The Gentleman In the Parlour (10 page)

Then I smoked my pipe and to clear my mind read, idly enough, I fear, some philosophical treatise that was not too heavy to hold in one hand. The first lot of mules had already got away, and now my bedding was rolled up, the things I had used for breakfast were put into the proper boxes, and everything was loaded on such of the mules as had remained behind. I let them get ahead. I was left alone in the bungalow, my pony tethered to a fence, and I watched with the eyes of my mind, so to say, while the village about me, the trees outside the bungalow, the chairs and tables, returned to the humdrum repose from which for a few hours the arrival of myself and my caravan had rudely snatched them. When I went down the steps and untethered my pony, silence, like an old mad woman with a finger on her lips, crept past me into the room that I had left. The map of the road hung on its nail more solidly because I was gone and the long chair in which I had been sitting gave a creaky sigh.

I started riding.

I caught up with the mules as they were nearing the bungalow and knowing it was close they increased their pace. They went along now with a sort of bustle, the bells ringing, the loads jangling, and the muleteers shouted to them and called out to one another. The muleteers were Yunnanese, strapping fellows, with bronzed faces, ragged and unwashed, but they bore themselves with a bold insouciance. Up and down Asia they marched with a lazy stride, hundreds upon hundreds of miles, and in their dark eyes were open spaces and the dim blue of far-off mountains. The mules crowded round them in the compound, each wanting his own load taken off first, and there was a shouting and a kicking and a jostling. The load is lashed to the yokes with leather
thongs and it needs two men to take it off. When this was done the mule retreated a step or two and bowed his head as though he were bowing his thanks for the release. Then the pack-saddle was taken off him and he lay down on the ground and rolled over and over to ease his back of the irritation. One after the other as they were freed the mules wandered out of the compound to the herbage and their liberty.

Gin and bitters waited for me on the table, then my curry was served, and I flung myself in a long chair and went to sleep. When I woke I went out with my gun. The headman had designated two or three young men to show me where I could shoot pigeon or jungle-fowl, but game was shy and I am a bad shot and I came back generally with nothing for my pains but a scramble in the bush. The light was failing. The muleteers called the mules to shut them up for the night in the compound. They called in a shrill falsetto, a sound wild and barbaric that seemed scarcely human; it was a peculiar, even a terrifying cry, and it suggested vaguely the vast distances of Asia and the nomad tribes of heaven knows how many ages back from which they were descended.

I read till my dinner was ready. If I had crossed a river that day I ate a bony, tasteless fish; if not, sardines or tunny; a dish of tough meat, and one of the three sweets that my Indian cook knew how to make. Then I played patience.

I reproached myself as I set out the cards. Considering the shortness of life and the infinite number of important things there are to do during its course, it can only be the proof of a flippant disposition that one should waste one's time in such a pursuit. I had with me a number of books that would have improved my mind and others, masterpieces of style, by the study of which I might have made progress in the learning of this difficult language in which we write. I had a volume, small enough to carry in my pocket, that contained all the tragedies of
Shakespeare and I had resolved to read one act of one play on every day of my journey. I promised myself thus both entertainment and profit. But I knew seventeen varieties of patience. I tried the Spider and never by any chance got it out; I tried the patience they play at the Florence Club (and you should hear the shout of triumph which goes up when some Florentine of noble family, Pazzi or Strozzi, accomplishes it) and I tried a patience, the most incredibly difficult of all, that was taught me by a Dutch gentleman from Philadelphia. Of course the perfect patience has never been invented. This should take a long time to do; it should be complicated, calling forth all the ingenuity you have; it should require profound thought and demand from you solid reasoning, the exercise of logic and the weighing of chances; it should be full of hairbreadth escapes so that your heart palpitates as you see what disaster might have befallen you had you put down the wrong card; it should poise you dizzy on the topmost peak of suspense when you consider that your fate hangs on the next card you turn up; it should wring your withers with apprehension; it should have desperate perils that you must avoid and incredible difficulties that only a reckless courage can surmount; and at the end, if you have made no mistake, if you have seized opportunity by the forelock and wrung unstable fortune by the neck, victory should always crown your efforts.

But since such a patience does not exist, in the long run I generally returned to that which has immortalised the name of Canfield. Though it is of course very difficult to get out, you are at least sure of some result, and when all seems lost the turning of a sudden happy card may grant you a respite. I have heard that this estimable gentleman was a gambler in New York and he sold you the pack for fifty dollars and gave you five dollars for every card you got out. The establishment was palatial, supper was free and champagne flowed freely; negroes shuffled the
packs for you. There were Turkey carpets on the floors and pictures by Meissonier and Lord Leighton on the walls, and there were life-sized statues in marble. I think it must have been very like Lansdowne House.

Looking back on it from this distance it had for me something of the charm of a genre picture and as I set out the seven cards, and then the six, I saw from my quiet room in the jungle bungalow (as it were through the wrong end of a telescope) the rooms brightly lit with glass chandeliers, the crowd of people, the haze of smoke and the tense, strained, tragic feeling of the gambling-hell. I was held for a moment in the great world with its complications, vice and dissipation. It is one of the mistakes that people make to think that the East is depraved; on the contrary the Oriental has a modesty that the ordinary European would find fantastic. His virtue is not the same as the European's, but I think he is more virtuous. Vice you must look for in Paris, London or New York, rather than in Benares or Peking. But whether this is due to the fact that the Oriental, not being oppressed as we are by the sense of sin, feels no need to transgress the rules that during the long course of his history he has found it convenient to make, or whether, as is shown by his art and literature (which after all are only complicated, but monotonous variations on a single theme) he is unimaginative, who am I to say?

It was time for me to go to bed. I got under my mosquito curtain, lit my pipe and read the novel which I kept for that particular moment. I had looked forward to it all day. It was
Du Côte de Guermantes
and in my fear of coming to the end of it too quickly (I had read it before and could not really start on it again the moment I had finished it) I limited myself rigidly to thirty pages at a time. A great deal of course was exquisitely boring, but what did I care? I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else, and I finished the thirty pages all too soon; I seemed to have to hold back my eyes not
to run along the lines too quickly. I put out my lamp and fell into a dreamless sleep.

But I could have sworn I had not been asleep ten minutes when a cock, crowing loudly, woke me; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, broke in upon the silence of the night. The gathering light crept into my room. Another day began.

I lost count of time. The track now could no longer be called a road and a bullock-cart could not have gone along it; it was no more than a narrow path and we went in single file. We began to climb, and a river, a tributary of the Salween, ran over rocks boisterously below us. The track wound up and down hills through the defiles of the range we were crossing, now at the level of the river, and then high above it. The sky was blue, not with the brilliant, provocative blue of Italy, but with the Eastern blue, which is milky, pale and languorous. The jungle now had all the air of the virgin forest of one's fancy: tall trees, rising straight, without a branch, for eighty or a hundred feet flaunted their power majestically in the sun. Creepers with gigantic leaves entwined them and the smaller trees were covered with parasitic plants as a bride is covered by her veil. The bamboos were sixty feet high. The wild plantains grew everywhere. They seemed set in their places by some skilful gardener, for they had the air of consciously completing the decoration. They were magnificent. The lower leaves were torn and yellow and bedraggled; they were like wicked old women who looked with envy and malice on the beauty of youth; but the upper ones, lissom, green and lovely, lifted their splendour proudly. They had the haughtiness and the callous indifference
of youthful beauty; their ample surface took the sun like water.

One day, looking for a short cut, I ventured along a path that led straight into the jungle. There was more life than I had seen while I kept to the highway; the jungle-fowl scurried over the tops of the trees as I passed, pigeons cooed all about me, and a hornbill sat quite still on a branch to let me look at it. I can never quite get over my surprise at seeing at liberty birds and beasts whose natural habitation seems a Zoological Garden, and I remember once in a far island away down in the South East of the Malay Archipelago, when I saw a great cockatoo staring at me I looked about for the cage from which it had escaped and could not realise for a moment that it was at home there and had never known confinement.

The jungle was not very thick and the sun finding its bold way through the trees diapered the ground with a coloured and fantastic pattern. But after a while it began to dawn on me that I was lost, not seriously and tragically lost as may happen to one in the jungle, but astray as one might be in the squares and terraces of Bayswater; I did not want to retrace my steps and the pathway, with the sun shining on it, was tempting: I thought I would go on a little further and see what happened. And suddenly I came upon a tiny village; it consisted of no more than four or five houses surrounded by a stockade of bamboos. I was as surprised to find it there, right in the jungle and six or seven miles from the main road, as its inhabitants must have been to see me, but neither they nor I would betray by our demeanour that there was anything odd about it. Small children playing on the dry, dusty ground scattered at my approach (I remembered how in one place I was asked if two little boys who had never seen a white man might be brought to have a look at me and were promptly carried away screaming with terror at the revolting sight); but the
women, carrying buckets of water or pounding rice, went on unconcernedly with their tasks; and the men, sitting on their verandahs, gave me but an indifferent glance. I wondered how those people had found their way there and what they did; they were self-subsistent, living a life entirely of their own, and as much cut off from the outside world as though they dwelt on an atoll in the South Seas. I knew and could know nothing of them. They were as different from me as though they belonged to another species. But they had passions like mine, the same hopes, the same desires, the same griefs. To them, too, I suppose, love came like sunshine after rain, and to them too, I suppose, came satiety. But for them the days unchanging added their long line to one another without haste and without surprise; they followed their appointed round and led the lives their fathers had led before them. The pattern was traced and all they had to do was to follow it. Was that not wisdom and in their constancy was there not beauty?

I urged my pony on and in a few yards I was once more in the thick of the jungle. I continued to climb, the path crossing and recrossing little rushing streams, and then wound down, wound round the hills, the trees growing upon them so densely that you felt you could walk upon the tree-tops as though upon a green floor, until all sunny I saw the plain and the village for which I was bound that day.

It was called Mong Pying and I had made up my mind to rest there for a little. It was very warm and in the afternoon I sat in shirt sleeves on the verandah of the bungalow. I was surprised to see approaching me a white man. I had not seen one since I left Taunggyi. Then I remembered that before leaving they had told me that somewhere along the road I should meet an Italian priest. I rose to meet him. He was a thin man, tall for an Italian, with regular features and large handsome eyes. His face, sallow from malaria, was covered almost to the eyes with
a luxuriant black beard that curled as boldly as the beard of an Assyrian king. And his hair was abundant, black and curling. I guessed him to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. He was dressed in a shabby black cassock, stained and threadbare, a battered khaki helmet, white trousers and white shoes.

‘I heard you were coming,' he said to me. ‘Just think, I haven't seen a white man for eighteen months.'

He spoke fluent English.

‘What will you have?' I asked him. ‘I can offer you whisky, or gin and bitters, or tea or coffee.'

He smiled.

‘I haven't had a cup of coffee for two years. I ran out of it, and I found I could do without it very well. It was an extravagance and we have so little money for this mission. But it is a deprivation.'

I told the Ghurka boy to make him a cup and when he tasted it his eyes glistened.

‘Nectar,' he cried. ‘It is real nectar. People should do without things more. It is only then that you really enjoy them.'

‘You must let me give you two or three tins.' ‘

Can you spare them? I will send you some lettuces from my garden.'

‘But how long have you been here then?' I asked.

‘Twelve years.'

He was silent for a moment.