A dog of no sort of caste stood in the veranda and barked at me
offensively. I picked up a stone, and he vanished like the dog of a
dream into the house. It was such a small house that it wasn’t on the
municipal map at all: it looked as if someone had built it for amusement
with anything that was lying about. Nevertheless, it had a name, it
was called Amy Villa, freshly painted in white letters on a shiny
black board, and nailed against the nearest tree in the orthodox Simla
fashion. It looked as if the owner of the place had named it as a
duty towards his tenant, the board was so new, and in that case the
reflection presented itself that the tenant might have cooperated to
call it something else. It was disconcerting somehow to find that our
dove had perched, even temporarily, in Amy Villa. Nor was it soothing
to discover that the small white object stuck in the corner of the board
was Mr. Ingersoll Armour’s card.
In Simla we do not stick our cards about in that way at the mercy of the
wind and the weather; we paint our names neatly under the names of our
houses with ‘I.C.S.’ for Indian Civil Service, or ‘P.W.D.’ for Public
Works Department, or whatever designation we are entitled to immediately
after, so that there can be no mistake. This strikes newcomers sometimes
as a little professional, especially when a hand accompanies, pointing;
but it is the only possible way where there are no streets and no
numbers, but where houses are dropped about a hilltop as if they had
fallen from a pepper-pot. In sticking his card out like that Mr. Armour
seemed to imagine himself au quatrieme or au cinquieme somewhere on
the south side of the Seine; it betrayed rather a ridiculous lack of
conformity. He was high enough up, however, to give any illusion; I had
to stop to find the wind to announce myself. There was nobody else to do
it if I except the dog.
I walked into the veranda and shouted. Then I saw that one end of it was
partly glazed off, and inside sat a young man in his shirt-sleeves with
his back to the door.
In reply he called out, ‘That you, Rosario?’ and I stood silent, taken
somewhat aback.
There was only one Rosario in Simla, and he was a subordinate in my own
office. Again the hateful need to explain. Between subordinate clerks
and officials in Simla there is a greater gulf fixed than was ever
imagined in parable. Besides, Rosario had a plain strain of what we
call ‘the country’ in him, a plain strain, that is, of the colour of the
country. It was certainly the first time in my official career that I
had been mistaken for Rosario.
Armour turned round and saw me--that I was a stranger.
He got up at once. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I thought it was Rosario.
‘It isn’t,’ I replied, ‘my name is Philips. May I ask whether you were
expecting Mr. Rosario? I can come again, you know.’
‘Oh, it doesn’t matter. Sit down. He may drop in or he may not--I rather
thought he would today. It’s a pull up, isn’t it, from the Mall? Have a
whisky and soda.’
I stood on the threshold spellbound. It was just the smell that bound
me, the good old smell of oil paints and turpentine and mediums and
varnish and new canvas that you never by any chance put your nose into
in any part of Asia. It carried me back twenty years to old haunts,
old friends, old joys, ideals, theories. Ah, to be young and have a
temperament! For I had one then--that instant in Armour’s veranda proved
it to me forever.
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll just have the smell.’
The young fellow knew at once that I liked the smell. ‘Well, have a
chair, anyhow,’ he said, and took one himself and sat down opposite me,
letting his lean brown hands fall between his knees.
‘Do you mind,’ I said, ‘if for a minute I sit still and look round?’
He understood again.
‘I haven’t brought much,’ he said, ‘I left pretty near everything in
Paris.’
‘You have brought a world.’ Then after a moment, ‘Did you do that?’ I
asked, nodding towards a canvas tacked against the wall. It was the head
of a half-veiled Arab woman turned away.
The picture was in the turning away, and the shadow the head-covering
made over the cheek and lips.
‘Lord, no! That’s Dagnan Bouveret. I used to take my things to him,
and one day he gave me that. You have an eye,’ he added, but without
patronage. ‘It’s the best thing I’ve got.’
I felt the warmth of an old thrill.
‘Once upon a time,’ I said, ‘I was allowed to have an eye.’ The wine,
untasted all those years, went to my head. ‘That’s a vigorous bit
above,’ I continued.
‘Oh, well! It isn’t really up to much, you know. It’s Rosario’s. He
photographs mostly, but he has a notion of colour.’
‘Really?’ said I, thinking with regard to my eye that the sun of that
atrocious country had put it out. ‘I expect I’ve lost it,’ I said aloud.
‘Your eye? Oh, you’ll easily get a fresh one. Do you go home for the
exhibitions?’
‘I did once,’ I confessed. ‘My first leave. A kind of paralysis
overtakes one here. Last time I went for the grouse.’
He glanced at me with his light clear eyes as if for the first time he
encountered a difficulty.
‘It’s a magnificent country for painting,’ he said.
‘But not for pictures,’ I rejoined. He paid no attention, staring at the
ground and twisting one end of his moustache.
‘The sun on those old marble tombs--broad sun and sand--’
‘You mean somewhere about Delhi.’
‘I couldn’t get anywhere near it.’ He was not at that moment anywhere
near me. ‘But I have thought out a trick or two--I mean to have another
go when it cools off again down there.’ He returned with a smile, and
I saw how delicate his face was. The smile turned down with a little
gentle mockery in its lines. I had seen that particular smile only on
the faces of one or two beautiful women. It had a borrowed air upon a
man, like a tiara or an earring.
‘There’s plenty to paint,’ he said, looking at me with an air of
friendly speculation.
‘Indeed, yes. And it has never been done. We are sure it has never been
done.’
‘“We”--you mean people generally?’
‘Not at all. I mean Miss Harris, Miss Harris and myself.’
‘Your daughter?’
‘My name is Philips,’ I reminded him pleasantly, remembering that the
intelligence of clever people is often limited to a single art. ‘Miss
Harris is the daughter of Mr. Edward Harris, Secretary of the Government
of India in the Legislative Department. She is fond of pictures. We have
a good many tastes in common. We have always suspected that India had
never been painted, and when we saw your things at the Town Hall we knew
it.’
His queer eyes dilated, and he blushed.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s only one interpretation. It all depends on what a
fellow sees. No fellow can see everything.’
‘Till you came,’ I insisted, ‘nobody had seen anything.’
He shook his head, but I could read in his face that this was not news
to him.
‘That is mainly what I came up to tell you,’ I continued, ‘to beg that
you will go on and on. To hope that you will stay a long time and do a
great deal. It is such an extraordinary chance that any one should turn
up who can say what the country really means.’
He stuck his hands in his pockets with a restive movement. ‘Oh, don’t
make me feel responsible,’ he said, ‘I hate that;’ and then suddenly he
remembered his manners. ‘But it’s certainly nice of you to think so,’ he
added.
There was something a little unusual in his inflection which led me to
ask at this point whether he was an American, and to discover that he
came from somewhere in Wisconsin, not directly, but by way of a few
years in London and Paris. This accounted in a way for the effect of
freedom in any fortune about him for which I already liked him, and
perhaps partly for the look of unembarrassed inquiry and experiment
which sat so lightly in his unlined face. He came, one realized, out of
the fermentation of new conditions; he never could have been the product
of our limits and systems and classes in England. His surroundings, his
‘things,’ as he called them, were as old as the sense of beauty, but
he seemed simply to have put them where he could see them, there was no
pose in their arrangement. They were all good, and his delight in them
was plain; but he was evidently in no sense a connoisseur beyond that of
natural instinct. Some of those he had picked up in India I could tell
him about, but I had no impression that he would remember what I said.
There was one Bokhara tapestry I examined with a good deal of interest.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they told me I shouldn’t get anything as good as that
out here, so I brought it,’ but I had to explain to him why it was
anomalous that this should be so.
‘It came a good many miles over desert from somewhere,’ he remarked, as
I made a note of inquiry as to the present direction of trade in woven
goods from Persia, ‘I had to pound it for a week to get the dust out.’
We spent an hour looking over work he had done down in the plains, and
then I took my leave. It did not occur to me at the moment to ask
Armour to come to the club or to offer to do anything for him; all the
hospitality, all that was worth offering seemed so much more at his
disposition than at mine. I only asked if I might come again, mentioning
somewhat shyly that I must have the opportunity of adding, at my
leisure, to those of his pictures that were already mine by transaction
with the secretary of the Art Exhibition. I left him so astonished that
this had happened, so plainly pleased, that I was certain he had never
sold anything before in his life. This impression gave me the uplifted
joy of a discoverer to add to the satisfactions I had already drawn from
the afternoon; and I almost bounded down the hill to the Mall. I left
the pi dog barking in the veranda, and I met Mr. Rosario coming up,
but in my unusual elation I hardly paused to consider either of them
further.
The mare and her groom were waiting on the Mall, and it was only when
I got on her back that the consciousness visited me of something
forgotten. It was my mission--to propose to take Armour, if he were
‘possible,’ to call upon the Harrises. Oh, well, he was possible enough;
I supposed he possessed a coat, though he hadn’t been wearing it; and
I could arrange it by letter. Meanwhile, as was only fair, I turned the
mare in the direction of the drawing-room where I had reason to believe
that Miss Dora Harris was quenching her impatience in tea.