My Place in the Bazaar

by Alec Waugh

  ‘So you’re going to shoot me first; then you’re going up to the hospital to shoot Martin.’

  Butterman nodded.

  ‘At the same time I don’t quite see how you’ll manage to get both of us.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘How could you hope to, my dear fellow? Think! A revolver’s a noisy thing. You’ll have no difficulty in doing me in, we’ll admit that, but how will you ever get out of here when you have? There’s only one way out of this room, the way you’ve come, through the main office, and there are three clerks there, to say nothing of a porter at the gate. What’ll you do when you’ve finished me?’

  ‘I shall walk straight out through your office to the car that is waiting for me in the porch.’

  ‘With all those clerks there?’

  ‘They won’t stop me. They’ll be too astonished. People always are when something unusual happens. They’ll be stunned into inaction. Suppose, for instance, you were to stand up on a table in the Ritz, shout “Silence” and then recite at the top of your voice an indecent limerick. What, do you imagine, would happen? That you’d be flung out? Nothing of the sort. People would just sit and gape at you, the waiters, the band, the diners, and you’d get down from the table, walk straight out of the room, and no one would say a word to you. Which is exactly what I shall do when I’ve shot you. I shall fire twice to make quite certain; then I shall walk out and no one will say a word to me. Long before the hue and cry has started I’ll have settled my account with Martin.’

  He spoke calmly, quietly, with the acute, clear sanity, that during the last days had characterized his discussion of every topic. It was as though by some law of compensation, the sickness that had warped one side of his intelligence, had intensified his perceptions in every other. And as Arnold sat back in his chair a sensation of utter helplessness possessed him. Through the window of his office he could hear the hooting of a car. In the office beyond two of his clerks were softly chattering together. Above his head the punkah was flapping lazily; the boy who worked it, the string of it tied round his toe, was rocking, half asleep, with a slow, measured rhythm, only six feet away behind that partition of thin match-board. All round him was the friendly, familiar world, pursuing its friendly, familiar course. And here he was trapped and weaponless.

  ‘I should doubt,’ continued Butterman, ‘whether it was worth while prolonging the discussion.’

  And on the butt of the revolver his finger tightened.

  Arnold braced himself. He was not the man to meet death un-protestingly. His desk, which was flanked with two narrow sets of drawers, was cut away in the centre to ease his legs; and he wondered whether he might not be able by slipping downwards suddenly, and pushing upwards to overturn the desk and Butterman simultaneously. Anyhow it was worth trying. Even if he did not save his own life, he might create sufficient disturbance or delay to rescue Martin. Slackening the muscles of his legs and gripping tightly the seat of his chair so as to ensure strong leverage, he steadied himself to dive. ONE—TWO—he began to count, but just as he was about to spring, he noticed a sudden change in his assistant. A perplexed look had come into his face, the muzzle of the revolver had begun to waver; he lifted his left hand towards his head, his lips quivered. He staggered to his feet, to stand swaying stupidly. His fingers loosened their hold on the revolver, letting it fall clattering upon the floor. ‘My head,’ he sobbed, ‘my head.’ And his face pressed tightly into his hands, he began to sway like a drunken man across the room.

  ‘Sunstroke!’ gasped Arnold. ‘Sunstroke! He had no topee!’

  And leaping to his feet, he caught the reeling body into his arms.

  An hour later in the small hospital ward that is reserved for American and European patients, Arnold and the Padre were standing at the foot of Butterman’s bed. He was less restless now, packed as he was in ice, but he still tossed occasionally from side to side, and from his lips fell ceaselessly a delirious muttering.

  ‘Those little painted bungalows up there …’ that was the gist of his tortured rambling. ‘Shut away up there by oneself, all the sweetness of one’s life denied one: the softness of a woman’s arms, the softness of a woman’s smile, not fit for them, not fit … too great a danger … the hands and feet … the bones eaten away, perishing … the scorn, the helplessness … not fit … not fit … they take one and they shut one away up there. They spy on you and watch you, wait till they are quite certain, then they take you … take you … and shut you away in a little bungalow … leave you there to rot and perish … fingerless, toeless, featureless, they wait and watch and wait for you.…’

  That was the gist of what he said.

  ‘So he thought,’ murmured Arnold, ‘that he was a leper, that we were spying on him. But he hasn’t a symptom, has he, of leprosy?’

  ‘Not a symptom.’

  ‘Then in heaven’s name …’

  But the Padre lifted his hand. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, ‘I think I see.’

  And as they stood there listening, gradually, through the labyrinth of repetitions and inaudibilities, the meaning of his trouble wound its way into the daylight, so that they came to see through what association of ideas the fever of an uneased longing had worked through that distracted brain till its owner had come to believe himself the victim of that dread disease.

  ‘Not fit to marry,’ the voice went on; ‘the loneliness and the monotony and the fever; for eight months of the year living by herself … no dancing, no theatres, the treachery of the climate … and if she were to go out to the jungle, the squalor of a narrow tent … not fit to marry … the fellow who would dare to ask a woman to share that life … not fit to marry … You’re right, Padre, not to let them marry … to shut them away in those little painted houses … danger’s too great … the softness and sweetness of a woman, the way she smiles, the way she speaks, the way she opens her arms to you … the swooning sweetness of a woman … no, no, Padre, you’re quite right … they’d only degrade it, spoil it, tarnish it, out in the jungle … too squalid, too narrow … lights and music and laughter … must give it them … they must have it … not fit to marry … shut them away in those bungalows … leave them to rot there in their sickness … not fit to marry, Padre … you’re quite right … shut us away, the lot of us … not fit to marry, not fit …’

  So the voice babbled on, and across that bed of suffering, Arnold’s eyes met the Padre’s in a look that absolved them of any need of words. They understood. There was nothing further to be said.

  Another white man had been beaten by the jungle.

  They got him back.

  A fellow in the Sarawak Company had his leave hastened by several weeks, and Butterman, his suspicions momentarily stifled by the weakness that followed his recovery, allowed himself to be persuaded by one of the junior assistants to accompany him. He would never come back, of course. Letters had been sent ahead to the London Office. The facts had been set out. Arrangements would be made for the proper medical treatment on the ship. There would be a pension waiting, and efforts would be made to find him a suitable job at home. In eighteen months probably he would be all right. Siam was finished though. Never again would he see the steaming, luxuriant greenery of the jungle, nor the little attap huts beside the river, nor watch the grey logs swing slowly on their long road south to Bangkok.

  Another white man beaten.

  It was wistfully, with a heavy heart, that Arnold walked down to the Chiengmai Club on the evening of the day on which they said good-bye to Butterman. One less among them, and how few there were left now of his contemporaries. Martin and the Consul and Atkinson who ran the Sarawak Company. New faces otherwise, new faces that came and went: fellows that came out for a year on trial and flung their hands in after seven months; fellows who signed on as permanents, whom every one liked and trusted, for whom every one prophesied quick promotion, and of whom the jungle sooner or later got the better, who were brought in as Farquharson had been on a stretcher, broken by malaria; or
were sent back on a liner, their nerves gone, like Butterman. A hard life, too hard possibly for the white man. Not many came through as he had done to the last chukka. And in a few weeks he’d be going.

  Only a few weeks now. And for the first time in the course of those twenty-five years, those seven chukkas, he experienced a feeling of regret, almost of nostalgia at the thought of saying good bye to these familiar scenes. Twenty-five years. A large chunk out of a man’s life. His youth and his early manhood, his first grey hairs; and he began to wonder whether he would find life in London so good a thing as he had expected. What would there be after all for him to do? His contemporaries would be strangers to him now, and it was not easy to start making friends at forty-five. His father was dead; his brother settled down in Chichester. There were no open doors waiting for him. And he remembered with misgiving the life that is led in London by the majority of pensioned Englishmen: the aimless empty days, the hanging about the Sports Club, the waiting for some fellow to drop in with whom you may exchange gossip of the far places you will not see again. Long empty days, and the drab, furtive romances with which one endeavoured to enliven them.

  He hardly spoke during his game of golf. And afterwards when the sun had set, and the brief tropic twilight had darkened into night, he did not join the others at the large round table where the bottles and glasses were set out. Instead he walked slowly home wards at Martin’s side, and as they turned through the gate of the Club, for the first time in his life he passed his arm beneath the Padre’s. For a little way they walked in silence: in a silence that was, however, peculiarly intimate. The Butterman incident had drawn them very close together.

  ‘ We shall miss you,’ the Padre said at length. ‘I sometimes wonder what we shall do without you. It isn’t so much that we shall be losing a friend, though that will be bad enough; for we’ve become accustomed to the loss of friends. It’s, if you’ll forgive my saying so, what you’ve stood for here. Life isn’t easy, in a small society like ours. There are many temptations, many difficulties. I don’t think we shall realize till you’ve gone, how much you’ve meant in … well … the keeping of things clean and straight.’

  It was the first time that the Padre had ever spoken intimately to Arnold, but there was no sign of embarrassment in his speech.

  ‘We shall miss you,’ he said, ‘more than I can say.’

  ‘Yet I’ve not been what you’d call a good man, Padre.’

  The Padre hesitated a moment before he answered. Not out of any embarrassment, but because he was searching for the exact words with which to convey his meaning. He knew well enough to what Arnold was referring: the small bungalow beside the river, and the unbaptized children who were growing into manhood in Malaya.

  ‘A good man,’ he echoed. ‘I suppose by our Western ideas you wouldn’t be. And I don’t mind admitting that when I left America, I came here in the belief that there would be two main evils for me to fight against. Alcohol was one, and the second and greater one, the white man’s attitude to the brown women. But that’s forty years ago. And in the course of forty years one’s view-point alters. I don’t mean that I think right the things I once thought wrong; it isn’t that, but that those things which I once looked on as mortal sins, seem now, well, how shall I put it, just rather a pity. There are other things that are very much more important than a standard of chastity that can never be more than relative. Courage, forbearance, kindliness; above all things kindliness; those seem to me now the most truly Christian qualities. We are so few here and so far. It is so terribly important that we should be patient with one another. We shall miss you more than I can say.’

  They had reached the bridge over the river, the point where their road separated, and there were tears in Arnold’s eyes as he said good night to Martin, and it was slowly that he strolled on in the warm darkness, under the tropic stars, watching the muddy waters of the Be-kang swirl past him. Twenty-five years. And it was a strange world that awaited him, a world where he would have no certain habitat, where no one needed him, where no one perhaps would miss him when he went. He had talked of getting things both ways, but might it be that it was to end in his getting them in neither? Something like a sob rose in his throat as he faced the prospect of his uprooting. He was loved after all and needed here. For a long while he lingered, beside the river, and when finally he hastened his pace it was not in the direction of his own house, but in that of the small bungalow where he had spent increasingly little time of late.

  To his surprise he found Cheam alone. She was dressed, for he had never made any attempt to Westernize her, in a short blue silk jacket that fell shapelily over a gold and scarlet sinn; her feet were bare; her hair, that was bright with coconut-oil, was drawn back tightly into the clutch of a high tortoiseshell and enamel comb. Her teeth, for from the betel habit he had discouraged her, were unfashionably clean. But from the corner of her mouth she was puffing slowly at a large white cheroot. As he came into the room she lifted her head in the calm, unemotional manner that had from the first characterized their meetings. There had never been at any time between them what Europe would have admitted as passionate relations.

  She looked at him steadily and incuriously. But as their eyes met he was conscious on this evening of self-discovery, of a curious sense of kinship with her. They were in the same boat after all, exiles both of them; exiles from their youth and their ambitions. This life of theirs together had not been by any means the thing they had dreamed of for themselves. It was something quite other that they had planned. He had had his dream of Oxford, of English life and English shires and she, no doubt, of such a mating and such a life as had their roots in the dateless annals of her race. But for each of them fate had intervened; on each had been laid the duty of obligation to a family. He had come here that his brother might go to Oxford, and she in her turn had come to him because her parents could not afford to refuse the three hundred rupees that were her purchase. They were both in the same boat. And that same curious sense of belonging to this woman and to this country of his exile, that earlier in the evening had made him forsake the round table and the laughter and the drinks, returned with redoubled force upon him. England had grown a foreign country to him. He had taken root here, by Babel’s waters.

  Softly across the night came the tinkle of a temple bell: the symbol of that Eastern doctrine which preaches subservience to one’s fate: the acceptance unprotestingly of one’s dharma.

  ‘I shall be retiring, you know, Cheam,’ he said, ‘in a few weeks from now.’

  She bent her head slowly forward and he knew well enough what was passing behind that inscrutable masked face. How much of paddy-field was he to offer her and how many ticals.

  ‘Very likely,’ he said, ‘I shall be staying on in Chiengmai. I am thinking of building myself a house across the river. It would be easier probably if you were to leave this bungalow and come and live there with me.’

  Again she bent her head. Her face showed neither pleasure nor surprise. Child of Buddha, she was subservient to her dharma; to her fate, as to his ardour, passive and irresponsive.

  ‘In which case,’ he went on, ‘it would probably be simpler if we were to be married according to English law.’

  ‘It is as the Naï wishes,’ she replied.

  1927

  ‘Tahiti Waits’

  I Shall never forget my first sight of Tahiti.

  For months I had been planning to go there. For weeks I had been dreaming of going there. But on the eve of my arrival I craved for one thing only: a magic carpet that would carry me to London. I had been travelling for seven months and I was very tired: tired of new places and new settings. My ears were confused with strange accents and my eyes with changing landscapes. To begin with there had been the Mediterranean. Naples, Athens, Constantinople. A few hours in each. A hurried rushing to the sights: then the parched seaboard of the Levant. Smyrna with its broken streets, and hidden among its ruins the oasis now and then of a shaded square where you c
an drink thick black coffee beside fat Syrians who puff lazily at immense glass-bowled pipes. Smyrna and Jaffa and Beyrouth. An island or two. The climbing streets of Rhodes, the barren ramparts of Famagusta. Then Egypt and the mud houses. And the tall sails drifting down the Nile. Then Suez and the torment of the Red Sea when the heat is so intense that perversely you long to be burnt more and at lunch eat the hottest of hot pickles neat, till the inside of your mouth is raw: a torment that lapses suddenly into the cool of the Indian Ocean.

  There had been Ceylon. The Temple of the Tooth at Kandy, with its scarlet and yellow Buddhas so garish and yet so oddly moving, as though there had passed into those pensive features something of the brooding faith of the hands that chiselled them; and the lake at Kandy after dusk, when the fireflies are thick about the trees; and the streets of Kandy on the night of the Perihera, when gilt-shod elephants lumber in the wake of guttering torches.

  And afterwards there had been Siam. Bangkok with its innumerable bright-tiled temples and the sluggish waterways that no hand has mapped; those dark mysterious canals, their edges crowded with huddled shacks, their surface ruffled by the cool, slow-moving barges in which whole families are born, grow up, see love and life and die. Siam and the jungles of the north through which I trekked day after day slithering through muddied paddy-fields, climbing the narrow bullock tracks that cross the mountains. There had been Malaya, green and steaming when the light lies level on the rice-fields; and Penang where I had lingered, held by the ease and friendliness of that friendly island, cancelling passage after passage till finally I had had no alternative but to cancel the visit I had planned to Borneo.

  ‘I’ll spend a month in Sydney,’ I had thought. ‘Then I’ll push on to the Pacific.’ But I had been away five months before I left Singapore, and each place that I had been to had meant the forming of new contacts and relationships, the adapting of myself to new conditions. And as the Marella swung into Sydney Harbour and I saw lined up on Circular Quay a smiling-faced crowd of relatives and friends, that sudden sensation of nostalgia which is familiar to most travellers overcame me. England was at the other side of the world. I was lonely and among strangers. That very afternoon I was enquiring at the Messageries about the next sailing for Noumea. And as a month later the Louqsor rolled its way eastwards through the New Hebrides, I lay back in my hammock chair upon the deck, a novel fallen forward upon my knees, dreaming not of the green island to which each day the flag on the map drew close, but of the London that was waiting a couple of months away.