Chapter XI
IF you choose to live on the top of one of the Himalayas there are some things you must particularly pay for. One of them is earth. Your mountain, if it is to be depended upon, is mostly made of rock and I have already mentioned how radically it slopes. So a garden is not at all a thing to be taken for granted. Sometimes you have a garden and sometimes only a shaly ledge, or you may have a garden to-day which to-morrow has slid down the hill and superimposed itself upon your neighbour below. That occurs in the rains; it is called a “slip.” It has never been our experience because the shelf is fairly flat; but it has happened to plenty of people. I suppose such a garden is recoverable, if you are willing to take the trouble, but it could never be quite the same thing. The most permanent plot, however, requires allkinds of attention, and one of the difficulties is to keep it up to its own level. Queer sinkings and fallings away are always taking place in the borders. Atma professes to find them quite reasonable; he says the flowers eat the earth and of course it disappears. The more scientific explanation appears to me to be that the gnomes of the mountain who live inside, have been effecting repairs, and naturally the top falls in. It may be said that gnomes are not as a rule so provident; but very little has yet been established about the Himalayan kind; they might be anything; they probably are.
This whole morning Atma and I have been patching the garden. At home when you buy a piece of land you expect that enough earth will go with it for ordinary purposes, but here you buy the land first and the earth afterwards, as you want it, in basketfuls. There is plenty in the jungle, beautiful leaf-mould, but it is against the law to collect it there for various reasons, all of them excellent and tiresome; you must buy it instead from the Town Council, andit costs fourpence a basket. Tiglath-Pileser says it is the smallest investment in land he ever heard of, but it takes a great many baskets, and when the bill comes in I shall be glad to know if he is still of that opinion. Meanwhile coolie after coolie dumps his load and I have heard of no process that more literally improves the property. You will imagine whether, when anything is pulled up, we do not shake the roots.
How far a sharp contrast will carry the mind! I never shake a root in these our limited conditions without thinking of the long loamy stretches of the Canadian woods where there was leaf-mould enough for a continent of gardens, and of the plank “sidewalk” that half-heartedly wandered out to them from the centre of what was a country town in my day, adorned perhaps at some remote and unfenced corner by a small grocery shop where hickory nuts in a half-pint measure were exposed for sale in the window. I am no longer passionately addicted to hickory nuts—you got the meat out with infinite difficulty and a pin,and if it was obstinate you sucked it—but nothing else, except perhaps the smell in the cars of the train-boy’s oranges, will ever typify to me so completely the liberal and stimulating opportunities of a new country. The town when I was there last had grown into a prosperous city, and there were no hickory nuts in its principal stores, but at the furthest point of a suburban sidewalk I found the little grocery still tempting the school children of the neighbourhood with this unsophisticated product and the half-pint measure in the window. I resisted the temptation to buy any, but I stood and looked so long that the proprietress came curious to the door. And along that sidewalk you might have taken a ton of leaf-mould before anybody made it his business to stop you.
We must acknowledge our compensations. Over there they certainly get their leaf-mould cheaper than fourpence a basket, but they have nobody to make things grow in it under a dollar a day. Here Atma, the invaluable Atma, labours for ten rupees a month—about fourteen shillings—andcooks his own meal cakes. The man who works for a dollar a day does it in the earnest hope, if we are to believe his later biographer, of a place in ward politics and the easier situation of a local boss. It would be hard to infect Atma with such vulgar ambitions. He is so lately from the hands of his Creator that he has not even yet conceived the idea of accumulation. The other day I told him that he might take a quantity of seed and surplus plants, and sell them, and he would not. “I, how shall I sell?” he said, “I am a gardener. This thing is done by Johnson-sahib,” and he looked at me with amusement. I called him by a foolish name and told him that he should surely sell, and get money; but he shook his head still smiling. “By your honour’s favour,” he said, “month by month I find ten rupees. From this there is food twice a day and clothes, and two or three rupees to go by the hand of an old man who comes from my people. It is enough. What more?” I mentioned the future. “Old?” he cried, “God knows if I will beold. At this time I am a work-doing wallah. When I am old and your honours are gone toBelaat,[2]I also will go, and live with my people.”
“And they will, without doubt, give you food and clothes?” I asked.
“According as there is,” he said, “without doubt they will give it,” and went on with his work.
Here, if you like, was a person of short views and unvexed philosophy. A lecture upon the importance of copper coins trembled on my lips, but I held it back. A base aim is a poor exchange for a lesson in content, and I held it back, wondering whether my servant might not be better off than I, in all that he could do without.
Alas for the poor people who have to pay at the rate of a dollar a day and mind their own business into the bargain! Never can they know one of the greatest pleasures of life, to be served by a serving people. There is a spark of patriarchal joy, long extinct west of Suez, in the simple old interpretationwhich still holds here, of the relation of master and servant, scolding and praise, favour and wrath; a lifelong wage and occasionally a little medicine are still the portion of the servant-folk, accepted as a matter of course, and “Thou wilt not hear orders?” ever a serious reproach. To all of us Outlanders of the East, it is one of the consolations of exile, and to some of us a keen and constant pleasure to be the centre and source of prosperity for these others, a simple, graphic, pressing opportunity to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. I, personally, like them for themselves—who could help liking Atma?—and of persons to whom they do not at all appeal I have my own opinion. It is the difference of race, no doubt, which makes this relation possible and enjoyable, the difference, and what we are accustomed to consider the superiority, of ours. At home all generous minds are somewhat tormented by a sense of the unfairness of the menial brand, and in the attitude of the menial mind there is nothing to modify that impression.
Servants in this place are regarded as luxuries, and taxed. So much you pay per capita, and whether the capita belongs to a body entirely in your employment, or to one which only serves you in common with several other people, it doesn’t matter; all the same you pay. Delia and I share a dhurjee, or sewing man, for example, and we are both chargeable for him. This I never could reconcile with my sense of justice and of arithmetic,—that the poll-tax of a whole man should be paid on half a tailor; but there is no satisfaction to be got out of Tiglath-Pileser. Some people have more respect for the law than it really deserves. I had the pleasure, however, of bringing him to a sense of his responsibilities when the tax-paper came in, from which he learned that no less than fifteen heads of families looked to him to be their providence. Under the weight of this communication he turned quite pale, and sat down hastily upon the nearest self-sustaining object, which happened to be the fender. But as a matter of fact he liked the idea. Every Englishmandoes, and this is why a certain measure of success attends not only his domestic but his general experiments in governing the East. He loves the service of an idea, and nothing flatters him so truly as his conception of all that he has to do.
The ear sharpens if its owner lives in the garden. It is no longer muffled by the four walls of a house, and remote sounds visit it, bringing with them a meaning which somehow they never have indoors, even when they penetrate there. Up here they principally make one aware of the silence, which is such a valuable function of sounds. I should like to write a chapter about the quiet of Simla, but of course if one began like that one would never finish. It is our vast solace, our great advantage; we live without noise. The great ranges forbid it; the only thing they will listen to is a salute from the big gun, and they pass that from one to another, uncertain that is not an insult. And the quenching comment in the silence that follows!
It is tremendous, invincible, taken up andrewritten in the lines of all the hills. It stands always before our little colony, with a solemn finger up, so that a cheer from the cricket ground is a pathetic thing, and the sound of the Roy-Regent’s carriage wheels awakens memories of Piccadilly. We are far withdrawn and very high up, fifty-six miles down to the level, and then it is only empty India—and the stillness lies upon us and about us and up and down the khuds, almost palpable and so morne, but with the sweetest melancholy. Consider, you of London and New York, what it must be to live on one mountain-side and hear a crow caw across the valley, on the other. Of course we are a Secretariat people; we have no factory whistles.
This afternoon, however, I hear an unlicensed sound. It is the sound of an infant giving tongue, and it comes from the quarters. Now there ought not to be a baby in the quarters; it is against all orders. No form of domestic ménage is permitted there; the place is supposed to be a monastery, and the servants to house their women-folk elsewhere.The sound is as persistent as it is unwarrantable; it is not only a breach of custom, but displeasing. How am I to reckon with it? I may send for Dumboo and complain. In that case the noise will cease at once; they will give opium to the child, which will injure its digestion, and in the future, as a grown-up person, it will enjoy life less because I could not put up with its crying as an infant. I can report the matter to Tiglath-Pileser, which would mean an end to the baby, not illegally, by banishment. But is it so easy? One approves, of course, of all measures to discourage them about the premises, but when in spite of rules and regulations a baby has found its way in, and is already lamenting its worldly prospects at the top of its voice, in honest confidence that at least the roof over its head will be permanent, a complication arises. I cannot dislodge such a one. Better deafness and complicity.
Far down the khud-side an Imperial bugle. Abroad the spaces the mountains stand in, and purple valleys deepening.Among the deodars a whisper, not of scandal, believe me. A mere announcement that the day is done. On the other side of the hill a pony trotting, farther and fainter receding, but at the farthest and faintest it is plain that he goes short in front. From the bazaar a temple bell, with the tongue of an alien religion....