No More Learning

If she looked over the garden
wall, for instance, women taxed her with stealing their husbands. She
complained pathetically that she was not allowed to choose her own
friends. When she put up her big white muff to her lips, and gazed over
it and under her eyebrows at you as she said this thing, you felt
that she had been infamously misjudged, and that all the other women's
instincts were all wrong; which was absurd. She was not allowed to own
the Tertium Quid in peace; and was so strangely constructed that she
would not have enjoyed peace had she been so permitted. She preferred
some semblance of intrigue to cloak even her most commonplace actions.

After two months of riding, first round Jakko, then Elysium, then Summer
Hill, then Observatory Hill, then under Jutogh, and lastly up and down
the Cart Road as far as the Tara Devi gap in the dusk, she said to the
Tertium Quid, "Frank, people say we are too much together, and people
are so horrid. "

The Tertium Quid pulled his moustache, and replied that horrid people
were unworthy of the consideration of nice people.

"But they have done more than talk--they have written--written to my
hubby--I'm sure of it," said the Man's Wife, and she pulled a letter
from her husband 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 the
Plains on two hundred rupees a month (for he allowed his wife eight
hundred and fifty), and in a silk banian and cotton trousers. It is said
that, perhaps, she had no thought of the unwisdom of allowing her name
to be so generally coupled with the Tertium Quid's; that she was too
much of a child to understand the dangers of that sort of thing; that
he, her husband, was the last man in the world to interfere jealously
with her little amusements and interests, but that it would be better
were she to drop the Tertium Quid quietly and for her husband's sake.
The letter was sweetened with many pretty little pet names, and it
amused the Tertium Quid considerably. He and She laughed over it, so
that you, fifty yards away, could see their shoulders shaking while the
horses 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. They
had both gone down to the Cemetery, which, as a rule, is only visited
officially by the inhabitants of Simla.
A Simla funeral with the clergyman riding, the mourners riding, and the
coffin creaking as it swings between the bearers, is one of the most
depressing things on this earth, particularly when the procession passes
under the wet, dank dip beneath the Rockcliffe Hotel, where the sun is
shut out and all the hill streams are wailing and weeping together as
they go down the valleys.

Occasionally folk tend the graves, but we in India shift and are
transferred so often that, at the end of the second year, the Dead have
no friends--only acquaintances who are far too busy amusing themselves
up the hill to attend to old partners. The idea of using a Cemetery as
a rendezvous 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 Tertium
Quid enjoyed each other's society among the graves of men and women whom
they had known and danced with aforetime.

They used to take a big horse-blanket and sit on the grass a little to
the left of the lower end, where there is a dip in the ground and where
the occupied graves stop short and the ready-made ones are not ready.
Each well-regulated India Cemetery keeps half a dozen graves permanently
open for contingencies and incidental wear and tear. In the Hills these
are more usually baby's size, because children who come up weakened and
sick from the Plains often succumb to the effects of the Rains in
the Hills or get pneumonia from their ayahs taking them through damp
pine-woods after the sun has set. In Cantonments, of course, the man's
size is more in request; these arrangements varying with the climate and
population.

One day when the Man's Wife and the Tertium Quid had just arrived in the
Cemetery, they saw some coolies breaking ground. They had marked out a
full-size grave, and the Tertium Quid asked them whether any Sahib was
sick. They said that they did not know; but it was an order that they
should 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 watched
and talked for a couple of hours while the grave was being deepened Then
a coolie, taking the earth in blankets as it was thrown up, jumped over
the grave.