Anna and the King of Siam

by Margaret Landon

  Shortly after her move to the eastern bank Anna had an opportunity to start her lessons in European etiquette. Louis and she were invited to tea by her royal pupils. The tea party was at the residence of one of the late queens. This quaint old palace was enclosed by a high, half-ruined and time-stained wall, overgrown with creepers, grasses and flowers. When the female porters opened the iron gates, Anna saw in the distance an orange grove in full blossom. As she walked down the path in the evening sunlight she could see shadowy vistas on either side: flower gardens and arches; bright fountains and marble basins where many-colored fish swam about; stone seats, groups of banana trees and graceful palms.

  There was an amphitheater in front of the royal dwelling enclosed in a thick border of ilex and oleander. It had been spread with costly Indian carpets. Two slave women dressed in scarlet and white were seated on stone benches at the end of the walk. As Louis and Anna approached, one of them rose and came forward to greet the guests. She invited them to take their places on a carpet. There they waited for half an hour, while Anna reflected that in Siam as in Europe royalty is proverbially late.

  At last the sound of many voices reached them. The gates of the palace were thrown open. Anna’s two oldest pupils flashed into sight, the Princess Ying Yaowalak and the Princess Somawadi. They were dressed in scarlet, gold, and blue, spangled with diamonds and costly gems that sparkled in the slanting rays of the sun. A troop of female slaves followed, also dressed in their best, with gold and silver ornaments. The princesses advanced smiling down the avenue to the carpet on which Anna and Louis sat. Ying Yaowalak, the older, came first. She took both of Anna’s hands into hers with reverence, and bowed until her forehead touched them. Her half-sister, Princess Somawadi, did the same. Then they dropped down one on either side of Anna, charmingly solicitous for their teacher, now also their guest.

  Presently thirty more of the royal pupils streamed through the gate, each accompanied by at least a dozen slaves, mostly young girls. The children salaamed Anna in turn, and then arranged themselves comfortably at full length on the carpets, while their slaves crouched behind them. It was certainly an unusual setting for a tea party. Reclining or crouching under the open sky were about five hundred people, quiet and orderly, although pleasantly titivated with anticipation.

  Almost immediately other girls came into sight through an opening in an avenue of ilex, dressed in brilliant colors and flowing draperies. They advanced in rhythmic measure carrying tambourines, flutes, cymbals and guitars. There was a barbaric beauty in the richness of their clothing and the movement of their bodies that made Anna think they were like a column of savage queens emerging from a primeval forest. As they approached the royal party they dropped to the pavement and hid their faces, nor did they rise until Princess Somawadi gave a signal. Then they formed into various groups, some the orchestra, some the chorus, and some dancers. A half hour concluded the program. Richly dressed slaves next brought teapots of at least ten different shapes, all of them gold, enameled and set in curious trays of gold and silver. Out of them the slaves poured different kinds of tea into beautiful jeweled cups.

  Anna saw that she was expected to drink at least one cup of each kind of tea. There were a dozen or more—the rose-scented tea, the jessamine-flavored tea, the tea of life, the tea of friendship, the tea of mirth, the tea of wakefulness, and many others. The tea of wakefulness was strongly stimulating. The leaves had been plucked when quite young and dried in large copper pans over fires. Anna was careful not to offend her hostesses, so she went through the ceremony of tasting all the teas, and praising each one. Each did have its own peculiar flavor, some quite pleasant and some the reverse.

  Various other small dishes were set in front of them. It was a delightful occasion except for one circumstance. Princess Ying Yaowalak, who had very long nails, and who wished to be polite to her teacher and Boy, would every now and then put one of these long nails into a dish of preserves, and spear a portion of the fruit on it. She would then present it to their mouths as if her nail were a fork. There was nothing for them to do but open their mouths and swallow with the best possible grace. According to Siamese etiquette this manner of feeding on the tip of the nail was an act full of kindness and poetic sentiment. But Anna almost wished during the course of the party that she had no mouth at all, since she could not overcome her revulsion.

  At last the sun set and she and Boy rose to go. They invited the royal children to an English tea party on the following Saturday evening, if the King would consent. The children were wild with delight at the prospect of going to Anna’s house, especially since it stood outside the walls of the Palace.

  The King gave his consent willingly. It was part of his plan for his children to have them understand and know how to observe European customs. On the evening of the party Anna decorated her dining room with English flags, and put quantities of flowers on the tables, which were spread with tea, coffee, homemade cakes, English preserves, bread and butter. Anna had invited thirty of her pupils, and it was her intention to arrange them around tables and to have the tea served in the old-fashioned English way.

  She had not thought to limit the number of attendants, however, and when the royal pupils arrived each was accompanied by many slaves. The children, excited by the strange new experience of an English tea party in an English home, were dressed in their brightest silks and weighted down with masses of gold and diamond ornaments. To Anna’s distress the slaves insisted on coming in with their masters and mistresses. The whole motley throng streamed through the open doors of the little house. Those who could not get in by that way because of the crowd jumped through the windows, until there was hardly an inch of standing room left.

  Vainly Anna tried to enforce order. She thought if she could persuade the children to sit down there was a chance that she could get the situation in hand. But her voice was lost in the din of all the attendants, who were screaming and bawling and elbowing each other for standing room in a house that had never been intended to hold four hundred people. The princes and princesses did not seem to understand that they were expected to sit in the chairs around the tables. They went to the tea tables and looked at them with interest. Some poked their fingers into the preserves to feel their consistency. Some handled the cakes and set them down again. Some looked in the teapots. Then, without having eaten anything, they spread through the house with their slaves, like a swarm of locusts, laying hands on everything that struck their fancy.

  Anna was like a chip of wood in a swirling stream. Up and down and around and over her they eddied, shouting and laughing and grabbing and exclaiming. The slaves watched the flittings of their royal charges with unbounded delight. Anna had taken it for granted that the quiet and order of their own entertaining of her would come with them into her home. She was struck dumb to discover that they were rifling her drawers, her toilet table, her closets and her cupboards. On her bed was a handsome crocheted quilt lined with pink silk, which one of the smallest of the princesses, not finding anything else to her liking, was dragging off with both her little hands when Anna rushed to its rescue.

  There would hardly have been a needle, a vase, a picture or a handkerchief left in the house if the boom of the clock striking from the high tower across the street had not announced the close of day. There was a sudden rush for the Palace. The slaves snatched up their royal charges loaded with booty and vanished as unceremoniously as they had come. The house was in ruins. The only thing completely untouched, as beautifully arranged as when the party began, was the row of tea tables, still set with dishes, bread and butter, preserves and cake.

  Anna sat down weakly to contemplate the damage. She had seen before the unpredictable strata of discipline and complete absence of it in Siamese behavior. She even knew that royalty had the right to take anything that pleased them. One dissolute prince roamed the streets of the city helping himself to whatever potables he could find in the shops of the merchants, and no one dared to interfere because he was of
royal blood. It had never occurred to her, though, that her pupils who obeyed her willingly day after day in the schoolroom would burst all bounds and become hoodlums when they stepped out of their orbit and came into her home. She hadn’t a pair of scissors, a spool of cotton, a pin or a thimble left. These especially had attracted the children.

  The next day, which was Sunday, brought a procession of slaves from the Palace. When the first appeared Anna hoped for a moment that she had come to return some pilfered item. The slave had been sent by the mother of one of the children, not with what the child had taken but with a chest of tea. Others came with boxes of tobacco, camphor, and snuff, compensatory offerings for the plunder of her house. Most of the gifts were of ten times the value of the things taken. The only trouble was that they were of no earthly use to her.

  27

  THE SERVICE IN THE TEMPLE

  Anna’s contacts with the mothers of her pupils continued to be many and varied. She was on excellent terms with all of them, but there were a select few to whom she was especially close. This small group were alike in that—with the exception of Lady Son Klin—they were among the most influential women of the harem. Anna had not selected them as friends for that reason, but because she had much in common with them. They all had an outreaching quality, a practical concern for those around them, that attracted her very much. Individually they were different, and their relationships with Anna reflected these differences.

  Lady Son Klin gave Anna valuable assistance in her study of the Siamese language. She was always delighted to see Anna in her home, and would produce hot tea and cakes with a rush of pleased attention that was heart-warming after a tiring day in the schoolroom. Her advice was shrewd and cautious. She understood the intricate politics of the harem and steered her friend through them with diplomatic skill. Anna was saved many a blunder by her careful little warnings.

  Anna’s relationship with Lady Thiang, mother of Princess Somawadi, was almost as intimate, but of quite another sort. She had quickly discovered the greatness of this Siamese woman’s heart. Life in the harem was supportable for many of the women of the Inside only because the head wife was a person of broad sympathy and discretion. Lady Thiang’s own sister, Choi, had very nearly been put to death five or six years previously. She had been the favorite at the time. While acting in a court play one of the young nobles had fallen in love with her. His wife in a passion of selfless devotion had sold herself to the concubine as slave and go-between. Before the noble’s plan to abduct Choi from the Palace could be carried out, one of her notes to him was intercepted. The plot was discovered. The noble and his wife were horribly tortured and then executed, and Choi herself was saved only because Sir Robert Schomburgk intervened.

  Perhaps this incident as much as anything else had ploughed and harrowed Lady Thiang’s heart. Anna had often carried some story of distress to her and had invariably been reassured if Lady Thiang said quickly, “Don’t worry any more, Mem cha, I’ll attend to it myself.”

  The head wife had devised a little court drama of her own in which she cast Anna for the leading part and used her again and again, with marked success. Whenever Lady Thiang thought that the King was dangerously angry and ready to loose the whip on one of the women of the harem, she would quickly summon Anna. It was Anna’s role to go immediately to the room in which His Majesty was, book in hand, to consult him about a translation from the Sanskrit or Siamese. She kept a store of such questions ready against the need. Transparent as the device was, or perhaps because of its simplicity, it usually worked.

  There was no possible way, so far as the King could have guessed, for Anna to learn that a woman was about to suffer from his wrath. He would see her standing hesitantly at the door with her book and would motion her to come in. Then he would turn with comical abruptness from curses and abuse to absorbed interest in the question she raised. The scholar would triumph over the man. Often he would motion the culprit, still kneeling before him, out of the room with an absent-minded wave of his hand, the better to devote himself to the attractive problem that Anna had brought him. Again and again as she approached his study and heard his voice shrill with anger, she would feel her heart sink and her steps slow down. This time he would guess! But he never did.

  Princess Lamom was the third woman whom Anna especially liked. The princess continued to seek advice about Prince Chulalongkorn and his brothers. Without her co-operation it would hardly have been possible to plant the principles of humanitarianism in Chulalongkorn’s mind. Anna made it a point to tell him of her efforts to help this or that unfortunate person. He listened gravely, his eyes alert and interested. She was convinced that she was having an effect—by example if not by words—when he deplored the cruelty with which the slaves were treated in the Palace. It was something, she felt, to have opened his eyes to this.

  She herself, to use the King’s phrase, was “a candle flame blowing in the wind.” If she could light one lamp that would some day illuminate every corner of the kingdom, her work in Siam would have been more than the trivial round it often seemed. None of her friends knew the utter loneliness of her life, the sense of futility that overwhelmed her. The load of duties, the provocations, and the fears accumulated month by month, and there was almost no release. The society of Bangkok was narrow and ingrown. Companionship was harder to find there than in any place she had ever lived. Fresh arrivals came seldom to the stagnant community. Even new books were rare and there was no theater, no music. Singapore had been alive, exciting, a crossroads of the world. Bangkok was a dead end.

  What compensation there was had to be found in her private studies and in her work. Perhaps nuns felt like this, she thought, when they passed within convent walls and left the glitter of the world behind. But their renunciation was of the will, while circumstances beyond her control had stripped her of the people who meant everything to her. And yet was it not possible that they had endured the same impoverishment, so that when the glory that was life had become husks they found it good to exchange those dead things for service and whatever vicarious happiness could be salvaged? Maybe selflessness was only selfishness on another level.

  Sometimes Anna knew a thrill of accomplishment when she had succeeded in helping one of the many who came to her for assistance. But it was always tempered the next day by the reflection that while she had remedied a single injustice ten had grown. It was not in her power to change the system that bore the malodorous fruit of sorrow around her. There was always the exciting chance, though, that Prince Chulalongkorn could. And this thought sustained her more than once when she grew discouraged or impatient.

  So it seemed a far better reward for her efforts than the paltry sum the King gave her when she noticed that the young prince was trying to teach kindness toward the slaves by his own example. He had his slaves carefully dressed and well fed, and he treated them with consideration. He insisted that his younger brothers and attendants do as much. One day he startled Anna by saying thoughtfully: “I don’t think they ought to be called slaves. They have more right to be called noble than we have, because they have learned how to endure. We princes are the ones who haven’t learned that there is nothing noble in oppressing our fellow men.”

  Khun Thao Ap and Lady Talap completed the circle of Anna’s particular friends on the Inside. At the beginning of 1864 Lady Talap’s position had been greatly enhanced by the elevation in rank of her father. Her older half-brother had long been chief judge of the Palace court. Numerous others of her family held important positions. In January of that year the Minister of the North, father of Chao Chom Manda Ung, who had owned L’Ore, died. Partly through Lady Talap’s influence as favorite her father had succeeded to the position. He had formerly been Lord Mayor of Bangkok. Now he was equal in rank to the Kralahome and thus one of the two most highly placed nobles in the kingdom.

  Lady Talap was a zealous Buddhist. She was eager to make her English friend understand her religion and frequently invited Anna to one or another of th
e religious services in the harem. “Come, Mem,” she would say with a wave of her hand, “today is our day for going to the temple. You must come, too. I will explain for you.” It was still hard for Anna to believe that she was not a young girl, for she was so full of gaiety, so childlike and unsullied in appearance.

  On one such occasion they set off together through the freshness of the morning for Wat Phra Kaeo. The bells on the pagoda made breezy gushes of music. A page asked Anna her destination, and when she answered inquired further, “To see or to hear?” She replied, “Both.”

  The women of the harem were already seated on the floor of polished brass diamonds when she and Lady Talap entered. They were dressed in white panungs with white silk scarfs drawn from their left shoulders in careful folds across their breasts and back, and thrown over their right shoulders. Their slaves sat a little apart. They were dressed in the same manner except not in silk. As a matter of fact, many of the slaves were half-sisters of their mistresses, children of the same father by a slave mother.

  The women were sitting in circles. Each had a vase of flowers and a lighted candle in front of her. Slightly in advance of the women was a circle of Anna’s pupils, who were, of course, higher in rank than their mothers. Close to the altar sat the priest, Chao Khun Sa. In his hand was a concave fan, richly embroidered, jeweled and gilded, and lined with pale green silk. It was an emblem of his rank and was held in front of his face according to the Buddhist custom. His yellow robe was open from throat to girdle, and closed below the waist. It suggested the Roman toga. From his shoulders hung two narrow strips, also yellow, resembling the scapular worn by certain orders of the Roman Catholic clergy. At his side was an open watch of gold, the gift of his sovereign. Seventeen disciples sat at his feet, protecting their faces with fans less richly adorned.

  Anna and Louis put off their shoes like the rest. There was no need to hush Boy. The reverence of the worshipers had already done that. The abbot sat motionless with his face covered in order that his eyes should not tempt his thoughts to stray. Anna was very curious about this priest for a number of reasons. She shifted her position to get a glimpse of his expression. He caught her movement and sent her a quick half-glance of remonstrance, and moved his fan so that his face was screened again. Then he began the opening chant.