The Gentleman In the Parlour (15 page)

Then we came to a large and prosperous village, called Hawng Luk, with a spacious and well-built rest-house,
and this was the last place we stayed at before reaching Siam. The hills in front of us were Siamese hills. I think we all had a feeling of elation as we approached the frontier. We passed through a trim little village (as we neared Siam the villages, touched by the greater civilisation of the country we were entering, seemed more prosperous) over a quaint covered bridge and then came to a small, sluggish stream. This was the boundary. We forded it and were in Siam.

We came to a wood of young teak-trees and rode through this till we reached the village at which I had arranged to pass the night. Here there was a police post, neat and trim, with flowers in the garden; the sergeant in charge, notwithstanding his khaki uniform and the tidy little soldiers under him somewhat flustered at the sight of a white man and such an imposing retinue, telling us that there was no rest-house, directed us to the monastery. It was about a quarter of a mile from the main road and I rode up to it through the rice fields. It was a very poor little monastery, consisting only of a sort of barn of sun-baked bricks, in which were the images, and a wooden bungalow, in which lived the monks and their pupils. Here my bed was set up and my camp equipment, in the temple itself, with the images looking down on me. It caused no scandal to the monks or the novices. They scanned my possessions with eager interest, they watched me eat as the crowd watches the wild beasts eat at the Zoo, and in the evening they stood round me with wondering eyes when I played patience. After a little while they caught the sense of my complicated motions and a little gasp was wrung from them (like that flattering, anguished sob that breaks from a silent audience as a trapezist a hundred feet from the ground
does the
salto mortale
) when with a bold gesture I transferred a dozen fitting cards to a line when there was a place for them. But such is the infirmity of human nature that no sooner had one of them got an inkling of what I was doing and in an agitated whisper explained to the others, than all with excited cries and gestures of delight pressed round about me; they snatched at my arm to point out to me a card that I should move (and how was I who knew no Siamese to explain that you could never, never put a six of hearts on a seven of diamonds?); I had to restrain them by force from moving a card, which I meant to move myself when I had sufficiently considered the matter, and when I did so my action was greeted with applause. No man, be he a monk in a Buddhist monastery or Prime Minister of England, can forbear to give advice when he watches somebody else doing a patience.

At eight the novices said their prayers, in a sing-song monotonous tone, some of them smoking cheroots the while, and then I was left alone for the night. There was no door to the temple and the blue night entered and the images on their tables shone dimly. The floor was clean, swept by women to acquire merit, but there were thousands of ants, attracted I suppose by the rice brought in offering by the devout, and they made sleep difficult. After a while I gave it up as a bad job and got up. I went to the doorway and looked out at the night. The air was balmy. I saw someone moving about and presently discovered that it was Kyuzaw. He also could not sleep. I offered him a cheroot and we sat down on the steps of the temple. He was a trifle contemptuous of this Siamese Buddhism. The monks did not go out with their begging bowls, it appeared, as the Blessed One had directed, but let the faithful bring them their rice and food to the monastery. Kyuzaw, like most Shans, had at one time been a novice and he told me, not without complacency, that he had never failed to go out with the begging bowl. He gave a little chuckle.

‘I always went to my own house first and got a wellcooked meal put in the bottom of my bowl. I covered it with a leaf and went on my round till the bowl was filled. Then I went back to the monastery, threw away to the dogs all that was above the leaf and ate my own good dinner.'

I asked him if he liked the life. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘There was nothing to do,' he said. ‘Two hours' work in the morning and there were prayers at night, but all the rest of the day nothing. I was glad when the time came for me to go home again.'

I inveigled him to speak of transmigration.

‘There was a man in a village near my house who remembered his old life. He had been dead eighteen years and he came to the village and he recognised his wife and he told her where they used to keep their money and he reminded her of things that she had long forgotten. He went into the house and said that one of the pots had been mended in such a way and they looked at it and it had been mended in the way he said. The woman cried and all the neighbours were amazed and people came to see him from all over the country. They wrote about it in the paper. They asked him questions and to every question he had an answer. He knew everything that had happened in the village during his previous existence and the people remembered that what he said was true. But it did not end well.'

‘Why, what happened?' I asked.

‘Well, his sons were grown up and they had divided the land and the buffaloes. They did not want to give everything back again. They said he had had his time and now it was their turn. He said he would go to the law and the mother said she would testify that what he said was true. You see, sir, she liked to have a fine young husband again, but the sons did not want to have a fine young father, so they took him aside and said that if he
did not go away they would beat him till he died, so he took the money that was in the house and everything he could lay his hands on and went away'

‘Did he take his wife, too?'

‘No, he did not take her. He did not tell her he was going. He just went away. She was very sorry. And of course she had nothing any more.'

We talked till we had finished our cheroots and then Kyuzaw got me some paraffin and we put it on the legs of my bed to keep the ants away and I went back to bed and slept. But the door of the temple looked due East and the dawn woke me and I saw a huge expanse of rose and purple. Then a little novice came in with a platter on which were four or five cakes of rice. He went down on his heels, a tiny little figure in yellow, with large black eyes, and uttered a brief invocation and then left the platter before the images. He had hardly gone before a pariah dog, evidently on the watch, slipped in quickly, seized one of the cakes in his mouth and ran out again. The early sun caught the gold on the Buddha and gave it a richness not its own.

I travelled leisurely down Siam. The country was pleasant, open and smiling, scattered with neat little villages, each surrounded with a fence, and fruit trees and areca palms growing in the compounds gave them an attractive air of modest prosperity. There was a good deal of traffic on the road, but it was carried on not, as in the little inhabited Shan States by mules, but by bullock-carts. Where the country was flat rice was cultivated, but where it undulated teak forests grew. The teak is a handsome tree, with a large smooth leaf; it does not make a very dense jungle and the sun shines through. To ride in a teak forest, so light, graceful and airy,
is to feel yourself a cavalier in an old romance. The rest-houses were clean and trim. During this part of my journey I came across but one white man and this was a Frenchman on his way north who came into the bungalow in which I had settled myself for the night. It belonged to a French teak company, of which he was a servant, and he seemed to look upon it as very natural that I, a stranger, should have made myself at home in it. He was cordial; there are few French in this business and the men, out in the jungle constantly to superintend the native labourer, live lives even more lonely than the English forest men, so that he was glad to have someone to talk to. We shared our dinner. He was a man of robust build, with a large fleshy red face and a warm voice that seemed to wrap his fluent words in a soft rich fabric of sound. He had just come from short leave in Bangkok and with the Frenchman's ingenuous belief that you are any more impressed by the number of his amours than by the number of his hats, talked much of the sexual experiences he had had there. He was a coarse fellow, ill-bred and stupid. But he caught sight of a torn, paper-bound book that was lying on the table.

‘
Tiens
, where did you get hold of this?'

I told him that I had found it in the bungalow and had been glancing through it. It was that selection of Verlaine's poems which has for a frontispiece Carrière's misty, but not uninteresting portrait of him.

‘I wonder who the devil can have left it here,' he said.

He took up the volume and idly fingering the pages told me various gross stories about the unhappy poet. They were not new to me. Then his eyes caught a line that he knew and he began to read

‘Voici des fleurs, des fleuis, des feuilles et des branches.

Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.'

And as he read his voice broke and tears came into his eyes and ran down his face.

‘Ah, merde,'
he cried,
‘ça me fait pleurer comme un veau.'

He flung the book down and laughed and gave a little sob. I poured him out a drink of whisky, for there is nothing better than alcohol to still or at least to enable one to endure that particular heartache from which at the moment he was suffering. Then we played piquet. He went to bed early, since he had a long day before him and was starting at dawn, and by the time I got up he was gone. I did not see him again.

But as I rode along in the sunshine, bustling and quick like women gossiping at their spinning-wheels, I thought of him. I reflected that men are more interesting than books, but have this defect that you cannot skip them; you have at least to skim the whole volume in order to find the good page. And you cannot put them on a shelf and take them down when you feel inclined; you must read them when the chance offers, like a book in a circulating library that is in such demand that you must take your turn and keep it no more than four and twenty hours. You may not be in the mood for them then or it may be that in your hurry you miss the only thing they had to give you.

And now the plain spread out with a noble spaciousness. The rice fields were no longer little patches laboriously wrested from the jungle, but broad acres. The days followed one another with a monotony in which there was withal something impressive. In the life of cities we are conscious but of fragments of days; they have no meaning of their own, but are merely parts of time in which we conduct such and such affairs; we begin them when they are already well on their way and continue them without regard to their natural end. But here they had completeness and one watched them unroll themselves with stately majesty from dawn to dusk; each day was like a flower, a rose that buds and blooms and, without regret but accepting the course of
nature, dies. And this vast sun-drenched plain was a fit scene for the pageant of that ever-recurring drama. The stars were like the curious who wander upon the scene of some great event, a battle or an earthquake, that has just occurred, first one by one timidly and then in bands, and stand about gaping or look for traces of what has passed.

The road became straight and level. Though here and there deep with ruts and when a stream crossed it muddy, great stretches could have been traversed by car. Now it is all very well to ride a pony at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day when you go along mountain paths, but when the road is broad and flat this mode of travel sorely tries your patience. It was six weeks now that I had been on the way. It seemed endless. Then on a sudden I found myself in the tropics. I suppose that little by little, as one uneventful day followed another, the character of the scene had been changing, but it had been so gradual that I had scarcely noticed it, and I drew a deep breath of delight when, riding into a village one noon, I was met, as by an unexpected friend, with the savour of the harsh, the impetuous, the flamboyant South. The depth of colour, the hot touch of the air on one's cheek, the dazzling, yet strangely veiled light, the different walk of the people, the lazy breadth of their gestures, the silence, the solemnity, the dust – this was the real thing and my jaded spirits rose. The village street was bordered by tamarinds and they were like the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne, opulent, stately and self-possessed. In the compounds grew plantains, regal and bedraggled, and the crotons flaunted the riches of their sepulchral hues. The coconut trees with their dishevelled heads were like long lean old men suddenly risen from sleep. In the monastery was a grove of areca palms and they stood, immensely tall and slender, with the gaunt precision and the bare, precise, and intellectual nakedness of a collection of apothegms. It was the South.

We had now to get the day's journey over as early as possible and we started just as the first grey light stole into the Eastern sky. The sun rose and it was pleasantly warm on one's back, but in a little while it grew fierce and by ten it was overwhelming. It seemed to me that I had been riding along that broad white road since the beginning of time and still it stretched interminably before me. Then we arrived at a handsome village where the township officer, a neat Siamese, smiling and polite, offered to put me up in his own spacious house; and when he took me into his compound I saw waiting for me, shaded by palm trees and diapered by the sun, red, substantial, reliable but unassuming – a Ford car. My journey was over. It ended without any flourish of trumpets, quietly, like the anti-climax of a play; and next morning, in the chilly dawn, leaving my mules and ponies with Kyuzaw, I started. The metal road was building and where it was impassable the Ford car took the bullock track; here and there we splashed through shallow streams. I was bumped and shaken and tossed from side to side; still it was a road, a motor road, and I sped along vertiginously at the rate of eight miles an hour. It was the first car in the history of man that had ever passed that way and the peasants in their fields looked at us in amaze. I wondered whether it occurred to any of them that in it they saw the symbol of a new life. It marked the end of an existence they had led since time immemorial. It heralded a revolution in their habits and their customs. It was change that came down upon them panting and puffing, with a slightly flattened tyre but blowing a defiant horn, Change.