r L CROWS mi The Crow's- Nest The Crow's -Nest By Mrs. Everard Cotes ssr- (Sara Jeannette Duncan) Author of "An American Girl in London" "A Social Departure," etc. New York Dodd, Mead and Company 1901 COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY UNIVERSITY PRKSS JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. THE CHAPTER I is an attraction about carpets and curtains, chairs and sofas, and the mantelpiece which is hard to explain, and harder to resist. I feel it in all its insidious power this morning as I am bidding them fare- well for a considerable time; I would not have believed that a venerable Axminster and an arm-chair on three casters could absorb and hold so much affection ; verily I think, standing in the door, it was these things that made Lot's wife turn her un- lucky head. Dear me, how they enter in, how they grow to be part of us, these ob- jects of ordinary use and comfort that we place within the four walls of the little shelters we build for ourselves on the fickle round o' the world ! I have gone back, I have sat down, I will not be de- prived of them ; they are necessary to the 2135389 The Crow's-Nest courage with which every one must face life. I will consider nothing without a cushion, on the hither side of the window, braced by dear familiar book-shelves, and the fender. And Tiglath-Pileser has come, and has quoted certain documents, and has used gentle propulsive force, and behold, be- cause I am a person whose contumacy can- not endure, the door is shut, and I am on the outside disconsolate. I would not have more sympathy than I can afterwards sustain ; I am only ban- ished to the garden. But the banishment is so definite, so permanent ! Its terms are plain to my unwilling glance, a long cane deck chair anchored under a tree. Overhead the sky, on the four sides the sky, without a pattern, full of wind and nothing. Abroad the landscape, consist- ing entirely of large mountains ; about, the garden. I never regarded a garden with more disfavour. Here I am to remain but to remain! The word expands, you will find, as you look into it. Man, and especially woman, is a restless being, made The Crow's-Nest to live in houses roaming from room to room, and always staying for the shortest time moreover, if you notice, in the one which is called the garden. The subtle and gratifying law of arrangement that makes the drawing-room the only proper place for afternoon tea operates all through. The convenience of one apartment, the quiet of another, the decoration of another regularly appeal in turn, and there is always one's beloved bed, for retirement when the world is too much with one. All this I am com- pelled to resjgn for a single fixed fact and condition, a cane chair set in the great monotony of out-of-doors. My eye, which is a captious organ, is to find its entertain- ment all day long in bushes and grass. All day long. Except for meals it is abso- lutely laid down that I am not to " come in." They have not locked the doors, that might have been negotiated, they have gone and put me on my honour. From morn- ing until night I am to sit for several months and breathe, with the grass and the bushes, the beautiful pure fresh air. I The Crow's-Nest don't know why they have not asked me to take root and be done with it. In vain I have represented that microbes will agree with them no better than with me ; it seems the common or house microbe is one of the things that I particularly must n't have. Some people are compelled to deny them- selves oysters, others strawberries or arti- chokes ; my fate is not harder than another's. Yet it tastes of bitterness to sit out here in an April wind twenty paces from a door behind which they are enjoying, in customary warmth and comfort, all the microbes there are. I have consented to this. I have been wrought upon certainly, but I have con- sented. For all that, it is not so simple as it looks. It is my occupation to write out with care and patience the trifles the world shows me, revolving as it does upon its axis before every intelligent eye ; and I cannot be divorced from all that is upholstered and from my dear occupation by the same de- cree. And how, I ask you, how observe life from a cane chair under a tree in a gar- den ! There is the beautiful pure fresh air The Crow's-Nest certainly, and there are the things coming up. But what, tell me, can you extract from air beside water ; and though a purely vegetable romance would be a novelty, could I get it published ? Tiglath-Pileser has contributed to my difficulty a book of reference, a volume upon the coleoptera of the neighbourhood, and I am to take care of it. I am taking the greatest care of it, but I do not like to hand it back to him with the sentiments I feel in case one fine day I should be reduced to coleoptera and thankful to get them. Nevertheless I have no choice, I cannot go forth in the world's ways and see what people are doing there, I must just sit under my tree and think and consider upon the current facts of a garden, the bursting buds I suppose and the following flowers, the people who happen that way and the ideas the wind brings ; the changes of the seasons there's fashion after all in that the behaviour of the ants and earwigs ; oh, I am encouraged, in the end it will be a novel of manners ! The Crow's-Nest Besides, there ought to be certain virtues, if one could find them, in plein air, for scrib- bling as well as for painting. One's head always feels particularly empty in a garden, but that is no reason why one should not see what is going on there, and if one's im- pressions are a trifle incoherent the wind does blow the leaves about they will be on that account all the more impressionistic. Yet it is not so simple as it looks. In such a project everything depends, it will be admitted, upon the garden ; it must be a tolerably familiar, at least a conceivable spot. The garden of Paradise, for instance, who would choose it as a point de repaire from which to observe the breed of Adam at the beginning of the twentieth century ? One would be interrupted everywhere by the necessity of describing the flora and 'fauna; it would be like writing a botany book with interpolations which would necessarily seem profane ; and the whole thing would be rejected in the end because it was not a scientific treatise upon the origin of apples. Certainly, if one might select one's plot, the The Crow's-Nest 7 first consideration should be the geographi- cal, and I am depressed to think that my garden is only less remote than Eve's. It is not an English garden ah, the thought ! nor a French one where they count the seeds and the windfalls, nor an Italian one sunning down past its statues to the blue Adriatic, nor even a garden in the neigh- bourhood of Poughkeepsie where they grow pumpkins. Elizabeth in her German gar- den was three thousand miles nearer to everybody than my cane chair is at this moment. How can I possibly expect people to come three thousand miles just to sit and talk under my pencil cedar ? So "long" an invitation requires such confi- dence, such assurance ! Who indeed should care to hear about every day as it goes on under a conifer in a garden, when that garden let me keep it back no longer is a mere patch on a mountain top of the Himalayas ? Not even India down below there, grilling in the sun which is not quite warm enough here that would be easy with snakes and palm-trees 8 The Crow's-Nest and mangoes and chutneys all growing round, ready and familiar ; but Simla, what is Simla ? An artificial little community which has climbed eight thousand feet out of the world to be cool. Who ever leaves Charing Cross for Simla? Who among the world's multitudes ever casts an eye across the Rajputana deserts to Simla ? Does Thomas Cook know where Simla is ? No ; Simla is a geographical expression, to be verified upon the map and never to be thought of again, and a garden in Simla is a vague and formless fancy, a possibility, no more. Yet people have to live there, I have to live there ; and certainly for the next few months I have to make the best of it from the outside. If you ask yourself what you really think of a garden you will find that you consider it a charming place to go out into. So much I gladly admit if you add the retreat and background of the house. The house is such an individual ; such a friend ! Even in Simla the house offers corners where may lurk the imagination, The Crow's-Nest 9 nails on which to hang a rag of fancy ; but in this windy patch under the sky surrounded by Himalayas, one Himalaya behind another indefinitely, who could find two ideas to rub together ? Also my cane chair is becoming most pitiably weary ; it aches in every limb. The sun was poor and pale enough ; now it has gone altogether, a grey ness has blown out of Thibet, my fingers are almost too numb to say how cold it is. The air is full of an apprehension of rain if it rains do you suppose I am to come in? Indeed no, I am to have an umbrella. Uncomforted, uncomfortable fate ! I wish it would rain ; I could then pity myself so profoundly, so abjectly, I would lie heroic, still and stoic ; and at the appointed time I would take my soaking, patient person into the house with a trail of drops, pursued by Thisbe with hot-water bottles, which I would reject, to her greater compassion and more contrition. And in the morning it would be a queer thing if I could n't produce rheumatism somewhere. Short of rain, however, it will io The Crow's-Nest be impossible to give a correct and adequate impression of the bald inhospitality of out- of-doors. They will think I want to be pitied and admired, and Thisbe will say, "But didn't you really enjoy it just a little ? " Walls are necessary to human happiness that I can asseverate. Tiglath-Pileser, in bringing me to this miserable point, argued that I should experience the joys of primi- tive man when he took all nature for his living-room ; subtle, long-lost sensations would arise in me, he said, of such a per- suasive character that in the end I should have to combat the temptation to take en- tirely to the woods. I expect nothing of the kind. My original nomad is too far away, I cannot sympathize with him in his embryotic preferences across so many wisest centuries. Moreover, if the poor barbarian had an intelligent idea it was to get under shelter, and that is the only one, doubtless, for which we have to thank him. The windows are blank ; they think it kindest, I suppose, not to appear to find The Crow's-Nest 1 1 entertainment in my situation. It is cer- tainly wisest ; if Thisbe showed but the tip of her pretty nose I should throw it up. The windows are blank, the door is shut, but hold there is smoke coming out of the drawing-room chimney ! Thisbe has lighted unto herself a fire and is now drawn up around it awaiting the tea-things. The house as an ordinary substantive is hard enough to resist, but the-house-with-a-fire ! No, I cannot. Besides it is already half- past four and I was to come in at five to tea. I will obey the spirit and scorn the letter of the law I will go in now. CHAPTER II A ROAD winds round the hill above our heads ; another winds round the hill below our feet ; between is a shelf jutting out. The principal object on the shelf is the house, but it also supports the pencil cedar, and the garden sits on it, and at the back the servants' quarters and stables just don't slip off; so that when Tiglath-Pileser walks about it with his hands in his pockets it looks a little crowded. The land between the upper road and the shelf, and the land between the shelf and the lower road is equally ours, but it is placed at such an abrupt and uncompromising angle that we do not know any way of taking possession of it. By surface measurement we are doubtless large proprietors, but as the crow flies we are distinctly over-taxed. This slanting hill-side is called the khud ; there The Crow's-Nest 13 is no real property in a khud. One always thinks of town lots as flat and running from the front street to the back, with suitable exposure for the washing. It just depends. This one stands on end, you could easily send a stone rolling from the front street into the back, if you knew which was which ; and there would be rather too much exposure for the washing. If you like you can lean up against the khud, but that is the only way of asserting your title-deed, and few people consider it worth doing. I may say that as soon as you tilt your property out of the horizontal you lose control over it. Things come up on it precisely as they like, in tufts, in suckers and in every vulgar manner, secure and defiant it rises above your head. Tiglath-Pileser and I have sought diligently, with ladders, for some way of bringing our khud into subjection, but in vain. As he says we might paper it, but as I say there are some things which persons who derive their income from current literature simply can not afford. So we are content perforce to look at it and " call it ours," as 14 The Crow's-Nest children are sometimes allowed by their elders to do. The khud is God's property but we call it ours. Trees grow on it and it makes a more agreeable background, after all, than other people's kitchens. Beyond the shelf the hill-side slopes clear from the upper road to the lower, a stretch of indefinite jungle which flourishes, no man aiding or forbidding. We have sometimes looked at it vaguely and thought of potatoes, but have always decided that it was useful enough and much less troublesome as part of the landscape. The other day the law threatened us if Tiglath-Pileser did not forthwith declare his boundaries in that direction, and he has since been going about with a measuring-chain and a great pretence of accuracy ; but it is my private belief that neither he nor his neighbour will be equal to the demand. They had better agree quickly and hatch a friendly deposition together, and so escape whatever penalty the law awards for not knowing where your premises leave off. Meanwhile the wild cherry and the unkempt rhododendron grow in one accord The Crow's-Nest 15 indifferent to these foolish claims. Such is ownership in a khud. Our domain therefore is spread out about as much as it would hang from a clothes- line, but the only part we really inhabit is the shelf. All this by way of informing you honestly that the garden in which you are invited to lighten so many long hours for me is no great place. Here and now I abjure invention and idealization ; you shall have just what happens, just what there is, and it won't be much. Pot-luck you can't expect more from a garden on a shelf. I must admit that before I was turned out to grow in it myself I thought it well enough, but now I regard it critically, like the other plants. We might do better, all of us, under more favourable conditions. We complain unanimously, for one thing, of the lack of room. Cramped we are to such an extent that I often feel thankful for the paling that runs along the edge and keeps us all in. I suppose nobody ever believed that his lot gave him proper scope for his activities in this world, but I can 1 6 The Crow's-Nest testify that the wisteria which twines over the paling is pushing a middle-aged hibiscus bush down the khud, while I, sitting here, elbow them both, and a honeysuckle, climbing up from below has to cling with both hands to hold on. If I invite a friend to take a walk in my garden I must go in front declaiming and he must come behind assenting ; we cannot waste space on mere paths, and none of them are wide enough for two people to walk abreast, except the main one to the door, which had to be on account of the rickshaws. As it is, pansies, daisies and other small objects constantly slip over the edge and hang there precariously attached by the slenderest root of family affection for days. We are all convinced in this garden, that for expansion one would not choose a shelf, and that applies in quite a ridiculous way to Simla itself, though per- haps it is hardly worth while, out here in the sun, to write an essay to explain exactly how. I would not show myself of a churlish mind ; the day is certainly fine, as fine a day The Crow's-Nest 17 as you could be compelled to sit out in. A week has passed since I lent myself to be a spectacle of domestic tyranny and modern science, and I hasten to announce that al- though I want to eat more and to go to bed earlier I am not at all better. I have let the week go by without taking any notice of it in this journal under the impression that it was not worth the pains, as they say in France. It was doubtless a wonderful week in nature, but which of the fifty-two is not ? and being certain that my fountain pen would be any- thing but a source of amiability, I left it in the house. Moreover, there is something not quite proper, one finds, in confiding an experience of personal discomfort, undergone with the object of improving one's health, to the printed page ; it is akin to lending one's maladies to an advertiser of patent medicines, and tends to give light literature too much the character of a human document. Also, to look back upon, the late week holds little but magnificent resolution and the sen- sation of cold feet. All that need be said about it is that I have at last arrived at the 1 8 The Crow's-Nest end of it, full of fortitude and resignation. I am not at all better, but I am resigned and prepared to go on, if it is required of me, and it seems likely to be. In fact it appears to have occurred to nobody but myself that there was anything experimental about this period. The whole summer is to be the ex- periment, I am told, as often as if they were addressing the meanest intelligence, which is not the case. My sensibilities no doubt are becoming slightly blunted. A whole week without a roof over one's head except at night would naturally have that tendency. I find that I am no longer a prey to the desire to go in and look at something in the last number of The Studio, and the more subtly tormented of modern novelties fails to hold my atten- tion for more than half-an-hour at a time. The spirit in my feet that would carry me indoors has still to be bound down, but it has grown vague and purposeless and might lead me anywhere, even to the kitchen to see if the cook is keeping -his saucepans clean, the most detestable responsibility of The Crow's-Nest 19 my life. Now that I am a close prisoner outside the house, by the way, it shall be delegated to Thisbe. That is no more than right. It was not worse than I expected, and it was a little less bad, let me confess, than I described it to my family. I can now sym- pathize with the youthful knight of the middle ages at the end of his first night's ghostly vigil in the sanctuary, if the rest are no worse than this they can be got through with. I am certainly on better terms with nature, as he was on better terms with the skeleton in the vault, apprehending with him in that neither of them was really calculated to do us any harm. He no doubt lost his superstitions as I am losing my finer feelings ; whether one is sufficiently com- pensated for them by a vulgar appetite and a tendency to drowsiness immediately after dinner is a question I should like to discuss with him. For one thing I am beginning to make acquaintance with the Days and to know them apart, not merely as sunny days, dull 2o The Crow's-Nest days, windy days and wet days, as they are commonly unobserved and divided, but in the full and abundant personality which every one of the three hundred and sixty- five offers to the world that rolls under it. To me also, a very short time ago, the day was a convenient arrangement for making things visible outside the house, accompanied by agreeable or disagreeable temperatures ; a mere condition monotonously recurrent and quite subordinated to engagements. To live out here enveloped by it, dependent on it, in a morning-to-night intimacy with it, is to know better. The Day is a great elemental creature left in charge of the world for as long, every twenty-four hours, as she can see it. No one day is the same as another; those of the same season have only a family likeness. They express character and tem- perament, like people, and if you elect to live with them, to throw yourself, as it were, upon their better nature with no other protection than an umbrella, it just makes all the differ- ence. Some were tender and sweet-tempered, I remember, some were thoughtful, with a The CrowVNest 2 i touch of gloom, one was artist with a firm hand and a splendid palette. And among all the seven I did not dislike a single Day, which is remarkable when one thinks of the abuse one is so apt to let fall, from the inside of a window, about what our common little brains call " the weather." There is no weather, it is a poor and pointless term, there is only the mood of a day, and how- ever badly it may serve our paltry ends it is bound at least to be interesting. When one reflects upon how little this great thing is regarded and how constantly from behind glass, by miserable men, one is touched with pity for the ingratitude of the race, and astonishment at the amount of personal superiority to be acquired in a week. Day unto day uttereth speech, swinging a lantern ; it is the business of night to wait. Day after day, too spiritual to be pagan, too sensuous to be divine, speeds out of time into the eternity where planets are served in turn. Behold, in spite of all their science, I show you a mystery, high and strange whether the sun is in his tabernacle or the clouds are on 22 The Crow's-Nest the hills. But it is there always, you can see it for yourself. Go out into the garden, not for a stroll, but for a day. The week has brought me and how can I be too grateful a new and personal feel- ing about this exquisite thing that passes. Waking in the blackness of the very small hours I find a delicate gladness in the thought of the far sure wing of the day. Already while we lie in the dark it brushes the curve of the world in that far East which is so much farther, already on a thousand slopes and rice fields the grey dawn is be- ginning, beginning ; and sleeping huts and silent palaces stand emergent, marvellously pathetic to the imagination. Even while I think, it is crisping the sullen waves of the Yellow Sea ; presently some outlying reef of palms will find its dim picture drawn, and then we too, high in the middle of Hindostan, will swing under this vast and solemn operation. With that precision which reigns in heaven our turn will also come, and in my garden and over the hills will walk another day. CHAPTER III I is a right side and a wrong side to the mountain of Simla, for it was a mountain eight thousand feet high and equally important long before it became the summer headquarters of the Government of India, and a possible pin-point on the map. These mountains run across the tip of India, you will remember, due east and west, so that if you live on one of them you are very apt to live due north or south. On the south side you look down, on a clear day, quite to the plains, if that is any advantage ; you see the Punjab lying there as flat as the palm of your hand and streaked with rivers, and the same sun that burns all India bakes down upon you. On the north side you have turned your back on Hindostan and sit upon the borders of Thibet, a world of mountains bars your horizon, a hermit Mahatma might 24 The Crow's-Nest abide with you in his ashes and have his meditations disturbed by no thought of missionaries or income tax. Your prospect is all blue and purple with a wonderful edge sometimes of white ; cool winds blow out of it and fan your roses on the hottest day. Out there is no-man's-land, where the coolies come from, or perhaps the country of a little king who wears his crown embroidered on his turban, and in India who recks of little kings ? Out there are no Secretariats, no Army Headquarters, no precedence, prob- ably very little pay, but the vast blue free- dom of it ! And all expanded, all extended just at your front door. ***** The asterisks stand for the time I have spent in looking at it. Freely translated they should express an apology. I find it one of the pernicious tendencies of living on this shelf that my eyes constantly wander out there taking my mind with them, which at once becomes no more than a vacant mirror of blue abysses. I look, I know, immensely serious and thoughtful, and Thisbe, believing me on the tip of some The Crow's-Nest 25 high imagination goes round the other way, whereas I am the merest reflecting puddle with exactly a puddle's enjoyment of the scene. There is neither virtue nor profit in this, but if I apologized every time I did it these chapters would be impassable with asterisks. Thisbe's method is much more reasonable ; she takes her view immediately after she takes her breakfast. Coming out upon the verandah she looks at it intelli- gently, pronounces it perfectly lovely or rather hazy, returns to her employments, and there is an end to the matter. One cannot always, in Thisbe's opinion, be refer- ring to views. I wish I could adopt this calm and governed attitude. I should get on faster in almost every way. It is my ignominious alternative to turn my back upon the prospect and look up the khud. Into my field of vision comes Atma, do- ing something to a banksia rose-bush that climbs over a little arbour erected across a path apparently for the convenience of the banksia rose-bush. Atma would tell you, protector of the poor, that he is the gardener 26 The CrowVNest of this place ; as a matter of fact his relation to it is that of tutelary deity and real pro- prietor. I have talked in as large a way as if it belonged to Tiglath-Pileser because he pays for the repairs, but I should have had the politeness at least to mention Atma, whose claims are so much better. So far as we are concerned Atma is prehistoric; he was here when we came and when we have completed the tale of one years of exile and gone away he will also be here. His hut is at the very end of the shelf and I have never been in it, but if you asked him how long he has lived there he would say, " Always." It must make very little difference to Atma what temporary lords come and give orders in the house with the magnificent tin roof where they have table-cloths ; some, of course, are more troublesome than others, but none of them stay. He and his bulbs and perennials are the permanent undisputed facts ; it is unimaginable that any of them should be turned out. I am more reconciled to my fate when Atma is in the garden, he is something The Crow's-Nest 27 human to look at and to consider, and he moves with such calm wisdom among the plants. He has a short black curling beard that grows almost up to his high cheek- bones, and soft round brown eyes full of guileless cunning, and a wide and pleasant smile. He is just a gentle hill-man and by religion a gardener, but with his turban twisted low and flat over his ears he might be any of the Old Testament characters one remembers in the pictured Bible stories of one's childhood. Something primitive and natural about him binds him closely to Adam in my mind. It was with this simplicity and patience, I am sure, that the original cultivator tied up his banksias and saved his portulaca and mignonette after the fall, when he had something to do beside come to his meals. I am not the only person ; every- body to whom it is pointed out notices at once how remarkably Atma takes after the father of us all. I have often wished to call him Adam because of his so peculiarly de- serving it ; but Tiglath-Pileser says that profane persons, knowing that he could not 28 The Crow's-Nest have received the name at his baptism, might laugh and thus hurt his feelings. So he is Atma still. It is near enough. He is also patriarchal in his ideas. This morning he came to us upon the business of Sropo. Sropo, he said, wished for six days' leave in order to marry himself. " But," said I, " this is not at all proper. Sropo went away last year to marry himself. How shall Sropo have two wives ? " " Na," replied Atma, with his kindly smile, " that was Masuddi. Masuddi has now a wife and a son has been, 1 and his wages are so much the less. Also without doubt this Sropo could not have two wives." " Certainly not," said Tiglath-Pileser, virtuously. " Sropo is of my village," Atma explained, genially, " and we folk are all poor men. More than one wife cannot be taken. But if we were rich like the Presence," he went on, gravely, " we would have five or six." Tiglath-Pileser shook his head. "You would be sorry," said he. " It would be a 1 Literally : "has been finished." The Crow's-Nest 29 mistake," but only I saw the ambiguity in his eye. " It is not your Honour's custom," re- turned Atma, simply. " Sropo, then, will go ? " "Call Masuddi," said Tiglath-Pileser. "It is a serious matter, this of wives." Round the corner of the verandah came Masuddi, shy and broadly smiling, with an end of his cotton shirt in the corner of his mouth and pulling at it, as other kinds of children pull at their pinafores. "Masuddi," said Tiglath-Pileser, "last year you made a marriage in your house, and now you have a son. Er which young woman did you marry ? " Masuddi's smile broadened ; he cast down his eyes and scrabbled the gravel about with his foot. " Tuktoo," he said shamefacedly. " Well, there is no harm in that. What is the name of your son ? " Masuddi looked up intelligently. " How should he have a name ? " he asked. " He has not yet four months. He came with the snow. When he has a year, then he will get a name. My padre-folk Brahmun will give it." 3<3 The CrowVNest " But you will say what it is to be," I put in. " Na," said Masuddi, " the padre-folk will say to their liking." " Masuddi," said Tiglath-Pileser, " speak straight words do you beat your wife ? " " Master," replied Masuddi, " how shall I utter false talk ? When she will not hear orders I beat her." " Masuddi," said I, " straight words do you beat her with a stick ? " Laughter rose up in him, and again he chewed the end of his garment. " According as my anger is," he said, half turning away to hide his face, " so I beat her." " Then she obeys ? " " Then fear is and she listens. Thus it is," said Masuddi, his face clearing to an idea, "as we servant-folk are before your Honours, so they-folk are before us." "You may go, worthy Masuddi," pro- nounced Tiglath-Pileser, "and Atma may say to Sropo, who is listening behind the water-barrel, that I have heard the words of Masuddi and they are just and reason- The Crow's-Nest 3 i able, and he may go also and marry himself, but it must be done in six days, and it must not occur again." Masuddi and Sropo are two of the four who pull my rickshaw. When I am not taking carriage exercise they will do almost anything else, except sew or cook, but I have discovered that the thing they really love to be set at is to paint. In the spring the paling required a fresh brown coat, and in a moment of inspired economy I decided that Masuddi and his men should be en- trusted with it. Never was task more will- ingly undertaken. With absorption they mixed the pigment and thewi-oil, squeez- ing it with their hands ; with joy they laid it on, competing among themselves, like Tom Sawyer's schoolfellows. " Lo, it is beautiful ! " Masuddi would exclaim after each brushful, drawing back to look at it. I think they were sorry when it was done. Atma is of these people, and the two grooms, and Dumboo, the upper house- maid, a strapping treasure six feet in his stockings. I would like it better if all our 32 The Crow's-Nest servants were, but it is impossible to con- ceive Sropo doing up muslin frills at least it is impossible to conceive the frills and I could not ask people to eat entrees sent up by any friend of Masuddi's. I ad- mit they do not altogether adapt themselves, or even wash themselves. I have before now locked Masuddi and the others up with a tub and a bar of kitchen soap and instructions of the most general nature, de- manding, on their release, to see the soap. It was the only reliable evidence. Besides if I had not required to see my soap, worn by honest service, they would have sold it and bought sweetmeats and gone none the cleaner. They have many such little ways, which few people I know consider as en- gaging as I do. But what I like best is their lightheartedness and their touch of fancy. Sropo will go to his nuptials with a rose behind his ear where in my bar- barous West does a young man choose to approach the altar thus ? and when Masuddi courted Tuktoo upon the mountain paths in the twilight I think a shy idyll went The Crow's-Nest 33 barefoot between them ; though he, the male creature, would make shame of it now, preferring to speak of sticks and of obedi- ence. They are the young of the world, these hill sons and daughters, and they still remember how the earth they are made of stirs in the spring. It is late evening in my garden now there has seemed, some- how, no good reason to go in, though one new leaf in the borders has long been just like another and far down the khud I hear a playing upon the flute. It is a frag- mentary air but vigorous and sweet, and it brings me, dropping through the vast and purple spaces of the evening, the most charming sensation. For it is not a Secre- tary to the Government of India who per- forms, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings hosannas over there to the Com- mander-in-Chief, but a simple hill-man who would make a melody because it is spring, and he has perchance been given leave to go and marry himself. CHAPTER IV PEOPLE are often removed from their proper social spheres in this world and placed in others which they think lower and generally less worthy of them. Their distant and haughty behaviour under these circum- stances is rather, I am afraid, like my own conduct at present, down in the world as I am and reduced to the society of a garden. I, too, have been looking about me with contemptuous indifference, returning no visits, though quantities of things have been coming up to see me, and perpetually refer- ring to the superior circles I moved in when I knew better days and went out to dinner. You may notice, however, that such per- sons generally end by condescending to the simpler folk they come to live among ; it is dull work subsisting upon the most glorious reminiscences and much wiser to become the The Crow's-Nest 35 shining ornament of the more limited sphere to which one may be transferred. That is the course I am considering, for whom cards of invitation are dead letters, and to whom the gay world up here will soon refer I have no doubt, as the late Mrs. Tiglath-Pileser who chose so singularly to bestow her re- mains in a garden, though I am really alive and flourishing there. I can never be the shining ornament of my garden because nature intended otherwise and there is too much competition, but I may be able to exert an improving influence. It is not im- possible, either, that I may find the horti- cultural class about me more interesting than I find myself. I have been accustomed to speak with quite the ordinary contempt of persons who have " no resources within themselves" in future I shall have more sympathy and less ridicule for such. I should rather like to know what one is ex- pected to possess in the way of " resources " tucked away in that vague interior which we are asked to believe regularly pigeon-holed and alphabetically classified. We do believe 36 The Crow's-Nest it by an effort of the imagination but only try, on a fine day out-of-doors, to rum- mage there. Your boasted brain is a per- fect rag-bag, a waste-paper basket, a bran pie from which you draw at hazard an article value a penny-ha'penny. This is disap- pointing and humiliating when both you and your family believe that you have only to think in order to be quite indifferent to the world and vastly entertained. " Resources " somehow suggests the things one has read, and I know I depended largely upon certain poets, not one of whom will come near me unless I go personally and bring him from the bookshelves in his covers. Pope for one why Pope I cannot say, unless be- cause he would blink and cough and be fundamentally miserable in a garden great breadths of Pope I thought would visit me in quotation. Not a breadth. Immortals of earlier and later periods are equally shy ; I catch at their fluttering garments and they are off, leaving a rag in my hand. Only that agreeable conceit of Marvell's comes and stays, The Crow's-Nest 37 "Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade," and I am ashamed to look it in the face I have positively worked it to death. Apply within for lofty sentiments or pro- found conclusions, the result is the same : these things fly the ardent seeker and only appear when you are not looking for them. Instead you find shreds of likes and dis- likes, the ghost of an opinion you held last week, a desire to know what time it is. My regrettable experience is that you can explore the recesses of your soul out-of-doors in much less than a week if you put your mind to it, with surprise and indignation that you should find so little there. " You beat your pate and fancy wit will come ; Knock as you please, there 's nobody at home." Dear me, there 's Mr. Pope, and very much, as usual, to the point ! No, resources are things you can lay your hands upon, and I have come to believe that they are all in the house. Everything is up and showing, the garden 38 The Crow's-Nest is green with promise, but very few things are quite ready for my kind advances ; very few things are out. What a pretty idea, by the way, in that common little word as the flowers use it ! Out of the damp earth and the green sheath, out into the sun with the others, out to meet the bees and to snub the beetles, oh, out ! When young girls emerge into the world they too are " out " the word was borrowed, of course, from the garden ; its propriety is plain. Thisbe, I remember, is out this season ; but I do not see anything in the borders exactly like Thisbe. Doubtless later on her prototype will come, in June I think, unfolding a pink petal-coat. There is no hurry ; it is yet only the second week in April and these grey mountains are still delicate and dim under the ideal touch of the wild apricot and plum. The borders may be empty, but there is sweet vision to be had by looking up, and just a hint of nature's possible purposes with a khud. It now occurs to me that there ought to be clouds and clouds of this pink and white blossoming all about the house, The Crow's-Nest 39 behind as well as before, on each of our several declivities, there ought to be and there is not. I remember now why there is not. One crisp morning last autumn Tig- lath-Pileser, who is a practical person, was struck by the fact, though it is not a new one, that wild fruit trees may be made to cultivate fruit by the process of grafting, and announced his intention to graft largely. " Think," said he, " of the satisfaction of being able to write home to England that you are gathering from your own trees quan- tities of the greengages which they pay ten- pence a pound for and place carefully in tarts ! " The proceeding had not my approval. It seemed to me that it would be a good deal of trouble and care and thought and anxiety to grow greengages on a khud, and we had none of these things to spare. Neither would there be any satisfaction in gathering quantities of them when one could buy a convenient number in the bazaar. We could not eat them all, and it was not our walk in life to sell such things ; we might certainly 40 The Crow's-Nest expect to be cheated. We should be re- duced to making indiscriminate presents of them and receiving grateful notes from peo- ple we probably could n't bear. Or possibly I, like the enterprising heroine of improving modern fiction, would feel compelled to start a jam factory, and did I strike him, Tiglath- Pileser, as a person to bring a jam factory to a successful issue ? At the moment, I remember, an accumulation of greengages seemed the one thing I precisely could n't and would n't tolerate, but I did n't say very much, hardly more than I have mentioned, as the supreme argument failed to occur to me at the time. The supreme argument, which only visits you after watching the pink and white petals drop among the deodars for hours together, is, of course, that if you can afford to grow fruit to look at it is utilitarian folly to turn it into fruit to eat. So I have no doubt he had his way. ... I have been to see ; it is the case. Where there should be masses of delicate bloom there are stumps, bare attenuated stumps, tied up in poultices with fingers sticking out of them, which I The Crow's-Nest 41 suppose are the precious grafts. Well, the devil enters into each of us in his own guise ; I shall warn Tiglath-Pileser particularly to beware of him in the form of a market gardener. I cannot conscientiously pass over the rhododendrons, which are all aloft and ablaze just now. It would be unkind and ungrate- ful when they have come of their own accord to grow on my khud and make it in places really magnificent, though they arouse in me no sentiment at all and I had just as soon they went somewhere else. At home the rhododendron is a bush on a lawn ; here it grows into a forest tree, and when you come upon it far out in the wilds with the sun shining through its red clusters against the vivid blue it stands like candelabra lighted to the glory of the Lord. I will consent to admire it in that office, but for common hu- man garden uses I find it a little over-superb and very disconcerting to the apricots and plums. Also Thisbe will put it about in bowls, and will not see that its very fitness for sanctuary purposes makes it worse than 42 The Crow's-Nest useless on the end of a piano. To begin with, its name is against it. Philologically speaking you might as well put a hippopot- amus in a vase as a rhododendron. Apart from that it sulks in the house and huddles into bunches of red cotton. It misses the sun in its veins, I suppose, and its spiky cup of leaves, and its proper place in the world at the end of a branch. The peony, which it is a little like, is much better behaved in a drawing-room, but then it has a leg to stand on ; we all want that. Besides, a peony is a peony, which reminds me that I have never seen one in Simla. It seems to have been left at home by design in the general emigration of English flowers, like an unat- tractive old maid whom it was not worth while to bring. But taste and fashion change, and I see a spot where a large bunch of peonies would be both comfortable and de- lectable. It is not, after all, only slim young things that are to be desired in society or in a garden. Firm, fine high-coloured madames with ample skirts and ripe experience are often much more worth cultivating. The Crow's-Nest 43 Ah ! they hold me, even in imagination, the dear old peonies ! Always they were the first, in a certain garden of early colonial fashion that I used to know in Canada, after the long hard winter was past, to push their red-green beginnings up into the shabby welcome of the month of March. We used to look for them under the wet black fallen leaves before a sign had come upon the apple-trees, before anything else stirred or spoke at all ; and how tender is one's grown- up affection for a thing which bound itself together like that with one's childish delight in the first happy vibration of the spring ! Here, after all these many springs and half across the world, here on my remote and lofty shelf where no one lives but Aryans and officials, I want them to come up again that way, and if they have not forgotten the joy of it perhaps I too shall remember. Atma having no objection, I will send to England for some peonies. Everything is green except the forget-me- nots, they are very blue indeed in thick borders along both sides of the drive ; sweet 44 The Crow's-Nest they look, like narrow streams reflecting the sky in the middle of the garden. Do not gather the forget-me-not, it is a foolish inert little nonentity in the hand, it has not even character enough for a button-hole, but in the bosom of its family it is delightful. At- ma is very pleased with these borders ; it is the first time he has had them so long and so gay. "How excellent this season," says he in his own tongue, " are the giftie-noughts of we people." I told you he was a man of parts ; it is not easy to be a poet in another language. Also, I perceive, there are periwinkles on the khud. CHAPTER V IT was an event this morning when Tha- lia came whisking along the Mall in her rickshaw and turned in here- The Mall, I should mention, is the only road in Simla that has a name. It is a deplorably inappropriate name, it makes you think of sedan-chairs and elderly beaux and other things that have never appeared upon the Himlayas, and it was doubtless given in derision, but it has stuck fast like many an- other poor old joke until at last people take it seriously and forget that it ever pretended to be humorous. I don't even know whether it is more fashionable to live upon the Mall than elsewhere, or whether one can claim to live upon it when it runs past one's attic windows like an elevated railway ; but we have often remarked to one another that if we cannot be said to live upon the Mall we cannot be said to live anywhere and 46 The Crow's-Nest taken what comfort may be had out of that. Our peculiar situation has at all events the advantage that I can always see Thalia com- ing, which adds the pleasure of anticipation to her most unexpected visit. Like most of us, Thalia arrives with the season, but it should be added that she brings the season with her. We amuse ourselves a good deal, for a serious community, with a toy theatre, in which we present Mr. Jones and Mr. Pi- nero so intelligently that I often wonder why neither of these playwrights has yet come out to ascertain what he is really capable of. Thalia is our leading comedienne ; you would have guessed that by her name. She is never too soon anywhere, but I had be- gun to wonder when she was coming up. " Up," of course, means up from the plains, up from the Pit, as its present temperature quite permits me to explain. April is the last month in which you can leave the Pit without being actually scorched. " What are you doing here ? " she ex- claimed, half-way down the drive. She ex- pected, I suppose, to find me in the house The Crow's-Nest 47 trying to decide upon the shade of this year's cheese-cloth curtains. By the way, I have decided that the old ones will do. Thisbe does n't mind, and I 've got the clouds. " Oh, I 'm just here," I said with non- chalance. There is nothing like nonchal- ance to prove superiority to circumstances. " How are you ? " " Thank you," said Thalia. " Well, come along in. I Ve got quantities of things to talk about." " It is very good of you," I returned, "to press my hospitality upon me, but I don't go in. I stay out. If Tiglath-Pileser saw me entering the house at this hour," I con- tinued with the vulgarity which we permit ourselves to the indulgent ear of a friend, " it would be as much as my place is worth. But you see I have a chair ready for emer- gencies pray sit down. You are the first emergency that has arisen, I mean that has dropped in, this year." When I had fully explained, as I was at once of course compelled to do, with a wealth of detail and much abuse of Tiglath- 48 The Crow's-Nest Pileser, I was not gratified with the effect upon Thalia. "You have simply been spending your time out-of-doors," said she, " a very ordinary thing to do." "Try it," said I. " And are you better ? " " I think," I replied, " that I have possi- bly gained a little weight. But I might as well admit it cheerfully, they won't take my word against any pair of scales." "That was an excellent prescription I sent you in October," Thalia continued re- proachfully. " You have n't given it up ? " " It has given me up," I responded promptly, " after the first three weeks it de- clined to have anything whatever to say to me. And besides, it had to be taken in decreasing doses. Now if a thing is really calculated to do you good it should be taken in increasing doses. That is why I begin to have some little confidence in this out-of- doors business. Every day I feel equal to a little more of it." " Well," said Thalia, " Mrs. Lyric told me that it had made another woman of her. The Crow's-Nest 49 And Colonel Lyric commands the loth Pink Hussars." Thalia knows it annoys me to be told about a woman, with any sort of significance, what position her husband occupies in the world, and that is the reason she does it. I do not say that it has no weight as a con- tributory fact in a general description, but I do say that an improper amount of impor- tance is usually attached to it. You ask what kind of a person Mrs. Thorn is, and you are told, " Oh, Mr. Thorn is Chief Sec- retary in the Department of Thuggi and Dacoity," being expected without further ado to dispose yourself to love her if she will let you. One is always inclined to say " But she may be very nice in spite of that," and one only refrains because one knows how scandal grows in Simla. And there are people in these parts, I assure you, who would run to take a prescription because it had made another woman of the wife of the colonel commanding t^he loth Pink Hussars, no matter what kind of a woman she had been before ; but I was not going 4 50 The Crow's-Nest to gratify Thalia by letting her see that I knew it. "At all events," I said calmly, "it had to be taken in decreasing doses and naturally it came to an end. Are you settled in ? " " I have a roof to cover me," said Thalia sententiously, "and for that," she added looking round, "I didn't know how thank- ful I was. But I am undergoing repairs. They are putting mud into the cracks of my dwelling, paperhangers are impending, and this morning arrived three whitewashers. I wanted to be done with it at once, so I sent for three. I told them I was in a hurry. In one breath, they said, it should be done, and sat down in the verandah to make their brushes. It 's a fact. Of split bamboo. You can not hustle the East. But I found I had to come away." " How foolish it all seems ! " I sighed with an eye upon the farther hills. "Shouldn't you like to see my pansies ? " "Yes," she replied resignedly, "I suppose I must see your pansies," and where I led she followed me, still babbling of paperhangers. The CrowVNest 51 It is no exaggeration to say that during the months of April, May, and June, there are more pansies than people in this town. (Upon second thoughts why should it be an exaggeration, since in every garden inhabited by two or three persons there are hundreds of pansies.) They seem to like the official atmosphere, doubtless in being so high and dry it suits them ; at all events they adapt themselves to it with less fuss than almost any other flower. And certainly they could teach individuality to most of our worthy bureaucrats, who have a way of coming up, they, exactly like each other. Pansies from the same parent root naturally look alike, but if you really scan their features there is not the least resemblance between families. I have been living principally in their fellow- ship for several days and I quite feel that my knowledge of human nature is extended. There never was such variety of tempera- ment in any community ; to describe it would be to write a list of all the adjectives yet invented to bear upon character, a tedious task. It is positively a relief after 52 The Crow's-Nest the slight monotony of a society in which everybody is paid by the Queen, to meet persons like pansies, who are n't paid by anybody, and who express themselves, in consequence, with the utmost facility and freedom. (Thalia, who is the wife of the Head of a Department, here interrupted me to ask what I could possibly mean.) Oh there is no charm like spontaneity, in idea, behaviour, or looks. The Dodos of Lon- don society triumph by it, while self-con- scious people of vast intellectual resources are considered frumps. I imparted all this to Thalia, and she agreed with me. You see these things in a pansy, and a great deal more station in life, religious convictions almost but try to focus your impression, try to analyze the blooming countenance that looks up into yours, and the result is fugitive and annoying. Not a feature will bear inspection ; instantly they vanish, magically, as if ashamed of the like- ness you look for, and leave you contem- plating just a flower, with petals. You have The Crow's-Nest 53 noticed that in a pansy. It is better, if you wish to enjoy yourself among them, to take them with a light and passing regard, and privately add them to the agreeable things of life that will not bear looking into. I here asked Thalia if she thought they did better from seeds or from roots, and she said she did n't know. One often hears the German language complimented on its pretty name for pan- sies, Stiefmiitterchen, but it is very indiscrim- inating. They are by no means all little stepmothers ; some of them wear beards and I wish they would n't, for a beard is a loathly thing in nature or on men. Also the personation that goes on among them is really reprehensible ; one can find pansy photographs of any number of people. One irascible and impossible old retired colonel in England is always appearing, to my great satisfaction and delight. The original would be so vastly annoyed to know how often he comes out to see me here, and how amiable and interesting I find him, for we are not good friends, and I am 54 The Crow's-Nest sure he would not dream of calling in the flesh. It is an old story among us, but I was surprised to find Atma, too, impressed with this likeness to the human family. I asked him the other day why some pansies were so big and others so little. He con- sidered for a moment and then he said with the smiling benevolence which we extend to the intelligence of the young, " Like people they come some are born to be large and some to be small. As Sropo and Masuddi." Atma is really the interpreter of this garden. Thalia again interrupted me to ask why it was not possible this season, when purple was so popular, to find in the shops any- thing as royal as the colour a certain pansy was wearing. I said the reason was prob- ably lost in science, but she immediately supplied it herself, as I have noticed my sex is prone to do in searching for general explanations. " Of course," she said, " one must remember that they grow their own clothes. If we could only do that ! The repose of being quite certain that nobody else had your pattern ! " The Crow's-Nest 55 " They would take too long," I objected. " This poor thing has spent three-quar- ters of her life making her frock, and now she can only wear it for about three days." But Thalia seemed pleased with the idea. " Think how original I could make my gowns in Lady Tbermidore" she said pen- sively. " And you would perish with your design ! " I exclaimed. " No," she cried luminously, " I should reappear in another character ! " I have often noticed how radical is the effect of play-acting upon the human mind. Your play-actress throws herself naturally into every character she meets. I could see that it was giving Thalia hardly any trouble to transform herself into a pansy. We went back to the chairs and sat down, but not for long. Consulting her watch, my friend announced that she must be off, she was going to lunch at Delia's. " At Delia's ! " I remarked. " How people are swallowed up in their houses, to be sure ! 5 6 The Crow's-Nest You would be more polite to say { at Delia.' It 's bad habit, this living in houses." " I think," she responded, " that you are losing your social graces. I had quantities of things to tell you, and I am taking them away untold. The garden is too vague a place to receive in. However, never mind, I will try to come again. Your flowers are charming, but it has not been what I call a satisfactory visit. I hope I have n't bored you." " How can you say so ! " I cried ; " I have enjoyed it immensely," and I tucked her affectionately into her rickshaw and sped her on her way. When she had well started I remembered something, and ran after her. " Well ? " she demanded, all interest and curiosity. " It was only to ask you," I said breath- lessly, " if you had noticed what a large number of pansies look like Mr. Asquith ? " CHAPTER VI IT is a dull and serious day. As my family declare that I have become a mere barometer of my former self, this will perhaps be, but I am not certain, a dull and serious chapter. There are no clouds, there is only a prevailing opaqueness, which shuts down just beyond the nearest ranges, letting through an un- pleasant general light that makes the place look like a bad, hard, lumpish study in oils. The stocks, which have come out very ele- gantly since last week, have a disappointed air and the pansies are positively lugubrious. Only the tall field-daisies and the snap- dragons seem not to mind. They plainly preach and as plainly practise the philosophy of flowers taking what they can get in the hope of better things. Like most philoso- phers in a small way, however, they are not over-distressed with sensibility on their own 58 The Crow's-Nest part, and I cannot see why they should take it upon themselves to cheer up any of the rest of us. I have asked Sropo whether it is going to rain. "Mistress," he replied, "how should I know ? " " Worthy one," said I, " you have lived in these parts for twenty years. What manner of owl are you that to you it does not appear whether or not it will rain ? " " Mistress," quoth he, with his throaty chuckle, " the rajah-folk themselves do not know this thing." I do not think, myself, that we shall have anything so pleasant as rain. The day is too dispirited for weeping ; it will perform its appointed task and go to bed. I have not in months encountered a circumstance, an associate or a prescription so lowering as the present morning. Coming out as usual, quite prepared to be agreeable, it has given me the cold shoulder and the sulky nod. For two pins I would go back into the house and take every flower I could gather with me. Cometh the postman, advancing down the The Crow's-Nest 59 drive. Always an interest attaches to the postman ; he is like to-morrow, you never know what he may bring, but he loses half his charm and all his dignity when deprived of his rat-tat-tat. Government makes up for it to some extent by dressing him in a red flannel coat with a leather belt and bare legs, but he can never acquire his proper and legitimate warning for the simple reason that the houses of this country have neither knockers nor bells. How sharply different are the ways in which people account for themselves in this world ! It is one of the poignancies of life. This Punjabi postman earns his living by putting one foot before another it conies to that in the diverse interests of the community, and you never saw anybody look more profoundly bored with other people's affairs. I earn mine or would if it were not for Tiglath-Pileser by looking carefully in the back of my head for foolish things to write about a garden. It is a method so much pleasanter that my compassion for the postman has a twinge of scruple in it for my lighter lot. That I had 60 The Crow's-Nest nothing in the world to do with the arrange- ment does not somehow make me quite happy about it the fact is that to be logi- cal is not always to be happy. I can only hope that if the postman and I meet again in the progress of eternity I shall find him composing poems. He has brought nothing to speak of, only the daily newspaper published at Lahore. That in itself is sufficiently curious, to live in a place where the morning paper is published at Lahore. Still stranger, to the western mind, may be the thought of a journal produced in Allahabad. Allahabad, as a centre of journalistic enterprise, has the glamour of comic opera. Yet Allahabad has its newspaper, and they print it very nicely too. However, it would be ridiculous to write an essay upon Indian journalism merely because a Punjabi postman has brought in a newspaper. That a day like this should sound another minor note is almost a thing to cry out against, yet it is on such days that they rise and swell in a perfect diapason of misery. The Crow's-Nest 61 When the sun withdraws itself from the human consciousness things come up, I suppose, from underneath. In the gayety of yesterday perhaps I should not have seen the coolie with the charcoal ; he would have passed naturally among the leaf-shadows, a thing to be taken for granted. To-day he hurts. His bag of charcoal is deplorably heavy ; he bends forward under it so far that he has to lift his head to see beyond him, and every muscle strains and glistens to carry it. His gait under his load is slow and uncertain and tentative, and I know it has brought him to the wrong house; we are supplied for months with charcoal. He has stopped to ask, and I find that he has come quite a mile out of his way to this mistake. With patience and submis- sion when I explained, he shifted his load and turned from me toward the deferred re- lief, the further limit. The human beast of burden is surely the summing up of pathos free and enviable are all others compared with him. So heavy a toil fills one with righteous anger against the inventor, so 62 The Crow's-Nest primitive a task humiliates one for the race. Niggardly, niggardly is the heritage of Adam's sons. I must see that man straighten his back. . . . There is no harm done ; you cannot have too much charcoal. One questions, on such a day, whether it is quite worth while, this attempt by the as- sistance of nature to live a little longer. I myself am almost convinced that persons afflicted with the gift of sympathy would be wise to perish easily and soon, and should be willing to do so, instead of throwing themselves in the lap of the mother of us all beseeching a few more years and promis- ing to be very, very good and try to deserve them. Why protract, at the expense of up- setting all your habits and customs, an acute sense of undeserved superiority to coolies and postmen ; why by taking infinite pains and indefinite air prolong existence based on such a distressing perception, when by going on with almost any good prescription you are pretty certain reasonably soon to take your comfortable place in the only democ- racy which, so far as we know, is a practical The Crow's-Nest 63 working success ? For there is neither class nor competition nor capital, nor any kind of advantage in the grave whither thou goest, but one indisputable dead level of condition and experience, with peace and freedom from the curse of evolution ; not even the fittest survive. Comfortable persons like, oh several I could mention, who have no way of walking with another postman's legs or bending with another coolie's back and who cannot under- stand why this should be called a distressful world which provides them regularly with tea and muffins, should go on naturally, to the end. They have their indifferent pro- totypes among the vegetables ; though I have noticed that most flowers look with the eye of compassion upon life. They follow the simple lines upon which they were created, by which to live and not to observe is the chief end of man ; there are a great many of them, thousands, in their pro- tective skins all over the world; and they are only interesting of course to each other. Nevertheless no one should speak slight- 64 The CrowVNest ingly of them, for we all number them among our friends and relations, and con- stantly go and stay with them. Besides, I did not set out to be disagreeable at any- body's expense. It was only borne in upon me that for us, the unhappy minority who have two sets of nerves, one for our own use and one at the disposal of every human failure by the wayside, the world is not likely to become a pleasanter place the longer one stays in it. If continual dropping will wear away a stone, continual rubbing will wear away a skin, and happy is he or she, after sixty or seventy years' contact with the mis- ery of life, who arrives at the grave with a whole one. I do not deny that there are poultices. One of them is a thing Tiglath-Pileser sometimes says that it is stupid to talk about the aggregate of human woe, since all the pain as well as all the pleasure of the world is summed up in the individual and limited by him. A battle is really no more than the killing of a soldier, a famine is comprised in a death by starvation. The The CrowVNest 65 unit of experience refuses to merge in the mass ; you cannot multiply beyond one. I do not think much of this emollient, but such as it is I will apply it if another coolie comes in with charcoal. Seriously speaking, when your time comes I hope this makes nobody uncomfortable, but I never can understand why one should shirk the subject instead of regarding it with the interest and curiosity it naturally inspires when your time goes, rather, and leaves you confronted with that vast eter- nity so full of unimaginably agreeable pos- sibilities, which of all the parts and members that make up you, shall you be most sorry to relinquish ? I do not refer to obscure organs such as the heart and lungs, which you never notice except when they are giv- ing trouble, but the willing agents by which you keep in touch with the world. I am very fond of them all, I am so accustomed to their ways and they know so exactly what I like ; I could not dismiss any of them without regret, but I find degrees in the distressful anticipation. One's eyes, for 5 66 The Crow's-Nest instance, have given one more and keener pleasure certainly, than any other organ ; but I could close my eyes. One's ears have registered all the voices one loves, and the sound of rain and the wind among the pines, hut there is such a din in this world besides that very gladly I could close my ears. One's feet have been most willing servitors, but one sees so little of them would you recognize a photograph of your own foot ? For me it is the most grievous thing to think that one will be obliged to abandon one's hands. One's hands are! more than servants, they are friends. One holds them in respect and admiration and personal affec- tion, and in the end is not what we write upon them the very summing-up of ourselves ? And from the first spoon they carry to our infant lips to the adult irritation they work off by tapping on the table how much they have done for one ! Above all things I shall miss my hands if I have to do without them, and I shall be profoundly resentful, though I may not show it, when somebody else takes the liberty of folding them for me. The Crow's-Nest 67 Thisbe, coming out to say that she has neuralgia, and will I ever come in to tea, demands to know what I have written there. I shall not tell Thisbe ; it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples. Moreover, she would report it to Tiglath- Pileser, and they would take measures ; I should be lucky to get off with an iron tonic. " Nothing about you, Thisbe." But in order to ascertain what I really have said about her, she has a hatred of publicity and I have to be very careful, she goes privily when I am immersed in tea, and possesses herself of the whole. " But you are not going to die," she exclaimed with dismay and disapproval. "We have made quite other arrangements. You can't possibly die, now." " Not immediately, in so far as I am aware," I respond. " But there is no harm in looking forward to it a little, on a day like this." CHAPTER VI I THERE are many methods of gardening. I have known peo- ple who were not content with anything but actually digging and weeding, grubbing up the curly wet worms and the tough roots, and bending their own backs over bulbs and seedlings. That is the thorough method, and though it is a little like sweeping and scrubbing out yourself the rooms your guests are to occu- py, and I suppose that would be a pleas- ure to some people, it is the method that commands the most respect. Compared with it I feel that I cannot ask respect for mine ; I must be content with admiration. My gardening is done entirely with scissors, scissors and discretion, both easy to use. With scissors and discretion I walk about my garden, snipping off the flowers that are over. Masuddi comes behind, holding my The Crow's-Nest 69 umbrella, Sropo with a basket picks up the devoted heads. I thus ignore causes and deal directly with results, much the simplest and quickest way when life is complicated by its manifold presentations and the cares of a family. And the results are wonderful, I can heartily recommend this method of gardening to any one who wants to compass the most charming effect with the least exertion. A plant is only a big bouquet, and what bouquet does not instantly redouble its beauty when you take away the one or two flowers that have withered in it? A faded flower is too sad a comment upon life to be allowed to remain even on its parent stem, besides being detrimental and untidy like a torn petticoat. There should be nothing but joy in the garden, joy and fresh- ness and coquetry, and the subtlest, loveliest suggestion of art ; anon by the diligent application of scissors and discretion I leave a flood of these things behind me every day. No doubt it is regrettable that the withered rags in Sropo's basket represent the joy and coquetry of yesterday ; this is the lesson of yo The Crow's-Nest life, however, and one cannot take account of everything. Also you lay yourself open to the charge of being a mere lady's-maid to your garden ; but worse things than that are said about nearly everybody. Among the pansies I confess I feel rather an executioner with my scissors, though there a rigorous policy most rewards me. Nothing is so slatternly as a pansy bed where some of the family are just coming out into the world, and others are beginning to weary of it and others are going shamelessly to seed. My pansies must all be properly coiffured and fit to appear in society ; when they be- gin to pull shawls over their heads and take despondent views I remove them. More- over, under this unremitting discipline, they will go on and on, I shall have four months of pansies ; it is in every way the right thing to do. And yet it is a remorseless business, turn- ing up the little faces to see if they have lived long enough to be ready for the guillo- tine. They look straight at you, and some of them shrink and some beseech, and some The Crow's-Nest 7 i are mutely resigned. I am no stern Atro- pos, I am weak before the fate I bring and often let it go ; and if by mistake I snip off a bud I hurry on and try to forget it. Has the divinity who lays us low also, I wonder, his moments of compunction does he ever hold his hand and say " One more day " ? Or does he snip here and there at random "just choosing so" ? Oh Sete- bos, Setebos, and Setebos, I do not like your role, I am glad I am not an omnipotent Whim ; I hope my garden thinks better of me than that. The prevailing expression among pansies, by the way, is that of appre- hension ; I hope this is a botanical fact and not confined to my pansies. Nothing is more annoying in a small way in this world than to see your tastes reflected in those whom you consider inferior to your- self. You would rather not share anything with such persons, even a preference. I have to submit to this vexation. There are others hereabouts, whom I have got into the habit of looking down upon, who have ex- actly my idea of gardening. I hasten to say 72 The CrowVNest that they are not people in the ordinary sense of the term. Bold, indeed, would be the non-official worm, in this bureaucratic stronghold, who should point to any gazetted creature about him and say " That is a lesser thing than I." Society would smile and decline to be deceived. For this is an or- dered Olympus, the gods go in to dinner by Regulation, their rank and pay is published in Kalends which anybody may buy, and the senior among them are diligently wor- shipped by the junior as " brass hats." No, it would certainly not be for the Tiglath- Pilesers who never sent back a parcel to the draper's tied up in red tape in their lives, not having a yard of it in the house for any purpose, to give themselves airs over per- sons who use it every day. But even a non-official may look down upon a monkey. My offensive imitators are monkeys. I would not object if they followed my example in their own jungle garden, but they come and do it in mine. Be sure I never catch them at it. When I am operating there myself they often leap crashing into The CrowVNest 73 the rhododendrons on the khud and sit among the branches watching me, whole troops of them, but at a stone or a compli- ment they are off, bounding with childish unintelligible curses down the khud. It is in the early dawn before any one is awake or about, that they come with freedom and familiarity to walk where I walk and do as I do. I can perfectly fancy them mincing along in impertinent caricature I do not mince holding up their tails with one hand and with the other catching and clawing hap- hazard at the flowers as they imagine I do. Two hours later, when I come out to mourn and storm over the withering fragments on the drive not a monkey vexes the horizon. And they do what some people think worse than this. They come and tear Tiglath- Pileser's carefully bound grafts from their adopted stems, and the young shoots from his little new apple-trees which have trav- elled all the way from England to live here with us and share our limitations and our shelf. These were only planted in February, and one of them, a beginner not three feet 74 The Crow's-Nest high, had six of its very own apples on it yesterday. It is not a thing that happens often, apples as soon as that, and six ; and Simla is a place where there is so little going on that we were more excited about them, perhaps, than you would be at home. They were small apples but they had to grow, and they were growing yesterday. This morn- ing while we still dreamed of our apples, a grey langur with a black face ate the whole crop at a sitting. So now we can neither bake them nor boil them nor measure them for publication. They have disappeared in a grey langur with a black face, and though I heartily hope they will inconvenience him I have very little expectation of it ; the punitive laws of nature matter little to monkeys. The jungle is full of wild fruit trees newly burgeoned, but the monkeys prefer the cul- tivated varieties, they have found out the improved flavour even in the young leaves. They find out everything, not merely for the purposes of honest burglary, but for the cynical satisfaction of tearing it to pieces. The Crow's-Nest 75 Thus, for one graft that a monkey devours, he pulls three out of their bandages and casts them on the ground, where they are of no further use to either men or monkeys. What you plant with infinite pains they pull up by the roots. " These people have done something; let us undo it," is the one thought they ever think, which shows, I suppose, that if there are politics among them they govern strictly on party lines. It makes one very ill-disposed toward them. A monkey has entered the pantry and bolted with a jam- pot even while my back was turned giving out the sugar to make more jam. A mon- key has come in at the verandah door and abstracted all the bread and butter for after- noon tea, while his accomplice sat upon the paling to gibber " Cave ! " This was legiti- mate larceny, and we put up with it. Thisbe said the poor monkey looked hungry, and she would be content with Madeira cake, adding, out of the depths of her experience, that it was a pity the monkey that took the jam hadn't taken the bread and butter too, they went so well together. We can be 7 6 The Crow's-Nest indulgent to an entirely empty monkey ; we have enough in common with him to under- stand his behaviour, and his villainous pirate's descent upon us is always good comedy. But when he picks the slates off the roof of your dwelling, when he privily enters your husband's dressing-room and abstracts the razor and strop Tiglath-Pileser, who would not lend his to a seraph ! what kind of patience is there which would be equal to the demand ? Monkeys do not throw stones and break windows ; one wishes they would, since that would bring them within the cog- nizance of the police and it might then be possible to deal with them. A monkey would hate solitary confinement above all things. Often in a troupe bounding from tree to tree overhead across the Mall there will be one with a collar and a bit of rope or chain hanging to it, escaped from capture and free again to range with his fellows the limit- less lunatic asylum the good God has en- dowed for him in the jungle. Once he became amenable to that sort of punishment he would forsake for ever, I am sure, the haunts The Crow's-Nest 77 of men ; but he is not intelligent enough, or perhaps he is too intelligent. There are so many of them. A monkey census is obviously impossible, but I believe if it could be taken it would show that every resident official had at least one simian coun- terpart, a statement which I hope will not give offence on either side. An old fakir on the top of Jakko keeps a kind of retreat for monkeys, a monastery with the most elastic rules, where indeed the domestic rela- tions are rather encouraged than forbidden. He is their ghostly father, though responsi- bility for their morals seems to sit upon him lightly ; he will call them out of the jungle for you in hundreds to be fed. Then you give him four annas and come away. A pious Hindoo, with sins to expiate, would doubtless give more, and the fakir would profess to spend it in grain for the monkeys. Here, by the way, we have an explanation of the incorrigibility of monkeys which has not hitherto occurred to ethnographers : they consume all the sins of the pious Hindoos. So they thrive and multiply and gambol all 78 The CrowVNest over this town of Simla, its house-tops and shop-fronts, its gardens and its public places, with none to make them afraid. There are two small brown ones sitting on the paling looking at me at this moment, knowing per- fectly well that I will never interrupt the flow of my ideas to get up and chase them away. Of course we try to make Atma responsi- ble, and he declares that he persecutes them without ceasing, but we know better. He claps his hands at them and shouts, " Go, brother ! " and that is all he does. And brother goes, to the next convenient branch. We have given Atma catapults and he tells us that he uses them every morning before our honours are awake, but we are certain that he hangs them on a nail. And indeed I do not think monkeys would be very shy of a house defended by mere catapults. Atma, however, has taken this business of Tiglath- Pileser's fruit-trees seriously. He had care- fully protected every tree and graft with thorns, but the monkeys slid their hands in underneath, and reached up, and tore The Crow's-Nest 79 down the young shoots with great strips of the tender bark as well. He was angry at last, was Atma, and he asked for a gun. " You would kill a monkey ? " we ex- claimed, " you would break your one com- mandment ? " and Atma cast down his eyes. "They are budmash" said he (a wicked and perverse generation), "and they eat the work of we people. Why should they not be killed?" " No," said the sahib, " you are a good churchman" or words to that effect " I know that you will not kill a monkey." And we both looked at him piercingly. " Nevertheless," said Atma, cheerfully and shamelessly recanting, " it would be well that a gun should be. A gun is a noise- making thing. These ^#W