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THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR

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RECORD OF A JOURKEY FROM RANGOON TO HAIPHONG

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W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN LTD.

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PRINXEI? ITsT OREAX BRiXAlISr AX THE 'W'lNOMXLI. PRESS, KrNGSWOOI> SURREY

THE GENTLEMAN IN THE PARLOUR

I

I HAVE never been able to feel for Charles Lamb the affection that he inspires in most of his readers. There is a cross grain in my nature that makes me resent the transports of others and gush will dry up in me (against my will, for heaven knows I have no wish to chill by my coldness the enthusiasm of my neighbours) the capacity of admiration. Too many critics have written of Charles Lamb with insipidity for me ever to have been able to read him without uneasiness. He is like one of those persons of overflowing heart who seem to lie in wait for disaster to befall you so that they may envelope you with their sympathy. Their arms are so quickly outstretched to raise you when you fall that you cannot help asking yourself, as you rub your barked shin, whether by any chance they did not put in your path the stone that tripped you up. I am afraid of people with too much charm. They devour you. In the end you are made a sacrifice to the exercise of their fascinating gift and their insincerity. Nor do I much care for writers whose charm is their chief asset. It is not enough. I want something to get my teeth into, and when I ask for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding I am

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dissatisfied to be given bread and milk. I am put out of countenance hj the sensibility of the Gentle Elia . For a generation Rousseau had pinned every writer’s heart to his sleeve and it was in his day still the fashion to write with a lump in the throat, but Lamb’s emotion to my mind too often suggests the facile lachrymosity of the alcoholic. I cannot but think his tenderness would have been advantageously tempered by abstinence, a blue pill and a black draught. Of course when you read the references made to him by his contemporaries, you discover that the Gentle Elia is an invention of the sentimentalists. He was a more robust, irascible and intemperate fellow than they have made him out, and he would have laughed (and with justice) at the portrait they have painted of him. If you had met him one evening at Benjamin Hayden’s, you would have seen a grubby little person, somewhat the worse for liquor, who could be very dull, and if he made a joke it might as easily have been a bad as a good one. In fact, you would have met Charles Lamb and not the Gentle Elia. And if you had read that morning one of his essays in The London Magazine you would have thought it an agreeable trifle. It would never have occurred to you that this pleasant piece would serve one day as a pretext for the lucubrations of the learned. You would have read it in the right spirit ; for to you it would have been a living thing. It is one of the misfortunes to which the writer is subject that he is too Httle praised when he is alive and too much when he is dead. The critics force us to read the classics as MachiavelU wrote, in Court dress ; whereas we should do much better to read them, as though they were our contemporaries, in a dressing-gown.

And because I had read Lamb in deference to common opinion rather than from inclination I had forborne to read Hazlitt at all. What with the innumerable books it urgently imported me to read, I came to the conclusion that I could afford to neglect a writer who had but done mediocrely (I understood) what another had done with excellence. And the Gentle Elia bored me. It was seldom I had read anything about Lamb without coming across a fling and a sneer at Hazlitt. I knew that FitzGerald had once intended to write a life of him, but had given up the proj ect in disgust of his character. He was a mean, savage, nasty little man and an unworthy hanger-on of the circle in which Lamb, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Wordsworth shone with so bright a lustre* There seemed no need to waste my time on a writer of so little talent and of so unpleasant a nature. But one day, about to start on a long journey, I was wandering round Bumpus’s looking for books to take with me when I came across a selection of Hazlitt’s Essays- It was an agreeable b’ttle volume in a green cover, and nicely printed, cheap in price and light to hold, and out of curiosity to know the truth about an author of whom I had read so much ill, I put it on the pile that I had abeady collected.

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II

WrHEN I had settled down on the boat that was taking me up the Irrawaddy to Pagan I got the little green volume out of my bag to read on the way. The boat was crowded with natives. They lay about on their beds surrounded by a great many small pieces of luggage and ate and gossiped all day long. There were among them a number of monks in yellow robes, their heads shaven, and they smoked cheroots in silence. Occasionally one passed a raft of teak-logs, with a little thatched house on it, going down-stream to Rangoon, and caught a brief glimpse of the family that lived on it busy with the preparation of a meal or cosily eating it. It looked a placid life that they led, with long hours of repose and ample leisure for the exercise of an idle curiosity. The river was broad and muddy, and its banks were flat. Now and then one saw a pagoda, sometimes spick and span and white, but more often crumbling to pieces ; and now and then one came to a riverside village nestling amiably among great green trees. On the landing-stage was a dense throng of noisy, gesticulating people in bright dresses and they looked like flowers on a stall in a market-place ; there was a turmoil and a confusion, shouting, a hurry and scurry as a mass of little people, laden with their belongings, got off, and another mass of little people, laden too, got on.

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River travelling is monotonous and soothing. In whatever part of the world you are it is the same. No responsibility rests on your shoulders. Life is easy. The long day is divided into neat parts by the meals and you very soon acquire a sense that you have no longer an individuality ; you are a passenger occupying a certain berth and the statistics of the company show that you have occupied that berth at this season for a certain number of years and wiU continue to do so long enough to make the company’s shares a sound investment.

I began to read my Hazlitt. I was astonished. I found a solid writer, without pretentiousness, courageous to speak his mind, sensible and plain, with a passion for the arts that was neither gushing nor forced, various, interested in the life about him, ingenious, sufficiently profound for his purposes, but with no affectation of profundity, humorous, sensitive. And I liked his English. It was natural and racy, eloquent when eloquence was needed, easy to read, clear and succinct, neither below the weight of his matter nor with fine phrases trying to give it a specious impor- tance. If art is nature seen through the medium of a personality, Hazlitt is a great artist.

I was enraptured. I could not forgive myself that I had lived so long without reading him and I raged against the idolaters of Elia whose foolishness had deprived me till now of so vivid an experience. Here certainly was no charm, but what a robust mind, sane, clear-cut and vivacious, and what vigour I Presently I came across the rich essay which is entitled On Going A Journey and I reached the passage that runs : “ Oh ! it is great to shake off the tranunels of the world and

of public opinion — ^to lose our importunate, tormenting, everlasting personal identity in the elements of nature, and become the creature of the moment, clear of all ties — ^to hold to the universe only by a dish of sweet-breads, and to owe nothing but the score of the evening — and no longer seeking for applause and meeting with contempt, to be known by no other title than The Gentleman in the Parlour ! *’ I could wish that Hazlitt had used fewer dashes in this passage. There is in the dash something rough, ready and haphazard that goes against my grain. I have seldom read a sentence in which it could not be well replaced by the elegant semi-colon or the discreet bracket. But I had no sooner read these words than it occurred to me that here was an admirable name for a book of travel and I made up my mind to write it.

Ill

I LET the book fall to my knees and looked at the river flowing silently. The Immense volume of slow mo\ing water gave me an exquisite sensation of inviolate peace. The night fell softly as a green leaf in summer falls softly to the ground. But trying for a moment to fight against the pleasant idleness of spirit that stole over me, I sorted in my memory the im- pressions that Eangoon had left on me.

It was a gay and sunny morning when the ship that I had taken at Colombo steamed up the Irrawaddy. They pointed out to me the tall chimneys of the Burmah Oil Company and the air was grey and misty with their smoke. But behind the smoke rose the golden spire of the Shwe Dagon. And now I found that my recollec- tions were entirely pleasing, but nebulous ; a cordial welcome, a drive in an American car through busy streets of business houses, concrete and iron like the streets, good heavens ! of Honolulu, Shanghai, Singapore or Alexandria, and then a spacious, shady house in a garden; an agreeable life, luncheon at this club or that, drives along trim, wide roads, bridge ajfter dark at that club or Jthis, gin pakitSy a great many men in white drill or pongee silk, laughter, pleasant con- versation ; and then back through the night to dress for dinner and out again to dine with this hospitable host or the other, cocktails, a substantial meal, dancing to a gramophone, or a game of billiards and then back once more to the large cool silent house It was very

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attractive, easj, comfortable and g&y; but was this Rangoon ? Down by the harbour and along the river were narrow streets, a rabbit warren of intersecting alleys ; and here, multitudinous, lived the Chinese, and there the Burmans : I looked with curious eyes as I passed in my motor-car and wondered what strange things I should discover and what secrets they had to tell me if I could plunge into that enigmatic life and lose myself in it as a cup of water thrown overboard is lost in the Irrawaddy. Rangoon. And now I found that in my recollections, so vague and uncertain, the Shwe Dagon rose superb as on that first morning it had risen, glistening with its gold, like a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul of which the mystics write, glistening against the fog and smoke of the thriving city.

A Burmese gentleman having asked me to dine with him, I went to his office whither I was bidden. It was gaily decorated with streamers of paper flowers. A large round table stood in the middle. I was introduced to a number of his friends and we sat down. There were a great many courses, most of which were rather cold, and the food, served in little bowls, swam in copious sauces. Round the centre of the table were bowls of Chinese tea, but champagne flowed freely, too freely, and after dinner liqueurs of all kinds were passed round. We were all very jolly. Then the table was taken away and the chairs were put against the wall. My amiable host asked for permission to bring in his wife, and she came with a fnend, two pretty little women with large, smiling eyes, and sat down shyly ; but they soon found the position on European chairs uncomfortable and so sat with their legs under them as though they were

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sitting on the floor An entertainment had been pro- vided for my diversion and the performers made their entrance. Two clowns, an orchestra and half a dozen dancers. One of them, they told me, was an artist celebrated through all Burmah. The dancers wore silk shirts and tight jackets, and they had flowers in their dark hair. They sang in a loud, forced voice so that the veins of their necks swelled with the effort, and they danced not together, but in turn, and their gestures were like the gestures of marionettes. Meanwhile the clowns uttered their merry quips ; back and forth went the dialogue between them and the dancers, and it was evidently of a facetious character, for my host and his guests laughed loudly.

For some time I had been watching the star. She certainly had an air. She stood with her companions but with an effect of being apart from them, and on her face she wore a good-humoured, but faintly supercilious smile, as though she belonged to another sphere. When the clowns attacked her with their gibes she answered them with a smiling detachment ; she was playing her part in a rite as became her, but she proposed to give nothing of herself. She had the aloofness of complete self-confidence. Then her moment came. She stepped forward. She forgot that she was a star and became an actress.

But I had been expressing regret to my neighbours that I must leave Rangoon without seeing the Shwe Dagon ; for the Burmese had made certain regulations, wliich the Buddhist faith did not demand, but to comply with which was humiliating to the occidental ; and to humiliate the occidental was the object of the regula-

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tions. No Europeans any longer went into the wat- houses. But it is a stately pile and the most venerable place of worship in the country. It enshrines eight hairs from the head of the Buddha. My Burmese friends offered now to take me and I put my Western pride in my pocket. It was midnight. Arriving at the temple we went up a long stairway on each side of which were booths ; but the people who lived in them to sell the devout what they might require had finished their work and some were sitting about, half naked, chatting in undertones, smoking or eating a final meal, while many in all attitudes of abandonment were asleep, some on low native beds and some on the bare stones. Here and there, left over from the day before, were masses of dying flowers, lotus and jasmine and marigold ; they scented the air heavily with a perfume in which was already an acrid decay. At last we reached the great terrace. AU about shrines and pagodas were jumbled pell-mell with the confusion with which trees grow in the jungle. They had been built without design or symmetry, but in the darkness, their gold and marble faintly gleaming, they had a fantastic richness. And then, emerging from among them like a great ship surrounded by lighters, rose dim, severe and splendid, the Shwe Dagon. Lamps illumined with a sober glow the gilt with which it was covered. It towered, aloof, impressive and mysterious against the night. A guardian walked noiselessly on his naked feet, an old man was lighting a row of candles before an image of the Buddha ; they gave an emphasis to the solitude. Here and there a yellow-robed monk muttered a husky invocation ; his droning punctuated the silence

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IV

So that the reader of these pages may be under no misapprehension I hasten to tell him that he will find in them little information. This book is the record of a journey through Burmah, the Shan States, Siam and Indo-China. I am writing it for my own diversion and I hope that it will divert also such as care to spend a few hours in reading it. I am a professional writer and I hope to get from it a certain amoimt of money and perhaps a little praise.

Though I have travelled much I am a bad traveller. The good traveller has the gift of surprise. He is perpetually interested by the differences he finds between what he knows at home and what he sees abroad. If he has a keen sense of the absurd he finds constant matter for laughter in the fact that the people among whom he is do not wear the same clothes as he does, and he can never get over his astonishment that men may eat with chop-sticks instead of forks or write with a brush instead of with a pen. Since everything is strange to him he notices everything, and according to his humour can be amusing or instructive. But I take things for granted so quickly that I cease to see anything unusual in my new sur- roundings. It seems to me so obvious for the Burman to wear a coloured paso that only by a deliberate effort can I make the observation that he is not dressed

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as I am. It seems to me just as natural to ride in a rickshaw as in a car, and to sit on the floor as on a chair, so that I forget that I am doing something odd and out-of-the-way. I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown ; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment and sometimes suggest a theme for a composition ; I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took.

It is true that should the historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire come across this book on the shelves of some public library he will have hard things to say of me. How can one explain,” he will ask, “ that this writer who in other places showed that he was not devoid of observation, could have gone through so many parts of this Empire and not noticed (for by never a word is it apparent that a suspicion of anything of the sort crossed his mind) with what a nerveless hand the British held the power that their fathers had conquered? A satirist in his day, was there no matter for his derision in the spectacle of a horde of officials who held their positions only by force of the guns behind them trying to persuade the races they ruled that they were there only on sufferance ? They offered efficiency to people to whom a hundred other things were of more consequence and sought to justify themselves by the benefits they conferred on people who did not want them. As if a man in whose house you have forcibly quartered yourself will welcome

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you any the more because you tell him you can run it better than he can ! Did he go through Burmah and not see how the British power was tottering because the masters were afraid to rule, did he not meet judges, soldiers, commissioners who had no confidence in them- selves and therefore inspired no respect in those they were placed over ? What had happened to the race that had produced Clive, Warren Hastings and Stamford Raffles that it must send out to govern its colonies men who were afraid of the authority entrusted to them, men who thought to rule the Oriental by cajolery and submissiveness, by being unobtrusive, by pocketing afironts and giving the natives powers they were unfit to use and must inevitably turn against their masters. But what is a master whose conscience is troubled because he is a master ? They prated of efficiency and they did not rxile efficiently, for they were filled with an xmeasy feeling that they were unfit to rule. They were sentimentalists. They wanted the profits of Empire, but would not assume the greatest of its responsibilities, which is power. But all this, w^hich was staring him in the face, seems to have escaped this writer, and he contented himself with jotting down little incidents of travel, describing his emotions and inventing little stories about the persons he met ; he produced a book that can be of no value to the historian, the political economist or the philosopher : it is deservedly forgotten.”

I cock a snook at the historian of the Decline and Fall of the British Empire, On my side I venture to express the wish that when the time comes for him to write this great work he will write it with sympathy,

justice and magnanimity. I would have him eschew rhetoric, but I do not think a restrained emotion would ill become him. I would have him write lucidly and yet with dignity ; I would have his periods march with a firm step. I should like his sentences to ring out as the anvil rings when the hammer strikes it ; his style should be stately but not pompous, picturesque without affectation or effort, lapidary, eloquent and yet sober ; for when all is said and done he will have a subject upon which he may well expend all his pains : the British Empire will have been in the world’s history a moment not without grandeur.

V

Alight rain was falling and the sky was dark with heavy clouds when I reached Pagan. In the distance I saw the pagodas for which it is renowned. They loomed, huge, remote and mysterious, out of the mist of the early morning like the vague recollections of a fantastic dream. The river steamer set me down at a bedraggled village some miles firom my destination, and I waited in the drizzle while my servant found an ox-waggon to take me on my way. It was a springless cart on solid wooden wheels, covered with a cocoanut matting. Inside, it was hot and breathless, but the rain had increased to a steady downpour and I was thankfiil for its shelter. I lay full length and when I was tired of this sat cross-legged. The oxen went at a snaiTs pace, with cautious steps, and I was shaken and jolted as they ploughed their way through the tracks made by the carts that had gone before, and every now and then I was given a terrific jerk as the cart passed over a great stone. When I reached the circuit-house I felt as though I had been beaten and pummelled.

The circuit-house stood on the river bank, quite close to the water, and all round it were great trees, tamarinds, banyans and wild gooseberries. A flight of wooden steps led to a broad verandah, which served as a living- room, and behind this were a couple of bedrooms, each

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with a bath-room. I found that one of these was occupied by another traveller, and I had but just examined the accommodation and talked to the Madrassi in charge about meals and taken stock of what pickles and canned goods and liquor he had on the premises when a little man appeared in a mackintosh and a topee dripping with rain. He took off his soaking things and presently we sat down to the meal known in this country as brunch. It appeared that he was a Czecho-Slovak, employed by a firm of exporters in Calcutta, and was spending his holiday seeing the sights of Burmah. He was a short man with wild black hair, a large face, a bold hooked nose and gold-rimmed spectacles. His stingah-shiffcer fitted tightly over a corpulent figure. He was evidently an active and an energetic sight-seer ; for the rain had not prevented him from going out in the morning and he told me that he had visited no less than seven pagodas. But the rain stopped while we were eating and soon the sun shone brightly. We had no sooner finished than he set out again I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan ; when you stand on an eminence they surround you as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings, for they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. To-day there is only a straggling village with broad untidy roads lined with great trees, a pleasant enough little place with matting houses, neat and trim, in which live the workers in

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lacquer ; for this is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives-

But of all these pagodas only one, the Ananda, is still a place of pilgrimage. Here are four huge gilded Buddhas standing against a gilded wall in a lofty gilded chamber. You look at them one by one through a gilded archway. In that glowing dimness they are inscrutable. In front of one a mendicant in his yellow robe chants in a high-pitched voice some litany that you do not understand. But the other pagodas are deserted. Grass grows in the chinks of the pavement and yoimg trees have taken root in the crannies. They are the refuge of birds. Hawks wheel about their summits and little green parrots chatter in the eaves. They are like bizarre and monstrous flowers turned to stone. There is one in which the architect has taken as his model the lotus, as the architect of St. John's, Smith Square, took Queen Anne's footstool, and it has a baroque extravagance that makes the Jesuit churches in Spain seem severe and classical. It is preposterous, so that it makes you smile to look at it, but its exuber- ance is captivating. It is quite unreal, shoddy but strange, and you are staggered at the fantasy that could ever have devised it. It looks hke the fabric of a single night made by the swarming hands of one of those wayward gods of the Indian mythology. Within the pagodas images of the Buddha sit in medi- tation. The gold leaf has long since worn away from the colossal figures and the figures are crumbling to dust. The fantastic lions that guard the entrance ways are rotting on their pedestals.

A strange and melancholy spot. But my curiosity

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was satisfied with a visit to half-a-dozen of the pagodas, and I would not let the vigour of my Czecho-Slovak be a reproach to my indolence. He divided them into various types and marked them down in his notebook according to their peculiarities. He had theories about them, and in his mind they were neatly ticketed to support a theory or clinch an argument. None was so ruined that he did not think it worth while to give it his close and enthusiastic attention, and to examine the make and shape of tiles he climbed up broken places like a mountain goat. I preferred to sit idly on the verandah of the circuit-house and watch the scene before me. In the full tide of noon the sun burned all the colour from the landscape so that the trees and the dwarf scrub that grew wildly where in time past were the busy haunts of men, were pale and grey ; but with the declining day the colour crept back, like an emotion that tempers the character and has been sub- merged for a while by the affairs of the world, and trees and scrub were again a sumptuous and living green. The sun set on the other side of the river and a red cloud in the west was reflected on the tranquil bosom of the Irrawaddy. There was not a ripple on the water. The river seemed no longer to flow. In the distance a solitary fisherman in a dug-out pHed his craft. A little to one side but in full view was one of the loveliest of the pagodas. In the setting sun its colours, cream and fawn-grey, were soft like the silk of old dresses in a museum. It had a symmetry that was grateful to the eye ; the turrets at one comer were repeated by the turrets at every other ; and the flamboyant windows repeated the flamboyant doors

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below. The decoration had a sort of bold violence, as though it sought to scale fantastic pinnacles of the spirit and in the desperate struggle, with life and soul engaged, could not concern itself with reticence or good taste. But withal it had at that moment a kind of majesty and there was majesty in the solitude in which it stood. It seemed to weigh upon the earth with too great a burden. It was impressive to reflect that it had stood for so many centuries and looked down impassively upon the smiling bend of the Irrawaddy. The birds were singing noisily in the trees ; the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere a boy was whistling a melancholy tune on a rude pipe and in the compound the natives were chattering loudly. There is no silence in the East.

It was at this hour that the Czecho-Slovak returned to the circuit-house. He was very hot and dusty, tired but happy, for he had missed nothing. He was a mine of information. The night began gradually to enfold the pagoda and it looked now unsubstantial, as though it were built of lath and plaster, so that you would not have been surprised to see it at the Paris exhibition housing a display of colonial produce. It was a strangely sophisticated building in that exquisitely rural scene. But the Czecho-Slovak told me when it was built and under what king, and then, gathering way, began to teU me something of the history of Pagan. He had a retentive memory. He marshalled his facts with precision and delivered them with the fluency of a lecturer delivering a lecture he has repeated too often. But I did not want to know the facts he gave me. What did it matter to me what kings reigned there, what

battles they fought and what lands they conquered ? I was content to see them as a low relief on a temple wall in a long procession, with their hieratic attitudes, seated on a throne and receiving gifts from the envoys of subjugated nations, or else, with a confusion of spears, in the hurry and skelter of chariots, in the turmoil of battle. I asked the Czecho-Slovak what he was going to do with all the information he had acquired.

** Do ? Nothing,” he replied. ” I like facts. I want to know things. Whenever I go anywhere I read everything about it that has been written. I study its history, the fauna and flora, the manners and customs of the people, I make myself thoroughly acquainted with its art and literature. I could write a standard book on every country I have visited. I am a mine of information.”

** That is just what I was saying to myself. But what is the good of information that means nothing to you ? Information for its own sake is like a flight .of steps that leads to a blank wall.”

” I do not agree with you. Information for its own sake is like a pin you pick up and put in the lapel of your coat or the piece of string that you untie instead of cutting and put away in a drawer. You never know when it will be useful.”

And to show me that he did not choose his metaphors at random the Czecho-Slovak turned up the bottom of his stingah-shifter (which has no lapel) and showed me four pins in a neat row

VI

FEOM Pagan, Tvisbing to go to Mandalay, I took the steamer once more, and a couple of days before I arrived there, the boat tying up at a riverside village, I made up my mind to go ashore. The skipper told me that there was there a pleasant little club in which I had only to make myself at home ; they were quite used to having strangers drop off like that from the steamer, and the secretary was a very decent chap ; I might even get a game of bridge, I had nothing in the world to do, so I got into one of the bullock-carts that were waiting at the landing-stage and was driven to the club. There was a man sitting on the verandah and as I walked up he nodded to me and asked whether I would have a whisky and soda or a gin and bitters. The possibility that I would have nothing at all did not even occur to him. I chose the longer drink and sat down. He was a tall, thin, bronzed man, with a big moustache, and he wore khaki shorts and a khaki shirt. I never knew his name, but when we had been chatting a little while another man came in who told me he was the secretary, and he addressed my friend as George.

Have you heard from your wife yet V* he asked him. The other's eyes brightened.

Yes, I had letters by this mail. She's having no end of a time."

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“ Did she tell you not to fret ? "

George gave a little chuckle, but was I mistaken in thinking that there was in it the shadow of a sob ?

In point of fact she did. But that’s easier said than done. Of course I know she wants a holiday, and I’m glad she should have it, but it’s devilish hard on a chap.” He turned to me. ” You see, this is the first time I’ve ever been separated from my missus, and I’m like a lost dog without her.”

” How long have you been married ? ”

” Five minutes.”

The secretary of the club laughed.

” Don’t be a fool, George. You’ve been married eight years.”

After we had talked for a little George, looking at his watch, said he must go and change his clothes for dinner and left us. The secretary watched him disappear into the night with a smile of not unkindly irony.

” We all ask him as much as we can now that he’s alone,” he told me. ” He mopes so terribly since his wife went home.”

” It must be very pleasant for her to know that her husband is as devoted to her as all that.”

” Mabel is a remarkable woman.”

He called the boy and ordered more drinks. In this hospitable place they did not ask you if you would have anything; they took it for granted. Then he settled himself in his long chair and lit a cheroot. He told me the story of George and Mabel.

They became engaged when he was home on leave, and when he returned to Burmah it was arranged that she should join him in six months. But one difficulty

cropped up after another ; Mabel’s father died, the war came, George was sent to a district unsuitable for a white woman ; so that in the end it was seven years before she was able to start. He made all arrangements for the marriage, which w'as to take place on the day of her arrival, and went down to Rangoon to meet her. On the morning on which the ship was due he borrowed a motor-car and drove along to the dock- He paced the quay.

Then, suddenly, without warning, his nerve failed him. He had not seen Mabel for seven years. He had forgotten what she was like. She was a total stranger. He felt a terrible sinking in the pit of his stomach and his knees began to wobble. He couldn’t go through with it. He must tell Mabel that he was very sorry, but he couldn’t, he really couldn’t marry her. But how could a man tell a girl a thing like that when she had been engaged to him for seven years and had come six thousand miles to marry him ? He hadn’t the nerve for that either. George was seized with the courage of despair. There was a boat at the quay on the very point of starting for Singapore ; he wrote a hurried letter to Mabel, and without a stick of luggage, just in the clothes he stood up in, leaped on board.

The letter Mabel received ran somewhat as follows :

Dearest Mabel, I have been suddenly called away on business and do not know when I shall he hack, I think it would be much wiser if you returned to England. My plans are very uncertain. Your loving George.

But when he arrived at Singapore he foimd a cable waiting for him.

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Quite understand, Dont worry. Love, Mabel,

Terror made him quick-witted.

By Jove, I believe she’s following me,” he said.

He telegraphed to the shipping-office at Rangoon and sure enough her name was on the passenger list of the ship that was now on its way to Singapore. There was not a moment to lose. He jumped on the train to Bangkok. But he was uneasy ; she would have no difficulty in finding out that he had gone to Bangkok and it was just as simple for her to take the train as it had been for him. Fortunately there was a French tramp sailing next day for Saigon. He took it. At Saigon he would be safe ; it would never occur to her that he had gone there ; and if it did, surely by now she would have taken the hint. It is five days journey from Bangkok to Saigon and the boat is dirty, cramped and uncomfortable. He was glad to arrive and took a rickshaw to the hotel. He signed his name in the visitors’ book and a telegram was immediately handed to him. It contained but two words : Love, Mabel, They were enough to make him break into a cold sweat.

“ When is the next boat for Hong-Kong ? ” he asked.

Now his flight grew serious. He sailed to Hong- Kong, but dared not stay there ; he went to Manila ; Manila was ominous ; he went on to Shanghai : Shanghai was nerve-racking ; every time he went out of the hotel he expected to run straight into Mabel’s arms ; no, Shanghai would never do. The only thing was to go to Yokohama. At the Grand Hotel at Yokohama a cable awaited him.

25

“ So sorry to have missed you at Manila. Lme. Mabel He scanned the shipping intelligence with a fevered brow. Where was she now ? He doubled back to Shanghai. This time he went straight to the club and asked for a telegram. It was handed to him.

“ Arriving shortly. Love. MaheV'

No, no, he was not so easy to catch as all that. He had already made his plans. The Yangtze is a long river and the Yangtze was falling. He could just about catch the last steamer that could get up to Chungking and then no one could travel till the following spring except by junk. Such a j oumey was out of the question for a woman alone. He went to Hankow and from Hankow to Ichang, he changed boats here and from Ichang through the rapids went to Chungking. But he was desperate now, he was not going to take any risks : there was a place called Cheng-tu, the capital of Szechuan, and it was four hundred miles away. It could only be reached by road, and the road was infested with brigands. A man would be safe there.

George collected chair-bearers and coolies and set out. It was with a sigh of relief that he saw at last the crenellated walls of the lonely Chinese city. From those walls at sunset you could see the snowy mountains of Tibet.

He could rest at last : Mabel would never find him there. The Consul happened to be a fiiend of his and he stayed with him. He enjoyed the comfort of a luxurious house, he enjoyed his idleness after that strenuous escape across Asia, and above all he enjoyed his divine security. The weeks passed lazily one after the other.

26

One morning George and the Consul were in the courtyard looking at some curios that a Chinese had brought for their inspection when there was a loud knocking at the great door of the Consulate. The doorman flung it open. A chair borne by foxir coolies entered, advanced, and was set down. Mabel stepped out. She was neat and cool and fresh. There was nothing in her appearance to suggest that she had just come in after a fortnight on the road. George was petrified. He was as pale as death. She went up to him.

“ Hulloa, George, I was so afiraid I*d missed you again.*’

Hulloa, Mabel,” he faltered.

He did not know what to say. He looked this way and that : she stood between him and the doorway. She looked at him with a smile in her blue eyes.

” You haven’t altered at all,” she said. ” Men can go off so dreadfully in seven years and I was afraid you’d got fat and bald. I’ve been so nervous. It would have been terrible if after all these years I simply hadn’t been able to bring myself to marry you after all.”

She turned to George’s host-

” Are you the Consul ? ” she asked.

1 am.

” That’s all right. I’m ready to marry him as soon as I’ve had a bath.”

And she did.

First of all Mandalay is a name. For there are places whose names from some accident of history or happy association have an independent magic and perhaps the wise man would never visit them, for the expectations they arouse can hardly be realised. Names have a life of their own, and though Trebizond may be nothing but a poverty-stricken village the glamour of its name must invest it for all right-thinking minds with the trappings of Empire ; and Samarkand : can anyone write the word without a quickening of the pulse and at his heart the pain of unsatisfied desire. The very name of the Irrawaddy informs the sensitive fancy with its vast and turbid flow. The streets of Mandalay, dusty, crowded and drenched with a garish sun, are broad and straight. Tram-cars lumber down them wdth a rout of passengers ; they fill the seats and gangways and cling thickly to the footboard hke flies clustered upon an over-ripe mango. The houses, with their balconies and verandahs, have the slatternly look of the houses in the Main Street of a Western town that has fallen upon evil days. Here are no narrow alleys nor devious ways down which the imagination may wander in search of the unimaginable. It does not matter : Mandalay has its name ; the falling cadence of the lovely word has gathered about itself the chiaroscuro of romance.

But Mandalay has also its fort. The fort is sur- rounded by a high wall, and the high wall by a moat. In the fort stands the palace, and stood, before they were torn down, the offices of King Thebaw s govern- ment and the dwelling-places of his ministers. At intervals in the wall are gateways washed white with lime and each is surmounted by a sort of belvedere, like a summer-house in a Chinese garden ; and on the bastions are teak pavilions too fanciful to allow you to think they could ever have served a warlike purpose. The wall is made of huge sun-baked bricks and the colour of it is old rose. At its foot is a broad stretch of sward planted quite thickly with tamarind, cassia and acacia ; a flock of brown sheep, advancing with tenacity, slowly but intently grazes the luscious grass ; and here in the evening you see the Burmese in their coloured skirts and bright headkerchiefs wander in twos and threes. They are little brown men of a solid and sturdy build, with something a trifle Mongolian in their faces. They walk deliberately as though they were owners and tillers of the soil. They have none of the sidelong grace, the deprecating elegance, of the Indian who passes them ; they have not his refine- ment of features, nor his languorous, effeminate dis- tinction. They smile easily. They are happy, cheerful and amiable

In the broad water of the moat the rosy wall and the thick foliage of the trees and the Burmese in their bright clothes are sharply reflected. The water is still, but not stagnant, and peace rests upon it like a swan with a golden crown Its colours, in the early morning and towards sunset, have the soft fatigued tenderness

of pastel ; they have the translucency \vithout the stubborn definiteness, of oils. It is as though light were a prestidigitator and in play laid on colours that he had just created and were about with a careless hand to wash them out again. You hold your breath for you cannot believe that such an effect can be anything but evanescent . Y ou watch it with the same expectancy with which you read a poem in some complicated metre when your ear awaits the long delayed rhyme that will fulfil the harmony. But at sunset, w'hen the clouds in the w'est are red and splendid so that the wall, the trees and the moat are drenched in radiance ; and at night under the full moon when the white gateways drip with silver and the belvederes above them are shot with silhouetted glimpses of the sky, the assault on your senses is shattering. You try to guard yourself by sapng it is not real. This is not a beauty that steals upon you unawares, that flatters and soothes your bruised spirit, this is not a beauty that you can hold in your hand and call your own and put in its place among familiar beauties that you know ; it is a beauty that batters you and stuns you and leaves you breath- less, there is no calmness in it nor control, it is like a fire that on a sudden consumes you and you are left shaken and bare and yet by a strange miracle alive.

VIII

T^HE palace of Mandalay is built within a great square, surrounded by a low whitewashed wall, and you go up to the terrace on which it stands by an inconsiderable stairway. In old days this expanse was thickly covered with buildings, but now many of them, the lodgings of inferior queens and of maids of honour, have been pulled down and where they stood are pleasant green spaces.

First then you come upon a long audience chamber, then a throne room, robing chambers, other throne rooms and private apartments. On each side of these are the dwelling-places of the king, the queens and the princesses. The throne room is a barn, a roof supported by tall posts, but the posts are great teak trees on which you can still see the marks of the tools with which they were rudely shaped, and they are lacquered and gilt ; the walls are mere planks roughly planed and they are lacquered and gilt too. The gold is worn and discoloured. The contrast of this crudeness of work- manship with all this gilt and lacquer gives, I know not how, an effect of peculiar magnificence. Each building, too much like a Swiss chalet, by itself is unimpressive, but in the mass they have a dark splendour that takes the fancy. The carving that adorns the roofs, the balustrades and the partitions between chamber and chamber, is coarse, but the designs have

31

often grace and a luxiirious elegance. The builders of the palace in the most unexpected way, by the use of the most incongruous elements, have achieved a palatial effect so that you feel that here Oriental monarchs might fitly dwell. Much of the decoration is obtained by the use in various patterns of a mosaic of innumerable little pieces of mirror and of white and brightly coloured glass : you would have said that nothing could be more hideous (it reminds you of the kind of thing you saw on Margate pier in your childhood and took back with pride after a day’s outing as a present to a dismayed relation), yet oddly enough the impression is not only sumptuous but pleasing. So rudely carved are the screens and partitions on which these artful fragments of glass are thus inlaid that they have none of the effect of tinsel, but on their gold ground glitter dimly with the secret radiance of tarnished gems. This is not a barbarous art, which has a greater strength and vitality, a more rugged force, but a savage or if you like a childlike art ; it is in a way trifling and effeminate and it is its roughness (as though with uncertain touch the artists were creating each familiar pattern afresh from their own heads) that gives it character. You have a notion of a people fumbling confusedly with the very beginning of the beautiful and they are charmed with shining objects as a bushman might be or a child.

The palace now is despoiled of the rich hangings and the gilded furniture with which it was adorned. You walk through chamber after chamber and it is like a house that has been long to let. No one seems to visit it. Towards evening these gilded, jewelled, deserted chambers are sombre and ghostly. You wander

32

softly so that you may not disturb the faintly scented silence. You stand and look at all that emptiness in amaze and it is incredible that so short a while ago this was the scene of unimaginable intrigue and of turbulent passion. For here romance is within the memory of men still alive. It is not fifty years since this palace saw incidents as dramatic and to us as remote as those of the Renaissance in Italy or of Byzantium. I was taken to see an old lady who in her day had made history. She was a rather stout, short person, dressed soberly in black and white, and she looked at me through gold-rimmed spectacles with quiet, slightly ironic eyes. Her father, a Greek, had been in the service of King Mindon and she was appointed maid of honour to Queen Supalayat. Presently she married the English captain of one of the king’s river boats, but he died, and after a decent interval she became engaged to a Frenchman. (She spoke in a low voice, with the very faintest trace of a foreign accent ; the flies buzzing about her did not seem to incommode her, she held her hands clasped demurely on her lap.) The Frenchman went home and at Marseilles married one of his own countrywomen. After so long a time she did not remember very much about him ; she remem- bered his name, of course, and she remembered that he had a very handsome moustache, and that was all. But then she loved him madly. (When she laughed it was a little ghostly chuckle as though her mirth were a shadow and what she laughed at an illusion of the comic.) She made up her mind to be revenged on him. She still had her entr6e to the palace. She got hold of the draft of a treaty that King Thebaw had made

with the French by the terms of w’hich every sphere of influence in Upper Burma passed into their hands. She gave it to the Italian Consul to take to the Chief Commissioner of Lower Burma, and so caused the English advance on Mandalay and the dethronement and exile of King Thebaw. Was it not Alexandre Dumas who said that in the theatre there is nothing so dramatic as something that is happening behind a closed door ? The quiet, ironic eyes of that old lady, behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, were a closed door, and who could tell what bizarre thoughts, what a welter of fantastic passions, still dwelt behind them ? She spoke of Queen Supalayat : she was a very nice woman, and people had been so unkind about her; aU those stories of the massacres she had instigated, stufiF and nonsense !

“ I know for a fact that she did not murder more than two or three people at the outside.’’ The old lady faintly shrugged her fat little shoulders. “ Two or three people ! What is that to make a fuss about ? Life is cheap.”

I sipped a cup of tea and someone turned on the gramophone.

IX

Though not an indomitable sight-seer I went to Amarapura, once the capital of Burma, but now a straggling village, where the tamarind trees grow lofty on each side of the road and in their shade the silk-weavers ply their trade. The tamarind is a noble tree. Its trunk is rough and gnarled, pale like the teak logs that have been floating down the river, and its roots are like great serpents that writhe upon the earth with a convulsive violence ; but its foliage is lacy and fern-like, so thick that notwith- standing the delicacy of the leaves it yields a dense shade. It is like an old farmer’s wife, full of years, but rugged and hale, who is clothed incongruously in fleecy muslins. Green pigeons roost in its branches. Men and women sit outside their little houses, spinning or winding the silk on bobbins, and they have soft friendly eyes. Children play about them and pariah dogs lie sleeping in the middle of the road. It is a gently industrious, happy and peaceful life that they seem to lead, and the thought crosses your mind that here are people who have found at least one solution to the mystery of existence.

Then I went to see the great bell at Mengon. Here is a Buddhist convent and as I stood looking a group of nuns surrounded me. They wore robes of the same shape and size as the monks’, but instead of the

34

monks’ fine yellow of a grimy dun. Little old toothless women, their heads shaven but covered with an inch of thin grey stubble, and their little old faces deeply lined and wrinkled. They held out skinny hands for money and gabbled with bare pale gums. Their dark eyes were alert with covetousness and their smiles were mischievous. They were very old and they had no human ties or afPections. They seemed to look upon the world with a humorous cynicism. They had lived through every kind of illusion and held existence in a malicious and laughing contempt. They had no tolerance for the follies of men and no indulgence for their weakness. There was something vaguely frighten- ing in their entire lack of attachment to human things. They had done with love, they had finished with the anguish of separation, death had no terrors for them, they had nothing left now but laughter. They struck the great bell so that I might hear its tone ; boom, boom, it went, a long low note that travelled in slow reverberations down the river, a solemn sound that seemed to call the soul from its tenement of clay and reminded it that though all created things were illusion, in the illusion was also beauty ; and the nuns, following the sound, burst into ribald cackles of laughter, hi, hi, hi, that mocked the call of the great bell. Dupes, their laughter said, dupes and fools. Laughter is the only reality.

X

Wf^HEN 1 left Colombo I had no notion of going to Keng Tung, but on the ship I met a man who told me he had spent five years there. He said it had an important market, held every five days, whither came natives of half a dozen countries and members of half a hundred tribes. It had pagodas darkly splendid and a remoteness that liberated the questing spirit from its anxiety. He said he would sooner live there than anywhere in the world. I asked him what it had offered him and he said, contentment. He was a tall, dark fellow with the aloofness of manner you often find in those who have lived much alone in unfrequented places. Men like this are a little restless in the company of others and though in the smoking- room of a ship or at the club bar they may be talkative and convivial, telling their story with the rest, joking and glad sometimes to narrate their unusual experiences, ■they seem always to hold something back. They have a life in themselves that they keep apart, and there is a look in their eyes, as it were turned inwards, that informs you that this hidden life is the only one that signifies to them. And now and then their eyes betray their weariness with the social round into which hazard or the fear of seeming odd has for a moment forced them. They seem then to long for the monotonous solitude of some place of their predilection where they

36

37

can be once more alone with the reality they have found.

It was as much the manner of this chance acquaintance as what he told me that persuaded me to make the journey across the Shan States on which I now set out. From the rail-head in Upper Burma to the rail-head in Siam, whence I could get down to Bangkok, it was be- tween six and seven hundred miles. Kind people had done everything possible to render the excursion easy for me and the Resident at Taunggyi had wired to me that he had made arrangements for mules and ponies to be ready for me on my arrival. I had bought in Rangoon such stores as seemed necessary, folding chairs and a table, a filter, lamps and I know not what. I took the train from Mandalay to Thazi, intending there to hire a car for Taunggyi, and a man I had met at the club at Mandalay and who lived at Thazi asked me to have brunch (the pleasant meal of Burma that combines breakfast and lunch) with him before I started. His name was Masterson. He was a man in the early thirties, with a pleasant friendly face, curling dark hair speckled with grey, and handsome dark eyes. He spoke with a singularly musical voice, very slowly, and this, I hardly know why, inspired you with confi- dence. You felt that a man who took such a long time to say what he had to say and had found the world with sufiicient leisure to listen to him must have qualities that made him sympathetic to his fellows. He took the amiability of mankind for granted and I suppose he could only have done this because he was himself amiable. He had a nice sense of humour, without of course a quick thrust and parry, but agreeably

38

sarcastic ; it was of that ageeable type that applies commonsense to the accidents of life and so sees them in a faintly ridiculous aspect. He was engaged in a business that kept him travelling up and down Burma most of the year and in his journeyings he had acquired the collector’s habit. He told me that he spent all his spare money on buying Burmese curiosities and it was especially to see them that he asked me to have a meal with him.

The train got in early in the morning. He had warned me that, having to be at his office, he could not meet me ; but brunch was at ten and he told me to go to his house as soon as I was finished with the one or two things I had to do in the town.

Make yourself at home,” he said, ” and if you want a drink ask the boy for it. I’ll get back as soon as I’ve got through with my business.”

I found out where there was a garage and made a bargain with the owner of a very dilapidated Ford to take me and my baggage to Taunggp. I left my Madrassi servant to see that everything was stowed in it that was possible and the rest tied on to the foot- boards and strolled along to Masterson’s house. It was a neat little bungalow in a road shaded by tall trees, and in the early light of a sunny day looked pretty and homelike. I walked up the steps and was hailed by Masterson.

” I got done more quickly than I expected. I shall have time to show you my things before brunch is ready. What will you have ? I’m afraid I can only offer you a whisky and soda.”

” Isn’t it rather early for that ? ”

39

Rather. But it*s one of the rules of the house that nobody crosses the threshold without having a drink.” ” What can I do but submit to the rule ? ”

He called the boy and in a moment a trim Burmese brought in a decanter, a syphon and glasses. I sat down and looked about the room. Though it was still so early the sun was hot outside and the jalousies were drawn. The light was pleasant and cool after the glare of the road. The room was comfortably furnished with rattan chairs and on the walls were water-colour paintings of English scenes. They were a little prim and old-fashioned and I guessed that they had been painted in her youth by the maiden and elderly aunt of my host. There were two of a cathedral I did not know, two or three of a rose garden and one of a Georgian house. When he saw my eyes for an instant rest upon this, he said :

“ That was our house at Cheltenham.”

“ Oh, is that where you come from ? ”

Then there was his collection. The room was crowded with Buddhas and with figures, in bronze or wood, of the Buddha^s disciples ; there were boxes of all shapes, utensils of one kind and another, curiosities of every sort, and although there were far too many they were arranged with a certain taste so that the effect was pleasing. He had some lovely things. He showed them to me with pride, telling me how he had got this object and that, and how he had heard of another and hunted it down and the incredible astuteness he had employed to induce an unwilling owner to part with it. His kindly eyes shone when he described a great bargain and they flashed darkly when he inveighed

D

4iO

against the unreasonableness of a vendor who rather than accept a fair price for a bronze dish had taken it away There were flowers in the room, and it had not the forlorn look that so many bachelors’ houses have in the East*

“ You’ve made the place very comfortable,” 1 said.

He gave the room a sweeping glance.

“ It was all right. It’s not much now.”

I did not quite know what he meant. Then he showed me a long wooden gilt box, decorated with the glass mosaic that I had admired in the palace at Mandalay, but the workmanship was more delicate than anything I had seen there, and this with its gem-like richness had really something of the ornate exquisiteness of the Italian Eenaissance.

“ They tell me it’s about a couple of hundred years old,” he said. “ They’ve not been able to turn out anything like this for a long time.”

It was a piece made obviously for a king’s palace and you wondered to what uses it had been put and what hands it had passed through. It was a jewel.

“ What is the inside like ? ” I asked.

“ Oh, nothing much. It’s just lacquered.”

He opened it and I saw that it contained three or four framed photographs.

“ Oh, I’d forgotten those were there,” he said.

His soft, musical voice had a queer sound in it, and I gave him a sidelong look. He was bronzed by the sun, but his face notwithstanding flushed a deeper red. He was about to close the box, and then he changed his mind. He took out one of the photographs and showed it to me.

41

** Some of these Burmese girls are rather sweet when they're young, aren’t they ? ” he said.

The photograph showed a young girl standing some- what self-consciously against the conventional back- ground of a photographer’s studio, a pagoda and a group of palm-trees. She was w^earing her best clothes and she had a flower in her hair. But the embarrassment you saw she felt at having her picture taken did not prevent a shy smile from trembhng on her lips and her large solemn eyes had ne\ertheless a roguish twinkle- She was very small and very slender.

** What a ravishing little thing,” I said.

Then Masterson took out another photograph in which she sat with a child standing by her side, his hand timidly on her knee, and a baby in her arms. The child stared straight in front of him with a look of terror on his face ; he could not understand what that machine and the man behind it, his head under a black cloth, were up to.

“ Are those her children ? ” I asked.

“ And mine,” said Masterson.

At that moment the boy came in to say that brunch was ready. We went into the dining-room and sat down.

“ I don’t know what you’ll get to eat. Since my girl went away everything in the house has gone to blazes.”

A sulky look came into his red honest face and I did not know what to reply.

“ I’m so hungry that whatever I get will seem good,” I hazarded.

He did not say anything and a plate of thin porridge was put before us. I helped myself to milk and sugar.

42

Masterson ate a spoonful or two and pushed his plate aside.

‘‘ I wish I hadn’t looked at those damned photo- graphs/’ he said. “ I put them away on purpose.”

I did not want to be inquisitive or to force a confidence my host had no wish to give, but neither did I desire to seem so imconcerned as to prevent him from telling me something he had in his heart. Often in some lonely post in the jungle or in a stiff grand house, solitary in the midst of a teeming Chinese city, a man has told me stories about himself that I was sure he had never told to a living soul. I was a stray acquaintance whom he had never seen before and would never see again, a wanderer for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse led him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting over a syphon or two and a bottle of whisky, the hostile, inexplicable world outside the radius of an acetelyne lamp) than I could have if I had known them for ten years. If you are interested in human nature it is one of the great pleasures of travel. And when you separate (for you have to be up betimes) sometimes they will say to you :

” I’m afraid I’ve bored you to death with all this nonsense. I haven’t talked so much for six months. But it’s done me good to get it off my chest.”

The boy removed the porridge plates and gave each of us a piece of pale fried fish. It was rather cold.

” The fish is beastly, isn’t it ? ” said Masterson. ” I hate river fish, except trout ; the only thing is to smother it with Worcester sauce.”

He helped himself freely and passed me the bottle.

4d

She was a damned good housekeeper, my girl ; I used to feed like a fighting-cock when she was here. She’d have had the cook out of the house in a quarter of an hour if he’d sent in muck like this.”

He gave me a smile, and I noticed that his smile was very sweet. It gave him a peculiarly gentle look.

” It was rather a wrench parting \v1th her, you know. ”

It was quite evident now that he wished to talk and I had no hesitation in giving him a lead.

” Did you have a row ? ”

” No. You could hardly call it a row. She lived with me five years and we never had a tiff even. She was the best-tempered little thing that ever was. Nothing seemed to put her out. She was always as merry as a cricket. You couldn’t look at her without her lips breaking into a smile. She was always happy. And there was no reason why she shouldn’t be. I was very good to her.”

“ I’m sure you were,” I answered.

” She was mistress here. I gave her everything she wanted. Perhaps if I’d been more of a brute she wouldn’t have gone away.”

” Don’t make me say anything so obvious as that women are incalculable.”

He gave me a deprecating glance and there was a trace of shyness in the smile that just flickered in his eyes

” Would it bore you awfully if I told you about it ? ”

“ Of course not.”

” Well, I saw her one day in the street and she rather took my fancy. I showed you her photograph, but the photograph doesn’t begin to do her justice. It sounds

44

silly to say about a Burmese girl, but she was like a rose-bud, not an English rose, you know, she was as little like that as the glass flowers on that box I showed you are like real flowers, but a rose grown in an Eastern garden that had something strange and exotic about it. I don't know how to make myself plain ? "

“ I think I understand what you mean all the same," I smiled.

“ I saw her two or three times and found out where she lived. I sent my boy to make enquiries about her, and he told me that her parents were quite willing that I should have her if we could come to an arrangement. I wasn't inclined to haggle and everything was settled in no time. Her family gave a party to celebrate the occasion and she came to live here. Of course I treated her in every way as my wife and put her in charge of the house. I told the boys that they'd got to take their orders from her and if she complained of any of them out they went. You know, some fellows keep their girls in the servants' quarters and when they go away on tour the girls have a rotten time. Well, I think that's a filthy thing to do. If you are going to have a girl to live with you the least you can do is to see that she has a good time.

She was a great success and I was as pleased as Punch. She kept the house spotless. She saved me money. She wouldn't let the boys rob me. I taught her to play bridge and believe me, she learned to play a damned good game."

" Did she like it ? "

" Loved it. When people came here she couldn’t have received them better if she'd been a duchess.

45

You know, these Burmese have beautiful manners. Sometimes it would make me laugh to see the assurance wilh which she would receive my guests, government officials, you know, and soldiers who were passing through. If some young subaltern was rather shy she'd put him at his ease at once. She was never pushing or obtrusive, but just there when she was wanted and doing her best to see that everjrthing went well and everyone had a good time. And m tell you what, she could mix the best cocktail you'd get anywhere between Rangoon and Bhamo. People used to say I was lucky."

“ I'm bound to say I think you were," I said.

The curry was served and I piled my plate with rice and helped myself to chicken and then chose from a dozen little dishes the condiments I fancied. It was a good curry.

" Then she had her babies, three in three years, but one died when it was six weeks old. I showed you a photograph of the two that are living. Funny looking little things, aren't they ? Are you fond of children ? "

“Yes. I have a strange and almost unnatural passion for new-born babies."

“ I don't think I am, you know. I couldn’t even feel very much about my own. I've often wondered if it showed that I was rather a rotter."

“ I don't think so. I think the passion many people affect for children is merely a fashionable pose. I have a notion that children are all the better for not being burdened with too much parental love."

“ Then my girl asked me to many her, legally I mean, in the English way. I treated it as a joke. I didn’t know how she'd got such an idea in her head. I thought

46

it was only a whim and I gave her a gold bracelet to keep her quiet. But it wasn’t a whim. She was quite serious about it. I told her there was nothing doing. But you know what women are, when they once set their mind on getting something they never give you a moment’s peace. She wheedled and sulked, she cried, she appealed to my compassion, she tried to extract a promise out of me when I was rather tight, she was on the watch for me when I was feeling amorous, she nearly tripped me when she was ill. She watched me more carefully, I should think, than a stockbroker ever watched the market, and I knew that, however natural she seemed, however occupied with something else, she was always warily alert for the unguarded moment when she could pounce on me and gain her point.”

Masterson gave me once more his slow, ingenuous smile.

“ I suppose women are pretty much the same all the world over,” he said.

“ I expect so,” I answered.

” A thing I’ve never been able to understand is why a woman thinks it worth while to make you do something you don’t want to. She’d rather you did a thing against the grain than not do it at all. I don’t see what satisfaction it can be to them.”

The satisfaction of triumph. A man convinced against his will may be of the same opinion still, but a woman doesn’t mind that. She has conquered. She has proved her power.”

Masterson shrugged his shoulders. He drank a cup of tea.

” You see, she said that sooner or later I was bound to

47

marry an English girl and turn her out. I said I wasn't thinking of marrying. She said she knew all about that. And even if I didn't I should retire some day and go back to England. And where would she be then ? It went on for a year. I held out. Then she said that if I wouldn't marry her she'd go and take the kids with her. I told her not to be a silly little fool. She said that if she left me now she could marry a Bunnan, but in a few years nobody would want her. She began to pack her things. I thought it was only a bluff and I called it : I said, * Well, go if you want to, but if you do you won't come back.’ I didn’t think she'd give up a house like this, and the presents I made her, and all the pickings, to go back to her own family. They were as poor as church mice. Well, she went on packing her things. She was just as nice as ever to me, she was gay and smiling ; when some fellows came to spend the night here she was just as cordial as usual, and she played bridge with us till two in the morning. I couldn’t believe she meant to go and yet I was rather scared. I was very fond of her. She was a damned good sort.”

“ But if you were fond of her why on earth didn't you marry her ? It had been a great success .' '

“ I'll tell you. If I married her I'd have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there . I don't want to be buried out here, I want to he buried in an English churchyard. I’m happy enough here, but I don't want to live here always. I couldn't. I want England. Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colours. I want grey

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skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I shall be a funny fat elderly man when I go back, too old to hunt even if I could afford it, but I can fish. I don’t want to shoot tigers, I want to shoot rabbits. And I can play golf on a proper course. I know I shall be out of it, we fellows whoVe spent our lives out here always are, but I can potter about the local club and talk to retired Anglo-Indians . I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go and have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me in yesterday was tough, and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops. I want to be said how d you do to in the street by people who knew me when I was a boy. And I want to have a walled garden at the back of my house and grow roses. I daresay it all soimds very humdrum and provincial and dull to you, but that’s the sort of life my people have always lived and that’s the sort of life I want to live myself. It’s a dream if you like, but it’s all I have, it means everything in the world to me, and I can’t give it up.”

He paused for a moment and looked into my eyes.

” Do you think me an awful fool ? ”

“ No.”

“ Then one morning she came to me and said that she was off. She had her things put on a cart and even then I didn’t think she meant it. Then she put the two children in a rickshaw and came to say good-bye to me. She began to cry. By George, that pretty well broke me up. I asked her if she really meant to go and she said yes, unless I married her. I shook my head. I very nearly yielded. I’m afraid I was crying too. Then she gave a great sob and ran out of the house* I

49

had to drink about half a tumbler of whisky to steady my nerves.”

“ How long ago did this happen ? ”

** Four months. At first I thought she’d come back and then because I thought she was ashamed to make the first step I sent my boy to tell her that if she wanted to come I’d take her. But she refused. The house seemed awfully empty without her. At first I thought I’d get used to it, but somehow it doesn’t seem to get any less empty. I didn’t know how much she meant to me She’d twined herself round my heart.”

“ I suppose she’ll come back if you agree to marry her.”

“ Oh, yes, she told the boy that. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth while to sacrifice my happiness for a dream. It is only a dream, isn’t it ? It’s funny, one of the things that holds me back is the thought of a muddy lane I know, with great clay banks on both sides of it, and above, beech trees bending over. It’s got a sort of cold, earthy smell that I can never quite get out of my nostrils. I don’t blame her, you know. I rather admire her. I had no idea she had so much character. Sometimes I’m awfully inclined to give way.” He hesitated for a little while “ I think, perhaps, if I thought she loved me I would. But of course, she doesn’t ; they never do, these girls who go and live with white men, I think she liked me, but that’s all. What would you do in my place ? ”

” Oh, my dear fellow, how can I tell ^ Would you ever forget the dream ? ”

“ Never.”

At that moment the boy came in to say that my

50

Madrassi servant with the Ford car had just come up. Masterson looked at his watch,

“ You'll want to be getting off, won’t you ? And I must get back to my office. I’m afraid I’ve rather bored you with my domestic affairs.”

** Not at all,” I said.

We shook hands, I put on my topee, and he waved to me as the car drove off.

XI

I SPENT a few days at Taunggyi completing my preparations and then early one morning started. It was the end of the rainy season and the sky was overcast, but the clouds were high in the heavens and bright. The country was wide and open, sparsely covered with little trees ; but now and then, a giant among them, you came upon a huge banyan with wide- spreading roots. It stood upon the earth, a fit object for worship, with a kind of solemnity, as though it were conscious of victory over the blind force of nature and now like a great power aware of its enemy's strength, rested in armed peace. At its foot were the offerings that the Shans had placed to the spirit that dwelt in it. The road woimd tortuously up and down gentle de- clivities and on each side of it, stretching over the upland plains, swayed the elephant grass. Its white fronds waved softly in the balmy air. It was higher than a man and I rode between it like the leader of an army reviewing coimtless regiments of tall green soldiers.

I rode at the head of the caravan, and the mules and ponies that carried the loads followed at my heeb. But one of the ponies, unused perhaps to a pack, was very wild. It had savage eyes. Every now and then it bolted wildly among the mules, hitting them with its packs ; then the leading mule headed it off, rounding it

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into the long grass at the side of the road, and stopped it. They both stood still for a moment and then the mule led the pony quietly back to its place in the file. It walked along quite contentedly. It had had its scamper and for a little wlule at all events was prepared to behave reasonably. The idea in the mulish brain of the pack-leader was as clear and distinct as any idea of Descartes . In the train was peace, order and happiness . To walk with your nose at the tail of the mule in front of you and to know that the nose of the mule behind you was at your tail, was virtue. Like some philosophers the mule knew that the only liberty was the power to do right ; any other power was only licence. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.

But presently I came face to face with a buffalo standing stock still in the middle of the road. Now I knew that the Shan buffalo had none of that dislike of my colour that makes white men give the Chinese buffalo a wide berth, but I was not certain whether this particular animal had a very exact notion of nationality, and since his horns were enormous and his eyes far from friendly I thought it prudent to make a slight detour : whereupon the whole file, though neither mules nor muleteers could have had my reason for anxiety, followed me into the elephant grass. I could not but reflect that an undue observance of the law may put you to a good deal of xumecessary trouble.

With abundant leisure before me and nothing to distract, I had promised myself to think out on this journey various things that had been on my mind for a long time. There were a number of subjects, error and evil, space, time, chance and mutability, which I felt I

5S

should really come to some conclusion about. I had a great deal to say to myself about art and life, but my ideas were higgledy-piggledy like the objects in an old junk shop and I did not know where to put my hands on them when I wanted them. They were in corners of my mind, like oddments stowed away at the back of a chest of drawers, and I only just knew they were there. Some of them hadn’t been taken out and brushed for so long that it was a disgrace, the new and the old were all jumbled together, and some were of no use any more and might just as well be thrown on the dust heap, and some (like a pair of Queen Anne spoons long forgotten that with the four a dealer has just found you in an auction room make up the half dozen) would fit very well with new ones. It would be pleasant to have everything cleaned and dusted, neatly put away on shelves, ordered and catalogued so that I knew what my stock consisted of. I resolved that while I rode through the country I would have a regular spring-cleaning of all my ideas. But the pack-leader had round his neck a raucous bell and it clanged so loudly that my reflections were very much disturbed. It was like a muffin bell and it made me think of Sunday afternoon in the London of my youth, with its empty streets and its grey, cold and melancholy sky. I put the spurs to my pony so that I might trot on and escape the dreary sound, but as soon as I began to do so the leader trotted too and the whole cavalcade trotted after him ; I galloped and in a moment mules and ponies, their packs jangling and bumping, were galloping helter-skelter after me, and the muffin bell rattled madly at my heels as though it were knelling the death agonies of all the muffin-makers in London. I

54

gave it np as a bad job and settled down again to walk ; the train slowed down and just behind me the pack- leader shufSed up and down the empty, respectable street offering muffins for tea, muffins and crumpets. I could not put two thoughts together. I resigned myself at least for that day to make no attempt at serious meditation and instead, to pass the time, invented Blenkinsop.

There can be nothing so gratifying to an author as to arouse the respect and esteem of the reader. Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. There was once a man called Blenkinsop. He had no talent, but he wrote a book in which his earnestness and his sincerity, his thoughtfulness and his integrity were so evident that, although it was quite unreadable, no one could fail to be impressed by it. Reviewers were unable to get through it, but could not but recognise the author’s high aim and purity of purpose. They praised it with such an enthusiastic unanimity that all the people who flatter themselves they are in the movement felt bound to have it on their tables. The critic of The London Mercury said that he would have liked to have written it himself. This was the highest praise he knew. Mr. Blenkinsop deplored the grammar but accepted the compliment. Mrs. Woolf paid it a generous tribute at Bloomsbury, Mr. Osbert Sitwell admired it in Chelsea and Mr. Arnold Bennett was judicious about it in Cadogan Square. Smart women of easy morals bought it so that people should not think they had no mind above the Embassy Club and banting. The poets who go to luncheon parties talked of it exactly as though they

55

had read it from cover to cover- It was bought in the great provincial towns where the virtuous young are gathered together at high tea to improve their minds. Mr. Hugh Walpole wrote a preface to the American edition. The booksellers placed it in piles in their shop windows with a photograph of the author on one side and a card with long extracts from the more important reviews on the other. In short the vogue of the book was so great that its publisher said that if it did not stop selling soon he would have to read it himself. Mr. Blenkinsop became a celebrity. He was asked to its annual dinner by the Lyceum Club.

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 R.A.’s there are the less is their financial value.”

** I see,” said the Prime Minister. “ But are there

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no authors in England ? ”

** I will inqxiire/’ 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 Janaes 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, sir, 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 Blenkin- sop’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 Bletikinsop’s name before the Prime Minister and told him of his book.

57

“ 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 K.C.V.O.

“ 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 wit’s end. But the Prime Minister was a man of determination. When h^ 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 birth- day honours. A viscounty was conferred on the Editor of Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables

XII

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 con- centrate 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. 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 Vendome 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 atten- tion 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 safiron butterflies upon the droppings of an ass reminded me of pretty girls in evening firocks 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

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little Shan pony. It has a scientific air and though the reader skips the passage it gives him a slight thriU 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 that you came across P. J ohnsonii. 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, korvever, states that he ohseroed 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 rotmd 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 for 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 oifice. 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 handkercliief 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 P.W.D. 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. Wlien 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 all 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

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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 191 8 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 com- mune 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

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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 fortimate in being under the control of a power that was content to leave them alone. Once a year the Resident of the district came roimd 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

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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 grati- fication 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 j est. 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

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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 regret- table fact, which the English or American humorist has to put up with, that the inane enrages more than the disgusting revolts.

But by this time I knew my public and this joke, though I hope not coarse, just touched the obscene as a mosquito touches your face and then flies away buzzing when you slap. It amused me very much, and as I rode along I thought of the headman and the elders of the village I was approaching, on their knees on the floor in front of me, shaking with laughter and rolling from side to side.

We arrived. The village chief was a man of fifty- seven and he had been headman for thirty years. He brought his nephew, a shy youth with the beginnings of a beard, four or five elders and the clerk, who sat a little by himself, a man of immeasurable age, wrinkled, with a sparse grey beard, a man jso old that he seemed hardly human. He looked like a pagoda which is tumbling into ruin and soon the encroaching jungle will fall upon it and it will be no more.

In due time I made my speech and when I came to my good joke the inteipreter giggled and his eyes glistened. I was pleased. I finished and sat back in my chair while he translated my winged words. The little half- circle of listeners turned firom me to him and watched him with dark, attentive eyes. He was a good

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speaker, my interpreter, fluent, with a gift of easy and descriptive gesture. I always felt that he did me justice. I had never made a wittier speech. I was surprised that it did not seem to go down Not a smile rewarded any of my sallies ; they listened politely, but no change in their expression suggested that they were either interested or amused. I had kept my best joke for the last and as I reckoned that it was approaching, a smile on my lips, I leaned forward. The interpreter finished. Not a laugh, not a chuckle. I will admit that I was put out. I signified to the headman that the ceremony was at an end, they shikoed, struggled to their feet, and one after the other left the bungalow.

For a moment I hesitated.

“ They didn’t seem to me very intelligent,” I hazarded.

They were the stupidest lot of people we’ve come across,” said my interpreter, and there was indignation in his tone. I’ve made the same jokes every day and this is the first time they’ve never laughed.”

I was a trifled startled. I was not sure that I under- stood.

** I beg your pardon ? ” I said.

“ What for you say all sorts of different things, sir f You take too much trouble for ignorant men like that. I make the same speech every day and they like it very much.”

I was silent for a moment.

” For all you care I might just as well say the multi- plication table,” I said then, with what I thought a certain irony.

My interpreter smiled brightly, flashing a great many white teeth at me.

“ Yes, sir, that will save you a lot of trouble,’* he said. “ You say the multiplication table and then I make my speech.”

The worst of it was that I could not be quite certain that I remembered it.

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XIV

W^HEN I set out in the early morning the dew was so heavy that I could see it falling, and the sky was grey ; but in a little while the sun pierced through and in the sky, blue now, the cumulus clouds were like white sea-monsters gambolling sedately round the North Pole. The country was thinly peopled and on each side of the road was the jungle. For some days we went through pleasant uplands by a broad track, unmetalled but hard, its surface deeply furrowed by the passage of buUock-carts. Now and then I saw a pigeon and now and then a crow, but there were few birds. Then leaving the open spaces we passed through secluded hills and forests of bamboo. A bamboo forest is a graceful thing. It has the air of an enchanted wood and you can imagine that in its green shade the princess, heroine of an Eastern story, and the prince her lover might very properly undergo their incredible and fantastic adventures . When the sun shines through and a tenuous breeze flutters its elegant leaves, the effect is charmingly unreal ; it has a beauty not of nature, but of the theatre.

At last we arrived at the Salween. This is one of the great rivers that rise far up in the Tibetan steppes, the Bramahputra, the Irrawaddy, the Salween and the Melikong, and roll southwards in parallel courses to pour their mighty waters into the Indian Ocean,

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Being very ignorant I had never heard of it till I went to Burma and even then it was nothing to me but a name. It had none of the associations that are for ever attached to such rivers as the Ganges, the Tiber and the Guadalquiver. It was only as I went along that it gained a meaning to me and with a meaning mystery. It was a measure of distance, we were seven days from the Salw’een, then six ; it seemed very remote ; and at Mandalay I had heard people say :

“ Don’t the Rogers live on the Salween ? You must go and stay with them when you cross.”

Oh, my dear fellow,” someone expostulated, “ they live right down on the Siamese frontier, he won’t be going within three weeks journey of them.”

And when we passed some rare traveller on the road perhaps my interpreter after talking to him would come and tell me that he had crossed the Salween three days before. The water was high, but was going down ; in bad weather it was no joke crossing. “ Beyond the Salween ” had a stirring sound and the country seemed dim and aloof. I added one little impression to another, a detached fact, a word, an epithet, the recollection of an engraving in an old book, enriching the name with associations as the lover in StendhaTs book decks his beloved with the j ewels of his fancy, and soon the thought of the Salween intoxicated my imagination. It became the Oriental river of my dreams, a broad stream, deep and secret, flowing through wooded hills, and it had romance, and a dark mystery so that you could scarcely believe that it rose here and there poured itself into the ocean, but like a s3rmbol of eternity flowed from an unknown source to lose itself at last in an unknown sea.

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We were two days from the Salween ; then one. We left the high road and took a rocky path that wound through the jungle in and out of the hills. There was a heavy fog and the bamboos on each side were ghostly. They were like the pale wraiths of giant armies that had fought desperate wars in the beginning of the world’s long history and now, lowering, waited in ominous silence, waited and watched for one knew not what. But every now and then, straight and imposing, rose dimly the shadow of a tall, an immensely tall tree. An unseen brook babbled noisily, but for the rest silence sur- rounded one. No birds sang and the crickets were still. One seemed to go stealthily, as though one had no business there, and dangers encompassed one all about. Spectral eyes seemed to watch one. Once when a branch broke and fell to the ground it was with so sharp and unexpected a sound that it startled one like a pistol shot.

But at last we came out into the sunshine and soon passed through a bedraggled village. Suddenly I saw the Salween shining silvery in front of me. I was prepared to feel like stout Cortez on his peak and was more than ready to look upon that sheet of water with a wild surmise, but I had already exhausted the emotion it had to offer me. It was a more ordinary and less imposing stream than I had expected ; indeed then, and there, it was no wider than the Thames at Chelsea Bridge. It flowed without turbulence, swiftly and silently.

The raft (two dug-outs on which was built a platform of bamboos) was at the water’s edge and we set about unloading the mules. One of them, seized with a

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sudden panic, bolted for the river and before anyone could stop him plunged in. He was carried away on the current, I would never have thought that that turbid, sluggish stream had such a power ; he vras swept along the reach, swiftly, swiftly, and the muleteers shouted and waved their arms. We could see the poor brute struggling desperately, but it was inevitable that he would be drowned and I was thankful when a bend of the river robbed me of the sight of him. WTien with my pon}" and my personal effects I was ferried across the stream I looked at it with more respect, and since the raft seemed to me none too secure I was not sorry when I reached the other side.

The bungalow was on the top of the bank. It was surrounded by lawns and flowers. Poinsettias enriched it with their brilliant hues. It had a little less than the austerity common to the bungalows of the P.W.D. and I was glad that I had chosen this place to linger at for a day or twn in order to rest the mules and my own weary limbs. From the window’s the nver shut in by the hills looked like an ornamental water I watched the raft going backwards and forwards bringing over the mules and their loads. The muleteers were cheerful because they were to get their rest and I had given the headman a trifling sum so that they could have a treat.

Then, their duties accomplished and the servants having impacked my things, peace descended upon the scene, and the river, empty as though man had never adventured up its winding defiles, regained its dim remoteness. There was not a sound. The day waned and the peace of the water, the peace of the tree-clad hills and the peace of the evening were three exquisite

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things. There is a moment just before sundown when the trees seem to detach themselves from the dark mass of the j ungle and become individuals . Then you cannot see the wood for the trees. In the magic of the hour they seem to acquire a life of a new kind so that it is not hard to imagine that spirits inhabit them and with dusk they will have the power to change their places. You feel that at some uncertain moment some strange thing will happen to them and they will be wondrously transfigured. You hold your breath waiting for a marvel the thought of which stirs your heart with a kind of terrified eagerness. But the night falls ; the moment has passed and once more the jungle takes them back. It takes them back as the world takes young people who, feeling in themselves the genius which is youth, hesitate for an instant on the brink of a great adventure of the spirit, and then engulfed by their surroundings sink back into the vast anonymity of human kind. The trees again become part of the wood ; they are still and if not lifeless, alive only with the sullen and stubborn life of the jungle.

The spot was so lovely and the bungalow with its lawns and trees so homelike and peaceful that for a moment I toyed with the notion of staying there not a day, but a year, not a year but all my hfe. Ten days from a railhead and my only communication with the outside world the trains of mules that passed occasion- ally between Taunggyi and Keng Tung, my only intercourse the villagers from the bedraggled village on the other side of the river, and so to spend the years away from the turmoil, the envy and bitterness and mahce of the world, with my thoughts, my books, my

7S

dog and my gun and all about me the vast, mysterious and luxuriant jungle. But alas, life does not consist only of years, but of hour*;, the day has twenty-four and it is no paradox that they are harder to get through than a year ; and I knew that in a week my restless spirit would drive me on, to no envisaged goal it is true, but on as dead leaves are blown hither and thither to no purpose by a gusty wind. But being a \mter (no poet, alas ! but merely a VTiter of stories) I was able to lead for others a life I could not lead for myself. This w^as a ft scene for an idyll of young lovers and I let my fancy wander as I devised a story to fit the tranquil and lovely scene. But, I do not know why unless it is that in beauty is always something tragic, my inven- tion threw itself into a perverse mould and disaster fell upon the thin wraiths of my imagination.

But on a sudden I heard a commotion in the compound and my Gurkha servant coming in at that moment with a gin and bitters, with which I was accustomed to bid the departing day farewell, I asked him w’hat -was the matter He spoke tolerable English.

“ The mule that was drowned, he come back,*' he said.

“ Dead or alive ? ’* I asked.

“ Oh, he alive all right. The mule fellow he give mule a damn good beating.”

my ? ”

“ Teach him not to show off.’^

Poor mule ! Freedom from the heavy load and the saddle that galled his sores, and that wild excitement when he saw the broad river before him and the green hills on the other side. Oh, for an escapade 1 Just a fling after all those days of humdrum labour and the joy

of feeling the strength of one’s limbs. The dash down to the river and then the irresistible force of the stream that carried one off, the desperate effort and the panting, the sudden fear of death, and at last a couple of miles down, the struggle to the safe shore. The scamper along a jungle path and then the approach of night Well, one had had one’s fling and one felt all the better for it, now one could go back quite quietly to the compound where all the other mules were and one was ready next day or the day after to take up one’s load again and go quietly on one’s way in the file, one’s nose at the tail of the mule ahead of one ; and when one got back, happy and rested after the adventure, they beat one because they said one had been showing off. As if one cared enough for them to bother to show off. Oh/ well, it was worth a hiding. Whoops, dearie !

XV

I TOOK to the road once more One day followed another ^vith a monotony in which was nothing tedious. At da^\’n a cock, cro^^ing loudly, woke me ; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, stealing upon the silence of the night a little uncertainly, as in a symphony one instrument takes up after another the first notes of a theme, the theme of day and the labour of man, the various sounds in the compound prevented me from going to sleep again: there was the bell around the neck of a mule that tinkled as he stirred or the shake another gave himself and the hee-haw of an ass ; there were the lazy movements of the muleteers, their muffled talk, and their cries as they called their beasts. The gathering light crept into my room. Then I heard my servants moving and in a little while my Ghurka boy, Rang Lai by name, brought me my tea and took down my mosquito curtains. I drank the tea and smoked the first delicious cigarette of the day. Pleasant thoughts crowded upon me, scraps of dialogue, a metaphor or a sonorous phrase, a trait or two to add to a character, an episode, and it was charming to lie there idly and let my fancy wander. But Rang Lai brought in my shaving water, silently, and the thought that it would soon grow cold urged me to get up. I shaved and had my bath and breakfast was ready. If I was in luck the headman of the village or the durwan

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of the bungalow had made me a present of a papaia. This is a fruit that many people dislike and it is true that it needs getting used to ; but when you have, you cannot but acquire a passion for it. It combines a clean and delicate savour with medicinal virtues (for does it not contain some almost incredible percentage of pepsine ?) so that in eating it you not only satisfy the grossness of your appetite, but attend likewise to your soul’s welfare. It is like a beautiful woman whose conversation is instructive and elevating.

Then I smoked my pipe and to clear my mind read, idly enough, I fear, some philosophical treatise that was not too heavy to hold in one hand. The first lot of mules had already got away, and now my bedding was rolled up, the things I had used for breakfast were put into the proper boxes, and everything was loaded on such of the mules as had remained behind. I let them get ahead. I was left alone in the bungalow, my pony tethered to a fence, and I watched with the eyes of my mind, so to say, while the village about me, the trees outside the bungalow, the chairs and tables, returned to the humdrum repose from which for a few hours the arrival of myself and my caravan had rudely snatched them. When I went down the steps and untethered my pony, silence, like an old madwoman with a finger on her lips, crept past me into the room that I had left. The map of the road hung on its nail more solidly because I was gone and the long chair in which I had been sit- ting gave a creaky sigh.

I started riding.

I caught up with the mules as they were nearing the bungalow and knowing it was close they increased their

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pace. They went along now with a sort of bustle, the bells ringing, the loads jangling, and the muleteers shouted to them and called out to one another. The muleteers were Yunnanese, strapping fellows, with bronzed faces, ragged and unwashed, but they bore themselves with a bold insouciance. Up and down Asia they marched with a lazy stride, hundreds upon hundreds of miles, and in their dark eyes were open spaces and the dim blue of far-off mountains. The mules crowded round them in the compound, each wanting his own load taken off first, and there was a shouting and a kicking and a jostling. The load is lashed to the yokes with leather thongs and it needs tw'o men to take it off. When this was done the mule retreated a step or two and bowled his head as though he were bowing his thanks for the release. Then the pack- saddle was taken off him and he lay down on the ground and rolled over and over to ease his back of the irritation. One after the other as they were freed the mules wandered out of the compound to the herbage and their liberty.

Gin and bitters waited for me on the table, then my curry was served, and I flung myself in a long chair and went to sleep. When I woke I went out with my gun. The headman had designated two or three young men to show me where I could shoot pigeon or jungle-fowl, but game was shy and I am a bad shot and I came back generally with nothing for my pains but a scramble in the bush. The light was failing. The muleteers called the mules to shut them up for the night in the compound. They called in a shrill falsetto, a sound wild and barbaric that seemed scarcely human ; it was a peculiar, even a

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terrifying cry, and it suggested vaguely the vast distances of Asia and the nomad tribes of heaven knows how many ages back from which they were descended.

I read till my dinner was ready. If I had crossed a river that day I ate a bony, tasteless fish ; if not, sardines or tunny ; a dish of tough meat, and one of the three sweets that my Indian cook knew how to make. Then I played patience.

I reproached myself as I set out the cards. Consider- ing the shortness of life and the infinite number of important things there are to do during its course, it can only be the proof of a flippant disposition that one should w^ste one’s time in such a pursuit. I had with me a number of books that would have improved my mind and others, masterpieces of style, by the study of which I might have made progress in the learning of this difficult language in which we write. I had a volume, small enough to carry in my pocket, that contained all the tragedies of Shakespeare and I had resolved to read one act of one play on every day of my journey. I promised myself thus both entertainment and profit. But I knew seventeen varieties of patience. I tried the Spider and never by any chance got it out ; I tried the patience they play at the Florence Club (and you should hear the shout of triumph which goes up when some Florentine of noble family, Pazzi or Strozzi, accomplishes it) and I tried a patience, the most in- credibly difficult of all, that was taught me by a Dutch gentleman from Philadelphia. Of course the perfect patience has never been invented. This should take a long time to do; it should be complicated, calling forth all the ingenuity you have; it should require profound

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thought and demand from you solid reasoning, the exercise of logic and the weighing of chances ; it should be fuH of hairbreadth escapes so that your heart palpitates as you see what disaster might have befallen you had you put down the wTong card ; it should poise you dizzy on the topmost peak of suspense when you consider that your fate hangs on the next card you turn up ; it should wring your withers with apprehension ; it should have desperate perils that you must avoid and incredible difficulties that only a reckless courage can surmount ; and at the end, if you have made no mistake, if you have seized opportunity by the forelock and TSTung unstable fortune by the neck, victory should always crown your efforts.

But since such a patience does not exist, in the long run I generally returned to that which has immortalised the name of Canfield. Though it is of course very difficult to get out, you are at least sure of some result, and when all seems lost the turning of a sudden happy card may grant you a respite. I have heard that this estimable gentleman was a gambler in New York and he sold you the pack for fifty dollars and gave you five dollars for every card you got out. The establishment was palatial, supper was free and champagne flowed freely ; negroes shuffled the packs for you. There were Turkey carpets on the floors and pictures by Meissonier and Lord Leighton on the walls, and there were life-sized statues in marble. I think it must have been very like Lansdowne House.

Looking back on it from this distance it had for me something of the charm of a genre picture and as I set out the seven cards, and then the six, I saw from my

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quiet room in the jungle bungalow (as it were through the wrong end of a telescope) the rooms brightly lit with glass chandeliers, the crowd of people, the haze of smoke and the tense, strained, tragic feeling of the gambling-hell. I was held for a moment in the great world with its complications, vice and dissipation. It is one of the mistakes that people make to think that the East is depraved ; on the contrary the Oriental has a modesty that the ordinary European would find fantastic. His virtue is not the same as the European’s, but I think he is more virtuous. Vice you must look for in Paris, London or New York, rather than in Benares or Peking. But whether this is due to the fact that the Oriental, not being oppressed as we are by the sense of sin, feels no need to transgress the rules that during the long course of his history he has found it convenient to make, or whether, as is shown by his art and literature (which after all are only complicated, but monotonous variations on a single theme) he is unimaginative, who am I to say ?

It was time for me to go to bed. I got under my mosquito curtain, lit my pipe and read the novel which I kept for that particular moment. I had looked forward to it all day. It was Du C6ie de Guermantes and in my fear of coming to the end of it too quickly (I had read it before and could not really start on it again the moment I had finished it) I limited myself rigidly to thirty pages at a time. A great deal of course was exquisitely boring, but what did I care ? I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else, and I finished the thirty pages all too soon ; I seemed to have to hold back my eyes not to run along the lines too quickly. I put out my lamp and fell into a dreamless sleep.

But I could have sworn I had not been asleep ten minutes when a cock, crowing loudly, woke me ; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, broke in upon the silence of the night. The gathering light crept into my room. Another day began.

XVl

I LOST count of time. The track now could no longer be called a road and a bullock-cart could not have gone along it ; it was no more than a narrow path and we went in single file. We began to climb, and a river, a tributary of the Salween, ran over rocks boister- ously below us.‘ The track wound up and down hills through the defiles of the range we were crossing, now at the level of the river, and then high above it. The sky was blue, not with the brilliant, provocative blue of Italy, but with the Eastern blue, which is milky, pale and languorous. The jungle now had all the air of the virgin forest of one’s fancy ; tall trees, rising straight, without a branch, for eighty or a hundred feet flaunted their power majestically in the sun. Creepers with gigantic leaves entwined them and the smaller trees were covered with parasitic plants as a bride is covered by her veil. The bamboos were sixty feet high. The wild plantains grew ever3rwhere. They seemed set in their places by some skilful gardener, for they had the air of consciously completing the decoration. They were magnificent. The lower leaves were torn and yellow and bedraggled ; they were like wicked old women who looked with envy and malice on the beauty of youth ; but the upper ones, lissom, green and lovely, lifted their splendour proudly. They had the haughtiness and the callous indifference of youthful

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beauty ; their ample surface took the sun like water.

One day, looking for a short cut, I ventured along a path that led straight into the jungle. There w'as more life than I had seen while I kept to the highway ; the jungle-fowl scurried over the tops of the trees as I passed, pigeons cooed all about me, and a hornbill sat quite still on a branch to let me look at it. I can never quite get over my surprise at seeing at liberty birds and beasts whose natural habitation seems a Zoological Garden, and I remember once in a far island away down in the South East of the Malay Archipelago, when I saw a great cockatoo staring at me I looked about for the cage from which it had escaped and could not realise for a moment that it was at home there and had never known confinement.

The jungle was not very thick and the sun finding its bold way through the trees diapered the ground with a coloured and fantastic pattern. But after a while it began to dawn on me that I was lost, not seriously and tragically lost as may happen to one in the jungle, but astray as one might be in the squares and terraces of Bayswater ; I did not want to retrace my steps and the pathway, with the sun shining on it, was tempting : I thought I would go on a little further and see what happened. And suddenly I came upon a tiny village ; it consisted of no more than four or five houses sur- rounded by a stockade of bamboos. I was as surprised to find it there, right in the jungle and six or seven miles from the main road, as its inhabitants must have been to see me, but neither they nor I would betray by our demeanour that there was anything odd about it. Small children playing on the dry, dusty

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ground scattered at my approach (I remembered how in one place I was asked if two little boys who had never seen a white man might be brought to have a look at me and were promptly carried away screaming with terror at the revolting sight ) ; but the women, carrying buckets of water or pounding rice, went on uncon- cernedly with their tasks ; and the men, sitting on their verandahs, gave me but an indifferent glance. I won- dered how those people had found their way there and what they did ; they were self-subsistent, living a life entirely of their own, and as much cut oflP from the outside world as though they dwelt on an atoll in the South Seas. I knew and could know nothing of them. They were as different from me as though they belonged to another species. But they, had passions like mine, the same hopes, the same desires, the same griefs. To them, too, I suppose, love came like sunshine after rain, and to them too, I suppose, came satiety. But for them the days unchanging added their long line to one another without haste and without surprise ; they followed their appointed round and led the lives their fathers had led before them. The pattern was traced and all they had to do was to follow it. Was that not wisdom and in their constancy was there not beauty ?

I urged my pony on and in a few yards I was once more in the thick of the jungle. I continued to climb, the path crossing and recrossing little rushing streams, and then wound down, wound round the hills, the trees growing upon them so densely that you felt you could walk upon the tree-tops as though upon a green floor, until all sunny I saw the plain and the village for which I was bound that day.

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It was called Mong Pying and I had made up my mind to rest there for a little. It was very warm and in the afternoon I sat in shirt sleeves on the verandah of the bungalow. I was surprised to see approaching me a white man. I had not seen one since I left Taunggj’i. Then I remembered that before leaving they had told me that somewhere along the road I should meet an Italian priest. I rose to meet him. He was a thin man, tall for an Italian, with regular features and large handsome eyes. His face, sallow from malaria, was covered almost to the eyes with a luxuriant black beard that curled as boldly as the beard of an Assyrian king. And his hair was abundant, black and curling. I guessed him to be somewhere between thirty-five and forty. He was dressed in a shabby black cassock, stained and threadbare, a battered khaki helmet, white trousers and white shoes.

I heard you were coming,” he said to me. “ Just think, I haven’t seen a white man for eighteen months.”

He spoke fluent English.

“ What will you have ? ” I asked him. ** I can offer you whisky, or gin and bitters, tea or coffee.”

He smiled.

“ I haven’t had a cup of coffee for two years. I ran out of it, and I found I could do without it very well. It was an extravagance and we have so little money for this mission. But it is a deprivation.”

I told the Ghurka boy to make him a cup and when he tasted it his eyes glistened.

** Nectar,” he cried. ” It is real nectar. People should do without things more. It is only then that you really enjoy them.”

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“You must let me give you two or three tins.”

“ Can you spare them ? I will send you some lettuces from my garden.”

“ But how long have you been here then ? ” I asked.

** Twelve years.”

He was silent for a moment.

“ My brother, who is a priest in Milan, offered to send me the money to go back to Italy so that I might see my mother before she died. She is an old woman and she cannot live much longer. They used to say I was her favourite son and indeed when I was a child she used to spoil me. I should have liked to see her once more, but to tell you the truth I was afraid to go ; I thought that if I did I should not have the courage to come back here to my people. Human nature is very weak, do you not think so ? I could not trust myself.” He smiled and gave a gesture that was oddly pathetic. “ Never mind, we shall meet again in Paradise ”

Then he asked me if I had a camera. He was very anxious to send a photograph of his new church to the lady in Lombardy through whose pious generosity he had been able to build it. He took me to it, a great wooden barn, severe and bare ; the reredos was de- corated with an execrable picture of Jesus Christ painted by one of the nuns at Keng Tung, and he begged me to take a photograph of this also so that when I went there and visited the convent I could show the mm how her work looked in place. There were two little pews for the scanty congregation. He was proud, as well he might be, because the church, the altar and the pews had been built by himself and his converts. He took me to his compound and showed me the modest

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building which sened as school-room and as sleeping- quarters for the children in his charge. I think he told me that there were six and thirty of them. He led me into his ovm little bungalow. The living-room was fairly spacious and this till the church was built he had used also as a chapel. At the back was a tiny bedroom no larger than a monk’s cell, in which was nothing but a small wooden bed, a washing-stand and a book-shelf. Alongside of this was a tiny, rather dirty and untidy kitchen. There were two women in it.

“ You see I am very grand now, I have a cook and a kitchen-maid/’ he said.

The younger woman had a hare-lip and, giggling, took pains to hide it with her hand, llie father said some- thing to her. The other was' squatting on the ground pounding some herb in a mortar and he patted her kindly on the shoulder.

“ They have been here nearly a year now,’’ he said. ** They are mother and daughter. The woman, poor thing, has a malformed hand and the girl, as you see, that terrible lip.”

The woman had had a husband and two children besides the girl with the hare-lip ; but they had died suddenly, within a few weeks of one another, and the people of her village, thinking that she was possessed of an evil spirit, drove her out, her and her daughter, penniless, into a world of which she knew nothing. She went to another village in the jungle where lived a catechist, for she had heard that the Christians did not fear the spirits, and the catechist was willing to give her lodging; but he was very poor and could not provide her with food. He told her to go to the father

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This was a five day journey and it was the beginning of the rainy season. She and her daughter shouldered their small possessions, they were no more than they could carry in a little bundle on their backs, and set out, walking along the jungle paths, up and down the hills, and at night they slept in a village if they came upon one and if not in such resting-place, in the shadow of a rock or under the branches of a tree, as they found by the wayside. But the people of the villages through which they passed sought to dissuade them from their purpose, for it was well known that the father took children into his house and after a little while bore them away to Rangoon where he offered them to the spirit of the sea and received money for them. They were terrified, but no village would keep them and the father was their only refuge. They went on and at last, desperate but panic-stricken, presented themselves to him. He told them that they could live in an out-house and cook the rice for the children in the school.

We went into the living-room and sat down. It was bare of every sort of comfort. There was a large table and two or three wooden chairs, straight-backed and severe ; there were shelves on which were a number of religious books, paper-bound and musty, and a great many Catholic periodicals. The only secular book I saw was that dreary masterpiece I Promessi Sposi, (When Manzoni met Sir Walter Scott who complimented him on his work he, acknowledging his debt to the Waverley Novels, said that it was not his book, but Sir Walter’s, upon which Sir Walter replied, then it is my best book. But he spoke from his generous heart ; it is of an almost intolerable tediousness )

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But the father received a daily paper from Italy, the Corriere della arriving in bundles once a month, and he told me that he read every word of every one.

“ It amuses me/* he said, ** of course, but I do it also as well, as a spiritual exercise, for I cannot afford to let my faculties rust. I know everything that is happening in Italy, what operas they are doing at the Scala, what plays are given, and what books are pub- lished. I read the political speeches;. Ever}i:hing. In that w'ay I keep abreast of the world. My mind remains active. I do not suppose I shall ever return to Italy, but if I do I shall step back into my environ- ment as though I had never been away. In this kind of life one must never let go of oneself for a minute.”

He talked fluently, in a resonant voice, and he w'as quick to smile ; he had a loud and hearty laugh. When first he came to this place he put up at the P.W.D. bun- galow and set about learning the language. The rest of his time he spent building the little house in which I now sat. Then he went out into the jungle.

” I can do nothing with the Shans,” he told me, “ They are Buddhists and they are satisfied with Buddhism, It suits them.” He gave me a deprecating look of his fine black eyes and with a smile made a statement that I could see was so bold to his mind that he was a trifle startled at it himself. “ You know, one must admit that Buddhism is a beautiful religion. I have long talks sometimes with the monk at the Pongyi Chann, he is not an uneducated man, and I cannot but respect him and his faith.”

He soon discoy^ye^ fhg^ jyg could hope to influence

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only the people in the little lonely villages in the jungle, for they were spirit-worshippers and their lives were perplexed by the unceasing dread of the malignant powers that lay in wait to ensnare them. But the villages were far away, in the mountains, and often he had to go twenty, thirty or even forty miles to reach them.

“ Do you ride ? " I asked.

“ No, I walk. I don't say I wouldn’t ride if I could afford a pony, but I am glad to walk. In this country you need plenty of exercise. I suppose that when I get old I shall have to have a pony, and by then I may have the money to buy one, but as long as I am in the prime of life there is no reason I should not travel on the legs God gave me.”

It was his custom on arriving at a village to go to the headman’s house and ask for lodging. When the people came back in the evening from their work he gathered them together on the verandah and talked to them. Now, after all these years, they knew him for forty miles around and they made him welcome. Sometimes a message came to ask him to go to some distant village that he had not yet visited so that they could hear what he had to say.

I remembered the lonely little village, shut oflP by the pressing growth of that dense verdure, that I had come upon in the jungle. I wanted to form in my mind’s eye some picture of the lives those people led in it. The father shrugged his shoulders when I questioned him.

“ They work. Men and women work together. It is a constant round of unceasing toil. Believe me.

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life IS not easy in the jungle villages up in the mourt** tains. The}" sow their rice, and you know what time and trouble it takes, and then they reap it; they cultivate opium, and when they have an interval they go into the jungle to gather the jungle produce. They do not starve, but they only save themselves from starvation because they never rest.”

As I wandered through the country, fording rivers or crossing them by rustic bridges, going up and down the tree-clad hills, passing between the rice fields, stop- ping for a night at one village of bamboo houses after another, talking with that long succession of headmen, their faces wizened or hardy, I seemed to myself like a figme in a tapestry that lined the halls of some old, infinitely deserted palace, an interminable tapestry of a sombre green in which you see dimly dark stiff trees and faded streams, hamlets of strange houses and shadowry people occupied without pause with actions that have a mystical, hieratic and obscure significance. But sometimes when I arrived at a village and the headman and the elders, kneeling on the ground, gave me their presents, I had seemed to read in their large dark eyes a strange hunger. They looked at me humbly, as though they were expecting from me a message for which they had been long eagerly waiting. I wished that I could make them a discourse that would stir them ; I wished that 1 could deliver to them the glad tidings for which they seemed to hanker. I could tell them nothing of a Beyond of which I knew nothing. The priest at least could give them something. I saw him arriving, footsore and weary, at some village, and when the approach of

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night prevented the people from working any longed, sitting on the floor on the verandah, lit by the moon perhaps, but perhaps only by the stars, and telling them, silent shadows in»the darkness, things strange and new.

I do not think he was a very intellectual man ; he had character, of course, and shrewdness. He knew quite well that the hill Shans let their children come to him only because he clothed, lodged and fed them, but he shrugged his shoulders tolerantly; they would return to their hills when they were of a proper age, and though some would revert to the savage beliefs of their fathers, others would retain the faith he had taught them and by their influence perhaps lighten the darkness that surrounded them. He led too busy a life to have much time for reflection, and certainly there was in his mind no mystical strain ; his faith was strong, as an athlete’s arms are muscular, and he accepted the dogmas of his religion as unquestion- ingly as you and I accept the fact of single vision or the flushing cheek. He told me that he had had a desire to come to the East as a missionary when he was still a seminarist and had studied in Milan to that end. He showed me a photograph of the group, sitting round the bishop, who had come out with him, twelve of them, and pointed out to me those that were dead. This one had been drowned crossing a river in Cliina, that one had died of cholera in India, and the other had been killed by the wild Was up in the north of the Shan States. I asked him when he had sailed and without a moment’s hesitation he gave me the day of the week, the day of the month and the year ; what-

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ever aimiversaries they may forget, thei>e nuns, monks and secular priests, the date on which they left Europe remains on the tip of their tongues. Then he showed me a photograph of his family, a typical group of lower middle-class people, such as you may see in the window of any cheap photographer in Italy. They w'ere stiff, formal and self-conscious, the father and mother sitting in the middle in their best clothes, two younger children arranged on the floor at their feet, a daughter on each side of them and behind, standing according to their heights, a row of sons. The priest pointed out to me those that had entered religion.

“ More than half,*’ I commented.

“ It has been a great happiness to our mother,” he said. “ It is her doing.”

She was a stout woman, in a black dress, with her hair parted in the middle and large, soft eyes. She looked like a good housekeeper and I had little doubt that when it came to buying and selling she could drive a hard bargain. The priest smiled affectionately.

” She is a wonderful creature, my mother, she has had fifteen children and eleven of them are still alive. She is a saint, and goodness is as natural to her as a fine voice is to a cantairice ; it is no more difficult for her to do a beautiful action than it was for Adelina Patti to take C in alt. CaraJ’

He put the photograph back on the table.

When the next day but one I set out again the father said he would walk with me till we came to the hills and so, slinging my pony’s bridle over my arm, w^e trudged along while he gave me messages for the nxms at Keng Tung and impressed upon me not to forget

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to send him prints of the photographs I had taken. He walked with his gun on his shoulder, an old weapon that looked to me much more dangerous to himself than to the beasts of the field ; he was an odd figure in his battered helmet and his black cassock trussed up round his waist in order not to impede his gait, his white trousers tucked into his heavy boots. He walked with a long slow stride and I could well imagine that the miles sagged away under it. But presently his sharp eyes caught sight of a kingfisher that sat on the low branch of a tree, green and blue, a little quivering, beautiful thing, poised there for a moment like a living gem ; the father put his hand on my arm to stop me and crept forward very softly, noiselessly, till he got to within ten feet ; then he fired and when the bird dropped he sprang forward with a cry of triumph and picking it up threw it in the bag he carried slung to his side.

“ That will help to make my rice tasty,*' he said

But we reached the jungle and he stopped again.

“ I shall leave you here,” he said. “ I must get back to my work.”

I mounted my pony, we shook hands, and I trotted off. I turned back when I came to a bend of the path and waved as I saw him still standing where I had left him. He had his hand on the trunk of a tall tree and the green of the forest surrounded him. I went on and soon, I suppose, with that heavy tread of his that seemed not to spurn the earth but to stamp upon it with a jovial energy, as though it were friendly and would take his affectionate violence in good part (like a great strong dog who wags his tail when you

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give him a hearty slap on the buttock) soon, I suppose he trudged back to the life from which for a day or two I had lured him, I knew that I should never see him again. I was going on to I knew' not what new experiences and presently I should return to the great w’orld with its excitement and vivid changes, but he would remain there always.

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 thiimer, 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, fnghtened to see a white man die, whether in a last moment of lucidity (those strange brown faces bending over him) fear wall 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 beheve 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, bnt 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 hke 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 monke\^ 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 underv'orld. 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 firont 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

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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 hke 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 :

. . . whether we he young or old,

Our destiny, our being* s heart and home.

Is with infinitude, and only there ;

With hope it is, hope that can never die.

Effort, and expectation, and desire,

And something ever more about to be.

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

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clad them. I trotted along a straight road, wide enough for a bullock w’agon, '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 tow’n for the market next day ; and at last I reached a broken brick gate'way. 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 vre had exchanged the proper civilities we rode on through the main street of the to'wn (but as the houses stood each in its com- pound with trees gro'wing 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 w-as 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.

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XVIII

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 j ostled 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 colomed 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

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the abundant hair and handkerchiefs of men and women These extravagant hats, hundreds of them, swaying, bobbing up and do\^Ti, 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 observ^ed 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 handful 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 small dried animals. But the aged apothe- caries 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 bantam’s 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 j erk, and the pill was gone. The apothecary watched him with rheumy eyes.

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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. ITiey were not lacking in elegance. The Chinese are the aris- tocracy 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

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a wistful melody. It gave you an impression of some- thing 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 loight 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

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members of many tribes. They held together in Bttle groups as though, feeling shy in this foreign environ- ment, they were afraid of being parted from one another. To them it must have seemed a vast and populous city, and they kept themseh es to themselves with the countrjroan^s odd mingling of awe and con- tempt for the inhabitants of a city. There were Tais, Laos, Kaws, Palaungs, Was and hea\eu 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 Mambw’e country, but for the purely utilitarian purpose of protecting their crops. A fresh skuU 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 w^ear 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

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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 adver- tisement 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

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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 w'oods, and there was a bo\ish smile on his handsome face.

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 com- pulsion 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.

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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 e\er be a customer ; in another four China- men crouched on their heels were gambling. Silence. The du«^ty road had great ruts in it, and the sun beat down on it flrom 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.

x^ind 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 bam, 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, an 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

XXI

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 tiiat most men who live in places where 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 j&ighten-

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ing 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 news- papers, 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 thjsit he should have no use for us and we nod

IIS

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 countrv" 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 imincible shyness. Shared emotions abash them. The thought of com- munity 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 wiU 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 hcxienda 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

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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 ^d 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 poHtely, as though they were enter- taining 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

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sell anything, and their goods are dusty and fly-blown ; or they run, with lackadaisical incompetence, a cocoanut plantation. They are on the verge of bankruptcy. Sometimes they are engaged in metaphysical specula- tion, 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 societ}^ 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.

4

XXII

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 jfrontier of the Sawbwa’s donoinions. 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 P.W.D. 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,

1x6

11?

and the roof was neatly thatched with rice straw. The floor was resilient so that, accustomed to an unyielding surface underfoot, I had at drat a feeling of some insecurity and walked gingerly ; but there was a net- work 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 accom- modation 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 ofiicial 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 inahenable 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.

But when my house was finished, a green house in a green glade with the torrent plashing noisily between its green banks, and I had eaten, I laughed at myself. At Keng Tung I had bought some rum off a Ghurka when I discovered that my supply of gin was running low and feared that I should have to finish my journey on tea and coffee ; it was good rum, home-made, but I did not like it ; so to mark the sincere contrition I felt for having behaved with so little sense I sent the Sawbwa’s official two bottles.

XXIII

IN reading the books of explorers I have been very much struck by the fact that they never tell you what they eat and drink unless they are driven to extremities and shoot a deer or a buffalo that re- plenishes their larder when they have drawTi in their belts to the last hole ; or are so much in want of water that their pack animals are dying and it is only by the merest chance that at the very last moment they come across a well, or by the exercise of the most ingenious ratiocination hit upon a spot where in the evening and the distance they see a shining that tells them that after a few’ more weary miles they will find ice to quench their thirst. Then a look of relief crosses their set grim faces and perchance a grateful tear courses down their unwashed cheeks. But I am no explorer and my food and drink are sufficiently important matters to me to persuade me in these pages to dwell on them at some length. I keep a pleasant place in my memory for the durwan of a bungalow on the way to Keng Tung who brought me with obsequious gestures a lordly dish covered with a napkin, removing which he craved my acceptance of two large cabbages. I had eaten no green vegetables for a fortnight and they tasted to me more delicious than peas fresh from a Surrey garden or young asparagus from Argenteuil. It is a charming sight and wonderfully exalting to the

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soul, when you ride wearily into a village, to come upon a duck-pond on which are swimming fat ducks, unconscious of the fact that next day one of them, the fattest, the youngest, the most tender, with baked potatoes and abundant gravy is destined (who can escape his fate ?) to make you a succulent dinner. Late in the afternoon, just before the sun is setting, you take an easy stroll and a little way from the compound you catch sight of two green pigeons flying about the trees. They run along the pathway, seeming playfully to chase each other, they are tame and friendly, and unless you have a heart of stone you cannot but be touched by the sight of them. You reflect on the innocence and bliss of their lives. You remember vaguely the fable of La Fontaine which in your childhood you learned by heart and shyly repeated when visitors came to see your mother.

Deux pigeons s*amaient d' amour tendre.

Dun d'euXi s*ennuyant au logis Fut assess fou pour entreprendre Un voyage en lointain pays^

The charming and obscene Lawrence Sterne would have been moved to tears by the sight of the dainty creatures and he would have written a passage that would have wrung your heart. But you are made of sterner stuff. You have a gun in your hands and though you are a bad shot they are an easy mark. In a little while the native who has accompanied you holds them in his hand, but he is unconcerned and sees nothing pathetic in those pretty little birdst but a moment ago so full of life, dead before him. How good they are, fat, succulent and juicy, when Bang Lai, the

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Gurkha, brings them ro«i*»ted to a turn tor your breakfast next morning !

My cook was a Telegu, a man of mature age ; his face, of a dark mahogany, -was thin, ravaged and lined, and his thick hair was dully streaked with silver. He was very lean, a tall, saturnine creature of a striking appearance in his white turban and white tunic. He walked with long strides and a swinging step, covering the twelve to fourteen miles of the day’s march without fatigue or edbrt. It startled me at first to see this bearded and dignified person nimbly shin up a tree in the compound and shake down the fruit he needed for some sauce. Like many another artist liis person- ality was more interesting than his work ; his cooking was neither good nor varied, one day he gave me trifle for my dinner and the next cabinet pudding: they are the staple sweets of the East, and as one sees them appear on table after table, made by a Japanese at Kyoto, a Chinese at Amoy, a Malay at Alor Star or a Madrassi at Mulmein, one’s sympathetic heart feels a pang at the thought of the drab live^ of those English ladies in country vicarages or seaside villas (with the retired Colonel their father) who introduced them to the immemorial East. My own knowledge of these matters is small, but I made so bold as to teach my Telegu how to make a corned beef hash. I trusted that after he left me he would pass on the precious recipe to other cooks and that eventually one more dish would be added to the scanty repertory of Anglo- Eastern cuisine. I should be a benefactor of my species.

It had occurred to me that the cook-house was very

disorderly and none too clean, but in these matters it is unwise to be squeamish ; when you think of all the disagreeable things that go on in your inside it seems absux'd to be too particular about the way in which is prepared what you put into it. It must be accepted that from a kitchen that is neat and shining like a new pin you do not often get food that is very good to eat. But I was taken aback when Rang Lai came to me with complaints that the Telegu was so dirty that no one could eat what he prepared. I went into the cook- house again and saw for myself ; it was impossible not to notice also that my cook was very much the worse for liquor. I was told then that he was often so drunk that Rang Lai had to do the cooking himself. We were a fortnight’s journey from any place where I might have replaced him, so I contented myself vdth such vituperation (not very effective since it had to be translated into Burmese which he understood but little) as I was master of. I think the most biting thing I said was that a drunken cook should at least be a good one, but he merely looked at me with large mournful eyes. He did not wince. At Keng Tung he went on a terrific spree and did not appear for three days ; I looked about for someone to take his place, for I had four weeks’ journey ahead of me before I could reach the rail-head in Siam, but there was no one to be found, so when he reappeared very sorry for himself and woe-begone, I assumed the part of one who is cut to the quick, but magnanimous. I forgave him and he promised that for the rest of the journey he would abstain One should be tolerant of the vices of others.

Now, pa^^sing thr > igh tn* 1 liad oftfn «ic*en

little pig^ ^currying ^t>out the on which tlie houses were built and about a week aftt*r I left Keng Tung it occurred to me that a sucking-pig would make a pleasant change io my daily fare ; so f gci\e instructions to buy one at the next opportunity, and one day on arriving at tin* bungalow I was shown a little black pig lyirti at the bottom of a basket. It did not look more than a week old. For a few da\s it w’as carried in its basket from stage to stage by a young Chinese boy I had engaged at Keng Tung to help my drunken cook, and the boy and Rang Lai played with it. It was a pet. I meant to keep it for a special occasion and often, as I rode along, I indulged in a pleasing reverie on the excellent dinner it would make ; I could not hope for apple sauce, but my mouth w’atered at the thought of the crackling, and I told myself that the flesh would be sw’eet and tender. Anxiously I asked the Telegu if he w'as quite certain he knew how to cook it. He swore by the heads of all his ancestors that there w'as nothing about roasting a pig that he did not know% Then I halted for a day to give the mules and the men a rest, and I ordered the sucking-pig to be killed. But when it came to the table (hovr vain are human hopes I) there w^as no crackling, there was no white tender meat, it w'as just a brown sloppy stinking mess, it was uneatable. For a moment I was dismayed. I wondered what on earth the great explorers would do in such a pass. Would a frown darken the stem face of Stanley and would Dr. Livingstone preserve unruflied his Christian temper ? I sighed. Not for this was the little black sucking-pig

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reft untimely from his mother’s breast. It had been better to leave