by Alec Waugh
The report he sent into Chiengmai was the occasion for loud and continued laughter. It was suggested that he should try the wagon. But the weeks passed, and the calf, instead of growing darker, became each day more faintly pink. All along the analogy held good—the mistrust of relatives, the incredulous contempt of critics, the admittance made grudgingly at last that “at least there was something unusual here,” their refusal definitely to commit themselves. For the critics are never happy till they have qualified their testimonial, till they have contrived a loophole for their escape should their swan reveal itself to be a goose. The experts remained dubious about those eighteen toes.
The Laos themselves, who are the public, had no doubt, however. The calf’s progress to Chiengmai was regal. And later, when vindication came, in the same way that genius when it visits poverty will lift out of obscurity a host of humble people, so did this freak of birth bring recompense to the associates of its infancy. Not alone was it to march to triumph. For the director of the teak company there was royalty’s recognition. For the rider—that ignorant Lao peasant—there was at Bangkok in the royal stables the dignity of leisured comfort. For the mother, that blind fulfiller of destiny, there had come an end for ever to the harsh jungle days. She was never to know work. Ended her days of ounging and tontawing; the long, heavily burdened marches under a tropic sun; the dragging of timber, the breaking up of stacks. She was immune. She had mothered prodigy. She was entitled to an old age of honoured ease. All along the analogy held good. And there was a quality curiously satisfying in the thought that somewhere in the jungle still, unhonoured and unrecognised, the anonymous begetter of divinity, the chance partner in a haphazard coupling, was trumpeting his servitude to “the reverberate hills.”
§
We were inspecting the workings of the Borneo and of the Bombay Burma companies. And most of the time was spent with one or other of the assistants. The work of an assistant consists mainly in long marches to supervise the work in the various sections of his district. There is a good deal to supervise. First of all there is the selection and girdling of the trees that are to be felled. Girdling is the process by which the sap is prevented from rising, so that the tree is dry and floatable when the time comes later for it to be felled. The logs are then dragged by elephants to the river. It takes four or five years for a log to float to Bangkok. Very often there are blocks along the way. During the dry season at the river’s bends the logs will heap themselves into immense stacks which have to be broken up by elephants. There are also to be arranged the innumerable details of road-making and commissariat. The district is large that each assistant covers. He has a big central compound where he keeps his clothes and books. But the greater part of the time he is on the march. Sometimes he has a rest house to stay in. As often as not he clears himself a camp near a stream where his elephants can water.
The weeks we spent there were very like a picnic. But I could picture what the life of the assistant must be during ordinary periods. For months on end, through the sequence of rain-drenched weeks, he might never see a white man. There would be no cheery companionship at the end of a long day’s marching; no antidote to the maladies of jungle life, the discomfort; the itch of prickly heat, the leeches, the mosquitoes and the mud-sores; the sandflies that no netting can keep out; the red ants that night after night make sleep impossible; the long depression of the September rains, when bedding and kit are soaked and for days it is impossible to wear dry clothing; the fever that takes its toll, slowly, spasm by spasm, of your vitality and courage. Fever comes suddenly upon you, and in a few hours you are incapable of movement. I remember returning to a compound where three hours earlier we had said “Good-bye” toa strong and vigorous assistant, to find waiting for us a pale, lined, white-faced figure laid out on a long chair, shivering with a rug over him. I could not believe that it was the same man.
It is in a place such as Northern Siam that the question of the brown woman is insistent. Siam is a hard country for the white woman. In the earlier days assistants were not encouraged to marry. And though the construction of the railway has brought Chiengmai into close touch with the basis of civilisation, and though the greater capacities of the modern girl have made it possible for a man to run the risk of bringing a white wife with him, the girls are not many with the courage and strength to face the loneliness and monotony of station life. It depends on the type of girl that one attracts and is attracted by. As one man said to me: “The only type of woman that I’ld care to marry would go mad in five weeks in a place like this.”
For such a one the alternative of the brown woman is difficult to avoid. It is not so much actual physical necessity as the need, when one returns to Chiengmai, to find waiting there a friendly and familiar atmosphere. During the War the one thing that the soldier longed for was a quiet domestic life; an ordered routine, with a train to be caught each morning and slippers warmed against his return. In the same way the young assistant, seated at nightfall on his verandah, will picture to himself a house well kept and comfortable and affection waiting for him.
It is an issue to which no moral principles are attached. There is no loss of caste. It is a matter of the practical management of one’s life. To a Lao the mere fact of living together constitutes marriage. Such relationships are decently and honourably lived. The children are well educated. Very often when children are born the white man marries. At any rate he leaves his consort properly provided for when he returns to Europe. The question for him to decide is whether by such arrangement life is going to be made simpler and happier for him. He knows what he is in for. He makes his choice open-eyed. Some decide one way, some another. It is, I should say, the minority of the younger men nowadays who enter into such arrangements.
But, either way, it is not a problem that bulks largely in the white man’s eyes. He acquires something of the Oriental attitude to women. In Europe and America, where love in films and plays and novels is a highly advertised commodity, where 90 per cent, of the shops in a big city are designed to attract women, life centres round women. In the Far East woman is a side-show.
That is the big surprise that awaits the woman who marries a man in the Far East.
§
At first she fancies she has come to a woman’s paradise. From a position of probably no very great importance, from a small house and a life of many cares, she is transported to a large house, a dignified position, an ample and a leisured life. In England only a very few people can imagine themselves to be anything more than very small cogs in a very large machine, but in the East, by the mere fact of being white, you are a person of prominence.
The young bride who in her own home is no more than one of many, finds herself in Penang and Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur what is the equivalent of being a member of the aristocracy. She is definitely of the ruling class.
She has a large and wide-verandahed house. She has a large staff of servants over whom she has complete control. She does not live, as her mother does, in terror of her cook and maids. She can discharge an entire staff at breakfast in the certainty of being able to replace it in time for tiffin. She has to do practically no work. She gives the vaguest of orders in the morning knowing that if she brings four people back to dinner after a pahit party her Malay cook will provide a meal for them at a moment’s notice with equanimity.
No Malay cook is ever unprepared. He works in collaboration with his friends. He enjoys what amounts to the amenities of a communal kitchen. He knows from whom he can borrow some soup, from whom some fish, from whom a savoury. He regards your crockery and silver along with those of your friends as destined for general use. It is by no means unusual to go out to dinner and find your own fish knives and forks set in front of you. All of which makes the business of housekeeping extremely simple.
A white woman in the East, even if she has a large family, has really very little to do except amuse herself and there are countless opportunities for that.
With the men outnumbering the wom
en by ten to one, she is surrounded with invitations to dance, to play tennis, to golf, to motor and to swim. She need never be lonely for want of beaux, nor are there any competing attractions. In no other part of the world does a woman find herself so completely without rivals. In England a woman’s men friends lead a private and personal life, which she herself scarcely ever sees. In Malaya there is no such life.
She is the only type of woman a man can meet otherwise than secretly. She has a monopoly that makes her superficially as powerful as is the American woman in the States—only superficially, however, for whereas the American woman not only looks but is important, governing and directing public opinion through her clubs, in the Far East the white woman counts for very little.
The East is a man’s world. A world of pioneers, of men who have abandoned their homes in a spirit of adventure to develop a strange country, and the pioneer is occupied pretty exclusively with his own job. He is there to produce rubber, to sell copra, to dredge for tin. His work is his life,
In London, a very large percentage of masculine conversation deals with women; in the East you will hear them very little mentioned, even by the younger men. The conversation there is concerned with sport, with shares, with questions of policy and administration. Woman is a side-show.
One thinks always of the tropics in terms of glamour and romance. One has seen so many films, one has read so many films, one has read so many descriptions of moonlit nights and palm trees, of golden sands, and softly lapping waters. But Malaya is not Polynesia. Penang is as lovely as Tahiti, but no two islands could be more different. Which is the reason, I think, why women weary of the East; why those first eager letters give way to prosaic bulletins of facts that are succeeded in their turn, as often as not, by indifference and discontent; why they are so ready, when the time comes, to accompany their children to Europe instead of remaining with their husbands.
The East is foreign to them—foreign and unwelcoming. They feel that it has cheated them. It has not given them the richness that it had seemed to offer. It has its glamour. But it is not the glamour they expected. In Europe and in America one thinks of glamour and romance in terms of women, but in the East romance is represented by the very real fortitude, patience and strength of those who have developed, in a hundred years, a strange and hostile country into a happy and prosperous dependency.
VI
Ceylon
It is as well to leave a place when leaving it can still make you a little sad, and as Eldred Curwen and I rowed away from Martinique at half-past two on a cloudless morning towards the Nova Scotia we sincerely regretted the little bungalow at Case Navire. The moon was full; across the harbour we could hear the barbaric rhythms of the Bal Lou-Lou. Should we, we wondered, find anywhere else anything so lovely and so strange?
Quarter of an hour later we were wondering whether we had ever been to Martinique at all. We were on an English ship. The passages and the decks were clean, the metal of door-handle and porthole shone. Stewards were arranging our luggage with the gruff amiability of sailors. In the saloon copies of Harper’s Bazaar and Nash’s were lying side by side. On the notice board a wireless message stated that at Melbourne the M.C.C. had made three hundred and seven for five wickets. Martinique, for all that its palm trees were outlined against the sky, seemed a century of miles away.
And next morning, after having been presented with a breakfast menu containing three-and-twenty items, we came on deck to see the white houses of Roseau spread along a hill-shadowed bay. It looked French, and, lying as it does midway between Martinique and Guadeloupe, with its background of French history and its natives still speaking Creole, it is, in its sympathies more French than English. But when you stand at the head of the gangway, though the negro boatmen shout at you from the water, there is a smartly dressed policeman at your side. “Which boat, sir, would you like?” he asks. You tell him. He calls out the name of the boat and the other boats stand back. When you reach the landing stage there is a policeman waiting so that there is no haggling about your fare. Though the feeling of the town is French, the streets are clean and the life is orderly. In the botanical gardens there is a cricket field. It was as complete a change of atmosphere as had been for me two years and a halfback the stepping on to the decks of the Kinta at Singapore.
That was the most welcome change of atmosphere I have ever known. It came at the end of the worst month of travel I have ever known.
To begin with there was the Red Sea.
The Red Sea in the middle of August, when in addition to that monstrous heat there was a following breeze to still such poor current of air as the ship’s slow movement brought. For four days the smoke rose perpendicularly to the blue-green sky. For four days I lay in a hammock chair wondering through hour after interminable hour whether the momentary rapture of iced beer compensated for the hour of intolerable discomfort that must ensue; while over-hot and over-tired infants who could not sleep and would not rest squabbled over their toys and fell about and bruised themselves and howled. Then with Djibouti passed, we met as we turned the corner of Gardafui the full fury of the monsoon. For six days under a lowering sky, through a grey and angry sea, the ship pitched and rolled and tossed its two-thousand-odd miles towards Ceylon. For six days I lay in a hammock chair, with hand and eyes half-closed, listening to the infants being sick, wondering whether the attempt to work up an appetite by a resolute patrolling of the deck would be certain to culminate in disaster. A ghastly voyage.
Before I was half-way across the Indian Ocean I had sworn that no power should keep me on the Amboise a day longer than was strictly necessary. I decided to break my journey at Colombo.
I regretted it. For every tourist there must be one place at which he will regret his stay; one place excellent in itself, at which expectation will be unrealised, at which for some reason or other everything will go wrong. Ceylon is that place for me. It was my own fault. I had not meant to break my journey there. I had made no preparation for staying. And Colombo is not a good place for the casually-presented stranger. In the nature of its geographical position that must be so. It is the most considerable port of call in the world. All the Australian traffic, all the Far East traffic, much of the Indian traffic passes through it. A great many ships spend a couple of days there. The streets and hotels are filled with tourists. In self-defence the resident population has built for itself an interior and self-contained society. The tourist, arriving with the average letter of introduction, is received in much the same way that such a one would be in Europe.
The man on whom I called was extremely affable.
“I am glad to see you,” he said. “Let’s see, now. I’m pretty full up this week. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. What about Saturday, now? Let’s lunch on Saturday.”
He was a pleasant fellow, and I enjoyed our lunch. But I decided that I would not present any of the other letters I had brought with me. By the time I had decided that, the Amboise was well out to sea. It would be a week before the next Messageries boat arrived. “This,” I thought, “is going to be a pretty difficult week to fill.”
It was.
One letter that I had brought I did decide to present, however. It was addressed to Mr. Gimvo Sanjbo, and had been given me at the last moment before I left by the foreign representative of Shepherd & Gray’s oil, paint and enamel factory.
“Look here,” he had said. “You had better see something of the native side of the place. This fellow must be one of the richest people there. He’s the biggest buyer we’ve got between Cairo and Singapore. I’ll tell him that you’ll be turning up.”
I went.
The rickshaw coolie, to whom I gave the address, looked puzzled for a moment, cogitated, then nodded his head. “I know,” he said. “I take you.”
With the resolute, steady swing of one who begins a Marathon he set off along a broad well-paved street with large buildings set back proudly from the roadway; after a mile or so the street grew narrower and rougher. The stat
ure of the houses lessened. White faces became less frequent. The pavement and the street were crowded. Another mile and the street became a road, the houses had become shacks, from whose doorways scarlet-mouthed Tamils spat betel juice upon the sidewalk. The noise was deafening. Stories of kidnapped white men fretted my memory like mosquitoes. I had seen a film that began this way. A rickshaw hurrying down streets that every yard grew narrower.
“Look here,” I shouted. “In heaven’s name, where are you taking me?”
The coolie made no answer. His shoulders worked the faster; just as they had in the film.
“Look here,” I began.
Before I could finish the sentence, the rickshaw had turned suddenly to the right, into a side street, narrower than I could have conceived compatible with traffic, and had drawn up suddenly before a long, low, one-storied cabin above which on a weather-beaten board was painted in faded lettering Gimvo Sanjbo. I stared at it with amazement. I was assured now of the coolie’s honesty. He was no more than ignorant.
“No, no,” I said, “this is not the place.” And, taking the letter from my pocket, I pointed out the address to him.
He shook his head.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “This is the place. I know. I take you.”
I looked closer at the shack. It was quite obviously a store. Various canned goods were stacked on shelves along its walls. But it was hard to believe that here was the largest buyer between Cairo and Singapore of Shepherd & Gray’s oil, paint, and enamel products.
It was, however.
A smile of welcome spread over the dark face of the Cingalese to whom I held out my letter.
