AT THE PIT'S MOUTH
Men say it was a stolen tide The Lord that sent it He knows all, But in mine ear will aye abide The message that the bells let fall-- And awesome bells they were to me, That in the dark rang, 'Enderby.' --Jean Ingelow
Once upon a time there was a Man and his Wife and a Tertium Quid.
All three were unwise, but the Wife was the unwisest. The Man shouldhave looked after his Wife, who should have avoided the Tertium Quid,who, again, should have married a wife of his own, after clean andopen flirtations, to which nobody can possibly object, round Jakko orObservatory Hill. When you see a young man with his pony in a whitelather and his hat on the back of his head, flying downhill at fifteenmiles an hour to meet a girl who will be properly surprised to meethim, you naturally approve of that young man, and wish him Staffappointments, and take an interest in his welfare, and, as the propertime comes, give them sugar-tongs or side-saddles according to yourmeans and generosity.
The Tertium Quid flew downhill on horseback, but it was to meet theMan's Wife; and when he flew uphill it was for the same end. The Manwas in the Plains, earning money for his Wife to spend on dresses andfour-hundred-rupee bracelets, and inexpensive luxuries of that kind. Heworked very hard, and sent her a letter or a post-card daily. She alsowrote to him daily, and said that she was longing for him to come up toSimla. The Tertium Quid used to lean over her shoulder and laugh as shewrote the notes. Then the two would ride to the Post-office together.
Now, Simla is a strange place and its customs are peculiar; nor isany man who has not spent at least ten seasons there qualified to passjudgment on circumstantial evidence, which is the most untrustworthy inthe Courts. For these reasons, and for others which need not appear,I decline to state positively whether there was anything irretrievablywrong in the relations between the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid. Ifthere was, and hereon you must form your own opinion, it was the Man'sWife's fault. She was kittenish in her manners, wearing generally anair of soft and fluffy innocence. But she was deadlily learned andevil-instructed; and, now and again, when the mask dropped, men sawthis, shuddered and almost drew back. Men are occasionally particular,and the least particular men are always the most exacting.
Simla is eccentric in its fashion of treating friendships. Certainattachments which have set and crystallised through half-a-dozen seasonsacquire almost the sanctity of the marriage bond, and are revered assuch. Again, certain attachments equally old, and, to all appearance,equally venerable, never seem to win any recognised official status;while a chance-sprung acquaintance, not two months born, steps into theplace which by right belongs to the senior. There is no law reducible toprint which regulates these affairs.
Some people have a gift which secures them infinite toleration, andothers have not. The Man's Wife had not. If she looked over the gardenwall, for instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. Shecomplained pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her ownfriends. When she put up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed overit and under her eyebrows at you as she said this thing, you feltthat she had been infamously misjudged, and that all the other women'sinstincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She was not allowed to ownthe Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely constructed that shewould not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted. She preferredsome semblance of intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace actions.
After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then SummerHill, then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly up and downthe Cart Road as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk, she said to theTertium Quid, 'Frank, people say we are too much together, and peopleare so horrid.'
The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid peoplewere unworthy of the consideration of nice people.
'But they have done more than talk they have written written to my hubbyI'm sure of it,' said the Man's Wife, and she pulled a letter from herhusband out of her saddle-pocket and gave it to the Tertium Quid.
It was an honest letter, written by an honest man, then stewing in thePlains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife eighthundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It saidthat, perhaps, she had not thought of the unwisdom of allowing her nameto be so generally coupled with the Tertium Quid's; that she was toomuch of a child to understand the dangers of that sort of thing; thathe, her husband, was the last man in the world to interfere jealouslywith her little amusements and interests, but that it would be betterwere she to drop the Tertium Quid quietly and for her husband's sake.The letter was sweetened with many pretty little pet names, and itamused the Tertium Quid considerably. He and She laughed over it, sothat you, fifty yards away, could see their shoulders shaking while thehorses slouched along side by side.
Their conversation was not worth reporting. The upshot of it was that,next day, no one saw the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid together. Theyhad both gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a rule, is only visitedofficially by the inhabitants of Simla.
A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding, and thecoffin creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of the mostdepressing things on this earth, particularly when the procession passesunder the wet, dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe Hotel, where the sun isshut out, and all the hill streams are wailing and weeping together asthey go down the valleys.
Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and aretransferred so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead haveno friend only acquaintances who are far too busy amusing themselves upthe hill to attend to old partners. The idea of using a Cemetery as arendezvous is distinctly a feminine one. A man would have said simply,'Let people talk. We'll go down the Mall.' A woman is made differently,especially if she be such a woman as the Man's Wife. She and the TertiumQuid enjoyed each other's society among the graves of men and women whomthey had known and danced with aforetime.
They used to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little tothe left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground, and wherethe occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are notready. Each well-regulated Indian Cemetery keeps half-a-dozen gravespermanently open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In theHills these are more usually baby's size, because children who come upweakened and sick from the Plains often succumb to the effects of theRains in the Hills or get pneumonia from their ayahs taking them throughdamp pine-woods after the sun has set. In Cantonments, of course, theman's size is more in request; these arrangements varying with theclimate and population.
One day when the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in theCemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground. They had marked out afull-size grave, and the Tertium Quid asked them whether any Sahib wassick. They said that they did not know; but it was an order that theyshould dig a Sahib's grave.
'Work away,' said the Tertium Quid, 'and let's see how it's done.'
The coolies worked away, and the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid watchedand talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened.Then a coolie, taking the earth in baskets as it was thrown up, jumpedover the grave.
'That's queer,' said the Tertium Quid. 'Where's my ulster?'
'What's queer?' said the Man's Wife.
'I have got a chill down my back just as if a goose had walked over mygrave.'
'Why do you look at the thing, then?' said the Man's Wife. 'Let us go.'
The Tertium Quid stood at the head of the grave, and stared withoutanswering for a space. Then he said, dropping a pebble down, 'Itis nasty and cold: horribly cold. I don't think I shall come to theCemetery any more. I don't think grave-digging is cheerful.'
The two talked and agreed that the Cemetery was depressing. They alsoarranged for a ride next day out from the Cemetery through the MashobraTunnel up to Fagoo and back, because all the world was going to agarden-party at Viceregal Lodge, and all the people of Mashobra would gotoo.
Coming up the Cemetery road, the Tertium Quid's horse tried to boltuphill, being tired with standing so long, and managed to strain a backsinew.
'I shall have to take the mare to-morrow,' said the Tertium Quid, 'andshe will stand nothing heavier than a snaffle.'
They made their arrangements to meet in the Cemetery, after allowingall the Mashobra people time to pass into Simla. That night itrained heavily, and, next day, when the Tertium Quid came to thetrysting-place, he saw that the new grave had a foot of water in it, theground being a tough and sour clay.
'Jove! That looks beastly,' said the Tertium Quid. 'Fancy being boardedup and dropped into that well!'
They then started off to Fagoo, the mare playing with the snaffle andpicking her way as though she were shod with satin, and the sun shiningdivinely. The road below Mashobra to Fagoo is officially styled theHimalayan-Thibet road; but in spite of its name it is not much more thansix feet wide in most places, and the drop into the valley below may beanything between one and two thousand feet.
'Now we're going to Thibet,' said the Man's Wife merrily, as the horsesdrew near to Fagoo. She was riding on the cliff-side.
'Into Thibet,' said the Tertium Quid, 'ever so far from people who sayhorrid things, and hubbies who write stupid letters. With you to the endof the world!'
A coolie carrying a log of wood came round a corner, and the mare wentwide to avoid him forefeet in and haunches out, as a sensible mareshould go.
'To the world's end,' said the Man's Wife, and looked unspeakable thingsover her near shoulder at the Tertium Quid.
He was smiling, but, while she looked, the smile froze stiff as it wereon his face, and changed to a nervous grin the sort of grin men wearwhen they are not quite easy in their saddles. The mare seemed to besinking by the stern, and her nostrils cracked while she was trying torealise what was happening. The rain of the night before had rotted thedrop-side of the Himalayan-Thibet Road, and it was giving way underher. 'What are you doing?' said the Man's Wife. The Tertium Quid gave noanswer. He grinned nervously and set his spurs into the mare, who rappedwith her forefeet on the road, and the struggle began. The Man's Wifescreamed, 'Oh, Frank, get off!'
But the Tertium Quid was glued to the saddle his face blue and white andhe looked into the Man's Wife's eyes. Then the Man's Wife clutched atthe mare's head and caught her by the nose instead of the bridle. Thebrute threw up her head and went down with a scream, the Tertium Quidupon her, and the nervous grin still set on his face.
The Man's Wife heard the tinkle-tinkle of little stones and loose earthfalling off the roadway, and the sliding roar of the man and horse goingdown. Then everything was quiet, and she called on Frank to leave hismare and walk up. But Frank did not answer. He was underneath the mare,nine hundred feet below, spoiling a patch of Indian corn.
As the revellers came back from Viceregal Lodge in the mists of theevening, they met a temporarily insane woman, on a temporarily madhorse, swinging round the corners, with her eyes and her mouth open, andher head like the head of a Medusa. She was stopped by a man at the riskof his life, and taken out of the saddle, a limp heap, and put on thebank to explain herself. This wasted twenty minutes, and then she wassent home in a lady's 'rickshaw, still with her mouth open and her handspicking at her riding-gloves.
She was in bed through the following three days, which were rainy; soshe missed attending the funeral of the Tertium Quid, who was loweredinto eighteen inches of water, instead of the twelve to which he hadfirst objected.
Under the Deodars Page 2