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.