Soames had taste, and Annette, if anything, had more, especially in food, so-that a better fed household could scarcely have been found.
In this bright weather, the leaves just full, the mayflower in bloom, bulbs not yet quite over, and the river re-learning its summer smile, the beauty of the prospect was not to be sneezed at. Soames on his green lawn walked a little and thought of why gardeners seemed always on the move from one place to another. He couldn’t seem to remember ever having seen an English gardener otherwise than about to work. That was, he supposed, why people so often had Scotch gardeners. Fleur’s dog came out and joined him. The fellow was getting old, and did little but attack imaginary fleas. Soames was very particular about real fleas, and the animal was washed so often that his skin had become very thin – a golden brown retriever, so rare that he was always taken for a mongrel. The head gardener came by with a spud in his hand.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Good afternoon,’ replied Soames. ‘So the strike’s over!’
‘Yes, sir. If they’d attend to their business, it’d be better.’
‘It would. How’s your asparagus?’
‘Well, I’m trying to make a third bed, but I can’t get the extra labour.’
Soames gazed at his gardener, who had a narrow face, rather on one side, owing to the growth of flowers. ‘What?’ he said. ‘When there are about a million and a half people out of employment?’
‘And where they get to, I can’t think,’ said the gardener.
‘Most of them,’ said Soames, ‘are playing instruments in the streets.’
‘That’s right, sir – my sister lives in London. I could get a boy, but I can’t trust him.’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’
‘Well, sir, I expect it’ll come to that; but I don’t want to let the garden down, you know.’ And he moved the spud uneasily.
‘What have you got that thing for? There isn’t a weed about the place.’
The gardener smiled. ‘It’s something cruel,’ he said, ‘the way they spring up when you’re not about.’
‘Mrs Mont will be down tomorrow,’ muttered Soames. ‘I shall want some good flowers in the house.’
‘Very little at this time of year, sir.’
‘I never knew a time of year when there was much. You must stir your stumps and find something.’
‘Very good, sir,’ said the gardener, and walked away.
‘Where’s he going now?’ thought Soames. ‘I never knew such a chap. But they’re all the same.’ He supposed they did work some time or other; in the small hours, perhaps – precious small hours! Anyway, he had to pay ’em a pretty penny for it! And, noticing the dog’s head on one side, he said:
‘Want a walk?’
They went out of the gate together, away from the river. The birds were in varied song, and the cuckoos obstreperous.
They walked up to the bit of common land where there had been a conflagration in the exceptionally fine Easter weather. From there one could look down at the river winding among poplars and willows. The prospect was something like that in a long river landscape by Daubigny which he had seen in an American’s private collection – a very fine landscape, he never remembered seeing a finer. He could mark the smoke from his own kitchen chimney, and was more pleased than he would have been marking the smoke from any other. He had missed it a lot last year – all those months, mostly hot – touring the world with Fleur from one unhomelike place to another. Young Michael’s craze for emigration! Soames was Imperialist enough to see the point of it in theory; but in practice every place out of England seemed to him so raw, or so extravagant. An Englishman was entitled to the smoke of his own kitchen chimney. Look at the Ganges – monstrous great thing, compared with that winding silvery thread down there! The St Lawrence, the Hudson, the Pótomac – as he still called it in thought – had all pleased him, but, comparatively, they were sprawling pieces of water. And the people out there were a sprawling lot. They had to be, in those big places. He moved down from the common through a narrow bit of wood where rooks were in a state of some excitement. He knew little about the habits of birds, not detached enough from self for the study of creatures quite unconnected with him; but he supposed they would be holding a palaver about food – worth-currency would be depressed, or there had been some inflation or other – fussy as the French over their wretched franc. Emerging, he came down opposite the lock-keeper’s cottage. There, with the scent of the wood-smoke threading from its low and humble chimney, the weir murmuring, the blackbirds and the cuckoos calling, Soames experienced something like asphyxiation of the proprietary instincts. Opening the handle of his shooting-stick, he sat down on it, to contemplate the oozy green on the sides of the emptied lock and dabble one hand in the air. Ingenious things – locks! Why not locks in the insides of men and women, so that their passions could be dammed to the proper moment, then used, under control, for the main traffic of life, instead of pouring to waste over weirs and down rapids? The tongue of Fleur’s dog licking his dabbled hand interrupted this somewhat philosophic reflection. Animals were too human nowadays, always wanting to have notice taken of them; only that afternoon he had seen Annette’s black cat look up into the plaster face of his Naples Psyche, and mew faintly – wanting to be taken up into its lap, he supposed.