Chapter XII
TO-DAY I think India, down below there on the other side of the hill, must be at its hottest. A white dust haze hangs over the plains, but we know what is going on under it; nearly all of us have gasped through June more than once in those regions. It is the time when you take medical advice before committing yourself to a railway journey, even with the provision of a cracked-ice pillow,—the favourite time to step out of the train and die of cholera in the waiting room. It is also the very special time for the British private soldier to go out in anger and kick with his foot the punkah-wallah who has fallen asleep with the slack rope in his hand, so that the punkah-wallah, in whom is concealed unknown to the private soldier an enlarged spleen, immediately dies. There is then trouble andhigh-talking, because of the people who consider that the death of a punkah-wallah demands the life of a private soldier who only meant to admonish him, a contention which cannot be judged without a knowledge of the relative values concerned, and an experience of the temperature in which the rash and negligent act was committed. There is reason in the superstition which associates great heat with the devil. Operating alone, it can do almost as much as he can.
The dust haze from the plains hangs all about us, obscuring even the near ranges, impalpable but curiously solid. It has a flavour which it is impossible not to taste if ever one breathes through the mouth, and hour by hour it silently gathers upon the furniture. It has been like this for a week, pressing round us at a measured distance, which just enables us to see our own houses and gardens. Within that space, the sunlight and every circumstance as usual. It is a little like living under a ground-glass bell. Do not choose the present time of year to come to see Simla. You would have tomake a house-to-house visitation, and piece it together from memory.
Even here, in the garden, much too hot the eye of heaven shines. I have abandoned the pencil-cedar, and taken refuge under a trellis covered with a banksia rose, which is thicker, and I have added to my defences a pith hat and an umbrella. Notwithstanding these precautions, we all gasp together to-day in the garden; and I am inclined to agree with the mignonette, which is not as a rule talkative, that this is no longer the summer—exquisite word—that we expect in Simla, but the odious “hot weather” which comes instead in the country down below. The mignonette, by the way, stands to my discernment, immediately under the pencil-cedar. When I sowed it there in the spring, Tiglath-Pileser said, “It will never do anything under a conifer.” When it began to show, he said again, “It may come up, but it will never do anything. Nothing ever does anything under a conifer.” Atma was not of this advice. “Come up?” he said, looking at it sternly, “wherefore should itnot come up, if your honour wishes it?” Atma always takes this view; he seems to suppose that the flowers, like himself, are above all things anxious to please, and if any of them fail in their duty, he implies, with indignation, that he will know the reason why. But his opinion is too constant, and I did not trust it about the mignonette. I insisted, instead, that every morning the fallen cedar spines should be picked out of it, and the earth freshly stirred about the roots; and I have a better patch of mignonette under my conifer than can be produced anywhere else in the garden. I am sure that the shade of a conifer is no less beneficial than any other kind of shade, except that there is never enough of it; nor can I accept the theory that there is anything poisonous in the spines. They only pack and only lie very closely together, never blown about like leaves, and so keep away the air and light, and if you happen to have the use of twenty or thirty brown fingers to pick them out, there is no reason why you cannot produce quantities of thingsbeside mignonette under a conifer. Do anything? I do not know a more able-bodied or hard-working flower on the shelf.
A thing like that offers one for some time afterwards a valuable handle in arguments.
However you do it, there is no more delicious experience in life than to put something beautiful where nothing was before, I mean in any suitable empty space. I have done it; I have had the consummation of this pleasure for a fortnight. There was no goldenrod in Simla till I went to America and got it. I make the lofty statement with confidence, but subject to correction. Some one may have thought of it long ago, and may be able to confront me with finer plumes than mine. If this should be so, I shall accept it with reluctance and mortification, and hereby promise to go and admire the other person’s, which is the most anybody can do; but my pride does not expect such a fall.
It is the Queen’s goldenrod, not the President’s, though he has a great deal of it and makes, I think, rather more fussabout it. A field flower of generous mind, it ignores the political line, and I gathered the seed one splendid autumn afternoon in Canada; so here on the shelf it may claim its humble part in the Imperial idea. A friend of my youth lent herself to the project; she took me in her father’s buggy, and as we went along the country roads I saw again in the light of a long absence, the quiet of the fields and the broad pebbled stretches of the river, and the bronze and purple of the untrimmed woods that had always been for me the margin of the thought of home. The quiet of after-harvest held it all, nothing was about but a chipmunk that ran along the top of a fence; you could count the apples in the orchards among their scanty leaves; it was time to talk and to remember. And so, not by anything unusual that we did or said, but by the rare and beautiful correspondence that is sometimes to be felt between the sentiment of the hour and the hour itself, this afternoon took its place in the dateless calendar of the heart which is so much morevaluable a reference than any other. What a delight it is when old forgotten things construct themselves again and the years gather into an afternoon! And is there any such curious instance of real usefulness for hidden treasure in the attic?
We found masses of goldenrod, all dry and scattering, principally along the railway embankment, which we took for a good omen that it would be a travelling flower; and in the fulness of time it was given to Atma with instructions. His excitement was even greater than mine, he nursed it tenderly, but it needed no nursing. It came up in thousands delighted with itself and the new climate, overrunning its boxes so that Atma pointed to it like a proud father. Then we planted it out along the paling behind the coreopsis, and it immediately—that is to say in three months’ time—grew to be five feet high, with the most thick and lovely yellow sprays, which have been waving there against the fir-trees, as I said before, for the last fortnight. It has quite lost the way to its proper season; athome it blossoms in September and this is only June,—but it appears to be rather the better than the worse for that, though it does seem to look about, as the Princess said when I sent her some, for the red sumach which is its friend and companion at home. It is itself like a little fir-tree with flat spreading branches of blossom, especially when it stands in groups as they do, and the sun slants upon it giving the sprays an edge of brighter gold so that it is the most luminous thing in the garden. And the warm scent of it, holding something so far beyond itself and India, something essential, impregnated with the solace that one’s youth and its affections are not lost, but only on the other side of the world!
Another delightful thing about the goldenrod is the way the bees and butterflies instantly found it out. The sprays are dotted with them all day long, swaying and dipping with the weight of the little greedy bodies; their hum of content stands in the air with the warm and comfortable scent. “This is good fare” they seem tosay. “There are some things they make better in America.” I had never before done anything for a bee or a butterfly, it is not really so easy, and I would not have believed there was such pleasure in it. “Le fleur qui vole”—is not that charming of M. Bourget?
I suppose it argues a very empty plane of life, but these little creatures have an immense power of entertaining a person who spends day after day in the theatre of their activities. I am reminded that here in India one ought to have marvellous tales to tell of them, only Simla is not really India, but a little bit of England with an Adirondack climate and the “insect belt” of Central Asia; and things are not so wonderful here as you would think to look at us on the map. Scorpions and centipedes do come up from the plains and live in the cracks of the wall whence they crawl out to be despatched when the first fires are lighted, but they have not the venom of those below. Scorpions Atma will take hold of by the poison bags at the end of their tails, andhold up in the air dangling and waving their arms; and nobody even screams at a centipede. Millipedes which look much more ferocious but are really quite harmless often run like little express trains across your bath-room walls, and very large, black, garden spiders also come there to enjoy the damp. They enjoy the damp, but what they really like is to get into the muslin curtain over the window and curl up and die. The first time I saw one of them in the folds of the curtain I thought it would be more comfortable in the garden and approached it with caution and a towel, to put it out. Then I perceived from its behaviour—it did not try to run away, but just drew its legs a little closer under it, as you or I would do if we absolutely didn’t care what happened so long as we were left in peace—that it had come there on purpose, being aware of its approaching end. I decided that the last moments of even a spider should be respected, but every day I shook the curtain and he drew his legs together a little more feebly than the day before,until at last he dropped out, the shell of a spider, comfortably and completely dead. I admired his expiring, it was business-like and methodical, the thing he had next to do, and he was so intent upon it, not in any way to be disturbed or distracted, asking no question of the purposes of nature, simply carrying them out. One might moralize.
Talking of spiders I have just seen a fly catch one. It was, of course, an ichneumon fly. One has many times heard of his habit of pouncing upon his racial enemy, puncturing and paralyzing him and finally carrying him off, walling him up and laying an egg in him, out of which comes a young ichneumon to feed upon his helpless vitals; but one does not often see the tragedy in the air. He held his fat prey quite firmly in his merciless jaws and he went withentrain, the villain! The victim spider and the assassin fly! One might moralize again.
It is hotter than ever, and the sunlight under the ground-glass bell has a factitious look, as if we had here a comedy with a scene of summer. A hawk-moth darts likea hummingbird in and out of the honeysuckle, and a very fine rose-chafer all in green and gold paces across this paragraph. I believe there are more rose-chafers this year than there ought to be, and Atma has a heavy bill against them in every stage of their existence, but they are such attractive depredators. When I find one making himself comfortable in the heart of a La France, I know very well that on account of the white grub he was once and the many white grubs he will be again I ought to kill him and think no more about it; but one hesitates to send a creature out of the world who exercises such good taste when he is in it. I know it is quite too foolish to write, but the extent of my vengeance upon such a one is only to put him into a common rose.
The birds are silent; the butterflies bask on the gravel like little ships with big sails. Even the lizards have sought temporary retirement between the flower-pots. I am the only person who is denied her natural shelter and compelled to resort to anumbrella. Tiglath-Pileser said the other day that he thought it was quite time I made some acknowledgment of the good it was doing me. Itisdoing me good—of course. But what strikes me most about it is the wonderful patience and fortitude people can display in having good done to them.