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....