It is sharp on these mountains now, keen, glorious weather. In the
house Thisbe cowers over a fire from morning to night. I call it
abject; she retorts that no English winter has ever produced in her
so much goose-flesh, and that she came to India to be warm. Even I
must bend to acknowledge the virtues of a hot-water bottle, and I have
abandoned the pencil-cedar; the deck chair now chases the sun. Every
hour we shift farther and farther to the west, until at about four
o’clock he dips behind the castle of the Princess, and then we grow
very grey and melancholy on the shelf. It is, after all, the great sun
of India; if it falls steadily upon your feet it will slowly warm them
through the shivering air; but nothing, not even a dahlia, must come
between you and it. Even a dahlia makes a difference. The glare upon
this page is particularly unpleasant, but I have permanently closed
my parasol; the double sensation of icy fingers and toasting feet was
worse. It is more than I bargained for, a week, as a matter of fact,
beyond my contract time; and only the fear of taking cold there keeps
me from going into the house.
Whatever forebodings the garden feels it puts a brave front upon
the matter. It is smart with zinnias now; in ranks they stand, like
soldiers, always at attention. I have no patience with people who are
too æsthetic for zinnias, who complain of their stiffness and their
commonness and what not. I think the zinnia a particularly delightful
creature, full of courage and character and cheerful confidence, and
here where we have to make such a fight for a bit of colour against
the void it is invaluable. It may not be exactly a lovable flower,
but what of that? Many of us must be content to be estimable. There
is even joy in a zinnia. From where I sit I look through a fringe of
them along the paling where they almost glitter in the sun. Beyond are
a few dark deodar tops and an oak from which the last yellow leaves
are fluttering, fluttering, and behind the tracery of this the blue
sky bending to the still sharp snowy ranges. If you shut your eyes and
succeed in seeing that, you may almost forget that I am in India and
you somewhere else; we are both, really, very near Thibet and not far,
I imagine, from heaven.
Nor would anybody, I am sure, ever think of India and chrysanthemums
together. Yet the shelf is glorious with chrysanthemums, purple and
bronze and gold and white. My gardening now takes the form of kind
attentions to the chrysanthemums. Atma will tie them up with what I
can only call swaddling strings, round their necks or their waists
or anywhere, without the slightest regard for their comfort. Whereas
if there is one thing a chrysanthemum pleads for, it is freedom to
exercise its own eccentric discretion with regard to pose. There is no
refreshment to exile like the cold sharp fragrance of chrysanthemums,
especially white ones. It brings back, straight back, the glistening
pavement of Kensington High Street on a wet November night and the dear
dense smell of London and a sense of the delight that can be bought
for sixpence there. Delight should be cheap but not too cheap. I am
thankful sometimes for the limitations of our shelf and the efforts
we must make to keep it pretty, and the fact that we have to consider
whether leaf-mould is not rather dear at fourpence a basket. It must
be difficult to keep in relation with a whole mountain-side, which
is the estate of some people, or with six thousand rupees a month,
which is the pay of a Member of Council. I should lease most of the
mountain-side, I think, and put the rupees in bags and lock them up
in a vault, just anyhow, as the rajahs do. To be aware that you had a
vault full of rupees in bags would remove every care from life, but not
to be obliged to know exactly how many bags there were would fill it
with peace and ecstasy. There is solid comfort in a bag of rupees--I
have possessed, at times, a little one--but in a vast income which you
never see there must be a vague dissatisfaction, as well as bank-books
and separate accounts, and cheques and other worries which you must
infallibly remember to date. The East teaches us much of simplicity
and comfort in the persons of its princes. It has taught me the real
magnificence of rupees in a bag.
Atma and I have had a morning of great anticipations. It is time now to
look forward, time to provision the garden against the greedy spring,
and to make plans. In all my plans the paling figures largely; it is a
hand-rail between us and eternity, naturally things look well against
it. Next year we are going to have hollyhocks, single and double, pink
and rose and white, in a rampart all along the paling as it follows the
sweep of the shelf, and spraying thickly out from these the biggest
and whitest marguerites that will consent to come up, and along the
border the broad blue ribbon of forget-me-nots. Farther on where the
shelf widens in front of the house and the deodars rise thick before
it, a creamy Devoniensis is already in possession of the paling, and
here my goldenrod is to stand fretted against the firs, and dwarf
sunflowers shall fraternize with it; and about its skirts shall grow
myriads of coreopsis single and double, and masses of puce-coloured
Michaelmas daisies, and at their feet the grateful simple-minded purple
petunia in the largest families, as thick as ever she likes. I did not
mention it before, because one does hate to be always complaining,
but Tiglath-Pileser has invaded the garden with some Japanese plums;
straight up they stick in the widest part of the paling border, and
discouragingly healthy they look. Round two of these I have planted
portulaca and ringed it with lobelia, and round the other two lobelia,
and ringed it with little pink lilies. The roses in the bed opposite
the dining-room window have grown rather leggy with age, and next year
they are to rise out of a thick and, as I see it, low forest of pink
and white candytuft, and the bed is to be deeply framed in pansies. We
are to have foxgloves on the khud rank above rank, and wallflowers on
its more accessible projections, and in the rains the gayest crowd of
dahlias of the ballet, the single degenerates, are to gather there.
Atma is to get them where he likes and I am to ask no questions. I am
homesick for a certain very sweet, very yellow rather small and not
very double brier rose that belongs to other years when it was much
presented to “the teacher,” also for a modest little fringed pink with
a dark line on its petals which made the kind of posy one offered to
one’s grandmother. But I fear the other years are a country one cannot
rediscover in every part; though I have asked diligently of persons who
also inhabited them I have not yet found my gentle pink or my little
yellow rose. Then a bed of irises is to be made just over the kitchen
roof, to take the eye off it, and the garden lilies, which are mostly
madonnas, are to foregather in one place instead of being scattered
about as they are now among the rose-bushes. Thisbe thinks nothing
could be lovelier than a lily and a rose, but I cannot agree with
her. The combination savours of _trop de luxe_, it recalls an early
Victorian lacquered tea-tray. If she likes to mix her garden-parties
like that she can, but my lilies must express themselves with no other
flower to interfere with them. A lily has so little to say to the
world; it must have an atmosphere of the completest reticence if it
is to speak at all. The roses will be reinforced by twenty-five other
sorts from the Government Gardens at Saharanpore; and there are to be
several new admittances to the home for decayed gentlewomen. The border
nearest the upper khud has been arranged to take everything we don’t
want in other places--the phloxes, the antirrhinums, the lupins and
carnations and gaillardias and surpluses of all sorts which it would
be a sin to throw away. It will be a kind of garden-attic, but the
medley should be bright. Also, to do him justice, Tiglath-Pileser has
given me a wild-rose hedge round our whole property, along both roads
and up and down the khuds. Thick and fragrant it will be in May and
starred with creamy blossoms. He said he owed me something on account
of the grafts, and I could not conscientiously dispute the matter. So
that will be my garden, I hope, of next year. It will hold no brilliant
effects; we only want to be gay and merry on the shelf and to keep
certain relations intact; we have no room to be ambitious. I know now
at least where my garden begins and where it leaves off, and a little
more. Next year I hope to pretend to that intimate knowledge which
comes of having gone over every foot of it, without which no one should
say anything, or even write anything probably. However, Elizabeth[6]
did, and everybody liked it. Elizabeth began as a complete amateur; and
her very amateurity disarmed criticism. She had nothing but taste and
affection, and her struggles to garden upon this capital have often
sympathetically occurred to me during the past summer. Frequently I
have had occasion to say to her, speaking quite anonymously, “What
would you think of that, Elizabeth, supposing you lived on a shelf?”
and often in the depression of wondering whether it was quite fair to
try to follow her charming fashion, I have explained that I really have
to write about my garden; I was turned out in it, I had no more choice
than Nebuchadnezzar; and that I sincerely hope I have not plagiarized
her plants. And I assured her it is a thing I would never do, that
those hereinbefore mentioned grew for me, every one, from seed or
bulb--that I would not ever plagiarize from Mr. Johnson, whose Japanese
lilies were glorious to behold this year and very moderate.
Notwithstanding these meek statements I feel, here at the end of the
book and the end of the summer, highly experienced and knowledgeable
about gardens. I long to pour out accumulated facts, and only a doubt
of the relative value of advice produced at an altitude of seven
thousand feet in the middle of Asia prevents my doing so. In more
serious moments I hardly dare hope that I have not already talked too
much about my garden and other things, but nobody should be severe
upon this who has not discovered the entertainment to be got out of a
perfectly silent visiting public. I should confess that I have enjoyed
it enormously; it would be becoming in me to thank that mute impersonal
body for a delightful summer. It is such an original pleasure to go on
saying exactly what you like and briefly imagine replies, as well as a
valuable aid, I am sure, to convalescence. To have increased the sum of
the world’s happiness by one’s own is perhaps no great accomplishment,
yet is it so easy? Neither can it be called especially virtuous to feel
a little better, but what moral satisfaction is there to compare with
it?
The summer and the book are done. The procession of the Days has gone
by, all but a straggler or two carrying a tattered flag; it took seven
months to pass a given point. There is a rustling among the roses
when the wind comes this way, but nearly always the blue void holds a
golden silence. Belated butterflies bask on the warm gravel with wings
expanded and closed down. Wooing is dangerous now; shadows overtake
you, and a shadow kills. The zinnias are all old soldiers, the Snows
have come nearer in the night. Some morning soon they will have crept
over the shelf, but only Atma will see that. The rest of the family
will be occupying a spot under the warm dust haze down below, so far
down as to be practically below sea-level. The vicissitudes of some
lives!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Literally: “has been finished.”
[2] England.
[3] Quietly.
[4] Country cart.
[5] “La Pia.”
[6] “Elizabeth and Her German Garden.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.