Is There a Cactus in the House?
By WOLF M*NKOWITZ MY wife knows one of these women who has a wonderful sense of interior decoration with which she is always decorating everyone else's, interiors. Her own home crawls with creeping plants. The only time I was there one of the cactuses bit me on the ankle.
" The idea is," my wife told me, " to get the garden into the house."
" And get the house into the garden? " I asked. " Nothing grows in the garden anyway except that climbing stuff that lets the damp-rot into the walls. And the fungus from the damp-rot, of course." " If you get the garden into the house," my wife continued, " you have a light theme running through everywhere, and everything is sort of light and airy." " Can't we use hundred-watt bulbs and leave the windows open? " I asked. " Also, where have we got room for themes, anyway? And the boys would only neglect them. Look at the mice."
Did you ever try to stop a woman bringing light themes into the house? I was too tired to try, and within a week the place was full of them. Wherever you looked the walls were smothered with creeping insouciance and crawling caracula. Cactus obscenuni (which flourishes in darkened places) crept quietly along the wainscot, while everlasting maidenhair hung from the mobiles. These mobiles, you should understand, are tops for light-theming the house. You get sun-spots before the eyes watching them go round and round and round, and then round and round and round the other way round. We also had one of these structures which you put bits of pottery on, also useful as a towel-rail, hat-rack, and wig-stand. It was made of hundreds of matches stuck end to end. Within twenty-four hours the boys struck one of them and the house nearly went up in flames. Only the water dripping constantly on to the floors from our climbing tropical rubber-plants put it out.
" You see," my wife said, " not only beautiful but practical." After a couple of days I. began to get a little worried. I love nature as much as any cat-hater can, but it seemed to me these trailing ivy-plants were beginning to take over.
" Look, honey," I said to my wife one evening. as we sat together quietly in the boughs of a spreading magnolia tree. " Doesn't this strike you as being, honey, let me say, a little, you know, extreme? She lowered her indoor gardening book for a moment.
" What, dear? " she asked, and at once returned to the chapter on succulents. " Well," I said, " this tree in the sitting room—it's going to grow, and, after all, it's killing the parquet. Did you have to plant it in the floor? " She looked mysteriously at me through eyelashes which, though always long, never used to trail like that.
" Flowergirl," I said to her, " don't you think it would be nice for you to try and get the garden to stay in the garden for a bit? After all, nothing grows out there, and with your green fingers—" I stopped dead. She was lifting her eye- lashes out of the book to turn the page. Not only her fingers but her hands down to the wrist were bright green. ' I never thought it could happen to me. The plants were taking over, and they had to pick on my freehold as a start! Instinct to the danger, I picked up an axe and rushed to the nursery. A crawling cactus yawned over the boys innocently asleep in their pots. I was about to hack the brutes away when my younger son sat up and whistled softly. The cactus crept away into the linen cupboard like a beaten dog.
" You're always spoiling our fun, dad," the elder son said. " Sometimes I wonder if it's all worth while." He smoothed his ruffled leaves.
I rushed back hysterically to the sitting room. " What have I got here ? ' I screamed, A family of creeping jennies 7 I'll stop this crawling invasion if I have to tear the house down."
In my paroxysm my wife told me I swore and thrust my arms violently in all directions. " And you pushed it over," she said, " you broke my lovely new trailing plant. If you want to sleep, why don't you go to bed? "
" Listen to me," I told her, " if you bring another one of those monsters into the house I will poison it at once. At once."
" Evelyn has them everywhere," she replied, " they bring a light theme into the house." " My house is for living in," I shouted. " Let the light themes stay in the garden where they belong. And close all the windows. I hate fresh air."
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