The Gentleman In the Parlour (16 page)

And a little before sunset we arrived at the railhead. There was a new, gaily-painted rest-house at the station, and it might almost have been called a hotel. There was a bath-room, with a bath you could lie down in, and on the verandah long chairs in which you could loll. It was civilisation.

I was within forty-eight hours by rail of Bangkok, but before going there I wanted to see Lopburi and Ayudha, which at one time were capitals of Siam. In these Eastern countries cities are founded, increase to greatness and are destroyed in a manner that cannot but fill the Western traveller, accustomed for many centuries now to a relative stability, with a certain misgiving. A king, forced by the hazards of war or maybe only to gratify a whim, will change his capital and founding a new city, build a palace and temples and richly ornament them; and in a few generations the seat of government, owing to another hazard or another whim, moving elsewhere, the city is abandoned and desolation usurps the place of so much transitory splendour. Here and there in the jungle, far from any habitation, you will find ruined temples, overgrown with trees, and among the dank verdure broken gods and elaborate bas-reliefs as the only sign that here was once a thriving city, and you will come across poverty-stricken villages that are all that remain of the capital of a rich and powerful kingdom. It is a sombre reminder of the mutability of human things.

Lopburi is now but a narrow winding street of Chinese houses, built along one bank of the river; but all about are the ruins of a great city, mouldering temples and crumbling pagodas with here and there a fragment of florid carving, and in the temples are broken images of the Blessed One, and in their courtyards bits of heads and arms and legs. The plaster is grey as though it had been discoloured by London fogs and it peels off the bricks so that you think of old men with loathsome diseases. There is no elegance of line in these ruins and the decoration
of doors and windows, robbed by time of their gold and tinsel, is mean and tawdry.

But I had come to Lopburi chiefly to see what remained of the grand house of Constantine Faulkon, who was, I suppose, one of the most amazing of the adventurers who have made the East the scene of their exploits. The son of a Cephalonian innkeeper, he ran away to sea in an English ship, and after many hazards arriving in Siam rose to be the chief minister of the King. The world of his day rang with the tale of his unlimited power, splendour and enormous wealth. There is an account of him in a little book by the Père d'Orléans of the Company of Jesus, but it is a work of edification and dilates unduly upon the tribulations of Constantine's widow when after his death she sought to preserve her virtue from the rude onslaughts of a Siamese prince. In her laudable efforts she was supported by her saintly grandmother, who at the age of eighty-eight, having lost nothing of the ardour and vivacity of her faith, talked to her continually of the famous Martyrs of Japan, from whom she had the honour to be descended. My
daughter
, she said to her,
what glory there is in being a martyr! You have here the advantage that martyrdom seems to be an heirloom in your family: if you have so much reason to expect it, what pains should you not take to deserve it!

It is satisfactory to learn that, sustained by these counsels and fortified by the incessant admonitions of the Jesuit fathers, the widow resisted all temptations to become the bejewelled inmate of an almost royal seraglio and ended her virtuous days as dish-washer in the house of a gentleman of no social consequence.

One could have wished that the Père d'Orléans had been a little more circumstantial in his account of his hero's career. The vicissitudes in the course of which he ascended from his lowly station to such a pinnacle surely deserved to be saved from oblivion. He represents him as a pious catholic and an upright minister devoted to the
interests of his king; but his account of the revolution that overthrew both king and dynasty and delivered the Greek into the hands of the outraged patriots of Siam, reads as though a certain arrangement of the facts had seemed necessary so that neither
le grand roi
nor various persons in high places should incur reproach. A decent veil is thrown over the sufferings of the fallen favourite, but his death at the hands of the executioners is vastly edifying. Reading between the jejune lines you receive notwithstanding the impression of a powerful and brilliant character. Constantine Faulkon was unscrupulous, cruel, greedy, faithless, ambitious; but he was great. His story reads like one of Plutarch's lives.

But of the grand house which he built nothing remains but the high brick wall that surrounded it and three or four roofless buildings, crumbling walls and the shapes of doors and windows. They have still the vague dignity of the architecture of Louis XIV. It is an unhandsome ruin that reminds you of nothing but a group of jerry-built villas destroyed by fire.

I went back to the river. It was narrow and turbid, deep between high banks, and on the other side were thick clumps of bamboo behind which the red sun was setting. The people were having their evening bath; fathers and mothers were bathing their children, and monks, having washed themselves, were rinsing out their yellow robes. It was a pleasant sight and grateful to the sensibility jarred by those sordid ruins and perplexed.

I have not the imagination to clothe dead bones with life nor the capacity to feel emotion over and over again about the same thing. I have known people who read
The Egoist
once a year and others who never go to Paris without having a look at Manet's
Olympe.
When once I have received from a work of art its peculiar thrill I have done with it till after the lapse of years, having become a different person, I can in
The Egoist
read a book I have never read before and in Manet's
Olympe
see a picture
that has only just been hung in the Louvre. I had a notion that Ayudha would offer me nothing more than Lopburi and so made up my mind to give it a miss. Besides, I like my ease. I had gone from rest-house to rest-house long enough to hanker for the modest comfort of an Eastern hotel. I was getting a trifle tired of tinned sausages and canned pears. I had neither had a letter nor seen a paper since I left Taunggyi and I thought with pleasure of the huge packet that must be awaiting me in Bangkok.

I determined to go there without lingering on the way. The train passed leisurely through wide and open country with jagged blue hills in the distance. There were rice fields on both sides of the line, as far as the eye could reach, but a good many trees, too, so that the landscape had a certain friendliness. The rice was in all stages of growth, from the young green shoots in little patches to the grain nearly ripe and yellowing in the sun. Here and there they were cutting it and sometimes you saw three or four peasants in line laden with great sheaves. I suppose that there is none of the staple foods of man that needs so much labour first to grow and then to prepare for consumption. In the stream by the side of the track buffaloes in herds, under the charge of a small boy or a bronzed, dwarfish man in a large hat, wallowed luxuriously. Little flocks of rice-birds flew white and shining and sometimes grey cranes with outstretched necks. At the wayside stations there was always a crowd of idlers, and their
panaungs
, bright yellow, plum or emerald green, made lovely splashes of colour against the dust and the sunshine.

The train arrived at Ayudha. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway-station (after all if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh-bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway-station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim,
weary vastness of London), and with nonchalant eyes I put my head out of the carriage window. But a young man sprang to the door and opened it so promptly that I was nearly precipitated on to the platform. He wore a small round topee, a white drill coat, a black silk
panaung
so arranged as to make breeches, black silk stockings and patent-leather pumps. He spoke voluble English. He had been sent to meet me, he said, and would show me everything there was to be seen at Ayudha; there was a launch waiting at the landing-stage to take me up and down the river; and he had ordered a carriage; and the rest-house had been swept and cleaned that morning; and he ended up:

‘Everything in the garden is lovely'

He smiled at me with large flashing white teeth. A young man with a yellow face as smooth as a new plate, high cheek-bones, and very black gleaming eyes. I had not the heart then to tell him that I would not stay at Ayudha and indeed he gave me no time, for calling porters he told them to take my traps out of the carriage.

He took his duties seriously. He spared me nothing. From the station we walked along a broad street shaded with tamarind trees, on each side of which were Chinese shops, and the light was lovely and the people made attractive little pictures so that I would willingly have lingered; but my guide told me that there was nothing to see there, you had to go to Bangkok for shops, there they had everything you could buy in Europe; and with gentle determination led me to the landing-stage. We got into the launch. The river was broad and yellow. All along it were houseboats in which were shops, and above the muddy banks were houses on piles among fruit-trees. My guide took me to a walled enclosure on the river bank where had been a royal palace, and in what might have been once a throne-room, for it was but a ruin, there was a royal bed and a royal chair and some fragments
of carved wood. He showed me innumerable heads of Buddha in bronze and stone, which had been brought from Lopburi or excavated from the numerous wats of Ayudha. We walked along a road for a little and there waiting for us was a tiny carriage and an obstinate pony. What organisation! We drove for two or three miles, along a pleasantly shady road with peasants' houses on piles on each side of it and outside each gateway was a little paper pagoda stuck over with little white flags in order to preserve the inmates of the house from cholera. We came to a vast park, with its green glades and grassy clearings, a pleasant place to picnic in, and here were the remains of a palace and great temples, many ruined pagodas and in one of the temples, deserted of all and lonely but indifferent, an enormous bronze figure of a sitting Buddha. Here and there under the trees children were playing. The little Siamese boys, with their wide eyes, curling hair and roguish looks, were very pretty. In passing my guide pointed out to me a shrub with a pale violet flower. He told me that when you found it you might be sure that there were no tigers.

‘You have no tigers in England,' he laughed, not, I thought, without condescension.

I answered with deprecating modesty.

‘No, we lead safe and peaceful lives in that tight little island. We are exposed to no dangers more alarming than the recklessness of a drunken motorist or the fury of a woman scorned.'

When we got back to the river I thanked the young Siamese warmly for showing me such interesting things and said that I would now go to the rest-house, upon which he opened his large gleaming eyes still larger and with his voice rising shrilly told me that I had not yet seen half of what he had to show me. I looked at him archly and murmured that enough was as good as a feast. He laughed brightly at this, evidently with the flattering belief that I had just invented the epigrammatic phrase,
but floored me with the observation that enough was a purely relative term. I let him take me to another ruined temple, a scene untidy with desolation, and I gave an impatient glance at another Buddha of enormous size. And another and another. At last we came to a temple that was still a place of pilgrimage. I drew a breath of relief. It was like coming out of an unfurnished house to let, with its dead emptiness, into the busy street. At the landing-stage were women in sampans selling gold leaf, papers and incense sticks. On each side of the walk that led to the temple were little tables on which were displayed the same wares and sweets and cakes besides, and the vendors were plying a busy trade. The chapel was not very large and it was almost filled with a gigantic image of the Blessed One, and as you walked up the steps and looked through the door (your eyes still dazzled by the sunlight) it was awe-inspiring to discern vaguely that enormous gilded figure looming out of the darkness. In front of him were large figures of two disciples and the altar table was covered with burning incense. In a comer was a large teak bed on which were sitting two monks, smoking the fat Siamese cigarettes, drinking tea and chewing betel; they seemed not to notice the people who were there; some, men, women and children, in order to acquire merit were applying gold leaf to the pediment, a gigantic lotus, on which the Buddha sat. One woman, a spare, middle-aged person with a thin, intelligent face, with genuflections and prayers was consulting fortune by means of large wooden beans, which she threw on the ground and which, by falling on their flat or their concave side, answered her questions. There was an old man who came in with half-a-dozen members of his family and as soon as the middle-aged woman had finished with the beans he took them and when after the prescribed rites he threw them on the ground the whole party watched anxiously. Having finished he lit a cigarette and the rest rose from their knees, but whether
the fates had promised good fortune or ill you could tell from not one of those impassive faces.

Now at last my guide took me to the rest-house that had been swept and cleaned for my visit. It was a houseboat with a narrow verandah looking on the river, a long sitting-room of dark wood and a bedroom and bath-room on each side. I very much liked the look of it. The young Siamese asked me to go to his house after dinner, saying he would ask his friends, but I told him I was tired, and with many expressions of goodwill he left me. The day was waning and, alone at last, sitting on the verandah I watched the traffic of the river. There were pedlars going along in their sampans with an easy stroke, pots and pans in their boats, vegetables for sale or food cooking in little stoves. Peasants passed me with a load of rice or an old woman with a shrivelled grey head paddling herself as unconcernedly in a tiny dug-out as though she were walking along the street. The rest-house was at a bend of the river and the bank to which it was moored turned sharply; it was thick with mangoes and palms and arecas. The sun set and they were silhouetted against the redness of the sky: the areca with its bedraggled crown looks like a feather duster very much the worse for wear, but at night against the sapphire of the sky it has the distinction of a Persian miniature. With the last light of day a white flock of egrets, like haphazard thoughts that flit through the mind without reason or sequence, fluttered disorderly down the tranquil stream. Darkness fell and at first the houseboats on the other side of the broad river were bright with lights, but they went out one by one and only here and there was a red gleam reflected on the water. One by one the stars came out and the sky blazed with them. The traffic of the river ceased and only now and then did you hear the soft splash of a paddle as someone silently passed on his way home. When I awoke in the night I felt a faint motion as the houseboat rocked a little and heard a little gurgle of water, like the ghost
of an Eastern music travelling not through space but through time. It was worth while for that sensation of exquisite peace, for the richness of that stillness, to have endured all that sight-seeing.