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.”