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“But that's not the type of girl at all,” I said, “that Keable's writing about. He's not writing about niggers. He's writing about Polynesians.”

“I suppose they are a bit different, really,” she admitted.

The Eskimo and the Hindoo are not more different. The Laos, the Malays, the Polynesians are proud, free-born people with a culture and traditions. They are completely separate from one another. But they have in common a heritage of personal dignity. They cannot be spoken of as the South African negro or the Australian aborigines.

All the same, I believe it is extremely rare for there to exist a profound relationship between a white man and a brown woman. The Polynesian, sweet-natured and tender though she is, is in too simple a state of development to attach permanently
to herself a modern Westerner. While though the Malays and Siamese have an old and complicated culture, it is invariably with Malays and Siamese of the coolie class that the white man allies himself and under conditions which preclude romance. These relationships, into whatever they may develop, begin as a business transaction with the parents of the girl. There is no process of selection. It is arranged through the head boy. You might just as hopefully expect a profound experience to come from the answering of an advertisement in
Le Sourire.

In most novels of the East, written by men who know the East, no attempt is made to disguise this fact. “The exceptional circumstance “that is introduced to make the story interesting is spontaneous feeling on the girl's part. Usually it is the story, as in
Spears of Deliverance
and
Sepia,
of a man who resists the ordinary situation to yield ultimately to a girl's wooing. These novels do not attempt to pretend that this situation is anything but exceptional. Novels are written out of dreams. It is in this way that the white man in the East dreams of things happening. They rarely do. Ninety-nine times in a hundred there is the discussion with a head boy, the bargaining with a parent. There is no glamour. There is no selection.

“It's a bit difficult at first,” I was told. “You've nothing to talk to her about except the price of paddy. After a while, you come to have things in common. You get pretty fond of her.”

It was a teak man in North Siam who said that to me.

“We can't take them up into the jungle with us,” he went on. “We're there for ten months of the year. Perhaps that's why we're so faithful to them. They don't have a chance of getting on our nerves.”

It is very much in that spirit that the majority of white men in the Far East regard these establishments. In Europe such relationships are exercising at the moment a powerful appeal on the popular imagination. The number of novels dealing with the subject is a proof of that. It: is an expression, that interest, of the desire to get a thing both ways. The European
imagines that in such a situation he will know the excitement of illicit love and the comforts of domesticity. But it is not like that. He is free. He has domesticity. But love he has not got. I have yet to meet the man who will say that he has really loved a coloured woman. In the work of no writer except Kipling—and women are a side-show in Kipling's mental make-up; in many of his greatest stories women do not appear at all—is there any attempt to pretend that love as the moderns know it can exist under such conditions. Only twice does Somerset Maugham make a relationship with a coloured woman binding upon a white. And in each case he chose a Chinese woman. Love, as we understand it, is foreign to these people. “
Son désir tout sensuel”
wrote Maupassant—he was speaking of the Arabs—“
n'est point de ceux qui dans nos pays a à nous montraient aux étoiles par des nuits pareilles. Sur cette terre amollissante et tiède, si captivante que la légende des Lotophages y est né dans l'île de Djerba, l'air est plus savoureux que partout, le soleil plus chaud, le jour plus clair. Mais le cœur ne sait pas aimer, les femmes belles et ardentes sont ignorantes de nos tendresses. Leurs âmes simples restent étrangères aux émotions sentimentales et leurs baisers, dit-on, n'enfantent point le rêve.”

Tahiti has been called the country of love, but Western love does not exist there. The Tahitians set no store by the things we value highest. “I suppose,” I once heard it asked, “that the Tahitians make love as readily as a modern girl will kiss?” But the answer is, “Much more readily.” The kiss is to the Tahitian a proof of affection. She will kiss no one of whom she is not fairly fond. Love-making she regards as a kind of dance. An adequate partner is all she needs. She regards that partner as the English girl regards a dancing partner. You do not kiss every man you dance with. The Tahitian who is ready to make love with a complete stranger might be offended if that stranger spoke of love to her. To an American, who was leaving for San Francisco for a couple of months, his Tahitian mistress said on their last evening, “Whatever you do, don't kiss any other girl.”

Tahiti is love's land. Love there is freely given. There are no discussions with head boys; no bargaining with
parents; there are no responsibilities. No girl will be reluctant to have children in a country where children are well loved, where life is easy and life is happy. For the believer in free love Tahiti will seem the realisation of all his dreams. And I am not sure that Tahiti's lesson to the white man is not the discovery that there is no such thing as free love; that where love is free there is no love; that he neither loves nor is loved who has no bonds laid on him; that it is not the person who gives to you, but the person to whom you give who matters; that to the person to whom you have given something of yourself you are bound permanently, since you must return to that person if you would be complete; which is a thing that the person who has divided himself between many loves can never be. The Don Juans declare that they are searching for the ideal mate. They are not. They are searching for themselves; they are unsatisfied because they are incomplete. It is not vaingloriousness but the desire that her whole life and being shall be in the hands of a new lover that drives woman to those confessions that cost her in the end that new lover's faith in her.

Tahiti is love's land. It warms and softens; it lays the heart bare in readiness to love. But I have not met a single white man who has found love there with a Tahitian. “
Leurs baisers n'enfantent point le rêve.”

Between brown and white there can be only a brief and superficial harmony. Such is the universal experience and the universal testimony of those in a position to judge accurately. Between brown and white there can be no relation interesting in itself. The interest lies in the situations that such relationships create. There are the half-caste children that have to be educated; there is the problem of the white wife who may come to a district in which her husband, as a bachelor, has had a coloured mistress; there is the wrench of leaving the brown woman when it is all over. Those situations are interesting. But the actual relationship I do not believe has ever gone very deep. And the greatest surprise to the traveller in the tropics will be to find how very little store is placed upon that side of life. In Siam, particularly, I noted this.

My visit to Siam was an unprepared adventure. They talk of the unhurrying East. And that, of course, it is. In a climate where a two-minute stroll reduces you to a state of damp prostration, life must move slowly if it is to be endured. But that is not to say that it is unadventurous. On the contrary, the very fact that it is unhurrying increases its potentiality for surprise. As for example:

It was in Penang, at the hour of ginsling, which is not the Malayan equivalent for cocktail time, but the morning break at the hour when people begin to weary of their offices. Between a quarter and half-past eleven there is a drifting towards those rival Harrod's, Pritchard's, and John Little's for twenty minutes of restoring gossip. It was in Pritchard's at the hour of the ginsling. And we were discussing, some four or five of us, Reginald Campbell's
Uneasy Virtue,
a novel that had its setting half in Penang and half in the teak jungles of North Siam. “I wonder,” I said, “how far it really is like that?” Adding in the idle way one does, “It would be rather fun to go and see.”

It was the kind of remark that in England would have been countered with a vague, “Ah, yes.” Or a discussion preferred, ironically, on the limitations and brevity of life. But in the East, whence half the fairy stories of the world have come, where magic carpets and bottled genii are no more than exaggerations of a way of living, there is the danger always of being taken at your word. “Then why,” said one of the party, “don't you go there?”

In a moment I had embarked on such a series of excuses as the cautious and calculating habits of Western life forge for us. But it was too late. The words of the spell were uttered.
The genie was wreathing into smoke out of the bottle's neck. The edges of the carpet had begun to lift. “That should be quite simple,” my friend was saying. “Let me see, now. There's a man I know, a forest officer, who's going to make a jungle tour next week. He's starting for the north on Sunday. It's Wednesday now. If you left here on Friday morning you'ld be in Bangkok before dark on Saturday; that just fits. We'll wire and see if he can take you.” Before I had realised what was happening a telegraph form had been requisitioned and the genie had begun his work.

That is the way things happen in the East. In Europe we make plans months ahead and we adhere to them. In the heat of summer we book our rooms in Switzerland for winter sports. Every seat on the Blue Train is sold while the croisette is a succession of shuttered windows. Like the billiard player, we think three strokes ahead. In January we make our plans for June. Life moves so quickly that we should be submerged otherwise. But in the countries that are south of Aden no man bothers overmuch about what he will be doing a fortnight hence. Plans mature swiftly in that country of easy growth. Suggestions are made casually. “Wouldn't it be rather fun?” says someone. And you agree eagerly. Nor, on the next morning, do you write one of those notes so eminently practical with their justifying quotation from Mrs. Browning to the effect that “colours seen by candlelight do not look the same by day,” to explain how, on thinking it over in cool blood, you really feel …

A jungle trip is not a thing that can be undertaken lightly. It requires very careful adjustments of commissariat. You have to carry your larder with you. It is not pleasant to find yourself without provisions a hundred miles from any road that can be described as “fordable.” But the days pass so slowly that the ordering of six elephants instead of four and thirty-five coolies instead of twenty is an unalarming enterprise. There is always time to remedy mistakes. Things wait for you to-catch them up.

Eighty-six hours later I was in Bangkok.

§

Bangkok is a surprising city.

It is advertised as the Venice of the East. It photographs exquisitely. There are its proud avenues; the stately proportion of the throne hall; the strangely shaped and strangely coloured temples; its dark, mysterious canals. But the prevailing impression that it leaves on you is of dust and heat and squalor. The temples and the palaces are far apart. They are divided from one another by hot white roads and sequences of ugly buildings. The avenues are lined by insignificant and unsightly cabins. The city was planned by an earlier monarch who did not realise that Siam was without enough rich people to adorn fittingly those avenues with spacious bungalows. And as you drive past shack after wooden shack you wonder whether the temple and avenues and palaces are anything more than a façade, imposing and distorting, before the real Siam that has expressed itself in the wooden and tin huts that crowd the canal and streets, and in the sluggish barges that float down its sluggish waterways. Siam is trying to Westernize itself. And, paradoxically, it is at the same time plying the slogan of “Siam for the Siamese.” The new
régime
is removing all the Europeans that it can from official positions, and those it is forced to retain are treated so cavalierly that many of them have presented their resignations. But the real Siam, the wealth and spirit of Siam, is apart from and indifferent to those changes. You suspect this while you are still in Bangkok. You are convinced of it within an hour of your leaving: as the train rattles through a landscape that has been, and for its geographical position must remain, exclusively agricultural.

§

Chiengmai, the northern capital, is twenty-seven hours of railroad north of Bangkok. In the old days, when there was no railway, you had to go by water. It was a five weeks' journey. The construction of the railway has brought vast differences into the life of those northern states, so separate from the southern states—they are more in touch with Burma
than Siam—that they speak different languages and employ in places a different currency. But even so Chiengmai is a very distant city. It is the timber trade that brings the white man to Siam, and Chiengmai is the administrative centre of the two chief companies, the Borneo and the Bombay Burma. There are not, I fancy, more than thirty white people in the station. There is the bank manager and the English consul; there are the forest manager, and an occasional assistant who has come in from the jungle for a rest; there is an American mission which is responsible for schools and hospitals and a big sanatorium for lepers. The white life of Chiengmai centres round the Gymkhana Club. It is a large field set a little way out of town which serves as polo ground and golf course and tennis court. By five o'clock, when the heat of the day has lessened, most of the white community is there, scattered about the field. There is seventy-five minutes of strenuous exercise. Then when the light fails there is a gathering round a large table on which have been set out drinks, glasses and a little lamp. There are rarely more and rarely less than a dozen people there. It is peaceful. In the swift-fallen dusk the large field, with its wide-branched trees rising from a hedge, looks heartbreakingly like an English meadow. Mosquitoes are buzzing round the table. The women have slipped their legs into sarongs, sewn up at one end in the shape of bags. The talk is subdued and intimate. It is the hour that makes amends for the heat and dust of morning and afternoon. But it is not easy to convey the essence of those evenings. “What,” I can hear the protest of the average townsman, “you call this the best hour of the day; sitting round a table talking to people you've seen every evening of the week for as many years as you may happen to have been there? And the only variety, you say, is when one of the assistants, a fellow about whom you know all that there is to know, comes in for a few days from the jungle, or one of the men from Bangkok, about whom you know everything that there is to know, comes up for a jungle trip.