A Writer's Notebook (60 page)

When I got back to Kuching I wrote to the Resident with whom we had been staying and asked him if he could see his way to commuting the sentences of the two prisoners who had saved my life. He wrote back and told me that he had set one of them free, but was afraid he could not do anything for the other, since on his way back to Simiangang he had stopped off at his own village and killed his mother-in-law
.

An eastern river. On either bank the jungle spread densely, and under the full moon it was blacker than the night, silent with a silence in which was something ominous. You shuddered as you thought of the dark, violent things which its thick foliage shrouded. It seemed to wait expectantly. But in the clear sky the moon proceeded leisurely: it was like the squire's lady, portly in her Sunday best, sailing up the aisle of the village church. Then in the east, beneath a ragged fringe of cloud, a faint redness appeared. On the placid river a sampan glided silently and against the water you saw the dim figure of the standing fisherman. On the bank a solitary light gleamed friendly amid the jungle wildness, and you guessed that a grass hut stood there clinging to the water's edge and pressed upon fiercely by the lush extravagance of palm and strange-named tree and creeping plant. Now the redness in the East was lurid. The ragged clouds were torn and tortured: the sun was rising unpeacefully as though he strove desperately with unknown, dark and merciless powers. And when you looked up the river
it was day; but when you looked back, the moon shone tranquilly and the night lingered serene.

L. He is a little over forty, of about the middle height, thin, very dark, slightly bald, with black hair and large eyes
à fleur de tête
. He has not the look of an Englishman, but rather of a Levantine. He speaks, without modulation, on one note. He has lived so long on outstations that he is shy and silent in company. He has a native wife whom he does not care for and four half-caste children whom he is educating in Singapore to be clerks in Government offices in Sarawak. He never wants to go to England, where he feels himself a stranger. He speaks Dyak and Malay like a native; he was born in the country and knows the native mind better than he knows the English. He got engaged to a girl on one of his leaves in England, but the thought of his native family harassed him so that he broke off the engagement. He would much sooner be on an outstation than in Kuching. He seldom smiles. He is a morbid, melancholy man, very conscientious, and always afraid of doing wrong. When he talks, without humour, he is verbose and dull. Life is a blind alley.

The bazaar at Kuching. The bazaar consists of narrow streets with arcades like those of Bologna and each house is a shop in which you see the thronging Chinese pursuing the busy life of the Chinese town, working, eating, talking. On the banks of the river are the native huts, and here, living their immemorial lives, are the Malays. As you wander in the crowd, as you linger watching, you get a curious, thrilling sense of urgent life. You divine a happy, normal activity. Birth and death, love and hunger; these are the affairs of man. And through that press of people passes the white man who rules them. He is never part of the life about him. So long as the Chinese keep the peace and pay their taxes he does not interfere with them. He
is a pale stranger who moves through all this reality like a being from another planet. He is no more than a policeman. He is the eternal exile. He has no interest in the place. He is only waiting for his pension, and he knows that when he gets it he will be unfit to live anywhere but here. In the club they often discuss where they shall live when they retire. They are bored with themselves, bored with one another. They look forward to their freedom from bondage and yet the future fills them with dismay.

A planter. He was at Cambridge and after taking his degree decided to be a planter. He has been out ten years. He is a bachelor. He was ruined by the slump. He made two thousand dollars in the boom and put it into rubber, but now most of the estates in which he invested his money have gone back to jungle. He is a little man with irregular features, soft dark eyes and a soft voice, very shy, with a gift of mimicry and a love of music. He can play after a fashion all kinds of instruments. He collects Malay silver. There is something pathetic about him. He lives alone in a very untidy bungalow. On the walls are innumerable pictures of women in all states of undress. On the rough shelves are modern novels.

Mrs. T. A blonde. Owing to the heat her hair is straight, but it is rather pretty hair, very fair, flaxen; and she has blue eyes, a little pale and already inclined to be tired although she cannot be more than six and twenty. Full-face she is almost pretty in her colourless fashion, but she has a very weak, small, insignificant chin, and in profile there is something sheeplike about her. He skin has been clear and fresh, but now like one of the tropical days it is faded. She wears cotton and muslin frocks, blue or pink, open at the neck, with short sleeves. Her usual ornament is a string of white coral beads. On her head a Philippine straw hat.

Mrs. N. Fair, fat and forty. She is a large, dark woman, with bright eyes and a bold, friendly manner. She gives you the impression that she might have been a chorus girl; as a matter of fact she comes from a family that has been busied with the East for a hundred years. She is stout, growing stouter all the time, to her dismay, but she cannot resist food, and she devours cream and potatoes and bread with gusto.

Singapore: Opium Dream. I saw a road lined on each side with tall poplars, the sort of road that you see often in France, and it stretched in front of me, white and straight, immensely far; I saw farther than I had ever thought it possible to see, and still the white road continued with green poplars on either side. And then I seemed to go along it, rapidly, and the poplars fled past memore quickly, infinitely more quickly than the telegraph poles fly past when you are in an express train; and still they went and still they were ahead of me, the long rows of poplars. Then, on a sudden, there were no more poplars, but shady trees with large leaves, chestnuts and planes; and they were spaced out, and I went at no breakneck speed, but leisurely, and presently I came upon an open space and then, as I looked down, far below me, was the grey calm sea. Here and there a fishing-boat was sailing into harbour. Yonder, on the other side of the bay, stood a trim and tidy granite house with a flagstaff in the garden. It must have been the coast-guard's.

He had been Resident in one of the Federated Malay States for twenty years. He lived in almost regal state. He was very odd and fierce. He was autocratic, violent and brutal. He had a Malay wife and by her and other women a great number of children. At last he retired and married a woman in Cheltenham where he had settled down, and his only desire thenceforward was hers, to get into the best society.