A Writer's Notebook (66 page)

Labuan. You land at a little pier and come upon the main street, which runs along in front of the sea. It consists of Chinese and Jewish shops which have this peculiarity: often two or three trades are conducted in one shop, and you will see on one side of the door in the open window a dentist's chair or a hairdresser's establishment and in another a watchmaker working at his bench, while in the rest of the shop they sell canned goods. There are three or four shops of Jewish traders from Baghdad. In one, a regular jack-of-all trades of a shop, with everything that you might find in a pedlar's pack for sale, there was reclining on a bench at the back a Jewess of amazing, of almost unbelievable beauty. Half lying, half sitting, in an attitude of lazy abandonment, she had nothing on but a faded pink dressing-gown. Her white feet were naked. She had a lovely oval face, ivory in colour, a mass of very black hair and magnificent, ox-like eyes. She might have stepped right out of one of the Arabian Nights. There was
about her a sensual languor and a voluptuousness which took your breath away. Her husband was a tall, emaciated, bearded Jew in spectacles, such as you might easily see in the East End of London; sharp, cunning and obsequious.

F.M.S. Dawn at sea. I happened to awake as day was breaking and went on deck. The hills of Perak were grey and above them were grey clouds, and as the sun rose for a moment it coloured the clouds pink and gold so that they looked like the sarongs of Trengganu.

Ricebirds. The ricebirds fluttered disorderly, a white flock, like haphazard thoughts that pass through the mind without reason or sequence.

The Resident Councillor. He is a little man, between fifty and fifty-two, with grey hair and bushy grey eyebrows. He has a good profile and you can imagine that in youth he was good-looking. His blue eyes are tired now and his mouth with its thin lips is peevish. He speaks as though he had no teeth in his mouth and it is difficult to understand his mumbling. He is said to be very shy, but gives you the impression of being merely ignorant of social usages. It embarrasses him to introduce one person to another. He cannot summon up enough courage to leave a party until someone else has made a move. He is conscientious and hard-working, but stupid. He is the kind of official who is always afraid of doing the wrong thing, and bound up in silly prejudice and red tape. Though he has been here for thirty years, he speaks little Malay and takes no interest in the country or in anything else but doing his work so that his superiors may have no cause for complaint against him, and getting away as soon as he is entitled to a pension. His mind is so occupied with trifles that he cannot
give any attention to general topics. His concerns are purely local and are confined to the club and the comings and goings of the people in his district.

Planters. For the most part they seem to belong to two classes. The greater number of them are rough and common men of something below the middle class, and they speak English with a vile accent, or broad Scotch. They have vulgar minds, occupied only with rubber and its price and the sports of their club. Their wives are either very genteel and anxious to be ladies, or else blatant, noisy and hail-fellow-well-met. There is another class of planter who has been to a public school and perhaps a university. He has become a planter because he had no means of earning a living in England, and rubber planting is apparently the only occupation at which a man can earn a salary without training or experience. He is often a little anxious to impress on you the fact that he is a gentleman born, but except that he leads a slightly different life when he goes to England on leave, his conversation and his interests are exactly the same as those of the others. Among all planters there seems to be the same feeling toward the Government officials, and this is a combination of awe, envy, contempt and petulance. They sneer at them behind their backs, but look upon a garden party or a dinner at the Resident's house as an event in their lives. You would have to go far to find among the planters a man of culture, reading or distinction.

F.M.S. Mac was staying at the rest-house and was over from Dutch Borneo where he lives, in the hope of selling to the Dunlop Company rubber lands belonging to some Dutch Malays. But he was prepared to sell anything that anyone would buy, and he spent much of his time trying to get a young Eurasian to purchase a motor-car and seeking to interest
some Jews in Singapore in black diamonds, of which he claimed to be able to get mining rights in Borneo. He has been in various parts of Malaya for the last thirty-five years and has followed a great number of occupations. He came out first as a missionary and then became a Government official, doing surveying work for Perak; after that he was a planter and then a miner, and he has been agent for a number of European firms. He seems to have succeeded in nothing and now is a man of hard on sixty. He is tall and heavily-built and walks in a clodhopperish sort of fashion as though his boots were heavy with clay. He has a dark red face and blue eyes, red at the rims. He gives you an impression of low cunning. His stories of the F.M.S. are mostly about the people who in one way and another have done him down, and he gives you the impression that he is the only honest man in a world of rogues. The one story he told me which was of any value was of a woman who married a man and, finding out that three or four half-caste children in the village were his, arranged with the headman to have them drowned in the river. There was probably not a word of truth in it, but he told it with a sardonic humour which made it effective.

O. He is the secretary of the club, a little hunchbacked man of about fifty who was a planter for many years. He has much more knowledge of the world and of literature than most of them, and speaks with a lively scorn of the complaints which the planters' wives make of the pains of exile. He says that of course all planters belong to the lower middle classes, and most of their wives, instead of having a house with plenty of servants and a motor-car, would at home be serving behind a counter.

G. R. He is the Government engineer. He is a very small, dapper fellow with clean-cut features and grey hair. He is precise in his manner. He is very much the soldier and the gentleman,
and has a house in the Isle of Wight to which he proposes to retire next year. He wants to find some occupation and suggests chicken-farming, which he hopes will take up his time and bring him ten per cent on his outlay. He is the typical dug-out with a great respect for all the prejudices of the military caste. You can imagine how well he will fit in with the retired soldiers when he finally settles down at Ventnor.