To understand how we prized him, Dora Harris and I, it is necessary to know Simla. I suppose people think of that place, if they ever do think of it, as an agreeable retreat in the wilds of the Himalayas where deodars and scandals grow, and where the Viceroy if he likes may take off his decorations and go about in flannels. I know how useless it would be to try to give a more faithful impression, and I will hold back from the attempt as far as I can. Besides, my little story is itself an explanation of Simla. Ingersoll Armour might have appeared almost anywhere else without making social history. He came and bloomed among us in the wilderness, and such and such things happened. It sounds too rude a generalization to say that Simla is a wilderness; I hasten to add that it is a waste as highly cultivated as you like, producing many things more admirable than Ingersoll Armour. Still he bloomed there conspicuously alone. Perhaps there would have been nothing to tell if we had not tried to gather him. That was wrong; Nature in Simla expects you to be content with cocked hats.
There are artists almost everywhere and people who paint even in the Himalayas, though Miss Harris and I in our superior way went yearly to the Simla Fine Arts Exhibition chiefly to amuse ourselves by scoffing. It was easy to say clever things about the poor little exhibits; and one was grateful to the show on this account, for nothing is more depressing east of Suez than the absence of provocation to say clever things. There one afternoon in May as we marched about enjoying ourselves, we came upon Ingersoll Armour, not in the flesh, but in half a dozen studies hanging in the least conspicuous corner and quite the worst light in the room.
‘Eh, what?’ said I, and Dora exclaimed:
‘I SAY!’
‘Sent out from home,’ I said, ever the oracle.
‘Not at all,’ replied Dora. ‘Look, they are Indian subjects. SIMLA subjects,’ she went on, with excitement.
I turned up the catalogue. ‘Ninety-seven, “Kasumti Bazaar”; ninety-eight, “Clouds on the Chor”; ninety-nine, “The House of a Friend”—Lord, what apricot blossoms! Yes, they’re all Simla.’
‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Dora, ‘who painted them? You’ve got the catalogue!’
‘“I. Armour,”’ I read.
‘“I. Armour,”’ she repeated, and we looked at each other, saying in plain silence that to the small world of Simla I. Armour was unknown.
‘Not on Government House list, I venture to believe,’ said Dora. That in itself may show to what depths we sink. Yet it was a trenchant and a reasonable speculation.
‘It may be a newcomer,’ I suggested, but she shook her head. ‘All newcomers call upon us,’ she said. ‘There in the middle of the Mall we escape none of them. He isn’t a calling person.’
‘Why do you say “he”? You are very confident with your pronouns. There’s a delicacy of feeling—’
‘Which exactly does not suggest a women. We are undermined by delicacy of feeling; we’re not strong enough to express it with brushes. A man can make it a quality, a decorative characteristic, and so we see it. With a woman it’s everything—all over the place—and of no effect. Oh, I assure you, I. Armour is a man.’
‘Who shall stand against you! Let him be a man. He has taste.’
‘Taste!’ exclaimed Miss Harris, violently, and from the corners of her mouth I gathered that I had said one of those things which she would store up and produce to prove that I was not, for all my pretensions, a person of the truest feeling. ‘He sees things.’
‘There’s an intensity,’ I ventured.
‘That’s better. Yes, an intensity. A perfect passion of colour. Look at that.’ She indicated a patch of hillsides perhaps six inches by four, in which the light seemed to come and go as it does in a sapphire.
We stood and gazed. It was a tremendous thing; only half a dozen studies with feeling and knowledge in them, but there in that remote fastness thrice barred against the arts a tremendous thing, a banquet for our famished eyes. What they would have said to us in London is a different matter, and how good they really were I do not find the courage to pronounce, but they had merit enough to prick our sense of beauty delightfully where we found them—oh, they were good!
‘Heaven send it isn’t a Tommy,’ said Dora, with a falling countenance. ‘There is something absolutely inaccessible about a Tommy.’
‘How could it be?’ I asked.
‘Oh, there are some inspired ones. But it isn’t—that’s French technique. It’s an Englishman or an American who has worked in Paris. What in the name of fortune is he doing here?’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘we have had them, you know. Val Prinsep came out at the time of the Prince of Wales’s visit.’
‘Do you remember that?’
‘It’s a matter of history,’ I said, evasively, ‘and Edwin Weeks travelled through India not so many years ago. I saw his studio in Paris afterward. Between his own canvases and Ahmedabad balconies and Delhi embroideries and Burmese Buddhas and other things he seemed to have carried off the whole place.’
‘But they don’t come up here ever. They come in the cold weather, and as they can get plenty of snow and ice at home, they stay down in the plains with the palm-trees.’
‘Precisely; they do,’ I said.
‘And besides,’ Dora went on, with increasing excitement, ‘this isn’t a master. You see, he doesn’t send a single picture—only these tiny things. And there’s a certain tentativeness’—Miss Harris, her parasol handle pressed against her lips, looked at me with an eagerness that was a pleasure to look at in itself.
‘A certain weakness, almost a lack of confidence, in the drawing,’ I said.
‘What does that signify?’
‘Why, immaturity, of course—not enough discipline.’
‘He’s a student. Not that it amounts to a defect, you know’—she was as jealous already as if she possessed the things—‘only a sign to read by. I should be grateful for more signs. Why should a student come to Simla?’
‘To teach, perhaps,’ I suggested. Naturally one sought only among reasons of utility.
‘It’s the Kensington person who teaches. When they have worked in the ateliers and learned as much as this they never do. They paint fans and menu cards, and starve, but they don’t teach.’
Sir William Lamb, Member of Council for the Department of Finance, was borne by the stream to our sides. The simile will hardly stand conscientious examination, for the stream was a thin one and did no more than trickle past, while Sir William weighed fifteen stone, and was so eminent that it could never inconvenience him at its deepest. Dora detached her gaze from the pictures and turned her back upon them; I saw the measure of precaution. It was unavailing, however. ‘What have we here?’ said Sir William. Dora removed her person from his line of vision, and he saw what we had there.
‘The work of a friend of yours?’ Sir William was spoken of as a ‘cautious’ man. He had risen to his present distinction on stepping-stones of mistakes he conspicuously had not made.
‘No,’ said Dora, ‘we were wondering who the artist could be.’
Sir William looked at the studies, and had a happy thought. ‘If you ask me, I should say a child of ten,’ he said. He was also known as a man of humour.
‘Miss Harris had just remarked a certain immaturity,’ I ventured.
‘Oh, well,’ said Sir William, ‘this isn’t the Royal Academy, is it? I always say it’s very good of people to send their things here at all. And some of them are not half bad—I should call this year’s average very high indeed.’
‘Are you pleased with the picture that has taken your prize, Sir William?’ asked Dora.
‘I have bought it.’ Sir William’s chest underwent before our eyes an expansion of conscious virtue. Living is so expensive in Simla; the purchase of a merely decorative object takes almost the proportion of an act of religion, even by a Member of Council drawing four hundred pounds a month.
‘First-rate it is, first-rate. Have you seen it? “Our Camp in Tirah.” Natives cooking in the foreground, fellows standing about smoking, and a whole pile of tinned stores dumped down in one corner, exactly as they would be, don’t you know! Oh, I think the Committee made a very good choice indeed, a very good choice.’
Sir William moved on, and Dora was free to send me an expressive glance. ‘Isn’t that just LIKE this place?’ she demanded. ‘Let me see, the Viceroy’s medal, the Society’s silver medal, five prizes from Members of Council. Highly Commended’s as thick as blackberries, and these perfectly fresh, original, admirable things completely ignored. What an absurd, impossible corner of the earth it is!’
‘You look very cross, you two,’ said Mrs. Sinclair, trailing past. ‘Come and see the crazy china exhibit, all made of little bits, you know. They say the photograph frames are simply lovely.’
Mrs. Sinclair’s invitation was not sincere. Miss Harris was able to answer it with a laugh and a wave. We remained beside the serious fact of exhibits 97-103.
‘Who are the judges this year?’ I asked, not that I did not know precisely who they were likely to be. There is a custom in these matters, and I had been part of Simla for eleven years.
Dora took the catalogue from my hand and turned its pages over.
‘Mr. Cathcart, of course; the Private Secretary to the Viceroy would be on the Committee almost ex officio, wouldn’t he? Impossible to conceive a Private Secretary to the Viceroy whose opinion would not be valuable upon any head. The member for Public Works—I suppose he can build bridges, or could once, therefore he can draw, or could once; besides, look at his precedence and his pay! General Haycock—isn’t he head of the Ordnance Department? I can’t think of any other reason for putting him on. Oh yes—he’s a K.C.B., and he is inventing a way of taking coloured photographs. Mr. Tilley, the old gentleman that teaches elementary drawing to the little girls in the diocesan school, that’s all right. And Mr. Jay, of course, because Mr. Jay’s water-colours are the mainstay of the exhibition, and he must be given a chance of expressing his opinion of them.’ She handed me back the catalogue. ‘I have never been really angry with them before,’ she said.
‘Are you really angry now?’ I asked.
‘Furious,’ Dora replied, and indeed her face expressed indignation. Its lines were quite tense, and a spark shone oddly in the middle of the eyes. One could not credit her with beauty, but as her lady friends were fond of saying, there was something ‘more’ in her face. I saw a good deal more at this moment, and it gave me pleasure, as all her feelings did when they came out like that. I hasten to add that she was not unpleasing; her features had a symmetry and a mobility, and her eyes could take any transient charm they chose to endow themselves with; though there were moments when she compared very badly with the other young ladies of Simla with their high spirits and their pretty complexions, very badly indeed. Those were occasions when the gay monotony of the place pressed, I imagine, a little heavily upon her, and the dullness she felt translated itself in her expression. But she was by no means unpleasing.
‘I must go and see Lady Pilkey’s picture,’ I said.
‘What is the use?’ said Dora. ‘It’s a landscape in oils—a view of the Himalayas, near Narkanda. There are the snows in the background, very thin and visionary through a gap in the trees, and two hills, one hill on each side. Dark green trees, pine-trees, with a dead one in the left foreground covered with a brilliant red creeper. Right foreground occupied by a mountain path and a solitary native figure with its back turned. Society’s silver medal.’
‘When did you see it?’ I asked.
‘I haven’t seen it—this year. But I saw the one she sent last, and the one the year before that. You can trust my memory, really.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I can’t. I’m dining there tonight. I must have an original impression.’
‘Congratulate her on the warm blaze of colour in the foreground. It’s perfectly safe,’ urged Miss Harris, but I felt compelled to go myself to see lady Pilkey’s landscape. When I returned I found her still sitting in grave absorption before the studies that had taken us so by surprise. Her face was full of a soft new light; I had never before seen the spring touched in her that could flood it like that.
‘You were very nearly right,’ I announced; ‘but the blaze of colour was in the middle distance, and there was a torrent in the foreground that quite put it out. And the picture does take the Society’s silver medal.’
‘I can not decide,’ she replied without looking at me, ‘between the Kattiawar fair thing and those hills in the rain. I can only have one—father won’t hear of more than one.’
‘You can have two,’ I said bluntly, so deeply interested I was in the effect the things had on her. ‘And I will have a third for myself. I can’t withstand those apricot-trees.’
I thought there was moisture in the eyes she turned upon me, an unusual thing—a most unusual thing—in Dora Harris; but she winked it back, if it was there, too quickly for any certainty.
‘You are a dear,’ she said. Once or twice before she had called me a dear. It reminded me, as nothing else ever did, that I was a contemporary of her father’s. It is a feeble confession, but I have known myself refrain from doing occasional agreeable things apprehending that she might call me a dear.
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.
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.
The very next morning I met Armour on my way to the office. He was ambling along on the leanest and most ill-groomed of bazaar ponies, and he wore a bowler. In Simla sun hats are admissible, straw hats are presentable, and soft felt hats are superior, but you must not wear a bowler. I might almost say that if one’s glance falls upon a bowler, one hardly looks further; the expectation of finding an acquaintance under it is so vain. In this instance, I did look further, fortunately, though in doing so I was compelled to notice that the bowler was not lifted in answer to my salutation. Of no importance in itself, of course, but betraying in Armour a certain lack of observation. I felt the Departmental Head crumble in me, however, as I recognized him, and I pulled the mare up in a manner which she plainly resented. It was my opportunity to do cautiously and delicately what I had omitted the afternoon before; but my recollection is that I was very clumsy.
I said something about the dust, and he said something about the glare, and then I could think of nothing better than to ask him if he wouldn’t like to meet a few Simla people.
‘Oh, I know lots of people, thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s kind of you to think of it, all the same, but I’ve got any amount of friends here.’
I thought of Mr. Rosario, and stood, or sat confounded.
The mare fidgeted; I knocked a beast of a fly off her, and so gained time.
‘This is my second season up here, you know.’
‘Your second season!’ I exclaimed. ‘Where on earth have you been hiding?’
‘Well, I didn’t exhibit last year, you see. I’d heard it was a kind of a toy show, so I thought I wouldn’t. I think now that was foolish. But I got to know quite a number of families.’
‘But I am sure there are numbers that you haven’t met,’ I urged,’ or I should have heard of it.’
He glanced at me with a slight flush. ‘If you mean society people,’ he said, ‘I don’t care about that kind of thing, Mr. Philips. I’m not adapted to it, and I don’t want to be. If any one offered to introduce me to the Viceroy, I would ask to be excused.’
‘Oh, the Viceroy,’ I responded, disrespectfully, ‘is neither here nor there. But there are some people, friends of my own, who would like very much to meet you.’
‘By the name of Harris?’ he asked. I was too amazed to do anything but nod. By the name of Harris! The Secretary of the Government of India in the Legislative Department! The expression, not used as an invocation, was inexcusable.
‘I remember you mentioned them yesterday.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there’s a father and daughter. Miss Harris is very artistic.’
His face clouded, as well it might, at the word. ‘Does she paint?’ he asked, so apprehensively that I could not forbear a smile at Dora’s expense. I could assure him that she did not paint, that she had not painted, at all events, for years, and presently I found myself in the ridiculous position of using argument to bring a young man to the Harrises. In the end I prevailed, I know, out of sheer good nature on Armour’s part; he was as innocent as a baby of any sense of opportunity.
We arranged it for the following Friday, but as luck would have it, His Excellency sent for me at the very hour; we met the messenger. I felt myself unlucky, but there was nothing for it but that Armour should go alone, which he did, with neither diffidence nor alacrity, but as if it were all in the day’s work, and he had no reason to be disobliging.
The files were very heavy during the succeeding fortnight, and the Viceroy quite importunate in his demand for my valuable suggestions. I was worked off my legs, and two or three times was obliged to deny myself in replying to notes from Dora suggesting Sunday breakfast or afternoon tea. Finally, I shook myself free; it was the day she wrote:
‘You must come—I can’t keep it to myself any longer.’
I half thought Armour would be there, but he wasn’t; that is, he was absent corporeally, but the spirit and expression of him littered every convenient part. Some few things lay about that I had seen in the studio, to call it so, but most of the little wooden panels looked fresh, almost wet, and the air held strongly the fragrance of Armour’s north veranda. In one corner there used to be a Madonna on a carved easel; the Madonna stood on the floor, and the easel with working pegs in it held an unfinished canvas. Dora sat in the midst with a distinct flush—she was inclined to be sallow—and made me welcome in terms touched with extravagance. She did not rush, however, upon the matter that was dyeing her cheeks, and I showed myself as little impetuous. She poured out the tea, and we sat there inhaling, as it were, the aroma of the thing, while keeping it consciously in the background.
I imagine there was no moment in the time I describe when we enjoyed Ingersoll Armour so much as at this one, when he lay in his nimbus half known and wholly suppressed, between us. There were later instances, perhaps, of deeper satisfaction, but they were more or less perplexed, and not unobscured by anxiety. That afternoon it was all to know and to be experienced, with just a delicious foretaste.
I said something presently about Lady Pilkey’s picnic on the morrow, to which we had both been bidden.
‘Shall I call for you?’ I asked. ‘You will ride, of course.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve cried off—I’m going sketching.’ Her eyes plainly added, ‘with Ingersoll Armour,’ but she as obviously shrank from the roughness of pitching him in that unconsidered way before us. For some reason I refrained from taking the cue. I would not lug him in either.
‘That is a new accomplishment,’ was as much as I felt I could say with dignity, and she responded:
‘Yes, isn’t it?’
I felt some slight indignation on Lady Pilkey’s account. ‘Do you really think you ought to do things like that at the eleventh hour?’ I asked, but Dora smiled at a glance, the hypocrisy out of my face.
‘What does anything matter?’ she demanded.
I knew perfectly well the standard by which nothing mattered, and there was no use, of course, in going on pretending that I did not.
‘I assured him that you didn’t paint,’ I said, accusingly.
‘Oh, I had to—otherwise what was there to go upon? He would have been found only to be lost again. You did not contemplate that?’ Miss Harris inquired sweetly.
‘I should have thought it was the surest way of losing him.’
‘I can’t think why you should be so rude. He observes progress already.’
‘With a view to claiming and holding him, would it be of any use,’ I asked, ‘for me to start in oils?’
Miss Harris eyed me calmly.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t seem the same thing somehow. I think you had better leave it to me.’
‘Indeed, I won’t,’ I said; ‘there is too much in it,’ and we smiled across the gulf of our friendly understanding.
I crossed to the mantelpiece and picked up one of the little wet panels. There was that in it which explained my friend’s exultation much more plainly than words.
‘That is what I am to show him tomorrow,’ she exclaimed; ‘I think I have done as he told me. I think it’s pretty right.’
Whether it was pretty right or pretty wrong, she had taken in an extraordinary way an essence out of him. It wasn’t of course good, but his feeling was reflected in it, at once so brilliantly and so profoundly that it was startling to see.
‘Do you think he’ll be pleased?’ she asked, anxiously.
‘I think he’ll be astounded,’ I said, reserving the rest, and she cried in her pleasure, ‘Oh, you dear man!’
‘I see you have taken possession of him,’ I went on.
‘Ah, body and soul,’ Dora rejoined, and it must have been something like that. I could imagine how she did it; with what wiles of simplicity and candid good-fellowship she had drawn him to forgetfulness and response, and how presently his enthusiasm leaped up to answer hers and they had been caught altogether out of the plane of common relations, and he had gone away on that disgraceful bazaar pony with a ratified arrangement to return next day which had been almost taken for granted from the beginning.
I confess, though I had helped to bring it about, the situation didn’t altogether please me. I did not dream of foolish dangers, but it seemed to take a little too much for granted; I found myself inwardly demanding whether, after all, a vivid capacity to make colour conscious was a sufficient basis on which to bring to Edward Harris’s house a young man about whom we knew nothing whatever else. An instant’s regard showed the scruple fraudulent, it fled before the rush of pleasure with which I gazed at the tokens he had left behind him. I fell back on my wonder, which was great, that Dora should have possessed the technique necessary to take him at a point where he could give her so much that was valuable.
‘Oh, well,’ she said when I uttered it, ‘you know I made the experiment! I found out in South Kensington—you can learn that much there—that I never would be able to paint well enough to make it worth while. So I dropped it and took a more general line towards life. But I find it very easy to imagine myself dedicated to that particular one again.’
‘You never told me,’ I said. Why had I been shut out of that experience?
‘I tell you now,’ Dora replied, absently, ‘when I am able to offer you the fact with illustrations.’ She laughed and dropped a still illuminated face in the palm of her hand. ‘He has wonderfully revived me,’ she declared. ‘I could throw, honestly, the whole of Simla overboard for this.’
‘Don’t,’ I urged, feeling, suddenly, an integral part of Simla.
‘Oh, no—what end would be served? But I don’t care who knows,’ she went on with a rush, ‘that in all life this is what I like best, and people like Mr. Armour are the people I value most. Heavens, how few of them there are! And wherever they go how the air clears up round them! It makes me quite ill to think of the life we lead here—the poverty of it, the preposterous dullness of it....’
‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, obscurely irritated, ‘don’t quote the bishop. The life holds whatever we put into it.’
‘For other people it does, and for us it holds what other people put into it,’ she retorted. ‘I don’t know whether you think it’s adequately filled with gold lace and truffles.’
‘Why should I defend it?’ I asked, not knowing indeed why. ‘But it has perhaps a dignity, you know. Ah, you are too fresh from your baptism,’ I continued, as she shook her head and went to the piano. The quality, whatever it was, that the last fortnight had generated in her, leaped from her fingers; she played with triumph, elation, intention. The notes seemed an outlet for the sense of beauty and for power to make it. I had never heard her play like that before.
It occurred to me to ask when she had done, how far, after a fortnight, she could throw light on Armour’s aims and history, where he had come from, and the great query with which we first received him, what he could be doing in Simla. I gathered that she had learned practically nothing, and had hardly concerned herself to learn anything. What difference did it make? she asked me. Why should we inquire? Why tack a theory of origin to a phenomenon of joy? Let us say the wind brought him, and build him a temple. She was very whimsical up to the furthest stretch of what could possibly be considered tea-time. When I went away I saw her go again and sit down at the piano. In the veranda I remembered something, stopped, and went back. I had to go back. ‘You did not tell me,’ I said, ‘when he was coming again.’
‘Oh, tomorrow—tomorrow, of course,’ Dora paused to reply.
I resented, as I made my way to the Club, the weight of official duties that made it so impossible for me to keep at all closely in touch with this young man.