around all, the garden! He had planned and planted it all, studying books, brooding over catalogues, making lists, writing labels ever so neatly. The vegetables were given over to the gardener; but his flowers, except for deep trenching—and oh, how deep, how rich, he saw to it that it was! he tended single-handed. His seed-boxes, his cold-frames, his tools and baskets, how he adored them all, and how happy he was in any small personal economies, so that extravagance in manure and bone-meal and leaf-mould should be well justified. The history of mediæval customs was also a long-cherished ideal, but it remained of secondary interest; his heart, always, was in the garden, meditating mulchings, waterings, or hoeings. Every dream had come true, had more than realized itself. Was it any wonder that he should feel himself going softly in his amazed gratitude, should sometimes, as when he listened to the willow-wren at evening, feel that such happiness was dangerous.

It had not seemed to flaw the happiness, it had seemed but to add a sweeter undertone to it, melancholy yet blissful, that into the new Paradise there should have stolen a new longing, and that, as of old, he should find himself haunted by an unattainable loveliness. He thought of this as he looked at the pink foxgloves, for they made him think of the face of Leila Pickering. “Yes, yes, yes,” he said to himself, as he turned to the mediæval history, for he had the habit, caught from his long loneliness, of speaking much to himself and with a quaint repetition of words that stole into his social speech, “it is she they are like; she they are like. Lovely, lovely, like her.”

Later in the morning, privileged as she was to interrupt even the history, it was Mrs. Pomfrey who informed him that the strange, delicate beauty was transitory, an unfixed type, and that, next year, or in a very few years, the palely rosy nymphs would be purple.

“They’ll revert. You can get pink ones, you know, from the seedsmen; rosy carmine they call it; but not at all this colour. I’ve never seen a colour quite like this. Your soil must do it. I’ve always thought the soil of Meadows had magic in it.”