The Gentleman In the Parlour (11 page)

‘My brother, who is a priest in Milan, offered to send me the money to go back to Italy so that I might see my mother before she died. She is an old woman and she cannot live much longer. They used to say I was her favourite son and indeed when I was a child she used to spoil me. I should have liked to see her once more, but to tell you the truth I was afraid to go; I thought that if I did I should not have the courage to come back here to my people. Human nature is very weak, do you not think so? I could not trust myself.' He smiled and gave
a gesture that was oddly pathetic. ‘Never mind, we shall meet again in Paradise.'

Then he asked me if I had a camera. He was very anxious to send a photograph of his new church to the lady in Lombardy through whose pious generosity he had been able to build it. He took me to it, a great wooden barn, severe and bare; the reredos was decorated with an execrable picture of Jesus Christ painted by one of the nuns at Keng Tung, and he begged me to take a photograph of this also so that when I went there and visited the convent I could show the nun how her work looked in place. There were two little pews for the scanty congregation. He was proud, as well he might be, because the church, the altar and the pews had been built by himself and his converts. He took me to his compound and showed me the modest building which served as school-room and as sleeping-quarters for the children in his charge. I think he told me that there were six and thirty of them. He led me into his own little bungalow. The living-room was fairly spacious and this till the church was built he had used also as a chapel. At the back was a tiny bedroom no larger than a monk's cell, in which was nothing but a small wooden bed, a washing-stand and a book-shelf. Alongside of this was a tiny, rather dirty and untidy kitchen. There were two women in it.

‘You see I am very grand now, I have a cook and a kitchen-maid,' he said.

The younger woman had a hare-lip and, giggling, took pains to hide it with her hand. The father said something to her. The other was squatting on the ground pounding some herb in a mortar and he patted her kindly on the shoulder.

‘They have been here nearly a year now,' he said. ‘They are mother and daughter. The woman, poor thing, had a malformed hand and the girl, as you see, that terrible lip.'

The woman had had a husband and two children besides the girl with the hare-lip; but they had died suddenly, within a few weeks of one another, and the people of her village, thinking that she was possessed of an evil spirit, drove her out, her and her daughter, penniless, into a world of which she knew nothing. She went to another village in the jungle where lived a catechist, for she had heard that the Christians did not fear the spirits, and the catechist was willing to give her lodging; but he was very poor and could not provide her with food. He told her to go to the father. This was a five-day journey and it was the beginning of the rainy season. She and her daughter shouldered their small possessions, they were no more than they could carry in a little bundle on their backs, and set out, walking along the jungle paths, up and down the hills, and at night they slept in a village if they came upon one and if not in such resting-place, in the shadow of a rock or under the branches of a tree, as they found by the wayside. But the people of the villages through which they passed sought to dissuade them from their purpose, for it was well known that the father took children into his house and after a while bore them away to Rangoon where he offered them to the spirit of the sea and received money for them. They were terrified, but no village would keep them and the father was their only refuge. They went on and at last, desperate but panic-stricken, presented themselves to him. He told them that they could live in an out-house and cook the rice of the children in the school.

We went into the living-room and sat down. It was bare of every sort of comfort. There was a large table and two or three wooden chairs, straight-backed and severe; there were shelves on which were a number of religious books, paper-bound and musty, and a great many Catholic periodicals. The only secular book I saw was that dreary masterpiece J
Promessi Sposi.
(When
Manzoni met Sir Walter Scott who complimented him on his work he, acknowledging his debt to the Waverley Novels, said that it was not his book, but Sir Walter's, upon which Sir Walter replied, then it is my best book. But he spoke from his generous heart; it is of an almost intolerable tediousness.) But the father received a daily paper from Italy, the
Corriere della Sera
, arriving in bundles once a month, and he told me that he read every word of every one.

‘It amuses me,' he said, ‘of course, but I do it also as well, as a spiritual exercise, for I cannot afford to let my faculties rust. I know everything that is happening in Italy, what operas they are doing at the Scala, what plays are given, and what books are published. I read the political speeches. Everything. In that way I keep abreast of the world. My mind remains active. I do not suppose I shall ever return to Italy, but if I do I shall step back in my environment as though I had never been away. In this kind of life one must never let go of oneself for a minute.'

He talked fluently, in a resonant voice, and he was quick to smile; he had a loud and hearty laugh. When first he came to this place he put up at the PWD bungalow and set about learning the language. The rest of his time he spent building the little house in which I now sat. Then he went out into the jungle.

‘I can do nothing with the Shans,' he told me. ‘They are Buddhists and they are satisfied with Buddhism. It suits them.' He gave me a deprecating look of his fine black eyes and with a smile made a statement that I could see was so bold to his mind that he was a trifle startled at it himself. ‘You know, one must admit that Buddhism is a beautiful religion. I have long talks sometimes with the monk at the Pongyi Chaun, he is not an uneducated man, and I cannot but respect him and his faith.'

He soon discovered that he could hope to influence only the people in the little lonely villages in the
jungle, for they were spirit-worshippers and their lives were perplexed by the unceasing dread of the malignant powers that lay in wait to ensnare them. But the villages were far away, in the mountains, and often he had to go twenty, thirty or even forty miles to reach them.

‘Do you ride?' I asked.

‘No, I walk. I don't say I wouldn't ride if I could afford a pony, but I am glad to walk. In this country you need plenty of exercise. I suppose that when I get old I shall have to have a pony, and by then I may have the money to buy one, but as long as I am in the prime of life there is no reason I should not travel on the legs God gave me.'

It was his custom on arriving at a village to go to the headman's house and ask for lodging. When the people came back in the evening from their work he gathered them together on the verandah and talked to them. Now, after all these years, they knew him for forty miles around and they made him welcome. Sometimes a message came to ask him to go to some distant village that he had not yet visited so that they could hear what he had to say.

I remembered the lonely little village, shut off by the pressing growth of that dense verdure, that I had come upon in the jungle. I wanted to form in my mind's eye some picture of the lives those people led in it. The father shrugged his shoulders when I questioned him.

‘They work. Men and women work together. It is a constant round of unceasing toil. Believe me, life is not easy in the jungle villages up in the mountains. They sow their rice, and you know what time and trouble it takes, and then they reap it; they cultivate opium, and when they have an interval they go into the jungle to gather the jungle produce. They do not starve, but they only save themselves from starvation because they never rest.'

As I wandered through the country, fording rivers or crossing them by rustic bridges, going up and down the tree-clad hills, passing between the rice fields, stopping for a night at one village of bamboo houses after another,
talking with that long succession of headmen, their faces wizened or hardy, I seemed to myself like a figure in a tapestry that lined the halls of some old, infinitely deserted palace, an interminable tapestry of a sombre green in which you see dimly dark stiff trees and faded streams, hamlets of strange houses and shadowy people occupied without pause with actions that have a mystical, hieratic and obscure significance. But sometimes when I arrived at a village and the headman and the elders, kneeling on the ground, gave me their presents, I had seemed to read in their large dark eyes a strange hunger. They looked at me humbly, as though they were expecting from me a message for which they had been long eagerly waiting. I wished that I could make them a discourse that would stir them; I wished that I could deliver to them the glad tidings for which they seemed to hanker. I could tell them nothing of a Beyond of which I knew nothing. The priest at least could give them something. I saw him arriving, footsore and weary, at some village, and when the approach of night prevented the people from working any longer, sitting on the floor on the verandah, lit by the moon perhaps, but perhaps only by the stars, and telling them, silent shadows in the darkness, things strange and new.

I do not think he was a very intellectual man; he had character, of course, and shrewdness. He knew quite well that the hill Shans let their children come to him only because he clothed, lodged and fed them, but he shrugged his shoulders tolerantly; they would return to their hills when they were of a proper age, and though some would revert to the savage beliefs of their fathers, others would retain the faith he had taught them and by their influence perhaps lighten the darkness that surrounded them. He led too busy a life to have much time for reflection, and certainly there was in his mind no mystical strain; his faith was strong, as an athlete's arms are muscular, and he accepted the dogmas of his religion as unquestioningly
as you and I accept the fact of single vision or the flushing cheek. He told me that he had had a desire to come to the East as a missionary when he was still a seminarist and had studied in Milan to that end. He showed me a photograph of the group, sitting round the bishop, who had come out with him, twelve of them, and pointed out to me those that were dead. This one had been drowned crossing a river in China, that one had died of cholera in India, and the other had been killed by the wild Was up in the north of the Shan States. I asked him when he had sailed and without a moment's hesitation he gave me the day of the week, the day of the month and the year; whatever anniversaries they may forget, these nuns, monks and secular priests, the date on which they left Europe remains on the tip of their tongues. Then he showed me a photograph of his family, a typical group of lower middle-class people, such as you may see in the window of any cheap photographer in Italy. They were stiff, formal and self-conscious, the father and mother sitting in the middle in their best clothes, two younger children arranged on the floor at their feet, a daughter on each side of them and behind, standing according to their heights, a row of sons. The priest pointed out to me those that had entered religion.

‘More than half,' I commented.

‘It has been a great happiness to our mother,' he said. ‘It is her doing.'

She was a stout woman, in a black dress, with her hair parted in the middle and large, soft eyes. She looked like a good housekeeper and I had little doubt that when it came to buying and selling she could drive a hard bargain. The priest smiled affectionately.

‘She is a wonderful creature, my mother, she has had fifteen children and eleven of them are still alive. She is a saint, and goodness is as natural to her as a fine voice is to a
cantatrice;
it is no more difficult for her to do a beautiful action than it was for Adelina Patti to take C
in alt.
Cara.'

He put the photograph back on the table.

When the next day but one I set out again the father said he would walk with me till we came to the hills and so, slinging my pony's bridle over my arm, we trudged along while he gave me messages for the nuns at Keng Tung and impressed upon me not to forget to send him prints of the photographs I had taken. He walked with his gun on his shoulder, an old weapon that looked to me much more dangerous to himself than to the beasts of the field; he was an odd figure in his battered helmet and his black cassock trussed up round his waist in order not to impede his gait, his white trousers tucked into his heavy boots. He walked with a long slow stride and I could well imagine that the miles sagged away under it. But presently his sharp eyes caught sight of a kingfisher that sat on the low branch of a tree, green and blue, a little quivering, beautiful thing, poised there for a moment like a living gem; the father put his hand on my arm to stop me and crept forward very softly, noiselessly, till he got to within ten feet; then he fired and when the bird dropped he sprang forward with a cry of triumph and picking it up he threw it in the bag he carried slung to his side.

‘That will help to make my rice tasty,' he said.

But we reached the jungle and he stopped again.

‘I shall leave you here,' he said. ‘I must get back to my work.'

I mounted my pony, we shook hands, and I trotted off. I turned back when I came to a bend of the path and waved as I saw him still standing where I had left him. He had his hand on the trunk of a tall tree and the green of the forest surrounded him. I went on and soon, I suppose, with that heavy tread of his that seemed not to spurn the earth but to stamp upon it with a jovial energy, as though it were friendly and would take his affectionate violence in good part (like a great strong dog who wags his tail when you give him a hearty slap on the buttock)
soon, I suppose, he trudged back to the life from which for a day or two I had lured him. I knew that I should never see him again. I was going on to I knew not what new experiences and presently I should return to the great world with its excitement and vivid changes, but he would remain there always.