It must be explained that our soil--green-sand--our position--high-perched--our general tendency--sloping down-hill--make us charmingly dry and healthy, but disagree with the bulb. It is impossible to naturalize anything less hardy than the daffodil. The snowdrop declines to live with us. Therefore our autumn bulb lists were copious and varied, and the results ephemeral and lovely. This year there has been no bulb list; who could think of this completely personal and selfish gratification when it is the flower of our manhood that is being mown down out yonder? when all that can be spared must be spared to help! There is so little one can do, and so appallingly much to be done.
And inside, too, we are being pinched; not badly, not cruelly, but just as if the war monster had reached out one of its myriad hands--quite a small and rather weak one--and had hold of us, enough to nip, not to strangle.
It will not surprise any garden owner to learn that this is the year of all others in which Adam, the Villino gardener, had an “accident” with the cuttings, and that therefore those bushes of chrysanthemums, which look so well on our grey and orange landings, have not been forthcoming. Another year it would not have mattered. We should have gaily replenished the Italian pots from the local nursery, where chrysanthemums are a speciality. But as it is--we go without.
In a hundred other items the nipping fingers produce the same paralyzing result. The footman, who, we regret to say, gibbered at the thought of enlisting, and avowed to a horrified kitchen circle that he might perhaps be able to help to carry a wounded man, but face a bullet--“Never, never!”--found his post untenable in a household chiefly composed of the fair and patriotic sex. We conceived that the times demanded of us to bring the garden-boy into the house, thus reducing our establishment without inflicting hardship.
Such, however, was not the opinion of Juvenal, our eccentric butler. This strange being, from certain aspects of his character, might have been, as the Italian prelate said of a distinguished Jesuit preacher, “born in a volcano.” He is devoted to the dogs, and has a genius for settling flowers; and he has become altogether so much a part of the establishment--the _famiglia_--that the Villino would lose half its charm without him. Nevertheless, he is volcanic! And though at first he took the substitution of four-foot in buttons for six-foot in livery with an angelic resignation, Vesuvius broke forth with unparalleled vigour and frequency after a couple of weeks of the regimen. Unfortunately, Juvenal is not sustained by patriotic ardour. He deliberately avoids afflicting himself with thoughts about the war. “I never could bear, miss, to see anything that was hurt! And as for anything dying, miss, even if it was only a little animal--why, there, I couldn’t as much as look at my poor old father!” Here is his point of view as expressed tersely to the Signorina of the Villino.