“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,” pronounced 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 reasonable, 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 entrusted with it. Never was task more willingly undertaken. With absorption they mixed the pigment and thewi-oil, squeezing 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 housemaid, a strapping treasure six feet in his stockings. I would like it better if all our servants were, but it is impossible to conceive Sropo doing up muslin frills—at least it is impossible to conceive the frills—and I could not ask people to eat entrées sent up by any friend of Masuddi’s. I admit 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, demanding, 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 engaging 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 barbarous 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 barefoot between them; though he, the male creature, would make shame of it now, preferring to speak of sticks and of obedience. 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, somehow, 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 fragmentary 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 Secretary to the Government of India who performs, nor any member of the choir invisible that sings hosannas over there to the Commander-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 circumstances 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 referring to the superior circles I moved in when I knew better days and went out to dinner. You may notice, however, that such persons 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 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 remains 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 impossible, either, that I may find the horticultural 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 expected 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 it—by an effort of the imagination—but only try, on a fine day out-of-doors, to rummage there. Your boasted brain is a perfect rag-bag, a waste-paper basket, a bran pie from which you draw at hazard an article value a penny-ha’penny. This is disappointing 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 because 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,