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Title: The crow's-nest

Author: Sara Jeannette Duncan

Release date: May 9, 2024 [eBook #73588]

Language: English

Original publication: Dodd, Mead and Company: New York

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CROW'S-NEST ***





The Crow’s-Nest




  The Crow’s-Nest

  By
  Mrs. Everard Cotes
  (_Sara Jeannette Duncan_)

  Author of “An American Girl in London,”
  “A Social Departure,” etc.

  [Illustration]

  New York
  Dodd, Mead and Company
  1901




  COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY
  DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

  UNIVERSITY PRESS · JOHN WILSON
  AND SON · CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.




_The Crow’s-Nest_




CHAPTER I


There is an attraction about carpets and curtains, chairs and sofas,
and the mantelpiece which is hard to explain, and harder to resist. I
feel it in all its insidious power this morning as I am bidding them
farewell for a considerable time; I would not have believed that a
venerable Axminster and an arm-chair on three casters could absorb
and hold so much affection; verily I think, standing in the door, it
was these things that made Lot’s wife turn her unlucky head. Dear me,
how they enter in, how they grow to be part of us, these objects of
ordinary use and comfort that we place within the four walls of the
little shelters we build for ourselves on the fickle round o’ the
world! I have gone back, I have sat down, I will not be deprived of
them; they are necessary to the courage with which every one must face
life. I will consider nothing without a cushion, on the hither side of
the window, braced by dear familiar bookshelves, and the fender. And
Tiglath-Pileser has come, and has quoted certain documents, and has
used gentle propulsive force, and behold, because I am a person whose
contumacy cannot endure, the door is shut, and I am on the outside
disconsolate.

I would not have more sympathy than I can afterwards sustain; I am
only banished to the garden. But the banishment is so definite, so
permanent! Its terms are plain to my unwilling glance, a long cane deck
chair anchored under a tree. Overhead the sky, on the four sides the
sky, without a pattern, full of wind and nothing. Abroad the landscape,
consisting entirely of large mountains; about, the garden. I never
regarded a garden with more disfavour. Here I am to remain--but to
_remain_! The word expands, you will find, as you look into it. Man,
and especially woman, is a restless being, made to live in houses
roaming from room to room, and always staying for the shortest time
moreover, if you notice, in the one which is called the garden. The
subtle and gratifying law of arrangement that makes the drawing-room
the only proper place for afternoon tea operates all through. The
convenience of one apartment, the quiet of another, the decoration of
another regularly appeal in turn, and there is always one’s beloved
bed, for retirement when the world is too much with one. All this I am
compelled to resign for a single fixed fact and condition, a cane chair
set in the great monotony of out-of-doors. My eye, which is a captious
organ, is to find its entertainment all day long in bushes--and grass.
All day long. Except for meals it is absolutely laid down that I am
not to “come in.” They have not locked the doors, that might have
been negotiated, they have gone and put me on my honour. From morning
until night I am to sit for several months and breathe, with the grass
and the bushes, the beautiful pure fresh air. I don’t know why they
have not asked me to take root and be done with it. In vain I have
represented that microbes will agree with them no better than with
me; it seems the common or house microbe is one of the things that I
particularly mustn’t have. Some people are compelled to deny themselves
oysters, others strawberries or artichokes; my fate is not harder than
another’s. Yet it tastes of bitterness to sit out here in an April wind
twenty paces from a door behind which they are enjoying, in customary
warmth and comfort, all the microbes there are.

I have consented to this. I have been wrought upon certainly, but I
have consented. For all that, it is not so simple as it looks. It is my
occupation to write out with care and patience the trifles the world
shows me, revolving as it does upon its axis before every intelligent
eye; and I cannot be divorced from all that is upholstered and from my
dear occupation by the same decree. And how, I ask you, how observe
life from a cane chair under a tree in a garden! There is the beautiful
pure fresh air certainly, and there are the things coming up. But
what, tell me, can you extract from air beside water; and though a
purely vegetable romance would be a novelty, could I get it published?
Tiglath-Pileser has contributed to my difficulty a book of reference, a
volume upon the coleoptera of the neighbourhood, and I am to take care
of it. I am taking the greatest care of it, but I do not like to hand
it back to him with the sentiments I feel in case one fine day I should
be reduced to coleoptera and thankful to get them.

Nevertheless I have no choice, I cannot go forth in the world’s ways
and see what people are doing there, I must just sit under my tree and
think and consider upon the current facts of a garden, the bursting
buds I suppose and the following flowers, the people who happen that
way and the ideas the wind brings; the changes of the seasons--there’s
fashion after all in that--the behaviour of the ants and earwigs; oh, I
am encouraged, in the end it will be a novel of manners!

Besides, there ought to be certain virtues, if one could find them, in
_plein air_, for scribbling as well as for painting. One’s head always
feels particularly empty in a garden, but that is no reason why one
should not see what is going on there, and if one’s impressions are a
trifle incoherent--the wind does blow the leaves about--they will be on
that account all the more impressionistic.

Yet it is _not_ so simple as it looks. In such a project everything
depends, it will be admitted, upon the garden; it must be a tolerably
familiar, at least a conceivable spot. The garden of Paradise, for
instance, who would choose it as a _point de repaire_ from which to
observe the breed of Adam at the beginning of the twentieth century?
One would be interrupted everywhere by the necessity of describing
the flora and fauna; it would be like writing a botany book with
interpolations which would necessarily seem profane; and the whole
thing would be rejected in the end because it was not a scientific
treatise upon the origin of apples. Certainly, if one might select
one’s plot, the first consideration should be the geographical, and I
am depressed to think that my garden is only less remote than Eve’s.
It is not an English garden--ah, the thought!--nor a French one where
they count the seeds and the windfalls, nor an Italian one sunning
down past its statues to the blue Adriatic, nor even a garden in the
neighbourhood of Poughkeepsie where they grow pumpkins. Elizabeth in
her German garden was three thousand miles nearer to everybody than my
cane chair is at this moment. How can I possibly expect people to come
three thousand miles just to sit and talk under my pencil-cedar? So
“long” an invitation requires such confidence, such assurance!

Who indeed should care to hear about every day as it goes on under
a conifer in a garden, when that garden--let me keep it back no
longer--is a mere patch on a mountain top of the Himalayas? Not even
India down below there, grilling in the sun which is not quite warm
enough here--that would be easy with snakes and palm-trees and mangoes
and chutneys all growing round, ready and familiar; but Simla, what is
Simla? An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand
feet out of the world to be cool. Who ever leaves Charing Cross for
Simla? Who among the world’s multitudes ever casts an eye across the
Rajputana deserts to Simla? Does Thomas Cook know where Simla is? No;
Simla is a geographical expression, to be verified upon the map and
never to be thought of again, and a garden in Simla is a vague and
formless fancy, a possibility, no more.

Yet people have to live there, I have to live there; and certainly for
the next few months I have to make the best of it from the outside. If
you ask yourself what you really think of a garden you will find that
you consider it a charming place to go out into. So much I gladly admit
if you add the retreat and background of the house. The house is such
an individual; such a friend! Even in Simla the house offers corners
where may lurk the imagination, nails on which to hang a rag of fancy;
but in this windy patch under the sky surrounded by Himalayas, one
Himalaya behind another indefinitely, who could find two ideas to rub
together?

Also my cane chair is becoming most pitiably weary; it aches in every
limb. The sun was poor and pale enough; now it has gone altogether, a
greyness has blown out of Thibet, my fingers are almost too numb to
say how cold it is. The air is full of an apprehension of rain--if
it rains do you suppose I am to come in? Indeed no, I am to have an
umbrella. Uncomforted, uncomfortable fate! I wish it would rain; I
could then pity myself so profoundly, so abjectly, I would lie heroic,
still and stoic; and at the appointed time I would take my soaking,
patient person into the house with a trail of drops, pursued by Thisbe
with hot-water bottles, which I would reject, to her greater compassion
and more contrition. And in the morning it would be a queer thing if I
couldn’t produce rheumatism somewhere. Short of rain, however, it will
be impossible to give a correct and adequate impression of the bald
inhospitality of out-of-doors. They will think I want to be pitied and
admired, and Thisbe will say, “But didn’t you really enjoy it--just a
little?”

Walls are necessary to human happiness--that I can asseverate.
Tiglath-Pileser, in bringing me to this miserable point, argued that
I should experience the joys of primitive man when he took all nature
for his living-room; subtle, long-lost sensations would arise in me, he
said, of such a persuasive character that in the end I should have to
combat the temptation to take entirely to the woods. I expect nothing
of the kind. My original nomad is too far away, I cannot sympathize
with him in his embryotic preferences across so many wisest centuries.
Moreover, if the poor barbarian had an intelligent idea it was to get
under shelter, and that is the only one, doubtless, for which we have
to thank him.

The windows are blank; they think it kindest, I suppose, not to appear
to find entertainment in my situation. It is certainly wisest; if
Thisbe showed but the tip of her pretty nose I should throw it up.
The windows are blank, the door is shut, but hold--there is smoke
coming out of the drawing-room chimney! Thisbe has lighted unto
herself a fire and is now drawn up around it awaiting the tea-things.
The house as an ordinary substantive is hard enough to resist, but
the-house-with-a-fire! No, I cannot. Besides it is already half-past
four and I was to come in at five to tea. I will obey the spirit and
scorn the letter of the law--I will go in now.




CHAPTER II


A road winds round the hill above our heads; another winds round the
hill below our feet; between is a shelf jutting out.

The principal object on the shelf is the house, but it also supports
the pencil-cedar, and the garden sits on it, and at the back the
servants’ quarters and stables just don’t slip off; so that when
Tiglath-Pileser walks about it with his hands in his pockets it looks
a little crowded. The land between the upper road and the shelf, and
the land between the shelf and the lower road is equally ours, but it
is placed at such an abrupt and uncompromising angle that we do not
know any way of taking possession of it. By surface measurement we are
doubtless large proprietors, but as the crow flies we are distinctly
over-taxed. This slanting hill-side is called the khud; there is no
real property in a khud. One always thinks of town lots as flat and
running from the front street to the back, with suitable exposure for
the washing. It just depends. This one stands on end, you could easily
send a stone rolling from the front street into the back, if you knew
which was which; and there would be rather too much exposure for the
washing. If you like you can lean up against the khud, but that is
the only way of asserting your title-deed, and few people consider it
worth doing. I may say that as soon as you tilt your property out of
the horizontal you lose control over it. Things come up on it precisely
as they like, in tufts, in suckers and in every vulgar manner, secure
and defiant it rises above your head. Tiglath-Pileser and I have
sought diligently, with ladders, for some way of bringing our khud
into subjection, but in vain. As he says we might paper it, but as I
say there are some things which persons who derive their income from
current literature simply can _not_ afford. So we are content perforce
to look at it and “call it ours,” as children are sometimes allowed
by their elders to do. The khud is God’s property but we call it ours.
Trees grow on it and it makes a more agreeable background, after all,
than other people’s kitchens.

Beyond the shelf the hill-side slopes clear from the upper road to the
lower, a stretch of indefinite jungle which flourishes, no man aiding
or forbidding. We have sometimes looked at it vaguely and thought
of potatoes, but have always decided that it was useful enough and
much less troublesome as part of the landscape. The other day the
law threatened us if Tiglath-Pileser did not forthwith declare his
boundaries in that direction, and he has since been going about with a
measuring-chain and a great pretence of accuracy; but it is my private
belief that neither he nor his neighbour will be equal to the demand.
They had better agree quickly and hatch a friendly deposition together,
and so escape whatever penalty the law awards for not knowing where
your premises leave off. Meanwhile the wild cherry and the unkempt
rhododendron grow in one accord indifferent to these foolish claims.
Such is ownership in a khud.

Our domain therefore is spread out about as much as it would hang from
a clothes-line, but the only part we really inhabit is the shelf. All
this by way of informing you honestly that the garden in which you
are invited to lighten so many long hours for me is no great place.
Here and now I abjure invention and idealization; you shall have just
what happens, just what there is, and it won’t be much. Pot-luck--you
can’t expect more from a garden on a shelf. I must admit that before
I was turned out to grow in it myself I thought it well enough, but
now I regard it critically, like the other plants. We might do better,
all of us, under more favourable conditions. We complain unanimously,
for one thing, of the lack of room. Cramped we are to such an extent
that I often feel thankful for the paling that runs along the edge and
keeps us all in. I suppose nobody ever believed that his lot gave him
proper scope for his activities in this world, but I can testify that
the wisteria which twines over the paling is pushing a middle-aged
hibiscus bush down the khud, while I, sitting here, elbow them both,
and a honeysuckle, climbing up from below has to cling with both hands
to hold on. If I invite a friend to take a walk in my garden I must
go in front declaiming and he must come behind assenting; we cannot
waste space on mere paths, and none of them are wide enough for two
people to walk abreast, except the main one to the door, which had to
be on account of the rickshaws. As it is, pansies, daisies and other
small objects constantly slip over the edge and hang there precariously
attached by the slenderest root of family affection for days. We are
all convinced in this garden, that for expansion one would not choose
a shelf, and that applies in quite a ridiculous way to Simla itself,
though perhaps it is hardly worth while, out here in the sun, to write
an essay to explain exactly how.

I would not show myself of a churlish mind; the day is certainly fine,
as fine a day as you could be compelled to sit out in. A week has
passed since I lent myself to be a spectacle of domestic tyranny and
modern science, and I hasten to announce that although I want to eat
more and to go to bed earlier I am not at all better. I have let the
week go by without taking any notice of it in this journal under the
impression that it was not worth the pains, as they say in France. It
was doubtless a wonderful week in nature, but which of the fifty-two
is not? and being certain that my fountain pen would be anything but
a source of amiability, I left it in the house. Moreover, there is
something not quite proper, one finds, in confiding an experience of
personal discomfort, undergone with the object of improving one’s
health, to the printed page; it is akin to lending one’s maladies to
an advertiser of patent medicines, and tends to give light literature
too much the character of a human document. Also, to look back upon,
the late week holds little but magnificent resolution and the sensation
of cold feet. All that need be said about it is that I have at last
arrived at the end of it, full of fortitude and resignation. I am
not at all better, but I am resigned and prepared to go on, if it is
required of me, and it seems likely to be. In fact it appears to have
occurred to nobody but myself that there was anything experimental
about this period. The whole summer is to be the experiment, I am told,
as often as if they were addressing the meanest intelligence, which is
not the case.

My sensibilities no doubt are becoming slightly blunted. A whole week
without a roof over one’s head except at night would naturally have
that tendency. I find that I am no longer a prey to the desire to go
in and look at something in the last number of _The Studio_, and the
more subtly tormented of modern novelties fails to hold my attention
for more than half-an-hour at a time. The spirit in my feet that would
carry me indoors has still to be bound down, but it has grown vague
and purposeless and might lead me anywhere, even to the kitchen to
see if the cook is keeping his saucepans clean, the most detestable
responsibility of my life. Now that I am a close prisoner outside the
house, by the way, it shall be delegated to Thisbe. That is no more
than right.

It was not worse than I expected, and it was a little less bad, let
me confess, than I described it to my family. I can now sympathize
with the youthful knight of the middle ages at the end of his first
night’s ghostly vigil in the sanctuary,--if the rest are no worse than
this they can be got through with. I am certainly on better terms with
nature, as he was on better terms with the skeleton in the vault,
apprehending with him in that neither of them was really calculated to
do us any harm. He no doubt lost his superstitions as I am losing my
finer feelings; whether one is sufficiently compensated for them by a
vulgar appetite and a tendency to drowsiness immediately after dinner
is a question I should like to discuss with him.

For one thing I am beginning to make acquaintance with the Days and
to know them apart, not merely as sunny days, dull days, windy days
and wet days, as they are commonly unobserved and divided, but in the
full and abundant personality which every one of the three hundred
and sixty-five offers to the world that rolls under it. To me also,
a very short time ago, the day was a convenient arrangement for
making things visible outside the house, accompanied by agreeable or
disagreeable temperatures; a mere condition monotonously recurrent
and quite subordinated to engagements. To live out here enveloped by
it, dependent on it, in a morning-to-night intimacy with it, is to
know better. The Day is a great elemental creature left in charge of
the world for as long, every twenty-four hours, as she can see it. No
one day is the same as another; those of the same season have only a
family likeness. They express character and temperament, like people,
and if you elect to live with them, to throw yourself, as it were,
upon their better nature with no other protection than an umbrella, it
just makes all the difference. Some were tender and sweet-tempered, I
remember, some were thoughtful, with a touch of gloom, one was artist
with a firm hand and a splendid palette. And among all the seven I did
not dislike a single Day, which is remarkable when one thinks of the
abuse one is so apt to let fall, from the inside of a window, about
what our common little brains call “the weather.” There is no weather,
it is a poor and pointless term, there is only the mood of a day, and
however badly it may serve our paltry ends it is bound at least to be
interesting. When one reflects upon how little this great thing is
regarded and how constantly from behind glass, by miserable men, one is
touched with pity for the ingratitude of the race, and astonishment at
the amount of personal superiority to be acquired in a week. Day unto
day uttereth speech, swinging a lantern; it is the business of night
to wait. Day after day, too spiritual to be pagan, too sensuous to be
divine, speeds out of time into the eternity where planets are served
in turn. Behold, in spite of all their science, I show you a mystery,
high and strange whether the sun is in his tabernacle or the clouds are
on the hills. But it is there always, you can see it for yourself. Go
out into the garden, not for a stroll, but for a day.

The week has brought me--and how can I be too grateful--a new and
personal feeling about this exquisite thing that passes. Waking in the
blackness of the very small hours I find a delicate gladness in the
thought of the far sure wing of the day. Already while we lie in the
dark it brushes the curve of the world in that far East which is so
much farther, already on a thousand slopes and rice fields the grey
dawn is beginning, beginning; and sleeping huts and silent palaces
stand emergent, marvellously pathetic to the imagination. Even while
I think, it is crisping the sullen waves of the Yellow Sea; presently
some outlying reef of palms will find its dim picture drawn, and then
we too, high in the middle of Hindostan, will swing under this vast and
solemn operation. With that precision which reigns in heaven our turn
will also come, and in my garden and over the hills will walk another
day.




CHAPTER III


There is a right side and a wrong side to the mountain of Simla, for
it was a mountain eight thousand feet high and equally important long
before it became the summer headquarters of the Government of India,
and a possible pin-point on the map. These mountains run across the tip
of India, you will remember, due east and west, so that if you live on
one of them you are very apt to live due north or south. On the south
side you look down, on a clear day, quite to the plains, if that is
any advantage; you see the Punjab lying there as flat as the palm of
your hand and streaked with rivers, and the same sun that burns all
India bakes down upon you. On the north side you have turned your back
on Hindostan and sit upon the borders of Thibet, a world of mountains
bars your horizon, a hermit Mahatma might abide with you in his ashes
and have his meditations disturbed by no thought of missionaries or
income tax. Your prospect is all blue and purple with a wonderful edge
sometimes of white; cool winds blow out of it and fan your roses on the
hottest day. Out there is no-man’s-land, where the coolies come from,
or perhaps the country of a little king who wears his crown embroidered
on his turban, and in India who recks of little kings? Out there are no
Secretariats, no Army Headquarters, no precedence, probably very little
pay, but the vast blue freedom of it! And all expanded, all extended
just at your front door. * * * * *

The asterisks stand for the time I have spent in looking at it. Freely
translated they should express an apology. I find it one of the
pernicious tendencies of living on this shelf that my eyes constantly
wander out there taking my mind with them, which at once becomes no
more than a vacant mirror of blue abysses. I look, I know, immensely
serious and thoughtful, and Thisbe, believing me on the tip of some
high imagination goes round the other way, whereas I am the merest
reflecting puddle with exactly a puddle’s enjoyment of the scene. There
is neither virtue nor profit in this, but if I apologized every time
I did it these chapters would be impassable with asterisks. Thisbe’s
method is much more reasonable; she takes her view immediately after
she takes her breakfast. Coming out upon the verandah she looks at it
intelligently, pronounces it perfectly lovely or rather hazy, returns
to her employments, and there is an end to the matter. One cannot
always, in Thisbe’s opinion, be referring to views. I wish I could
adopt this calm and governed attitude. I should get on faster in almost
every way. It is my ignominious alternative to turn my back upon the
prospect and look up the khud.

Into my field of vision comes Atma, doing something to a banksia
rose-bush that climbs over a little arbour erected across a path
apparently for the convenience of the banksia rose-bush. Atma would
tell you, protector of the poor, that he is the gardener of this
place; as a matter of feet his relation to it is that of tutelary deity
and real proprietor. I have talked in as large a way as if it belonged
to Tiglath-Pileser because he pays for the repairs, but I should have
had the politeness at least to mention Atma, whose claims are so much
better. So far as we are concerned Atma is prehistoric; he was here
when we came and when we have completed the tale of _one_ years of
exile and gone away he will also be here. His hut is at the very end of
the shelf and I have never been in it, but if you asked him how long
he has lived there he would say, “Always.” It must make very little
difference to Atma what temporary lords come and give orders in the
house with the magnificent tin roof where they have table-cloths; some,
of course, are more troublesome than others, but none of them stay. He
and his bulbs and perennials are the permanent undisputed facts; it is
unimaginable that any of them should be turned out.

I am more reconciled to my fate when Atma is in the garden, he is
something human to look at and to consider, and he moves with such
calm wisdom among the plants. He has a short black curling beard
that grows almost up to his high cheek-bones, and soft round brown
eyes full of guileless cunning, and a wide and pleasant smile. He
is just a gentle hill-man and by religion a gardener, but with his
turban twisted low and flat over his ears he might be any of the Old
Testament characters one remembers in the pictured Bible stories of
one’s childhood. Something primitive and natural about him binds him
closely to Adam in my mind. It was with this simplicity and patience,
I am sure, that the original cultivator tied up his banksias and saved
his portulaca and mignonette after the fall, when he had something to
do beside come to his meals. I am not the only person; everybody to
whom it is pointed out notices at once how remarkably Atma takes after
the father of us all. I have often wished to call him Adam because of
his so peculiarly deserving it; but Tiglath-Pileser says that profane
persons, knowing that he could not have received the name at his
baptism, might laugh and thus hurt his feelings. So he is Atma still.
It is near enough.

He is also patriarchal in his ideas. This morning he came to us upon
the business of Sropo. Sropo, he said, wished for six days’ leave in
order to marry himself. “But,” said I, “this is not at all proper.
Sropo went away last year to marry himself. How shall Sropo have two
wives?”

“Nā,” replied Atma, with his kindly smile, “that was Masuddi. Masuddi
has now a wife and a son has been,[1] and his wages are so much the
less. Also without doubt this Sropo could not have two wives.”

“Certainly not,” said Tiglath-Pileser, virtuously.

“Sropo is of my village,” Atma explained, genially, “and we folk are
all poor men. More than one wife cannot be taken. But if we were rich
like the Presence,” he went on, gravely, “we would have five or six.”

Tiglath-Pileser shook his head. “You would be sorry,” said he. “It
would be a mistake,” but only I saw the ambiguity in his eye.

“It is not your Honour’s custom,” returned Atma, simply. “Sropo, then,
will go?”

“Call Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser. “It is a serious matter, this of
wives.”

Round the corner of the verandah came Masuddi, shy and broadly smiling,
with an end of his cotton shirt in the corner of his mouth and pulling
at it, as other kinds of children pull at their pinafores.

“Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “last year you made a marriage in your
house, and now you have a son. Er--which young woman did you marry?”

Masuddi’s smile broadened; he cast down his eyes and scrabbled the
gravel about with his foot. “Tuktoo,” he said shamefacedly.

“Well, there is no harm in that. What is the name of your son?”

Masuddi looked up intelligently. “How should he have a name?” he asked.
“He has not yet four months. He came with the snow. When he has a year,
then he will get a name. My padre-folk--_Brahmun_--will give it.”

“But you will say what it is to be,” I put in.

“Nā,” said Masuddi, “the padre-folk will say--to their liking.”

“Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “speak straight words--do you beat
your wife?”

“Master,” replied Masuddi, “how shall I utter false talk? When she will
not hear orders I beat her.”

“Masuddi,” said I, “straight words--do you beat her with a stick?”
Laughter rose up in him, and again he chewed the end of his garment.
“According as my anger is,” he said, half turning away to hide his
face, “so I beat her.”

“Then she obeys?”

“Then fear is and she listens. Thus it is,” said Masuddi, his face
clearing to an idea, “as we servant-folk are before your Honours, so
they-folk are before us.”

“You may go, worthy Masuddi,” pronounced Tiglath-Pileser, “and Atma may
say to Sropo, who is listening behind the water-barrel, that I have
heard the words of Masuddi and they are just and reasonable, and he
may go also and marry himself, but it must be done in six days, and it
must not occur again.”

Masuddi and Sropo are two of the four who pull my rickshaw. When I
am not taking carriage exercise they will do almost anything else,
except sew or cook, but I have discovered that the thing they really
love to be set at is to paint. In the spring the paling required a
fresh brown coat, and in a moment of inspired economy I decided that
Masuddi and his men should be entrusted with it. Never was task more
willingly undertaken. With absorption they mixed the pigment and
thewi-oil, squeezing it with their hands; with joy they laid it on,
competing among themselves, like Tom Sawyer’s schoolfellows. “Lo, it is
beautiful!” Masuddi would exclaim after each brushful, drawing back to
look at it. I think they were sorry when it was done.

Atma is of these people, and the two grooms, and Dumboo, the upper
housemaid, a strapping treasure six feet in his stockings. I would like
it better if all our servants were, but it is impossible to conceive
Sropo doing up muslin frills--at least it is impossible to conceive
the frills--and I could not ask people to eat entrées sent up by any
friend of Masuddi’s. I admit they do not altogether adapt themselves,
or even wash themselves. I have before now locked Masuddi and the
others up with a tub and a bar of kitchen soap and instructions of the
most general nature, demanding, on their release, to _see the soap_. It
was the only reliable evidence. Besides if I had not required to see
my soap, worn by honest service, they would have sold it and bought
sweetmeats and gone none the cleaner. They have many such little ways,
which few people I know consider as engaging as I do. But what I like
best is their lightheartedness and their touch of fancy. Sropo will go
to his nuptials with a rose behind his ear--where in my barbarous West
does a young man choose to approach the altar thus? and when Masuddi
courted Tuktoo upon the mountain paths in the twilight I think a shy
idyll went barefoot between them; though he, the male creature, would
make shame of it now, preferring to speak of sticks and of obedience.
They are the young of the world, these hill sons and daughters, and
they still remember how the earth they are made of stirs in the spring.
It is late evening in my garden now--there has seemed, somehow, no good
reason to go in, though one new leaf in the borders has long been just
like another--and far down the khud I hear a playing upon the flute. It
is a fragmentary air but vigorous and sweet, and it brings me, dropping
through the vast and purple spaces of the evening, the most charming
sensation. For it is not a Secretary to the Government of India who
performs, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings hosannas
over there to the Commander-in-Chief, but a simple hill-man who would
make a melody because it is spring, and he has perchance been given
leave to go and marry himself.




CHAPTER IV


People are often removed from their proper social spheres in this world
and placed in others which they think lower and generally less worthy
of them. Their distant and haughty behaviour under these circumstances
is rather, I am afraid, like my own conduct at present, down in the
world as I am and reduced to the society of a garden. I, too, have
been looking about me with contemptuous indifference, returning no
visits, though quantities of things have been coming up to see me,
and perpetually referring to the superior circles I moved in when I
knew better days and went out to dinner. You may notice, however, that
such persons generally end by condescending to the simpler folk they
come to live among; it is dull work subsisting upon the most glorious
reminiscences and much wiser to become the shining ornament of the
more limited sphere to which one may be transferred. That is the course
I am considering, for whom cards of invitation are dead letters, and
to whom the gay world up here will soon refer I have no doubt, as the
late Mrs. Tiglath-Pileser who chose so singularly to bestow her remains
in a garden, though I am really alive and flourishing there. I can
never be the shining ornament of my garden because nature intended
otherwise and there is too much competition, but I may be able to exert
an improving influence. It is not impossible, either, that I may find
the horticultural class about me more interesting than I find myself.
I have been accustomed to speak with quite the ordinary contempt of
persons who have “no resources within themselves”--in future I shall
have more sympathy and less ridicule for such. I should rather like to
know what one is expected to possess in the way of “resources” tucked
away in that vague interior which we are asked to believe regularly
pigeon-holed and alphabetically classified. We do believe it--by an
effort of the imagination--but only try, on a fine day out-of-doors, to
rummage there. Your boasted brain is a perfect rag-bag, a waste-paper
basket, a bran pie from which you draw at hazard an article value a
penny-ha’penny. This is disappointing and humiliating when both you and
your family believe that you have only to think in order to be quite
indifferent to the world and vastly entertained. “Resources” somehow
suggests the things one has read, and I know I depended largely upon
certain poets, not one of whom will come near me unless I go personally
and bring him from the bookshelves in his covers. Pope for one--why
Pope I cannot say, unless because he would blink and cough and be
fundamentally miserable in a garden--great breadths of Pope I thought
would visit me in quotation. Not a breadth. Immortals of earlier and
later periods are equally shy; I catch at their fluttering garments and
they are off, leaving a rag in my hand. Only that agreeable conceit of
Marvell’s comes and stays,

  “Annihilating all that’s made
  To a green thought in a green shade,”

and I am ashamed to look it in the face--I have positively worked it to
death.

Apply within for lofty sentiments or profound conclusions, the result
is the same: these things fly the ardent seeker and only appear when
you are not looking for them. Instead you find shreds of likes and
dislikes, the ghost of an opinion you held last week, a desire to know
what time it is. My regrettable experience is that you can explore the
recesses of your soul out-of-doors in much less than a week if you put
your mind to it, with surprise and indignation that you should find so
little there.

  “You beat your pate and fancy wit will come;
  Knock as you please, there’s nobody at home.”

Dear me, there’s Mr. Pope, and very much, as usual, to the point! No,
resources are things you can lay your hands upon, and I have come to
believe that they are all in the house.

Everything is up and showing, the garden is green with promise, but
very few things are quite ready for my kind advances; very few things
are out. What a pretty idea, by the way, in that common little word
as the flowers use it! Out of the damp earth and the green sheath,
out into the sun with the others, out to meet the bees and to snub
the beetles,--oh, _out_! When young girls emerge into the world they
too are “out”--the word was borrowed, of course, from the garden; its
propriety is plain. Thisbe, I remember, is out this season; but I do
not see anything in the borders exactly like Thisbe. Doubtless later on
her prototype will come, in June I think, unfolding a pink petal-coat.
There is no hurry; it is yet only the second week in April and these
grey mountains are still delicate and dim under the ideal touch of the
wild apricot and plum. The borders may be empty, but there is sweet
vision to be had by looking up, and just a hint of nature’s possible
purposes with a khud. It now occurs to me that there ought to be clouds
and clouds of this pink and white blossoming all about the house,
behind as well as before, on each of our several declivities,--there
ought to be and there is not. I remember now why there is not. One
crisp morning last autumn Tiglath-Pileser, who is a practical person,
was struck by the fact, though it is not a new one, that wild fruit
trees may be made to cultivate fruit by the process of grafting, and
announced his intention to graft largely. “Think,” said he, “of the
satisfaction of being able to write home to England that you are
gathering from your own trees quantities of the greengages which they
pay tenpence a pound for and place carefully in tarts!”

The proceeding had not my approval. It seemed to me that it would
be a good deal of trouble and care and thought and anxiety to grow
greengages on a khud, and we had none of these things to spare. Neither
would there be any satisfaction in gathering quantities of them when
one could buy a convenient number in the bazaar. We could not eat
them all, and it was not our walk in life to sell such things; we
might certainly expect to be cheated. We should be reduced to making
indiscriminate presents of them and receiving grateful notes from
people we probably couldn’t bear. Or possibly I, like the enterprising
heroine of improving modern fiction, would feel compelled to start a
jam factory, and did I strike him, Tiglath-Pileser, as a person to
bring a jam factory to a successful issue? At the moment, I remember,
an accumulation of greengages seemed the one thing I precisely couldn’t
and wouldn’t tolerate, but I didn’t say very much, hardly more than
I have mentioned, as the supreme argument failed to occur to me at
the time. The supreme argument, which only visits you after watching
the pink and white petals drop among the deodars for hours together,
is, of course, that if you can afford to grow fruit to look at it is
utilitarian folly to turn it into fruit to eat. So I have no doubt he
had his way.... I have been to see; it is the case. Where there should
be masses of delicate bloom there are stumps, bare attenuated stumps,
tied up in poultices with fingers sticking out of them, which I
suppose are the precious grafts. Well, the devil enters into each of us
in his own guise; I shall warn Tiglath-Pileser particularly to beware
of him in the form of a market gardener.

I cannot conscientiously pass over the rhododendrons, which are all
aloft and ablaze just now. It would be unkind and ungrateful when they
have come of their own accord to grow on my khud and make it in places
really magnificent, though they arouse in me no sentiment at all and
I had just as soon they went somewhere else. At home the rhododendron
is a bush on a lawn; here it grows into a forest tree, and when you
come upon it far out in the wilds with the sun shining through its red
clusters against the vivid blue it stands like candelabra lighted to
the glory of the Lord. I will consent to admire it in that office, but
for common human garden uses I find it a little over-superb and very
disconcerting to the apricots and plums. Also Thisbe will put it about
in bowls, and will not see that its very fitness for sanctuary purposes
makes it worse than useless on the end of a piano. To begin with, its
name is against it. Philologically speaking you might as well put a
hippopotamus in a vase as a rhododendron. Apart from that it sulks in
the house and huddles into bunches of red cotton. It misses the sun
in its veins, I suppose, and its spiky cup of leaves, and its proper
place in the world at the end of a branch. The peony, which it is a
little like, is much better behaved in a drawing-room, but then it has
a leg to stand on; we all want that. Besides, a peony is a peony, which
reminds me that I have never seen one in Simla. It seems to have been
left at home by design in the general emigration of English flowers,
like an unattractive old maid whom it was not worth while to bring.
But taste and fashion change, and I see a spot where a large bunch of
peonies would be both comfortable and delectable. It is not, after
all, only slim young things that are to be desired in society or in a
garden. Firm, fine high-coloured madames with ample skirts and ripe
experience are often much more worth cultivating.

Ah! they hold me, even in imagination, the dear old peonies! Always
they were the first, in a certain garden of early colonial fashion that
I used to know in Canada, after the long hard winter was past, to push
their red-green beginnings up into the shabby welcome of the month
of March. We used to look for them under the wet black fallen leaves
before a sign had come upon the apple-trees, before anything else
stirred or spoke at all; and how tender is one’s grown-up affection
for a thing which bound itself together like that with one’s childish
delight in the first happy vibration of the spring! Here, after all
these many springs and half across the world, here on my remote and
lofty shelf where no one lives but Aryans and officials, I want them to
come up again that way, and if they have not forgotten the joy of it
perhaps I too shall remember. Atma having no objection, I will send to
England for some peonies.

Everything is green except the forget-me-nots, they are very blue
indeed in thick borders along both sides of the drive; sweet they
look, like narrow streams reflecting the sky in the middle of the
garden. Do not gather the forget-me-not, it is a foolish inert
little nonentity in the hand, it has not even character enough for a
button-hole, but in the bosom of its family it is delightful. Atma is
very pleased with these borders; it is the first time he has had them
so long and so gay. “How excellent this season,” says he in his own
tongue, “are the giftie-noughts of we people.” I told you he was a man
of parts; it is not easy to be a poet in another language.

Also, I perceive, there are periwinkles on the khud.




CHAPTER V


It was an event this morning when Thalia came whisking along the Mall
in her rickshaw and turned in here. The Mall, I should mention, is the
only road in Simla that has a name. It is a deplorably inappropriate
name, it makes you think of sedan-chairs and elderly beaux and other
things that have never appeared upon the Himalayas, and it was
doubtless given in derision, but it has stuck fast like many another
poor old joke until at last people take it seriously and forget that
it ever pretended to be humorous. I don’t even know whether it is
more fashionable to live upon the Mall than elsewhere, or whether one
can claim to live upon it when it runs past one’s attic windows like
an elevated railway; but we have often remarked to one another that
if we cannot be said to live upon the Mall we cannot be said to live
anywhere and taken what comfort may be had out of that. Our peculiar
situation has at all events the advantage that I can always see Thalia
coming, which adds the pleasure of anticipation to her most unexpected
visit. Like most of us, Thalia arrives with the season, but it should
be added that she brings the season with her. We amuse ourselves a
good deal, for a serious community, with a toy theatre, in which we
present Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinero so intelligently that I often wonder
why neither of these playwrights has yet come out to ascertain what he
is really capable of. Thalia is our leading comedienne; you would have
guessed that by her name. She is never too soon anywhere, but I had
begun to wonder when she was coming up. “Up,” of course, means up from
the plains,--up from the Pit, as its present temperature quite permits
me to explain. April is the last month in which you can leave the Pit
without being actually scorched.

“What _are_ you doing here?” she exclaimed, half-way down the drive.
She expected, I suppose, to find me in the house trying to decide upon
the shade of this year’s cheese-cloth curtains. By the way, I have
decided--that the old ones will do. Thisbe doesn’t mind, and I’ve got
the clouds.

“Oh, I’m just here,” I said with nonchalance. There is nothing like
nonchalance to prove superiority to circumstances. “How are you?”

“Thank you,” said Thalia. “Well, come along in. I’ve got quantities of
things to talk about.”

“It is very good of you,” I returned, “to press my hospitality upon me,
but I don’t go in. I stay out. If Tiglath-Pileser saw me entering the
house at this hour,” I continued with the vulgarity which we permit
ourselves to the indulgent ear of a friend, “it would be as much as my
place is worth. But you see I have a chair ready for emergencies--pray
sit down. You are the first emergency that has arisen, I mean that has
dropped in, this year.”

When I had fully explained, as I was at once of course compelled to do,
with a wealth of detail and much abuse of Tiglath-Pileser, I was not
gratified with the effect upon Thalia. “You have simply been spending
your time out-of-doors,” said she, “a very ordinary thing to do.”

“Try it,” said I.

“And are you better?”

“I think,” I replied, “that I have possibly gained a little weight. But
I might as well admit it cheerfully, they won’t take my word against
any pair of scales.”

“That was an excellent prescription I sent you in October,” Thalia
continued reproachfully. “You haven’t given it up?”

“It has given me up,” I responded promptly, “after the first three
weeks it declined to have anything whatever to say to me. And besides,
it had to be taken in decreasing doses. Now if a thing is really
calculated to do you good it should be taken in increasing doses. That
is why I begin to have some little confidence in this out-of-doors
business. Every day I feel equal to a little more of it.”

“Well,” said Thalia, “Mrs. Lyric told me that it had made another woman
of her. And Colonel Lyric commands the 10th Pink Hussars.”

Thalia knows it annoys me to be told about a woman, with any sort of
significance, what position her husband occupies in the world, and
that is the reason she does it. I do not say that it has no weight as
a contributory fact in a general description, but I do say that an
improper amount of importance is usually attached to it. You ask what
kind of a person Mrs. Thom is, and you are told, “Oh, Mr. Thom is Chief
Secretary in the Department of Thuggi and Dacoity,” being expected
without further ado to dispose yourself to love her if she will let
you. One is always inclined to say “But she may be very nice in spite
of that,” and one only refrains because one knows how scandal grows in
Simla. And there are people in these parts, I assure you, who would run
to take a prescription because it had made another woman of the wife of
the colonel commanding the 10th Pink Hussars, no matter what kind of a
woman she had been before; but I was not going to gratify Thalia by
letting her see that I knew it.

“At all events,” I said calmly, “it had to be taken in decreasing doses
and naturally it came to an end. Are you settled in?”

“I have a roof to cover me,” said Thalia sententiously, “and for
that,” she added looking round, “I didn’t know how thankful I was. But
I am undergoing repairs. They are putting mud into the cracks of my
dwelling, paperhangers are impending, and this morning arrived three
whitewashers. I wanted to be done with it at once, so I sent for three.
I told them I was in a hurry. In one breath, they said, it should be
done, and sat down in the verandah _to make their brushes_. It’s a
fact. Of split bamboo. You can _not_ hustle the East. But I found I had
to come away.”

“How foolish it all seems!” I sighed with an eye upon the farther
hills. “Shouldn’t you like to see my pansies?”

“Yes,” she replied resignedly, “I suppose I must see your pansies,” and
where I led she followed me, still babbling of paperhangers.

It is no exaggeration to say that during the months of April, May, and
June, there are more pansies than people in this town. (Upon second
thoughts why should it be an exaggeration, since in every garden
inhabited by two or three persons there are hundreds of pansies.)
They seem to like the official atmosphere, doubtless in being so high
and dry it suits them; at all events they adapt themselves to it with
less fuss than almost any other flower. And certainly they could teach
individuality to most of our worthy bureaucrats, who have a way of
coming up, they, exactly like each other. Pansies from the same parent
root naturally look alike, but if you really scan their features there
is not the least resemblance between families. I have been living
principally in their fellowship for several days and I quite feel
that my knowledge of human nature is extended. There never was such
variety of temperament in any community; to describe it would be to
write a list of all the adjectives yet invented to bear upon character,
a tedious task. It is positively a relief after the slight monotony
of a society in which everybody is paid by the Queen, to meet persons
like pansies, who aren’t paid by anybody, and who express themselves,
in consequence, with the utmost facility and freedom. (Thalia, who is
the wife of the Head of a Department, here interrupted me to ask what I
could possibly mean.) Oh there is no charm like spontaneity, in idea,
behaviour, or looks. The Dodos of London society triumph by it, while
self-conscious people of vast intellectual resources are considered
frumps.

I imparted all this to Thalia, and she agreed with me.

You see these things in a pansy, and a great deal more--station in
life, religious convictions almost--but try to focus your impression,
try to analyze the blooming countenance that looks up into yours,
and the result is fugitive and annoying. Not a feature will bear
inspection; instantly they vanish, magically, as if ashamed of the
likeness you look for, and leave you contemplating just a flower, with
petals. You have noticed that in a pansy. It is better, if you wish
to enjoy yourself among them, to take them with a light and passing
regard, and privately add them to the agreeable things of life that
will not bear looking into.

I here asked Thalia if she thought they did better from seeds or from
roots, and she said she didn’t know.

One often hears the German language complimented on its pretty name for
pansies, _Stiefmütterchen_, but it is very indiscriminating. They are
by no means all little stepmothers; some of them wear beards and I wish
they wouldn’t, for a beard is a loathly thing in nature or on men. Also
the personation that goes on among them is really reprehensible; one
can find pansy photographs of any number of people. One irascible and
impossible old retired colonel in England is always appearing, to my
great satisfaction and delight. The original would be so vastly annoyed
to know how often he comes out to see me here, and how amiable and
interesting I find him, for we are not good friends, and I am sure he
would not dream of calling in the flesh. It is an old story among us,
but I was surprised to find Atma, too, impressed with this likeness to
the human family. I asked him the other day why some pansies were so
big and others so little. He considered for a moment and then he said
with the smiling benevolence which we extend to the intelligence of the
young, “Like people they come--some are born to be large and some to be
small. As Sropo and Masuddi.” Atma is really the interpreter of this
garden.

Thalia again interrupted me to ask why it was not possible this season,
when purple was so popular, to find in the shops anything as royal as
the colour a certain pansy was wearing. I said the reason was probably
lost in science, but she immediately supplied it herself, as I have
noticed my sex is prone to do in searching for general explanations.
“Of course,” she said, “one must remember that they grow their own
clothes. If we could only do that! The repose of being quite certain
that nobody else had your pattern!”

“They would take too long,” I objected. “This poor thing has spent
three-quarters of her life making her frock, and now she can only wear
it for about three days.”

But Thalia seemed pleased with the idea. “Think how original I could
make my gowns in _Lady Thermidore_,” she said pensively.

“And you would perish with your design!” I exclaimed.

“No,” she cried luminously, “I should reappear in another character!”

I have often noticed how radical is the effect of play-acting upon
the human mind. Your play-actress throws herself naturally into every
character she meets. I could see that it was giving Thalia hardly any
trouble to transform herself into a pansy.

We went back to the chairs and sat down, but not for long. Consulting
her watch, my friend announced that she must be off, she was going to
lunch at Delia’s. “At Delia’s!” I remarked. “How people are swallowed
up in their houses, to be sure! You would be more polite to say ‘at
Delia.’ It’s bad habit, this living in houses.”

“I think,” she responded, “that you are losing your social graces. I
had quantities of things to tell you, and I am taking them away untold.
The garden is too vague a place to receive in. However, never mind, I
will try to come again. Your flowers are charming, but it has not been
what I call a satisfactory visit. I hope I haven’t bored you.”

“How can you say so!” I cried; “I have enjoyed it immensely,” and I
tucked her affectionately into her rickshaw and sped her on her way.
When she had well started I remembered something, and ran after her.

“Well?” she demanded, all interest and curiosity.

“It was only to ask you,” I said breathlessly, “if you had noticed what
a large number of pansies look like Mr. Asquith?”




CHAPTER VI


It is a dull and serious day. As my family declare that I have become
a mere barometer of my former self, this will perhaps be, but I am not
certain, a dull and serious chapter. There are no clouds, there is
only a prevailing opaqueness, which shuts down just beyond the nearest
ranges, letting through an unpleasant general light that makes the
place look like a bad, hard, lumpish study in oils. The stocks, which
have come out very elegantly since last week, have a disappointed air
and the pansies are positively lugubrious. Only the tall field-daisies
and the snapdragons seem not to mind. They plainly preach and as
plainly practise the philosophy of flowers taking what they can get
in the hope of better things. Like most philosophers in a small way,
however, they are not over-distressed with sensibility on their own
part, and I cannot see why they should take it upon themselves to cheer
up any of the rest of us.

I have asked Sropo whether it is going to rain. “Mistress,” he replied,
“how should I know?” “Worthy one,” said I, “you have lived in these
parts for twenty years. What manner of owl are you that to you it does
not appear whether or not it will rain?” “Mistress,” quoth he, with his
throaty chuckle, “the rajah-folk themselves do not know this thing.”

I do not think, myself, that we shall have anything so pleasant as
rain. The day is too dispirited for weeping; it will perform its
appointed task and go to bed. I have not in months encountered a
circumstance, an associate or a prescription so lowering as the present
morning. Coming out as usual, quite prepared to be agreeable, it has
given me the cold shoulder and the sulky nod. For two pins I would go
back into the house and take every flower I could gather with me.

Cometh the postman, advancing down the drive. Always an interest
attaches to the postman; he is like to-morrow, you never know what
he may bring, but he loses half his charm and all his dignity when
deprived of his rat-tat-tat. Government makes up for it to some
extent by dressing him in a red flannel coat with a leather belt
and bare legs, but he can never acquire his proper and legitimate
warning for the simple reason that the houses of this country have
neither knockers nor bells. How sharply different are the ways in
which people account for themselves in this world! It is one of the
poignancies of life. This Punjabi postman earns his living by putting
one foot before another--it comes to that--in the diverse interests
of the community, and you never saw anybody look more profoundly
bored with other people’s affairs. I earn mine--or would if it were
not for Tiglath-Pileser--by looking carefully in the back of my head
for foolish things to write about a garden. It is a method so much
pleasanter that my compassion for the postman has a twinge of scruple
in it for my lighter lot. That I had nothing in the world to do with
the arrangement does not somehow make me quite happy about it--the fact
is that to be logical is not always to be happy. I can only hope that
if the postman and I meet again in the progress of eternity I shall
find him composing poems.

He has brought nothing to speak of, only the daily newspaper published
at Lahore. That in itself is sufficiently curious, to live in a place
where the morning paper is published at Lahore. Still stranger, to the
western mind, may be the thought--of a journal produced in Allahabad.
Allahabad, as a centre of journalistic enterprise, has the glamour of
comic opera. Yet Allahabad has its newspaper, and they print it very
nicely too. However, it would be ridiculous to write an essay upon
Indian journalism merely because a Punjabi postman has brought in a
newspaper.

That a day like this should sound another minor note is almost a thing
to cry out against, yet it is on such days that they rise and swell
in a perfect diapason of misery. When the sun withdraws itself from
the human consciousness things come up, I suppose, from underneath. In
the gaiety of yesterday perhaps I should not have seen the coolie with
the charcoal; he would have passed naturally among the leaf-shadows, a
thing to be taken for granted. To-day he hurts. His bag of charcoal is
deplorably heavy; he bends forward under it so far that he has to lift
his head to see beyond him, and every muscle strains and glistens to
carry it. His gait under his load is slow and uncertain and tentative,
and I know it has brought him to the wrong house; we are supplied for
months with charcoal.

He has stopped to ask, and I find that he has come quite a mile out of
his way to this mistake. With patience and submission when I explained,
he shifted his load and turned from me toward the deferred relief, the
further limit. The human beast of burden is surely the summing-up of
pathos--free and enviable are all others compared with him. So heavy a
toil fills one with righteous anger against the inventor, so primitive
a task humiliates one for the race. Niggardly, niggardly is the
heritage of Adam’s sons. I must see that man straighten his back....
There is no harm done; you cannot have too much charcoal.

One questions, on such a day, whether it is quite worth while, this
attempt by the assistance of nature to live a little longer. I myself
am almost convinced that persons afflicted with the gift of sympathy
would be wise to perish easily and soon, and should be willing to do
so, instead of throwing themselves in the lap of the mother of us all
beseeching a few more years and promising to be very, very good and try
to deserve them. Why protract, at the expense of upsetting all your
habits and customs, an acute sense of undeserved superiority to coolies
and postmen; why by taking infinite pains and indefinite air prolong
existence based on such a distressing perception, when by going on with
almost any good prescription you are pretty certain reasonably soon
to take your comfortable place in the only democracy which, so far as
we know, is a practical working success? For there is neither class
nor competition nor capital, nor any kind of advantage in the grave
whither thou goest, but one indisputable dead level of condition and
experience, with peace and freedom from the curse of evolution; not
even the fittest survive.

Comfortable persons like, oh several I could mention, who have no way
of walking with another postman’s legs or bending with another coolie’s
back and who cannot understand why this should be called a distressful
world which provides them regularly with tea and muffins, should go on
naturally, to the end. They have their indifferent prototypes among the
vegetables; though I have noticed that most flowers look with the eye
of compassion upon life. They follow the simple lines upon which they
were created, by which to live and not to observe is the chief end of
man; there are a great many of them, thousands, in their protective
skins all over the world; and they are only interesting of course to
each other. Nevertheless no one should speak slightingly of them, for
we all number them among our friends and relations, and constantly
go and stay with them. Besides, I did not set out to be disagreeable
at anybody’s expense. It was only borne in upon me that for us, the
unhappy minority who have two sets of nerves, one for our own use and
one at the disposal of every human failure by the wayside, the world
is not likely to become a pleasanter place the longer one stays in it.
If continual dropping will wear away a stone, continual rubbing will
wear away a skin, and happy is he or she, after sixty or seventy years’
contact with the misery of life, who arrives at the grave with a whole
one.

I do not deny that there are poultices. One of them is a thing
Tiglath-Pileser sometimes says--that it is stupid to talk about the
aggregate of human woe, since all the pain as well as all the pleasure
of the world is summed up in the individual and limited by him. A
battle is really no more than the killing of a soldier, a famine is
comprised in a death by starvation. The unit of experience refuses to
merge in the mass; you cannot multiply beyond one. I do not think much
of this emollient, but such as it is I will apply it if another coolie
comes in with charcoal.

Seriously speaking, when your time comes--I hope this makes nobody
uncomfortable, but I never can understand why one should shirk the
subject instead of regarding it with the interest and curiosity it
naturally inspires--when your time goes, rather, and leaves you
confronted with that vast eternity so full of unimaginably agreeable
possibilities, which of all the parts and members that make up you,
shall you be most sorry to relinquish? I do not refer to obscure organs
such as the heart and lungs, which you never notice except when they
are giving trouble, but the willing agents by which you keep in touch
with the world. I am very fond of them all, I am so accustomed to
their ways and they know so exactly what I like; I could not dismiss
any of them without regret, but I find degrees in the distressful
anticipation. One’s eyes, for instance, have given one more and keener
pleasure certainly, than any other organ; but I could close my eyes.
One’s ears have registered all the voices one loves, and the sound of
rain and the wind among the pines, but there is such a din in this
world besides that very gladly I could close my ears. One’s feet have
been most willing servitors, but one sees so little of them--would you
recognize a photograph of your own foot? For me it is the most grievous
thing to think that one will be obliged to abandon one’s hands. One’s
hands are more than servants, they are friends. One holds them in
respect and admiration and personal affection, and in the end is not
what we write upon them the very summing-up of ourselves? And from the
first spoon they carry to our infant lips to the adult irritation they
work off by tapping on the table how much they have done for one! Above
all things I shall miss my hands if I have to do without them, and I
shall be profoundly resentful, though I may not show it, when somebody
else takes the liberty of folding them for me.

Thisbe, coming out to say that she has neuralgia, and will I ever come
in to tea, demands to know what I have written there. I shall not tell
Thisbe; it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples.
Moreover, she would report it to Tiglath-Pileser, and they would take
measures; I should be lucky to get off with an iron tonic.

“Nothing about you, Thisbe.”

But in order to ascertain what I really have said about her,--she has
a hatred of publicity and I have to be very careful,--she goes privily
when I am immersed in tea, and possesses herself of the whole.

“But you are not going to die,” she exclaimed with dismay and
disapproval. “We have made quite other arrangements. You can’t possibly
die, now.”

“Not immediately, in so far as I am aware,” I respond. “But there is no
harm in looking forward to it a little,--on a day like this.”




CHAPTER VII


There are many methods of gardening. I have known people who were not
content with anything but actually digging and weeding, grubbing up
the curly wet worms and the tough roots, and bending their own backs
over bulbs and seedlings. That is the thorough method, and though it
is a little like sweeping and scrubbing out yourself the rooms your
guests are to occupy,--and I suppose that would be a pleasure to some
people,--it is the method that commands the most respect. Compared
with it I feel that I cannot ask respect for mine; I must be content
with admiration. My gardening is done entirely with scissors, scissors
and discretion, both easy to use. With scissors and discretion I walk
about my garden, snipping off the flowers that are over. Masuddi
comes behind, holding my umbrella, Sropo with a basket picks up the
devoted heads. I thus ignore causes and deal directly with results,
much the simplest and quickest way when life is complicated by its
manifold presentations and the cares of a family. And the results
are wonderful,--I can heartily recommend this method of gardening
to any one who wants to compass the most charming effect with the
least exertion. A plant is only a big bouquet, and what bouquet does
not instantly redouble its beauty when you take away the one or two
flowers that have withered in it? A faded flower is too sad a comment
upon life to be allowed to remain even on its parent stem, besides
being detrimental and untidy like a torn petticoat. There should be
nothing but joy in the garden, joy and freshness and coquetry, and the
subtlest, loveliest suggestion of art; anon by the diligent application
of scissors and discretion I leave a flood of these things behind me
every day. No doubt it is regrettable that the withered rags in Sropo’s
basket represent the joy and coquetry of yesterday; this is the lesson
of life, however, and one cannot take account of everything. Also you
lay yourself open to the charge of being a mere lady’s-maid to your
garden; but worse things than that are said about nearly everybody.

Among the pansies I confess I feel rather an executioner with my
scissors, though there a rigorous policy most rewards me. Nothing is so
slatternly as a pansy bed where some of the family are just coming out
into the world, and others are beginning to weary of it and others are
going shamelessly to seed. My pansies must all be properly coiffured
and fit to appear in society; when they begin to pull shawls over
their heads and take despondent views I remove them. Moreover, under
this unremitting discipline, they will go on and on, I shall have four
months of pansies; it is in every way the right thing to do.

And yet it is a remorseless business, turning up the little faces to
see if they have lived long enough to be ready for the guillotine. They
look straight _at_ you, and some of them shrink and some beseech, and
some are mutely resigned. I am no stern Atropos, I am weak before the
fate I bring and often let it go; and if by mistake I snip off a bud I
hurry on and try to forget it. Has the divinity who lays us low also, I
wonder, his moments of compunction--does he ever hold his hand and say
“One more day”? Or does he snip here and there at random “just choosing
so”? Oh Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos, I do not like your rôle, I am
glad I am not an omnipotent Whim; I hope my garden thinks better of me
than that. The prevailing expression among pansies, by the way, is that
of apprehension; I hope this is a botanical fact and not confined to my
pansies.

Nothing is more annoying in a small way in this world than to see your
tastes reflected in those whom you consider inferior to yourself. You
would rather not share anything with such persons, even a preference.
I have to submit to this vexation. There are others hereabouts, whom I
have got into the habit of looking down upon, who have exactly my idea
of gardening. I hasten to say that they are not people in the ordinary
sense of the term. Bold, indeed, would be the non-official worm, in
this bureaucratic stronghold, who should point to any gazetted creature
about him and say “That is a lesser thing than I.” Society would smile
and decline to be deceived. For this is an ordered Olympus, the gods
go in to dinner by Regulation, their rank and pay is published in
Kalends which anybody may buy, and the senior among them are diligently
worshipped by the junior as “brass hats.” No, it would certainly not be
for the Tiglath-Pilesers who never sent back a parcel to the draper’s
tied up in red tape in their lives, not having a yard of it in the
house for any purpose, to give themselves airs over persons who use
it every day. But even a non-official may look down upon a monkey. My
offensive imitators are monkeys.

I would not object if they followed my example in their own jungle
garden, but they come and do it in mine. Be sure I never catch them at
it. When I am operating there myself they often leap crashing into the
rhododendrons on the khud and sit among the branches watching me, whole
troops of them, but at a stone or a compliment they are off, bounding
with childish unintelligible curses down the khud. It is in the early
dawn before any one is awake or about, that they come with freedom and
familiarity to walk where I walk and do as I do. I can perfectly fancy
them mincing along in impertinent caricature--I do not mince--holding
up their tails with one hand and with the other catching and clawing
haphazard at the flowers as they imagine I do. Two hours later, when I
come out to mourn and storm over the withering fragments on the drive
not a monkey vexes the horizon. And they do what some people think
worse than this. They come and tear Tiglath-Pileser’s carefully bound
grafts from their adopted stems, and the young shoots from his little
new apple-trees which have travelled all the way from England to live
here with us and share our limitations and our shelf. These were only
planted in February, and one of them, a beginner not three feet high,
had six of its very own apples on it yesterday. It is not a thing that
happens often, apples as soon as that, and six; and Simla is a place
where there is so little going on that we were more excited about them,
perhaps, than you would be at home. They were small apples but they had
to grow, and they were growing yesterday. This morning while we still
dreamed of our apples, a grey langur with a black face ate the whole
crop at a sitting. So now we can neither bake them nor boil them nor
measure them for publication. They have disappeared in a grey langur
with a black face, and though I heartily hope they will inconvenience
him I have very little expectation of it; the punitive laws of nature
matter little to monkeys.

The jungle is full of wild fruit trees newly burgeoned, but the monkeys
prefer the cultivated varieties, they have found out the improved
flavour even in the young leaves. They find out everything, not merely
for the purposes of honest burglary, but for the cynical satisfaction
of tearing it to pieces. Thus, for one graft that a monkey devours, he
pulls three out of their bandages and casts them on the ground, where
they are of no further use to either men or monkeys. What you plant
with infinite pains they pull up by the roots. “These people have done
something; let us undo it,” is the one thought they ever think,--which
shows, I suppose, that if there are politics among them they govern
strictly on party lines. It makes one very ill-disposed toward them.
A monkey has entered the pantry and bolted with a jam-pot even while
my back was turned giving out the sugar to make more jam. A monkey has
come in at the verandah door and abstracted _all_ the bread and butter
for afternoon tea, while his accomplice sat upon the paling to gibber
“Cave!” This was legitimate larceny, and we put up with it. Thisbe
said the poor monkey looked hungry, and she would be content with
Madeira cake, adding, out of the depths of her experience, that it was
a pity the monkey that took the jam hadn’t taken the bread and butter
too,--they went so well together. We can be indulgent to an entirely
empty monkey; we have enough in common with him to understand his
behaviour, and his villainous pirate’s descent upon us is always good
comedy. But when he picks the slates off the roof of your dwelling,
when he privily enters your husband’s dressing-room and abstracts
the razor and strop--Tiglath-Pileser, who would not lend his to a
seraph!--what kind of patience is there which would be equal to the
demand? Monkeys do not throw stones and break windows; one wishes they
would, since that would bring them within the cognizance of the police
and it might then be possible to deal with them. A monkey would hate
solitary confinement above all things. Often in a troupe bounding from
tree to tree overhead across the Mall there will be one with a collar
and a bit of rope or chain hanging to it, escaped from capture and free
again to range with his fellows the limitless lunatic asylum the good
God has endowed for him in the jungle. Once he became amenable to that
sort of punishment he would forsake for ever, I am sure, the haunts of
men; but he is not intelligent enough, or perhaps he is too intelligent.

There are so many of them. A monkey census is obviously impossible,
but I believe if it could be taken it would show that every resident
official had at least one simian counterpart,--a statement which I hope
will not give offence on either side. An old fakir on the top of Jakko
keeps a kind of retreat for monkeys, a monastery with the most elastic
rules, where indeed the domestic relations are rather encouraged than
forbidden. He is their ghostly father, though responsibility for their
morals seems to sit upon him lightly; he will call them out of the
jungle for you in hundreds to be fed. Then you give him four annas and
come away. A pious Hindoo, with sins to expiate, would doubtless give
more, and the fakir would profess to spend it in grain for the monkeys.
Here, by the way, we have an explanation of the incorrigibility of
monkeys which has not hitherto occurred to ethnographers: they consume
all the sins of the pious Hindoos. So they thrive and multiply and
gambol all over this town of Simla, its house-tops and shop-fronts,
its gardens and its public places, with none to make them afraid. There
are two small brown ones sitting on the paling looking at me at this
moment, knowing perfectly well that I will never interrupt the flow of
my ideas to get up and chase them away.

Of course we try to make Atma responsible, and he declares that he
persecutes them without ceasing, but we know better. He claps his hands
at them and shouts, “Go, brother!” and that is all he does. And brother
goes, to the next convenient branch. We have given Atma catapults and
he tells us that he uses them every morning before our honours are
awake, but we are certain that he hangs them on a nail. And indeed I
do not think monkeys would be very shy of a house defended by mere
catapults. Atma, however, has taken this business of Tiglath-Pileser’s
fruit trees seriously. He had carefully protected every tree and graft
with thorns, but the monkeys slid their hands in underneath, and
reached up, and tore down the young shoots with great strips of the
tender bark as well. He was angry at last, was Atma, and he asked for a
gun.

“You would kill a monkey?” we exclaimed, “you would break your one
commandment?” and Atma cast down his eyes.

“They are _budmash_,” said he (a wicked and perverse generation), “and
they eat the work of we people. Why should they not be killed?”

“No,” said the sahib, “you are a good churchman”--or words to that
effect--“I know that you will not kill a monkey.” And we both looked at
him piercingly.

“Nevertheless,” said Atma, cheerfully and shamelessly recanting, “it
would be well that a gun should be. A gun is a noise-making thing.
These _bundar_-people have no shame, but it will appear to them that
here a gun is, and they will not come. Also,” he added ferociously,
“for that long-tail apple-eating wallah, I will put a stone in the gun.”

He had definite proposals to make about the gun; it had plainly been
weighed and considered, not being a matter to be lightly undertaken.
It would not be wise for the sahib to buy it in Simla, where the price
would be great and the article probably inferior. By our honours’
favour he, Atma, would go to his own village, where apparently they
knew a thing or two about guns, and where, since they were all poor
men, guns were also cheap, and there select one for our approbation. If
our honours’ liking was not, he added, the gun could be sent back, but
our honours’ liking would be.

“Where is your village, worthy one?” asked Tiglath-Pileser.

Atma waved his arm across the purple masses on the western horizon. “I
will come to it in three days,” he said, and Tiglath-Pileser consented.

“He wants leave,” said the master. “The gun is only a pretext, but it’s
as good as a dead grandmother any day. Let him go.”

But punctually on the evening of the tenth day Atma returned from his
village shouldering a gun. Pride was in his port and pleasure in his
countenance. It was an ancient muzzle-loader, respectable, useful,
strong, in no way to be compared to a dead grandmother. The sahib
gave it the honourable attention which all sahibs have for weapons of
character, while Atma stood by and spoke of it as it had been indeed a
relative.

“Behold it is a beautiful gun, and it shall bring fear. Now I am but a
gardener and know nothing; but my father is a man with understanding
of all things, and though there were five guns to be bought in the
village, he forbade the other four. My father showed me how the ribs of
this were thick and its stomach was clean--is it so, sahib?--and how
it would speak well and loudly. But the price is also great. Though my
father spoke for three hours, till he was in anger, the price is also
great.”

“How much?” asked Tiglath-Pileser.

“It could not be lessened,” said Atma anxiously, “thirteen rupees.”

About seventeen and sixpence!

The gun speaks well and loudly, and the monkeys are much entertained
by it. They make off at a report with a great jabber of concern, but
they have already discovered that it is a mere expression of opinion,
with nothing in it to hurt, and they come back when their nerves are
soothed to hear it again. They know that you cannot shoot your own
relations; they rest with confidence upon the prehistoric tie, and oh,
they presume upon it! Too far, perhaps. There is a broad-faced Thibetan
in the bazaar, behind whose cheerful grin I am sure no conscience
resides at all. Every year he sells me pheasants and partridges which
I know he poaches from the Kingdom of Patiala--I am sure he would
pot a fellow-poacher for a suitable consideration. When I suggest
this, however, Tiglath-Pileser asks me if I like the idea of a hired
assassin. I do not like the idea. I would rather do it myself, although
even justifiable homicide has never been a favourite amusement of mine.

Shoot a monkey? If it is a mother-monkey, and the baby that clings
between her shoulders is a little one, you cannot even throw a stone at
her.

I wonder if it is good for us to live among them like this. I wonder
whether the constant spectacle of his original, glorious freedom may
not produce a tendency to revert to his original habits even in a brass
hat. It is a futile speculation, but there is a thrill in it. One would
know him of course, by the hat, and the bit of red tape hanging to his
collar....

What would you do about it--about this plague, if it plagued you? And
does it not mark, like a picture in a book of travels, the distance
that lies between us, that I should thus complain to you, not of
sparrows or foxes or rats or rabbits or any of the ordinary pests of
civilization, but of being overrun--simply overrun--by monkeys!




CHAPTER VIII


This is going to be a day of roses, a grand opening day. They have
been getting ready for weeks; every morning there has been a show of
pink promises, half kept, white hints and creamy suggestions, and
here and there a sweet full-blown advertisement; but so much has been
suddenly done that I think the bushes must have sat up all night to
enable the garden definitely to make this morning its chief summer
announcement--the roses are out. The shelf holds a great many roses,
its widest part indeed, where the house stands, is quite taken up
by a large bed of them which was meant to be oval, and only is not
because no design in this country can ever be described by even an
approximately exact term. That is at the side of the house; the drive
runs past it. There is another bed, an attempted oblong, between the
front door and the precipice by way of being devoted to them, and
beside that they have made room for themselves in all the borders where
there may or may not be accommodation for other people; and they climb,
as well, over every window that looks out into the garden.

It is our privilege to entertain largely among roses; I don’t believe
there is another shelf in Simla that holds so many. And I will hasten
to say this for them, that in all my social experience they offer the
best example of hospitality being its own reward, which, of course,
goes without saying; but it is difficult to sit down for the first
time in the year before the glory of the roses, and refrain from
offering them a politeness of some sort, even one that might be taken
for granted. I will add a compliment which is not perhaps quite so
lamentably obvious. There are people--moderns, decadents--who will
not subscribe to the paramountcy of the rose. They produce other
flowers--hyacinths, violets, daffodils--to which they attach the label
of their poor preference. I will not dispute any taste in theory, but
I will say this broad, general thing which is evident and plain: once
the roses are in bloom, nothing else in the garden matters. The rose
may or may not be queen, but when she appears the other flowers dwindle
into pretty little creatures of no great pretension who may come out
or not at their convenience. You will admit that if there is a rose in
sight you do not look at anything else. As to the daffodils, they came
up a month ago, and I cut them and put them in the drawing-room and
thought no more about it.

So the garden for me this morning means roses (dear me, yes, those
Gloire de Dijons alone command it for yards in every direction),
and the excitement of it, the pure keen delicious excitement of it,
makes me wonder whether a simple life led in a cane chair under a
pencil-cedar is not a better background for the minor sensations than
the most elaborate existence indoors. But that is another truism;
elaboration is always bad, it prevents one’s seeing things. An
existence obscured by curtains and frescoed with invitations from the
Princess would never, I am surely convinced, afford me the exquisite
joy and wonder, the sense of expanded miracle, that reigns in me at
this moment. I must be allowed to say so, though nothing, I know, is
so dull as the detailing of another person’s sensations. It will be
admitted that I do not often gush, that is a claim I make with a good
conscience; and if I were forbidden to write emotionally about roses
this morning I should simply not write at all, which would be a breach
of good manners and a loss of time. If the truth were confessed, I have
wasted hours already congratulating them upon their happy advent, I
have been much led away among them from my fountain pen; idleness is
so perfect with a rose. After putting down that stupidity about our
hospitality being its own reward, I fell into unnumbered asterisks,
raptures in the manner of M. Pierre Loti, and only refrained from
making them because one would not gasp too obviously after the master.
And now that I have pulled my chair into the thickest shade of the
pencil-cedar--it is little better after all than a spoke to sit under,
wheeling with the sun--and am once more prepared to offer you my best
attention, down upon me descends Delia, waving a parasol from afar.
I must introduce Delia; she is a vagabond and an interruption, but I
shall be extremely glad to see her.

I wonder whether anybody has ever felt the temptation of dealing quite
honestly with the thousand eyes that listen to him, and putting in
the interruptions as well as the other full-stops that occur in the
course of a morning’s work in manuscript, saying in brackets exactly
where he was compelled to leave off on account of a rose or a Delia.
One would then see precisely how far such a one’s flight carried him,
and how long, after he had been brought to earth, it took his beating
pinions to regain the ether. One might share his irritation at being
interrupted, or one might wish him interrupted oftener; it would
all depend. At all events it would give the impression of engaging
candour, and would evoke--in me, certainly--the deepest sympathy,
especially if the interruption were domestic. “Here I was compelled
to give orders for dinner.” “At this point a man brought a bill with
a cash discount on first presentation--and never again after.” “Just
then Thisbe wished to know whether or not she should send my love to
Aunt Sophia. I said _not_.” I could weep with an author who put such
things in. But instead, for the sake of dignity and smoothness, most of
them try to ignore these calamities, like painters who rub a little oil
into the edges of yesterday’s work; and go on, stifling their emotions.
There is probably a great deal of simple heroism concealed with care in
the pages of even a third-class novel.

“Are you writing something clever?” asks Delia. What a demand she makes
upon one’s reticence! “Finish it quickly and pick me some roses.” So I
finished it quickly, as you see. “I have passed this way several times
lately,” she explains, “and have always resisted the temptation of
running in. But this morning something drew me down.”

“They haven’t been properly out before,” I remark. There is no use,
after all, in being too obtuse. But I can’t go on juggling with the
present tense. Delia is gone now. I shall treat her as a historical
fact.

“I hope you remember what a lot you used to send me last year,” she
continued, “and how grateful I always was.” I said I remembered. “Yes,”
she sighed. “You set yourself a very good example,” and at that I got
up and sacrificed to her, with gladness; because if Delia ever suffers
cremation the last whiff of her to float sadly away will be her passion
for a rose. There are people who might dissolve in suggestion before
I would offer up a single petal, which is deplorable in me, for if
you want a thing badly enough to hint for it, you must want it very
badly indeed. Nevertheless, I think it a detestable habit, worse than
punning; and nothing rouses in me a spirit of fiercer, more implacable
opposition than a polite, gentle, well-considered hint. Delia, of
course, doesn’t hint, she prods, and you accept her elbow with delight,
sharing the broad and conscious humour of it.

I am glad Delia dropped in, I want to talk about her; she holds to me
so much of the charm of this irresponsible impious little Paradise
that we have made for ourselves up here above the clouds and connected
by wire with Westminster. A wire is not a very substantial thing, and
that, if you leave out Mr. Kipling, is all that attaches us to the
rest of the world. If an ill-disposed person, the Mullah Powindah or
another, should one day cut it, we might float off anywhere, and be
hardly more unrelated to the planet we should lodge upon than we are
to our own. The founders of Simla--may they dwell in beatitude for
ever--saw their golden chance and took it. Far in and far up they
climbed to build it, and not being gods, but only men, they thought
well to leave the more obvious forms of misery out of their survey
plans. They brought with them many desirable things, not quite
enough, but many; poverty and sorrow and age they left at the bottom
of the hill. They barred out greed and ruin by forbidding speculation;
they warned off the spectre of decrepitude by the “age limit” which
sends you after fifty-five to whiten and perish elsewhere. This is an
ordinance that many call divine, for want of a better word, but there
ought to be a better word. They made it so expensive that the widow
in her black takes the first ship to Balham, and so attractive that
the widower promptly marries again. But they also arranged with Death
that he should seldom show himself upon the Mall, so nobody has rue to
wear, even with a difference. From ten to five we compose Blue Books,
at least our husbands do; the rest of the time we gallop about on
little country-bred ponies, and vigorously dance, even to fifty-four
years, eleven months, and thirty days; and with full hearts and empty
heads--and this is the consummation of bliss--congratulate ourselves.
There are houses where they play games after dinner. I myself before I
became the dryadess of a pencil-cedar, have played games after dinner,
and felt as innocent and expansive as I did at nine.

Delia draws her breath in all this, and opens a wicked Irish eye upon
it--ah, what Delia doesn’t see!--and is to me the gay flower of it,
delicately exhaling an essence of Paris. I approve myself of just a
suspicion of essence of Paris. We are none of us beasts of the field.
I regret to say that she misquotes. Her gloves fit perfectly, and she
carries herself like a lily of the field, but she misquotes. It is
the single defect upon what she would be annoyed to hear me call a
lovely character. I mention it because it is the only one. If there
were others, I should allow them to be taken for granted, and protect
myself from the suspicion of exaggerated language. That does not look
like an absolutely serious statement, but if I am writing nonsense it
is entirely the fault of Delia. She is packed with nonsense like a
siphon, and if you sit much out-of-doors you become very absorbent. She
had been paying calls, and I was obliged to restore her with vermouth
and a biscuit. She was bored and fatigued, and she buried her nose in
her roses and closed her eyes expressively. “The ladies of India,”
she remarked, “are curiously alike. Is it our mode of thought? Is it
because we have the same kind of husbands?”

“Some are much better than others,” I interrupted.

“I saw eleven of us,” she went on with depression, “one after the
other, this morning. I couldn’t help thinking of articles on a counter
marked ‘all this size five and elevenpence-ha’penny.’”

“Never mind, Delia,” said I, “you are not at all alike.”

“Oh, and nobody,” she hastened to apologize, “could be less alike than
_you_.”

“And yet we are quite different,” I replied; and Delia, with a glance
of reproach and scorn and laughter said, “You jackass!”

Now in anybody else’s mouth this term would be almost opprobrious,
but from Delia’s it drops affectionately. It is an acknowledgment, a
compliment, it helps to lighten the morning. It is not everybody who
could call one a jackass with impunity, but it is not everybody who
would think of doing it. I should not wish the epithet to become the
fashion, but when Delia offers it I roll it under my tongue.

“I am convinced,” said I, “that there is nothing in the world so
valuable as personality. I mean, of course, to other people. As you
justly remark, Delia, we are round pebbles on this coral strand, worn
smooth by rubbing against nothing but each other. It is an obscure
and little regarded form of the great Imperial sacrifice, but I wish
somebody would call attention to it in the _Daily Mail_ and wring a
tear from the British public. You have still a slight unevenness of
surface, my Delia, and that is why I love you. If you had a good sharp
corner or two, I should never let you out of my sight.”

“And to think,” said Delia, finely, “how little, in England, they prize
and value their precious angular old maids!”

“Oh, in England,” I replied, “I think they are almost too much blessed.
There is such a thing as tranquillity and repose. You don’t want the
personal equation at every meal. In England, especially in the academic
parts, you can’t see the wood for the trees.”

“And in America,” observed Delia, “I suppose it must be worse.”

“Not at all,” I said out of my experience, “in America there is as yet
great uniformity of peculiarity,” but this was going very far afield on
a warm day, and we left the matter there.

“I don’t think I like individuality in young men,” remarked Delia,
thoughtfully, “In young men it seems a liberty, almost an impertinence.”

I can imagine the normal attitude of young men toward Delia being quite
satisfying, but I let her go on.

“I have just met an A.D.C. riding up the Mall smoking a pipe,” she
continued. “He took off his hat to me like a bandit.” Now Simla’s
traditions of behaviour are very strict and the choicest of them are
locked up in the _tenue_ of an aide-de-camp. “It was quite a shock,”
said Delia.

“All things are possible in nature, but some are rare,” I told her.
“It is doubtless a remote effect of all this Irregular Horse in South
Africa. You may live to boast that you have seen an aide-de-camp ride
up the Mall at Simla smoking a common clay.”

“It wasn’t a common clay,” she corrected me.

“But it will be when you boast of it,” I assured her. “Come and see my
home for decayed gentlewomen.”

“What _do_ you mean?” she cried, and would have buffeted me; but I led
her with circumstance to the edge of the shelf, over which appeared
lower down on the khud-side, another small projection which tried to
be a shelf and couldn’t, but was still flat enough for purposes. There
were sitting, in respectable retirement, all the venerable roses that
had outlived delight, the common kinds and those that had grown little
worth in the service of the summer.

“They had to come out,” I explained, “and I couldn’t find it in my
heart to throw them on the ash-heap.”

“With all their modest roots exposed,” put in Delia. “Cruel it would
have been.”

“So I planted them down there, and I see that they’re not altogether
neglected. They get an allowance of four buckets of water a day and a
weeding once a fortnight,” I explained further, “but what I fancy they
must feel most is that nobody ever picks them. I can’t get down to do
that.”

“I’m sure they look most comfortable,” Delia assured me. “What do
they care about being picked? You lose that vanity very early”--oh,
Delia!--“What they really enjoy is to sit in the sun and talk about
their gout. But I know what you mean about throwing away a flower”--and
Delia’s eyes grew more charming with the sentiment behind them.
“Somebody gave me a sweet-pea yesterday and the poor little thing faded
on me, as we say in Ireland, and of course I ought to have thrown it
away, but I couldn’t. What do you think I did with it?” She looked
half ashamed.

“What?”

“_I put it in my pocket!_” said this dear Delia.




CHAPTER IX


I am not getting on at all; it is days since Delia was here and I wrote
about her. There is certainly this advantage in the walls of a house,
they make a fold for your mind, which must browse inside, picking up
what it can. But existence in a garden was not meant to be interfered
with by a pen; we have the best reason for believing that Adam never
wrote for publication, much less Eve, who of course, when one thinks of
it, was absorbed at that time in the first principles of dress-making.
I envy her that original seam; sewing is an ideal occupation in a
garden. You can be for ever looking up and the hand goes on of itself;
everything rhymes with your needle, and your mind seems stimulated by
its perfunctory superintendence to spin and weave other things, often
lovely and interesting things which it is a pain to have forgotten by
dinner-time. I should very much prefer fine stitching to composition
out here if I could choose. One might then look at the sun on the
leaves without the itch and necessity to explain just what it is like.
Moreover, there is always this worry: you cannot make a whole chapter
out of the sun on the leaves, even at different angles, and yet before
that happy circumstance what else is there to say? But how little
use there is in crying for what one was not meant to have. The fairy
godmother who put this unwilling instrument into my hand and denied
me a needle will have something to answer for if ever I meet her.
Meanwhile I might as well confess that my finest stitching only makes
mirth for Thisbe, and “lay a violence,” as Stevenson advises, upon my
will to other ends.

It is the very height of the season in the garden. The roses have held
several drawing-rooms and practically everybody is here. Sweet-peas
flutter up two of the verandah pillars, the rest are dark with
honeysuckle and heavy with Maréchal Niels. The pansies are thicker
than ever, and a very elegant double wisteria, a lady from Japan,
trails her purple skirts over the trellis under which the rickshaws go
to their abode. The corn-bottles have come up exactly where I asked
them to, scattered thick among the leaves of the chrysanthemums which
are already tall and bushy. They are exactly the right blue in exactly
the right green and they give a little air, not at all a disagreeable
little air, of discernment and sophistication to their corner of the
garden. I would like to venture to say that they resemble blue stars
in a green sky, if I were sure of offending nobody’s sense of humour.
It is natural enough to observe this and pass on, but why should one
find a subtle pleasure in the comparison, and linger over it? It must
be the same throb of joyful activity with which the evolved human
intelligence first detected a likeness between any two of the phenomena
about it, and triumphed in the perception, attracted to wisdom and
stirred to art. Those indeed were days to live in, when everything was
mysteriously to copy and inherit and nothing was exploited, explained,
laid bare, when the great sweet thoughts were all to think and heroism
had not yet received its molecular analysis, and babies equipped with
an instinctive perception of the fundamental weakness of socialistic
communism were neither born nor thought of. These seem violent
reflections to make in a garden, and they may well be obscured behind
the long bed of poppies and field-daisies and more bluets that runs
along the side of the house under the windows that support the roses.
If you can tell me for what primitive reason poppies and field-daisies
and corn-flowers go well together I had rather you didn’t.

I have clumps and clumps of hollyhocks, and a balustrade of them,
pink and white ones, on each side of the steps that run down from the
verandah in front of the drawing-room door. It is an unsophisticated
thing, the single hollyhock, like a bashful school child in a
sun-bonnet. Do what you will you cannot make it feel at home among the
beaux and belles of high life in the garden; it never looks really
happy except just inside a cottage paling with a bunch of rhubarb on
one side and a tangle of “old man” on the other. Still it is a good
and grateful flower in whatever station it pleases the sun to call it.
It gets along on the merest necessities of life when times are bad and
water scarce, and flowers, with anything like a chance, twice in the
season. One cannot, after all, encourage class feeling in the garden;
there every one must stand on his own roots, and take his share of
salts and carbon dioxide without precedence, and the hollyhocks in my
garden receive as much consideration as anybody.

Petunias are up all over the place, purple and white and striped. I
knew by experience that we could have too many petunias on this shelf,
so whenever a vague, young pushing thing disclosed itself to be a
petunia, as it nearly always did, I requested Atma to pull it up.
Nevertheless they survive surprisingly everywhere, looking out among
the feet of the roses, flaunting over the forget-me-nots, unexpected
in a box of seedling asters. Now if I were going to recognize
social distinctions in the garden, which I am not, I should call the
good petunia a person unmistakably middle-class. Whether it is this
incapacity of hers to see a snub, or her very full skirt, or her very
high colour, the petunia always seems to me a bourgeoise little lady
in her Sunday best, with her hair smooth and her temper well kept
under for the occasion. I think she leads her family a nagging life,
and goes to church regularly. One should always mass them; a single
petunia here and there among the community of flowers is more desolate
and ineffective than most maiden ladies. Rather late this spring we
discovered a corner of the bed in front of the dining-room window
to be quite empty, and what to put in we couldn’t think, and were
considering, when Atma told us that he knew of a thousand petunias
homeless and roaming the shelf. I quite believed him, and bade him
gather them in, with such a resultant blaze of purple as I shall never
in future be without. The border just beyond them is simply shouting
with yellow coreopsis, and behind that rise the dark branches of the
firs on the khud-side, and between these, very often in broken pictures
sharp against the blue, the jagged points and peaks of the far snows.
All this every morning the person has with her eggs and bacon who
sits opposite the dining-room window. I am glad to say that the other
members of my family object to the glare.

Atma has a liberal and progressive mind toward the garden; he is always
trying to smuggle some new thing into it. In out-of-the-way corners I
constantly come upon perfect strangers, well-rooted and entirely at
home, and when I ask him by whose order they were admitted, he smiles
apologetically and says that without doubt they will be very beautiful,
and that his brother gave them to him. He can never tell me the name.
“It will be so high,” he shows me with his hand, stooping, “and the
flower will be red, simply red it will arrive.” I look at it without
enthusiasm, and weakly let it stay. Generally it “arrives” a common
little disappointment, but once a great leggy thing turned out an
evening primrose, and I knew, before it was too late, that I had been
entertaining an angel unawares.

“To grow a little catholic,” writes Stevenson, “is the compensation of
years.” Dear shade, is it so? In the spiritual outlook, perhaps, in the
moral retrospect,--but in matters of taste, in likes and dislikes? You
who wrote nothing lightly must have proved this dispensation, poorer
spirits can only wish it more general. I remember youth as curious and
enterprising, hospitable to everything, and I begin to find the middle
years jealously content with what they have. Who, when he has reached
the age of all the world, looks with instinctive favour upon anything
new? An acquaintance, who may create the common debt of friendship;
you are long since heavily involved. An author, who may insist upon
intimately engaging your intelligence,--a thing you feel, after a
time, to be a liberty in a new-comer. Or even a flower, offering
another sentiment to the little store that holds some pain already.
Now this godetia. I suppose it argues a depth of ignorance, but until
Mr. Johnson recommended it to me in the spring, I had never heard of
godetia. Mr. Johnson is the source of seeds and bulbs for Simla, we
all go to him; but I, for one, always come away a little ruffled by
his habit of referring to everything by its Latin name, and plainly
showing that his respect for you depends upon your understanding him. I
have wished to preserve Mr. Johnson’s respect, and things have come up
afterward that I did not think I had ordered. However, this is by the
way. Mr. Johnson assured me that godetia had a fine fleshy flower of
variegated colours, would be an abundant bloomer, and with reasonable
care should make a good appearance. I planted it with misgivings, and
watched its advent with aloofness, I knew I shouldn’t recognize it, and
I didn’t. I had never seen it before, I very nearly said so; and at my
time of life, with so many old claims pressing, I could not attempt a
new affection. And I have taken the present opportunity, when Atma’s
back is turned, and pulled it all up. Besides it may have been fleshy,
but it wasn’t pretty, and the slugs ate it till its appearance was
disgraceful.

I suppose our love of flowers is impregnated with our love of life and
our immense appreciation of each other. We hand our characteristics
up to God to figure in; we look for them in animals with delight and
laughter, and it is even our pleasure to find them out here in the
garden. Who cares much for lupins, for example; they are dull fellows,
they have no faces; yet who does not care for every flower with a heart
and eyes, that gives back your glance to you and holds up its head
bravely to any day’s luck, as you would like to do.

But it is growing late. I can still see a splendid crimson cactus
glooming at me from his tub in the verandah; the rest of the garden has
drawn away into the twilight. Only the honeysuckle, that nobody notices
when the sun is bright and the flowers all talk at once, sends out a
timid sweetness to the night and murmurs, “I am here.” If I might have
had a seam to do, it would have been finished; but instead there has
been this vexatious chapter, which only announces, when all is said
and done, that another human being has spent a day in the garden. I
intended to write about the applied affections.

But it is too late even for the misapplied affections, generally
thought, I believe, the more interesting presentment. Happy Thisbe on
the verandah, conscious of another bud to her tapestry, glances at the
fading west and makes ready to put all away. I will lay down my pen, as
she does her needle, and gather up my sheets and scraps, as she does
her silks and wools; and humbly, if I can get no one else to do it for
me, carry my poor pattern into the house.




CHAPTER X


The Princess has a hill almost entirely to herself. She lives there in
a castle almost entirely made of stone, with turrets and battlements.
Her affectionate subjects cluster about her feet in domiciles walled
with mud and principally roofed with kerosene tins, but they cheerfully
acknowledge this to be right and proper, and all they can pay for. One
of the many advantages of being a princess is that you never have to
put down anything for house-rent; there is always a castle waiting for
you and a tax-payer happy to paper it. The world will not allow that it
is responsible to a beggar for a crust; but it is delighted to admit
that it owes every princess a castle. It is a curious world; but it is
quite right, for princesses are to be encouraged and beggars aren’t.

The Princess is married to the Roy-Regent, who puts his initial upon
Resolutions and writes every week to the Secretary of State; but it is
the Princess who is generally “at home,” and certainly the Princess who
matters. The Roy-Regent may induce his Government to make Resolutions;
the Princess could persuade it, I am sure, to break them--if she wanted
to. Unfortunately we are not permitted to see that comedy, which would
be adorable. She does not want to. She is not what you would call a
political princess; I have no doubt she has too much else to do. To
begin with, only to begin with, she has to go on being beautiful and
kind and unruffled; she has to keep the laughter in her eyes and the
gentleness in her heart; she has to be witty without being cynical, and
initiated without being hard. She has to see through all our little
dodges to win her favour and not entirely despise us, and to accept our
rather dull and very daily homage without getting sick and tired of us.
To say nothing of the Roy-Regent and the babies who have some claims,
I suppose, though we are apt to talk about the Princess as if she were
here solely to hold her Majesty’s vice-Drawing-rooms and live up to a
public ideal. All the virtues, in short, which the rest of us put on of
a Sunday, the Princess must wear every day; and that is why it is so
difficult and often so tiresome to be a real princess.

Fortunately the Simla Princess is not expected to hold her commission
for life. Her Majesty knew, I suppose, from her own royal experience,
how it got on the nerves, and realized that if she required anything
like that it would be impossible to get the right kind of people. So
at the end of every four or five years the Roy-Regent goes home to
his ordinary place in the Red Book burdened for life with a frontier
policy, but never again compelled to drive out in the evenings attended
by four cantering Sikhs, each Sikh much larger than himself and shaking
a lance. He may go on to greater things, or he may simply return to the
family estates; but in any case the Princess can put her crown away in
a drawer and do things, if she likes, in the kitchen, which must be a
great relief. Of course she can never quite forget that she has been
a princess, in commission, once. The thought must have an ennobling
effect ever after, and often interpose, as it were, between the word
and the blow in domestic differences. For this reason alone, many of us
would gladly undertake to find the necessary fortitude for the task;
but it is not a thing you can get by merely applying for it.

To the state of the Princess belongs that quaint old-fashioned
demonstration, the curtsey. The Princess curtseys to the
Queen-Empress--how I should like to see her do it!--and we all curtsey
to the Princess. This alone would make Simla a school for manners, now
that you have to travel so far, unless you are by way of running in
and out of Windsor Castle, to find the charming form in ordinary use.
How admirable a point of personal contact lies in the curtsey--what
deference rendered, what dignity due! “You are a Princess,” it says,
“therefore I bend my knee. I am a Person, therefore I straighten it
again,” and many things more graceful, more agreeable, more impertinent
than that. Indeed, there is a very little that cannot be said in the
lines and the sweep of a curtsey. To think there was a time when
conversation was an art, and curtseying an accomplishment, is to hate
our day of monosyllables and short cuts, of sentiments condensed,
and opinions taken for granted. One wonders how we came to lose the
curtsey, and how much more went with it, how we could ever let it go,
to stand instead squarely on our two feet and nod our uncompromising
heads, and say what we have to say. I suppose it is one of the things
that are quite gone; we can never reaffect it, indeed our behaviour,
considered _as_ behaviour, is growing steadily worse. Already you may
be asked, by a person whom you have never seen before, whether you
prefer Ecclesiastics or Omar Khayyám, or how you would define the
ego, or what you think of Mr. Le Gallienne--matters which require
confidence, almost a curtain. We have lost the art of the gradual
approach; presently we shall hustle each other like kinetic atoms. A
kinetic atom, I understand, goes straight to the point.

We all love curtseying to the Princess therefore, partly because it is
a lost art, and partly because it is a way in which we can say, without
being fulsome or troublesome, how happy we are to see her. There is
only one circumstance under which it is not entirely a privilege. That
is when, dismounted, one meets her in one’s habit. Whether it is the
long boots or the short skirt, or the uncompromising cut, I cannot say,
but I always feel, performing a curtsey to the Princess in my habit,
that I am in a false position. Every true woman loves to stalk about in
her habit, and tap her heels with her riding crop; there is a shadow
of the privileges of the other sex about it which is alluring, and
which, as the costume is sanctioned, one can enjoy comfortably; but it
is not arranged for curtseying, and there ought to be a dispensation
permitting ladies wearing it to bow from the waist.

Then the Princess passes on, leaving you smiling. I have seen people
continue to smile in a lower key for twenty minutes after the Princess
has gone by, as water will go on reflecting a glow long after the
sunlight has left it. The effect is quite involuntary, and of course
it looks a little foolish, but it is agreeable to feel, and nobody,
positively nobody, can produce it but the Princess. Indeed the power to
produce it would be a capital test for princesses.

If I were in any way in a position to submit princesses to tests, I
should offer that of the single pea and the twenty feather beds with
confidence to ours. Which is a pride and a pleasure to be able to
say in these days, when ladies thus entitled are so apt to disguise
themselves in strong minds or blunt noses or irritating clothes. It
is delightful to be assured that, in spite of this tendency, the
Princess has not yet vanished, the Princess of the fairy tales, the
real Princess, from among us, that such a one is sitting at the moment
in her castle, not ten minutes’ walk from here, eating marmalade
with a golden spoon, or whatever she likes better than marmalade,
and bringing to life day after day that delight in living which you
must have, or there’s no use in being a princess. It is possible that
she may not put on her diadem every morning; there is no necessity
for that, since you could not imagine her without it; and if she
prefers reading her Browning to watching her gold-fish, it is not in
any way my affair. Indeed, although she occupies a public position,
there is no one who more readily accedes her right to a private life
than I, though, of course, with the rest of her subjects, I would
prefer that she had as little of it as possible. It is said that the
Roy-Regent, knowing what would be expected of her, was not content
until he had found the most beautiful and agreeable Princess there
was; and I can well believe that he sailed over seas and seas to
find her, though it is probably only a tradition that they met at
George Washington’s country seat where the Princess was looking for
trailing arbutus,--another lovely thing whose habitat is the banks of
the Potomac. And an improbable tradition, as George Washington never
encouraged princesses.

Last night there was an entertainment at the castle and among the
guests a chief of one of those smaller Indias that cluster about the
great one. He wore his own splendid trappings, and he was a handsome
fellow, well set up; and above his keen dark face, in front of the
turban, set round with big irregular pearls, was fastened a miniature
of the Queen-Empress who holds his fealty in her hand. To him the
Princess, all in filmy lace with her diadem flashing, spoke kindly.
They sat upon gold-backed chairs a little way apart, and as she leaned
to confer her smile and he to receive it, I longed to frame the picture
and make perpetual the dramatic moment, the exquisite odd chance.
“Surely,” thought I, “the world has never been so graciously bridged
before.” Talking of George Washington, if the good man could have seen
that, I think he might have melted toward princesses; I do not think,
from all we know of him, that he would have had the heart to turn
coldly away and disclaim responsibility for this one. I wish he could
have seen it; yes, and Martha too, though if anybody thought necessary
to make trouble and talk about sacred principles of democracy, it would
have been Martha. Martha, she would have been the one. Her great and
susceptible husband would have taken a philosophic pinch of snuff and
toasted posterity.

I see that I have already admitted it, I have slipped in the path of
virtuous resolution and lofty indifference; I have gone back, just for
a minute, into the world. The reason I have neglected every flower in
the garden this morning to write about the Princess is that I have
been dining with her. It is so difficult to be unmoved and firm when
you know the band will play and there will be silver soup-plates, to
say nothing of the Roy-Regent smiling and pleased to see you, and the
Roman punch in the middle of the menu. At home, one so seldom has Roman
punch in the middle of the menu. Besides, now that I think of it, it
was a “command” invitation, and I did not go for any of these reasons,
or even to see the Princess, but because I had to; a lofty compulsion
of State was upon me, and nobody would place her loyalty in question
on account of a possible draught. If there had been a draught and I
had taken cold I should have felt an added nobility to-day; somewhat
the virtue, I suppose, of the elderly statesman who contracts a fatal
influenza at a distinguished interment, and so creates a vicious circle
of funerals; but there was no draught.

The Princess lives in splendid isolation. If it were not for the
Roy-Regent and the babies, and the Commander-in-Chief and _his_ family,
she would die of loneliness. And of course the Bishop, though I can’t
understand in what way one would depend much upon a bishop, except to
ask a blessing when he came to dinner. Kind and human as the Princess
is she lives in another world, with an A.D.C. always going in front
to tell people to get up, “Their Excellencies are coming.” You cannot
ask after the Princess’s babies as you would ask after the babies
of a person like yourself; you must say, “How are Your Excellency’s
babies?” and this at once removes them far beyond the operation of
your affectionate criticism. When it is impossible even to take babies
for granted the difficulties of the situation may be imagined. The
situation is glorious but troubling, your ideas often will not flow
freely in it, and is there anything more dreadful at a supreme moment
than to have your ideas stick? You find yourself saying the same thing
you said the last time you had the honour, which is the most mortifying
thing that can happen in any conversation.

I often wonder whether the Princess does not look at our little mud
houses and wish sometimes that she could come in. The thought is a
reckless one but I do entertain it. If you take a kind and friendly
interest in people as the Princess does in us all, you cannot be
entirely satisfied merely to add them up as population and set them a
good example. Nor can it be very interesting to look at the little mud
houses and observe only that they have chimneys, and not to know how
the mantelpieces are done or whether there is a piano, or if anybody
else’s sweet-peas are earlier than yours. In my dreams I sometimes
invite the Princess to tea. An A.D.C. always comes behind her carrying
the diadem on a red silk cushion, but at my earnest prayer he is
made to stay outside on the verandah. We have the best china; and in
one dream the Princess broke a cup and we wept together. On another
occasion she gave me a recipe for pickled blackberries and told me of
a way--I always forget the way--of getting rid of frowns. There is
generally something to spoil a dream, and the thing that spoils this
one is the A.D.C., who will look in at the window. All the same we have
a lovely time, the Princess ignoring all her prerogatives, unless I say
something about the state of the country, when she instantly, royally,
changes the subject....




CHAPTER XI


If you choose to live on the top of one of the Himalayas there are
some things you must particularly pay for. One of them is earth. Your
mountain, if it is to be depended upon, is mostly made of rock and I
have already mentioned how radically it slopes. So a garden is not at
all a thing to be taken for granted. Sometimes you have a garden and
sometimes only a shaly ledge, or you may have a garden to-day which
to-morrow has slid down the hill and superimposed itself upon your
neighbour below. That occurs in the rains; it is called a “slip.”
It has never been our experience because the shelf is fairly flat;
but it has happened to plenty of people. I suppose such a garden is
recoverable, if you are willing to take the trouble, but it could never
be quite the same thing. The most permanent plot, however, requires
all kinds of attention, and one of the difficulties is to keep it up
to its own level. Queer sinkings and fallings away are always taking
place in the borders. Atma professes to find them quite reasonable;
he says the flowers eat the earth and of course it disappears. The
more scientific explanation appears to me to be that the gnomes of the
mountain who live inside, have been effecting repairs, and naturally
the top falls in. It may be said that gnomes are not as a rule so
provident; but very little has yet been established about the Himalayan
kind; they might be anything; they probably are.

This whole morning Atma and I have been patching the garden. At home
when you buy a piece of land you expect that enough earth will go with
it for ordinary purposes, but here you buy the land first and the earth
afterwards, as you want it, in basketfuls. There is plenty in the
jungle, beautiful leaf-mould, but it is against the law to collect it
there for various reasons, all of them excellent and tiresome; you must
buy it instead from the Town Council, and it costs fourpence a basket.
Tiglath-Pileser says it is the smallest investment in land he ever
heard of, but it takes a great many baskets, and when the bill comes
in I shall be glad to know if he is still of that opinion. Meanwhile
coolie after coolie dumps his load and I have heard of no process that
more literally improves the property. You will imagine whether, when
anything is pulled up, we do not shake the roots.

How far a sharp contrast will carry the mind! I never shake a root
in these our limited conditions without thinking of the long loamy
stretches of the Canadian woods where there was leaf-mould enough for a
continent of gardens, and of the plank “sidewalk” that half-heartedly
wandered out to them from the centre of what was a country town in my
day, adorned perhaps at some remote and unfenced corner by a small
grocery shop where hickory nuts in a half-pint measure were exposed for
sale in the window. I am no longer passionately addicted to hickory
nuts--you got the meat out with infinite difficulty and a pin, and
if it was obstinate you sucked it--but nothing else, except perhaps
the smell in the cars of the train-boy’s oranges, will ever typify to
me so completely the liberal and stimulating opportunities of a new
country. The town when I was there last had grown into a prosperous
city, and there were no hickory nuts in its principal stores, but at
the furthest point of a suburban sidewalk I found the little grocery
still tempting the school children of the neighbourhood with this
unsophisticated product and the half-pint measure in the window. I
resisted the temptation to buy any, but I stood and looked so long that
the proprietress came curious to the door. And along that sidewalk
you might have taken a ton of leaf-mould before anybody made it his
business to stop you.

We must acknowledge our compensations. Over there they certainly
get their leaf-mould cheaper than fourpence a basket, but they have
nobody to make things grow in it under a dollar a day. Here Atma,
the invaluable Atma, labours for ten rupees a month--about fourteen
shillings--and cooks his own meal cakes. The man who works for a
dollar a day does it in the earnest hope, if we are to believe his
later biographer, of a place in ward politics and the easier situation
of a local boss. It would be hard to infect Atma with such vulgar
ambitions. He is so lately from the hands of his Creator that he has
not even yet conceived the idea of accumulation. The other day I told
him that he might take a quantity of seed and surplus plants, and
sell them, and he would not. “I, how shall I sell?” he said, “I am a
gardener. This thing is done by Johnson-sahib,” and he looked at me
with amusement. I called him by a foolish name and told him that he
should surely sell, and get money; but he shook his head still smiling.
“By your honour’s favour,” he said, “month by month I find ten rupees.
From this there is food twice a day and clothes, and two or three
rupees to go by the hand of an old man who comes from my people. It is
enough. What more?” I mentioned the future. “Old?” he cried, “God knows
if I will be old. At this time I am a work-doing wallah. When I am old
and your honours are gone to _Belaat_,[2] I also will go, and live with
my people.”

“And they will, without doubt, give you food and clothes?” I asked.

“According as there is,” he said, “without doubt they will give it,”
and went on with his work.

Here, if you like, was a person of short views and unvexed philosophy.
A lecture upon the importance of copper coins trembled on my lips, but
I held it back. A base aim is a poor exchange for a lesson in content,
and I held it back, wondering whether my servant might not be better
off than I, in all that he could do without.

Alas for the poor people who have to pay at the rate of a dollar a day
and mind their own business into the bargain! Never can they know one
of the greatest pleasures of life, to be served by a serving people.
There is a spark of patriarchal joy, long extinct west of Suez, in the
simple old interpretation which still holds here, of the relation of
master and servant, scolding and praise, favour and wrath; a lifelong
wage and occasionally a little medicine are still the portion of the
servant-folk, accepted as a matter of course, and “Thou wilt not hear
orders?” ever a serious reproach. To all of us Outlanders of the East,
it is one of the consolations of exile, and to some of us a keen and
constant pleasure to be the centre and source of prosperity for these
others, a simple, graphic, pressing opportunity to do justice and love
mercy and walk humbly with their God. I, personally, like them for
themselves--who could help liking Atma?--and of persons to whom they
do not at all appeal I have my own opinion. It is the difference of
race, no doubt, which makes this relation possible and enjoyable, the
difference, and what we are accustomed to consider the superiority, of
ours. At home all generous minds are somewhat tormented by a sense of
the unfairness of the menial brand, and in the attitude of the menial
mind there is nothing to modify that impression.

Servants in this place are regarded as luxuries, and taxed. So much you
pay per capita, and whether the capita belongs to a body entirely in
your employment, or to one which only serves you in common with several
other people, it doesn’t matter; all the same you pay. Delia and I
share a dhurjee, or sewing man, for example, and we are both chargeable
for him. This I never could reconcile with my sense of justice and of
arithmetic,--that the poll-tax of a whole man should be paid on half a
tailor; but there is no satisfaction to be got out of Tiglath-Pileser.
Some people have more respect for the law than it really deserves.
I had the pleasure, however, of bringing him to a sense of his
responsibilities when the tax-paper came in, from which he learned
that no less than fifteen heads of families looked to him to be their
providence. Under the weight of this communication he turned quite
pale, and sat down hastily upon the nearest self-sustaining object,
which happened to be the fender. But as a matter of fact he liked
the idea. Every Englishman does, and this is why a certain measure
of success attends not only his domestic but his general experiments
in governing the East. He loves the service of an idea, and nothing
flatters him so truly as his conception of all that he has to do.

The ear sharpens if its owner lives in the garden. It is no longer
muffled by the four walls of a house, and remote sounds visit it,
bringing with them a meaning which somehow they never have indoors,
even when they penetrate there. Up here they principally make one aware
of the silence, which is such a valuable function of sounds. I should
like to write a chapter about the quiet of Simla, but of course if one
began like that one would never finish. It is our vast solace, our
great advantage; we live without noise. The great ranges forbid it; the
only thing they will listen to is a salute from the big gun, and they
pass that from one to another, uncertain that is not an insult. And the
quenching comment in the silence that follows!

It is tremendous, invincible, taken up and rewritten in the lines of
all the hills. It stands always before our little colony, with a solemn
finger up, so that a cheer from the cricket ground is a pathetic thing,
and the sound of the Roy-Regent’s carriage wheels awakens memories of
Piccadilly. We are far withdrawn and very high up, fifty-six miles down
to the level, and then it is only empty India--and the stillness lies
upon us and about us and up and down the khuds, almost palpable and so
morne, but with the sweetest melancholy. Consider, you of London and
New York, what it must be to live on one mountain-side and hear a crow
caw across the valley, on the other. Of course we are a Secretariat
people; we have no factory whistles.

This afternoon, however, I hear an unlicensed sound. It is the sound
of an infant giving tongue, and it comes from the quarters. Now there
ought not to be a baby in the quarters; it is against all orders. No
form of domestic ménage is permitted there; the place is supposed to be
a monastery, and the servants to house their women-folk elsewhere. The
sound is as persistent as it is unwarrantable; it is not only a breach
of custom, but displeasing. How am I to reckon with it? I may send for
Dumboo and complain. In that case the noise will cease at once; they
will give opium to the child, which will injure its digestion, and in
the future, as a grown-up person, it will enjoy life less because I
could not put up with its crying as an infant. I can report the matter
to Tiglath-Pileser, which would mean an end to the baby, not illegally,
by banishment. But is it so easy? One approves, of course, of all
measures to discourage them about the premises, but when in spite of
rules and regulations a baby has found its way in, and is already
lamenting its worldly prospects at the top of its voice, in honest
confidence that at least the roof over its head will be permanent, a
complication arises. I cannot dislodge such a one. Better deafness and
complicity.

Far down the khud-side an Imperial bugle. Abroad the spaces the
mountains stand in, and purple valleys deepening. Among the deodars a
whisper, not of scandal, believe me. A mere announcement that the day
is done. On the other side of the hill a pony trotting, farther and
fainter receding, but at the farthest and faintest it is plain that he
goes short in front. From the bazaar a temple bell, with the tongue of
an alien religion....




CHAPTER XII


To-day I think India, down below there on the other side of the hill,
must be at its hottest. A white dust haze hangs over the plains, but we
know what is going on under it; nearly all of us have gasped through
June more than once in those regions. It is the time when you take
medical advice before committing yourself to a railway journey, even
with the provision of a cracked-ice pillow,--the favourite time to step
out of the train and die of cholera in the waiting room. It is also the
very special time for the British private soldier to go out in anger
and kick with his foot the punkah-wallah who has fallen asleep with the
slack rope in his hand, so that the punkah-wallah, in whom is concealed
unknown to the private soldier an enlarged spleen, immediately dies.
There is then trouble and high-talking, because of the people who
consider that the death of a punkah-wallah demands the life of a
private soldier who only meant to admonish him, a contention which
cannot be judged without a knowledge of the relative values concerned,
and an experience of the temperature in which the rash and negligent
act was committed. There is reason in the superstition which associates
great heat with the devil. Operating alone, it can do almost as much as
he can.

The dust haze from the plains hangs all about us, obscuring even the
near ranges, impalpable but curiously solid. It has a flavour which it
is impossible not to taste if ever one breathes through the mouth, and
hour by hour it silently gathers upon the furniture. It has been like
this for a week, pressing round us at a measured distance, which just
enables us to see our own houses and gardens. Within that space, the
sunlight and every circumstance as usual. It is a little like living
under a ground-glass bell. Do not choose the present time of year to
come to see Simla. You would have to make a house-to-house visitation,
and piece it together from memory.

Even here, in the garden, much too hot the eye of heaven shines. I have
abandoned the pencil-cedar, and taken refuge under a trellis covered
with a banksia rose, which is thicker, and I have added to my defences
a pith hat and an umbrella. Notwithstanding these precautions, we all
gasp together to-day in the garden; and I am inclined to agree with
the mignonette, which is not as a rule talkative, that this is no
longer the summer--exquisite word--that we expect in Simla, but the
odious “hot weather” which comes instead in the country down below. The
mignonette, by the way, stands to my discernment, immediately under
the pencil-cedar. When I sowed it there in the spring, Tiglath-Pileser
said, “It will never do anything under a conifer.” When it began to
show, he said again, “It may come up, but it will never do anything.
Nothing ever does anything under a conifer.” Atma was not of this
advice. “Come up?” he said, looking at it sternly, “wherefore should
it not come up, if your honour wishes it?” Atma always takes this
view; he seems to suppose that the flowers, like himself, are above all
things anxious to please, and if any of them fail in their duty, he
implies, with indignation, that he will know the reason why. But his
opinion is too constant, and I did not trust it about the mignonette. I
insisted, instead, that every morning the fallen cedar spines should be
picked out of it, and the earth freshly stirred about the roots; and I
have a better patch of mignonette under my conifer than can be produced
anywhere else in the garden. I am sure that the shade of a conifer is
no less beneficial than any other kind of shade, except that there is
never enough of it; nor can I accept the theory that there is anything
poisonous in the spines. They only pack and only lie very closely
together, never blown about like leaves, and so keep away the air and
light, and if you happen to have the use of twenty or thirty brown
fingers to pick them out, there is no reason why you cannot produce
quantities of things beside mignonette under a conifer. Do anything? I
do not know a more able-bodied or hard-working flower on the shelf.

A thing like that offers one for some time afterwards a valuable handle
in arguments.

However you do it, there is no more delicious experience in life than
to put something beautiful where nothing was before, I mean in any
suitable empty space. I have done it; I have had the consummation of
this pleasure for a fortnight. There was no goldenrod in Simla till I
went to America and got it. I make the lofty statement with confidence,
but subject to correction. Some one may have thought of it long ago,
and may be able to confront me with finer plumes than mine. If this
should be so, I shall accept it with reluctance and mortification, and
hereby promise to go and admire the other person’s, which is the most
anybody can do; but my pride does not expect such a fall.

It is the Queen’s goldenrod, not the President’s, though he has a great
deal of it and makes, I think, rather more fuss about it. A field
flower of generous mind, it ignores the political line, and I gathered
the seed one splendid autumn afternoon in Canada; so here on the shelf
it may claim its humble part in the Imperial idea. A friend of my youth
lent herself to the project; she took me in her father’s buggy, and
as we went along the country roads I saw again in the light of a long
absence, the quiet of the fields and the broad pebbled stretches of
the river, and the bronze and purple of the untrimmed woods that had
always been for me the margin of the thought of home. The quiet of
after-harvest held it all, nothing was about but a chipmunk that ran
along the top of a fence; you could count the apples in the orchards
among their scanty leaves; it was time to talk and to remember. And
so, not by anything unusual that we did or said, but by the rare and
beautiful correspondence that is sometimes to be felt between the
sentiment of the hour and the hour itself, this afternoon took its
place in the dateless calendar of the heart which is so much more
valuable a reference than any other. What a delight it is when old
forgotten things construct themselves again and the years gather into
an afternoon! And is there any such curious instance of real usefulness
for hidden treasure in the attic?

We found masses of goldenrod, all dry and scattering, principally along
the railway embankment, which we took for a good omen that it would
be a travelling flower; and in the fulness of time it was given to
Atma with instructions. His excitement was even greater than mine, he
nursed it tenderly, but it needed no nursing. It came up in thousands
delighted with itself and the new climate, overrunning its boxes so
that Atma pointed to it like a proud father. Then we planted it out
along the paling behind the coreopsis, and it immediately--that is to
say in three months’ time--grew to be five feet high, with the most
thick and lovely yellow sprays, which have been waving there against
the fir-trees, as I said before, for the last fortnight. It has quite
lost the way to its proper season; at home it blossoms in September
and this is only June,--but it appears to be rather the better than
the worse for that, though it does seem to look about, as the Princess
said when I sent her some, for the red sumach which is its friend
and companion at home. It is itself like a little fir-tree with flat
spreading branches of blossom, especially when it stands in groups
as they do, and the sun slants upon it giving the sprays an edge of
brighter gold so that it is the most luminous thing in the garden. And
the warm scent of it, holding something so far beyond itself and India,
something essential, impregnated with the solace that one’s youth and
its affections are not lost, but only on the other side of the world!

Another delightful thing about the goldenrod is the way the bees
and butterflies instantly found it out. The sprays are dotted with
them all day long, swaying and dipping with the weight of the little
greedy bodies; their hum of content stands in the air with the warm
and comfortable scent. “This is good fare” they seem to say. “There
are some things they make better in America.” I had never before done
anything for a bee or a butterfly, it is not really so easy, and I
would not have believed there was such pleasure in it. “_Le fleur qui
vole_”--is not that charming of M. Bourget?

I suppose it argues a very empty plane of life, but these little
creatures have an immense power of entertaining a person who spends day
after day in the theatre of their activities. I am reminded that here
in India one ought to have marvellous tales to tell of them, only Simla
is not really India, but a little bit of England with an Adirondack
climate and the “insect belt” of Central Asia; and things are not so
wonderful here as you would think to look at us on the map. Scorpions
and centipedes do come up from the plains and live in the cracks of the
wall whence they crawl out to be despatched when the first fires are
lighted, but they have not the venom of those below. Scorpions Atma
will take hold of by the poison bags at the end of their tails, and
hold up in the air dangling and waving their arms; and nobody even
screams at a centipede. Millipedes which look much more ferocious but
are really quite harmless often run like little express trains across
your bath-room walls, and very large, black, garden spiders also come
there to enjoy the damp. They enjoy the damp, but what they really
like is to get into the muslin curtain over the window and curl up
and die. The first time I saw one of them in the folds of the curtain
I thought it would be more comfortable in the garden and approached
it with caution and a towel, to put it out. Then I perceived from
its behaviour--it did not try to run away, but just drew its legs a
little closer under it, as you or I would do if we absolutely didn’t
care what happened so long as we were left in peace--that it had come
there on purpose, being aware of its approaching end. I decided that
the last moments of even a spider should be respected, but every day I
shook the curtain and he drew his legs together a little more feebly
than the day before, until at last he dropped out, the shell of a
spider, comfortably and completely dead. I admired his expiring, it was
business-like and methodical, the thing he had next to do, and he was
so intent upon it, not in any way to be disturbed or distracted, asking
no question of the purposes of nature, simply carrying them out. One
might moralize.

Talking of spiders I have just seen a fly catch one. It was, of course,
an ichneumon fly. One has many times heard of his habit of pouncing
upon his racial enemy, puncturing and paralyzing him and finally
carrying him off, walling him up and laying an egg in him, out of which
comes a young ichneumon to feed upon his helpless vitals; but one does
not often see the tragedy in the air. He held his fat prey quite firmly
in his merciless jaws and he went with _entrain_, the villain! The
victim spider and the assassin fly! One might moralize again.

It is hotter than ever, and the sunlight under the ground-glass
bell has a factitious look, as if we had here a comedy with a scene
of summer. A hawk-moth darts like a hummingbird in and out of the
honeysuckle, and a very fine rose-chafer all in green and gold paces
across this paragraph. I believe there are more rose-chafers this year
than there ought to be, and Atma has a heavy bill against them in every
stage of their existence, but they are such attractive depredators.
When I find one making himself comfortable in the heart of a La France,
I know very well that on account of the white grub he was once and the
many white grubs he will be again I ought to kill him and think no
more about it; but one hesitates to send a creature out of the world
who exercises such good taste when he is in it. I know it is quite too
foolish to write, but the extent of my vengeance upon such a one is
only to put him into a common rose.

The birds are silent; the butterflies bask on the gravel like little
ships with big sails. Even the lizards have sought temporary retirement
between the flower-pots. I am the only person who is denied her natural
shelter and compelled to resort to an umbrella. Tiglath-Pileser
said the other day that he thought it was quite time I made some
acknowledgment of the good it was doing me. It _is_ doing me good--of
course. But what strikes me most about it is the wonderful patience and
fortitude people can display in having good done to them.




CHAPTER XIII


I have had a morning of domestic details with the Average Woman. I
don’t quite know whether one ought to write about such things, or
whether one ought to draw a veil; I have not yet formed a precise
opinion as to the function of the commonplace in matter intended for
publication. But surely no one should scorn domestic details, which
make our universal background and mainstay of existence. Theories and
abstractions serve to adorn it and to give us a notion of ourselves:
but we keep them mostly for lectures and sermons, the monthly reviews,
the original young man who comes to tea. All would be glad to shine
at odd times, but the most luminous demonstration may very probably
be based upon a hatred of cold potatoes and a preference for cotton
sheets. And of course no one would dare to scorn the average woman; she
is the backbone of society. Personally I admire her very humbly, and
respect her very truly. For many of us, to become an average woman is
an ambition. I think I will go on.

Besides, Thalia interrupted us, and Thalia will always lend herself to
a chapter.

The Average Woman is not affectionate but she is solicitous, and there
was the consideration of my original situation and my tiresome health.
Then she perceived that I had a garden and that it was a pretty garden.
I said, indifferently, that people thought so; I knew it was a subject
she would not pursue unless she were very much encouraged, and there
was no reason at all why she should pursue it; she would always be a
visitor in such a place, whereas there were many matters which she
could treat with familiar intelligence. I was quite right; she wandered
at once into tins of white enamel, where it seemed she had already
spent several industrious hours. We sympathized deeply over the extent
to which domestic India was necessarily enamelled, though I saw a look
of criticism cross her face when I announced that I hoped one day to
be rich enough not to possess a single article painted in that way--not
a chair, not a table. I think she considered my declaration too
impassioned, but she did not dissent from it. That is a circumstance
one notes about the Average Woman: she never dissents from anything.
She never will be drawn into an argument. One could make the most wild
and whirling statement to her, if one felt inclined, and it is as
likely as not that she would say “Yes indeed,” or “I think so too,” and
after a little pause of politeness go on to talk about something else.
I can’t imagine why one never does feel inclined.

We continued to discuss interior decoration, and I learned that she was
preparing a hearth seat for her drawing-room, one of those low square
arrangements projecting into the room before the fire, upon which two
ladies may sit before dinner and imagine they look picturesque, while
the rest of the assembled guests, from whom they quite cut off the
cheerful blaze, wonder whether they do. The Average Woman declared
that she could no longer live without one.

“As time goes on one notices that fewer and fewer average women can,” I
observed absently, and hastily added, “I mean, you know, that of course
very portly ladies--”

“Oh, I _see_,” said she. “No, of course not.”

“So long,” I went on, pursuing the same train of thought, “as one can
sit down readily upon a hearth seat, and especially so long as one can
clasp one’s knees upon it, one is not even middle-aged. To clasp one’s
knees is really to hug one’s youth.”

“I had _such_ a pretty one in Calcutta,” said the Average Woman. “So
cosy it looked. Everybody admired it.”

“But in Calcutta,” I exclaimed with astonishment, “it is always so
hot--and there are no fireplaces.”

“Oh, that didn’t matter,” replied she triumphantly, “I draped the
mantelpiece. It looked just as well.” And yet there are people who say
that the Average Woman has no imagination.

“Talking of age,” she continued, “how old do you suppose Mrs. ---- is?
Somebody at tiffin yesterday _who knew the family_ declared that she
could not be a day under thirty-seven. I should not give her more than
thirty-five myself. My husband says thirty-two.”

“About a person’s age,” I said, “what can another person’s husband
know?”

“What _should_ you say?” she insisted. I am sorry to have to underline
so much, but you know how the average woman talks in italics. It is
as if she wished to make up in emphasis--but I will not finish that
good-natured sentence.

“Oh,” said I, “you cannot measure Mrs. ----’s age in years! She is as
old as Queen Elizabeth and as young as the day before yesterday. Parts
of her date from the Restoration and parts from the advent of M. Max
Nordau--” At that moment Thalia arrived. “And that is the age of all
the world,” I finished.

“We were wondering,” said the Average Woman, “how old Mrs. ---- is.”

“_You_ were wondering,” I corrected her.

“What does it matter?” said Thalia, which was precisely what I should
have expected her to say. What _does_ it matter? Why should the average
woman excite herself so greatly about this particularly small thing?
How does it bear upon the interest or the attractiveness or the value
of any woman to know precisely how many years she counts between thirty
and forty, at all events to another of her sex? Yet to the average
woman it seems to be the all-important fact, the first thing she must
know. She is _enragée_ to find it out, she will make the most cunning
enquiries and take the most subtle means. Much as I appreciate the
average woman, I have in this respect no patience with her. It is as
if she would measure the pretensions of all others by recognized rule
of thumb with a view to discovering the surplus claim and properly
scoring it down. It is surely a survival from days when we were much
more feminine than we are now; but it is still very general, even among
married ladies, for whom, really, the question might have an exhausted
interest.

“What does it matter?” said Thalia. “I see your fuchsias, like me, have
taken advantage of a fine day to come out. What a lot you’ve got!”

“Yes,” I said, without enthusiasm, “they were here when we came.”

“Oh, don’t you like them?” exclaimed the Average Woman, “I think the
fuchsia such a graceful, pretty flower.”

“It is graceful and it is pretty,” I assented. There are any number
of fuchsias, as Thalia said, standing in rows along the paling under
the potato-creeper; the last occupant must have adored them. They
remain precisely in the pots in which they were originally cherished.
Knowing that the first thing I do for a flower I like is to put it
in the ground where it has room to move its feet and stir about at
night, and take its share in the joys of the community, Tiglath-Pileser
says compassionately of the fuchsia, “It is permitted to occupy a
pot;” but I notice that he does not select it for his button-hole
notwithstanding.

Thalia looked at me suspiciously. “What have you got against it?” she
demanded, and the Average Woman chorussed, “Now tell us.”

I fixed a fuchsia sternly with my eye. “It’s an affected thing,”
I said. “Always looking down. I think modesty can be an overrated
virtue in a flower. It is also like a ballet-dancer, flaunting short
petticoats, which doesn’t go with modesty at all. I like a flower to be
sincere; there is no heart, no affection, no sentiment about a fuchsia.”

Thalia listened to this diatribe with her head a little on one side.

“You are _full_ of prejudices,” said she, “but there is something in
this one. Nobody could say ‘My love is like a fuchsia.’”

“It depends,” I said; “there are ladies not a hundred miles from here
who thrill when they are told that they walk like the partridge and
shine like the moon. I shouldn’t care about it myself.”

“No, indeed,” said the Average Woman. “That bit beyond the mignonette
seems rather empty. What are you going to put in there?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said.

“I don’t know,” remarked Thalia combatively, “when there are so many
beautiful things in the world, why you should discriminate in favour of
nothing.”

“Yes, why?” said the Average Woman.

“Well,” I replied defiantly, “that’s my spare bedroom. You’ve got to
have _some_where to put people. I don’t like the feeling that every
border is fully occupied and not a square inch available for any one
coming up late in the season.”

You can see that Thalia considers that while we are respected for our
virtues our weaknesses enable us to enjoy ourselves. She accepts them
as an integral and intentional part of us and from some of them she
even extracts a contemplative pleasure. The Average Woman looks down
upon such things and I did not dare to encounter her glance of reserved
misunderstanding.

Thalia smiled. I felt warmed and approved. “Alas!” said she, “my garden
is all spare bedrooms.” She lives, poor dear, on the other side of the
Jakko and has to wait till September for her summer. “I see you keep
it aired and ready.”

As a matter of fact Atma had freshly turned the earth. I hold to that
in the garden; it seems to me a parallel to good housekeeping. The
new-dug mould makes a most enhancing background; and an empty bed, if
it is only freshly made, offers the mind as much pleasure as a gay
parterre. It is the sense, I suppose, of effort expended and care
taken, and above all it is a stretch of the possible, a vista beyond
the realized present which is as valuable in a garden as it is in life.
Oh no, not as valuable. In life it is the most precious thing, and
it is sparingly accorded. Thalia has it, I know, but I looked at the
Average Woman in doubt. Thalia, whatever else she does, will have high
comedy always for her portion, and who can tell in what scenes she will
play or at what premières she will assist? But the Average Woman,--can
one not guess at the end of ten years what she will be talking about,
what she will have experienced, what she will have done? I looked
at the Average Woman and wondered. She was explaining to Thalia the
qualities of milk tea. I decided that she was probably happier than
Thalia, and that there was no need whatever to be sorry for her. She
stayed a long time; I think she enjoyed herself; and when she went away
of course we talked about her.

We spoke in a vein of criticism, and I was surprised to learn that the
thing about the Average Woman to which Thalia took most exception was
her husband. I had always found the poor patient creatures entirely
supportable, and I said so. “Oh, yes,” replied Thalia impatiently,
“in themselves they’re well enough. But didn’t you hear her? ‘_George
adores you in “Lady Thermidore.”_’ Now that annoys me.”

“Does it?” said I. “Why shouldn’t George adore you in _Lady Thermidore_
if he wants to, especially if he tells his wife?”

“That’s exactly it,” said Thalia. “If he really did he wouldn’t tell
her. But he doesn’t. She just says so in order to give herself the
pleasure of imagining that I am charmed to believe that George--her
George--”

“I see,” I said, sympathetically.

“They are always offering their husbands up to me like that,” continued
Thalia, gloomily. “They expect me, I suppose, to blush and simper. As
if I hadn’t a very much better one of my own!”

“They think it the highest compliment they can pay you.”

“Precisely. That’s what is so objectionable. And besides it’s a
mistake.”

“I shall never tell you that Tiglath-Pileser adores you,” I stated.

“My dear, I have known it for ages!” said Thalia, _en se sauvant_, as
they do in French novels.

Perhaps the Average Woman is a little tiresome about her husband. She
is generally charged with quoting him overmuch. I don’t think that;
his opinions are often useful and nearly always sensible, but she
certainly assumes a far too general interest for him as a subject upon
which to dwell for long periods. Average wives of officials are much
more distressingly affected in this way than other ladies are; it is
quite a local peculiarity of bureaucratic centres. They cherish the
delusion, I suppose, that in some degree they advance the interests
of these unfortunate men by a perpetual public attitude of adoration,
but I cannot believe it is altogether the case. On the contrary, I am
convinced that the average official husband himself would find too
much zeal in the recounting of his following remarkable traits. His
obstinate and absurd devotion to duty. “In _my_ husband the Queen
has a good bargain!” His remarkable youth for the post he holds,--I
remember a case where my budding affection for the wife of an Assistant
Secretary was entirely checked by this circumstance. The compliments
paid him by his official superiors, those endless compliments. And more
than anything perhaps, his extraordinary and deplorable indifference
to society. “I simply can_not_ get my husband out; I am positively
ashamed of making excuses for him.” When her husband is served up to me
in this guise I feel my indignation rising out of all proportion to
its subject, always an annoying experience. Why should I be expected to
accept his foolish idea that he is superior to society, and admire it?
Why should I be assumed to observe with interest whether he comes out;
why indeed, so far as I am concerned, should he not eternally stay in?

It comes to this that one positively admires the woman who has the
reticence to let her husband make his own reputation.

What offends one, I suppose, is the lack of sincerity. A very different
case is that of the simple soul who says, “Tom will not allow me to
have it in the house,” or “Jim absolutely refuses to let me know her.”
One hears that with the warm thrill of mutual bondage; one has one’s
parallel ready--the tyranny I could relate of Tiglath-Pileser! The note
of grievance is primitive and natural; but the woman who butters her
husband in friendly council, what excuse has she?




CHAPTER XIV


The rains have come. They were due on the fifteenth of June and they
are late; this is the twentieth. The whole of yesterday afternoon we
could see them beating up the valleys, and punctually at midnight
they arrived, firing their own salute with a great clap of thunder
and a volley on the roof--it is a galvanized roof--that left no room
for doubt. You will notice that it is the rains that have come and
not the rain; there is more difference than you would imagine between
water and water. The rain is a gentle thing and descends in England;
the rains are untamed, torrential, and visit parts of the East. They
come to stay; for three good months they are with us, pelting the
garden, beating at the panes. It would be difficult for persons living
in the temperate zone to conceive how wet, during this period, our
circumstances are.

One always hears them burst with a feeling of apprehension; it is such
a violent movement of nature, potential of damage, certain of change;
and life is faced next morning at breakfast with a gloom which is not
assumed. A dripping dulness varied by deluges, that is the prospect
for the next ninety days. The emotions of one who will be expected to
support it under an umbrella, with the further protection of a conifer
only, are offered, please, to your kind consideration. I dreamed as the
night wore on of shipwreck in a sea of mountains on a cane chair, and
when I awoke, salvaged in my bed, it was raining as hard as ever.

At breakfast Tiglath-Pileser said, uneasily, that it would probably
clear up in half an hour. “It simply can’t go on like this,” remarked
Thisbe, and I saw that they were thinking of me, under the conifer.
When you suspect commiseration the thing to do is to enhance it. “Clear
up?” said I with indifference. “Why should it clear up? It has only
just begun.”

“It is all very well to sit out in the rain in England,” said Thisbe;
“but this is quite a different thing.”

“Oh dear, no,” said I. “There is only a little more of it.”

“Well, if it continues to pelt like this, of course--” began
Tiglath-Pileser.

“I shall take the old green gamp,” I put in, “it’s the biggest.”

They glanced at each other; I perceived the glance though my attention
was supposed to be given to a curried egg. A word of petition would
have installed me at once by the drawing-room fire; but a commanding
pride rose up in me and forbade the word. Tiglath-Pileser, who holds to
carrying out a system thoroughly, asked me thoughtfully if I wouldn’t
have a little marmalade with my egg; and the matter dropped.

Half an hour afterwards I was encamped under the pencil-cedar and the
old green umbrella. You cannot screen your whole person in a long chair
with these two things, and I added to myself a water-proof sheet. It
was a magnificent moment. The rain was coming down straight and thick
with a loud, steady drum, small flat puddles were dancing all about
me, and brooks were running under my chair--I sat calm and regardless.
I was really quite dry and not nearly so uncomfortable as I looked;
but I presented a spectacle of misery that afforded me a subtle joy.
The only drawback was that there was nobody to witness it; Thisbe and
Tiglath-Pileser seemed by common consent to withdraw themselves to the
back parts. Only Dumboo circulated disconsolately about the verandah,
with the heavy knowledge that now without doubt it was proved that the
mistress was mad; and I wished to be thought indifferent only, not
insane. He seemed to think that I required surveillance, and kept an
anxious eye upon me until I sent him about his business.

It was a day of great affairs in the garden; I could hear them going
on all round me. To everybody there it meant a radical change of
housekeeping; some families were coming out and some going in, some
moving up and some down, while others would depart, almost at once, for
the season. No wonder they all talked at once in an excited murmur
under the rain. I could hear the murmur, but I could not distinguish
the voices; between the rain and the umbrella, most of the garden was
hidden from me, and it is a curious fact that if you cannot see a
flower you cannot hear what it says. Only the pansy beds came within
eyesight and ear-shot, and there I could see that consternation and
confusion reigned. It is the beginning of the end for the pansies; they
love rain in watering-pots, morning and evening, and a bright sun all
day, and this downpour disconcerts them altogether. They cry out, every
one of them, against the waste and improvidence of it. For another
month they will go on opening fresh buds and uttering fresh protests,
plainly disputing among themselves whether, under such adverse
circumstances, life is worth living; and one sad day I shall find that
they have decided it is not. I am always sorry to see the last pansy
leave the garden; it goes with such regret.

I intended to be undisturbed and normal, and to accomplish pages;
but I find that you cannot think in heavy rain. It is too fierce, too
attacking. You know that it will not do you any harm, but your nerves
are not convinced; you can only wait in a kind of physical suspense,
like the cows in the fields, whose single idea I am sure is, “How soon
will it be over?”

Well, I knew it would not be over for ninety days, and already there
were drops on the inside of the green umbrella. I was seriously
weighing the situation when Tiglath-Pileser appeared upon the verandah.
He had come out to say that the rains always broke with thunder-storms,
that this was practically a thunder-storm, and that he considered my
situation, under the tallest tree in the neighbourhood, too exposed.
He had to think of something; that was what he thought of, and I
was pleased to find it convincing. “Shall I take it for granted,” I
inquired blandly, “whenever it comes down in bucketfuls like this, that
there is thunder in the air, and come in?” and Tiglath-Pileser said
that he thought it would be as well.

So I am in--in to spend the day. It does not sound in any way
remarkable, which shows how entirely custom is our measure for the
significance of things. It is really an excursion into the known and
familiar, become unusual and exciting by banishment; and it brings one
fresh sense of how easy it would be to make life--almost any--vivid
and interesting by a discreet and careful use of abstinence. I am not
praising the pleasures of the anchorite; his is an undiscriminating
experience upon quite a lower plane; but, oh, restraint, the discipline
of the greedy instinct, how it brings out the colours of life! To have
learnt this lesson only makes it worth while to have come through the
world. People to whom a roof is normal have never, I venture to say,
known the sense of shelter I feel to-day, the full enclosure of the
four walls, the independence of the dry floor. The hill-man who watches
the long slant of the rain into the valley from a cave out there on the
road to Thibet, where a little heap of cold embers often tell of such a
one’s refuging, may offer me intelligent sympathy--I should criticise
any one else’s.

Meanwhile I have been criticising other things. The house is a place
of shelter; it is also a place of confinement, and there are corners
where the blessed air does not sufficiently circulate. This as an
abstraction is generally accepted, but unless you pass a good deal of
time out-of-doors you can never know it as a fact. It is not perhaps
the happiest result of living in the open air that to the nose thus
accustomed there are twice as many smells in the world as there were
before. I have been discovering them in various places this morning,
here a suggestion of kerosene, there a flavour of cheese, in another
spot a reminiscence of Tiglath-Pileser’s pipe. I even pretend to know
that it was his meerschaum and not his brier, though Thisbe thinks
this preposterous. Thisbe thinks me preposterous altogether, vainly
sniffing for the odours which offend me, and begging me to desist
from opening windows and letting in the rain. Dumboo, more practical,
goes carefully round after me, and closes each in turn as soon as
I have left the room, with an air of serious perturbation,--who
can be _jewabdeh_--answer-giving--for the acts of a mad mistress?
I have finally subsided as near as possible to the window in the
breakfast-room, with the garden and the rain outside. It has been given
me to understand that I am to have a present shortly, and I may choose
my present. For some time I have been vainly revolving the matter;
the world seems so full of desirable articles that one does not want;
but here an inspiration visits me--I will have another window in the
breakfast-room. There is plenty of room for it, nothing but a wall in
the way. Where this blank wall, covered with wall-paper, now blocks the
vision, another square of garden shall appear; it will let in a line
of blue hill, most of the pencil-cedar, a corner of the rose-bushes,
and a whole company of poppies and corn-bottles. A carpenter from
Jullunder will make it in a week,--Jullunder thrives upon the export
of carpenters to the hills,--and it will be a most delicious present,
giving a pleasure every morning freshly new, much better than anything
that would have to be locked up in a drawer. Also, when we go away I
shall be able, without a pang of self-sacrifice, to leave it behind for
the enjoyment of other people, which is quite the most pleasing kind of
benefit to confer.

Very heavily it descends, this first burst of the rains. The garden
is bowed under it; from far and near comes the sound of rushing water
down the khud-sides. The great valleys beyond the paling are brimful of
grey, impenetrable vapour, as if the clouds, even in dissolving, were
too heavy to carry themselves. From my asylum nothing appears to stir
or speak except the rain. The day weeps fast and stormily, as if night
might fall before she had half deplored enough.

It would be dull at the window but for the discovery I have made in
the banksia over the arched trellis which stands, for no purpose at
all, across the garden walk that runs round the roses. Here I strongly
suspect the brown bird has an establishment, and a sitting hen. So long
as I myself sat in the garden I never guessed it, he was too clever;
but he did not dream, I suppose, that I would take to spying upon him
in ambush like this, and from here his conduct looks most husbandly.
The brown bird joined us one afternoon about a fortnight ago, while
we were having tea on the verandah. He perched on a flower-pot, and
hinted, in the most engaging way, that the ground was baked and worms
were scarce, and we made him feel so welcome to crumbs that he has
constantly dropped in upon us since. He is most venturesome with us;
he will run under our chairs and under the table, and he loves to slip
in and out of hiding among the flower-pots. He goes with little leaps
and bounds, like a squirrel; and he whistles with such melody that one
might very well think him a thrush. I thought him a thrush, until one
afternoon Tiglath-Pileser said aggressively, “I don’t believe that bird
is a thrush.”

“Pray, then,” said I, “what is he?”

“He belongs, nevertheless,” said Tiglath-Pileser judicially, “to the
_Passeres_.”

“If I asked your name,” said Delia, who was there, “I should not be
grateful to be told that you were one of the primates,” and we laughed
at the master of the house.

“Wait a bit,” said he, “I should call him a robin.”

“He’s got no red breast,” I brought forth, out of the depth of my
ignorance.

“He has a reddish spot under each ear,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “and mark
how his tail turns up.”

“I am no ornithologist,” I said. “His tail turns up.”

“How little one realizes,” quoth Thisbe, pensively, “that a bird has
ears.”

“I think,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “that I can decide this matter,” and
disappeared into the house.

“He has gone to get a book,” said Delia, “that will settle _you_, dear
lady, you and your thrush,” and presently he came out triumphant, as
she said, with “Wanderings of a Naturalist in India.”

“‘Although differing altogether in the colour of its plumage from the
European robin,’” he read aloud, “‘there is great similarity in their
habits. It frisks before the door, and picks up crumbs, jerking its
tail as it hops along. How often have associations of home been brought
to mind by seeing this pretty little warbler pursuing its gambols
before the door of an Eastern bungalow!’”

“Well,” said I, “not often, because of course we didn’t recognize it,
but in future they always will be,” and at that moment the pretty
little warbler put himself in profile on the paling before us, and
threw out his little waistcoat, and threw back his little head and
whistled, and we all cried out that he had established his identity,
there could not be any doubt of it, in face of that brave and dainty
attitude. There are some things a bird never could pick up.

So it is a robin that has gone to housekeeping there in the close-cut
banksia. He is a devoted mate; he knows by heart, perhaps by
experience, how necessary it is to encourage, dull little wives on the
nest; and, neglectful of the hard-beating storm, he perches as near
her as may be and sends out every dulcet variation he can think of. To
the prisoner in the house it seems a supreme note of hope, this bird
singing in the rain.




CHAPTER XV


I find it desirable to sit more and more out in the rain. A little
stouter protection, a little more determination, and the cane chair
will soon weather anything. There are still tempestuous half-hours
which drive me as far as the verandah, but I am growing every day
more used to the steady beat and drip about my defences, and I now
know precisely the term of resistance of every umbrella in the house.
One after the other I put them to the proof; on a really wet day I
discourage three or four. An occasional pelting of my person does
not trouble me, I am very water-proof; but when drops descend upon
this fair page and confuse its sentiments I call loudly for another
umbrella. Constantly, no doubt, the cane chair under the conifer grows
a stranger spectacle; but my family have become accustomed to it and
there is no one else to see. The occasional rickshaw that passes along
the road above pays attention to nothing, but goes as fast as it can,
with the hood up, like a deranged beetle, and if any one rides past it
is with bent head and flying mackintosh. I have the world very much to
myself, most of the mountains when I can see them, and all the garden.
And it is full of rewards and satisfactions, this rainy world. The wind
that pushes the clouds up here blows over a thousand miles of sun and
sand and draws a balm from the desert to mingle with its cool dampness,
delicious to breathe, like a cooled drink to the lungs. It cannot be
tasted in the house because of the prevailing flavour of carpets and
curtains. Nor can anybody know, who has not sat out under it, the
delight of the slow termination of a shower, the spacing lines and the
sparser drop-dancers on the gravel, the jolly irregular drip from the
branches on your umbrella, the wraiths of mist skimming over the drive
and the feint thin veil slanting against the deodars into which it all
dissolves. So invariably we are careful to wait in the house “until
it is over,”--quite over. A pencil-cedar too, very wet, with a drop at
the end of every spine, and a soft gray light shining through it, is a
good thing to look up into. “As if it were candied,” as Thisbe politely
conceded, and departed at once into the house out of the damp.

For the first time, I have this year a rains garden. It is a thing
anybody may have, but very few people do. As a rule gardens in our
part of the world are handed over in the rains to slugs and their own
resources. The resources of a garden, left to itself, are hardly ever
suspected. It is impossible, people say, to keep it down, and they sit
comfortably in the house looking out upon the impossibility. In the hot
weather they say it is impossible to keep it up. They complain that
they are here for so short a time that it is not worth while to do
anything. Most people are transitory in our little town, certainly; it
is generally only a year or two in Paradise and then down again into
the Pit, but why that year or two should be thought less worth than
others of their lives I never can quite understand. Especially as a
flower takes such a little while to come to you. But people are just
people.

To me of course, peculiarly situated under a conifer, a rains garden
was a peremptory necessity, and I have had it in my mind’s eye for
months. There was an unavoidable fortnight, when the earlier flowers
were going out and the others only answering my invitation as it
were, promising to come, which was not quite cheerful. The sweet-peas
fluttered for days about the verandah before they would submit to be
beaten down, and the roses, those that were left, looked up as if they
had been for a long time in ladies’ bonnets. The mignonette grew leggy
and curious, spreading in all directions and forgetting to flower, with
a smell, moreover, like decaying cabbage, deplorable in mignonette; and
the petunias went off with draggled petticoats, which must have been
distressing to a flower whose principal virtue is her neat and buxom
appearance. The snapdragons and the corn-bottles are just holding on
anyhow and the phloxes seem not to know what to do; but the poppies
were dashed out in a single night, and quantities of things in pots
have been considerately removed by Atma to the back parts, there to
meet dissolution in private.

But now everything that craves or loves the rain is coming on. I
should not be so proud of my potato-vine; I did not plant it, but
somebody probably, who looked down from here and saw the flame of the
mutiny light up the land. He has my thanks; he has left for himself
a steadfast memorial. So eager is it to do him credit that every hot
weather shower a twig will clothe itself in white; and now, when the
time is fully come it trembles everywhere over the paling against the
sky and heaps up its blossoms among its glossy leaves like snow. That
is not idle simile; it takes blue shadows and fills up chinks, it is
exactly like snow. The verandah is odorous with lilies, from the tall
curling Japanese kind, as opulent as a lily can be to the simple and
delicate day lilies that love this world so little. All the lilies
live in the verandah except the strenuous peppered orange kind which
Tiglath-Pileser declares is not the tiger-lily and which bears itself
most gallantly under the rain, standing like a street lamp in the
darkest corners, and those strange crimson and yellow Tigridæ (I am
sorry I do not know their Christian name) that roll up so unexpectedly
with us in the middle of the morning. I must say I like a flower that
you can depend upon. Mr. Johnson speaks contemptuously of the Tigridæ,
so I suppose they are common enough, but to me they were new and very
remarkable, and when they began to come out I asked Thalia to lunch to
see them. When she arrived, at two o’clock, every one of them had gone
into the likeness of a duck’s head, with a satirical red and yellow eye
that almost winked at us. I was prepared to ask Thalia to admire the
Tigridæ, but such conduct puts one off. I am still willing to concede
that it is wonderful; but you do not want a flower to astonish you; its
functions are quite different. I have taken occasion to point out this
to Thisbe, when she complains that she is not original.

Tall stocks of tuberose--quite three feet--stand among the rose-bushes
in front of the drawing-room windows; but they turn brown almost as
fast as they open; next year I will plant them under the eaves for
more shelter. A clump of cannas, spikes of flame, waving splendid
Italian and African leaves, red-brown and brown-green, with coleas
of all colours sitting round their feet, lord it at chosen corners
on each side of the drive. Even on a shelf you may have features; it
is all a matter of relation. If your scale is only simple enough the
most surprising incident is possible; and of this the moral certainly
lies in the application of it. Masses of pink and white hydrangeas
on this principle make the garden look like a Japanese print; they
are so big and blotchy and yet so simply, elegantly effective. They
are distributed wherever a tub will improve the shelf-scape; like
Diogenes the hydrangea must have its tub. Put him in the ground and at
once he grows woody and branchy and leafy, imagining perhaps that he
is intended to become a shrub. Thus he can be seen to profit by his
limitations--of how many more of us may this be said! The lobelia--a
garden should always be provided with plenty of lobelia, to give it
hope--is flushing into the thick young leaf with a twinkle here and
there to show what it could do if the rain would stop for just ten
minutes; and the salvia is presently blue, though sparingly, as is
its nature. The fuchsias care nothing for the rain and are full of
flounces purple and pink; but nobody takes it quite like the begonias,
who sit up unblinking crimson and brick-dust and mother-of-pearl, with
their gay yellow hearts in their splendid broad petals, saying plainly
“We like this.” And dahlias everywhere, single and double, opening
a cheerful eye upon a very wet world. The dahlia took possession of
Simla--I have looked it up--the same year the Government of India
did, and it has made itself equally at home. It grows profusely not
only in our bits of garden but everywhere along the khud-sides that
border the public highways. It mixes itself up with Finance and Foreign
Relations; it nods under the Telegraph Office and sways about the
Military Department. It does as it pleases, no one attempts to govern
it; it paints our little mountain town with the colours of fantasy and
of freedom.

Sunflowers and nasturtiums take as kindly to bureaucratic conditions.
We consider them fellows of the baser sort and plant them all behind,
the sunflower tall along the lattice between us and the road above,
the nasturtiums scrambling and blazing down the khud-side beneath. The
nasturtiums make a mere cloth of gold, there is not much entertainment
to be got out of them; but on heavily pouring days when I have betaken
myself to the attic-window level with them, I have found good company
in the sunflowers. Thoughtfully considered, the sunflower has no
features to speak of; an eye, and you have mentioned them all, yet many
comedians might envy that furnishing. His personality is evasive; I
have idly tried to draw him, and have reproduced a sunflower but no
gentleman. It lies in a nuance of light across that expressive round,
which may say anything, or merely stare. One looks intelligently to the
west, another hopefully to the east. Two little ones cower together;
another glances confidently up at its tall mother, another folds its
leaves under its chin and considers the whole question of life with
philosophy. On a particularly wet day I find a note to the effect that
a small sunflower called across to me, “I am just out this morning and
it’s pouring. A nice look-out, but I’ll try to bear up.” That was the
day on which I distinctly saw a sunflower shut its eye.

With Tiglath-Pileser everything is secondary at present to the state
of the drains and the kitchen roof. The drains are open channels down
the khud-side, the kitchen roof is of tin, and when it leaks enough to
put the fire out the cook comes and complains. He is a Moog cook, which
means that he prefers to avoid the disagreeable, so he waits until it
is actually out before he says anything. When, between showers, we
walk abroad upon the shelf my footsteps naturally tend to the border
where the wild puce-coloured Michaelmas daisies are thickening among
the goldenrod, and his would take the straightest direction to the
plumber and the coolies who are making another stone ditch for him. To
me there is no joy in repairing a kitchen roof, nor can I ever decide
whether it should be tarred or painted, while to Tiglath-Pileser the
union of Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod, though pleasing, is a matter
of trivial importance. So we have agreed upon the principle of a fair
partition of interest. He comes and assumes moderate enthusiasm before
my hedge of purple and yellow; I go and pronounce finally that nothing
could be uglier than either paint or tar for the kitchen roof. By such
small compromises as these people may hold each other in the highest
estimation for years.

The consideration of the kitchen roof reminds me of poor Delia, from
whom I had a letter this morning. She has rejoined her husband in a
frontier outpost, where the Department of Military Works had somewhat
neglected their quarters. Their position--that of Captain and Mrs.
Delia--in this weather is trying to a degree. In a particularly heavy
storm recently the rain came in upon them in such floods that they were
obliged to take refuge under the table. Imagine the knock of a stranger
at the gate under such circumstances! It was better than that--it
was the knock of a wayfaring Sapper come to _inspect the bungalow_.
How great must Delia’s joy have been in making him comfortable under
the table! And there they sat, all three, for fifteen mortal hours,
subsisting, for the cook-house was carried away, upon ginger-nuts
and chocolates and a bottle of anchovies. The more remote service of
Her Majesty our Queen-Empress involves some curious situations. The
Sapper, Delia writes, went forth no longer a stranger; fifteen hours
spent together under a table would naturally make a bond for life. One
might also trust Delia, whose mission is everywhere to strike a note
of gaiety and make glad the heart of man, to give the circumstance a
character sufficiently memorable. Almost, if four would not have been a
crowd, I could have wished myself there too, under the table.




CHAPTER XVI


I have heard crying in the nursery; it is the most babyish and
plaintive repetition of the old birds’ note, but it grows daily
stronger, more importunate. The parent birds utter six notes, dwelling
on the fourth in long musical appeal, the babies have learned only
the fourth, the one that really tells when you are hungry; it is a
little pipe, ridiculous to tears. The pretty little warbler pursues his
gambols more energetically than ever before the door of our Eastern
bungalow now, his wife comes with him and they are more punctual than
we are at meals, always in the verandah, on the impatient hop, for
breakfast and lunch and tea, though dinner-time finds them reluctantly
in bed. I will go so far as to say that if I am late in the morning the
father bird comes to my window and asks whether I am aware that I am
keeping two families waiting--if that is not his idea why does he so
markedly whistle there? Further I expect to be believed when I say that
I whistle him my apologies and he replies, and we frequently have quite
long conversations through the window before I actually appear. They
are such a young couple and so absorbed in their domestic affairs that
we take a great interest in them. It is a delight to find out a bird’s
doings and plans, and his nest is the only clue. At other times how
private they are, the birds! We know that they are about, and that is
all.

One real service I have been able to render the robins--in throwing
stones at the crows. The crow has a sleek and clerical exterior, but
inside he is as black-hearted a villain as wears feathers. He is a
killer and eater of other people’s offspring. Early in the season he
marks the nest, but eggs are not good enough for him, he waits until
hatching time is well over and then descends upon it with his great
sharp jaws ravaging and devouring. The other day a young bird took
refuge from a crow in my bath-room. It was huddled up in a corner and
I thought it a rat, but closer approach revealed it a baby mina, and
through the open door I saw the enemy’s impudent black head peering in.
He sailed away with imprecations on his beak and the mina was restored
to its family; Atma fortunately knew where they lived. Two crows have
marked our robins for their next dinner, and I am much interrupted by
the necessity for disappointing them. I must say one is not disposed
by such a circumstance as a nest to an over-confident belief in those
disguising arrangements of nature that are so much vaunted in books
of popular science. What could betray a nestful to the marauder more
quickly than this perpetual treble chorus? Nothing, I am sure, unless
the valiant declamation of its papa, who sometimes takes an exposed
perch and tells the world exactly what he would do to a crow, if he
could only catch him. Why are not young birds taught the wisdom of
silence and old ones the folly of vaunting? Because birds and lizards
and insects and things are not taught half as much as we imagine, and
as to the protective colour of a robin I believe it only happens to be
brown. In this Thisbe agrees with me; the amount of popular science
which is not in Thisbe’s possession would make many a humble home
happy. The small events of a garden, as I must apologize for pointing
out once more, become important to any one who lies all day, warm or
cold, awake or sleepy there, and I went in to tea lately bursting
with the information that the tits had come. “The Titts,” said Thisbe
meditatively. “Did we know them last year?” “I rather think we did,”
I replied, “Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Titt. I saw them this morning, but
they didn’t leave cards.” At which I was obliged to dodge a suddenly
illumined, perfectly undeserved sofa-cushion.

The garden is full of birds just now; they are for ever wanting to make
new introductions, it is almost impossible to pursue the simplest train
of thought. None of them are very constant except the robins and the
woodpeckers and a pair of minas that have built in a disused chimney
and squeal defiance at the crows all day long from the eavestrough,--no
crow was ever yet bold enough to go down a chimney after his prey. The
rest come and go, I never know what they are at, or even, to tell the
truth, how to address them. They appear suddenly out of nowhere and fly
in companies from tree to tree, or settle down to an industrious meal
all together under the rose-bushes, as if by common consent they had
decided to picnic there; perhaps I shall not see them again for two
or three days. Among the branches they take one direction, the tiny
tree-climbers with yellow-green breasts are like young leaves flying.
They add to life a charming note of the unexpected, these sudden
flights of little birds; I wish I knew them to speak to....

It must be explained that this is the following day, and that an event
of a very disturbing kind has taken place in the mean time. The rain
was coming down in sheets this morning as Tiglath-Pileser and I stood
by the window after breakfast. From the nest in the banksia came the
most keen and mournful protest. For an instant it would stop when the
old birds came and filled the little throats; then the plaint against
life and circumstances, quite heartbreaking in accents so youthful,
would begin again, and go on until it seemed to us too grievous to be
borne. Heavily and heavily fell the rain. “I wonder the little beasts
aren’t drowned out,” said Tiglath-Pileser. The close-cut roof of the
banksia seemed a very poor protection to persons standing in the house.

“Couldn’t we do something?” I suggested “An umbrella?” but
Tiglath-Pileser thought an umbrella would be too difficult to fix. He
went away, however, and out of his own wisdom and understanding he
produced a mackintosh. This with a walking-stick and infinite pains
and precautions he spread over the banksia, the rain descending upon
his devoted head, I admonishing from the window. The crying ceased
instantly, and though we waited for some minutes it did not recommence.
Evidently the little things were more comfortable, perhaps they had
gone to sleep. “That,” said I to Tiglath-Pileser as he turned away,
“was a real kindness.”

Half an hour later I was still at the window. No sound from the nest.
At a little distance the mother bird hopped about anxiously, something
evidently on her mind. I watched her for a long time and she did not
go up to the nest. “The old birds,” thought I, “are afraid of the
mackintosh. It is better to drown than to starve,” and I picked my way
out among the puddles with a chair in one hand and an umbrella in the
other and managed to get the thing off. And there at the foot of the
trellis sat a little helpless bunch of feathers with round bright eyes
and a heart beating inside,--a baby robin tumbled out.

I picked the adventurer up and took him into the house. He regarded me
without distrust, comfortable in the warmth of my hand, but when I put
him down he sent out no uncertain sound to say that he was unfriended.
I have often tried to feed fledgelings, it is an impossible charge;
and my advice as to this one was to put him on the window-ledge where
his mother might do it. There he sat up with his back to the world
and, looking at me with confidence, unexpectedly opened wide his
preposterous futile yellow beak. It was as if a gnome had suddenly
spoken--before the gaping demand I was helpless, full of consternation.
“You pathetic little idiot,” I reflected aloud, “what can _I_ do for
you!” and of course by the time bread and water arrived the beak was
hermetically sealed, as usual. I sat down with confidence, however, to
await events, and presently the small brown mother, saying all sorts of
things in an undertone, came slipping in and out among the rose-stems
below; and with much relief I saw the wanderer drop over the sill and
join her. They made off together very quietly, and again I watched,
uneasily, the nest. No sound, no parent birds, and as time went on
still silence and abandonment. I decided that the young ones had been
drowned or chilled to death before we thought of protecting them,
that the friendly mackintosh had come too late; and in some depression
I went out to see. By standing on a chair I could just reach, and
thrusting my hand through the wet leaves I felt for the little corpses.
The nest was empty!

It is a novel and rather a laughable sensation to be taken
in--completely sold--by a bird. How she managed it I cannot imagine,
for it all happened under my eyes and I saw nothing, but one by one she
must have enticed her family out into a most unattractive world some
days before their time, alarmed at the shrouding mackintosh. The last
had got only as far as the foot of the trellis when I found it. She
had out-witted Providence. I sent for Atma and together we prowled and
searched about the garden in the lessening rain. Presently he paused
beside the closest tangles of the potato-creeper, “_Chupsie!_”[3] said
he--the word was half a whisper, half a soft whistle--and bent down.
I looked too, and there they sat in a row, three soft, surprised,
obedient little feather-balls, well hidden, and waiting no doubt to
see what in this astonishing wilderness would happen next. I got back
to the window in time to receive the parent birds’ opinion of me,
full-throated, unabridged. They poured it out from perches commanding
the banksia, from which they could see the Thing removed and their
premature flitting quite foolish and futile. Plainly they connected me
with the horrid dream that for an hour had cloaked all their horizon,
and it _was_ a murderous scolding. Ten days of steady rain and then
this misfortune! Every other bird was silent in shelter, only these
two poured forth their tale of dolorous injustice. What weather to be
obliged to fledge in--pretty accommodation for a young family in a
potato-creeper! Was I not aware that they had been brought up in the
rains themselves, hatched exactly this time last year? Could I not
conceive that they might be able to mind their own business? “When
you have quite finished,” I whistled humbly, “I’ll explain,” but I
couldn’t get a word in, as the saying is, edgeways, and finally I fled,
leaving them still expressing their opinion of well-intentioned people.




CHAPTER XVII


We have arrived at September and the rains are “breaking.” For two
months and a half they have trampled upon us steadily, armies on
the march; now they come in scattered battalions and make off as if
pursued. The attack, too, is as erratic; it will hammer hard upon the
kitchen while not a drop falls on the verandah, or a great slant will
sweep down the nearest valley while we look on in dry security from
the shelf. Here in the garden a wall of mist will often surround me,
with the sun shining brightly inside; it turns the shelf into a room,
and makes one think of the impalpable barrier of one’s environment,
possible to break in any direction but never broken, always there, the
bound of one’s horizon and the limit of one’s activities. I wonder if
Tiglath-Pileser will call that far-fetched.

Thin, ragged, white clouds sail over the rose-bushes, just low enough
to touch the fresh red shoots, which are now as lovely to look at,
all in new curling leaf, as ever they can be in full rose time. That
of course is written when there are no roses here to contradict me.
There is one red-brown tone that one never sees except on a new leafing
rose-bush and in the eyes of some animals, and there is a purple which
is mixed nowhere else at all. And it all shines--how it shines!--under
the soft cloud fringes, and when by accident a full-hearted deep-pink
rose comes and sits alone among these young twigs and sprays the sight
gives that strange ache of pleasure that hints how difficult perpetual
ecstasy would be to bear. The rose-bed sleeps in the rains, but it
sleeps with one eye open; I seldom look in vain for at least one
flower. Now it is full of buds; the rose of yesterday is only waiting
for to-morrow. Maréchal Niels have waited in a different way; they have
not put out new roses but they have clung obstinately to the old ones.
“At once the silken tassel of my purse tear, and its treasure on the
garden throw” is no part of the Maréchal Niels’ philosophy. It hangs a
heavy head and clings to every petal, reluctantly giving up day by day
a moiety of its sweetness and lasting so unwarrantably long that in
sheer indignation I frequently cut off its head. The garden rejoices
wildly now, all the rains-flowers are gayer than ever, and daily
confess to the sun that they never really pretended to do without him.
A new lease of vitality has sprung up everywhere; even the poor sticks
that Atma has propped up the dahlias with, have forgotten that they
have been cut off untimely and are trying to bud. There is sadness in
this and I will not consider it.

The crows are moved to speak in all sorts of strange languages,
including a good deal of English. One took his seat on the very
swaying top of a deodar this morning and distinctly ejaculated “Oh
_Bother_! Oh _Bother_! Oh _Bother_!” with a guttural throaty emphasis
that excited me at last to an unfriendly stone; whereat he went from
bad to worse and cursed me. The crow that superintends the East is a
strange bird, never happy, seldom in a good humour. He declaims, he
soliloquizes, he frequently flies off and says “I’ll enquire;” but
his principal note is that of simple derision and he plainly finds
humbug in everything. He has no period of tender innocence; some crows
are older than others but nobody has ever seen a young crow. There is
nothing like him in England; the rooks make as much noise perhaps, but
only for a little while in the evening; the crow’s comment upon life is
perpetual. Remote, across a valley, it is a kind of fantastic chorus
to the reckless course of men; overhead it is a criticism of the most
impertinent and espionage without warrant. These, of course, are only
country crows; in the cities, like other bad characters, they take
greater liberties, becoming more objectionable by sophistication.

The butterflies have come back as if by appointment; one big blue
and black fellow is carrying on a violent flirtation with a fuchsia
under my very nose. She hasn’t much honey, and he, according to
Tiglath-Pileser has hardly anything to extract it with. I fear, in the
cynicism of our contemporary Gauls, _il perd terriblement son temps_,
but it seems to amuse them both, and why comment more severely upon the
charming fooling of affinities? The butterflies alight so differently
now upon the gravel drive, which is still glistening wet; they pause
there on lightest tiptoe with waving wings; a butterfly hates cold
feet. The bees are as busy and as cheery as ever; I have wasted the
last ten minutes in watching a bumblebee, with the most persuasive hum,
sucking the last of their sweetness out of the corn-bottles. The bee
clings and the flower drops over; the old pretty garden idyll never
loses its power to please. Dear me, if it would always rain and be
unattractive I might get something done; as it is.... That was rather
a sharp shower, and I noticed that the hawk-moth courting the salvias,
braved it through. One would have thought that the big drops would have
reduced him to a tiny ball of wet fluff in two minutes, but he has
gone on darting from flower to flower quite indifferent. Last night a
hawk-moth dined with us, on the dahlias in the middle of the table. He
thought it a charming sunny day under the lamps, and enjoyed himself
enormously, only leaving with the ladies as he objected to tobacco. We
should be delighted to see him again.

A morning ride, I am glad to say, is not considered an adventure into
the world, and morning rides are again possible without the risk of a
drenching. I have left Pat and Arabi in the seclusion of their stables
all this time, but for no fault, as we should say if we were selling
them. Horses, I fear I am of those who fondly think, were created first
in a mood of pure pleasure, and a careful Providence then made men to
look after them. I should not like to tell Thisbe this; she takes the
orthodox view about the succession of beasts and it might make her
consider one unsound; but I do not mind saying it in print where it is
likely to do less harm. Besides, my friend the Bengal Lancer entirely
agrees with me, and that is what one might call a professional
opinion. Pat and Arabi came walking in on the shelf one spring morning
a year and a half ago, very meek and sorry for themselves, having
climbed up every one of fifty-eight miles and seven thousand feet on
very little, probably, but hay. They came out of a kicking, squealing
herd in the Rawalpindi fair, where Tiglath-Pileser bought them on
a day with their full respective equipment of hill-ropes, a ragged
blanket, a tin bucket and a valet for less than twenty pounds apiece.
The price seems low when you consider that Arabi’s papa was a Persian
of pedigree and Pat’s an English thoroughbred. It is due to certain
liberal provisions of an all-wise Government which nobody is compelled
to discuss except the officials of the Remount Department. It will be
enough to say that we do not boast of their connections on the maternal
side, and painfully try to subdue all characteristics which seem to
hark back that way. Their siring is by dirty scrip established, but
in this country it is a wise foal that knows his own mother. Arabi
has a pink streak on his nose which was plainly one of his mother’s
charms, but this, as I cannot see it when I am on his back, troubles me
less than his four white stockings and hoofs to match, which were also
bequeathed to him by her. But his glossy coat and the arch of his neck
and his paces he inherits from his more distinguished parent, after
whom also we have had the weakness to name him. I don’t like to think
of Arabi’s tie with the country; she probably went in an ekka[4] with
a string of blue beads across her forehead; but Pat’s mother’s family
was pure tribal Waziri, which means that with the manners and make of
your English sire you come into the world with the wiry alertness your
maternal grandfather learned in getting round lofty mountain corners
in a hurry, and a way of lifting your feet in trotting over stony
country that is pretty to see, and a pride in your dark grey coat and
iron muscles that there is no need to conceal either. Of course you
may also inherit the Waziri irritability of temperament. Pat, in a
moment of annoyance, one day early last season, cow-kicked the Head of
the Army Veterinary Department, but that was before he had been long
enough in Simla to know who people were. He would not dream of doing
such a thing now; at least he might dream of it, but that is all. He
is a noble animal and he has his ambitions. I sometimes think they
are directed against the pair of fat Australian cobs that draw the
carriage of the Commander-in-Chief. Waziris of all classes dislike the
Commander-in-Chief; and Pat may very well have a blood feud on his
hoofs to avenge.

Pat is the prouder, the more daring animal of the two; Arabi merely
champs and pretends to bite his groom to show that he too is of noble
blood. Pat will take the lead past a perambulator any day and will only
slightly consider a length of unexpected drain pipe along the road. But
even Pat has his objects of suspicion, and chief among them is a man,
any man on foot in black clothes. At such a person he will always shy
violently. This is a cause of great inconvenience and embarrassment to
us. There is one perfectly inoffensive gentleman, rather stout, who
beams upon the world through his spectacles with unvarying amiability,
whose perfectly respectable occupation no doubt compels him to wear
black, and whom it is our misfortune constantly to meet. Neither
soft words nor smiting will induce Pat to pass this person without a
wild affrighted curve away from him. The first time he smiled; the
second time he looked mildly surprised; the third time he mantled with
indignation, and now he always mantles. It has gone, I assure you,
quite beyond a joke. And we, what can _we_ do? You cannot apologize
for a thing like that. One’s usual course when a pony shies is to
take him up to the object and let him sniff it so that he will know
better the next time, but how ask an elderly, self-respecting gentleman
to allow himself to be sniffed in that way? This morning I saw the
object coming, and had an inspiration. “Let us turn round,” said I to
Tiglath-Pileser, “and let him pass _us_.” So we turned and waited,
with the air of expecting some one from the opposite direction. The man
in black came nervously on and Tiglath-Pileser laid a reassuring hand
on Pat’s neck. Would you believe it, Pat stood like an angel, and _the
man in black shied_! Shied badly. And went on looking more furious than
ever. We daily expect to have some kind of writ served on us, and do
not at all know what steps we should take.

The ponies went excitedly this morning, as they always do after a
storm like the one we had last night. “Ridiculous animal,” said I
to Arabi as he paused to look askance at a small boulder that had
slipped down the khud. “This is the same old road you travelled many
yesterdays and will travel many to-morrows. Foolish beast, of what are
you afraid?” Tiglath-Pileser reproved me. “To us,” said he, “it is the
same old road, but to a really observant person like Arabi it presents
fifty significant changes. He in his stable listened to the rain last
night with emotions quite different from yours in your bed. To him
it meant that the young grass was everywhere springing and the turf
everywhere softening under foot, and no doubt he reflected once more
upon the insoluble problem presented by heel-ropes and your meals in
a trough. This morning his experienced eye discovers all he expected
and more,--puddles, channels, and other suspicious circumstances. That
stone was not there yesterday, no doubt a wild beast had unearthed
it and was sitting behind it as we passed, waiting for just such a
breakfast as Arabi knows he comprises. That the wild beast didn’t
happen to be there on this occasion was great luck for Arabi and you
can see he is relieved.”

“Well,” said I, unsympathetic, “I think a good deal of it is nonsense
all the same,” and as we approached the next lurking lion I gave Arabi
a sound cuff that drew off his attention and he cantered past it
without a word.

The familiar road wound round our own hill, the Roy-Regent’s hill
crowned with his castle, and Summer Hill. It would be entertaining to
be as observant as Arabi and find wonders round every curve; we come
far short of that and sometimes confess the great book of nature before
us a little dull for lack of the writing of man. It is possible that
mountains may suggest mere altitude, especially mountains like the
Himalayas, wall behind wall, waves transfixed in long unbroken lines
against the sky; one cannot always feel a passion of admiration for
mere matter at an inconvenient level. But their new mood of the rains
makes them beautiful, almost interesting. The mist rises among them and
turns them cleverly into the peaks and masses they ought to be, and a
slope flashes in the brilliant sun and a ravine sinks in the purple
shade, and the barest shoulder is cloaked in green velvet. “They would
give a good deal to see _that_ from the Row,” I say boastfully, and
Tiglath-Pileser responds “Yes indeed,” and we both look at it as if
we were the proprietors, momentarily almost inclined to admit it as a
compensation.

The jungle triumphs in the rains; it overwhelms the place. Even on the
shelf it is hard enough to cope with, creeping up, licking and lipping
the garden through the paling; but out upon the public khud-sides it
is unchecked and insatiable. We hate the jungle; it is so patient and
designing and unremitting, so much stronger than we are. Such constant
war we have to make upon it merely to prevent it from swallowing us
alive. It will plant a toadstool in your bedroom and a tree in your
roof; it shrinks from nothing. That is why we hear newcomers from tidy
England in rapture upon the glorious freedom of the wilderness with
grim displeasure; and point to the crooked squares of our pathetic
little estates, painfully redeemed and set smugly about with posies,
saying “Admire _that_!” And it is so demoralizing, the jungle. The oak,
for instance, at home, is a venerable person we all respect and some
of us used to worship. Here he is a disreputable old Bacchus with an
untrimmed beard and ferns sticking to his branches. Certain English
flowers even, alas that I should say it! have left the paths of
propriety and taken permanently to unregulated living. The dahlia has
never repented, and the tiger-lilies brazen it out, but the little blue
face of a convolvulus I met this morning, strayed away in the company
of a snake-plant and a young rhododendron, said with wistful plainness,
“I was a virtuous flower once!”

Everything is still very damp, and in the shade very chill, and we
were glad enough to escape the cloud that suddenly sobered the highway
just as we turned in upon the shelf. A figure moved along the road
in the greyness, came closer, making automatic movements of head and
hands, passed us--a coolie eating a cucumber. It was a long and thick
cucumber, and he was eating the rind and the seeds, everything. It
seemed a cold, unsuitable, injudicious thing for even a coolie to eat
in the rain. We hoped it was vicious indulgence, but we feared it was
his breakfast.




CHAPTER XVIII


We have entered upon the period of our great glory and content; it is
second summer in these hills, with just a crisp hint of autumn coming.
There is nothing left of the rains but their benediction; all day long
the sun draws the scent out of the deodars and makes false promises to
the garden, where they believe it is spring. The field-daisies and the
hollyhocks and the mignonette are all in second bloom and the broom
down the khud has kindled up again. The person who is really puzzled
is the lilac. We have a lilac bush. I assure you it is not everybody
who can say so in the town of Simla; the lilac is most capricious about
where she will stay and where she won’t stay. We have only one; all her
children either die young or grow up dwarfs. However, after blooming in
the most delicious and heartbreaking manner in April, fainting through
June and going quite distracted in the rains, the lilac now finds new
sap in her veins and the temptation assails her to flower regardless of
the calendar. Yet she doesn’t, poor dear, quite know how; something is
lacking to the consummation of April, and the fictitious joy she grasps
at comes out in ragged little bunches that stick straight up at the end
of the wood of the topmost branches. Nevertheless it is pure lilac,
enough for a button-hole, and matter to boast of, lilac in October.

For all these reasons I was perfectly happy this morning until twenty
minutes past ten o’clock. Atma and I had been transplanting some
cactus dahlias to fill up an empty place. It is a liberty I wouldn’t
have taken at this time of year, but Atma says that he can deceive
the dahlias. “By giving much water,” he explains, “they will take no
notice,” and he has been craftily setting them down in little ponds.
I had a dispute with him about a plant, which he declared was a lily.
To settle the matter, as soon as my back was turned, he dug it up,
and triumphantly sought me. “Behold,” said he, “it has an onion.” He
was distressed to contradict me, but behold it _had_ an onion. The
connection between an onion and a lily was simpler perhaps to Atma
than it would be to many people; but I conceded it. Then came a pedlar
of apples from a neighbouring garden. We shall have apples of our own
in time, but our neighbour down the khud thought of it three or four
years before we did, and there is no particular reason to wait. Our
neighbour’s sturdy retailer squatted discouraged on his haunches before
me. His brown muscles stood out in cords on his arms and legs, his face
was anxious and simple like a child’s. “If your honour will listen,”
said he, “half over Simla I have carried this burden of apples, and it
is no lighter. My words are good and I go always to the verandah, but
the sahib-folk will not buy.”

“And is that,” said I, eyeing the fruit, “a strange thing, worthy one?”

He picked up an apple and held it disparagingly, at arm’s-length, in
front of him. “Certainly they are going rotten,” said he simply. “And
the more they rot the louder is the anger of the mistress when I carry
them back. Your honour will listen--if apples rot is it the fault of
the servant? No,” he answered himself with solid conviction, “it is the
fault of God.”

He sat in the sun content--content to sit and talk of his grievance
with his load on the ground. I smiled at his dilemma, and he smiled
back; but gravity quickly overtook him, it was a serious matter.

“Seven days ago, when they were sound,” he went on, “the gardener
himself took them and sold many. Now he gives me the command, and
because I do not sell there is talk of a donkey.”

“Truly you are no donkey, worthy one,” said I soothingly. “All the
donkeys are employed by the washermen to carry home the clothes. You
are a large, fine, useful Pahari. What is the price of the apples? Some
of them are good.”

“It is true talk that the mistress said ten annas a seer,” he replied
eagerly, “but if your honour wishes to pay eight annas I will say that
your honour, seeing the rottenness, would give no more.”

I would not profit by the rottenness since it did not concern me,
so he picked out of his best for me with exclamations, “Lo, how it
is red!” “Listen, this one will be a honey-wallah!” and almost more
polishing than I could bear. The cloud departed from his honest face,
it was that I had paid for; and when Tiglath-Pileser passing by said
that I had been imposed upon I was indignant. He, the master, would
not have an apple though they are really very good, and neither do
I feel so disposed; they must be made into a pudding. We talked for
a little while of the annoyance of reaching that critical time of
life when one looks askance at a casual apple. In early youth it is
a trifle to be appropriated at any hour; between the ages of ten and
fourteen it is preferable the last thing before going to bed. After
that ensues a period of indifference, full of the conviction that there
are things in the world more interesting than apples; and by the time
one again realizes that there is nothing half so good, circumstances
have changed so that it is most difficult to decide when to eat them.
A raw apple in the American fashion before breakfast is admitted by
the mass of mankind to have a too discouraging effect upon everything
else, and all will grant that it is impossible to do justice to its
flavour, impossible to cope with it in any way, after a meal. It is
not elusive--like the grape or the lychee; it is far too much on the
spot. There remains the impromptu occasion, but you have long since
come to regard with horror anything “between meals.” A day arrives when
the fact stares you in the face that there is no time at which to eat
an apple. Tiglath-Pileser and I considered it together this morning;
but we were philosophic, we didn’t mind, we remembered that up to
threescore years and ten there would probably always be somebody to
bake them for us and were happy, nevertheless. Then Tryphena came and
stayed an hour, and now I am not so happy as I was.

I would not dwell upon her, I would pass to other themes, but one
has a feeling that Tryphena has been too much omitted from accounts
of our little town. Such chronicles have been somehow too playful;
one would think we did nothing but discover affinities and listen to
the band and eat expensive things in tins. One would think life was
all joy and pleasure whereas there are Associations of every kind.
Whatever may have been the case in the golden age, or the time of
Lord Lytton, I believe that the great over-fed conscience of Great
Britain now sends out more Tryphenas every year, and their good works
have to be seriously reckoned with in considering the possibility
of remaining here. We have our traditions, of course, but we are
practically compelled to live upon them, and it seems to me that a
distant world should hear not only of our declining past but of what we
have increasingly to put up with. I would not have invited Tryphena to
occupy a chapter, but as she has walked in without this formality she
might as well stay.

Indeed I would not have invited her. She is the kind of Tryphena that
never comes to see you unless you are ill. I am not so agreeable when
I am ill--I imagine few people are--and I prefer visits, at such a
time, only from people who are fond of seeing me when I am well. Why in
heaven’s name, when you are feverish or aguish or panting for breath,
you should be expected to accept as a “kindness” a visit from a person
who never thinks of you until you become a helpless object to whet
her righteousness on, who comes and inflicts a personality upon you
to which the most robust health only enables you to be barely polite,
is to me an irritating conundrum. I had taken particular pains to
be reported to Tryphena as entirely convalescent, “quite out of the
doctor’s hands;” I did not want to be on her parish books. Why should
I suffer to enable her to do her duty? Why should she have things put
down to her credit at my expense? This does not seem to me reasonable
or proper and I am averse to it. Yet I have told her, such is my
hypocrisy, how good it was of her to come, and she has gone away
better pleased with herself than ever.

Tryphena’s attitude toward the social body by which she is good enough
to allow herself to be surrounded is a mingling of compassion and
censure. She is _la justicière_. She will judge with equity, even
with mercy, but she must always judge. She is perpetually weighing,
measuring, criticising, tolerating, exercising her keen sense of the
shortcomings of man in general and woman in particular. She will bring
her standards and set them up by your bedside. Your scanty stock of
force cannot be better used than in contemplating and admiring them,
and you must recognize how completely she herself attains them; you
have no alternative. If one will for ever strike human balances
one should have a broad fair page to do it on, and Tryphena’s is
already over-written with cramped prejudices. It is a triviality, but
Tryphena’s gloves always wrinkle at the thumbs.

If she had been a man she would have been a certain kind of clergyman,
and if she had been a clergyman his legs would have gone in gaiters.
Indeed, sooner or later she would probably have added to the name of
Tryphenus the glories of an episcopal see. She is past mistress of the
art of kindly rebuke. But I do not wish to be kindly rebuked. In that
respect I am like the Roy-Regent, and all other persons whom Providence
has enabled to do without this attention. She has more principles than
any one person is entitled to, and she is always putting them into
action before you. I think it is a mistake to imagine that people care
about the noble reasons that direct one’s doings; if one’s doings
themselves provoke interest it is exceptional luck. I wish somebody
would tell Tryphena that principles ought to be hidden as deep as a
conviction of superiority; and see what would happen. I am sure we were
not born to edify one another.

The deplorable part of it is that Tryphena leaves one inclined to
follow her in the steep and narrow path that leads to self-esteem. I
find myself at this moment not only in a bad temper, but in a vein of
criticism which I am inclined to visit upon persons whom I am usually
entirely occupied in admiring. My friend the Bengal Lancer has just
ridden by, with his hand on his hip. It has never struck me before that
to ride with a hand on the hip is a sign of irredeemable vanity. The
Gunner was here to tea yesterday--he of the Mountain Battery--and told
us stories of his mules. I think disparagingly of his mules. That a
mule will “chum up to” a pony and kick a donkey, seems this morning an
imbecile statement of an improbable fact, though I admit I laughed at
the time, it was so British. The unpaid Attaché came too. The unpaid
Attaché gives one the impression of never allowing himself to be as
charming as he might be. What foolish fear can justify this reticence?
Enthusiasm, we all know, is permitted to the gods and to foreigners
only, but even an unpaid Attaché can afford a whole smile.

The worst that can be said of Delia is that numbers of people whom she
doesn’t care a button about call her a dear. At least that is the
worst I can think of. As to Thalia, I had a note from her yesterday in
which she spelled my name wrong. This after two years of notes. It may
have been an accident; but much as I love Thalia I am disposed--this
morning--to think that there is somewhere in her a defect obscure,
elementary, which matches this. What is the worst they know of me? I
have not the least idea, but I am prepared--this morning--to hope it is
something rather bad.

The fact is that here in our remote and arbitrary and limited
conditions we are rather like a colony in a lighthouse; we have nothing
but ourselves and each other, and we grow overwrought, over-sensitive
to the personal impression. I suppose that is what has produced, has at
least aggravated, cases like Tryphena’s. It is a thing to be on one’s
guard against. I quite see that if my own symptoms increase I shall
shortly arrive at the point of being unable to endure the sight of many
persons superior to myself; which is illogical and ridiculous.




CHAPTER XIX


I was congratulating the hydrangea this morning on its delightful
attitude toward life. This is no virtue of the hydrangea’s; it is a
thing conferred, a mere capacity, but how enviable! All through its
youth and proper blossoming time, which is the rains, it has the
pink-and-white prettiness that belongs to that period. When it is
over, instead of acknowledging middle age by any form of frumpishness
the hydrangea grows delicately green again; it retires agreeably,
indistinguishably into leaves, a most artistic pose. That, too, passes
in these sharp days when the sun is only gold that glitters, and the
hydrangea, taking its unerring tone from the season, turns a kind of
purplish rose, and still never drops a petal, never turns a hair. In
the end the hydrangea will be able to say with truth that it has not
died without having lived.

Sooner or later I might perhaps have seen that for myself, but it was
Cousin Christina who pointed it out to me. It is one of the subtler and
more gratifying forms of selfishness to ask persons of taste to help
you to enjoy your garden; and at no one’s expense do I indulge in this
oftener than at Cousin Christina’s. She spends more time with me here
under the pencil-cedar than any one else does, partly because I think
she likes me a little and the garden a great deal, and partly because
she has fallen, recently, upon very idle circumstances.

We always thought, she and I, that we should more or less take to one
another. Mutual friends told us so, and there was evidence to support
the statement. We approved what they carried back and forth between us
of our respective habits and opinions; and once I saw a scrap of her
interesting handwriting conveying a view in terms very net. Constantly
we were made to feel that upon the basis of human intercourse--the
delicate terms of which who can quite expose?--we had things to give
each other, and constantly we said with intention, “Next summer I must
really manage to meet her.” That is all I knew of Cousin Christina,
except that life had offered her, somehow, less than she had a title
to, and that she spent a great deal of time in her garden.

And then--“on sait trop de cela, que les heures sont comptées à
l’homme qui doit mourir, et on agit comme si le trésor de ces heures
était inépuisable, l’occasion indéfiniment renouvable et nos amis
éternels.”[5] Cousin Christina died last year, and we had never met.

It will be judged how much I value her visits now, now that she has
so far to come, and her efforts to make me understand; we who remain
are so deaf. There were many points at which the world irritated her
while she was conditioned in it; and I think the remoteness of this
place appeals to her in her freedom; she is pleased in its great lines
and vast spaces which yet hold just the touch of human enterprise and
affection which she too thought essential, here in my garden. She
seems, at all events, to belong to the vague, as if she loved it, and
of course I can never lay my hand on her.

She is devoted to the garden, constantly she trails about it, having
nothing to say to me, with precisely that attitude toward a rose and
that hand under a top-heavy aster which separates the true lover from
the mere admirer. Dahlias swing free as she passes, and leaves that
keep the sun off the convolvuluses get out of their way. It is not the
wind, it is Cousin Christina. She is more intimate with the flowers
than I; almost invariably, when I show her anything new in bloom she
informs me “I saw that yesterday.” She does not seem to think it a
liberty to see another person’s flowers before the person herself. I
criticise her there.

I cannot put down what she says in the form of dialogue, because,
although the meaning is plain, it seems to take some other. She herself
is amused at the idea of confining her within quotation marks. It comes
to this that I can give you only an essence, an extract, of what she
conveys. How blundering and explosive, after Cousin Christina’s way,
are the great words of other people! I like sleeping in the attic
because the sun climbing up behind the shoulder of Jakko, comes in
there first. This morning, looking up through the little high window
in the wall I saw a hawk sailing with broad sunlight on his wings,
though none had reached the window yet, and the attic was still grey
and waiting. I have seen it all day, the hawk up there with his wings
gleaming, but it was Cousin Christina who suggested that perhaps after
all it was only necessary to rise high enough to meet the light. A
more definite showing, it appears, was what she lacked most in life.
Among a bewildering worldful of facts, appearances and incidents,
vague, she complains, is the short existence, and untrustworthy the
interests which are our only guides to spend it to the best account.
She seems grieved now to discover how much more there was and how much
better worth doing. Upon one thing only I feel that she congratulates
herself. Among our poor chances there is one which is supreme, and she
had it. Within her radius she _saw_. The mirror was hers which prints
the lovely suggestion of things, and I have learned from her and from
the garden that there is no finer or more delicate or more charming
occupation for a person of leisure than to sit and polish her mirror.

She did not live as long as I wish to do, and I think at the time she
would have been glad to stay. Nevertheless, she looks with no great
encouragement upon the efforts after completer health which I hope I
have not too continuously referred to in these chapters. I gather from
her that if you are asked to an entertainment, you do not reproach your
host that it is so soon over, nor are you supposed to resent other
people getting more extended invitations. The lights and the music
please you, but at the end you never hesitate to step outside again
into the dark. Perhaps we are all here quite as long as we are wanted.
Life is very hospitable, but she cannot put on every card “1 to 70
years.” I gather that these are Cousin Christina’s views; and I reply
that it is easy to be wise after the event, which I am nevertheless
still inclined to postpone.

On days when life is a pure pleasure she is not much with me, but
on days when it is a mere duty--she knew many of those herself,
poor dear--I can always depend upon her. It was she who lifted her
long-handled glasses and looked at Thisbe, who one morning came and
stood in the sun between us, and quoted,--

  “A happy soul that all the way
  To heaven hath a summer’s day,”

which exactly prints Thisbe, and she who described Lutetia as soothing
but uninteresting, like a patent food--her invalid’s fancies seem
to cling to her. Cousin Christina is a little difficult to please;
she dismissed the fresh-coloured, vigorous Alexandra very shortly as
a nice thing growing in a garden, and when I hinted that Alexandra
held views of her own she admitted that the creature had a strong
scent. She permits herself these vagaries, these liberties with my
acquaintances, the majority of whom she finds, I fear, a trifle
limited. And she has a courage of expression which belongs, I am sure,
only to the disembodied. Nothing rouses her to more impatience than the
expression “quite a character.” Is it not deplorable and distressing,
she demands, that we are not all characters? She herself was very much
of a character, one could imagine soft, stupid, little women saying so,
at meetings to dress dolls for zenanas, and how it would irritate her
when the mild imputation was brought home to her. She is delightful
to take one’s indignations to; she underlines every word, though she
pretends a tolerance for the unintelligent which I am sure she does not
feel. “Consider,” I almost heard her say, “if we clever ones of the
world were not so few, how miserable the stupid ones would be! Secure
in their grunting majority they let us smite them and turn the other
cheek, but if they had to grunt solitarily!” She sometimes forgets,
like that, that she is gone, is not. How sharp must have been the
individuality that refuses so obstinately to blend with the universal
current!

In the simple mosaic here, put together at odd times, piece by piece
rubbed up as it came and set in its place, many of the fragments are
here. I know this because they are not things that would naturally
occur to me, whereas they correspond exactly with the sentiments I know
she used to hold. I have nevertheless written them out without scruple
because she seems in a way to have given them to me.

My possession in her is uncertain after all, hardly greater, I suppose,
than a kind of constructive regret. Yet somehow I imagine it is more
tangible than hers in the asters and the carnations. Her impressions
were always strong and her affections always loyal; but divested,
denuded as she is, I fancy it must be only the memory that flowers are
beautiful that brings her here, poor ghost.




CHAPTER XX


It is sharp on these mountains now, keen, glorious weather. In the
house Thisbe cowers over a fire from morning to night. I call it
abject; she retorts that no English winter has ever produced in her
so much goose-flesh, and that she came to India to be warm. Even I
must bend to acknowledge the virtues of a hot-water bottle, and I have
abandoned the pencil-cedar; the deck chair now chases the sun. Every
hour we shift farther and farther to the west, until at about four
o’clock he dips behind the castle of the Princess, and then we grow
very grey and melancholy on the shelf. It is, after all, the great sun
of India; if it falls steadily upon your feet it will slowly warm them
through the shivering air; but nothing, not even a dahlia, must come
between you and it. Even a dahlia makes a difference. The glare upon
this page is particularly unpleasant, but I have permanently closed
my parasol; the double sensation of icy fingers and toasting feet was
worse. It is more than I bargained for, a week, as a matter of fact,
beyond my contract time; and only the fear of taking cold there keeps
me from going into the house.

Whatever forebodings the garden feels it puts a brave front upon
the matter. It is smart with zinnias now; in ranks they stand, like
soldiers, always at attention. I have no patience with people who are
too æsthetic for zinnias, who complain of their stiffness and their
commonness and what not. I think the zinnia a particularly delightful
creature, full of courage and character and cheerful confidence, and
here where we have to make such a fight for a bit of colour against
the void it is invaluable. It may not be exactly a lovable flower,
but what of that? Many of us must be content to be estimable. There
is even joy in a zinnia. From where I sit I look through a fringe of
them along the paling where they almost glitter in the sun. Beyond are
a few dark deodar tops and an oak from which the last yellow leaves
are fluttering, fluttering, and behind the tracery of this the blue
sky bending to the still sharp snowy ranges. If you shut your eyes and
succeed in seeing that, you may almost forget that I am in India and
you somewhere else; we are both, really, very near Thibet and not far,
I imagine, from heaven.

Nor would anybody, I am sure, ever think of India and chrysanthemums
together. Yet the shelf is glorious with chrysanthemums, purple and
bronze and gold and white. My gardening now takes the form of kind
attentions to the chrysanthemums. Atma will tie them up with what I
can only call swaddling strings, round their necks or their waists
or anywhere, without the slightest regard for their comfort. Whereas
if there is one thing a chrysanthemum pleads for, it is freedom to
exercise its own eccentric discretion with regard to pose. There is no
refreshment to exile like the cold sharp fragrance of chrysanthemums,
especially white ones. It brings back, straight back, the glistening
pavement of Kensington High Street on a wet November night and the dear
dense smell of London and a sense of the delight that can be bought
for sixpence there. Delight should be cheap but not too cheap. I am
thankful sometimes for the limitations of our shelf and the efforts
we must make to keep it pretty, and the fact that we have to consider
whether leaf-mould is not rather dear at fourpence a basket. It must
be difficult to keep in relation with a whole mountain-side, which
is the estate of some people, or with six thousand rupees a month,
which is the pay of a Member of Council. I should lease most of the
mountain-side, I think, and put the rupees in bags and lock them up
in a vault, just anyhow, as the rajahs do. To be aware that you had a
vault full of rupees in bags would remove every care from life, but not
to be obliged to know exactly how many bags there were would fill it
with peace and ecstasy. There is solid comfort in a bag of rupees--I
have possessed, at times, a little one--but in a vast income which you
never see there must be a vague dissatisfaction, as well as bank-books
and separate accounts, and cheques and other worries which you must
infallibly remember to date. The East teaches us much of simplicity
and comfort in the persons of its princes. It has taught me the real
magnificence of rupees in a bag.

Atma and I have had a morning of great anticipations. It is time now to
look forward, time to provision the garden against the greedy spring,
and to make plans. In all my plans the paling figures largely; it is a
hand-rail between us and eternity, naturally things look well against
it. Next year we are going to have hollyhocks, single and double, pink
and rose and white, in a rampart all along the paling as it follows the
sweep of the shelf, and spraying thickly out from these the biggest
and whitest marguerites that will consent to come up, and along the
border the broad blue ribbon of forget-me-nots. Farther on where the
shelf widens in front of the house and the deodars rise thick before
it, a creamy Devoniensis is already in possession of the paling, and
here my goldenrod is to stand fretted against the firs, and dwarf
sunflowers shall fraternize with it; and about its skirts shall grow
myriads of coreopsis single and double, and masses of puce-coloured
Michaelmas daisies, and at their feet the grateful simple-minded purple
petunia in the largest families, as thick as ever she likes. I did not
mention it before, because one does hate to be always complaining,
but Tiglath-Pileser has invaded the garden with some Japanese plums;
straight up they stick in the widest part of the paling border, and
discouragingly healthy they look. Round two of these I have planted
portulaca and ringed it with lobelia, and round the other two lobelia,
and ringed it with little pink lilies. The roses in the bed opposite
the dining-room window have grown rather leggy with age, and next year
they are to rise out of a thick and, as I see it, low forest of pink
and white candytuft, and the bed is to be deeply framed in pansies. We
are to have foxgloves on the khud rank above rank, and wallflowers on
its more accessible projections, and in the rains the gayest crowd of
dahlias of the ballet, the single degenerates, are to gather there.
Atma is to get them where he likes and I am to ask no questions. I am
homesick for a certain very sweet, very yellow rather small and not
very double brier rose that belongs to other years when it was much
presented to “the teacher,” also for a modest little fringed pink with
a dark line on its petals which made the kind of posy one offered to
one’s grandmother. But I fear the other years are a country one cannot
rediscover in every part; though I have asked diligently of persons who
also inhabited them I have not yet found my gentle pink or my little
yellow rose. Then a bed of irises is to be made just over the kitchen
roof, to take the eye off it, and the garden lilies, which are mostly
madonnas, are to foregather in one place instead of being scattered
about as they are now among the rose-bushes. Thisbe thinks nothing
could be lovelier than a lily and a rose, but I cannot agree with
her. The combination savours of _trop de luxe_, it recalls an early
Victorian lacquered tea-tray. If she likes to mix her garden-parties
like that she can, but my lilies must express themselves with no other
flower to interfere with them. A lily has so little to say to the
world; it must have an atmosphere of the completest reticence if it
is to speak at all. The roses will be reinforced by twenty-five other
sorts from the Government Gardens at Saharanpore; and there are to be
several new admittances to the home for decayed gentlewomen. The border
nearest the upper khud has been arranged to take everything we don’t
want in other places--the phloxes, the antirrhinums, the lupins and
carnations and gaillardias and surpluses of all sorts which it would
be a sin to throw away. It will be a kind of garden-attic, but the
medley should be bright. Also, to do him justice, Tiglath-Pileser has
given me a wild-rose hedge round our whole property, along both roads
and up and down the khuds. Thick and fragrant it will be in May and
starred with creamy blossoms. He said he owed me something on account
of the grafts, and I could not conscientiously dispute the matter. So
that will be my garden, I hope, of next year. It will hold no brilliant
effects; we only want to be gay and merry on the shelf and to keep
certain relations intact; we have no room to be ambitious. I know now
at least where my garden begins and where it leaves off, and a little
more. Next year I hope to pretend to that intimate knowledge which
comes of having gone over every foot of it, without which no one should
say anything, or even write anything probably. However, Elizabeth[6]
did, and everybody liked it. Elizabeth began as a complete amateur; and
her very amateurity disarmed criticism. She had nothing but taste and
affection, and her struggles to garden upon this capital have often
sympathetically occurred to me during the past summer. Frequently I
have had occasion to say to her, speaking quite anonymously, “What
would you think of that, Elizabeth, supposing you lived on a shelf?”
and often in the depression of wondering whether it was quite fair to
try to follow her charming fashion, I have explained that I really have
to write about my garden; I was turned out in it, I had no more choice
than Nebuchadnezzar; and that I sincerely hope I have not plagiarized
her plants. And I assured her it is a thing I would never do, that
those hereinbefore mentioned grew for me, every one, from seed or
bulb--that I would not ever plagiarize from Mr. Johnson, whose Japanese
lilies were glorious to behold this year and very moderate.

Notwithstanding these meek statements I feel, here at the end of the
book and the end of the summer, highly experienced and knowledgeable
about gardens. I long to pour out accumulated facts, and only a doubt
of the relative value of advice produced at an altitude of seven
thousand feet in the middle of Asia prevents my doing so. In more
serious moments I hardly dare hope that I have not already talked too
much about my garden and other things, but nobody should be severe
upon this who has not discovered the entertainment to be got out of a
perfectly silent visiting public. I should confess that I have enjoyed
it enormously; it would be becoming in me to thank that mute impersonal
body for a delightful summer. It is such an original pleasure to go on
saying exactly what you like and briefly imagine replies, as well as a
valuable aid, I am sure, to convalescence. To have increased the sum of
the world’s happiness by one’s own is perhaps no great accomplishment,
yet is it so easy? Neither can it be called especially virtuous to feel
a little better, but what moral satisfaction is there to compare with
it?

The summer and the book are done. The procession of the Days has gone
by, all but a straggler or two carrying a tattered flag; it took seven
months to pass a given point. There is a rustling among the roses
when the wind comes this way, but nearly always the blue void holds a
golden silence. Belated butterflies bask on the warm gravel with wings
expanded and closed down. Wooing is dangerous now; shadows overtake
you, and a shadow kills. The zinnias are all old soldiers, the Snows
have come nearer in the night. Some morning soon they will have crept
over the shelf, but only Atma will see that. The rest of the family
will be occupying a spot under the warm dust haze down below, so far
down as to be practically below sea-level. The vicissitudes of some
lives!




FOOTNOTES:


  [1] Literally: “has been finished.”

  [2] England.

  [3] Quietly.

  [4] Country cart.

  [5] “La Pia.”

  [6] “Elizabeth and Her German Garden.”




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

  Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.





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