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!