Chapter VII
THERE are many methods of gardening. I have known people who were not content with anything but actually digging and weeding, grubbing up the curly wet worms and the tough roots, and bending their own backs over bulbs and seedlings. That is the thorough method, and though it is a little like sweeping and scrubbing out yourself the rooms your guests are to occupy,—and I suppose that would be a pleasure to some people,—it is the method that commands the most respect. Compared with it I feel that I cannot ask respect for mine; I must be content with admiration. My gardening is done entirely with scissors, scissors and discretion, both easy to use. With scissors and discretion I walk about my garden, snipping off the flowers that are over. Masuddi comes behind, holding myumbrella, Sropo with a basket picks up the devoted heads. I thus ignore causes and deal directly with results, much the simplest and quickest way when life is complicated by its manifold presentations and the cares of a family. And the results are wonderful,—I can heartily recommend this method of gardening to any one who wants to compass the most charming effect with the least exertion. A plant is only a big bouquet, and what bouquet does not instantly redouble its beauty when you take away the one or two flowers that have withered in it? A faded flower is too sad a comment upon life to be allowed to remain even on its parent stem, besides being detrimental and untidy like a torn petticoat. There should be nothing but joy in the garden, joy and freshness and coquetry, and the subtlest, loveliest suggestion of art; anon by the diligent application of scissors and discretion I leave a flood of these things behind me every day. No doubt it is regrettable that the withered rags in Sropo’s basket represent the joy and coquetry of yesterday; this is the lesson oflife, however, and one cannot take account of everything. Also you lay yourself open to the charge of being a mere lady’s-maid to your garden; but worse things than that are said about nearly everybody.
Among the pansies I confess I feel rather an executioner with my scissors, though there a rigorous policy most rewards me. Nothing is so slatternly as a pansy bed where some of the family are just coming out into the world, and others are beginning to weary of it and others are going shamelessly to seed. My pansies must all be properly coiffured and fit to appear in society; when they begin to pull shawls over their heads and take despondent views I remove them. Moreover, under this unremitting discipline, they will go on and on, I shall have four months of pansies; it is in every way the right thing to do.
And yet it is a remorseless business, turning up the little faces to see if they have lived long enough to be ready for the guillotine. They look straightatyou, and some of them shrink and some beseech, and someare mutely resigned. I am no stern Atropos, I am weak before the fate I bring and often let it go; and if by mistake I snip off a bud I hurry on and try to forget it. Has the divinity who lays us low also, I wonder, his moments of compunction—does he ever hold his hand and say “One more day”? Or does he snip here and there at random “just choosing so”? Oh Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos, I do not like your rôle, I am glad I am not an omnipotent Whim; I hope my garden thinks better of me than that. The prevailing expression among pansies, by the way, is that of apprehension; I hope this is a botanical fact and not confined to my pansies.
Nothing is more annoying in a small way in this world than to see your tastes reflected in those whom you consider inferior to yourself. You would rather not share anything with such persons, even a preference. I have to submit to this vexation. There are others hereabouts, whom I have got into the habit of looking down upon, who have exactly my idea of gardening. I hasten to saythat they are not people in the ordinary sense of the term. Bold, indeed, would be the non-official worm, in this bureaucratic stronghold, who should point to any gazetted creature about him and say “That is a lesser thing than I.” Society would smile and decline to be deceived. For this is an ordered Olympus, the gods go in to dinner by Regulation, their rank and pay is published in Kalends which anybody may buy, and the senior among them are diligently worshipped by the junior as “brass hats.” No, it would certainly not be for the Tiglath-Pilesers who never sent back a parcel to the draper’s tied up in red tape in their lives, not having a yard of it in the house for any purpose, to give themselves airs over persons who use it every day. But even a non-official may look down upon a monkey. My offensive imitators are monkeys.
I would not object if they followed my example in their own jungle garden, but they come and do it in mine. Be sure I never catch them at it. When I am operating there myself they often leap crashing intothe rhododendrons on the khud and sit among the branches watching me, whole troops of them, but at a stone or a compliment they are off, bounding with childish unintelligible curses down the khud. It is in the early dawn before any one is awake or about, that they come with freedom and familiarity to walk where I walk and do as I do. I can perfectly fancy them mincing along in impertinent caricature—I do not mince—holding up their tails with one hand and with the other catching and clawing haphazard at the flowers as they imagine I do. Two hours later, when I come out to mourn and storm over the withering fragments on the drive not a monkey vexes the horizon. And they do what some people think worse than this. They come and tear Tiglath-Pileser’s carefully bound grafts from their adopted stems, and the young shoots from his little new apple-trees which have travelled all the way from England to live here with us and share our limitations and our shelf. These were only planted in February, and one of them, a beginner not three feethigh, had six of its very own apples on it yesterday. It is not a thing that happens often, apples as soon as that, and six; and Simla is a place where there is so little going on that we were more excited about them, perhaps, than you would be at home. They were small apples but they had to grow, and they were growing yesterday. This morning while we still dreamed of our apples, a grey langur with a black face ate the whole crop at a sitting. So now we can neither bake them nor boil them nor measure them for publication. They have disappeared in a grey langur with a black face, and though I heartily hope they will inconvenience him I have very little expectation of it; the punitive laws of nature matter little to monkeys.
The jungle is full of wild fruit trees newly burgeoned, but the monkeys prefer the cultivated varieties, they have found out the improved flavour even in the young leaves. They find out everything, not merely for the purposes of honest burglary, but for the cynical satisfaction of tearing it to pieces.Thus, for one graft that a monkey devours, he pulls three out of their bandages and casts them on the ground, where they are of no further use to either men or monkeys. What you plant with infinite pains they pull up by the roots. “These people have done something; let us undo it,” is the one thought they ever think,—which shows, I suppose, that if there are politics among them they govern strictly on party lines. It makes one very ill-disposed toward them. A monkey has entered the pantry and bolted with a jam-pot even while my back was turned giving out the sugar to make more jam. A monkey has come in at the verandah door and abstractedallthe bread and butter for afternoon tea, while his accomplice sat upon the paling to gibber “Cave!” This was legitimate larceny, and we put up with it. Thisbe said the poor monkey looked hungry, and she would be content with Madeira cake, adding, out of the depths of her experience, that it was a pity the monkey that took the jam hadn’t taken the bread and butter too,—they went so well together. We can beindulgent to an entirely empty monkey; we have enough in common with him to understand his behaviour, and his villainous pirate’s descent upon us is always good comedy. But when he picks the slates off the roof of your dwelling, when he privily enters your husband’s dressing-room and abstracts the razor and strop—Tiglath-Pileser, who would not lend his to a seraph!—what kind of patience is there which would be equal to the demand? Monkeys do not throw stones and break windows; one wishes they would, since that would bring them within the cognizance of the police and it might then be possible to deal with them. A monkey would hate solitary confinement above all things. Often in a troupe bounding from tree to tree overhead across the Mall there will be one with a collar and a bit of rope or chain hanging to it, escaped from capture and free again to range with his fellows the limitless lunatic asylum the good God has endowed for him in the jungle. Once he became amenable to that sort of punishment he would forsake for ever, I am sure, the hauntsof men; but he is not intelligent enough, or perhaps he is too intelligent.
There are so many of them. A monkey census is obviously impossible, but I believe if it could be taken it would show that every resident official had at least one simian counterpart,—a statement which I hope will not give offence on either side. An old fakir on the top of Jakko keeps a kind of retreat for monkeys, a monastery with the most elastic rules, where indeed the domestic relations are rather encouraged than forbidden. He is their ghostly father, though responsibility for their morals seems to sit upon him lightly; he will call them out of the jungle for you in hundreds to be fed. Then you give him four annas and come away. A pious Hindoo, with sins to expiate, would doubtless give more, and the fakir would profess to spend it in grain for the monkeys. Here, by the way, we have an explanation of the incorrigibility of monkeys which has not hitherto occurred to ethnographers: they consume all the sins of the pious Hindoos. So they thrive and multiply and gambol allover this town of Simla, its house-tops and shop-fronts, its gardens and its public places, with none to make them afraid. There are two small brown ones sitting on the paling looking at me at this moment, knowing perfectly well that I will never interrupt the flow of my ideas to get up and chase them away.
Of course we try to make Atma responsible, and he declares that he persecutes them without ceasing, but we know better. He claps his hands at them and shouts, “Go, brother!” and that is all he does. And brother goes, to the next convenient branch. We have given Atma catapults and he tells us that he uses them every morning before our honours are awake, but we are certain that he hangs them on a nail. And indeed I do not think monkeys would be very shy of a house defended by mere catapults. Atma, however, has taken this business of Tiglath-Pileser’s fruit trees seriously. He had carefully protected every tree and graft with thorns, but the monkeys slid their hands in underneath, and reached up, and toredown the young shoots with great strips of the tender bark as well. He was angry at last, was Atma, and he asked for a gun.
“You would kill a monkey?” we exclaimed, “you would break your one commandment?” and Atma cast down his eyes.
“They arebudmash,” said he (a wicked and perverse generation), “and they eat the work of we people. Why should they not be killed?”
“No,” said the sahib, “you are a good churchman”—or words to that effect—“I know that you will not kill a monkey.” And we both looked at him piercingly.
“Nevertheless,” said Atma, cheerfully and shamelessly recanting, “it would be well that a gun should be. A gun is a noise-making thing. Thesebundar-people have no shame, but it will appear to them that here a gun is, and they will not come. Also,” he added ferociously, “for that long-tail apple-eating wallah, I will put a stone in the gun.”
He had definite proposals to make about the gun; it had plainly been weighedand considered, not being a matter to be lightly undertaken. It would not be wise for the sahib to buy it in Simla, where the price would be great and the article probably inferior. By our honours’ favour he, Atma, would go to his own village, where apparently they knew a thing or two about guns, and where, since they were all poor men, guns were also cheap, and there select one for our approbation. If our honours’ liking was not, he added, the gun could be sent back, but our honours’ liking would be.
“Where is your village, worthy one?” asked Tiglath-Pileser.
Atma waved his arm across the purple masses on the western horizon. “I will come to it in three days,” he said, and Tiglath-Pileser consented.
“He wants leave,” said the master. “The gun is only a pretext, but it’s as good as a dead grandmother any day. Let him go.”
But punctually on the evening of the tenth day Atma returned from his village shouldering a gun. Pride was in his port and pleasure in his countenance. It was anancient muzzle-loader, respectable, useful, strong, in no way to be compared to a dead grandmother. The sahib gave it the honourable attention which all sahibs have for weapons of character, while Atma stood by and spoke of it as it had been indeed a relative.
“Behold it is a beautiful gun, and it shall bring fear. Now I am but a gardener and know nothing; but my father is a man with understanding of all things, and though there were five guns to be bought in the village, he forbade the other four. My father showed me how the ribs of this were thick and its stomach was clean—is it so, sahib?—and how it would speak well and loudly. But the price is also great. Though my father spoke for three hours, till he was in anger, the price is also great.”
“How much?” asked Tiglath-Pileser.
“It could not be lessened,” said Atma anxiously, “thirteen rupees.”
About seventeen and sixpence!
The gun speaks well and loudly, and the monkeys are much entertained by it. Theymake off at a report with a great jabber of concern, but they have already discovered that it is a mere expression of opinion, with nothing in it to hurt, and they come back when their nerves are soothed to hear it again. They know that you cannot shoot your own relations; they rest with confidence upon the prehistoric tie, and oh, they presume upon it! Too far, perhaps. There is a broad-faced Thibetan in the bazaar, behind whose cheerful grin I am sure no conscience resides at all. Every year he sells me pheasants and partridges which I know he poaches from the Kingdom of Patiala—I am sure he would pot a fellow-poacher for a suitable consideration. When I suggest this, however, Tiglath-Pileser asks me if I like the idea of a hired assassin. I do not like the idea. I would rather do it myself, although even justifiable homicide has never been a favourite amusement of mine.
Shoot a monkey? If it is a mother-monkey, and the baby that clings between her shoulders is a little one, you cannot even throw a stone at her.
I wonder if it is good for us to live among them like this. I wonder whether the constant spectacle of his original, glorious freedom may not produce a tendency to revert to his original habits even in a brass hat. It is a futile speculation, but there is a thrill in it. One would know him of course, by the hat, and the bit of red tape hanging to his collar....
What would you do about it—about this plague, if it plagued you? And does it not mark, like a picture in a book of travels, the distance that lies between us, that I should thus complain to you, not of sparrows or foxes or rats or rabbits or any of the ordinary pests of civilization, but of being overrun—simply overrun—by monkeys!