1895: Elspeth Mallard
Fragment of a letter to Jeanne d’Anatis
It is a bright afternoon here, though a mischievous wind has decided that no parasol shall remain obedient for long. The gooseberry bushes shake as though whispering secrets, and the ducks look scandalised, as they always do when the weather behaves like an unchaperoned guest. It is a most suitable day, therefore, to write to you about Mrs Pond’s latest lecture, which was as seasonal in spirit as her name promises, and nearly as pastoral as spring itself.
I shall not attempt to recount her argument—one cannot really “summarise” Mrs Capability Pond; she grows everywhere at once—but she left us feeling delightfully cross-fertilised in mind. Afterwards we all went out to the garden, where chairs had been placed in a semicircle around the sundial, and Mrs Pond presided like a benevolent deity of conversation. Tea appeared miraculously upon a long table adorned with strawberries, sponge cake, and two enormous jugs of cream. She announced, with that characteristic twinkle, that philosophy is far more digestible when taken with cream. Everyone laughed, and it was the first time I can recall a philosophical statement which no one wished to dispute.
The scene would have amused you, Maman: nine young women attempting dignity while simultaneously juggling teacups, parasols, and metaphors. Miss Anstruther dropped her plate onto the lawn but insisted it was an experiment in gravity. Miss Fielding compared sponge cake to empiricism—soft at first, then mysteriously firm upon reflection. Mrs Pond encouraged the nonsense with perfect seriousness, occasionally interrupting with a spoon raised like a pointer to declare that ideas, like cream, must not be over-whipped.
I think I enjoyed the conversation far more than the cake, though both were light enough to justify indulgence. There was something in the air—perhaps pollen, perhaps possibility—that made every topic feel somehow connected. We began with poetry and ended with poultry; I am still unsure how the transition occurred, but Mrs Pond called it “an example of creative migration.” If this is education, it is certainly more entertaining than the catalogues of Cambridge.
Yet it was the strawberries that touched me most, for they tasted of home. They had that Sussex sweetness which no Norfolk sun, however earnest, can quite imitate. One bite transported me back to the south garden and the slope by the orchard where you used to send me with a basket and a hat too large for my head. I think there is more learning in that memory than in all the lectures—the lesson, perhaps, that pleasure and thought belong to the same species when recognised correctly.
After tea we wandered through the lower path, full of bees and odd correspondences between plants that Mrs Pond insists are “conversing in chlorophyll.” She speaks so naturally of communication between flowers that one begins to suspect she overhears them. By the time we returned to the house, I half believed I might wake tomorrow fluent in botany purely by association.
It was nearly six before we dispersed, and the light had softened to that peculiar lilac haze which makes every tree appear self-satisfied. I lingered a moment by the pond—her namesake—thinking how curious it is that learning and leisure are not enemies here but slow companions walking the same path. We are taught not so much what to know as how to notice. It is an agreeable discipline.
Please give my love to Papa and tell him his strawberries are producing philosophical nostalgia at inconvenient intervals. I hope the bees are thriving and that the greenhouse geraniums have not insisted on their usual melodrama. I miss the south wind and your voice at breakfast, though I am learning to appreciate the morning chorus of Norfolk crows, who, I’m convinced, disagree about everything but the hour.
You are here: States of Grace > Philosophy