The crow's-nest

by Sara Jeannette Duncan

Chapter XVIII

WE have entered upon the period of our great glory and content; it is second summer in these hills, with just a crisp hint of autumn coming. There is nothing left of the rains but their benediction; all day long the sun draws the scent out of the deodars and makes false promises to the garden, where they believe it is spring. The field-daisies and the hollyhocks and the mignonette are all in second bloom and the broom down the khud has kindled up again. The person who is really puzzled is the lilac. We have a lilac bush. I assure you it is not everybody who can say so in the town of Simla; the lilac is most capricious about where she will stay and where she won’t stay. We have only one; all her children either die young or grow up dwarfs. However, after blooming in the most delicious and heartbreaking manner in April, fainting through June and going quite distracted in the rains, the lilac now finds new sap in her veins and the temptation assails her to flower regardless of the calendar. Yet she doesn’t, poor dear, quite know how; something is lacking to the consummation of April, and the fictitious joy she grasps at comes out in ragged little bunches that stick straight up at the end of the wood of the topmost branches. Nevertheless it is pure lilac, enough for a button-hole, and matter to boast of, lilac in October.

For all these reasons I was perfectly happy this morning until twenty minutes past ten o’clock. Atma and I had been transplanting some cactus dahlias to fill up an empty place. It is a liberty I wouldn’t have taken at this time of year, but Atma says that he can deceive the dahlias. “By giving much water,” he explains, “they will take no notice,” and he has been craftily setting them down in little ponds. I had a dispute with him about a plant, which he declared was a lily. To settle the matter, as soon as my back was turned, he dug it up, and triumphantly sought me. “Behold,” said he, “it has an onion.” He was distressed to contradict me, but behold it had an onion. The connection between an onion and a lily was simpler perhaps to Atma than it would be to many people; but I conceded it. Then came a pedlar of apples from a neighbouring garden. We shall have apples of our own in time, but our neighbour down the khud thought of it three or four years before we did, and there is no particular reason to wait. Our neighbour’s sturdy retailer squatted discouraged on his haunches before me. His brown muscles stood out in cords on his arms and legs, his face was anxious and simple like a child’s. “If your honour will listen,” said he, “half over Simla I have carried this burden of apples, and it is no lighter. My words are good and I go always to the verandah, but the sahib-folk will not buy.”

“And is that,” said I, eyeing the fruit, “a strange thing, worthy one?”

He picked up an apple and held it disparagingly, at arm’s-length, in front of him. “Certainly they are going rotten,” said he simply. “And the more they rot the louder is the anger of the mistress when I carry them back. Your honour will listen—if apples rot is it the fault of the servant? No,” he answered himself with solid conviction, “it is the fault of God.”

He sat in the sun content—content to sit and talk of his grievance with his load on the ground. I smiled at his dilemma, and he smiled back; but gravity quickly overtook him, it was a serious matter.

“Seven days ago, when they were sound,” he went on, “the gardener himself took them and sold many. Now he gives me the command, and because I do not sell there is talk of a donkey.”

“Truly you are no donkey, worthy one,” said I soothingly. “All the donkeys are employed by the washermen to carry home the clothes. You are a large, fine, useful Pahari. What is the price of the apples? Some of them are good.”

“It is true talk that the mistress said ten annas a seer,” he replied eagerly, “but if your honour wishes to pay eight annas I will say that your honour, seeing the rottenness, would give no more.”

I would not profit by the rottenness since it did not concern me, so he picked out of his best for me with exclamations, “Lo, how it is red!” “Listen, this one will be a honey-wallah!” and almost more polishing than I could bear. The cloud departed from his honest face, it was that I had paid for; and when Tiglath-Pileser passing by said that I had been imposed upon I was indignant. He, the master, would not have an apple though they are really very good, and neither do I feel so disposed; they must be made into a pudding. We talked for a little while of the annoyance of reaching that critical time of life when one looks askance at a casual apple. In early youth it is a trifle to be appropriated at any hour; between the ages of ten and fourteen it is preferable the last thing before going to bed. After that ensues a period of indifference, full of the conviction that there are things in the world more interesting than apples; and by the time one again realizes that there is nothing half so good, circumstances have changed so that it is most difficult to decide when to eat them. A raw apple in the American fashion before breakfast is admitted by the mass of mankind to have a too discouraging effect upon everything else, and all will grant that it is impossible to do justice to its flavour, impossible to cope with it in any way, after a meal. It is not elusive—like the grape or the lychee; it is far too much on the spot. There remains the impromptu occasion, but you have long since come to regard with horror anything “between meals.” A day arrives when the fact stares you in the face that there is no time at which to eat an apple. Tiglath-Pileser and I considered it together this morning; but we were philosophic, we didn’t mind, we remembered that up to threescore years and ten there would probably always be somebody to bake them for us and were happy, nevertheless. Then Tryphena came and stayed an hour, and now I am not so happy as I was.