The Gentleman In the Parlour (3 page)

When I had settled down on the boat that was taking me up the Irrawaddy to Pagan I got the little green volume out of my bag to read on the way. The boat was crowded with natives. They lay about on their beds surrounded by a great many small pieces of luggage and ate and gossiped all day long. There were among them a number of monks in yellow robes, their heads shaven, and they smoked cheroots in silence. Occasionally one passed a raft of teak-logs, with a little thatched house on it, going down-stream to Rangoon, and caught a brief glimpse of the family that lived on it busy with the preparations of a meal or cosily eating it. It looked a placid life that they led, with long hours of repose and ample leisure for the exercise of an idle curiosity. The river was broad and muddy, and its banks were flat. Now and then one saw a pagoda, sometimes spick and span and white, but more often crumbling to pieces; and now and then one came to a riverside village nestling amiably among great green trees. On the landing-stage was a dense throng of noisy, gesticulating people in bright dresses and they looked like flowers on a stall in a market-place; there was a turmoil and a confusion, shouting, a hurry and scurry as a mass of little people, laden with their belongings, got off, and another mass of little people, laden too, got on.

River travelling is monotonous and soothing. In what-ever part of the world you are it is the same. No responsibility rests on your shoulders. Life is easy. The long day is divided into neat parts by the meals and you very soon acquire a sense that you have no longer an individuality; you are a passenger occupying a certain berth and the statistics of the company show that you have occupied that berth at this season for a certain number of years and will continue to do so long enough to make the company's shares a sound investment.

I began to read my Hazlitt. I was astonished. I found a solid writer, without pretentiousness, courageous to speak his mind, sensible and plain, with a passion for the arts that was neither gushing nor forced, various, interested in the life about him, ingenious, sufficiently profound for his purposes, but with no affectation of profundity, humorous, sensitive. And I liked his English. It was natural and racy, eloquent when eloquence was needed, easy to read, clear and succinct, neither below the weight of his matter nor with fine phrases trying to give it a specious importance. If art is nature seen through the medium of a personality, Hazlitt is a great artist.

I was enraptured. I could not forgive myself that I had lived so long without reading him and I raged against the idolaters of Elia whose foolishness had deprived me till now of so vivid an experience. Here certainly was no charm, but what a robust mind, sane, clear-cut and vivacious, and what vigour! Presently I came across the rich essay which is entitled
On Going A Journey
and I reached the passage that runs: ‘Oh! it is great to shake off the trammels of the world and of public opinion – to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties – to hold to the universe only by a dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the evening – and no longer
seeking for applause and meeting with contempt, to be known by no other title than
The Gentleman in the Parlour!'
I could wish that Hazlitt had used fewer dashes in this passage. There is in the dash something rough, ready and haphazard that goes against my grain. I have seldom read a sentence in which it could not be well replaced by the elegant semi-colon or the discreet bracket. But I had no sooner read these words than it occurred to me that here was an admirable name for a book of travel and I made up my mind to write it.

I let the book fall to my knees and looked at the river flowing silently. The immense volume of slow moving water gave an exquisite sensation of inviolate peace. The night fell softly as a green leaf in summer falls softly to the ground. But trying for a moment to fight against the pleasant idleness of spirit that stole over me, I sorted in my memory the impressions that Rangoon had left on me.

It was a gay and sunny morning when the ship that I had taken at Colombo steamed up the Irrawaddy. They pointed out to me the tall chimneys of the Burmah Oil Company and the air was grey and misty with their smoke. But behind the smoke rose the golden spire of the Shwe Dagon. And now I found that my recollections were entirely pleasing, but nebulous; a cordial welcome, a drive in an American car through busy streets of business houses, concrete and iron like the streets, good heavens! of Honolulu, Shanghai, Singapore or Alexandria, and then a spacious, shady house in a garden; an agreeable life, luncheon at this club or that, drives along trim, wide roads, bridge after dark at that club or this, gin
pahits
, a great many men in white drill or pongee silk, laughter, pleasant conversation; and then
back through the night to dress for dinner and out again to dine with this hospitable host or the other, cocktails, a substantial meal, dancing to a gramophone, or a game of billiards and then back once more to the large cool silent house. It was very attractive, easy, comfortable and gay; but was this Rangoon? Down by the harbour and along the river were narrow streets, a rabbit warren of intersecting alleys; and here, multitudinous, lived the Chinese, and there the Burmans: I looked with curious eyes as I passed in my motor car and wondered what strange things I should discover and what secrets they had to tell me if I could plunge into that enigmatic life and lose myself in it as a cup of water thrown overboard is lost in the Irrawaddy. Rangoon. And now I found that in my recollections, so vague and uncertain, that Shwe Dagon rose superb as on that first morning it had risen, glistening with its gold, like a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, glistening against the fog and smoke of the thriving city.

A Burmese gentleman having asked me to dine with him, I went to his office whither I was bidden. It was gaily decorated with streamers of paper flowers. A large round table stood in the middle. I was introduced to a number of his friends and we sat down. There were a great many courses, most of which were rather cold, and the food, served in little bowls, swam in copious sauces. Round the centre of the table were bowls of Chinese tea, but champagne flowed freely, too freely, and after dinner liqueurs of all kinds were passed round. We were all very jolly. Then the table was taken away and the chairs were put against the wall. My amiable host asked for permission to bring in his wife, and she came with a friend, two pretty little women with large, smiling eyes, and sat down shyly; but they soon found the position on European chairs uncomfortable and so sat with their legs under them as though they were sitting on the floor. An entertainment had been provided for my
diversion and the performers made their entrance. Two clowns, an orchestra and half a dozen dancers. One of them, they told me, was an artist celebrated through all Burmah. The dancers wore silk shirts and tight jackets, and they had flowers in their dark hair. They sang in a loud, forced voice so that the veins of their necks swelled with the effort, and they danced not together, but in turn, and their gestures were like the gestures of marionettes. Meanwhile the clowns uttered their merry quips; back and forth went the dialogue between them and the dancers, and it was evidently of a facetious character, for my host and his guests laughed loudly.

For some time I had been watching the star. She certainly had an air. She stood with her companions but with an effect of being apart from them, and on her face she wore a good-humoured, but faintly supercilious smile, as though she belonged to another sphere. When the clowns attacked her with their gibes she answered them with a smiling detachment; she was playing her part in a rite as became her, but she proposed to give nothing of herself. She had the aloofness of complete self-confidence. Then her moment came. She stepped forward. She forgot that she was a star and became an actress.

But I had been expressing regret to my neighbours that I must leave Rangoon without seeing the Shwe Dagon; for the Burmese had made certain regulations, which the Buddhist faith did not demand, but to comply with which was humiliating to the occidental; and to humiliate the occidental was the object of the regulations. No Europeans any longer went into the wat-houses. But it is a stately pile and the most venerable place of worship in the country. It enshrines eight hairs from the head of the Buddha. My Burmese friends offered now to take me and I put my Western pride in my pocket. It was midnight. Arriving at the temple we went up a long stairway on each side of which were booths; but the people who lived in them, to sell the devout what they might require, had
finished their work and some were sitting about, half naked, chatting in undertones, smoking or eating a final meal, while many in all attitudes of abandonment were asleep, some on low native beds and some on the bare stones. Here and there, left over from the day before, were masses of dying flowers, lotus and jasmine and marigold; they scented the air heavily with a perfume in which was already an acrid decay. At last we reached the great terrace. All about shrines and pagodas were jumbled pell-mell with the confusion with which trees grow in the jungle. They had been built without design or symmetry, but in the darkness, their gold and marble faintly gleaming, they had a fantastic richness. And then, emerging from among them like a great ship surrounded by lighters, rose dim, severe and splendid, the Shwe Dagon. Lamps illuminated with a sober glow the gilt with which it was covered. It towered, aloof, impressive and mysterious against the night. A guardian walked noiselessly on his naked feet, an old man was lighting a row of candles before an image of the Buddha; they gave an emphasis to the solitude. Here and there a yellow-robed monk muttered a husky invocation; his droning punctuated the silence.

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.'