Chapter II
A ROAD winds round the hill above our heads; another winds round the hill below our feet; between is a shelf jutting out.
The principal object on the shelf is the house, but it also supports the pencil-cedar, and the garden sits on it, and at the back the servants’ quarters and stables just don’t slip off; so that when Tiglath-Pileser walks about it with his hands in his pockets it looks a little crowded. The land between the upper road and the shelf, and the land between the shelf and the lower road is equally ours, but it is placed at such an abrupt and uncompromising angle that we do not know any way of taking possession of it. By surface measurement we are doubtless large proprietors, but as the crow flies we are distinctly over-taxed. This slanting hill-side is called the khud; thereis no real property in a khud. One always thinks of town lots as flat and running from the front street to the back, with suitable exposure for the washing. It just depends. This one stands on end, you could easily send a stone rolling from the front street into the back, if you knew which was which; and there would be rather too much exposure for the washing. If you like you can lean up against the khud, but that is the only way of asserting your title-deed, and few people consider it worth doing. I may say that as soon as you tilt your property out of the horizontal you lose control over it. Things come up on it precisely as they like, in tufts, in suckers and in every vulgar manner, secure and defiant it rises above your head. Tiglath-Pileser and I have sought diligently, with ladders, for some way of bringing our khud into subjection, but in vain. As he says we might paper it, but as I say there are some things which persons who derive their income from current literature simply cannotafford. So we are content perforce to look at it and “call it ours,” aschildren are sometimes allowed by their elders to do. The khud is God’s property but we call it ours. Trees grow on it and it makes a more agreeable background, after all, than other people’s kitchens.
Beyond the shelf the hill-side slopes clear from the upper road to the lower, a stretch of indefinite jungle which flourishes, no man aiding or forbidding. We have sometimes looked at it vaguely and thought of potatoes, but have always decided that it was useful enough and much less troublesome as part of the landscape. The other day the law threatened us if Tiglath-Pileser did not forthwith declare his boundaries in that direction, and he has since been going about with a measuring-chain and a great pretence of accuracy; but it is my private belief that neither he nor his neighbour will be equal to the demand. They had better agree quickly and hatch a friendly deposition together, and so escape whatever penalty the law awards for not knowing where your premises leave off. Meanwhile the wild cherry and the unkempt rhododendron grow in one accordindifferent to these foolish claims. Such is ownership in a khud.
Our domain therefore is spread out about as much as it would hang from a clothes-line, but the only part we really inhabit is the shelf. All this by way of informing you honestly that the garden in which you are invited to lighten so many long hours for me is no great place. Here and now I abjure invention and idealization; you shall have just what happens, just what there is, and it won’t be much. Pot-luck—you can’t expect more from a garden on a shelf. I must admit that before I was turned out to grow in it myself I thought it well enough, but now I regard it critically, like the other plants. We might do better, all of us, under more favourable conditions. We complain unanimously, for one thing, of the lack of room. Cramped we are to such an extent that I often feel thankful for the paling that runs along the edge and keeps us all in. I suppose nobody ever believed that his lot gave him proper scope for his activities in this world, but I cantestify that the wisteria which twines over the paling is pushing a middle-aged hibiscus bush down the khud, while I, sitting here, elbow them both, and a honeysuckle, climbing up from below has to cling with both hands to hold on. If I invite a friend to take a walk in my garden I must go in front declaiming and he must come behind assenting; we cannot waste space on mere paths, and none of them are wide enough for two people to walk abreast, except the main one to the door, which had to be on account of the rickshaws. As it is, pansies, daisies and other small objects constantly slip over the edge and hang there precariously attached by the slenderest root of family affection for days. We are all convinced in this garden, that for expansion one would not choose a shelf, and that applies in quite a ridiculous way to Simla itself, though perhaps it is hardly worth while, out here in the sun, to write an essay to explain exactly how.
I would not show myself of a churlish mind; the day is certainly fine, as fine a dayas you could be compelled to sit out in. A week has passed since I lent myself to be a spectacle of domestic tyranny and modern science, and I hasten to announce that although I want to eat more and to go to bed earlier I am not at all better. I have let the week go by without taking any notice of it in this journal under the impression that it was not worth the pains, as they say in France. It was doubtless a wonderful week in nature, but which of the fifty-two is not? and being certain that my fountain pen would be anything but a source of amiability, I left it in the house. Moreover, there is something not quite proper, one finds, in confiding an experience of personal discomfort, undergone with the object of improving one’s health, to the printed page; it is akin to lending one’s maladies to an advertiser of patent medicines, and tends to give light literature too much the character of a human document. Also, to look back upon, the late week holds little but magnificent resolution and the sensation of cold feet. All that need be said about it is that I have at last arrived at theend of it, full of fortitude and resignation. I am not at all better, but I am resigned and prepared to go on, if it is required of me, and it seems likely to be. In fact it appears to have occurred to nobody but myself that there was anything experimental about this period. The whole summer is to be the experiment, I am told, as often as if they were addressing the meanest intelligence, which is not the case.
My sensibilities no doubt are becoming slightly blunted. A whole week without a roof over one’s head except at night would naturally have that tendency. I find that I am no longer a prey to the desire to go in and look at something in the last number ofThe Studio, and the more subtly tormented of modern novelties fails to hold my attention for more than half-an-hour at a time. The spirit in my feet that would carry me indoors has still to be bound down, but it has grown vague and purposeless and might lead me anywhere, even to the kitchen to see if the cook is keeping his saucepans clean, the most detestable responsibility ofmy life. Now that I am a close prisoner outside the house, by the way, it shall be delegated to Thisbe. That is no more than right.
It was not worse than I expected, and it was a little less bad, let me confess, than I described it to my family. I can now sympathize with the youthful knight of the middle ages at the end of his first night’s ghostly vigil in the sanctuary,—if the rest are no worse than this they can be got through with. I am certainly on better terms with nature, as he was on better terms with the skeleton in the vault, apprehending with him in that neither of them was really calculated to do us any harm. He no doubt lost his superstitions as I am losing my finer feelings; whether one is sufficiently compensated for them by a vulgar appetite and a tendency to drowsiness immediately after dinner is a question I should like to discuss with him.
For one thing I am beginning to make acquaintance with the Days and to know them apart, not merely as sunny days, dulldays, windy days and wet days, as they are commonly unobserved and divided, but in the full and abundant personality which every one of the three hundred and sixty-five offers to the world that rolls under it. To me also, a very short time ago, the day was a convenient arrangement for making things visible outside the house, accompanied by agreeable or disagreeable temperatures; a mere condition monotonously recurrent and quite subordinated to engagements. To live out here enveloped by it, dependent on it, in a morning-to-night intimacy with it, is to know better. The Day is a great elemental creature left in charge of the world for as long, every twenty-four hours, as she can see it. No one day is the same as another; those of the same season have only a family likeness. They express character and temperament, like people, and if you elect to live with them, to throw yourself, as it were, upon their better nature with no other protection than an umbrella, it just makes all the difference. Some were tender and sweet-tempered, I remember, some were thoughtful, with atouch of gloom, one was artist with a firm hand and a splendid palette. And among all the seven I did not dislike a single Day, which is remarkable when one thinks of the abuse one is so apt to let fall, from the inside of a window, about what our common little brains call “the weather.” There is no weather, it is a poor and pointless term, there is only the mood of a day, and however badly it may serve our paltry ends it is bound at least to be interesting. When one reflects upon how little this great thing is regarded and how constantly from behind glass, by miserable men, one is touched with pity for the ingratitude of the race, and astonishment at the amount of personal superiority to be acquired in a week. Day unto day uttereth speech, swinging a lantern; it is the business of night to wait. Day after day, too spiritual to be pagan, too sensuous to be divine, speeds out of time into the eternity where planets are served in turn. Behold, in spite of all their science, I show you a mystery, high and strange whether the sun is in his tabernacle or the clouds are onthe hills. But it is there always, you can see it for yourself. Go out into the garden, not for a stroll, but for a day.
The week has brought me—and how can I be too grateful—a new and personal feeling about this exquisite thing that passes. Waking in the blackness of the very small hours I find a delicate gladness in the thought of the far sure wing of the day. Already while we lie in the dark it brushes the curve of the world in that far East which is so much farther, already on a thousand slopes and rice fields the grey dawn is beginning, beginning; and sleeping huts and silent palaces stand emergent, marvellously pathetic to the imagination. Even while I think, it is crisping the sullen waves of the Yellow Sea; presently some outlying reef of palms will find its dim picture drawn, and then we too, high in the middle of Hindostan, will swing under this vast and solemn operation. With that precision which reigns in heaven our turn will also come, and in my garden and over the hills will walk another day.