The Gentleman In the Parlour (8 page)

Now it happened that just about the time when Mr Blenkinsop's book reached this dizzy height of success, the Prime Minister's secretary presented the Prime Minister with the list of birthday honours. This high dignitary of the Crown looked at it with misgiving.

‘A pretty mangy lot,' he said. ‘The public will raise a stink about this.'

The secretary was a democrat.

‘Who cares?' he said. ‘Let the public go and boil itself.'

‘Couldn't we do something for arts and letters?' suggested the Prime Minister.

The secretary remarked that almost all the RA's were knights already and those that were kicked up the devil of a row if any others were knighted.

‘The more the merrier, I should have thought,' said the Prime Minister flippantly.

‘Not at all,' answered the secretary. ‘The more titled RA's there are the less is their financial value.'

‘I see,' said the Prime Minister. ‘But are there no authors in England?'

‘I will inquire,' replied the secretary, who had been at Balliol.

He asked at the National Liberal Club and was told that there were Sir Hall Caine and Sir James Barrie. But honours had already been heaped upon them so freely that there seemed nothing more to offer them than the Garter and it was evident that the Lord Mayor of London would be very much put out if they were offered that. The Prime Minister, was, however, insistent and his secretary was in a quandary. But one day when he was being shaved his barber asked him if he had read Blenkinsop's book.

‘I'm not much of a reader meself,' he said, ‘but our Miss Burroughs, she done your nails last time you was here, she says it's simply divine.'

The Prime Minister's secretary was a man who made it his business to be abreast of the current movements in art and literature, and he was well aware that Blenkinsop's book was a sound piece of work. In honouring him the State would honour itself and the public might swallow without a wry face the baronetcies and peerages that rewarded services of a less obvious character. But he could afford to take no risks and so sent for the manicurist.

‘Have you read it?' he asked her point blank.

‘No, sir, I haven't exactly what you might call read it, but all the gentlemen who talk about it when I'm doing their nails say it's absolutely priceless.'

The result of this conversation was that the secretary placed Blenkinsop's name before the Prime Minister and told him of his book.

‘What do you think about it yourself?' asked the great man.

‘I haven't read it, I don't read books,' replied the secretary frigidly, ‘but there's nothing about it that I don't know.'

Blenkinsop was offered a KCVO.

‘We may just as well do the thing well if we're going to do it at all,' said the Prime Minister.

But Blenkinsop, true to his character, begged to be allowed to refuse the distinction. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! The Prime Minister's secretary was at his wits' end. But the Prime Minister was a man of determination. When he had once made up his mind to do a thing he would allow no obstacle to stand in his way. He discovered the solution in a flash of his fertile brain and literature after all found a place in the birthday honours. A viscounty was conferred on the Editor of Bradshaw's Railway Time Tables.

But even when I had learned by experience that if I wanted a quiet ride I must give the mules an hour's start of me I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on any of the subjects that I had selected for meditation. Though nothing of the least consequence happened my attention was distracted by a hundred trifling incidents of the wayside. The two big butterflies in black and white fluttered along in front of me, and they were like young war widows bearing the loss they had sustained for their country's sake with cheerful resignation: so long as there were dances at Claridge's and dressmakers in the Place Vendôme they were ready to swear that all was well with the world. A little cheeky bird hopped down the road turning round every now and then jauntily as though to call my attention to her smart suit of silver grey. She looked like a neat typist tripping along from the station to her office in Cheapside. A swarm of saffron butterflies upon the droppings of an ass reminded me of pretty girls in evening frocks hovering round an obese financier. At the roadside grew a flower that was like the Sweet William that I remember in the cottage gardens of my childhood and another had the look of a more leggy white heather. I wish, as many writers do, I could give distinction to these pages by the enumeration of the birds and flowers that I saw as I ambled along on my little Shan pony. It has a scientific air and though the reader skips the passage it gives him a slight thrill of self-esteem to know that he is reading a book with solid fact in it. It puts you on strangely familiar terms with your reader when you tell him you came across P. Johnsonii. It has a significance that is almost cabalistic; you and he (writer
and reader) share a knowledge that is not common to all and sundry and there is the sympathy between you that there is between men who wear masonic aprons or Old Etonian ties. You communicate with one another in a secret language. I should be proud to read in a footnote of a learned work on the botany or ornithology of Upper Burma,
Maugham, however, states that he observed F. Jonesia in the Southern Shan States.
But I know nothing of botany and ornithology. I could, indeed, fill a page with the names of all the sciences of which I am completely ignorant. A yellow primrose to me, alas! is not
primula Vulgaris
, but just a small yellow flower, ever so faintly scented with the rain, and grey balmy mornings in February when you have a funny little flutter in your heart, and the smell of the rich wet Kentish earth, and kind dead faces, and the statue of Lord Beaconsfield in his bronze robes in Parliament Square, and the yellow hair of a girl with a sweet smile, hair now grey and shingled.

I passed a party of Shans cooking their dinner under a tree. Their wagons were placed in a circle round them, making a kind of laager, and the bullocks were grazing a little way off. I went on a mile or two and came upon a respectable Burman sitting at the side of the road and smoking a cheroot. Round him were his servants, with their loads on the ground beside them, for he had no mules and they were carrying his luggage themselves. They had made a little fire of sticks and were cooking the rice of his midday meal. I stopped while my interpreter had a chat with the respectable Burman. He was a clerk from Keng Tung on his way to Taunggyi to look for a situation in a government office. He had been on the road for eighteen days and with only four more to go looked upon his journey as nearly at an end. Then a Shan on horseback threw confusion among the thoughts I tried to marshal. He rode a shaggy pony and his feet were bare in his stirrups. He wore a white jacket and his coloured skirt was tucked up so that it looked like gay riding
breeches. He had a yellow handkerchief bound round his head. He was a romantic figure cantering through that wide upland, but not so romantic as Rembrandt's
Polish Rider
who rides through space and time with so gallant a bearing. No living horseman has ever achieved that effect of mystery so that when you look at him you feel that you stand on the threshold of an unknown that lures you on and yet closes the way for you. Nor is it strange, for nature and the beauty of nature are dead and senseless things and it is only art that can give them significance.

But with so much to distract me I could not but suspect that I should reach my journey's end without after all having made up my mind upon a single one of the important subjects that I had promised myself to consider.

The day's march was no more than from twelve to fifteen miles, that being the distance that a mule can comfortably do, and the distance from one another at which the PWD bungalows are placed. But because it is the daily routine it gives you just as much the sensation of covering space as if you had been all day in an express train. When you arrive at your destination you are in reality just as far from your starting place, though you have gone but a few miles, as if you had travelled from Paris to Madrid. When you have ridden along a stream for a couple of days it seems to you of quite imposing length; you ask its name and are surprised to find that it has none, until you stop to reflect that you have followed it for no more than five and twenty miles. And the differences between the upland that you rode through yesterday and the jungle that you are riding through to-day impress themselves upon you as much
as the differences between one country and another.

But because the bungalows are built on the same pattern, though you have been riding for several hours (your caravan does little more than two miles an hour) you seem always to arrive at the same house. It stands on piles in a compound a few yards away from the road. There is a large living-room, and behind, two bedrooms with their bath-rooms. In the middle of the living-room is a handsome teak table. There are two easy-chairs with extensions for the legs and four stout, severe armchairs to set round the table. There is a chiffonier on which are copies of the Strand Magazine for 1918 and two tattered much read novels by Phillips Oppenheim. On the walls there is a longitudinal section of the road, a summary of the Burma Game rules and a list of the furniture and the household utensils of the bungalow. In the compound are the servants' quarters, stalls for the ponies and a cook-house. It is certainly not very pretty, it is not very comfortable, but it is solid, substantial and serviceable; and though I had never seen any one bungalow before and after that day should never see it again, I seldom caught sight of it at the end of the morning's journey without a little thrill of content. It was like coming home and when I got my first glimpse of its trim roof I put the spurs to my pony and galloped helter-skelter to the door.

The bungalow stands generally on the outskirts of a village, and when I arrived at the confines of the commune I found waiting to greet me the headman with his clerk and an attendant, a son or nephew, and the elders. When I approached they went down on their haunches, shikoed and offered me a cup of water, a few marigolds and a little rice. I drank the water with misgiving. But once I was handed on a tray eight thin tapers and was told that this was the highest mark of respect that could be shown me, for they were the tapers that were set before the image of Buddha. I could not but be conscious that I little deserved such a compliment. I settled down in
the bungalow and then my interpreter informed me that the headman and the elders stood without, desiring to tender the customary presents. They brought them in on lacquer trays, eggs, rice and bananas. I sat down in a chair and they knelt on the floor in a half-circle in front of me. The headman, with abundant gestures but with composure, made me a long harangue. Through the translation that my interpreter gave me I thought I perceived certain phrases that were not unfamiliar to me, and I seemed to discern something about one flag, hands across the sea and the desire that I should take back to my own country not only a greeting from this distant land, but the urgent request of the inhabitants that the government would build a metal road. I felt it became me to make a reply if not as eloquent at least as long. I was only a wandering stranger, and if by the instructions they had received to make easy my way they had been misled into thinking me a person of any consequence I could at least do myself the justice of not behaving like one. I am no politician and I was too shamefaced to utter the imperial platitudes that fall so trippingly from the mouth of those who make it their business to govern empires. Perhaps I might have told my listeners that they were fortunate in being under the control of a power that was content to leave them alone. Once a year the Resident of the district came round and composed the differences that they could not compose themselves, listened to their complaints, appointed a new headman when one was needed, and then left them to their own devices. They governed themselves according to their own customs and they were free to grow their rice, to marry, bring forth children, and die, to worship the gods they chose, without let or hindrance. They saw no soldiers and had no jail. But I felt that these matters were not of my competence and so contented myself with the smaller office of amusing them. Though no speaker (I can count on one hand the speeches that on public occasions
I have been induced to make), it was not hard to devise a few graceful and humorous remarks in return for the eggs, bananas and rice which were presented to me.

It is not easy, however, to make forty different speeches about eggs, bananas and rice, and the eggs I soon learnt by experience were far from fresh. But thinking my interpreter would despise me if I said the same thing every day, in the morning as I rode along I racked my brain for new ways of expressing my gratification at my welcome and my present. I invented as one day followed another more than thirty different speeches and when I sat there while my interpreter translated what I had said, it was a satisfaction for me to see the little nods the headman and the elders gave me when a point had gone home and the way they shook themselves when they saw a joke. Now one morning I suddenly thought of an entirely new jest. It was a very good one and I saw in the twinkling of an eye how I could bring it into my speech. The lot of the English and the American humorist is hard, for pornography rather than brevity is the soul of wit, but the prudishness of his audience (and perhaps their sentimentality) has forced him to look for a laugh everywhere but where it is most easily to be found. But just as the poet may beat out more exquisite verse when he is constrained by the complicated measures of a Pindaric ode than when he has the elbow room of blank verse, so the difficulties placed in the way of our humorists have often resulted in their making unexpected discoveries in the ludicrous. They have found a rich load of laughter where but for the taboos they would never have sought it. The two pitfalls that threaten the humorist are the inane on one side and the disgusting on the other; and it is a regrettable fact, which the English or American humorist has to put up with, that the inane enrages more than the disgusting revolts.