Anna and the King of Siam

by Margaret Landon

  But the girls pursued her without compunction, repeating over and over the insulting question, laughing and nudging each other, dragging the Malay duenna along willy-nilly to interpret the reply. The intrusion provoked her. Sharp words rose to her tongue. Then she remembered the poverty of their lives, the lack of liberty, of hope, of education, of love, and she choked the words back. But they were persistent. They would not leave the room without an answer. She did not dare to open her boxes and begin unpacking for fear that they would pounce on every little treasure. Desperately she turned to them at last. In a controlled voice she said, “And if I give you an answer, will you go away like good girls and leave me to myself for a while?”

  They nodded. All their eyes were fixed on hers eagerly. Her answers tumbled over each other within her. Leon. Her religious scruples. Slavery. Polygamy. What could these children understand?

  Slowly she spoke, the duenna interpreting a sentence at a time: “The Kralahome, your lord, and the King, the Lord of Life, are Buddhists. A Christian woman like myself would rather be put to the torture, and chained in a dungeon for life, than enter the harem of either!”

  They were silent in unbelieving astonishment. One, bolder than the rest, cried, “What? Not if he gave you all these jeweled rings and boxes, and these golden things?”

  When the old Malay woman, fearing to offend, whispered the test question to her, she laughed at the earnest eyes around her, and replied gently: “No, not even so. I am only here to teach the children of the royal family, not to enter the harem. You see I am not like you. You have nothing to do but to play and sing and dance for your master. But I must work to support my children since my husband is dead. One of my children is on the ocean going far away from me to England to school. She is a girl, only seven years old, and I am very sad now that I must be separated from her.”

  Shades of sympathy flitted across the faces pressed close to hers. Then softly repeating, “Phutho, Phutho!” (Dear Buddha, dear Buddha!) they quietly left her. A minute more and she heard them laughing as they retreated down the corridors of the palace.

  7

  THE KRALAHOME’S HOUSEHOLD

  After her visitors had gone Anna began to unpack. The apartment was comfortably furnished in the European manner. Apparently the chests, beds, wardrobes, and chairs had been imported from Singapore or Hongkong. Louis was happily playing in the little garden near the pond while Beebe and the dog Bessy kept guard. Suddenly all the weariness of the day before, the sleepless night, overcame Anna. The unpacking could wait. She lay down on the bed, grateful for the quiet of the spacious rooms, and fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  She was awakened, how much later she could not tell, by piercing shrieks. “Mem, Mem! Mem sahib, help! Oh, help!”

  It was Beebe calling. Had Louis fallen into the water? With alarm Anna leaped from the bed, just as Beebe rushed wildly into the room. Her head was uncovered. Her fine muslin sari had been trampled under her feet. Her face was green with terror. Louis came running behind her.

  “Beebe, quiet! Quiet! Tell me what has happened.” The trembling Beebe sank to the floor.

  “Mem sahib, my husband, the honored Moonshee, Mem’s good teacher, has fallen into the hands of these barbarians. Mem sahib, help us, help us!” Her voice rose in an anguished wail.

  “Come, Beebe, come! Calm yourself and tell me what has happened or how can I help you?”

  “Mem sahib, he meant no harm, he did not know. How could he know, Mem sahib?”

  “Know what, Beebe?” Anna insisted.

  Beebe swallowed her sobs as best she could. “He did not know that it was the harem. It was not walled off as in India, Mem. How could he then tell? It is his kismet! He has walked into the quarters of the favorite, and he has been arrested by two great ugly women and dragged to court.”

  Anna did not stop to do more than adjust her collar and smooth her dress. This was serious! She did not even comb her rumpled hair, but followed the shaking ayah headlong to an open sala that served as court.

  Moonshee, respectable servant of the Prophet, stood there with his hands tied behind him. His turban had come off in the scuffle that accompanied his arrest. His face was woebegone but resigned. Faithful Moslem that he was, he waited patiently to have his throat cut, since it was his kismet that had brought him to this land of Kafirs, infidels. His eyes as he turned them toward his mistress were calm and hopeless.

  “Moonshee, Moonshee!” she exclaimed, “Don’t look like that! And don’t worry. There’s been a mistake. I’ll find the interpreter and we’ll fix everything.”

  Moonshee said nothing, and Anna ran off in search of the Kralahome’s half-brother. She dared not go too far, fearing to err as had her servant by entering some part of the palace grounds to which she was forbidden. The interpreter was nowhere to be found. Hurrying back to the sala, she saw that the judge had arrived, an imposing and irascible person. Frantically in signs and gestures she tried to tell him that her old servant had offended unwittingly. The judge could not, or would not, understand her. He stormed at the old man in a tone easily understood, even though his words were not. But Moonshee bore the abuse with a calm indifference. He did not understand the language in which he was being cursed, and he expected neither intelligence nor mercy of these Kafirs among whom the Mem sahib was so unaccountably determined to live.

  The loafers in the yards and porches shook off their napping and surrounded the group in the sala. Among them came the interpreter. Anna rushed to him at once: “Oh, there you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere. Come quickly and explain to the judge that my Moonshee did not know where he was going, and that he got into the harem quite by mistake and meant no harm.”

  The young man eyed her insolently, then turned away with a shrug. “It’s the judge’s business. I can’t interfere. Your stupid servant must take his punishment.”

  Grins went around the crowd of squatting loafers, who did not miss the significance of the sideplay, although they understood no English. It added zest to see the queer white woman getting so excited and making a fool of herself.

  Anna wondered briefly if she had been wrong after all not to have bought the interpreter’s good will. Then the judge paused dramatically and in a solemn voice pronounced what must have been the sentence. A long whip was brought by a ragged lackey. Other slaves stepped forward and suddenly stripped the old man’s clothes from his back.

  Anna’s eyes blazed. Her mauve muslin swished. She walked straight up to the judge and looked him squarely in the eye: “Let one single lash fall on the back of that old man and I’ll see to it that you suffer tenfold. I am going this very minute to lay the matter before the British Consul, so take care what you do!”

  Although she spoke in English the words “British Consul” had meaning even for the judge. He stayed the lackey with the whip, and turned toward the interpreter, speaking to him in Siamese. The interpreter moved forward and a long conversation began.

  Anna watched anxiously. The judge was asking, the interpreter explaining. There was nothing to reassure her in either cruel face. Suddenly they both fell on the ground as did every other person in the sala except Moonshee and Beebe and herself. Behind her stood the Kralahome unannounced.

  Calmly he took in the situation. Calmly he motioned to the slaves to untie Moonshee’s bonds. From the corner of her eye Anna could see the interpreter inching away on his knees and elbows until he was out of the crowd, and out of the way of his brother’s eyes. As soon as Moonshee’s hands were free he picked up his turban and, advancing with the dignity that had never left him, laid it at the feet of his deliverer.

  “Peace be with you, O Vizier of a Wise King,” he said in Hindustani.

  The mild and venerable aspect of Moonshee with his snow-white beard falling low upon his breast must have dissipated any lingering doubts that the Kralahome had about his character and purpose.

  “You may go to your wife’s room, old man,” he said in English, and the little company bro
ke up.

  Anna went back to her apartment and resumed the unpacking. Her fright over Moonshee had upset her, and the putting away of things steadied her, restored her jangling nerves a little. She was occupied with this work until five o’clock when dinner was brought. It was set on a table by little pages. Louis and she seated themselves and began, rather uncertainly, their first Siamese meal. It seemed to be a mixture, European foods probably prepared especially for them, and curries and sauces that were obviously Siamese. The little pages waited on them with brown cheroots hanging out of pouting lips. From time to time they hopped over two large porcelain heads of Medusa set in front of the windows, and spit into the yard. When she pointed reproachfully at this double peccadillo, they only laughed and scampered away. They were soon replaced, however, by another set of pages, bearing fruits. These were set in their baskets on the table by the boys, who then retired to the sofas to lounge and watch with interest while she and Louis dined. She shook her head at them. They giggled, jumped off the sofas, did several acrobatic stunts on the carpet and took themselves off. The second day in Siam was over.

  It was twilight on the piazza. The sun was setting in long pencils of rose and gold from a palette of painted glass. The blended gloom and brightness without entered and mixed with the blended gloom and brightness within. Lights and shadows lay half asleep, and life seemed to be breathing itself sluggishly away, drifting along a slumberous stream toward the ocean of death.

  Below in the garden Beebe and Moonshee were preparing their evening meal. The smoke of their pottage was borne slowly upward on the hot still air, which was stirred only by the careless laughter of some girls plunging and paddling in the golden lake.

  Moonshee was unperturbed by his misadventure. Anna, on the other hand, was still troubled by it and its implications. “Perhaps I should have conciliated that wretch,” she thought. “He’s vindictive and dangerous.” Angry color came and went in her cheeks. “No, I couldn’t have made the situation better by trying to placate him. He would merely have grown more demanding. He had to be shown his place! Even though he may cause us trouble. But when we have our own home everything will be better.” And it was comforting to remember that the Kralahome had been just.

  She determined to press for the fulfillment of the King’s promise without delay. She must try to establish her home before her work at the Palace began. And that surely could not be long now. Even an Oriental monarch with the wealth of Croesus would hardly want to pay her salary to sit idle.

  The next day was full with unpacking and several callers. In the morning Anna was surprised on answering a knock at the door of the room she had just finished arranging as a parlor to find a Eurasian man standing there. He bowed slightly.

  “I am Mr. Robert Hunter, ma’am. His Excellency’s English secretary. Is there anything that I can do to help you?”

  A wave of relief filled her at the knowledge that she need not depend upon the half-brother as an interpreter. “Mr. Hunter, I am so glad to meet you. Won’t you sit down? I don’t need anything now, but I shall certainly be calling upon you for help later.”

  He bowed gravely. “My duties as harbor officer quite frequently take me out for many hours of the day, but I am always in for at least a while.” His manner of speaking was stilted but friendly. “I shall be delighted to be of service. If there is nothing you want now, I shall be going.”

  “Do you have any idea when the King will send for me, Mr. Hunter?”

  The secretary looked thoughtful. “It’s hard to say, ma’am. It may be several days or several weeks. His Majesty is busy with two important ceremonies, which started the day you came here and will last until the twenty-first. He is performing the tonsure on his oldest daughter and he is raising his oldest son, Prince Chulalongkorn, to official rank. It’s all quite complicated, you see. The boy is to be presented with a gold tablet engraved with his royal name—it’s a kind of christening, in other words. And then he’s to be invested with official position and title.”

  “You mean he’s to be installed as crown prince?” Anna asked with interest.

  “Well, no, not exactly that. There isn’t any such office. But he will have a grade of forty thousand sakdina. I hardly know how to translate it but a common man has only six sakdina—ranks or points you might call it—so naturally forty thousand will place him above everyone else in the kingdom. And in a way it does make him the same as the crown prince.”

  “The heir presumptive, perhaps,” Anna suggested. “And will he be one of my pupils?”

  “I think he will,” Mr. Hunter assured her. She was pleased with this news. Her decision to come to Siam had not been dictated entirely by the need for employment. She had felt a sense of destiny. Death had left her without ties except those that bound her to her children.

  The movement in the United States to free the slaves had struck in her a sympathetic chord. Perhaps the opportunity to teach in the harem meant that she would be able to inculcate into her pupils her own deep sense of the sacredness of the human soul, and the evil of any system which violated it by permitting one person to own another. It was possible, she thought, looking back over her twenty-seven years, which had started so promisingly and withered so quickly, that like Queen Esther in the Bible she had come into the world “for such a time as this.” If the young heir was to be her pupil she could hope, at least, to mold him a little. All this flashed through her mind as she asked Mr. Hunter: “And you think I’ll be sent for as soon as the ceremony is over?”

  “It’s impossible to say, ma’am,” he hedged carefully. “Mr. Alexander Loudon is here to exchange the ratifications of the Netherlands Treaty with the Siamese government. He will be received in audience several times and there will be a state dinner. Then New Year starts on the twenty-ninth and there is always a great to-do with fireworks on the river and on the royal plaza, and theatricals in all the palaces, and gambling for the people. And after that there is another festival called the Songkran. And His Majesty is getting ready for the public cremation of his late queen consort, Prince Chulalongkorn’s mother, who died last September. That will be in April sometime and will take a week or two. I think you may count on having some time to yourself.”

  He bowed again in his grave and courtly way and left.

  Shortly after a page came with a card which read “Mr. George Orton.” Behind him was the captain, smiling. He had a pleasantly familiar look in the new and strange surroundings and Anna’s greeting was warm.

  “We’re sailing with the tide,” he explained. “And I wanted to ask you if you had anything to send back to your friends in Singapore.”

  “Captain Orton, how kind of you! Do sit down. Will I have time to send Beebe out for fruit?” And learning that he could wait, she dispatched Beebe at once. “Get some pomeloes, Beebe, and mangoes, if you can.”

  While she waited, she sat down to write to Avis. What could one say to a child? Terror, the darkness, the sense of being tossed about on a sea of unpredictable people, the fear. She sighed. None was for a child. But when she began, the letter wrote itself:

  My own Avis,

  Birds sing sweetly and brightly. The sun beams as Mama reads again her darling’s dear little note. Be good brave child and never cry when kind friends are near, for that will make them and Mama sad. Look up to the fair blue sky every evening, for Mama looks there then; and think how much comes from there—sunshine and rain, cool winds and breezes, dew drops and rainbows, while one, only one thing brings these bright visitors to us, that is love, God’s great love, which is small in the dew drop but how large in the sunshine.

  So be good in the smallest and brave in the largest act of your young sweet life. Louis sends his love and this flower which he has picked from the little garden below our window. We often speak of our dear Avis and miss her now. We feel her very near, not before our eyes but in our hearts. O Father, bless my Avis in and with Thy love.

  YOUR MAMA.

  The tears were close to Anna’s eyes
as she signed and sealed the note and handed it over to the captain, with the basket of fruit for Mr. Cobb and the other Singapore friends. He held her hand just a moment longer than was necessary as he asked, “You’re staying, then?”

  “I’m staying,” she said in a low voice.

  “God bless you,” he said, and was gone.

  The unpacking and putting to rights was harder than ever after that. The face of the child now perhaps on the ocean seemed to have been evoked by the mere act of writing the letter. Anna felt the little arms around her neck like fetters as they had been that last day in Singapore when she was about to leave for the Chow Phya. “Mama, Mama, I won’t let you go,” Avis had said. And Anna had seemed to herself insensible and cruel as she disengaged the arms and entrusted the small soft body to strangers—friends, yes, but strangers who could not know or care, kind as they were, for the private lovelinesses of the child’s heart. Tears, which seemed to come now so easily and to make her a constant Niobe, rose again to her eyes and fell unheeding on her lap, turning the mauve muslin to purple where they struck.

  How long she sat there she did not know. A knock at the door aroused her. A Siamese woman entered. She was perhaps forty, stout, dark, heavy of feature. She was followed by a large retinue, which proclaimed her the chief woman in this establishment filled with women. She was not pretty, but for all its plainness it was a mild face that came toward Anna, and the hands that took hers between them were gentle. The duenna of the day before interpreted.

  “Mem, this is Khun Ying Phan. She is the head wife of the Kralahome. She bids you welcome and asks if there is anything that you will need.”