There are, no doubt, advantages attached to the simple life.  It is decidedly easier to deal with your drawback when you do not have to pretend it has no existence.  You can enlist help from outside if you can go boldly to veterinary surgeons and others, and say that whisky is your father’s weakness, and would they please oblige and gratify you by not offering him any.

CHAPTER XVII

NARCISSUS TRIANDRUS STRIATUM, THE GOOD COMRADE

The winter wore away; a very long winter, and a very cold one to those at the cottage who were used to the mild west country.  But at last spring came; late and with bitter winds and showers of sleet, but none the less wonderful, especially as one had to look to see the tentative signs of its coming.  March in Marbridge used to mean violets and daffodils, tender green shoots and balmy middays.  March here means days of pale clean light and great sweeping wind which chased grey clouds across a steely sky, and stirred the lust for fight and freedom in men’s minds and set them longing to be up and away and at battle with the world or the elements.  This restlessness, which those who have lost it call divine, took possession of Julia that springtime, and a dissatisfaction with the simple life and its narrow limits beset her.  Surely, she found herself asking, this was not the end of all things—­this cottage to be the limit of her life and ambitions; her work to grow cabbages and eat them, to keep her father in the paths of temperance and sobriety, and to make Johnny’s closing days happy?  The March winds spoke vaguely of other things; they whispered of the life she had put from her; the big, wide, moving, thinking, feeling life which would have been living indeed.  Worse, they whispered of the man who had offered it to her, the man whom her heart told her she would have made friend and comrade if only circumstances had allowed him to make her wife.  But she thrust these thoughts from her; she had no choice, she never had a choice; now less if possible than before, there was no heart-aching decision to make.  The work she had taken up could not be put down; she must go on even if voices stronger and more real than these wind ones called her out.

One day the crocuses which Mijnheer had sent came into flower; Julia thought she had never seen anything so beautiful as the little purple and golden cups, partly because they had been sent in kindness of heart, partly, no doubt, because she had grown them herself, and she had never grown a flower which had its root in the inarticulate joy of all things at the first flowering of dead brown earth and monotonous lifeless days.  The next event in her calendar, and Johnny’s, was the blooming of the fruit trees.  She had seen hillside orchards in the west country break into a foam of flower—­a sight perhaps as beautiful as any England has to show.  But, to her mind, it did not compare with the sparse white bloom which lay like a first hoar frost on her crooked trees and showed cold and delicate against the pale blue sky.  After that, nearly every day, there was something fresh and interesting for Mr. Gillat and Julia, so that the March wind was forgotten, except in the ill-effect on Captain Polkington with whom it had disagreed a good deal, both in health and temper.