The Gentleman In the Parlour (12 page)

Much time has passed since then and sometimes, at a party when women, their cheeks painted, with pearls round their necks, sit listening to a broad-bosomed
prima donna
singing the songs of Schumann or at a first night when the curtain falls after an act and the applause is loud, and the audience bursts into amused conversation, my thoughts go back to the Italian priest, a little older now and greyer, a little thinner, for since then he has had two or three bouts of fever, who is jogging up the Shan hills along the forest paths, the same to-day and to-morrow as when I left him; and so it will be till one day, old and broken, he is taken ill in one of those little mountain villages, and too weak to be moved down to the valley is presently overtaken by death. They will bury him in the jungle, with a wooden cross over him, and perhaps (the beliefs of generations stronger than the new faith he had taught) they will put little piles of stone about his grave and flowers so that his spirit may be friendly to the people of the village in which he died. And I have sometimes wondered whether at the end, so far from his kin, the headman of the village and the elders sitting round him silently, frightened to see a white man die, whether in a last moment of lucidity (those strange brown faces bending over him) fear will seize him and doubt, so that he will look beyond death and see that there is nothing but annihilation and whether then he will have a feeling of wild revolt because he has given up for nothing all that the world has to offer of beauty, love and ease, friendship and art and the pleasant gifts of nature, or whether even then he will think his brave life of toil and abnegation and endurance worth while.
It must be a terrifying moment for those whom faith has sustained and supported all their lives, the moment when they must finally know whether their belief was true. Of course he had a vocation. His faith was robust and it was as natural to him to believe as to us to breathe. He was no saint to work miracles and no mystic to endure the pain and the ineffable pleasure of union with the Godhead, but as it were the common labourer of God. The souls of men were like the fields of his native Lombardy and without sentimentality, without emotion even, taking the rough with the smooth, he ploughed them and sowed, he protected the growing corn from the birds, he took advantage of the sunshine and grumbled because the rain was too much or too little, he shrugged his shoulders when the yield was scanty and took it as his due when it was abundant. He looked upon himself as a wage-earner like any other (but his wages were the glory of God and a world without end), and it gave him a sort of satisfaction to feel that he earned his keep. He gave the people his heart, and made no more fuss about it than did his father when he sold macaroni over the counter of his little shop in the Milanese.

I entered upon the last lap of the journey to Keng Tung. For two or three days I went along the valleys by a level path, with a pretty stream flowing by the side of it; on its banks grew huge trees and now and again I saw a nimble monkey leaping from branch to branch; then I began to climb. I had to cross the divide between the basins of the Salween and the Mehkong and soon it grew very cold. Up and up we went. In the morning the mist swathed the surrounding hills, but here and there their tops emerged from it so that they looked like little green islets in a grey sea. The sun shining on the mist made
a rainbow, and it was like the bridge that led to the gate of some fairy region of the underworld. A bitter wind blew around those bleak heights, and soon I was chilled to the bone. The mule track was muddy and very slippery, so that my pony kept his feet with difficulty and dismounting I walked. The mist was heavy now, and I could see but a few yards in front of me. The bell on the leader of my caravan was muffled and plaintive and the muleteers shivering trudged along by their beasts' sides in silence. The path wound through one defile after another, and at each bend I thought I had reached the pass, but the way still went uphill and it seemed interminable. Then suddenly I found myself sloping down. I had crossed the pass, which had needed so prolonged an effort to reach, without noticing it; it gave me a slight shock of disillusion. So when you have spent all your labour to achieve some ambition and have achieved it, it seems nothing to you and you go on somewhither without any sense of a great thing accomplished. And it may be that death is like that also. I should add that this pass being no more than seven thousand feet high, to reach it was perhaps not so extraordinary a feat as to merit these pregnant reflections.

A similar incident occurred to Mr Wordsworth when with his friend, Mr Jones
(Jones, as from Calais South ward you and I)
he crossed the Alps; but being a poet he wrote:

So simple is it when you know just how to put the best words in the best order to achieve beauty. The
elephant can with his trunk pick up a sixpence and uproot a tree.

Then I came to a point from which they told me I could see Keng Tung, but the whole country was bathed in a silvery vapour and though I strained my eyes I could see nothing. I wound down and down and gradually emerged from the mountain mist and the sun was warm on my back. In the afternoon I came into the plain. The hills I had left were dark and the grey clouds were entangled in the trees that clad them. I trotted along a straight road, wide enough for a bullock wagon, with rice fields, now only a brown and dusty stubble, on each side; I passed peasants with loads on their backs, or suspended on bamboos, going to town for the market next day; and at last I reached a broken brick gateway. It was the gate of Keng Tung. I had been twenty-six days on the journey.

Here I was met by a magistrate, a stoutish man of dignified aspect but of friendly reception, riding a mettlesome white pony, and some other official, who had come to greet me on behalf of the Sawbwa, the chieftain of that state. After we had exchanged the proper civilities we rode on through the main street of the town (but as the houses stood each in its compound with trees growing in it, it had no air of a street but rather of a road in a garden suburb), till we came to the circuit-house, at which I was to lodge. This was a long brick bungalow, placed on a hill without the town, whitewashed, with a verandah in front of it, and from the verandah I saw among trees the brown roofs of Keng Tung. All round were the green hills that surround it.

I rode down to the market on my little Shan pony. It was held on a great flat space in which were four rows of open booths and here the people jostled one another in a serried throng. I had wandered so long through country almost uninhabited that I was dazzled by the variety and the colour of the crowd. The sun shone brightly. In the wayside villages the peasants were dressed in sombre hues, in blue or maroon, and often in black, but here the colours were brilliant. The women were neat and small and pretty, with flattened faces, and sallow rather than swarthy, but their hands were beautiful, as delicate as the flowers they wore in their hair, and finely attached to their slender wrists. They were dressed in a sort of skirt, called a
lungyi
, a long strip of silk wound round and tucked in at the waist, the upper part of which was in stripes of gay colours and the lower part pale green, maroon or black, and they wore a little white bodice, very neat and modest, and over this a padded jacket, pale green or pink or black like a Spanish bolero, with tight sleeves and little wings on the shoulders which suggested that at any moment they might fly smilingly away. The men wore coloured
lungyis
too or baggy Shan trousers. And a great many wore huge hats of finely plaited straw, like candle extinguishers, with enormous curved brims, and they perched uneasily on the abundant hair and handkerchiefs of men and women. These extravagant hats, hundreds of them, swaying, bobbing up and down, with the restless movements of their wearers, were so fantastic that you could not persuade yourself that these people were busy with the serious affairs of life, but rather, engaged in a frolic, were having an enormous joke with one another.

As is usual in the East the sellers of the same things
congregated together. The stalls were merely tiled roofs on posts, speaking well for the clemency of the climate, and the floor was either the trodden earth or a very low wooden platform. The selling was done for the most part by women; there were generally three or four of them in each stall, and they sat smoking long green cheroots. But in the medicine stalls the vendors were very old men, with wrinkled faces and blood-shot eyes, who looked like wizards. I observed their wares with consternation. There were piles of dried herbs and large boxes of powders of various colours, blue, yellow, red and green, and I could not but think he must be a brave man who ventured upon them. In my childhood I have been beguiled into taking a dose of salts under the impression that as a reward for virtue I was being treated to a spoonful of plum jam (and have never been able to stomach plum jam since), but I cannot imagine how a fond Shan mother would conceal from her little Shan boy that she was administering to him a large spoonful of a gritty emerald powder. There were pills so large that I asked myself what throat was ever so capacious as to be able to wash them down with a drink of water. There were small dried animals that looked like the roots of plants that had been dug out of the ground and left to rot, and there were roots of plants that looked like dried animals. But the aged apothecaries suffered from no lack of custom. Trade was brisk that morning, and they were kept busy weighing out drugs not with the flaky weights we use at home but with large pieces of lead cast in the form of the Buddha. At last my patience was rewarded, and having seen a man buy a dozen pills as large as bantams' eggs, I watched him take one in finger and thumb, open his mouth, drop it in and swallow. There was a struggle, for a moment his face bore a strained look, then he gave himself a jerk, and the pill was gone. The apothecary watched him with rheumy eyes.

In the market was to be found everything, to eat to wear, and to furnish his house that was necessary to the needs of the simple Shan. There were silks from China, and the Chinese hucksters, sedately smoking their water pipes, were dressed in blue trousers, tight-fitting black coats and black silk caps. They were not lacking in elegance. The Chinese are the aristocracy of the East. There were Indians in white trousers, a white tunic that fitted closely to their thin bodies and round caps of black velvet. They sold soap and buttons, and flimsy Indian silks, rolls of Manchester cotton, alarm clocks, looking-glasses and knives from Sheffield. The Shans retailed the goods brought down by the tribesmen from the surrounding hills and the simple products of their own industry. Here and there a little band of musicians occupied a booth and a crowd stood round idly listening. In one three men beat on gongs, one played the cymbals and another thumped a drum as long as himself. My uneducated ear could discern no pattern in that welter of sound, but only a direct and not unexhilarating appeal to crude emotion; but a little further on I came across another band, not of Shans this time but of hillmen who played on long wind instruments of bamboo and their music was melancholy and tremulous. Every now and then I seemed in its vague monotony to catch a few notes of a wistful melody. It gave you an impression of something immensely old. Every violence of statement had been worn away from it and every challenge to an energetic reaction, and there remained but subdued suggestions on which the imagination might work and references, as it were, to desires and hopes and despairs deep buried in the heart.
You had the feeling of a music recollected at night by the camp-fires of nomad tribes on their wanderings from the grass-lands of their ancient homes and begotten of the scattered sounds of the jungle and the silence of flowing rivers; and to my fancy (worked up now, as is the writer's way, by the power of the words, so difficultly controlled, that throng upon his imagination) it suggested the perplexity in the midst of strange and hostile surroundings of men who came they knew not whence and went they knew not whither, a plaintive, questioning cry and a song sung together (as men at sea in a storm tell one another lewd stories to drive away the uneasiness of the battering waves and the howling wind) to reassure themselves by the blessed solace of human companionship against the loneliness of the world.

But there was nothing doleful or forlorn in the throng that crowded the streets of the market. They were gay, voluble and blithe. They had come not only to buy and sell, but to gossip and pass the time of day with their friends. It was the meeting-place not only of Keng Tung, but of the whole countryside for fifty miles around. Here they got the news and heard the latest stories. It was as good as a play and doubtless much better than most. Among the Shans, who were in the majority, wandered in their distinctive costumes members of many tribes. They held together in little groups as though, feeling shy in this foreign environment, they were afraid of being parted from one another. To them it must have seemed a vast and populous city, and they kept themselves to themselves with the countryman's odd mingling of awe and contempt for the inhabitants of a city. There were Tais, Laos, Kaws, Palaungs, Was and heaven knows what else. The Was are divided by people wise in these matters into wild and tame, but the wild ones do not leave their mountain fastnesses. They are head-hunters, not from vainglory like the Dyaks, nor for aesthetic reasons like the people of the Mambwe country, but for the purely
utilitarian purpose of protecting their crops. A fresh skull will guard and strengthen the growing grain, and so at the approach of spring from each village a small party of men goes out to look for a likely stranger. A stranger is sought since he does not know his way about the country and his spirit will not wander away from his earthly remains. It is said that travel in those parts is far from popular during the hunting season. But the tame Was have the air of amiable and kindly people and certainly their appearance, though wild enough, is picturesque. The Kaws stand out from among the others by reason of their fine physique and swarthy colour. The authorities, however, state that the darkness of their complexion is due for the most part to their dislike of the use of water. The women wear a headdress covered with silver beads so that it looks like a helmet; their hair is parted in the middle and comes down over the ears as one sees it in the portraits of the Empress Eugenie, and in middle age they have funny little wrinkled faces full of humour. They wear a short coat, a kilt and leggings; and there is quite an interval between the coat and the kilt; I could not fail to notice how much character it gives a woman's face to display her navel. The men are dressed in dingy blue, with turbans, and in these the young lads put marigolds as a sign that they are bachelors and want to marry. I wondered indeed if they kept them there or only put them in when the urge was strong upon them. For presumably no one feels inclined to marry on a cold and frosty morning. I saw one with half a dozen flowers in his turban. He was not going to leave his intentions in doubt. He cut a gay and jaunty figure, but the girls seemed to take no more notice of him than he, I am bound to confess, took of them. Perhaps they thought his eagerness was exaggerated and he, I suppose, having put his advertisement in the paper, as it were, was willing to leave it at that. He was a pleasant creature, of a dusky complexion, with large dark eyes, bold and shining, and
he stood, with his back a trifle arched, as though all his muscles quivered with strength. There were peasants threading their way among the throng with pigeons on a perch tied by the leg with a string, which you might either buy to release and so acquire merit or add to the next day's curry. One of these men passing him the young Kaw, evidently a careless fellow with his money, on a sudden impulse (and you saw on his mobile face how unexpectedly it came into his head) bought a pigeon, and when it was given to him he held it for a moment in both his hands, a grey wood pigeon with a pink breast, and then throwing up his arms with the gesture of the bronze boy from Herculaneum flung it high into the air. He watched it fly rapidly away, fly back to its native woods, and there was a boyish smile on his handsome face.