I find it desirable to sit more and more out in the rain. A little
stouter protection, a little more determination, and the cane chair
will soon weather anything. There are still tempestuous half-hours
which drive me as far as the verandah, but I am growing every day
more used to the steady beat and drip about my defences, and I now
know precisely the term of resistance of every umbrella in the house.
One after the other I put them to the proof; on a really wet day I
discourage three or four. An occasional pelting of my person does
not trouble me, I am very water-proof; but when drops descend upon
this fair page and confuse its sentiments I call loudly for another
umbrella. Constantly, no doubt, the cane chair under the conifer grows
a stranger spectacle; but my family have become accustomed to it and
there is no one else to see. The occasional rickshaw that passes along
the road above pays attention to nothing, but goes as fast as it can,
with the hood up, like a deranged beetle, and if any one rides past it
is with bent head and flying mackintosh. I have the world very much to
myself, most of the mountains when I can see them, and all the garden.
And it is full of rewards and satisfactions, this rainy world. The wind
that pushes the clouds up here blows over a thousand miles of sun and
sand and draws a balm from the desert to mingle with its cool dampness,
delicious to breathe, like a cooled drink to the lungs. It cannot be
tasted in the house because of the prevailing flavour of carpets and
curtains. Nor can anybody know, who has not sat out under it, the
delight of the slow termination of a shower, the spacing lines and the
sparser drop-dancers on the gravel, the jolly irregular drip from the
branches on your umbrella, the wraiths of mist skimming over the drive
and the feint thin veil slanting against the deodars into which it all
dissolves. So invariably we are careful to wait in the house “until
it is over,”--quite over. A pencil-cedar too, very wet, with a drop at
the end of every spine, and a soft gray light shining through it, is a
good thing to look up into. “As if it were candied,” as Thisbe politely
conceded, and departed at once into the house out of the damp.
For the first time, I have this year a rains garden. It is a thing
anybody may have, but very few people do. As a rule gardens in our
part of the world are handed over in the rains to slugs and their own
resources. The resources of a garden, left to itself, are hardly ever
suspected. It is impossible, people say, to keep it down, and they sit
comfortably in the house looking out upon the impossibility. In the hot
weather they say it is impossible to keep it up. They complain that
they are here for so short a time that it is not worth while to do
anything. Most people are transitory in our little town, certainly; it
is generally only a year or two in Paradise and then down again into
the Pit, but why that year or two should be thought less worth than
others of their lives I never can quite understand. Especially as a
flower takes such a little while to come to you. But people are just
people.
To me of course, peculiarly situated under a conifer, a rains garden
was a peremptory necessity, and I have had it in my mind’s eye for
months. There was an unavoidable fortnight, when the earlier flowers
were going out and the others only answering my invitation as it
were, promising to come, which was not quite cheerful. The sweet-peas
fluttered for days about the verandah before they would submit to be
beaten down, and the roses, those that were left, looked up as if they
had been for a long time in ladies’ bonnets. The mignonette grew leggy
and curious, spreading in all directions and forgetting to flower, with
a smell, moreover, like decaying cabbage, deplorable in mignonette; and
the petunias went off with draggled petticoats, which must have been
distressing to a flower whose principal virtue is her neat and buxom
appearance. The snapdragons and the corn-bottles are just holding on
anyhow and the phloxes seem not to know what to do; but the poppies
were dashed out in a single night, and quantities of things in pots
have been considerately removed by Atma to the back parts, there to
meet dissolution in private.
But now everything that craves or loves the rain is coming on. I
should not be so proud of my potato-vine; I did not plant it, but
somebody probably, who looked down from here and saw the flame of the
mutiny light up the land. He has my thanks; he has left for himself
a steadfast memorial. So eager is it to do him credit that every hot
weather shower a twig will clothe itself in white; and now, when the
time is fully come it trembles everywhere over the paling against the
sky and heaps up its blossoms among its glossy leaves like snow. That
is not idle simile; it takes blue shadows and fills up chinks, it is
exactly like snow. The verandah is odorous with lilies, from the tall
curling Japanese kind, as opulent as a lily can be to the simple and
delicate day lilies that love this world so little. All the lilies
live in the verandah except the strenuous peppered orange kind which
Tiglath-Pileser declares is not the tiger-lily and which bears itself
most gallantly under the rain, standing like a street lamp in the
darkest corners, and those strange crimson and yellow Tigridæ (I am
sorry I do not know their Christian name) that roll up so unexpectedly
with us in the middle of the morning. I must say I like a flower that
you can depend upon. Mr. Johnson speaks contemptuously of the Tigridæ,
so I suppose they are common enough, but to me they were new and very
remarkable, and when they began to come out I asked Thalia to lunch to
see them. When she arrived, at two o’clock, every one of them had gone
into the likeness of a duck’s head, with a satirical red and yellow eye
that almost winked at us. I was prepared to ask Thalia to admire the
Tigridæ, but such conduct puts one off. I am still willing to concede
that it is wonderful; but you do not want a flower to astonish you; its
functions are quite different. I have taken occasion to point out this
to Thisbe, when she complains that she is not original.
Tall stocks of tuberose--quite three feet--stand among the rose-bushes
in front of the drawing-room windows; but they turn brown almost as
fast as they open; next year I will plant them under the eaves for
more shelter. A clump of cannas, spikes of flame, waving splendid
Italian and African leaves, red-brown and brown-green, with coleas
of all colours sitting round their feet, lord it at chosen corners
on each side of the drive. Even on a shelf you may have features; it
is all a matter of relation. If your scale is only simple enough the
most surprising incident is possible; and of this the moral certainly
lies in the application of it. Masses of pink and white hydrangeas
on this principle make the garden look like a Japanese print; they
are so big and blotchy and yet so simply, elegantly effective. They
are distributed wherever a tub will improve the shelf-scape; like
Diogenes the hydrangea must have its tub. Put him in the ground and at
once he grows woody and branchy and leafy, imagining perhaps that he
is intended to become a shrub. Thus he can be seen to profit by his
limitations--of how many more of us may this be said! The lobelia--a
garden should always be provided with plenty of lobelia, to give it
hope--is flushing into the thick young leaf with a twinkle here and
there to show what it could do if the rain would stop for just ten
minutes; and the salvia is presently blue, though sparingly, as is
its nature. The fuchsias care nothing for the rain and are full of
flounces purple and pink; but nobody takes it quite like the begonias,
who sit up unblinking crimson and brick-dust and mother-of-pearl, with
their gay yellow hearts in their splendid broad petals, saying plainly
“We like this.” And dahlias everywhere, single and double, opening
a cheerful eye upon a very wet world. The dahlia took possession of
Simla--I have looked it up--the same year the Government of India
did, and it has made itself equally at home. It grows profusely not
only in our bits of garden but everywhere along the khud-sides that
border the public highways. It mixes itself up with Finance and Foreign
Relations; it nods under the Telegraph Office and sways about the
Military Department. It does as it pleases, no one attempts to govern
it; it paints our little mountain town with the colours of fantasy and
of freedom.
Sunflowers and nasturtiums take as kindly to bureaucratic conditions.
We consider them fellows of the baser sort and plant them all behind,
the sunflower tall along the lattice between us and the road above,
the nasturtiums scrambling and blazing down the khud-side beneath. The
nasturtiums make a mere cloth of gold, there is not much entertainment
to be got out of them; but on heavily pouring days when I have betaken
myself to the attic-window level with them, I have found good company
in the sunflowers. Thoughtfully considered, the sunflower has no
features to speak of; an eye, and you have mentioned them all, yet many
comedians might envy that furnishing. His personality is evasive; I
have idly tried to draw him, and have reproduced a sunflower but no
gentleman. It lies in a nuance of light across that expressive round,
which may say anything, or merely stare. One looks intelligently to the
west, another hopefully to the east. Two little ones cower together;
another glances confidently up at its tall mother, another folds its
leaves under its chin and considers the whole question of life with
philosophy. On a particularly wet day I find a note to the effect that
a small sunflower called across to me, “I am just out this morning and
it’s pouring. A nice look-out, but I’ll try to bear up.” That was the
day on which I distinctly saw a sunflower shut its eye.
With Tiglath-Pileser everything is secondary at present to the state
of the drains and the kitchen roof. The drains are open channels down
the khud-side, the kitchen roof is of tin, and when it leaks enough to
put the fire out the cook comes and complains. He is a Moog cook, which
means that he prefers to avoid the disagreeable, so he waits until it
is actually out before he says anything. When, between showers, we
walk abroad upon the shelf my footsteps naturally tend to the border
where the wild puce-coloured Michaelmas daisies are thickening among
the goldenrod, and his would take the straightest direction to the
plumber and the coolies who are making another stone ditch for him. To
me there is no joy in repairing a kitchen roof, nor can I ever decide
whether it should be tarred or painted, while to Tiglath-Pileser the
union of Michaelmas daisies and goldenrod, though pleasing, is a matter
of trivial importance. So we have agreed upon the principle of a fair
partition of interest. He comes and assumes moderate enthusiasm before
my hedge of purple and yellow; I go and pronounce finally that nothing
could be uglier than either paint or tar for the kitchen roof. By such
small compromises as these people may hold each other in the highest
estimation for years.
The consideration of the kitchen roof reminds me of poor Delia, from
whom I had a letter this morning. She has rejoined her husband in a
frontier outpost, where the Department of Military Works had somewhat
neglected their quarters. Their position--that of Captain and Mrs.
Delia--in this weather is trying to a degree. In a particularly heavy
storm recently the rain came in upon them in such floods that they were
obliged to take refuge under the table. Imagine the knock of a stranger
at the gate under such circumstances! It was better than that--it
was the knock of a wayfaring Sapper come to _inspect the bungalow_.
How great must Delia’s joy have been in making him comfortable under
the table! And there they sat, all three, for fifteen mortal hours,
subsisting, for the cook-house was carried away, upon ginger-nuts
and chocolates and a bottle of anchovies. The more remote service of
Her Majesty our Queen-Empress involves some curious situations. The
Sapper, Delia writes, went forth no longer a stranger; fifteen hours
spent together under a table would naturally make a bond for life. One
might also trust Delia, whose mission is everywhere to strike a note
of gaiety and make glad the heart of man, to give the circumstance a
character sufficiently memorable. Almost, if four would not have been a
crowd, I could have wished myself there too, under the table.