The Prince professed himself satisfied. Gagool and the village did not. Amai and I became outcasts. My football team deserted me. Akbar, my best half-back, who held the nominal post of bendahara or minister of war under Gagool, betook himself to the jungle. I was warned that he was preparing to run “amok.” My Chinese cook left me. He was afraid of what might happen to my food.
And then I fell ill. Day after day a particularly virulent form of malaria wasted my flesh and blood. Every afternoon and every morning I ran a temperature with the regularity of an alarum clock. My doctor came. Like every one else the good man was immersed in the rubber boom. His charge was by the mile, and, as my estate was his most distant call, I could not afford him very often. He drenched me with quinine, but to little purpose. As the months passed, my illness became aggravated by a constant vomiting. I could not keep down any solid food. In three months my weight declined from twelve stone eight to under ten stone. I became depressed and miserable. All day I lay propped up in my long chair, trying to read, cursing my half-caste assistants and the “kenganies” who came to disturb me about the estate work, making myself a burden and a nuisance to everyone. But Amai I would not give up. This determination, this obstinacy, was the one thing that saved me from suicide.
For Amai herself I have nothing but praise. She was an incurable optimist. She was not afraid of any man and she ran my house with a rod of iron. Her cheerfulness, it is true, became a strain almost greater than I could bear. She liked noise which in Malaya means that she liked the gramophone. It was not safe for her to go oustide the compound. She, therefore, stayed at home and played “When the Trees are White with Blossom, I’ll return.” To-day, I should break the record, or throw it at her head, but at that time I was too weak. Instead, I made a martyr of myself. My only relief from the gramophone was the piano. When I could bear the blossom of the trees no longer, I would offer to play the tin-kettle upright which I had borrowed from my cousin. Amai would then help me to the piano-stool, put a shawl over my shoulders, and sit beside me, while with chattering teeth and palsied fingers I strove to recall the harmonies of my Viennese and Berlin days. Her taste in music was entirely primitive. Obviously, she would have liked negro spirituals and, more than negro rhythmics, the languorous melodies of the Tsiganes. But in those days the “Blue Danube” was the supreme thrill of her musical sensuousness, and, if Wolff and Buresh could have descended on my bungalow with that combined artistry which has made them supreme as exponents of the Viennese waltz, she would have transferred her affections on the spot.
Perhaps I do her an injustice. She had her full share of pride of race. She despised the women who worked in the fields. The irregularity of her own position worried her not at all. Marriage and my own Mohammedanism never entered her mind. As mistress of the only “Tuan” in the district, she held her head proudly. She had the only gramophone and the only piano in the village. Moreover, she saved my life. Suspecting that I was being poisoned, she allowed no food, which she had not prepared herself, to pass my lips. And when I failed to recover, she sent Si Woh for Dowden, the government doctor.
Dowden was a queer fellow—a cynical, morose Irishman, whom I had known in my Port Dickson days. He was unhappy in the East and vented his unhappiness in an aggressiveness which made him unpopular. His heart, however, was all gold, and, as the son of the Dublin Shakespeare and Shelley professor, he appealed to me intellectually more than any other white man in Malaya. He was not entitled to attend me professionally, but he was not the man to worry overmuch about questions of etiquette. He came at once. He saw and he grunted. And that night he went into the bar of the Sungei Ujong Club. The rubber boom was then at its height. Several planters, including my uncle, had made vast fortunes on paper, and in the club drink flowed as it always seems to flow in moments of sudden prosperity. My uncle was playing poker in the card-room—high poker with an “ante” of a hundred dollars. Dowden, who had something of the Bolshevik in his nature, tracked him down. My uncle had just raised the stakes. The doctor poured a douche of cold water on his exuberance.
“If you don’t want to lay out your stake in a white man’s coffin, you had better collect that nephew of yours at once.”
My uncle was shocked. He acted immediately. The next morning he came out with two Chinese “boys” in his car. In silence the “boys” packed my clothes. Wrapping me in blankets, my uncle carried me into the car. Amai had disappeared into the back room. She must have guessed what was happening, but she never came forward. There was no farewell. But, as the car turned in the compound drive, the sun cast a glint on her little silver slippers which were lying neatly on the bottom step of my bungalow entrance. They were the last I saw of her—the last I was ever to see of her.
1 The Court medicine woman.
CHAPTER FIVE
TO-DAY, ALTHOUGH I have travelled farther afield both by land and sea than even most Scotsmen, I never remember the name of a ship. I recall only vaguely the date and the route of my voyages. Perhaps it was my illness; perhaps first impressions and the memories of early youth are more easily retained; perhaps—and this is true—the first home-coming is the one a man remembers best. The fact remains that every moment of that long voyage from my uncle’s bungalow in Seremban to my Highland home in Scotland is impressed on my mind as clearly as if it were yesterday. With great generosity my uncle sent me to Japan for two months. His doctor had said that, once I were removed from the source of infection and infatuation, I should be a new man in six weeks. But Dowden shook his head. He advised me to cut my traces and to go for good. I was given money and a ticket to Yokohama. Maurice Foster, the Worcestershire cricketer, brought me to Singapore. Ned Coke took charge of me on board the steamer. He had left the Rifle Brigade for big business in rubber in Malaya and in real estate in Canada, and his immense physique and vigorous personality overwhelmed me. I let myself be managed. The ship’s captain, a German with a Captain Kettle beard, was kindness itself. Perhaps the other passengers objected to my constant retching. At any rate he gave me a cabin to myself on the upper deck. But the voyage itself was a nightmare. The sickness and the vomiting would not stop. My clothes hung in loose folds on my wasted frame. The other passengers had bets whether I should reach Japan alive. At Shanghai I was too ill to go ashore. My eyes were too weak to allow me to read. I wanted to die and was prepared to die. All day long I lay on my long chair and gazed with a fixed vacant stare at the pleasant panorama of hazy coast and island-studded sea. The ship’s doctor had me watched in case I slipped overboard. But there was no thought of suicide in my mind—only an immense weariness of the body and of the soul. I was well enough to appreciate the beauty of the Inland Sea. I was well enough to write bad poetry—atrocious sonnets to Amai in which I still heard the surf beating upon Malaya’s palm-crested shore with regret for the life and the love I had lost. I was well enough, when we landed in Yokohama, to hate the Japanese with all the prejudice of an Englishman who has worked with the Chinese. But I was not well enough to eat. I was too ill to withstand Ned Coke.
With military precision he had already decided my fate. He was sailing for England via Canada in ten days. If I wished to save my wretched carcase, I must sail with him. He had business in Canada which would detain him six weeks. I should spend these six weeks in the “Rockies.” I should take the sulphur baths at Banff (of which more anon). The fever would leave my body, and I should land in Liverpool and be restored to my parents in the same state of healthy and seraphic innocence in which I had left them.
To me it seemed a complicated decision. Coke made it delightfully simple. He took me to a Tokio doctor who confirmed Coke’s views about my salvation. He telegraphed both to my father and to my uncle for the necessary funds for this new journey, and both lots of money—more than double what was necessary for my needs—arrived three days later. He was the perfect organiser, and, if I qualify the perfection later, I cast no reflection either on his merits or on my own gratitude. If I were dictator of England at this moment,
I should make him Earl of Leicester and leader of the House of Lords. He would soon find the necessary means of reinvigorating that palace of somnolence or, failing in his task, he would, like Samson, remove it on his broad shoulders and deposit it gracefully in the Thames.
Having paid this tribute to my rescuer, I must return to the narrative of my voyage. Everything worked out according to plan. Crossing the Pacific, I shivered and suffered tortures from ague. But at last I began to take nourishment without ill effects. I could even watch with zest a British admiral (long since dead) indulging in deck hockey with that ferocious youth-fulness which makes us at once the envy and the laughing-stock of foreigners. When we arrived at Vancouver, I was introduced to Robert Service and for the first time for months the blood came back to my cheeks. I was a shy youth and could still blush, and Service, then at the height of his fame, was the first British author I had met. He gave me autographed copies of his “Songs of a Sourdough,” and his “Ballads of a Cheechako.” To-day, with the rest of my books, they are doubtless gracing the shelves of a Bolshevik library unless, which is highly probable, they have been burnt by the Moscow hangman as imperialistic effluvia and, therefore, noxious to the Moscow nostrils.
In the smoking-room of the C.P.R. Hotel I heard delirious conversation about speculators in real estate, who had made millions in a night, leaving in their trail a ruin which has lasted to this day. There, too, for the first time I heard the name of Max Aitken, who, having fought and beaten the millionaires of Montreal, had gone to seek new fields of conquest in England. It is a tribute to the honesty of my romanticism, if not to the soundness of my judgment, that at that moment Max Aitken meant nothing to me and Robert Service a good deal.
Be that as it may, I read Service’s books, had a drink with him, and sniffed the Canadian air. The combined effort cured me of my infatuation for Amai and made me turn my eyes towards the West. And so to Banff.
Patriotism is the most abused of all sentiments. In its best sense it expresses an animal instinct of self-preservation. In its worst it is tainted with material interests and such sordid things as money and self-advancement. In the Englishman it manifests itself in a dumb contempt for everything that is not English. The Scot has a more practical patriotism. His contempt for foreigners includes the Englishman, but is carefully concealed. His jingoism is confined to cheering Scotland at Twickenham. It is racial rather than local. It concerns Scotland hardly at all. Its aim is the glorification and self-satisfaction of the Scot in whatever part of the globe the impulse of self-advancement drives him.
There is, however, another form of patriotism which may be truly expressed as love of country. This is the actual love which is in every man for the place in which he was born and brought up. It may be inspired by vanity, by the desire to see himself reflected again in the glory of his youth. It is especially strong in the man who has been brought up in beautiful surroundings, but it affects even the man from Wigan. It is strongest of all in the Highlander.
Banff with its glorious background of fir and pine was to me the first breath of returning life. Rarely have I felt so homesick, and this outpost of Scotland was already halfway home. The Rockies were grander than the Grampians, but they were like the Grampians. The Bow River made a substitute for the Spey. The village itself was named after a Scottish town not twenty miles away from the scenes of my own early youth. I took Banff to my heart. I hired a launch and explored the Bow River (alas! I was still too weak to fish) and I visited the cold waters of Lake Louise and Lake Minnewanka. I talked with the Indians in the settlement. I discovered Parkman and read him voraciously. I devoured stories of Soapy Smith and the other brigands of the trail of ’98. Klondyke was still on everyone’s lips. In every township one found the scarred and frost-bitten victims of the gold rush. It was an age of romance—sordid enough when one looked beneath the surface, but in the luxurious comfort of a C.P.R. Hotel no one wanted to look. Motor-buses had not yet made the highways hideous. There was no army of American tourists to fill the mountain air with their discordant rapture. Dangerous Dan McGrew was at any rate true to life and “Soapy” himself a nearer descendant of Dick Turpin than Al Capone. Above all, the mountain passes lit by the Arctic moon were a more fitting setting for romantic crime than the searchlights and machine-guns of the underworld fastnesses of Cicero.
If it is true that man creates his own atmosphere, Nature can make or mar the process, and in Banff Nature was a powerful ally. I bathed myself in the romance of the Far West and felt better. I was now to bathe in a more literal sense.
Ned Coke was the agent of my undoing. My health was his constant preoccupation. My progress towards recovery delighted him, and, rightly, he took full credit for it. Unfortunately, he was unable to leave well alone. He had the mind of a prospector, and he was always seeking new fields of exploration. At Banff there were famous sulphur baths—open-air baths situated some 1,000 feet above sea-level. I had spent three years in an unhealthy climate almost on the equator. I was suffering from as bad an attack of malaria as mortal man could withstand and, if the desire to live had returned, death had not yet relaxed his grip on my enfeebled body. Commonsense might have pointed out to me the folly of bathing in the open air in a high and cooler altitude. I had, however, little commonsense and less will-power, and Coke was an experimentalist. He found an ally in the hotel doctor—a young enthusiast, who was impressed by Coke’s persuasiveness and wished to share in the credit of the discovery of sulphur as a sovereign cure for malaria. Perhaps my faith was not as strong as Naaman’s. At any rate I bathed in Banff’s Jordan. I stayed in the bubbling sulphur the requisite number of minutes ordained by Coke and his McGill University admirer. Unaided, but with chattering teeth, I returned to the hotel; within ten minutes my temperature had risen to 103. I retired to bed. My friends piled blanket after blanket on top of me. An hour later my temperature had risen another point. Gasping and half-delirious, I raved for quinine. Prompted by Coke, the doctor gave me five grains of quinine and five grains of aspirin. Then they both withdrew to leave me to sleep. Fortunately, they left the bottles on my night-table. I made a sign to Harry Stephenson, who had remained with me, and Harry gave me fifteen grains more of both the quinine and the aspirin. For four hours I tossed in my delirium, half-way between life and death. And then the sweat broke. I dripped through my sheets. I dripped through my mattress. My bed was like a pool. But my temperature was down and, limp and weary, I changed beds and slept myself back to life.
The rest of my homeward voyage was accomplished without incident. I stayed a week in Quebec, read the “Chien d’Or,” scaled the heights of Abraham and dreamed those first dreams of Empire, which were afterwards to make me a willing disciple of the policy of Lord Beaverbrook. The seeds of my Canadian visit bore fruit in 1916, when I was the first Englishman to celebrate Empire Day in Russia in a fitting and official manner.
The only fiasco was the actual home-coming itself. If the blue skies of the Canadian autumn had restored some of my former vigours, the fogs of Liverpool brought a return of my malaria and with it a fresh access of that moral cowardice which in moments of crisis has always been my bane in life.
I returned to the bosom of my family who were then rusticating in the Highlands. There was, however, no fatted calf for the returning prodigal. My mother welcomed me, as mothers will always welcome their first-born, that is to say, with gratitude to God for my escape from death and with sorrow for the disappointment of her fondest hopes. My father, himself the most austere of moralists, has always been tolerance itself in his attitude towards others. No word of reproach fell from his lips. I am, however, on my mother’s side, a member of the Clan Gregarra, and until her death our family world moved on the axis of my grandmother—an Atlas of a woman who supported on her broad shoulders a vast army of children and grandchildren. She was a woman cast in the Napoleonic mould—an avatar of the old Highland Chieftains whose word was law and whose every whim a command which had to be fulfilled. She supported the clan wit
h a generosity which is rare in these days, but the business of the clan was her business, and woe betide the scapegoat whose delinquencies were brought to her notice by any other members of the family than the offender himself.
She was a rigid and austere Presbyterian who ruled her ministers with the same iron rod with which she ruled her family. Nor was she tolerant of clerical opposition. On one occasion the elders of the Speyside congregation over which she presided dared to select as parish minister a candidate against whom she had turned her face. Her anger was as sharp as her decision. She deserted the church where her ancestors were buried, and half a mile away set up at her own expense a new church and a new manse for the candidate whom she herself had approved. Not until the offending minister had passed away did she relent. Then her repentance was as magnanimous as her anger had been petty. Her own church was joined to the old church and converted into a free library and concert hall. The manse was sold for the benefit of the parish, and she herself returned to the family pew in which she had sat in judgment on so many sermons. To-day her remains repose on the banks of the Spey beside those massive granite boulders of which she herself had been in life the living embodiment.
She was a great woman, but like most Presbyterians she worshipped material success. At the time of my return she had made a vast paper fortune out of her plantations in the Malay States. In Edinburgh she was re-christened the Rubber Queen, and the flattery had gone to her head like new wine. Already she saw herself controlling the Stock Exchange. Her financial success was the reward of her own foresight and business acumen. She refused to see anything exceptional in this most exceptional of booms and, heedless of the warnings of her brokers, she continued to buy rubber shares on a falling market. Within a few years her fortune had dwindled to proportions incommensurate with her scale of expenditure.
Memoirs of a British Agent Page 4
