“Mopincosa juicyflorum. (English hibiscus); orange, scarlet, and blue; very prolific; suitable for damp waste places where soil occurs rarely; flowers all the year round.”
All this is just the cookery-book trick in another form. The people who write these books evidently form a ring, like oil magnates and deceivers of that sort; they monopolise the cooking and gardening that is done, and then they send out misleading literature telling us how simple it all is and getting us to buy their wares. I bought what the seedsmen’s lists called “strong hardy plants” of all sorts of beautiful things that were guaranteed to flower freely in damp waste places. Mullins and I planted them, and that was the last we heard of them. The places we chose were quite damp enough; I am sure about that. Of course Mullins made it a point of honour to disapprove of everything I planted—one must expect that of any gardener—but in fact his were not any more successful than mine, and they cost more to buy. My private opinion is that on the night after I sowed any seeds Mullins came out with a small lantern, collected the soil, sifted it, and made Quaker oats for his breakfast next morning out of my godetia and poppy. I have read that mandragora or poppy is a powerful drug, and I suspect that is partly what is the matter with Mullins.
We put in bulbs, too, which no doubt he stuffs with some savoury compound and finds an excellent substitute for onions, and more digestible; either that, or else the entire gardening trade is riddled with the direct descendants of Ananias, and that seems almost too sweeping a statement to be credible. I prefer the Mullins’ meals hypothesis.
At present I have quite a bright little garden, and this is the plan on which I have achieved it. I have a border of stuffed cats down one side; they are of various sizes, and their glass eyes make a bright spot of colour amongst the misty duns and greys of their outer coatings; they are perennial, and not easily dashed by rain. Down the other side I have spread a wide border of coarse red flannel, and on this I contrive to raise quite a number of little evergreens. In the round beds (where the efficient female tells me there is nothing to prevent my having a capital show of roses) I have planted a nice lot of aspidistras. James has a friend who owned an aspidistra which he sent to a cold-storage place with a van-load of furniture when he went abroad for five years. The aspidistra was not valuable, and he did not much care if he never saw it again. But it was all right when he came back, and had put out a number of green shoots.
My third contrivance in the greenhouse where I have some plants is to put up wire netting to keep off Mullins. He used to go in there two or three times a day “just to give a look round,” as he called it, and after his visits it was impossible to keep anything alive except large families of green fly, which he seemed to bring with him. I had quite a promising collection there one week—some geraniums, a fuchsia or two, a hardy palm, and the remains of a good rose: it was nothing like dead when I left it that morning at ten o’clock. At twelve Mullins humped up the iron stair which leads to the greenhouse, spat once on the floor, exclaimed “Hum! ha! ho!” in a loud voice, and sent a message by Clara asking me for four-and-sixpence. By the afternoon there was not a living plant in the place, and the air was thick with green fly.
I once counted the number of pests (exclusive of Mullins) which I collected from the greenhouse and garden. I used to scrape balls of animated grey fluff off the staging and bottle different specimens of the attenuated orange and black works of the Almighty which I caught skating in and out of the soil, either on their stomachs, or with a pianola-like flexibility of touch on an unnecessary number of legs. I sent all these specimens to a friend at the University, and some of them turned out to be very rare and quite unusually destructive. There were forms of fungus, too, in the greenhouse that were quite pretty but very infectious, and were really animals—at least I think that was what he said—and I am absolutely certain that they were all brought by Mullins. He still comes, and I still pay him four-and-sixpence a week, because he keeps out other Mullinses. And I have learned now, as I said, to stop him from doing any active harm; I let him trundle the mowing machine when I am out, and talk to the cook, and at Christmas-time he dirties the house with large bunches of sooty holly, but it all makes for what the servants call “nice feeling.”
CHAPTER VII: THE DOCTOR
James had often said that we must get to know of a good doctor whom we could call in if either of us was ill; but neither of us was ill, and we put off our inquiries until it was too late. Mrs. Beehive called one day, boasting that she had just recovered from influenza and really had no business to be out. Within forty-eight hours I wished she had never been born, and James brought a captive gentleman in spectacles to my bedside.
He held counsel with my inner works through the usual formulæ and then rang for hot water. While Clara was bringing it he adjusted his spectacles, put his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the mantelpiece.
“Fond of Alpine climbing?” he asked.