Chapter XX
IT is sharp on these mountains now, keen, glorious weather. In the house Thisbe cowers over a fire from morning to night. I call it abject; she retorts that no English winter has ever produced in her so much goose-flesh, and that she came to India to be warm. Even I must bend to acknowledge the virtues of a hot-water bottle, and I have abandoned the pencil-cedar; the deck chair now chases the sun. Every hour we shift farther and farther to the west, until at about four o’clock he dips behind the castle of the Princess, and then we grow very grey and melancholy on the shelf. It is, after all, the great sun of India; if it falls steadily upon your feet it will slowly warm them through the shivering air; but nothing, not even a dahlia, must come between you and it. Even a dahlia makes a difference. The glare upon this page isparticularly unpleasant, but I have permanently closed my parasol; the double sensation of icy fingers and toasting feet was worse. It is more than I bargained for, a week, as a matter of fact, beyond my contract time; and only the fear of taking cold there keeps me from going into the house.
Whatever forebodings the garden feels it puts a brave front upon the matter. It is smart with zinnias now; in ranks they stand, like soldiers, always at attention. I have no patience with people who are too æsthetic for zinnias, who complain of their stiffness and their commonness and what not. I think the zinnia a particularly delightful creature, full of courage and character and cheerful confidence, and here where we have to make such a fight for a bit of colour against the void it is invaluable. It may not be exactly a lovable flower, but what of that? Many of us must be content to be estimable. There is even joy in a zinnia. From where I sit I look through a fringe of them along the paling where they almost glitter in the sun. Beyond are a fewdark deodar tops and an oak from which the last yellow leaves are fluttering, fluttering, and behind the tracery of this the blue sky bending to the still sharp snowy ranges. If you shut your eyes and succeed in seeing that, you may almost forget that I am in India and you somewhere else; we are both, really, very near Thibet and not far, I imagine, from heaven.
Nor would anybody, I am sure, ever think of India and chrysanthemums together. Yet the shelf is glorious with chrysanthemums, purple and bronze and gold and white. My gardening now takes the form of kind attentions to the chrysanthemums. Atma will tie them up with what I can only call swaddling strings, round their necks or their waists or anywhere, without the slightest regard for their comfort. Whereas if there is one thing a chrysanthemum pleads for, it is freedom to exercise its own eccentric discretion with regard to pose. There is no refreshment to exile like the cold sharp fragrance of chrysanthemums, especially white ones. Itbrings back, straight back, the glistening pavement of Kensington High Street on a wet November night and the dear dense smell of London and a sense of the delight that can be bought for sixpence there. Delight should be cheap but not too cheap. I am thankful sometimes for the limitations of our shelf and the efforts we must make to keep it pretty, and the fact that we have to consider whether leaf-mould is not rather dear at fourpence a basket. It must be difficult to keep in relation with a whole mountain-side, which is the estate of some people, or with six thousand rupees a month, which is the pay of a Member of Council. I should lease most of the mountain-side, I think, and put the rupees in bags and lock them up in a vault, just anyhow, as the rajahs do. To be aware that you had a vault full of rupees in bags would remove every care from life, but not to be obliged to know exactly how many bags there were would fill it with peace and ecstasy. There is solid comfort in a bag of rupees—I have possessed, at times, a little one—but in a vastincome which you never see there must be a vague dissatisfaction, as well as bank-books and separate accounts, and cheques and other worries which you must infallibly remember to date. The East teaches us much of simplicity and comfort in the persons of its princes. It has taught me the real magnificence of rupees in a bag.
Atma and I have had a morning of great anticipations. It is time now to look forward, time to provision the garden against the greedy spring, and to make plans. In all my plans the paling figures largely; it is a hand-rail between us and eternity, naturally things look well against it. Next year we are going to have hollyhocks, single and double, pink and rose and white, in a rampart all along the paling as it follows the sweep of the shelf, and spraying thickly out from these the biggest and whitest marguerites that will consent to come up, and along the border the broad blue ribbon of forget-me-nots. Farther on where the shelf widens in front of the house and the deodars rise thick before it, a creamy Devoniensisis already in possession of the paling, and here my goldenrod is to stand fretted against the firs, and dwarf sunflowers shall fraternize with it; and about its skirts shall grow myriads of coreopsis single and double, and masses of puce-coloured Michaelmas daisies, and at their feet the grateful simple-minded purple petunia in the largest families, as thick as ever she likes. I did not mention it before, because one does hate to be always complaining, but Tiglath-Pileser has invaded the garden with some Japanese plums; straight up they stick in the widest part of the paling border, and discouragingly healthy they look. Round two of these I have planted portulaca and ringed it with lobelia, and round the other two lobelia, and ringed it with little pink lilies. The roses in the bed opposite the dining-room window have grown rather leggy with age, and next year they are to rise out of a thick and, as I see it, low forest of pink and white candytuft, and the bed is to be deeply framed in pansies. We are to have foxgloves on thekhud rank above rank, and wallflowers on its more accessible projections, and in the rains the gayest crowd of dahlias of the ballet, the single degenerates, are to gather there. Atma is to get them where he likes and I am to ask no questions. I am homesick for a certain very sweet, very yellow rather small and not very double brier rose that belongs to other years when it was much presented to “the teacher,” also for a modest little fringed pink with a dark line on its petals which made the kind of posy one offered to one’s grandmother. But I fear the other years are a country one cannot rediscover in every part; though I have asked diligently of persons who also inhabited them I have not yet found my gentle pink or my little yellow rose. Then a bed of irises is to be made just over the kitchen roof, to take the eye off it, and the garden lilies, which are mostly madonnas, are to foregather in one place instead of being scattered about as they are now among the rose-bushes. Thisbe thinks nothing could be lovelier than a lily and a rose, but I cannotagree with her. The combination savours oftrop de luxe, it recalls an early Victorian lacquered tea-tray. If she likes to mix her garden-parties like that she can, but my lilies must express themselves with no other flower to interfere with them. A lily has so little to say to the world; it must have an atmosphere of the completest reticence if it is to speak at all. The roses will be reinforced by twenty-five other sorts from the Government Gardens at Saharanpore; and there are to be several new admittances to the home for decayed gentlewomen. The border nearest the upper khud has been arranged to take everything we don’t want in other places—the phloxes, the antirrhinums, the lupins and carnations and gaillardias and surpluses of all sorts which it would be a sin to throw away. It will be a kind of garden-attic, but the medley should be bright. Also, to do him justice, Tiglath-Pileser has given me a wild-rose hedge round our whole property, along both roads and up and down the khuds. Thick and fragrant it will be in May and starred with creamy blossoms.He said he owed me something on account of the grafts, and I could not conscientiously dispute the matter. So that will be my garden, I hope, of next year. It will hold no brilliant effects; we only want to be gay and merry on the shelf and to keep certain relations intact; we have no room to be ambitious. I know now at least where my garden begins and where it leaves off, and a little more. Next year I hope to pretend to that intimate knowledge which comes of having gone over every foot of it, without which no one should say anything, or even write anything probably. However, Elizabeth[6]did, and everybody liked it. Elizabeth began as a complete amateur; and her very amateurity disarmed criticism. She had nothing but taste and affection, and her struggles to garden upon this capital have often sympathetically occurred to me during the past summer. Frequently I have had occasion to say to her, speaking quite anonymously, “What would you think of that, Elizabeth, supposing you lived on a shelf?” and oftenin the depression of wondering whether it was quite fair to try to follow her charming fashion, I have explained that I really have to write about my garden; I was turned out in it, I had no more choice than Nebuchadnezzar; and that I sincerely hope I have not plagiarized her plants. And I assured her it is a thing I would never do, that those hereinbefore mentioned grew for me, every one, from seed or bulb—that I would not ever plagiarize from Mr. Johnson, whose Japanese lilies were glorious to behold this year and very moderate.
Notwithstanding these meek statements I feel, here at the end of the book and the end of the summer, highly experienced and knowledgeable about gardens. I long to pour out accumulated facts, and only a doubt of the relative value of advice produced at an altitude of seven thousand feet in the middle of Asia prevents my doing so. In more serious moments I hardly dare hope that I have not already talked too much about my garden and other things, but nobody should be severe upon this who hasnot discovered the entertainment to be got out of a perfectly silent visiting public. I should confess that I have enjoyed it enormously; it would be becoming in me to thank that mute impersonal body for a delightful summer. It is such an original pleasure to go on saying exactly what you like and briefly imagine replies, as well as a valuable aid, I am sure, to convalescence. To have increased the sum of the world’s happiness by one’s own is perhaps no great accomplishment, yet is it so easy? Neither can it be called especially virtuous to feel a little better, but what moral satisfaction is there to compare with it?
The summer and the book are done. The procession of the Days has gone by, all but a straggler or two carrying a tattered flag; it took seven months to pass a given point. There is a rustling among the roses when the wind comes this way, but nearly always the blue void holds a golden silence. Belated butterflies bask on the warm gravel with wings expanded and closed down. Wooing is dangerous now; shadows overtakeyou, and a shadow kills. The zinnias are all old soldiers, the Snows have come nearer in the night. Some morning soon they will have crept over the shelf, but only Atma will see that. The rest of the family will be occupying a spot under the warm dust haze down below, so far down as to be practically below sea-level. The vicissitudes of some lives!