re 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 said
that, perhaps, she had not 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 friend 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
|