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.