The Gentleman In the Parlour (13 page)

I spent the best part of a week in Keng Tung. The days were warm and sunny and the circuit-house neat, clean and roomy. After so many strenuous days on the road it was pleasant to have nothing much to do. It was pleasant not to get up till one felt inclined and to breakfast in pyjamas. It was pleasant to lounge through the morning with a book. For it is an error to think that because you have no train to catch and no appointments to keep your movements on the road are free. Your times for doing this and that are as definite as if you lived in a city and had to go to business every morning. Your movements are settled not by your own whim, but by the length of the stages and the endurance of the mules. Though you would not think it mattered if you arrived half an hour sooner or later at your day's destination, there is always a rush to get up in the morning, a bustle of preparation and an urgent compulsion to get off without delay.

I kept the emotion with which Keng Tung filled me
well under control. It was a village, larger than those I had passed on the way, but a village notwithstanding, of wooden houses, spacious, with wide dirt streets, and I was put to it to find objects of interest to visit. On other than market days it was empty. In the main street you saw nothing but a few gaunt pariah dogs. In one or two shops a woman, smoking a cheroot, sat idly on the floor; she had no thought that on such a day there would ever be a customer; in another four Chinamen crouched on their heels were gambling. Silence. The dusty road had great ruts in it, and the sun beat down on it from a clear blue sky. Three little women suddenly appeared in monstrous, diverting hats and passed along in single file; they had a couple of baskets suspended by a bamboo over the shoulder and they walked with bent knees, speedily, as though if they went more slowly they would sink under their burdens. And against the emptiness of the street they made a quick and evanescent pattern.

And there was silence too in the monasteries. There are perhaps a dozen of them in Keng Tung and their high roofs stand out when you look at the town from the little hill on which is the circuit-house. Each one stands in its compound and in the compound are a number of crumbling pagodas. The great hall in which the Buddha, enormous, sits in his hieratic attitude, surrounded by others, eight or ten, hardly smaller, is like a barn, but its roof is supported by huge columns of teak, gilt or lacquered, and the wooden walls and the rafters are gilt or lacquered too. Rude paintings of scenes in the Master's life hang from the eaves. It is dark and solemn, but the Buddhas sit on their great lotus leaves in the gloaming like gods who have had their day, and now neglected, but indifferent to neglect, in their decaying grandeur of gilt and mosaic continue to reflect on suffering and the end of suffering, transitoriness and the eightfold path. Their aloofness is almost terrifying. You tread on tiptoe in order not to disturb their meditations and when you
close behind you the carved and gilded doors and come out once more into the friendly day it is with a sigh of relief. You feel like a man who has gone by accident to a party at the wrong house and on realising his mistake makes his escape quickly and hopes that no one has noticed him.

Musing upon the odd chance that had brought me to that distant spot, my idle thoughts gathered about the tall, aloof figure of the casual acquaintance whose words spoken at random had tempted me to make the journey. I tried from the impressions he had left upon me to construct the living man. For when we meet people we see them only in the flat, they offer us but one side of themselves, and they remain shadowy; we have to give them our flesh and our bones before they exist in the round. That is why the characters of fiction are more real than the characters of life. He was a soldier and for five years had been in command of the Military Police Post at Loimwe, which is a few miles south-east of Keng Tung. Loimwe signifies the Hill of Dreams.

I do not think he was a great hunter, for I have noticed that most men who live in places were game is plentiful acquire a distaste for killing the wild creatures of the jungle. When on their arrival they have shot this animal or that, the tiger, the buffalo, or the deer, for the satisfaction of their self-esteem, they lose interest. It suggests itself to them that the graceful creatures, whose habits they have studied, have as much right to life as they; they get a sort of affection for them, and it is only unwillingly that they take their guns to kill a tiger that is frightening the villagers, or woodcock or snipe for the pot.

Five years is a big slice out of a man's life. He spoke
of Keng Tung as a lover might speak of his bride. It had been an experience so poignant that it had set him apart for ever from his fellows. He was reticent, and as is the English way could tell but in clumsy words what he had found there. I do not know whether even to himself he was able to put into plain language the vague emotions that touched his heart when in a secluded village at night he sat and talked with the elders and whether he asked himself the questions, so new and strange to one of his circumstances and profession, that stood in silence (like homeless men in winter outside a refuge for the destitute) waiting to be answered. He loved the wild wooded hills and the starry nights. The days were interminable and monotonous, and on them he embroidered a vague and misty pattern. I do not know what it was. I can only guess that it made the world he went back to, the world of clubs and mess-tables, of steam-engines and motor cars, dances and tennis-parties, politics, intrigue, bustle, excitement, the world of the newspapers, strangely without meaning. Though he lived in it, though he even enjoyed it, it remained utterly remote. I think it had lost its sense for him. In his heart was the reflection of a lovely dream that he could never quite recall.

We are gregarious, most of us, and we resent the man who does not seek the society of his fellows. We do not content ourselves with saying that he is odd, but we ascribe to him unworthy motives. Our pride is wounded that he should have no use for us and we nod to one another and wink and say that if he lives in this strange way it must be to practise some secret vice and if he does not inhabit his own country it can only be because his own country is too hot to hold him. But there are people who do not feel at home in the world, the companionship of others is not necessary to them and they are ill-at-ease amid the exuberance of their fellows. They have an invincible shyness. Shared emotions abash them. The thought of community singing, even though it be but
God Save
the King
, fills them with embarrassment, and if they sing it is plaintively in their baths. They are self-sufficient and they shrug a resigned and sometimes, it must be admitted, a scornful shoulder because the world uses that adjective in a depreciatory sense. Wherever they are they feel themselves ‘out of it'. They are to be found all over the surface of this earth, members of a great monastic order bound by no vows and cloistered though not by walls of stone. If you wander up and down the world you will meet them in all sorts of unexpected places. You are not surprised when you hear that an elderly English lady is living in a villa on a hill outside a small Italian town that you have happened on by an accident to the car in which you were driving, for Italy has always been the preferred refuge of these staid nuns. They have generally adequate means and an extensive knowledge of the
cinque cento.
You take it as a matter of course when a lonely
hacienda
is pointed out to you in Andalusia and you are told that there has dwelt for many years an English lady of a certain age. She is usually a devout Catholic and sometimes lives in sin with her coachman. But it is more surprising when you hear that the only white person in a Chinese city is an Englishwoman, not a missionary, who has lived there, none knows why, for a quarter of a century; and there is another who inhabits an islet in the South Seas and a third who has a bungalow on the outskirts of a large village in the centre of Java. They live solitary lives, without friends, and they do not welcome the stranger. Though they may not have seen one of their own race for months they will pass you on the road as though they did not see you, and if, presuming on your nationality, you call, the chances are that they will decline to receive you; but if they do they will give you a cup of tea from a silver tea-pot and on a plate of old Worcester you will be offered hot scones. They will talk to you politely, as though they were entertaining you in a drawing-room overlooking a London square, but when
you take your leave they express no desire ever to see you again.

The men are at once shyer and more friendly. At first they are tongue-tied and you see the anxious look on their faces as they rack their brains for topics of conversation, but a glass of whisky loosens their minds (for sometimes they are inclined to tipple) and then they will talk freely. They are glad to see you, but you must be careful not to abuse your welcome; they get tired of company very soon and grow restless at the necessity of making an effort. They are more apt to run to seed than women, they live in a higgledy-piggledy manner, indifferent to their surroundings and their food. They have often an ostensible occupation. They keep a little shop, but do not care whether they sell anything, and their goods are dusty and fly-blown; or they run, with lackadaisical incompetence, a coconut plantation. They are on the verge of bankruptcy. Sometimes they are engaged in metaphysical speculation, and I met one who had spent years in the study and annotation of the works of Immanuel Swedenborg. Sometimes they are students and take endless pains to translate classical works which have been already translated, like the dialogues of Plato, or of which translation is impossible, like Goethe's
Faust.
They may not be very useful members of society, but their lives are harmless and innocent. If the world despises them they on their side despise the world. The thought of returning to its turmoil is a nightmare to them. They ask nothing but to be left in peace. Their satisfaction with their lot is sometimes a trifle irritating. It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men. They have given up everything for a dream, a dream of peace or happiness or
freedom, and their dream is so intense that they make it true.

But I had idled long enough and so, bright and early one morning, I set out with my caravan from Keng Tung. I was accompanied by an official of the Sawbwa's court who was to escort me to the frontier of the Sawbwa's dominions. He was a corpulent gentleman and he rode a very small and scraggy pony. For the first day I rode through the plain with rice fields on either side of the road and then plunged once more into the hills. I had finished now with the PWD bungalows, but the Sawbwa had been good enough to order houses to be built for me on the way and messengers had been sent on to the various villages with the necessary instructions. I felt very grand to have a house built for me to spend a single night in and the first one I lodged at filled me with delight. It was like a toy. It would hardly have kept out the wet if it rained or the wind if it blew, but in fine weather it was a place for young lovers to live in rather than a middle-aged writer. It was very neat and clean, for the bamboos of which it was made had been cut that morning, and it had the pleasant, fresh smell of growing things. It was all green, walls, floor and roof. It consisted of two rooms and a broad verandah. The walls and the floor, raised about three feet from the ground, were of split bamboos. The supporting pillars and the beams were of whole bamboos, and the roof was neatly thatched with rice straw. The floor was resilient so that, accustomed to an unyielding surface underfoot, I had at first a feeling of some insecurity and walked gingerly; but there was a network of solid bamboos under it and it was really as strong as could be desired. Within a few feet was a rushing mountain stream (I had crossed it half-a-dozen
times during the day either by a ford or a rickety bridge) and its banks were thickly grown with trees. In front was a little open space where cattle grazed and the view was shut in by a green hill. It was an enchanting spot.

One day, the letter sent on ahead to arrange accommodation having been received but that morning, on arriving at the end of the stage I found the villagers, gathered from a village some miles off, for this was in the middle of the jungle, still busy with the construction of my house. It was of course very curious to watch the speed and deftness with which with their rude knives they cut and split the bamboos in order to make the floor, the ingenuity with which they fitted the rafters and the neatness with which they thatched the roof; but it did not interest me. I was tired and hungry, I wanted a cook-house so that my dinner could be prepared, and I wanted a place for my bed so that I could lie down and rest. I lost my temper and my commonsense. I sent for the Sawbwa's official and abused him roundly for his slackness. I vowed I would send him back to his master and threatened him with every sort of punishment my angry imagination could devise. I would not listen to his excuses. I stamped and raved. Now no one had ever troubled in my life before to treat me with such consideration and though I have travelled much in out-of-the-way parts of the world I have had to shift for myself and lodge at haphazard wherever I could find a lodging. I have slept quite happily for seven days in an open rowing boat and in South Sea islands shared a native hut open to the wind and rain with a family of Kanakas. No one had even thought of building a house for me, and in the middle of the jungle besides, and it was an attention to which I had no right. The moral is that even the most sensible person can very easily get above himself: grant him certain privileges and before you know where you are he will claim them as his inalienable right; lend him a little authority and he will play the tyrant. Give a fool a
uniform and sew a tab or two on his tunic and he thinks that his word is law.