We have entered upon the period of our great glory and content; it is
second summer in these hills, with just a crisp hint of autumn coming.
There is nothing left of the rains but their benediction; all day long
the sun draws the scent out of the deodars and makes false promises to
the garden, where they believe it is spring. The field-daisies and the
hollyhocks and the mignonette are all in second bloom and the broom
down the khud has kindled up again. The person who is really puzzled
is the lilac. We have a lilac bush. I assure you it is not everybody
who can say so in the town of Simla; the lilac is most capricious about
where she will stay and where she won’t stay. We have only one; all her
children either die young or grow up dwarfs. However, after blooming in
the most delicious and heartbreaking manner in April, fainting through
June and going quite distracted in the rains, the lilac now finds new
sap in her veins and the temptation assails her to flower regardless of
the calendar. Yet she doesn’t, poor dear, quite know how; something is
lacking to the consummation of April, and the fictitious joy she grasps
at comes out in ragged little bunches that stick straight up at the end
of the wood of the topmost branches. Nevertheless it is pure lilac,
enough for a button-hole, and matter to boast of, lilac in October.
For all these reasons I was perfectly happy this morning until twenty
minutes past ten o’clock. Atma and I had been transplanting some
cactus dahlias to fill up an empty place. It is a liberty I wouldn’t
have taken at this time of year, but Atma says that he can deceive
the dahlias. “By giving much water,” he explains, “they will take no
notice,” and he has been craftily setting them down in little ponds.
I had a dispute with him about a plant, which he declared was a lily.
To settle the matter, as soon as my back was turned, he dug it up,
and triumphantly sought me. “Behold,” said he, “it has an onion.” He
was distressed to contradict me, but behold it _had_ an onion. The
connection between an onion and a lily was simpler perhaps to Atma
than it would be to many people; but I conceded it. Then came a pedlar
of apples from a neighbouring garden. We shall have apples of our own
in time, but our neighbour down the khud thought of it three or four
years before we did, and there is no particular reason to wait. Our
neighbour’s sturdy retailer squatted discouraged on his haunches before
me. His brown muscles stood out in cords on his arms and legs, his face
was anxious and simple like a child’s. “If your honour will listen,”
said he, “half over Simla I have carried this burden of apples, and it
is no lighter. My words are good and I go always to the verandah, but
the sahib-folk will not buy.”
“And is that,” said I, eyeing the fruit, “a strange thing, worthy one?”
He picked up an apple and held it disparagingly, at arm’s-length, in
front of him. “Certainly they are going rotten,” said he simply. “And
the more they rot the louder is the anger of the mistress when I carry
them back. Your honour will listen--if apples rot is it the fault of
the servant? No,” he answered himself with solid conviction, “it is the
fault of God.”
He sat in the sun content--content to sit and talk of his grievance
with his load on the ground. I smiled at his dilemma, and he smiled
back; but gravity quickly overtook him, it was a serious matter.
“Seven days ago, when they were sound,” he went on, “the gardener
himself took them and sold many. Now he gives me the command, and
because I do not sell there is talk of a donkey.”
“Truly you are no donkey, worthy one,” said I soothingly. “All the
donkeys are employed by the washermen to carry home the clothes. You
are a large, fine, useful Pahari. What is the price of the apples? Some
of them are good.”
“It is true talk that the mistress said ten annas a seer,” he replied
eagerly, “but if your honour wishes to pay eight annas I will say that
your honour, seeing the rottenness, would give no more.”
I would not profit by the rottenness since it did not concern me,
so he picked out of his best for me with exclamations, “Lo, how it
is red!” “Listen, this one will be a honey-wallah!” and almost more
polishing than I could bear. The cloud departed from his honest face,
it was that I had paid for; and when Tiglath-Pileser passing by said
that I had been imposed upon I was indignant. He, the master, would
not have an apple though they are really very good, and neither do
I feel so disposed; they must be made into a pudding. We talked for
a little while of the annoyance of reaching that critical time of
life when one looks askance at a casual apple. In early youth it is
a trifle to be appropriated at any hour; between the ages of ten and
fourteen it is preferable the last thing before going to bed. After
that ensues a period of indifference, full of the conviction that there
are things in the world more interesting than apples; and by the time
one again realizes that there is nothing half so good, circumstances
have changed so that it is most difficult to decide when to eat them.
A raw apple in the American fashion before breakfast is admitted by
the mass of mankind to have a too discouraging effect upon everything
else, and all will grant that it is impossible to do justice to its
flavour, impossible to cope with it in any way, after a meal. It is
not elusive--like the grape or the lychee; it is far too much on the
spot. There remains the impromptu occasion, but you have long since
come to regard with horror anything “between meals.” A day arrives when
the fact stares you in the face that there is no time at which to eat
an apple. Tiglath-Pileser and I considered it together this morning;
but we were philosophic, we didn’t mind, we remembered that up to
threescore years and ten there would probably always be somebody to
bake them for us and were happy, nevertheless. Then Tryphena came and
stayed an hour, and now I am not so happy as I was.
I would not dwell upon her, I would pass to other themes, but one
has a feeling that Tryphena has been too much omitted from accounts
of our little town. Such chronicles have been somehow too playful;
one would think we did nothing but discover affinities and listen to
the band and eat expensive things in tins. One would think life was
all joy and pleasure whereas there are Associations of every kind.
Whatever may have been the case in the golden age, or the time of
Lord Lytton, I believe that the great over-fed conscience of Great
Britain now sends out more Tryphenas every year, and their good works
have to be seriously reckoned with in considering the possibility
of remaining here. We have our traditions, of course, but we are
practically compelled to live upon them, and it seems to me that a
distant world should hear not only of our declining past but of what we
have increasingly to put up with. I would not have invited Tryphena to
occupy a chapter, but as she has walked in without this formality she
might as well stay.
Indeed I would not have invited her. She is the kind of Tryphena that
never comes to see you unless you are ill. I am not so agreeable when
I am ill--I imagine few people are--and I prefer visits, at such a
time, only from people who are fond of seeing me when I am well. Why in
heaven’s name, when you are feverish or aguish or panting for breath,
you should be expected to accept as a “kindness” a visit from a person
who never thinks of you until you become a helpless object to whet
her righteousness on, who comes and inflicts a personality upon you
to which the most robust health only enables you to be barely polite,
is to me an irritating conundrum. I had taken particular pains to
be reported to Tryphena as entirely convalescent, “quite out of the
doctor’s hands;” I did not want to be on her parish books. Why should
I suffer to enable her to do her duty? Why should she have things put
down to her credit at my expense? This does not seem to me reasonable
or proper and I am averse to it. Yet I have told her, such is my
hypocrisy, how good it was of her to come, and she has gone away
better pleased with herself than ever.
Tryphena’s attitude toward the social body by which she is good enough
to allow herself to be surrounded is a mingling of compassion and
censure. She is _la justicière_. She will judge with equity, even
with mercy, but she must always judge. She is perpetually weighing,
measuring, criticising, tolerating, exercising her keen sense of the
shortcomings of man in general and woman in particular. She will bring
her standards and set them up by your bedside. Your scanty stock of
force cannot be better used than in contemplating and admiring them,
and you must recognize how completely she herself attains them; you
have no alternative. If one will for ever strike human balances
one should have a broad fair page to do it on, and Tryphena’s is
already over-written with cramped prejudices. It is a triviality, but
Tryphena’s gloves always wrinkle at the thumbs.
If she had been a man she would have been a certain kind of clergyman,
and if she had been a clergyman his legs would have gone in gaiters.
Indeed, sooner or later she would probably have added to the name of
Tryphenus the glories of an episcopal see. She is past mistress of the
art of kindly rebuke. But I do not wish to be kindly rebuked. In that
respect I am like the Roy-Regent, and all other persons whom Providence
has enabled to do without this attention. She has more principles than
any one person is entitled to, and she is always putting them into
action before you. I think it is a mistake to imagine that people care
about the noble reasons that direct one’s doings; if one’s doings
themselves provoke interest it is exceptional luck. I wish somebody
would tell Tryphena that principles ought to be hidden as deep as a
conviction of superiority; and see what would happen. I am sure we were
not born to edify one another.
The deplorable part of it is that Tryphena leaves one inclined to
follow her in the steep and narrow path that leads to self-esteem. I
find myself at this moment not only in a bad temper, but in a vein of
criticism which I am inclined to visit upon persons whom I am usually
entirely occupied in admiring. My friend the Bengal Lancer has just
ridden by, with his hand on his hip. It has never struck me before that
to ride with a hand on the hip is a sign of irredeemable vanity. The
Gunner was here to tea yesterday--he of the Mountain Battery--and told
us stories of his mules. I think disparagingly of his mules. That a
mule will “chum up to” a pony and kick a donkey, seems this morning an
imbecile statement of an improbable fact, though I admit I laughed at
the time, it was so British. The unpaid Attaché came too. The unpaid
Attaché gives one the impression of never allowing himself to be as
charming as he might be. What foolish fear can justify this reticence?
Enthusiasm, we all know, is permitted to the gods and to foreigners
only, but even an unpaid Attaché can afford a whole smile.
The worst that can be said of Delia is that numbers of people whom she
doesn’t care a button about call her a dear. At least that is the
worst I can think of. As to Thalia, I had a note from her yesterday in
which she spelled my name wrong. This after two years of notes. It may
have been an accident; but much as I love Thalia I am disposed--this
morning--to think that there is somewhere in her a defect obscure,
elementary, which matches this. What is the worst they know of me? I
have not the least idea, but I am prepared--this morning--to hope it is
something rather bad.
The fact is that here in our remote and arbitrary and limited
conditions we are rather like a colony in a lighthouse; we have nothing
but ourselves and each other, and we grow overwrought, over-sensitive
to the personal impression. I suppose that is what has produced, has at
least aggravated, cases like Tryphena’s. It is a thing to be on one’s
guard against. I quite see that if my own symptoms increase I shall
shortly arrive at the point of being unable to endure the sight of many
persons superior to myself; which is illogical and ridiculous.