Chapter III
THERE is a right side and a wrong side to the mountain of Simla, for it was a mountain eight thousand feet high and equally important long before it became the summer headquarters of the Government of India, and a possible pin-point on the map. These mountains run across the tip of India, you will remember, due east and west, so that if you live on one of them you are very apt to live due north or south. On the south side you look down, on a clear day, quite to the plains, if that is any advantage; you see the Punjab lying there as flat as the palm of your hand and streaked with rivers, and the same sun that burns all India bakes down upon you. On the north side you have turned your back on Hindostan and sit upon the borders of Thibet, a world of mountains bars your horizon, a hermit Mahatma mightabide with you in his ashes and have his meditations disturbed by no thought of missionaries or income tax. Your prospect is all blue and purple with a wonderful edge sometimes of white; cool winds blow out of it and fan your roses on the hottest day. Out there is no-man’s-land, where the coolies come from, or perhaps the country of a little king who wears his crown embroidered on his turban, and in India who recks of little kings? Out there are no Secretariats, no Army Headquarters, no precedence, probably very little pay, but the vast blue freedom of it! And all expanded, all extended just at your front door. * * * * *
The asterisks stand for the time I have spent in looking at it. Freely translated they should express an apology. I find it one of the pernicious tendencies of living on this shelf that my eyes constantly wander out there taking my mind with them, which at once becomes no more than a vacant mirror of blue abysses. I look, I know, immensely serious and thoughtful, and Thisbe, believing me on the tip of somehigh imagination goes round the other way, whereas I am the merest reflecting puddle with exactly a puddle’s enjoyment of the scene. There is neither virtue nor profit in this, but if I apologized every time I did it these chapters would be impassable with asterisks. Thisbe’s method is much more reasonable; she takes her view immediately after she takes her breakfast. Coming out upon the verandah she looks at it intelligently, pronounces it perfectly lovely or rather hazy, returns to her employments, and there is an end to the matter. One cannot always, in Thisbe’s opinion, be referring to views. I wish I could adopt this calm and governed attitude. I should get on faster in almost every way. It is my ignominious alternative to turn my back upon the prospect and look up the khud.
Into my field of vision comes Atma, doing something to a banksia rose-bush that climbs over a little arbour erected across a path apparently for the convenience of the banksia rose-bush. Atma would tell you, protector of the poor, that he is the gardenerof this place; as a matter of feet his relation to it is that of tutelary deity and real proprietor. I have talked in as large a way as if it belonged to Tiglath-Pileser because he pays for the repairs, but I should have had the politeness at least to mention Atma, whose claims are so much better. So far as we are concerned Atma is prehistoric; he was here when we came and when we have completed the tale ofoneyears of exile and gone away he will also be here. His hut is at the very end of the shelf and I have never been in it, but if you asked him how long he has lived there he would say, “Always.” It must make very little difference to Atma what temporary lords come and give orders in the house with the magnificent tin roof where they have table-cloths; some, of course, are more troublesome than others, but none of them stay. He and his bulbs and perennials are the permanent undisputed facts; it is unimaginable that any of them should be turned out.
I am more reconciled to my fate when Atma is in the garden, he is somethinghuman to look at and to consider, and he moves with such calm wisdom among the plants. He has a short black curling beard that grows almost up to his high cheek-bones, and soft round brown eyes full of guileless cunning, and a wide and pleasant smile. He is just a gentle hill-man and by religion a gardener, but with his turban twisted low and flat over his ears he might be any of the Old Testament characters one remembers in the pictured Bible stories of one’s childhood. Something primitive and natural about him binds him closely to Adam in my mind. It was with this simplicity and patience, I am sure, that the original cultivator tied up his banksias and saved his portulaca and mignonette after the fall, when he had something to do beside come to his meals. I am not the only person; everybody to whom it is pointed out notices at once how remarkably Atma takes after the father of us all. I have often wished to call him Adam because of his so peculiarly deserving it; but Tiglath-Pileser says that profane persons, knowing that he could nothave received the name at his baptism, might laugh and thus hurt his feelings. So he is Atma still. It is near enough.
He is also patriarchal in his ideas. This morning he came to us upon the business of Sropo. Sropo, he said, wished for six days’ leave in order to marry himself. “But,” said I, “this is not at all proper. Sropo went away last year to marry himself. How shall Sropo have two wives?”
“Nā,” replied Atma, with his kindly smile, “that was Masuddi. Masuddi has now a wife and a son has been,[1]and his wages are so much the less. Also without doubt this Sropo could not have two wives.”
“Certainly not,” said Tiglath-Pileser, virtuously.
“Sropo is of my village,” Atma explained, genially, “and we folk are all poor men. More than one wife cannot be taken. But if we were rich like the Presence,” he went on, gravely, “we would have five or six.”
Tiglath-Pileser shook his head. “You would be sorry,” said he. “It would be amistake,” but only I saw the ambiguity in his eye.
“It is not your Honour’s custom,” returned Atma, simply. “Sropo, then, will go?”
“Call Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser. “It is a serious matter, this of wives.”
Round the corner of the verandah came Masuddi, shy and broadly smiling, with an end of his cotton shirt in the corner of his mouth and pulling at it, as other kinds of children pull at their pinafores.
“Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “last year you made a marriage in your house, and now you have a son. Er—which young woman did you marry?”
Masuddi’s smile broadened; he cast down his eyes and scrabbled the gravel about with his foot. “Tuktoo,” he said shamefacedly.
“Well, there is no harm in that. What is the name of your son?”
Masuddi looked up intelligently. “How should he have a name?” he asked. “He has not yet four months. He came with the snow. When he has a year, then he will get a name. My padre-folk—Brahmun—will give it.”
“But you will say what it is to be,” I put in.
“Nā,” said Masuddi, “the padre-folk will say—to their liking.”
“Masuddi,” said Tiglath-Pileser, “speak straight words—do you beat your wife?”
“Master,” replied Masuddi, “how shall I utter false talk? When she will not hear orders I beat her.”
“Masuddi,” said I, “straight words—do you beat her with a stick?” Laughter rose up in him, and again he chewed the end of his garment. “According as my anger is,” he said, half turning away to hide his face, “so I beat her.”
“Then she obeys?”
“Then fear is and she listens. Thus it is,” said Masuddi, his face clearing to an idea, “as we servant-folk are before your Honours, so they-folk are before us.”
“You may go, worthy Masuddi,” pronounced Tiglath-Pileser, “and Atma may say to Sropo, who is listening behind the water-barrel, that I have heard the words of Masuddi and they are just and reasonable,and he may go also and marry himself, but it must be done in six days, and it must not occur again.”
Masuddi and Sropo are two of the four who pull my rickshaw. When I am not taking carriage exercise they will do almost anything else, except sew or cook, but I have discovered that the thing they really love to be set at is to paint. In the spring the paling required a fresh brown coat, and in a moment of inspired economy I decided that Masuddi and his men should be entrusted with it. Never was task more willingly undertaken. With absorption they mixed the pigment and thewi-oil, squeezing it with their hands; with joy they laid it on, competing among themselves, like Tom Sawyer’s schoolfellows. “Lo, it is beautiful!” Masuddi would exclaim after each brushful, drawing back to look at it. I think they were sorry when it was done.
Atma is of these people, and the two grooms, and Dumboo, the upper housemaid, a strapping treasure six feet in his stockings. I would like it better if all ourservants were, but it is impossible to conceive Sropo doing up muslin frills—at least it is impossible to conceive the frills—and I could not ask people to eat entrées sent up by any friend of Masuddi’s. I admit they do not altogether adapt themselves, or even wash themselves. I have before now locked Masuddi and the others up with a tub and a bar of kitchen soap and instructions of the most general nature, demanding, on their release, tosee the soap. It was the only reliable evidence. Besides if I had not required to see my soap, worn by honest service, they would have sold it and bought sweetmeats and gone none the cleaner. They have many such little ways, which few people I know consider as engaging as I do. But what I like best is their lightheartedness and their touch of fancy. Sropo will go to his nuptials with a rose behind his ear—where in my barbarous West does a young man choose to approach the altar thus? and when Masuddi courted Tuktoo upon the mountain paths in the twilight I think a shy idyll wentbarefoot between them; though he, the male creature, would make shame of it now, preferring to speak of sticks and of obedience. They are the young of the world, these hill sons and daughters, and they still remember how the earth they are made of stirs in the spring. It is late evening in my garden now—there has seemed, somehow, no good reason to go in, though one new leaf in the borders has long been just like another—and far down the khud I hear a playing upon the flute. It is a fragmentary air but vigorous and sweet, and it brings me, dropping through the vast and purple spaces of the evening, the most charming sensation. For it is not a Secretary to the Government of India who performs, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings hosannas over there to the Commander-in-Chief, but a simple hill-man who would make a melody because it is spring, and he has perchance been given leave to go and marry himself.