The Gentleman in the Parlour Page 3

  IV

  So that the reader of these pages may be under no misapprehension I hasten to tell him that he will find in them little information. This book is the record of a journey through Burmah, the Shan States, Siam and Indo-China. I am writing it for my own diversion and I hope that it will divert also such as care to spend a few hours in reading it. I am a professional writer and I hope to get from it a certain amount of money and perhaps a little praise.

  Though I have travelled much I am a bad traveller. The good traveller has the gift of surprise. He is perpetually interested by the differences he finds between what he knows at home and what he sees abroad. If he has a keen sense of the absurd he finds constant matter for laughter in the fact that the people among whom he is do not wear the same clothes as he does, and he can never get over his astonishment that men may eat with chop-sticks instead of forks or write with a brush instead of with a pen. Since everything is strange to him he notices everything, and according to his humour can be amusing or instructive. But I take things for granted so quickly that I cease to see anything unusual in my new surroundings. It seems to me so obvious for the Burman to wear a coloured paso that only by a deliberate effort can I make the observation that he is not dressed as I am. It seems to me just as natural to ride in a rickshaw as in a car, and to sit on the floor as on a chair, so that I forget that I am doing something odd and out-of-the-way. I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment and sometimes suggest a theme for a composition; I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.

  It is true that should the historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire come across this book on the shelves of some public library he will have hard things to say of me. ‘How can one explain,’ he will ask, ‘that this writer who in other places showed that he was not devoid of observation, could have gone through so many parts of this Empire and not noticed (for by never a word is it apparent that suspicion of anything of the sort crossed his mind) with what a nerveless hand the British held the power that their fathers had conquered? A satirist in his day, was there no matter for his derision in the spectacle of a horde of officials who held their positions only by force of the guns behind them trying to persuade the races they ruled that they were there only on sufferance? They offered efficiency to people to whom a hundred other things were of more consequence and sought to justify themselves by the benefits they conferred on people who did not want them. As if a man in whose house you have forcibly quartered yourself will welcome you any the more because you tell him you can run it better than he can! Did he go through Burmah and not see how the British power was tottering because the masters were afraid to rule? Did he not meet judges, soldiers, commissioners who had no confidence in themselves and therefore inspired no respect in those they were placed over? What had happened to the race that had produced Clive, Warren Hastings and Stamford Raffles that it must send out to govern its colonies, men who were afraid of the authority entrusted to them, men who thought to rule the Oriental by cajolery and submissiveness, by being unobtrusive, by pocketing affronts and giving the natives powers they were unfit to use and must inevitably turn against their masters? But what is a master whose conscience is troubled because he is a master? They prated of efficiency and they did not rule efficiently, for they were filled with an uneasy feeling that they were unfit to rule. They were sentimentalists. They wanted the profits of Empire, but would not assume the greatest of its responsibilities, which is power. But all this, which was staring him in the face, seems to have escaped this writer, and he contented himself with jotting down little incidents of travel, describing his emotions and inventing little stories about the persons he met; he produced a book that can be of no value to the historian, the political economist or the philosopher: it is deservedly forgotten.’

  I cock a snook at the historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire. On my side I venture to express the wish that when the time comes for him to write this great work he will write it with sympathy, justice and magnanimity. I would have him eschew rhetoric, but I do not think a restrained emotion would ill become him. I would have him write lucidly and yet with dignity; I would have his periods march with a firm step. I should like his sentences to ring out as the anvil rings when the hammer strikes it; his style should be stately but not pompous, picturesque without affectation or effort, lapidary, eloquent and yet sober; for when all is said and done he will have a subject upon which he may well expend all his pains: the British Empire will have been in the world’s history a moment not without grandeur.

  V

  A light rain was falling and the sky was dark with heavy clouds when I reached Pagan. In the distance I saw the pagodas for which it is renowned. They loomed, huge, remote and mysterious, out of the mist of the early morning like the vague recollections of a fantastic dream. The river steamer set me down at a bedraggled village some miles from my destination, and I waited in the drizzle while my servant found an ox-wagon to take me on my way. It was a springless cart on solid wooden wheels, covered with a coconut matting. Inside, it was hot and breathless, but the rain had increased to a steady downpour and I was thankful for its shelter. I lay full length and when I was tired of this sat cross-legged. The oxen went at a snail’s pace, with cautious steps, and I was shaken and jolted as they ploughed their way through the tracks made by the carts that had gone before, and every now and then I was given a terrific jerk as the cart passed over a great stone. When I reached the circuit-house I felt as though I had been beaten and pummelled.

  The circuit-house stood on the river bank, quite close to the water, and all round it were great trees, tamarinds, banyans and wild gooseberries. A flight of wooden steps led to a broad verandah, which served as a living-room, and behind this were a couple of bedrooms, each with a bath-room. I found that one of these was occupied by another traveller, and I had but just examined the accommodation and talked to the Madrassi in charge about meals and taken stock of what pickles and canned goods and liquor he had on the premises when a little man appeared in a mackintosh and a topee dripping with rain. He took off his soaking things and presently we sat down to the meal known in this country as brunch. It appeared that he was a Czecho-Slovak, employed by a firm of exporters in Calcutta, and was spending his holiday seeing the sights of Burmah. He was a short man with wild black hair, a large face, a bold hooked nose and gold-rimmed spectacles. His stingah-shifter fitted tightly over a corpulent figure. He was evidently an active and an energetic sightseer; for the rain had not prevented him from going out in the morning and he told me that he had visited no less than seven pagodas. But the rain stopped while we were eating and soon the sun shone brightly. We had no sooner finished than he set out again. I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan; when you stand on an eminence they surround you as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings, for they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. To-day there is only a straggling village with broad untidy roads lined with great trees, a pleasant enough little place with matting houses, neat and trim, in which live the workers in lacquer; for this is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives.

  But of all these pagodas only one, the Ananda, is still a place of pilgrimage. Here are four huge gilded Buddhas standing against a gilded wall in a lofty gilded chamber. You look at them one by one through a gilded archway. In that glowing dimness they are inscrutable. In front of one a mendicant in his yellow robe chants in a high-pitched voice some litany that you do not understand. But the o
ther pagodas are deserted. Grass grows in the chinks of the pavement and young trees have taken root in the crannies. They are the refuge of birds. Hawks wheel about their summits and little green parrots chatter in the eaves. They are like bizarre and monstrous flowers turned to stone. There is one in which the architect has taken as his model the lotus, as the architect of St John’s, Smith Square, took Queen Anne’s footstool, and it has a baroque extravagance that makes the Jesuit churches in Spain seem severe and classical. It is preposterous, so that it makes you smile to look at it, but its exuberance is captivating. It is quite unreal, shoddy but strange, and you are staggered at the fantasy that could ever have devised it. It looks like the fabric of a single night made by the swarming hands of one of those wayward gods of the Indian mythology. Within the pagodas images of the Buddha sit in meditation. The gold leaf has long since worn away from the colossal figures and the figures are crumbling to dust. The fantastic lions that guard the entrance ways are rotting on their pedestals.

  A strange and melancholy spot. But my curiosity was satisfied with a visit to half-a-dozen of the pagodas, and I would not let the vigour of my Czecho-Slovak be a reproach to my indolence. He divided them into various types and marked them down in his notebook according to their peculiarities. He had theories about them, and in his mind they were neatly ticketed to support a theory or clinch an argument. None was so ruined that he did not think it worth while to give it his close and enthusiastic attention; and to examine the make and shape of tiles he climbed up broken places like a mountain goat. I preferred to sit idly on the verandah of the circuit-house and watch the scene before me. In the full tide of noon the sun burned all the colour from the landscape so that the trees and the dwarf scrub that grew wildly, where in time past were the busy haunts of men, were pale and grey; but with the declining day the colour crept back, like an emotion that tempers the character and has been submerged for a while by the affairs of the world, and trees and scrub were again a sumptuous and living green. The sun set on the other side of the river and a red cloud in the west was reflected on the tranquil bosom of the Irrawaddy. There was not a ripple on the water. The river seemed no longer to flow. In the distance a solitary fisherman in a dug-out plied his craft. A little to one side but in full view was one of the loveliest of the pagodas. In the setting sun its colours, cream and fawn-grey, were soft like the silk of old dresses in a museum. It had a symmetry that was grateful to the eye; the turrets at one corner were repeated by the turrets at every other; and the flamboyant windows repeated the flamboyant doors below. The decoration had a sort of bold violence, as though it sought to scale fantastic pinnacles of the spirit and in the desperate struggle, with life and soul engaged, could not concern itself with reticence or good taste. But withal it had at that moment a kind of majesty and there was majesty in the solitude in which it stood. It seemed to weigh upon the earth with too great a burden. It was impressive to reflect that it had stood for so many centuries and looked down impassively upon the smiling bend of the Irrawaddy. The birds were singing noisily in the trees; the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere a boy was whistling a melancholy tune on a rude pipe and in the compound the natives were chattering loudly. There is no silence in the East.

  It was at this hour that the Czecho-Slovak returned to the circuit-house. He was very hot and dusty, tired but happy, for he had missed nothing. He was a mine of information. The night began gradually to enfold the pagoda and it looked now unsubstantial, as though it were built of lath and plaster, so that you would not have been surprised to see it at the Paris exhibition housing a display of colonial produce. It was a strangely sophisticated building in that exquisitely rural scene. But the Czecho-Slovak told me when it was built and under what king, and then, gathering way, began to tell me something of the history of Pagan. He had a retentive memory. He marshalled his facts with precision and delivered them with the fluency of a lecturer delivering a lecture he has repeated too often. But I did not want to know the facts he gave me. What did it matter to me what kings reigned there, what battles they fought and what lands they conquered? I was content to see them as a low relief on a temple wall in a long procession, with their hieratic attitudes, seated on a throne and receiving gifts from the envoys of subjugated nations, or else, with a confusion of spears, in the hurry and skelter of chariots, in the turmoil of battle. I asked the Czecho-Slovak what he was going to do with all the information he had acquired.

  ‘Do? Nothing,’ he replied. ‘I like facts. I want to know things. Whenever I go anywhere I read everything about it that has been written. I study its history, the fauna and flora, the manners and customs of the people, I make myself thoroughly acquainted with its art and literature. I could write a standard book on every country I have visited. I am a mine of information.’

  ‘That is just what I was saying to myself. But what is the good of information that means nothing to you? Information for its own sake is like a flight of steps that leads to a blank wall.’

  ‘I do not agree with you. Information for its own sake is like a pin you pick up and put in the lapel of your coat or the piece of string that you untie instead of cutting and put away in a drawer. You never know when it will be useful.’

  And to show me that he did not choose his metaphors at random the Czecho-Slovak turned up the bottom of his stingah-shifter (which has no lapel) and showed me four pins in a neat row.

  VI

  From Pagan, wishing to go to Mandalay, I took the steamer once more, and a couple of days before I arrived there, the boat tying up at a riverside village, I made up my mind to go ashore. The skipper told me that there was there a pleasant little club in which I had only to make myself at home; they were quite used to having strangers drop off like that from the steamer, and the secretary was a very decent chap; I might even get a game of bridge. I had nothing in the world to do, so I got into one of the bullock-carts that were waiting at the landscape-stage and was driven to the club. There was a man sitting on the verandah and as I walked up he nodded to me and asked whether I would have a whisky and soda or a gin and bitters. The possibility that I would have nothing at all did not even occur to him. I chose the longer drink and sat down. He was a tall, thin, bronzed man, with a big moustache, and he wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt. I never knew his name, but when we had been chatting a little while another man came in who told me he was the secretary, and he addressed my friend as George.

  ‘Have you heard from your wife yet?’ he asked him.

  The other’s eyes brightened.

  ‘Yes, I had letters by this mail. She’s having no end of a time.’

  ‘Did she tell you not to fret?’

  George gave a little chuckle, but was I mistaken in thinking that there was in it the shadow of a sob?

  ‘In point of fact she did. But that’s easier said than done. Of course I know she wants a holiday, and I’m glad she should have it, but it’s devilish hard on a chap.’ He turned to me. ‘You see, this is the first time I’ve ever been separated from my missus, and I’m like a lost dog without her.’

  ‘How long have you been married?’

  ‘Five minutes.’

  The secretary of the club laughed.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, George. You’ve been married eight years.’

  After we had talked for a little George, looking at his watch, said he must go and change his clothes for dinner and left us. The secretary watched him disappear into the night with a smile of not unkindly irony.

  ‘We all ask him as much as we can now that he’s alone,’ he told me. ‘He mopes so terribly since his wife went home.’

  ‘It must be very pleasant for her to know that her husband is as devoted to her as all that.’

  ‘Mabel is a remarkable woman.’

  He called the boy and ordered more drinks. In this hospitable place they did not ask you if you would have anything; they took it for granted. Then he settled himself in his long chair and lit a cheroot. He told me t
he story of George and Mabel.

  They became engaged when he was home on leave, and when he returned to Burmah it was arranged that she should join him in six months. But one difficulty cropped up after another; Mabel’s father died, the war came, George was sent to a district unsuitable for a white woman; so that in the end it was seven years before she was able to start. He made all arrangements for the marriage, which was to take place on the day of her arrival, and went down to Rangoon to meet her. On the morning on which the ship was due he borrowed a motor-car and drove along to the dock. He paced the quay.

  Then, suddenly, without warning, his nerve failed him. He had not seen Mabel for seven years. He had forgotten what she was like. She was a total stranger. He felt a terrible sinking in the pit of his stomach and his knees began to wobble. He couldn’t go through with it. He must tell Mabel that he was very sorry, but he couldn’t, he really couldn’t marry her. But how could a man tell a girl a thing like that when she had been engaged to him for seven years and had come six thousand miles to marry him? He hadn’t the nerve for that either. George was seized with the courage of despair. There was a boat at the quay on the very point of starting for Singapore; he wrote a hurried letter to Mabel, and without a stick of luggage, just in the clothes he stood up in, leaped on board.