To-day I think India, down below there on the other side of the hill,
must be at its hottest. A white dust haze hangs over the plains, but we
know what is going on under it; nearly all of us have gasped through
June more than once in those regions. It is the time when you take
medical advice before committing yourself to a railway journey, even
with the provision of a cracked-ice pillow,--the favourite time to step
out of the train and die of cholera in the waiting room. It is also the
very special time for the British private soldier to go out in anger
and kick with his foot the punkah-wallah who has fallen asleep with the
slack rope in his hand, so that the punkah-wallah, in whom is concealed
unknown to the private soldier an enlarged spleen, immediately dies.
There is then trouble and high-talking, because of the people who
consider that the death of a punkah-wallah demands the life of a
private soldier who only meant to admonish him, a contention which
cannot be judged without a knowledge of the relative values concerned,
and an experience of the temperature in which the rash and negligent
act was committed. There is reason in the superstition which associates
great heat with the devil. Operating alone, it can do almost as much as
he can.
The dust haze from the plains hangs all about us, obscuring even the
near ranges, impalpable but curiously solid. It has a flavour which it
is impossible not to taste if ever one breathes through the mouth, and
hour by hour it silently gathers upon the furniture. It has been like
this for a week, pressing round us at a measured distance, which just
enables us to see our own houses and gardens. Within that space, the
sunlight and every circumstance as usual. It is a little like living
under a ground-glass bell. Do not choose the present time of year to
come to see Simla. You would have to make a house-to-house visitation,
and piece it together from memory.
Even here, in the garden, much too hot the eye of heaven shines. I have
abandoned the pencil-cedar, and taken refuge under a trellis covered
with a banksia rose, which is thicker, and I have added to my defences
a pith hat and an umbrella. Notwithstanding these precautions, we all
gasp together to-day in the garden; and I am inclined to agree with
the mignonette, which is not as a rule talkative, that this is no
longer the summer--exquisite word--that we expect in Simla, but the
odious “hot weather” which comes instead in the country down below. The
mignonette, by the way, stands to my discernment, immediately under
the pencil-cedar. When I sowed it there in the spring, Tiglath-Pileser
said, “It will never do anything under a conifer.” When it began to
show, he said again, “It may come up, but it will never do anything.
Nothing ever does anything under a conifer.” Atma was not of this
advice. “Come up?” he said, looking at it sternly, “wherefore should
it not come up, if your honour wishes it?” Atma always takes this
view; he seems to suppose that the flowers, like himself, are above all
things anxious to please, and if any of them fail in their duty, he
implies, with indignation, that he will know the reason why. But his
opinion is too constant, and I did not trust it about the mignonette. I
insisted, instead, that every morning the fallen cedar spines should be
picked out of it, and the earth freshly stirred about the roots; and I
have a better patch of mignonette under my conifer than can be produced
anywhere else in the garden. I am sure that the shade of a conifer is
no less beneficial than any other kind of shade, except that there is
never enough of it; nor can I accept the theory that there is anything
poisonous in the spines. They only pack and only lie very closely
together, never blown about like leaves, and so keep away the air and
light, and if you happen to have the use of twenty or thirty brown
fingers to pick them out, there is no reason why you cannot produce
quantities of things beside mignonette under a conifer. Do anything? I
do not know a more able-bodied or hard-working flower on the shelf.
A thing like that offers one for some time afterwards a valuable handle
in arguments.
However you do it, there is no more delicious experience in life than
to put something beautiful where nothing was before, I mean in any
suitable empty space. I have done it; I have had the consummation of
this pleasure for a fortnight. There was no goldenrod in Simla till I
went to America and got it. I make the lofty statement with confidence,
but subject to correction. Some one may have thought of it long ago,
and may be able to confront me with finer plumes than mine. If this
should be so, I shall accept it with reluctance and mortification, and
hereby promise to go and admire the other person’s, which is the most
anybody can do; but my pride does not expect such a fall.
It is the Queen’s goldenrod, not the President’s, though he has a great
deal of it and makes, I think, rather more fuss about it. A field
flower of generous mind, it ignores the political line, and I gathered
the seed one splendid autumn afternoon in Canada; so here on the shelf
it may claim its humble part in the Imperial idea. A friend of my youth
lent herself to the project; she took me in her father’s buggy, and
as we went along the country roads I saw again in the light of a long
absence, the quiet of the fields and the broad pebbled stretches of
the river, and the bronze and purple of the untrimmed woods that had
always been for me the margin of the thought of home. The quiet of
after-harvest held it all, nothing was about but a chipmunk that ran
along the top of a fence; you could count the apples in the orchards
among their scanty leaves; it was time to talk and to remember. And
so, not by anything unusual that we did or said, but by the rare and
beautiful correspondence that is sometimes to be felt between the
sentiment of the hour and the hour itself, this afternoon took its
place in the dateless calendar of the heart which is so much more
valuable a reference than any other. What a delight it is when old
forgotten things construct themselves again and the years gather into
an afternoon! And is there any such curious instance of real usefulness
for hidden treasure in the attic?
We found masses of goldenrod, all dry and scattering, principally along
the railway embankment, which we took for a good omen that it would
be a travelling flower; and in the fulness of time it was given to
Atma with instructions. His excitement was even greater than mine, he
nursed it tenderly, but it needed no nursing. It came up in thousands
delighted with itself and the new climate, overrunning its boxes so
that Atma pointed to it like a proud father. Then we planted it out
along the paling behind the coreopsis, and it immediately--that is to
say in three months’ time--grew to be five feet high, with the most
thick and lovely yellow sprays, which have been waving there against
the fir-trees, as I said before, for the last fortnight. It has quite
lost the way to its proper season; at home it blossoms in September
and this is only June,--but it appears to be rather the better than
the worse for that, though it does seem to look about, as the Princess
said when I sent her some, for the red sumach which is its friend
and companion at home. It is itself like a little fir-tree with flat
spreading branches of blossom, especially when it stands in groups
as they do, and the sun slants upon it giving the sprays an edge of
brighter gold so that it is the most luminous thing in the garden. And
the warm scent of it, holding something so far beyond itself and India,
something essential, impregnated with the solace that one’s youth and
its affections are not lost, but only on the other side of the world!
Another delightful thing about the goldenrod is the way the bees
and butterflies instantly found it out. The sprays are dotted with
them all day long, swaying and dipping with the weight of the little
greedy bodies; their hum of content stands in the air with the warm
and comfortable scent. “This is good fare” they seem to say. “There
are some things they make better in America.” I had never before done
anything for a bee or a butterfly, it is not really so easy, and I
would not have believed there was such pleasure in it. “_Le fleur qui
vole_”--is not that charming of M. Bourget?
I suppose it argues a very empty plane of life, but these little
creatures have an immense power of entertaining a person who spends day
after day in the theatre of their activities. I am reminded that here
in India one ought to have marvellous tales to tell of them, only Simla
is not really India, but a little bit of England with an Adirondack
climate and the “insect belt” of Central Asia; and things are not so
wonderful here as you would think to look at us on the map. Scorpions
and centipedes do come up from the plains and live in the cracks of the
wall whence they crawl out to be despatched when the first fires are
lighted, but they have not the venom of those below. Scorpions Atma
will take hold of by the poison bags at the end of their tails, and
hold up in the air dangling and waving their arms; and nobody even
screams at a centipede. Millipedes which look much more ferocious but
are really quite harmless often run like little express trains across
your bath-room walls, and very large, black, garden spiders also come
there to enjoy the damp. They enjoy the damp, but what they really
like is to get into the muslin curtain over the window and curl up
and die. The first time I saw one of them in the folds of the curtain
I thought it would be more comfortable in the garden and approached
it with caution and a towel, to put it out. Then I perceived from
its behaviour--it did not try to run away, but just drew its legs a
little closer under it, as you or I would do if we absolutely didn’t
care what happened so long as we were left in peace--that it had come
there on purpose, being aware of its approaching end. I decided that
the last moments of even a spider should be respected, but every day I
shook the curtain and he drew his legs together a little more feebly
than the day before, until at last he dropped out, the shell of a
spider, comfortably and completely dead. I admired his expiring, it was
business-like and methodical, the thing he had next to do, and he was
so intent upon it, not in any way to be disturbed or distracted, asking
no question of the purposes of nature, simply carrying them out. One
might moralize.
Talking of spiders I have just seen a fly catch one. It was, of course,
an ichneumon fly. One has many times heard of his habit of pouncing
upon his racial enemy, puncturing and paralyzing him and finally
carrying him off, walling him up and laying an egg in him, out of which
comes a young ichneumon to feed upon his helpless vitals; but one does
not often see the tragedy in the air. He held his fat prey quite firmly
in his merciless jaws and he went with _entrain_, the villain! The
victim spider and the assassin fly! One might moralize again.
It is hotter than ever, and the sunlight under the ground-glass
bell has a factitious look, as if we had here a comedy with a scene
of summer. A hawk-moth darts like a hummingbird in and out of the
honeysuckle, and a very fine rose-chafer all in green and gold paces
across this paragraph. I believe there are more rose-chafers this year
than there ought to be, and Atma has a heavy bill against them in every
stage of their existence, but they are such attractive depredators.
When I find one making himself comfortable in the heart of a La France,
I know very well that on account of the white grub he was once and the
many white grubs he will be again I ought to kill him and think no
more about it; but one hesitates to send a creature out of the world
who exercises such good taste when he is in it. I know it is quite too
foolish to write, but the extent of my vengeance upon such a one is
only to put him into a common rose.
The birds are silent; the butterflies bask on the gravel like little
ships with big sails. Even the lizards have sought temporary retirement
between the flower-pots. I am the only person who is denied her natural
shelter and compelled to resort to an umbrella. Tiglath-Pileser
said the other day that he thought it was quite time I made some
acknowledgment of the good it was doing me. It _is_ doing me good--of
course. But what strikes me most about it is the wonderful patience and
fortitude people can display in having good done to them.