The crow's-nest

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

We must acknowledge our compensations. Over there they certainly get their leaf-mould cheaper than fourpence a basket, but they have nobody to make things grow in it under a dollar a day. Here Atma, the invaluable Atma, labours for ten rupees a month—about fourteen shillings—and cooks his own meal cakes. The man who works for a dollar a day does it in the earnest hope, if we are to believe his later biographer, of a place in ward politics and the easier situation of a local boss. It would be hard to infect Atma with such vulgar ambitions. He is so lately from the hands of his Creator that he has not even yet conceived the idea of accumulation. The other day I told him that he might take a quantity of seed and surplus plants, and sell them, and he would not. “I, how shall I sell?” he said, “I am a gardener. This thing is done by Johnson-sahib,” and he looked at me with amusement. I called him by a foolish name and told him that he should surely sell, and get money; but he shook his head still smiling. “By your honour’s favour,” he said, “month by month I find ten rupees. From this there is food twice a day and clothes, and two or three rupees to go by the hand of an old man who comes from my people. It is enough. What more?” I mentioned the future. “Old?” he cried, “God knows if I will be old. At this time I am a work-doing wallah. When I am old and your honours are gone to Belaat,[2] I also will go, and live with my people.”

“And they will, without doubt, give you food and clothes?” I asked.

“According as there is,” he said, “without doubt they will give it,” and went on with his work.

Here, if you like, was a person of short views and unvexed philosophy. A lecture upon the importance of copper coins trembled on my lips, but I held it back. A base aim is a poor exchange for a lesson in content, and I held it back, wondering whether my servant might not be better off than I, in all that he could do without.

Alas for the poor people who have to pay at the rate of a dollar a day and mind their own business into the bargain! Never can they know one of the greatest pleasures of life, to be served by a serving people. There is a spark of patriarchal joy, long extinct west of Suez, in the simple old interpretation which still holds here, of the relation of master and servant, scolding and praise, favour and wrath; a lifelong wage and occasionally a little medicine are still the portion of the servant-folk, accepted as a matter of course, and “Thou wilt not hear orders?” ever a serious reproach. To all of us Outlanders of the East, it is one of the consolations of exile, and to some of us a keen and constant pleasure to be the centre and source of prosperity for these others, a simple, graphic, pressing opportunity to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. I, personally, like them for themselves—who could help liking Atma?—and of persons to whom they do not at all appeal I have my own opinion. It is the difference of race, no doubt, which makes this relation possible and enjoyable, the difference, and what we are accustomed to consider the superiority, of ours. At home all generous minds are somewhat tormented by a sense of the unfairness of the menial brand, and in the attitude of the menial mind there is nothing to modify that impression.

Servants in this place are regarded as luxuries, and taxed. So much you pay per capita, and whether the capita belongs to a body entirely in your employment, or to one which only serves you in common with several other people, it doesn’t matter; all the same you pay. Delia and I share a dhurjee, or sewing man, for example, and we are both chargeable for him. This I never could reconcile with my sense of justice and of arithmetic,—that the poll-tax of a whole man should be paid on half a tailor; but there is no satisfaction to be got out of Tiglath-Pileser. Some people have more respect for the law than it really deserves. I had the pleasure, however, of bringing him to a sense of his responsibilities when the tax-paper came in, from which he learned that no less than fifteen heads of families looked to him to be their providence. Under the weight of this communication he turned quite pale, and sat down hastily upon the nearest self-sustaining object, which happened to be the fender. But as a matter of fact he liked the idea. Every Englishman does, and this is why a certain measure of success attends not only his domestic but his general experiments in governing the East. He loves the service of an idea, and nothing flatters him so truly as his conception of all that he has to do.

The ear sharpens if its owner lives in the garden. It is no longer muffled by the four walls of a house, and remote sounds visit it, bringing with them a meaning which somehow they never have indoors, even when they penetrate there. Up here they principally make one aware of the silence, which is such a valuable function of sounds. I should like to write a chapter about the quiet of Simla, but of course if one began like that one would never finish. It is our vast solace, our great advantage; we live without noise. The great ranges forbid it; the only thing they will listen to is a salute from the big gun, and they pass that from one to another, uncertain that is not an insult. And the quenching comment in the silence that follows!

It is tremendous, invincible, taken up and rewritten in the lines of all the hills. It stands always before our little colony, with a solemn finger up, so that a cheer from the cricket ground is a pathetic thing, and the sound of the Roy-Regent’s carriage wheels awakens memories of Piccadilly. We are far withdrawn and very high up, fifty-six miles down to the level, and then it is only empty India—and the stillness lies upon us and about us and up and down the khuds, almost palpable and so morne, but with the sweetest melancholy. Consider, you of London and New York, what it must be to live on one mountain-side and hear a crow caw across the valley, on the other. Of course we are a Secretariat people; we have no factory whistles.

This afternoon, however, I hear an unlicensed sound. It is the sound of an infant giving tongue, and it comes from the quarters. Now there ought not to be a baby in the quarters; it is against all orders. No form of domestic ménage is permitted there; the place is supposed to be a monastery, and the servants to house their women-folk elsewhere. The sound is as persistent as it is unwarrantable; it is not only a breach of custom, but displeasing. How am I to reckon with it? I may send for Dumboo and complain. In that case the noise will cease at once; they will give opium to the child, which will injure its digestion, and in the future, as a grown-up person, it will enjoy life less because I could not put up with its crying as an infant. I can report the matter to Tiglath-Pileser, which would mean an end to the baby, not illegally, by banishment. But is it so easy? One approves, of course, of all measures to discourage them about the premises, but when in spite of rules and regulations a baby has found its way in, and is already lamenting its worldly prospects at the top of its voice, in honest confidence that at least the roof over its head will be permanent, a complication arises. I cannot dislodge such a one. Better deafness and complicity.

Far down the khud-side an Imperial bugle. Abroad the spaces the mountains stand in, and purple valleys deepening. Among the deodars a whisper, not of scandal, believe me. A mere announcement that the day is done. On the other side of the hill a pony trotting, farther and fainter receding, but at the farthest and faintest it is plain that he goes short in front. From the bazaar a temple bell, with the tongue of an alien religion....