Ah! they hold me, even in imagination, the dear old peonies! Always they were the first, in a certain garden of early colonial fashion that I used to know in Canada, after the long hard winter was past, to push their red-green beginnings up into the shabby welcome of the month of March. We used to look for them under the wet black fallen leaves before a sign had come upon the apple-trees, before anything else stirred or spoke at all; and how tender is one’s grown-up affection for a thing which bound itself together like that with one’s childish delight in the first happy vibration of the spring! Here, after all these many springs and half across the world, here on my remote and lofty shelf where no one lives but Aryans and officials, I want them to come up again that way, and if they have not forgotten the joy of it perhaps I too shall remember. Atma having no objection, I will send to England for some peonies.
Everything is green except the forget-me-nots, they are very blue indeed in thick borders along both sides of the drive; sweet they look, like narrow streams reflecting the sky in the middle of the garden. Do not gather the forget-me-not, it is a foolish inert little nonentity in the hand, it has not even character enough for a button-hole, but in the bosom of its family it is delightful. Atma is very pleased with these borders; it is the first time he has had them so long and so gay. “How excellent this season,” says he in his own tongue, “are the giftie-noughts of we people.” I told you he was a man of parts; it is not easy to be a poet in another language.
Also, I perceive, there are periwinkles on the khud.
Chapter V
IT was an event this morning when Thalia came whisking along the Mall in her rickshaw and turned in here. The Mall, I should mention, is the only road in Simla that has a name. It is a deplorably inappropriate name, it makes you think of sedan-chairs and elderly beaux and other things that have never appeared upon the Himalayas, and it was doubtless given in derision, but it has stuck fast like many another poor old joke until at last people take it seriously and forget that it ever pretended to be humorous. I don’t even know whether it is more fashionable to live upon the Mall than elsewhere, or whether one can claim to live upon it when it runs past one’s attic windows like an elevated railway; but we have often remarked to one another that if we cannot be said to live upon the Mall we cannot be said to live anywhere and taken what comfort may be had out of that. Our peculiar situation has at all events the advantage that I can always see Thalia coming, which adds the pleasure of anticipation to her most unexpected visit. Like most of us, Thalia arrives with the season, but it should be added that she brings the season with her. We amuse ourselves a good deal, for a serious community, with a toy theatre, in which we present Mr. Jones and Mr. Pinero so intelligently that I often wonder why neither of these playwrights has yet come out to ascertain what he is really capable of. Thalia is our leading comedienne; you would have guessed that by her name. She is never too soon anywhere, but I had begun to wonder when she was coming up. “Up,” of course, means up from the plains,—up from the Pit, as its present temperature quite permits me to explain. April is the last month in which you can leave the Pit without being actually scorched.
“What are you doing here?” she exclaimed, half-way down the drive. She expected, I suppose, to find me in the house trying to decide upon the shade of this year’s cheese-cloth curtains. By the way, I have decided—that the old ones will do. Thisbe doesn’t mind, and I’ve got the clouds.
“Oh, I’m just here,” I said with nonchalance. There is nothing like nonchalance to prove superiority to circumstances. “How are you?”
“Thank you,” said Thalia. “Well, come along in. I’ve got quantities of things to talk about.”
“It is very good of you,” I returned, “to press my hospitality upon me, but I don’t go in. I stay out. If Tiglath-Pileser saw me entering the house at this hour,” I continued with the vulgarity which we permit ourselves to the indulgent ear of a friend, “it would be as much as my place is worth. But you see I have a chair ready for emergencies—pray sit down. You are the first emergency that has arisen, I mean that has dropped in, this year.”
When I had fully explained, as I was at once of course compelled to do, with a wealth of detail and much abuse of Tiglath-Pileser, I was not gratified with the effect upon Thalia. “You have simply been spending your time out-of-doors,” said she, “a very ordinary thing to do.”