Maiden Voyages

by Mary Morris

  The crooked position on a side-saddle—for one must sit crooked to look straight—is very fatiguing to a weak back, and many women to whom the exercise would otherwise prove of the greatest benefit cannot stand the strain: so this healthy mode of exercise is debarred them, because Society says they must not ride like men. Society is a hard taskmaster. Nothing is easier than to stick on a side-saddle, of course, and nothing more difficult than to ride on one gracefully.

  For comfort and safety, I say, ride like a man. If you have not courage to do this, when visiting Iceland take your own side-saddle and bridle (for a pony), as, except in Reykjavik, horse furniture is of the most miserable description, and the constant breakages cause many delays, while there are actually no side-saddles, except in the capital, and a chair is an instrument of torture not to be recommended even to your worst enemy.

  In past times women have ridden in every possible position, and in every conceivable costume. They have ridden sideways on both the near and off sides, they have ridden astride (as the Mexicans, Indians, Tartars, Roumanians, Icelanders, &c., do to-day), and they have also ridden pillion. Queen Elizabeth rode thus behind the Earl of Leicester on public occasions, in a full hoop skirt, low-necked bodice, and large ruff. Nevertheless, she dispensed with a cavalier when out hawking at the ripe age of seventy-six.

  When hunting, hawking, or at tournaments, women during the Middle Ages always rode astride in this country, reserving their side-saddles merely for State functions. Judging from old pictures, they then mounted, arrayed in full ball dresses, in long-veiled headdresses (time of Edward II), and in flowing skirts, while their heads were often ornamented with huge plumed hats.

  Formerly, every church door, every roadside inn, had its horse block or “jumping-on stone”—called in Kent and some other southern counties the “joust stone,” and in Scotland the “louping-on stane.” These were necessary in the olden days of heavy armour, and at a time when women rode astride. Men can now mount alone, although the struggles of a small man to climb to the top of a big horse are sometimes mightily entertaining; but women have to trust to any capable or incapable man who can assist them into their saddles.

  Fashion is ephemeral. Taste and public opinion, having no corporal identity, are nothing but the passing fancy of a given generation.

  Dress to a woman should always be an important matter, and to be well dressed it is necessary to be suitably clothed. Of course breeches, high boots or leggings are essential in riding; but a neatly arranged divided skirt, reaching well below the knee, can be worn over these articles, and the effect produced is anything but inelegant. Of one thing we may be certain—namely, that whenever English women summon up enough courage to ride their horses man fashion again, every London tailor will immediately set himself to design becoming and useful divided skirts for the purpose.

  I strongly advocate the abolition of the side-saddle for the country, hunting, or rough journeys, for three reasons—1st, safety; 2nd, comfort; 3rd, health.

  I. Of course nothing is easier under ordinary circumstances than to “stick on” a side-saddle, because the pommels almost hold one there: wherein lies much danger. In the case of a horse falling, for instance, a woman (although doubtless helped by the tight skirts of the day) cannot extricate herself. She is caught in the pommels or entangled by the stirrup, both of which calamities mean dragging, and often result in a horrible death.

  II. Miss Bird, in her famous book of travels, tells us how terribly her back suffered from hard riding on a side-saddle, and how easily she accomplished the same distances when, disregarding conventionalities, she adopted a man’s seat.

  The wife of a well-known Consul-General, who, in company with her husband, rode in a similar fashion from Shanghai to St. Petersburg through Siberia, always declared such a feat would have been impossible for her to have achieved on a side-saddle. Further, the native women of almost all countries ride astride to this day, as they did in England in the fourteenth century.

  III. Cross-riding doubtless has been considered injurious to health by a few members of the medical profession, but the majority, and notably the highest authorities, hold a different opinion.

  Are we not all aware that many girls become crooked when learning to ride, and have to mount on the off side in order to counteract the mischief. Is this not proof in itself of how unnatural the position must be?

  As women ride at the present moment, horses with sore backs are unfortunately no rarity. It is true that these galls are caused by bad riding; still, such things would be avoided with a man’s saddle, which is far lighter than a woman’s, and easier to carry, because the rider’s weight is not on one side, but equally distributed—a great comfort to a horse’s loins and withers.

  We know that a woman’s horse is far sooner knocked up with a hard day than one ridden by a man, although the man is probably the heavier weight of the two, and this merely because he is properly balanced.

  Therefore, ye women travellers, before starting on long and fatiguing expeditions, lay these facts to heart, and remember cross-riding is no novelty; our female ancestors all mounted that way, and all native women who ride for business and not for pleasure sit astride. My own personal experience only endorses its advisability and practicability.

  ANNA LEONOWENS

  (1834–1914)

  In 1945 Margaret Landon won immediate acclaim when her book, Anna and the King of Siam, based on Anna Leonowens’s memoirs, became an overnight best-seller. The musical, starring Gertrude Lawrence, and film, starring Deborah Kerr as Anna and Yul Brynner reprising his stage role Rama IV of Siam, followed. But few know the book that began it all. As the following excerpt demonstrates, Leonowens was a marvelous storyteller, conveying emotional truths of the royal children, wives, and slaves of the King’s harem with a rare compassion. Unlike many other writers of her time, Leonowens was personally involved in the lives of the people around her. In poor health, Leonowens left the king and his court in 1867 and, after publishing two accounts of her life there, failed to encourage theatrical interest in her story, despite her confidence in its dramatic appeal. She spent her final years in Montreal but continued to correspond regularly with many of her former students.

  from THE ENGLISH GOVERNESS AT THE SIAMESE COURT

  SHADOWS AND WHISPERS OF THE HAREM

  As, month after month, I continued to teach in the palace—especially as the language of my pupils, its idioms and characteristic forms of expression, began to be familiar to me—all the dim life of the place “came out” to my ken, like a faint picture, which at first displays to the eye only a formless confusion, a chaos of colours, but by force of much looking and tracing and joining and separating, first objects and then groups are discovered in their proper identity and relation, until the whole stands out, clear, true, and informing in its coherent significance of light and shade. Thus, by slow processes, as one whose sight has been imperceptibly restored, I awoke to a clearer and truer sense of the life within “the city of the beautiful and invincible angel.”

  Sitting at one end of the table in my school-room, with Boy at the other, and all those far-off faces between, I felt as though we were twenty thousand miles away from the world that lay but a twenty minutes’ walk from the door; the distance was but a speck in space, but the separation was tremendous. It always seemed to me that here was a sudden, harsh suspension of nature’s fundamental law—the human heart arrested in its functions, ceasing to throb, and yet alive.

  The fields beyond are fresh and green, and bright with flowers. The sun of summer, rising exultant, greets them with rejoicing; and evening shadows, falling soft among the dewy petals, linger to kiss them goodnight. There the children of the poor—naked, rude, neglected though they be—are rich in the freedom of the bounteous earth, rich in the freedom of the fair blue sky, rich in the freedom of the limpid ocean of air above and around them. But within the close and gloomy lanes of this city within a city, through which many lovely women are wont to come and go, many
little feet to patter, and many baby citizens to be borne in the arms of their dodging slaves, there is but cloud and chill, and famishing and stinting, and beating of wings against golden bars. In the order of nature, evening melts softly into night, and darkness retreats with dignity and grace before the advancing triumphs of the morning; but here light and darkness are monstrously mixed, and the result is a glaring gloom that is neither of the day nor of the night, nor of life nor of death, nor of earth nor of—yes, hell!

  In the long galleries and corridors, bewildering with their everlasting twilight of the eye and of the mind, one is forever coming upon shocks of sudden sunshine or shocks of sudden shadow—the smile yet dimpling in a baby’s face, a sister bearing a brother’s scourging; a mother singing to her “sacred infant,” a slave sobbing before a deaf idol. And O, the forlornness of it all! You who have never beheld these things know not the utterness of loneliness. Compared with the predicament of some who were my daily companions, the sea were a home and an iceberg a hearth.

  How I have pitied those ill-fated sisters of mine, imprisoned without a crime! If they could but have rejoiced once more in the freedom of the fields and woods, what new births of gladness might have been theirs—they who with a gasp of despair and moral death first entered those royal dungeons, never again to come forth alive! And yet have I known more than one among them who accepted her fate with a repose of manner and a sweetness of smile that told how dead must be the heart under that still exterior. And I wondered at the sight. Only twenty minutes between bondage and freedom—such freedom as may be found in Siam! only twenty minutes between those gloomy, hateful cells and the fair fields and the radiant skies! only twenty minutes between the cramping and the suffocation and the fear, and the full, deep, glorious inspirations of freedom and safety!

  I had never beheld misery till I found it here; I had never looked upon the sickening hideousness of slavery till I encountered its features here; nor, above all, had I comprehended the perfection of the life, light, blessedness and beauty, the all-sufficing fulness of the love of God as it is in Jesus, until I felt the contrast here—pain, deformity, darkness, death, and eternal emptiness, a darkness to which there is neither beginning nor end, a living which is neither of this world nor of the next. The misery which checks the pulse and thrills the heart with pity in one’s common walks about the great cities of Europe is hardly so saddening as the nameless, mocking wretchedness of these women, to whom poverty were a luxury, and houselessness as a draught of pure, free air.

  And yet their lot is light indeed compared with that of their children. The single aim of such a hapless mother, howsoever tender and devoted she may by nature be, is to form her child after the one strict pattern her fate has set her—her master’s will; since, otherwise, she dare not contemplate the perils which might overtake her treasure. Pitiful indeed, therefore, is the pitiless inflexibility of purpose with which she wings from her child’s heart all the dangerous endearments of childhood— its merry laughter, its sparkling tears, its trustfulness, its artlessness, its engaging waywardness; and in their place instils silence, submission, self-constraint, suspicion, cunning, carefulness, and an ever-vigilant fear. And the result is a spectacle of unnatural discipline simply appalling. The life of such a child is an egg-shell on an ocean; to its helpless speck of experience all horrors are possible. Its passing moment is its eternity; and that overwhelmed with terrors, real or imaginary, what is left but that poor little floating wreck, a child’s despair?

  I was often alone in the school-room, long after my other charges had departed, with a pale, dejected woman, whose name translated was “Hidden-Perfume.” As a pupil she was remarkably diligent and attentive, and in reading and translating English her progress was extraordinary. Only in her eager, inquisitive glances was she childlike; otherwise, her expression and demeanour were anxious and aged. She had long been out of favour with her “lord”; and now, without hope from him, surrendered herself wholly to her fondness for a son she had borne him in her more youthful and attractive days. In this young prince, who was about ten years old, the same air of timidity and restraint was apparent as in his mother, whom he strikingly resembled, only lacking that cast of pensive sadness which rendered her so attractive, and her pride, which closed her lips upon the past, though the story of her wrongs was a moving one.

  It was my habit to visit her twice a week at her residence,* for I was indebted to her for much intelligent assistance in my study of the Siamese language. On going to her abode one afternoon, I found her absent; only the young prince was there, sitting sadly by the window.

  “Where is your mother, dear?” I inquired.

  “With his Majesty upstairs, I think,” he replied, still looking anxiously in one direction, as though watching for her.

  This was an unusual circumstance for my sad, lonely friend, and I returned home without my lesson for that day.

  Next morning, passing the house again, I saw the lad sitting in the same attitude at the window, his eyes bent in the same direction, only more wistful and weary than before. On questioning him, I found his mother had not yet returned. At the pavilion I was met by the Lady Tâlâp, who, seizing my hand, said, “Hidden-Perfume is in trouble.”

  “What is the matter?” I inquired.

  “She is in prison,” she whispered, drawing me closely to her. “She is not prudent, you know—like you and me,” in a tone which expressed both triumph and fear.

  “Can I see her?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes! if you bribe the jailers. But don’t give them more than a tical each. They’ll demand two; give them only one.”

  In the pavilion, which served as a private chapel for the ladies of the harem, priests were reading prayers and reciting homilies from the sacred book of Buddha called Sâsânâh Thai, “The Religion of the Free”; while the ladies sat on velvet cushions with their hands folded, a vase of flowers in front of each, and a pair of odoriferous candles, lighted. Prayers are held daily in this place, and three times a day during the Buddhist Lent. The priests are escorted to the pavilion by Amazons, and two warriors, armed with swords and clubs, remain on guard till the service is ended. The latter, who are eunuchs, also attend the priests when they enter the palace, in the afternoon, to sprinkle the inmates with consecrated water.

  Leaving the priests reciting and chanting, and the rapt worshippers bowing, I passed a young mother with a sleeping babe, some slave-girls playing at sabâh* on the stone pavement, and two princesses borne in the arms of their slaves, though almost women grown, on my way to the palace prison.

  If it ever should be the reader’s fortune, good or ill, to visit a Siamese dungeon, whether allotted to prince or peasant, his attention will be first attracted to the rude designs on the rough stone walls (otherwise decorated only with moss and fungi and loathsome reptiles) of some nightmared painter, who has exhausted his dyspeptic fancy in portraying hideous personifications of Hunger, Terror, Old Age, Despair, Disease, and Death, tormented by furies and avengers, with hair of snakes and whips of scorpions—all beyond expression devilish. Floor it has none, nor ceiling, for, with the Meinam so near, neither boards nor plaster can keep out the ooze. Underfoot, a few planks, loosely laid, are already as soft as the mud they are meant to cover; the damp has rotted them through and through. Overhead, the roof is black, but not with smoke; for here, where the close steam of the soggy earth and the reeking walls is almost intolerable, no fire is needed in the coldest season. The cell is lighted by one small window, so heavily grated on the outer side as effectually to bar the ingress of fresh air. A pair of wooden trestles, supporting rough boards, form a makeshift for a bedstead, and a mat (which may be clean or dirty, the ticals of the prisoner must settle that) is all the bed.

  In such a cell, on such a couch, lay the concubine of a supreme king and the mother of a royal prince of Siam, her feet covered with a silk mantle, her head supported by a pillow of glazed leather, her face turned to the clammy wall.

  There was no door
to grate upon her quivering nerves; a trap-door in the street overhead had opened to the magic of silver, and I had descended a flight of broken steps of stone. At her head, a little higher than the pillow, were a vase of flowers, half faded, a pair of candles burning in gold candlesticks, and a small image of the Buddha. She had brought her god with her. Well, she needed his presence.

  I could hardly keep my feet, for the footing was slippery and my brain swam. Touching the silent, motionless form, in a voice scarcely audible I pronounced her name. She turned with difficulty, and a slight sound of clanking explained the covering on her feet. She was chained to one of the trestles.

  Sitting up, she made room for me beside her. No tears were in her eyes; only the habitual sadness of her face was deepened. Here, truly, was a perfect work of misery, meekness, and patience.

  Astonished at seeing me, she imagined me capable of yet greater things, and folding her hands in an attitude of supplication, implored me to help her. The offence for which she was imprisoned was briefly this:

  She had been led to petition, through her son,* that an appointment held by her late uncle, Phya Khien, might be bestowed on her elder brother, not knowing that another noble had already been preferred to the post by his Majesty.

  Had she been guilty of the gravest crime, her punishment could not have been more severe. It was plain that a stupid grudge was at the bottom of this cruel business. The king, on reading the petition, presented by the trembling lad on his knees, became furious, and, dashing it back into the child’s face, accused the mother of plotting to undermine his power, saying he knew her to be at heart a rebel, who hated him and his dynasty with all the rancour of her Peguan ancestors, the natural enemies of Siam. Thus lashing himself into a rage of hypocritical patriotism, and seeking to justify himself by condemning her, he sent one of his judges to bring her to him. But before the myrmidon could go and come, concluding to dispense with forms, he anticipated the result of that mandate with another—to chain and imprison her. No sooner was she dragged to this deadly cell, than a third order was issued to flog her till she confessed her treacherous plot; but the stripes were administered so tenderly,* that the only confession they extorted was a meek protestation that she was “his meanest slave, and ready to give her life for his pleasure.”