<p>June 3rd.—This is such an out-of-the-way corner of the world that it
requires quite unusual energy to get here at all, and I am thus delivered
from casual callers; while, on the other hand, people I love, or people
who love me, which is much the same thing, are not likely to be deterred
from coming by the roundabout train journey and the long drive at the end.
Not the least of my many blessings is that we have only one neighbour. If
you have to have neighbours at all, it is at least a mercy that there
should be only one; for with people dropping in at all hours and wanting
to talk to you, how are you to get on with your life, I should like to
know, and read your books, and dream your dreams to your satisfaction?
Besides, there is always the certainty that either you or the dropper-in
will say something that would have been better left unsaid, and I have a
holy horror of gossip and mischief-making. A woman's tongue is a deadly
weapon and the most difficult thing in the world to keep in order, and
things slip off it with a facility nothing short of appalling at the very
moment when it ought to be most quiet. In such cases the only safe course
is to talk steadily about cooks and children, and to pray that the visit
may not be too prolonged, for if it is you are lost. Cooks I have found to
be the best of all subjects—the most phlegmatic flush into life at
the mere word, and the joys and sufferings connected with them are
experiences common to us all.</p>
<p>Luckily, our neighbour and his wife are both busy and charming, with a
whole troop of flaxenhaired little children to keep them occupied, besides
the business of their large estate. Our intercourse is arranged on lines
of the most beautiful simplicity. I call on her once a year, and she
returns the call a fortnight later; they ask us to dinner in the summer,
and we ask them to dinner in the winter. By strictly keeping to this, we
avoid all danger of that closer friendship which is only another name for
frequent quarrels. She is a pattern of what a German country lady should
be, and is not only a pretty woman but an energetic and practical one, and
the combination is, to say the least, effective. She is up at daylight
superintending the feeding of the stock, the butter-making, the sending
off of the milk for sale; a thousand things get done while most people are
fast asleep, and before lazy folk are well at breakfast she is off in her
pony-carriage to the other farms on the place, to rate the "mamsells," as
the head women are called, to poke into every corner, lift the lids off
the saucepans, count the new-laid eggs, and box, if necessary, any
careless dairymaid's ears. We are allowed by law to administer "slight
corporal punishment" to our servants, it being left entirely to individual
taste to decide what "slight" shall be, and my neighbour really seems to
enjoy using this privilege, judging from the way she talks about it. I
would give much to be able to peep through a keyhole and see the dauntless
little lady, terrible in her wrath and dignity, standing on tiptoe to box
the ears of some great strapping girl big enough to eat her.</p>
<p>The making of cheese and butter and sausages <i>excellently</i> well is a
work which requires brains, and is, to my thinking, a very admirable form
of activity, and entirely worthy of the attention of the intelligent. That
my neighbour is intelligent is at once made evident by the bright
alertness of her eyes—eyes that nothing escapes, and that only gain
in prettiness by being used to some good purpose. She is a recognised
authority for miles around on the mysteries of sausage-making, the care of
calves, and the slaughtering of swine; and with all her manifold duties
and daily prolonged absences from home, her children are patterns of
health and neatness, and of what dear little German children, with white
pigtails and fearless eyes and thick legs, should be. Who shall say that
such a life is sordid and dull and unworthy of a high order of
intelligence? I protest that to me it is a beautiful life, full of
wholesome outdoor work, and with no room for those listless moments of
depression and boredom, and of wondering what you will do next, that leave
wrinkles round a pretty woman's eyes, and are not unknown even to the most
brilliant. But while admiring my neighbour, I don't think I shall ever try
to follow in her steps, my talents not being of the energetic and
organising variety, but rather of that order which makes their owner
almost lamentably prone to take up a volume of poetry and wander out to
where the kingcups grow, and, sitting on a willow trunk beside a little
stream, forget the very existence of everything but green pastures and
still waters, and the glad blowing of the wind across the joyous fields.
And it would make me perfectly wretched to be confronted by ears so
refractory as to require boxing.</p>
<p>Sometimes callers from a distance invade my solitude, and it is on these
occasions that I realise how absolutely alone each individual is, and how
far away from his neighbour; and while they talk (generally about babies,
past, present, and to come), I fall to wondering at the vast and
impassable distance that separates one's own soul from the soul of the
person sitting in the next chair. I am speaking of comparative strangers,
people who are forced to stay a certain time by the eccentricities of
trains, and in whose presence you grope about after common interests and
shrink back into your shell on finding that you have none. Then a frost
slowly settles down on me and I grow each minute more benumbed and
speechless, and the babies feel the frost in the air and look vacant, and
the callers go through the usual form of wondering who they most take
after, generally settling the question by saying that the May baby, who is
the beauty, is like her father, and that the two more or less plain ones
are the image of me, and this decision, though I know it of old and am
sure it is coming, never fails to depress me as much as though I heard it
for the first time. The babies are very little and inoffensive and good,
and it is hard that they should be used as a means of filling up gaps in
conversation, and their features pulled to pieces one by one, and all
their weak points noted and criticised, while they stand smiling shyly in
the operator's face, their very smile drawing forth comments on the shape
of their mouths; but, after all, it does not occur very often, and they
are one of those few interests one has in common with other people, as
everybody seems to have babies. A garden, I have discovered, is by no
means a fruitful topic, and it is amazing how few persons really love
theirs—they all pretend they do, but you can hear by the very tone
of their voice what a lukewarm affection it is. About June their interest
is at its warmest, nourished by agreeable supplies of strawberries and
roses; but on reflection I don't know a single person within twenty miles
who really cares for his garden, or has discovered the treasures of
happiness that are buried in it, and are to be found if sought for
diligently, and if needs be with tears. It is after these rare calls that
I experience the only moments of depression from which I ever suffer, and
then I am angry at myself, a well-nourished person, for allowing even a
single precious hour of life to be spoil: by anything so indifferent. That
is the worst of being fed enough, and clothed enough, and warmed enough,
and of having everything you can reasonably desire—on the least
provocation you are made uncomfortable and unhappy by such abstract
discomforts as being shut out from a nearer approach to your neighbour's
soul; which is on the face of it foolish, the probability being that he
hasn't got one.</p>
<p>The rockets are all out. The gardener, in a fit of inspiration, put them
right along the very front of two borders, and I don't know what his
feelings can be now that they are all flowering and the plants behind are
completely hidden; but I have learned another lesson, and no future
gardener shall be allowed to run riot among my rockets in quite so
reckless a fashion. They are charming things, as delicate in colour as in
scent, and a bowl of them on my writing-table fills the room with
fragrance. Single rows, however, are a mistake; I had masses of them
planted in the grass, and these show how lovely they can be. A border full
of rockets, mauve and white, and nothing else, must be beautiful; but I
don't know how long they last nor what they look like when they have done
flowering. This I shall find out in a week or two, I suppose. Was ever a
would-be gardener left so entirely to his own blundering? No doubt it
would be a gain of years to the garden if I were not forced to learn
solely by my failures, and if I had some kind creature to tell me when to
do things. At present the only flowers in the garden are the rockets, the
pansies in the rose beds, and two groups of azaleas—mollis and
pontica. The azaleas have been and still are gorgeous; I only planted them
this spring and they almost at once began to flower, and the sheltered
corner they are in looks as though it were filled with imprisoned and
perpetual sunsets. Orange, lemon, pink in every delicate shade—what
they will be next year and in succeeding years when the bushes are bigger,
I can imagine from the way they have begun life. On gray, dull days the
effect is absolutely startling. Next autumn I shall make a great bank of
them in front of a belt of fir trees in rather a gloomy nook. My tea-roses
are covered with buds which will not open for at least another week, so I
conclude this is not the sort of climate where they will flower from the
very beginning of June to November, as they are said to do.</p>
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