Chapter VIII
THIS is going to be a day of roses, a grand opening day. They have been getting ready for weeks; every morning there has been a show of pink promises, half kept, white hints and creamy suggestions, and here and there a sweet full-blown advertisement; but so much has been suddenly done that I think the bushes must have sat up all night to enable the garden definitely to make this morning its chief summer announcement—the roses are out. The shelf holds a great many roses, its widest part indeed, where the house stands, is quite taken up by a large bed of them which was meant to be oval, and only is not because no design in this country can ever be described by even an approximately exact term. That is at the side of the house; the drive runs past it. There is another bed, an attempted oblong,between the front door and the precipice by way of being devoted to them, and beside that they have made room for themselves in all the borders where there may or may not be accommodation for other people; and they climb, as well, over every window that looks out into the garden.
It is our privilege to entertain largely among roses; I don’t believe there is another shelf in Simla that holds so many. And I will hasten to say this for them, that in all my social experience they offer the best example of hospitality being its own reward, which, of course, goes without saying; but it is difficult to sit down for the first time in the year before the glory of the roses, and refrain from offering them a politeness of some sort, even one that might be taken for granted. I will add a compliment which is not perhaps quite so lamentably obvious. There are people—moderns, decadents—who will not subscribe to the paramountcy of the rose. They produce other flowers—hyacinths, violets, daffodils—to which they attach the label of their poorpreference. I will not dispute any taste in theory, but I will say this broad, general thing which is evident and plain: once the roses are in bloom, nothing else in the garden matters. The rose may or may not be queen, but when she appears the other flowers dwindle into pretty little creatures of no great pretension who may come out or not at their convenience. You will admit that if there is a rose in sight you do not look at anything else. As to the daffodils, they came up a month ago, and I cut them and put them in the drawing-room and thought no more about it.
So the garden for me this morning means roses (dear me, yes, those Gloire de Dijons alone command it for yards in every direction), and the excitement of it, the pure keen delicious excitement of it, makes me wonder whether a simple life led in a cane chair under a pencil-cedar is not a better background for the minor sensations than the most elaborate existence indoors. But that is another truism; elaboration is always bad, it prevents one’s seeing things. Anexistence obscured by curtains and frescoed with invitations from the Princess would never, I am surely convinced, afford me the exquisite joy and wonder, the sense of expanded miracle, that reigns in me at this moment. I must be allowed to say so, though nothing, I know, is so dull as the detailing of another person’s sensations. It will be admitted that I do not often gush, that is a claim I make with a good conscience; and if I were forbidden to write emotionally about roses this morning I should simply not write at all, which would be a breach of good manners and a loss of time. If the truth were confessed, I have wasted hours already congratulating them upon their happy advent, I have been much led away among them from my fountain pen; idleness is so perfect with a rose. After putting down that stupidity about our hospitality being its own reward, I fell into unnumbered asterisks, raptures in the manner of M. Pierre Loti, and only refrained from making them because one would not gasp too obviously after themaster. And now that I have pulled my chair into the thickest shade of the pencil-cedar—it is little better after all than a spoke to sit under, wheeling with the sun—and am once more prepared to offer you my best attention, down upon me descends Delia, waving a parasol from afar. I must introduce Delia; she is a vagabond and an interruption, but I shall be extremely glad to see her.
I wonder whether anybody has ever felt the temptation of dealing quite honestly with the thousand eyes that listen to him, and putting in the interruptions as well as the other full-stops that occur in the course of a morning’s work in manuscript, saying in brackets exactly where he was compelled to leave off on account of a rose or a Delia. One would then see precisely how far such a one’s flight carried him, and how long, after he had been brought to earth, it took his beating pinions to regain the ether. One might share his irritation at being interrupted, or one might wish him interrupted oftener; it would all depend. At all events it wouldgive the impression of engaging candour, and would evoke—in me, certainly—the deepest sympathy, especially if the interruption were domestic. “Here I was compelled to give orders for dinner.” “At this point a man brought a bill with a cash discount on first presentation—and never again after.” “Just then Thisbe wished to know whether or not she should send my love to Aunt Sophia. I saidnot.” I could weep with an author who put such things in. But instead, for the sake of dignity and smoothness, most of them try to ignore these calamities, like painters who rub a little oil into the edges of yesterday’s work; and go on, stifling their emotions. There is probably a great deal of simple heroism concealed with care in the pages of even a third-class novel.
“Are you writing something clever?” asks Delia. What a demand she makes upon one’s reticence! “Finish it quickly and pick me some roses.” So I finished it quickly, as you see. “I have passed this way several times lately,” she explains, “andhave always resisted the temptation of running in. But this morning something drew me down.”
“They haven’t been properly out before,” I remark. There is no use, after all, in being too obtuse. But I can’t go on juggling with the present tense. Delia is gone now. I shall treat her as a historical fact.
“I hope you remember what a lot you used to send me last year,” she continued, “and how grateful I always was.” I said I remembered. “Yes,” she sighed. “You set yourself a very good example,” and at that I got up and sacrificed to her, with gladness; because if Delia ever suffers cremation the last whiff of her to float sadly away will be her passion for a rose. There are people who might dissolve in suggestion before I would offer up a single petal, which is deplorable in me, for if you want a thing badly enough to hint for it, you must want it very badly indeed. Nevertheless, I think it a detestable habit, worse than punning; and nothing rouses in me a spirit of fiercer, more implacable opposition than a polite, gentle,well-considered hint. Delia, of course, doesn’t hint, she prods, and you accept her elbow with delight, sharing the broad and conscious humour of it.
I am glad Delia dropped in, I want to talk about her; she holds to me so much of the charm of this irresponsible impious little Paradise that we have made for ourselves up here above the clouds and connected by wire with Westminster. A wire is not a very substantial thing, and that, if you leave out Mr. Kipling, is all that attaches us to the rest of the world. If an ill-disposed person, the Mullah Powindah or another, should one day cut it, we might float off anywhere, and be hardly more unrelated to the planet we should lodge upon than we are to our own. The founders of Simla—may they dwell in beatitude for ever—saw their golden chance and took it. Far in and far up they climbed to build it, and not being gods, but only men, they thought well to leave the more obvious forms of misery out of their survey plans. They brought with them many desirablethings, not quite enough, but many; poverty and sorrow and age they left at the bottom of the hill. They barred out greed and ruin by forbidding speculation; they warned off the spectre of decrepitude by the “age limit” which sends you after fifty-five to whiten and perish elsewhere. This is an ordinance that many call divine, for want of a better word, but there ought to be a better word. They made it so expensive that the widow in her black takes the first ship to Balham, and so attractive that the widower promptly marries again. But they also arranged with Death that he should seldom show himself upon the Mall, so nobody has rue to wear, even with a difference. From ten to five we compose Blue Books, at least our husbands do; the rest of the time we gallop about on little country-bred ponies, and vigorously dance, even to fifty-four years, eleven months, and thirty days; and with full hearts and empty heads—and this is the consummation of bliss—congratulate ourselves. There are houses where they play games after dinner. I myself before I becamethe dryadess of a pencil-cedar, have played games after dinner, and felt as innocent and expansive as I did at nine.
Delia draws her breath in all this, and opens a wicked Irish eye upon it—ah, what Delia doesn’t see!—and is to me the gay flower of it, delicately exhaling an essence of Paris. I approve myself of just a suspicion of essence of Paris. We are none of us beasts of the field. I regret to say that she misquotes. Her gloves fit perfectly, and she carries herself like a lily of the field, but she misquotes. It is the single defect upon what she would be annoyed to hear me call a lovely character. I mention it because it is the only one. If there were others, I should allow them to be taken for granted, and protect myself from the suspicion of exaggerated language. That does not look like an absolutely serious statement, but if I am writing nonsense it is entirely the fault of Delia. She is packed with nonsense like a siphon, and if you sit much out-of-doors you become very absorbent. She had been paying calls, and I wasobliged to restore her with vermouth and a biscuit. She was bored and fatigued, and she buried her nose in her roses and closed her eyes expressively. “The ladies of India,” she remarked, “are curiously alike. Is it our mode of thought? Is it because we have the same kind of husbands?”
“Some are much better than others,” I interrupted.
“I saw eleven of us,” she went on with depression, “one after the other, this morning. I couldn’t help thinking of articles on a counter marked ‘all this size five and elevenpence-ha’penny.’”
“Never mind, Delia,” said I, “you are not at all alike.”
“Oh, and nobody,” she hastened to apologize, “could be less alike thanyou.”
“And yet we are quite different,” I replied; and Delia, with a glance of reproach and scorn and laughter said, “You jackass!”
Now in anybody else’s mouth this term would be almost opprobrious, but from Delia’s it drops affectionately. It is anacknowledgment, a compliment, it helps to lighten the morning. It is not everybody who could call one a jackass with impunity, but it is not everybody who would think of doing it. I should not wish the epithet to become the fashion, but when Delia offers it I roll it under my tongue.
“I am convinced,” said I, “that there is nothing in the world so valuable as personality. I mean, of course, to other people. As you justly remark, Delia, we are round pebbles on this coral strand, worn smooth by rubbing against nothing but each other. It is an obscure and little regarded form of the great Imperial sacrifice, but I wish somebody would call attention to it in theDaily Mailand wring a tear from the British public. You have still a slight unevenness of surface, my Delia, and that is why I love you. If you had a good sharp corner or two, I should never let you out of my sight.”
“And to think,” said Delia, finely, “how little, in England, they prize and value their precious angular old maids!”
“Oh, in England,” I replied, “I think they are almost too much blessed. There is such a thing as tranquillity and repose. You don’t want the personal equation at every meal. In England, especially in the academic parts, you can’t see the wood for the trees.”
“And in America,” observed Delia, “I suppose it must be worse.”
“Not at all,” I said out of my experience, “in America there is as yet great uniformity of peculiarity,” but this was going very far afield on a warm day, and we left the matter there.
“I don’t think I like individuality in young men,” remarked Delia, thoughtfully, “In young men it seems a liberty, almost an impertinence.”
I can imagine the normal attitude of young men toward Delia being quite satisfying, but I let her go on.
“I have just met an A.D.C. riding up the Mall smoking a pipe,” she continued. “He took off his hat to me like a bandit.” Now Simla’s traditions of behaviour are very strict and the choicest of them arelocked up in thetenueof an aide-de-camp. “It was quite a shock,” said Delia.
“All things are possible in nature, but some are rare,” I told her. “It is doubtless a remote effect of all this Irregular Horse in South Africa. You may live to boast that you have seen an aide-de-camp ride up the Mall at Simla smoking a common clay.”
“It wasn’t a common clay,” she corrected me.
“But it will be when you boast of it,” I assured her. “Come and see my home for decayed gentlewomen.”
“Whatdoyou mean?” she cried, and would have buffeted me; but I led her with circumstance to the edge of the shelf, over which appeared lower down on the khud-side, another small projection which tried to be a shelf and couldn’t, but was still flat enough for purposes. There were sitting, in respectable retirement, all the venerable roses that had outlived delight, the common kinds and those that had grown little worth in the service of the summer.
“They had to come out,” I explained, “and I couldn’t find it in my heart to throw them on the ash-heap.”
“With all their modest roots exposed,” put in Delia. “Cruel it would have been.”
“So I planted them down there, and I see that they’re not altogether neglected. They get an allowance of four buckets of water a day and a weeding once a fortnight,” I explained further, “but what I fancy they must feel most is that nobody ever picks them. I can’t get down to do that.”
“I’m sure they look most comfortable,” Delia assured me. “What do they care about being picked? You lose that vanity very early”—oh, Delia!—“What they really enjoy is to sit in the sun and talk about their gout. But I know what you mean about throwing away a flower”—and Delia’s eyes grew more charming with the sentiment behind them. “Somebody gave me a sweet-pea yesterday and the poor little thing faded on me, as we say in Ireland, and of course I ought to have thrown it away,but I couldn’t. What do you think I did with it?” She looked half ashamed.
“What?”
“I put it in my pocket!” said this dear Delia.