“To grow a little catholic,” writes Stevenson, “is the compensation of years.” Dear shade, is it so? In the spiritual outlook, perhaps, in the moral retrospect,—but in matters of taste, in likes and dislikes? You who wrote nothing lightly must have proved this dispensation, poorer spirits can only wish it more general. I remember youth as curious and enterprising, hospitable to everything, and I begin to find the middle years jealously content with what they have. Who, when he has reached the age of all the world, looks with instinctive favour upon anything new? An acquaintance, who may create the common debt of friendship; you are long since heavily involved. An author, who may insist upon intimately engaging your intelligence,—a thing you feel, after a time, to be a liberty in a new-comer. Or even a flower, offering another sentiment to the little store that holds some pain already. Now this godetia. I suppose it argues a depth of ignorance, but until Mr. Johnson recommended it to me in the spring, I had never heard of godetia. Mr. Johnson is the source of seeds and bulbs for Simla, we all go to him; but I, for one, always come away a little ruffled by his habit of referring to everything by its Latin name, and plainly showing that his respect for you depends upon your understanding him. I have wished to preserve Mr. Johnson’s respect, and things have come up afterward that I did not think I had ordered. However, this is by the way. Mr. Johnson assured me that godetia had a fine fleshy flower of variegated colours, would be an abundant bloomer, and with reasonable care should make a good appearance. I planted it with misgivings, and watched its advent with aloofness, I knew I shouldn’t recognize it, and I didn’t. I had never seen it before, I very nearly said so; and at my time of life, with so many old claims pressing, I could not attempt a new affection. And I have taken the present opportunity, when Atma’s back is turned, and pulled it all up. Besides it may have been fleshy, but it wasn’t pretty, and the slugs ate it till its appearance was disgraceful.
I suppose our love of flowers is impregnated with our love of life and our immense appreciation of each other. We hand our characteristics up to God to figure in; we look for them in animals with delight and laughter, and it is even our pleasure to find them out here in the garden. Who cares much for lupins, for example; they are dull fellows, they have no faces; yet who does not care for every flower with a heart and eyes, that gives back your glance to you and holds up its head bravely to any day’s luck, as you would like to do.
But it is growing late. I can still see a splendid crimson cactus glooming at me from his tub in the verandah; the rest of the garden has drawn away into the twilight. Only the honeysuckle, that nobody notices when the sun is bright and the flowers all talk at once, sends out a timid sweetness to the night and murmurs, “I am here.” If I might have had a seam to do, it would have been finished; but instead there has been this vexatious chapter, which only announces, when all is said and done, that another human being has spent a day in the garden. I intended to write about the applied affections.
But it is too late even for the misapplied affections, generally thought, I believe, the more interesting presentment. Happy Thisbe on the verandah, conscious of another bud to her tapestry, glances at the fading west and makes ready to put all away. I will lay down my pen, as she does her needle, and gather up my sheets and scraps, as she does her silks and wools; and humbly, if I can get no one else to do it for me, carry my poor pattern into the house.
Chapter X
THE Princess has a hill almost entirely to herself. She lives there in a castle almost entirely made of stone, with turrets and battlements. Her affectionate subjects cluster about her feet in domiciles walled with mud and principally roofed with kerosene tins, but they cheerfully acknowledge this to be right and proper, and all they can pay for. One of the many advantages of being a princess is that you never have to put down anything for house-rent; there is always a castle waiting for you and a tax-payer happy to paper it. The world will not allow that it is responsible to a beggar for a crust; but it is delighted to admit that it owes every princess a castle. It is a curious world; but it is quite right, for princesses are to be encouraged and beggars aren’t.
The Princess is married to the Roy-Regent, who puts his initial upon Resolutions and writes every week to the Secretary of State; but it is the Princess who is generally “at home,” and certainly the Princess who matters. The Roy-Regent may induce his Government to make Resolutions; the Princess could persuade it, I am sure, to break them—if she wanted to. Unfortunately we are not permitted to see that comedy, which would be adorable. She does not want to. She is not what you would call a political princess; I have no doubt she has too much else to do. To begin with, only to begin with, she has to go on being beautiful and kind and unruffled; she has to keep the laughter in her eyes and the gentleness in her heart; she has to be witty without being cynical, and initiated without being hard. She has to see through all our little dodges to win her favour and not entirely despise us, and to accept our rather dull and very daily homage without getting sick and tired of us. To say nothing of the Roy-Regent and the babies who have some claims, I suppose, though we are apt to talk about the Princess as if she were here solely to hold her Majesty’s vice-Drawing-rooms and live up to a public ideal. All the virtues, in short, which the rest of us put on of a Sunday, the Princess must wear every day; and that is why it is so difficult and often so tiresome to be a real princess.
Fortunately the Simla Princess is not expected to hold her commission for life. Her Majesty knew, I suppose, from her own royal experience, how it got on the nerves, and realized that if she required anything like that it would be impossible to get the right kind of people. So at the end of every four or five years the Roy-Regent goes home to his ordinary place in the Red Book burdened for life with a frontier policy, but never again compelled to drive out in the evenings attended by four cantering Sikhs, each Sikh much larger than himself and shaking a lance. He may go on to greater things, or he may simply return to the family estates; but in any case the Princess can put her crown away in a drawer and do things, if she likes, in the kitchen, which must be a great relief. Of course she can never quite forget that she has been a princess, in commission, once. The thought must have an ennobling effect ever after, and often interpose, as it were, between the word and the blow in domestic differences. For this reason alone, many of us would gladly undertake to find the necessary fortitude for the task; but it is not a thing you can get by merely applying for it.
To the state of the Princess belongs that quaint old-fashioned demonstration, the curtsey. The Princess curtseys to the Queen-Empress—how I should like to see her do it!—and we all curtsey to the Princess. This alone would make Simla a school for manners, now that you have to travel so far, unless you are by way of running in and out of Windsor Castle, to find the charming form in ordinary use. How admirable a point of personal contact lies in the curtsey—what deference rendered, what dignity due! “You are a Princess,” it says, “therefore I bend my knee. I am a Person, therefore I straighten it again,” and many things more graceful, more agreeable, more impertinent than that. Indeed, there is a very little that cannot be said in the lines and the sweep of a curtsey. To think there was a time when conversation was an art, and curtseying an accomplishment, is to hate our day of monosyllables and short cuts, of sentiments condensed, and opinions taken for granted. One wonders how we came to lose the curtsey, and how much more went with it, how we could ever let it go, to stand instead squarely on our two feet and nod our uncompromising heads, and say what we have to say. I suppose it is one of the things that are quite gone; we can never reaffect it, indeed our behaviour, considered as behaviour, is growing steadily worse. Already you may be asked, by a person whom you have never seen before, whether you prefer Ecclesiastics or Omar Khayyám, or how you would define the ego, or what you think of Mr. Le Gallienne—matters which require confidence, almost a curtain. We have lost the art of the gradual approach; presently we shall hustle each other like kinetic atoms. A kinetic atom, I understand, goes straight to the point.
We all love curtseying to the Princess therefore, partly because it is a lost art, and partly because it is a way in which we can say, without being fulsome or troublesome, how happy we are to see her. There is only one circumstance under which it is not entirely a privilege. That is when, dismounted, one meets her in one’s habit. Whether it is the long boots or the short skirt, or the uncompromising cut, I cannot say, but I always feel, performing a curtsey to the Princess in my habit, that I am in a false position. Every true woman loves to stalk about in her habit, and tap her heels with her riding crop; there is a shadow of the privileges of the other sex about it which is alluring, and which, as the costume is sanctioned, one can enjoy comfortably; but it is not arranged for curtseying, and there ought to be a dispensation permitting ladies wearing it to bow from the waist.