Dora had been out three seasons when these things happened. I remember
sharing Edward Harris’s anxiety in no slight degree as to how the
situation would resolve itself when she came, the situation consisting
so considerably in his eyes of the second Mrs. Harris, who had
complicated it further with three little red-cheeked boys, all of the
age to be led about the station on very small ponies, and not under any
circumstances to be allowed in the drawing-room when one went to tea
with their mother. No one, except perhaps poor Ted himself, was more
interested than I to observe how the situation did resolve itself, in
the decision of Mrs. Harris that the boys, the two eldest at least, must
positively begin the race for the competitive examinations of the future
without further delay, and that she must as positively be domiciled in
England ‘to be near’ them, at all events until they had well made the
start. I should have been glad to see them ride their ponies up and down
the Mall a bit longer, poor little chaps; they were still very cherubic
to be invited to take a view of competitive examinations, however
distant; but Mrs. Harris’s conviction was not to be overcome. So they
went home to begin, and she went with them, leaving Dora in possession
of her father, her father’s house, his pay, his precedence, and all
that was his. Not that I would suggest any friction; I am convinced that
there was nothing like that--at least, nothing that met the eye, or the
ear. Dora adored the three little boys and was extremely kind to their
mother. She regarded this lady, I have reason to believe, with
the greatest indulgence, and behaved towards her with the greatest
consideration; I mean she had unerring intuitions as to just when,
on afternoons when Mrs. Harris was at home from dusk till dinner, she
should be dying for a walk. One could imagine her looking with her grey
eyes at dear mamma’s horizon and deciding that papa was certainly not
enough to fill it by himself, deciding at the same time that he was
never likely to be ousted there, only accompanied, in a less important
and entirely innocent degree. It may be surprising that any one should
fly from so broad-minded a step-daughter; but the happy family party
lasted a bare three months. I think Mrs. Harris had a perception--she
was the kind of woman who arrived obscurely at very correct
conclusions--that she was contributing to her step-daughter’s amusement
in a manner which her most benevolent intentions had not contemplated,
and she was not by any means the little person to go on doing that
indefinitely, perhaps increasingly. Besides, it was in the natural order
of things that Dora should marry, and Mrs. Harris doubtless foresaw a
comfortable return for herself in the course of a year or two, when the
usual promising junior in ‘the Department’ should gild his own
prospects and promote the general well-being by acquiring its head for a
father-in-law. Things always worked out if you gave them time. How much
time you ought to give them was doubtless by now a pretty constant
query with the little lady in her foggy exile; for two years had already
passed and Dora had found no connection with any young man of the
Department more permanent than those prescribed at dinners and at
dances. It is doubtful, indeed, if she had had the opportunity. There
was no absolute means of knowing; but if offers were made they never
transpired, and Mrs. Harris, far away in England, nourished a certainty
that they never were made. Speaking with her intimate knowledge of the
sex she declared that Dora frightened the men, that her cleverness was
of a kind to paralyze any sentiment of the sort that might be expected.
It depended upon Mrs. Harris’s humour whether this was Dora’s misfortune
or her crime. She, Dora, never frightened me, and by the time her
cleverness dawned upon me, my sentiment about her had become too robust
to be paralyzed. On the contrary, the agreeable stimulus it gave me
was one of the things I counted most valuable in my life out there. It
hardly mattered, however, that I should confess this; I was not a young
man in Harris’s department. I had a department of my own; and Dora,
though she frisked with me gloriously and bullied continually, must ever
have been aware of the formidable fact that I joined the Service two
years before Edward Harris did. The daughter of three generations of
bureaucrats was not likely to forget that at one time her father had
been junior to me in the same office, though in the course of time and
the march of opportunity he had his own show now, and we nodded to
each other on the Mall with an equal sense of the divine right of
secretaries. It may seem irrelevant, but I feel compelled to explain
here that I had remained a bachelor while Harris had married twice, and
that I had kept up my cricket, while Harris had let his figure take all
the soft curves of middle age. Nevertheless the fact remained. Sometimes
I fancied it gave a certain piquancy to my relations with his daughter,
but I could never believe that the laugh was on my side.
If we met at dinner-parties, it would be sometimes Edward Harris and
sometimes myself who would take the dullest and stoutest woman down. If
she fell to him, the next in precedence was bestowed upon me, and there
might not be a pin to choose between them for phlegm and inflation. It
is a preposterous mistake to suppose that the married ladies of Simla
are in the majority brilliant and fascinating creatures, who say things
in French for greater convenience, and lead a man on. After fifteen
years I am ready to swear that I have been led on to nothing more
compromising than a subscription to the Young Women’s Christian
Association, though no one could have been more docile or more
intelligent. During one viceroyalty of happy memory half a dozen
clever and amusing men and women came together in Simla--it was a mere
fortuitous occurrence, aided by a joyous ruler who hated being bored
as none before or ever since have hated it--and the place has lived
socially upon the reputation of that meteoric term ever since. Whereas
the domestic virtues are no more deeply rooted anywhere than under the
deodars; nor could any one, I hasten to add, chronicle the fact with
more profound satisfaction than myself. A dinner-party, however, is not
a favourable setting for the domestic virtues; it does them so little
justice that one could sometimes almost wish them left at home, and I
was talking of Simla dinner-parties, where I have encountered so many.
How often have I been consulted as to the best school for boys in
England, or instructed as to how much I should let my man charge me for
shoe-blacking, or advised as to the most effectual way of preventing the
butler from stealing my cheroots, while Dora Harris, remote as a star,
talked to a cavalry subaltern about wind-galls and splints! At these
moments I felt my seniority bitterly; to give Dora to a cavalry
subaltern was such plain waste.
It was an infinite pleasure to know any one as well as I seemed to know
Dora Harris. She, I believe, held no one else upon the same terms of
intimacy, though she found women, of course, with whom she fluttered and
embraced; and while there were, naturally, men with whom I exchanged the
time o’day in terms more or less cordial, I am certain that I kept all
my closest thoughts for her. It is necessary again to know Simla to
understand how our friendship was gilded by the consideration that it
was on both sides perfectly spontaneous. Social life in the poor little
place is almost a pure farce with the number of its dictated, prompted
intimacies, not controlled by general laws of expediency as at home, but
each on its own basis of hope and expectancy, broadly and ludicrously
obvious as a case by itself. There is a conspiracy of stupidity about
it, for we are all in the same hat, every one of us; there is none so
exalted that he does not urgently want a post that somebody else can
give him. So we continue to exchange our depreciated smiles, and only
privately admit that the person who most desires to be agreeable to us
is the person whom we regard with the greatest suspicion. As between
Dora Harris and myself there could be, naturally, no ax to grind. We
amused ourselves by looking on penetratingly but tolerantly at the
grinding of other people’s.
That was a very principal bond between us, that uncompromising clearness
with which we looked at the place we lived in, and on the testimony of
which we were so certain that we didn’t like it. The women were nearly
all so much in heaven in Simla, the men so well satisfied to be there
too, at the top of the tree, that our dissatisfaction gave us to
one another the merit of originality, almost proved in one another a
superior mind. It was not that either of us would have preferred to
grill out our days in the plains; we always had a saving clause for the
climate, the altitude, the scenery; it was Simla intrinsic, Simla as its
other conditions made it, with which we found such liberal fault. Again
I should have to explain Simla, at the length of an essay at least, to
justify our condemnation. This difficulty confronts me everywhere.
I must ask you instead to imagine a small colony of superior--very
superior--officials, of British origin and traditions, set on the top of
a hill, years and miles away from literature, music, pictures, politics,
existing like a harem on the gossip of the Viceroy’s intentions, and
depending for amusement on tennis and bumble-puppy, and then consider,
you yourself, whether you are the sort of person to be unquestionably
happy there. If you see no reason to the contrary, pray do not go on.
There were times when Dora declared that she couldn’t breathe for want
of an atmosphere, and times when I looked round and groaned at the
cheerful congratulatory aridity in every man’s eye--men who had done
things at Oxford in my own year, and come out like me to be mummified
into a last state like this. Thank Heaven, there was never any cheerful
congratulation in my eye; one could always put there, when the thought
inspired it, a saving spark of rank ingratitude instead.
It was as if we had the most desirable things--roses, cool airs, far
snowy ranges--to build what we like with, and we built Simla--altitude,
7,000, population 2,500, headquarters of the Government of India during
the summer months. An ark it was, of course; an ark of refuge from the
horrible heat that surged below, and I wondered as I climbed the steeps
of Summer Hill in search of I. Armour’s inaccessible address, whether he
was to be the dove bearing beautiful testimony of a world coming nearer.
I rejected the simile, however, as over-sanguine; we had been too long
abandoned on our Ararat.