The week has brought me—and how can I be too grateful—a new and personal feeling 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 beginning, 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
THERE 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 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, probably very little pay, but the vast blue freedom 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 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 intelligently, 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 referring 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, doing 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 of this place; as a matter of feet his relation to it is that of tutelary deity and real proprietor. 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 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; everybody 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 deserving it; but Tiglath-Pileser says that profane persons, knowing that he could not 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?”
“Nā,” 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.”