Chapter XVII
WE have arrived at September and the rains are “breaking.” For two months and a half they have trampled upon us steadily, armies on the march; now they come in scattered battalions and make off as if pursued. The attack, too, is as erratic; it will hammer hard upon the kitchen while not a drop falls on the verandah, or a great slant will sweep down the nearest valley while we look on in dry security from the shelf. Here in the garden a wall of mist will often surround me, with the sun shining brightly inside; it turns the shelf into a room, and makes one think of the impalpable barrier of one’s environment, possible to break in any direction but never broken, always there, the bound of one’s horizon and the limit of one’s activities. I wonder if Tiglath-Pileser will call that far-fetched.
Thin, ragged, white clouds sail over the rose-bushes, just low enough to touch the fresh red shoots, which are now as lovely to look at, all in new curling leaf, as ever they can be in full rose time. That of course is written when there are no roses here to contradict me. There is one red-brown tone that one never sees except on a new leafing rose-bush and in the eyes of some animals, and there is a purple which is mixed nowhere else at all. And it all shines—how it shines!—under the soft cloud fringes, and when by accident a full-hearted deep-pink rose comes and sits alone among these young twigs and sprays the sight gives that strange ache of pleasure that hints how difficult perpetual ecstasy would be to bear. The rose-bed sleeps in the rains, but it sleeps with one eye open; I seldom look in vain for at least one flower. Now it is full of buds; the rose of yesterday is only waiting for to-morrow. Maréchal Niels have waited in a different way; they have not put out new roses but they have clung obstinately to the old ones. “At once the silken tassel of my purse tear, and itstreasure on the garden throw” is no part of the Maréchal Niels’ philosophy. It hangs a heavy head and clings to every petal, reluctantly giving up day by day a moiety of its sweetness and lasting so unwarrantably long that in sheer indignation I frequently cut off its head. The garden rejoices wildly now, all the rains-flowers are gayer than ever, and daily confess to the sun that they never really pretended to do without him. A new lease of vitality has sprung up everywhere; even the poor sticks that Atma has propped up the dahlias with, have forgotten that they have been cut off untimely and are trying to bud. There is sadness in this and I will not consider it.
The crows are moved to speak in all sorts of strange languages, including a good deal of English. One took his seat on the very swaying top of a deodar this morning and distinctly ejaculated “OhBother! OhBother! OhBother!” with a guttural throaty emphasis that excited me at last to an unfriendly stone; whereat he went from bad to worse and cursed me. The crowthat superintends the East is a strange bird, never happy, seldom in a good humour. He declaims, he soliloquizes, he frequently flies off and says “I’ll enquire;” but his principal note is that of simple derision and he plainly finds humbug in everything. He has no period of tender innocence; some crows are older than others but nobody has ever seen a young crow. There is nothing like him in England; the rooks make as much noise perhaps, but only for a little while in the evening; the crow’s comment upon life is perpetual. Remote, across a valley, it is a kind of fantastic chorus to the reckless course of men; overhead it is a criticism of the most impertinent and espionage without warrant. These, of course, are only country crows; in the cities, like other bad characters, they take greater liberties, becoming more objectionable by sophistication.
The butterflies have come back as if by appointment; one big blue and black fellow is carrying on a violent flirtation with a fuchsia under my very nose. She hasn’t much honey, and he, according to Tiglath-Pileserhas hardly anything to extract it with. I fear, in the cynicism of our contemporary Gauls,il perd terriblement son temps, but it seems to amuse them both, and why comment more severely upon the charming fooling of affinities? The butterflies alight so differently now upon the gravel drive, which is still glistening wet; they pause there on lightest tiptoe with waving wings; a butterfly hates cold feet. The bees are as busy and as cheery as ever; I have wasted the last ten minutes in watching a bumblebee, with the most persuasive hum, sucking the last of their sweetness out of the corn-bottles. The bee clings and the flower drops over; the old pretty garden idyll never loses its power to please. Dear me, if it would always rain and be unattractive I might get something done; as it is.... That was rather a sharp shower, and I noticed that the hawk-moth courting the salvias, braved it through. One would have thought that the big drops would have reduced him to a tiny ball of wet fluff in two minutes, but he has gone on dartingfrom flower to flower quite indifferent. Last night a hawk-moth dined with us, on the dahlias in the middle of the table. He thought it a charming sunny day under the lamps, and enjoyed himself enormously, only leaving with the ladies as he objected to tobacco. We should be delighted to see him again.
A morning ride, I am glad to say, is not considered an adventure into the world, and morning rides are again possible without the risk of a drenching. I have left Pat and Arabi in the seclusion of their stables all this time, but for no fault, as we should say if we were selling them. Horses, I fear I am of those who fondly think, were created first in a mood of pure pleasure, and a careful Providence then made men to look after them. I should not like to tell Thisbe this; she takes the orthodox view about the succession of beasts and it might make her consider one unsound; but I do not mind saying it in print where it is likely to do less harm. Besides, my friend the Bengal Lancer entirely agrees with me, and thatis what one might call a professional opinion. Pat and Arabi came walking in on the shelf one spring morning a year and a half ago, very meek and sorry for themselves, having climbed up every one of fifty-eight miles and seven thousand feet on very little, probably, but hay. They came out of a kicking, squealing herd in the Rawalpindi fair, where Tiglath-Pileser bought them on a day with their full respective equipment of hill-ropes, a ragged blanket, a tin bucket and a valet for less than twenty pounds apiece. The price seems low when you consider that Arabi’s papa was a Persian of pedigree and Pat’s an English thoroughbred. It is due to certain liberal provisions of an all-wise Government which nobody is compelled to discuss except the officials of the Remount Department. It will be enough to say that we do not boast of their connections on the maternal side, and painfully try to subdue all characteristics which seem to hark back that way. Their siring is by dirty scrip established, but in this country it is a wise foal that knows hisown mother. Arabi has a pink streak on his nose which was plainly one of his mother’s charms, but this, as I cannot see it when I am on his back, troubles me less than his four white stockings and hoofs to match, which were also bequeathed to him by her. But his glossy coat and the arch of his neck and his paces he inherits from his more distinguished parent, after whom also we have had the weakness to name him. I don’t like to think of Arabi’s tie with the country; she probably went in an ekka[4]with a string of blue beads across her forehead; but Pat’s mother’s family was pure tribal Waziri, which means that with the manners and make of your English sire you come into the world with the wiry alertness your maternal grandfather learned in getting round lofty mountain corners in a hurry, and a way of lifting your feet in trotting over stony country that is pretty to see, and a pride in your dark grey coat and iron muscles that there is no need to conceal either. Of course you may also inherit theWaziri irritability of temperament. Pat, in a moment of annoyance, one day early last season, cow-kicked the Head of the Army Veterinary Department, but that was before he had been long enough in Simla to know who people were. He would not dream of doing such a thing now; at least he might dream of it, but that is all. He is a noble animal and he has his ambitions. I sometimes think they are directed against the pair of fat Australian cobs that draw the carriage of the Commander-in-Chief. Waziris of all classes dislike the Commander-in-Chief; and Pat may very well have a blood feud on his hoofs to avenge.
Pat is the prouder, the more daring animal of the two; Arabi merely champs and pretends to bite his groom to show that he too is of noble blood. Pat will take the lead past a perambulator any day and will only slightly consider a length of unexpected drain pipe along the road. But even Pat has his objects of suspicion, and chief among them is a man, any man on foot in black clothes. At such a person he will alwaysshy violently. This is a cause of great inconvenience and embarrassment to us. There is one perfectly inoffensive gentleman, rather stout, who beams upon the world through his spectacles with unvarying amiability, whose perfectly respectable occupation no doubt compels him to wear black, and whom it is our misfortune constantly to meet. Neither soft words nor smiting will induce Pat to pass this person without a wild affrighted curve away from him. The first time he smiled; the second time he looked mildly surprised; the third time he mantled with indignation, and now he always mantles. It has gone, I assure you, quite beyond a joke. And we, what canwedo? You cannot apologize for a thing like that. One’s usual course when a pony shies is to take him up to the object and let him sniff it so that he will know better the next time, but how ask an elderly, self-respecting gentleman to allow himself to be sniffed in that way? This morning I saw the object coming, and had an inspiration. “Let us turn round,” said I to Tiglath-Pileser,“and let him passus.” So we turned and waited, with the air of expecting some one from the opposite direction. The man in black came nervously on and Tiglath-Pileser laid a reassuring hand on Pat’s neck. Would you believe it, Pat stood like an angel, andthe man in black shied! Shied badly. And went on looking more furious than ever. We daily expect to have some kind of writ served on us, and do not at all know what steps we should take.
The ponies went excitedly this morning, as they always do after a storm like the one we had last night. “Ridiculous animal,” said I to Arabi as he paused to look askance at a small boulder that had slipped down the khud. “This is the same old road you travelled many yesterdays and will travel many to-morrows. Foolish beast, of what are you afraid?” Tiglath-Pileser reproved me. “To us,” said he, “it is the same old road, but to a really observant person like Arabi it presents fifty significant changes. He in his stable listened to the rain last night with emotions quite different fromyours in your bed. To him it meant that the young grass was everywhere springing and the turf everywhere softening under foot, and no doubt he reflected once more upon the insoluble problem presented by heel-ropes and your meals in a trough. This morning his experienced eye discovers all he expected and more,—puddles, channels, and other suspicious circumstances. That stone was not there yesterday, no doubt a wild beast had unearthed it and was sitting behind it as we passed, waiting for just such a breakfast as Arabi knows he comprises. That the wild beast didn’t happen to be there on this occasion was great luck for Arabi and you can see he is relieved.”
“Well,” said I, unsympathetic, “I think a good deal of it is nonsense all the same,” and as we approached the next lurking lion I gave Arabi a sound cuff that drew off his attention and he cantered past it without a word.
The familiar road wound round our own hill, the Roy-Regent’s hill crowned with his castle, and Summer Hill. It would beentertaining to be as observant as Arabi and find wonders round every curve; we come far short of that and sometimes confess the great book of nature before us a little dull for lack of the writing of man. It is possible that mountains may suggest mere altitude, especially mountains like the Himalayas, wall behind wall, waves transfixed in long unbroken lines against the sky; one cannot always feel a passion of admiration for mere matter at an inconvenient level. But their new mood of the rains makes them beautiful, almost interesting. The mist rises among them and turns them cleverly into the peaks and masses they ought to be, and a slope flashes in the brilliant sun and a ravine sinks in the purple shade, and the barest shoulder is cloaked in green velvet. “They would give a good deal to seethatfrom the Row,” I say boastfully, and Tiglath-Pileser responds “Yes indeed,” and we both look at it as if we were the proprietors, momentarily almost inclined to admit it as a compensation.
The jungle triumphs in the rains; itoverwhelms the place. Even on the shelf it is hard enough to cope with, creeping up, licking and lipping the garden through the paling; but out upon the public khud-sides it is unchecked and insatiable. We hate the jungle; it is so patient and designing and unremitting, so much stronger than we are. Such constant war we have to make upon it merely to prevent it from swallowing us alive. It will plant a toadstool in your bedroom and a tree in your roof; it shrinks from nothing. That is why we hear newcomers from tidy England in rapture upon the glorious freedom of the wilderness with grim displeasure; and point to the crooked squares of our pathetic little estates, painfully redeemed and set smugly about with posies, saying “Admirethat!” And it is so demoralizing, the jungle. The oak, for instance, at home, is a venerable person we all respect and some of us used to worship. Here he is a disreputable old Bacchus with an untrimmed beard and ferns sticking to his branches. Certain English flowers even, alas that I should say it! have left the paths ofpropriety and taken permanently to unregulated living. The dahlia has never repented, and the tiger-lilies brazen it out, but the little blue face of a convolvulus I met this morning, strayed away in the company of a snake-plant and a young rhododendron, said with wistful plainness, “I was a virtuous flower once!”
Everything is still very damp, and in the shade very chill, and we were glad enough to escape the cloud that suddenly sobered the highway just as we turned in upon the shelf. A figure moved along the road in the greyness, came closer, making automatic movements of head and hands, passed us—a coolie eating a cucumber. It was a long and thick cucumber, and he was eating the rind and the seeds, everything. It seemed a cold, unsuitable, injudicious thing for even a coolie to eat in the rain. We hoped it was vicious indulgence, but we feared it was his breakfast.