Chapter XVIII
WE have entered upon the period of our great glory and content; it is second summer in these hills, with just a crisp hint of autumn coming. There is nothing left of the rains but their benediction; all day long the sun draws the scent out of the deodars and makes false promises to the garden, where they believe it is spring. The field-daisies and the hollyhocks and the mignonette are all in second bloom and the broom down the khud has kindled up again. The person who is really puzzled is the lilac. We have a lilac bush. I assure you it is not everybody who can say so in the town of Simla; the lilac is most capricious about where she will stay and where she won’t stay. We have only one; all her children either die young or grow up dwarfs. However, after blooming in the most delicious and heartbreaking mannerin April, fainting through June and going quite distracted in the rains, the lilac now finds new sap in her veins and the temptation assails her to flower regardless of the calendar. Yet she doesn’t, poor dear, quite know how; something is lacking to the consummation of April, and the fictitious joy she grasps at comes out in ragged little bunches that stick straight up at the end of the wood of the topmost branches. Nevertheless it is pure lilac, enough for a button-hole, and matter to boast of, lilac in October.
For all these reasons I was perfectly happy this morning until twenty minutes past ten o’clock. Atma and I had been transplanting some cactus dahlias to fill up an empty place. It is a liberty I wouldn’t have taken at this time of year, but Atma says that he can deceive the dahlias. “By giving much water,” he explains, “they will take no notice,” and he has been craftily setting them down in little ponds. I had a dispute with him about a plant, which he declared was a lily. To settle the matter, as soon as my back was turned, he dug it up,and triumphantly sought me. “Behold,” said he, “it has an onion.” He was distressed to contradict me, but behold ithadan onion. The connection between an onion and a lily was simpler perhaps to Atma than it would be to many people; but I conceded it. Then came a pedlar of apples from a neighbouring garden. We shall have apples of our own in time, but our neighbour down the khud thought of it three or four years before we did, and there is no particular reason to wait. Our neighbour’s sturdy retailer squatted discouraged on his haunches before me. His brown muscles stood out in cords on his arms and legs, his face was anxious and simple like a child’s. “If your honour will listen,” said he, “half over Simla I have carried this burden of apples, and it is no lighter. My words are good and I go always to the verandah, but the sahib-folk will not buy.”
“And is that,” said I, eyeing the fruit, “a strange thing, worthy one?”
He picked up an apple and held it disparagingly, at arm’s-length, in front of him.“Certainly they are going rotten,” said he simply. “And the more they rot the louder is the anger of the mistress when I carry them back. Your honour will listen—if apples rot is it the fault of the servant? No,” he answered himself with solid conviction, “it is the fault of God.”
He sat in the sun content—content to sit and talk of his grievance with his load on the ground. I smiled at his dilemma, and he smiled back; but gravity quickly overtook him, it was a serious matter.
“Seven days ago, when they were sound,” he went on, “the gardener himself took them and sold many. Now he gives me the command, and because I do not sell there is talk of a donkey.”
“Truly you are no donkey, worthy one,” said I soothingly. “All the donkeys are employed by the washermen to carry home the clothes. You are a large, fine, useful Pahari. What is the price of the apples? Some of them are good.”
“It is true talk that the mistress said ten annas a seer,” he replied eagerly, “but ifyour honour wishes to pay eight annas I will say that your honour, seeing the rottenness, would give no more.”
I would not profit by the rottenness since it did not concern me, so he picked out of his best for me with exclamations, “Lo, how it is red!” “Listen, this one will be a honey-wallah!” and almost more polishing than I could bear. The cloud departed from his honest face, it was that I had paid for; and when Tiglath-Pileser passing by said that I had been imposed upon I was indignant. He, the master, would not have an apple though they are really very good, and neither do I feel so disposed; they must be made into a pudding. We talked for a little while of the annoyance of reaching that critical time of life when one looks askance at a casual apple. In early youth it is a trifle to be appropriated at any hour; between the ages of ten and fourteen it is preferable the last thing before going to bed. After that ensues a period of indifference, full of the conviction that there are things in the world more interesting than apples; andby the time one again realizes that there is nothing half so good, circumstances have changed so that it is most difficult to decide when to eat them. A raw apple in the American fashion before breakfast is admitted by the mass of mankind to have a too discouraging effect upon everything else, and all will grant that it is impossible to do justice to its flavour, impossible to cope with it in any way, after a meal. It is not elusive—like the grape or the lychee; it is far too much on the spot. There remains the impromptu occasion, but you have long since come to regard with horror anything “between meals.” A day arrives when the fact stares you in the face that there is no time at which to eat an apple. Tiglath-Pileser and I considered it together this morning; but we were philosophic, we didn’t mind, we remembered that up to threescore years and ten there would probably always be somebody to bake them for us and were happy, nevertheless. Then Tryphena came and stayed an hour, and now I am not so happy as I was.
I would not dwell upon her, I would pass to other themes, but one has a feeling that Tryphena has been too much omitted from accounts of our little town. Such chronicles have been somehow too playful; one would think we did nothing but discover affinities and listen to the band and eat expensive things in tins. One would think life was all joy and pleasure whereas there are Associations of every kind. Whatever may have been the case in the golden age, or the time of Lord Lytton, I believe that the great over-fed conscience of Great Britain now sends out more Tryphenas every year, and their good works have to be seriously reckoned with in considering the possibility of remaining here. We have our traditions, of course, but we are practically compelled to live upon them, and it seems to me that a distant world should hear not only of our declining past but of what we have increasingly to put up with. I would not have invited Tryphena to occupy a chapter, but as she has walked in without this formality she might as well stay.
Indeed I would not have invited her. She is the kind of Tryphena that never comes to see you unless you are ill. I am not so agreeable when I am ill—I imagine few people are—and I prefer visits, at such a time, only from people who are fond of seeing me when I am well. Why in heaven’s name, when you are feverish or aguish or panting for breath, you should be expected to accept as a “kindness” a visit from a person who never thinks of you until you become a helpless object to whet her righteousness on, who comes and inflicts a personality upon you to which the most robust health only enables you to be barely polite, is to me an irritating conundrum. I had taken particular pains to be reported to Tryphena as entirely convalescent, “quite out of the doctor’s hands;” I did not want to be on her parish books. Why should I suffer to enable her to do her duty? Why should she have things put down to her credit at my expense? This does not seem to me reasonable or proper and I am averse to it. Yet I have told her, such is my hypocrisy,how good it was of her to come, and she has gone away better pleased with herself than ever.
Tryphena’s attitude toward the social body by which she is good enough to allow herself to be surrounded is a mingling of compassion and censure. She isla justicière. She will judge with equity, even with mercy, but she must always judge. She is perpetually weighing, measuring, criticising, tolerating, exercising her keen sense of the shortcomings of man in general and woman in particular. She will bring her standards and set them up by your bedside. Your scanty stock of force cannot be better used than in contemplating and admiring them, and you must recognize how completely she herself attains them; you have no alternative. If one will for ever strike human balances one should have a broad fair page to do it on, and Tryphena’s is already over-written with cramped prejudices. It is a triviality, but Tryphena’s gloves always wrinkle at the thumbs.
If she had been a man she would havebeen a certain kind of clergyman, and if she had been a clergyman his legs would have gone in gaiters. Indeed, sooner or later she would probably have added to the name of Tryphenus the glories of an episcopal see. She is past mistress of the art of kindly rebuke. But I do not wish to be kindly rebuked. In that respect I am like the Roy-Regent, and all other persons whom Providence has enabled to do without this attention. She has more principles than any one person is entitled to, and she is always putting them into action before you. I think it is a mistake to imagine that people care about the noble reasons that direct one’s doings; if one’s doings themselves provoke interest it is exceptional luck. I wish somebody would tell Tryphena that principles ought to be hidden as deep as a conviction of superiority; and see what would happen. I am sure we were not born to edify one another.
The deplorable part of it is that Tryphena leaves one inclined to follow her in the steep and narrow path that leads to self-esteem. I find myself at this moment not only in abad temper, but in a vein of criticism which I am inclined to visit upon persons whom I am usually entirely occupied in admiring. My friend the Bengal Lancer has just ridden by, with his hand on his hip. It has never struck me before that to ride with a hand on the hip is a sign of irredeemable vanity. The Gunner was here to tea yesterday—he of the Mountain Battery—and told us stories of his mules. I think disparagingly of his mules. That a mule will “chum up to” a pony and kick a donkey, seems this morning an imbecile statement of an improbable fact, though I admit I laughed at the time, it was so British. The unpaid Attaché came too. The unpaid Attaché gives one the impression of never allowing himself to be as charming as he might be. What foolish fear can justify this reticence? Enthusiasm, we all know, is permitted to the gods and to foreigners only, but even an unpaid Attaché can afford a whole smile.
The worst that can be said of Delia is that numbers of people whom she doesn’t care a button about call her a dear. At leastthat is the worst I can think of. As to Thalia, I had a note from her yesterday in which she spelled my name wrong. This after two years of notes. It may have been an accident; but much as I love Thalia I am disposed—this morning—to think that there is somewhere in her a defect obscure, elementary, which matches this. What is the worst they know of me? I have not the least idea, but I am prepared—this morning—to hope it is something rather bad.
The fact is that here in our remote and arbitrary and limited conditions we are rather like a colony in a lighthouse; we have nothing but ourselves and each other, and we grow overwrought, over-sensitive to the personal impression. I suppose that is what has produced, has at least aggravated, cases like Tryphena’s. It is a thing to be on one’s guard against. I quite see that if my own symptoms increase I shall shortly arrive at the point of being unable to endure the sight of many persons superior to myself; which is illogical and ridiculous.