by Alec Waugh
Tahiti is love’s land. It warms and softens; it lays the heart bare in readiness to love. But I have not met a single white man who has found love there with a Tahitian. “Leurs baisers n’enfantent point le rêve.”
Between brown and white there can be only a brief and superficial harmony. Such is the universal experience and the universal testimony of those in a position to judge accurately. Between brown and white there can be no relation interesting in itself. The interest lies in the situations that such relationships create. There are the half-caste children that have to be educated; there is the problem of the white wife who may come to a district in which her husband, as a bachelor, has had a coloured mistress; there is the wrench of leaving the brown woman when it is all over. Those situations are interesting. But the actual relationship I do not believe has ever gone very deep. And the greatest surprise to the traveller in the tropics will be to find how very little store is placed upon that side of life. In Siam, particularly, I noted this.
V
Siam
My visit to Siam was an unprepared adventure. They talk of the unhurrying East. And that, of course, it is. In a climate where a two-minute stroll reduces you to a state of damp prostration, life must move slowly if it is to be endured. But that is not to say that it is unadventurous. On the contrary, the very fact that it is unhurrying increases its potentiality for surprise. As for example:
It was in Penang, at the hour of ginsling, which is not the Malayan equivalent for cocktail time, but the morning break at the hour when people begin to weary of their offices. Between a quarter and half-past eleven there is a drifting towards those rival Harrod’s, Pritchard’s, and John Little’s for twenty minutes of restoring gossip. It was in Pritchard’s at the hour of the ginsling. And we were discussing, some four or five of us, Reginald Campbell’s Uneasy Virtue, a novel that had its setting half in Penang and half in the teak jungles of North Siam. “I wonder,” I said, “how far it really is like that?” Adding in the idle way one does, “It would be rather fun to go and see.”
It was the kind of remark that in England would have been countered with a vague, “Ah, yes.” Or a discussion preferred, ironically, on the limitations and brevity of life. But in the East, whence half the fairy stories of the world have come, where magic carpets and bottled genii are no more than exaggerations of a way of living, there is the danger always of being taken at your word. “Then why,” said one of the party, “don’t you go there?”
In a moment I had embarked on such a series of excuses as the cautious and calculating habits of Western life forge for us. But it was too late. The words of the spell were uttered. The genie was wreathing into smoke out of the bottle’s neck. The edges of the carpet had begun to lift. “That should be quite simple,” my friend was saying. “Let me see, now. There’s a man I know, a forest officer, who’s going to make a jungle tour next week. He’s starting for the north on Sunday. It’s Wednesday now. If you left here on Friday morning you’ld be in Bangkok before dark on Saturday; that just fits. We’ll wire and see if he can take you.” Before I had realised what was happening a telegraph form had been requisitioned and the genie had begun his work.
That is the way things happen in the East. In Europe we make plans months ahead and we adhere to them. In the heat of summer we book our rooms in Switzerland for winter sports. Every seat on the Blue Train is sold while the croisette is a succession of shuttered windows. Like the billiard player, we think three strokes ahead. In January we make our plans for June. Life moves so quickly that we should be submerged otherwise. But in the countries that are south of Aden no man bothers overmuch about what he will be doing a fortnight hence. Plans mature swiftly in that country of easy growth. Suggestions are made casually. “Wouldn’t it be rather fun?” says someone. And you agree eagerly. Nor, on the next morning, do you write one of those notes so eminently practical with their justifying quotation from Mrs. Browning to the effect that “colours seen by candlelight do not look the same by day,” to explain how, on thinking it over in cool blood, you really feel …
A jungle trip is not a thing that can be undertaken lightly. It requires very careful adjustments of commissariat. You have to carry your larder with you. It is not pleasant to find yourself without provisions a hundred miles from any road that can be described as “fordable.” But the days pass so slowly that the ordering of six elephants instead of four and thirty-five coolies instead of twenty is an unalarming enterprise. There is always time to remedy mistakes. Things wait for you to-catch them up.
Eighty-six hours later I was in Bangkok.
§
Bangkok is a surprising city.
It is advertised as the Venice of the East. It photographs exquisitely. There are its proud avenues; the stately proportion of the throne hall; the strangely shaped and strangely coloured temples; its dark, mysterious canals. But the prevailing impression that it leaves on you is of dust and heat and squalor. The temples and the palaces are far apart. They are divided from one another by hot white roads and sequences of ugly buildings. The avenues are lined by insignificant and unsightly cabins. The city was planned by an earlier monarch who did not realise that Siam was without enough rich people to adorn fittingly those avenues with spacious bungalows. And as you drive past shack after wooden shack you wonder whether the temple and avenues and palaces are anything more than a façade, imposing and distorting, before the real Siam that has expressed itself in the wooden and tin huts that crowd the canal and streets, and in the sluggish barges that float down its sluggish waterways. Siam is trying to Westernize itself. And, paradoxically, it is at the same time plying the slogan of “Siam for the Siamese.” The new régime is removing all the Europeans that it can from official positions, and those it is forced to retain are treated so cavalierly that many of them have presented their resignations. But the real Siam, the wealth and spirit of Siam, is apart from and indifferent to those changes. You suspect this while you are still in Bangkok. You are convinced of it within an hour of your leaving: as the train rattles through a landscape that has been, and for its geographical position must remain, exclusively agricultural.
§
Chiengmai, the northern capital, is twenty-seven hours of railroad north of Bangkok. In the old days, when there was no railway, you had to go by water. It was a five weeks’ journey. The construction of the railway has brought vast differences into the life of those northern states, so separate from the southern states—they are more in touch with Burma than Siam—that they speak different languages and employ in places a different currency. But even so Chiengmai is a very distant city. It is the timber trade that brings the white man to Siam, and Chiengmai is the administrative centre of the two chief companies, the Borneo and the Bombay Burma. There are not, I fancy, more than thirty white people in the station. There is the bank manager and the English consul; there are the forest manager, and an occasional assistant who has come in from the jungle for a rest; there is an American mission which is responsible for schools and hospitals and a big sanatorium for lepers. The white life of Chiengmai centres round the Gymkhana Club. It is a large field set a little way out of town which serves as polo ground and golf course and tennis court. By five o’clock, when the heat of the day has lessened, most of the white community is there, scattered about the field. There is seventy-five minutes of strenuous exercise. Then when the light fails there is a gathering round a large table on which have been set out drinks, glasses and a little lamp. There are rarely more and rarely less than a dozen people there. It is peaceful. In the swift-fallen dusk the large field, with its wide-branched trees rising from a hedge, looks heartbreakingly like an English meadow. Mosquitoes are buzzing round the table. The women have slipped their legs into sarongs, sewn up at one end in the shape of bags. The talk is subdued and intimate. It is the hour that makes amends for the heat and dust of morning and afternoon. But it is not easy to convey the essence of those evenings. “What,” I can hear the protest of the average townsman, �
�you call this the best hour of the day; sitting round a table talking to people you’ve seen every evening of the week for as many years as you may happen to have been there? And the only variety, you say, is when one of the assistants, a fellow about whom you know all that there is to know, comes in for a few days from the jungle, or one of the men from Bangkok, about whom you know everything that there is to know, comes up for a jungle trip.
“And the only festivity, you say, is the Christmas meet, when the assistants come in from the jungle. But that would only mean about fifty people all told. And, anyhow, they would be people that you know already. My word, I can’t imagine anything more terrible. I should think that they’ld all be on each other’s nerves so completely that they’ld be wanting to cut each other’s throats.”
If you were to picture Chiengmai in terms of England that is what it would be like and that is what would happen. But you cannot picture it in terms of England. Chiengmai is so far and the whites there are so few. Their life is hard and testing. It has many dangers, many difficulties. It is only by mutual tolerance, by interdependence, by loyalty and friendship that it can be made tolerable. In most small communities you will find gossiping and malice and petty spite. But in Chiengmai you will not. The white community has the solidarity of a small band united against a common foe.
§
During the month that I spent in the jungle I was to realise the nature and capacities of that foe. We were three of us who made the trip. The Siamese Government leaves to certain companies the right to work for a number of years certain sections of forest land. There are a number of restrictions laid upon the companies, and the two men with whom I was travelling were making a tour of inspection on behalf of the Government to see that the agreements were being faithfully carried out.
During the War I often felt that life in a quiet part of the line would be rather a pleasant picnic if one were without responsibilities; if one had not to inspect the packing of limbers and the equipment of one’s men; if the moment one arrived, hot and weary after a long march, one could rest in one’s dug-out instead of having to rush round gun emplacements to see that one’s men were settled in. In Siam that wish was granted. It was the War without its danger and without its responsibilities. We travelled with an establishment of nine elephants and forty coolies. The hard work of camping was taken off our shoulders. At quarter to six in the morning we woke to a cup of tea and the sound of packing. While we dressed and breakfasted at our leisure the camp was struck. Our bedding and our food were stacked on elephants and coolies’ shoulders. The supervision was in the hands of a head boy. By half-past seven our ponies were waiting for us and our procession was half an hour’s march away. Elephants move slowly. Two miles an hour is the maximum. Fourteen miles is a long day’s march. Not that you can picture jungle miles in terms of English miles. Along the majority of the roads you could not drag a bullock cart. For the most part you are piloting yourself with the aid of a heavy staff along steep and stony paths or slithering over slippery paddy fields. The streams through which you wade are high above your knees. The average village road is a narrow isthmus of caked mud running between bogs into which you are likely to slide every seven steps. You are caked in mud. You are soaked with sweat. The mornings are few during the autumn when you are not drenched with a heavy downpour of rain. You are very weary by the time you reach, after a seven-hour march, the compound on the stream by which you are to spend the night. You sit forward on a log, limp and motionless, while the coolies cut away a clearing in the bush and your boys run up your tent and your cook prepares your tiffin. You are too tired to talk over your meal, and the moment it is over you fling yourself upon your bed. In a couple of minutes you are asleep.
§
The country through which you travel is varied.
The word ‘jungle’ evokes a picture of tangled undergrowth, of scarlet macaws, of monkeys screaming to each other from every bough, of large many-coloured butterflies, of snakes and bears and natives shooting at you from behind hills with blowpipes. It may be that in South America that is what it is But in Siam it is a friendly landscape. There are cobra, it is true, but you rarely meet them. I only saw a couple of small snakes, neither of which was poisonous probably. You will hear the screech of monkeys, but they remain invisible. Though you will come upon the tracks of a bear, the bear is an animal that must be hunted. And though the foliage is in places overpoweringly luxuriant, the country is for the most part open. The flat land is planted with rice, and the undergrowth is inconsiderable in the actual forests.
The Laos are quiet, simple, decently-lived people. They cultivate their rice, carry their produce to the markets, tend their animals and chew their betel nut. And though, when you ask how far it is to such a place, you will be answered in such simple methods of reckoning as “Half a bullock’s march” or “As far as you can hear a dog bark,” it is hard to believe that you are a hundred miles from a road, from what is called civilisation. It is only at odd moments that you will realise how remote these people are from the practical organisation of the big cities.
When, for example, you purchase a six-satang object with a tical, you will receive as your change not the ninety-four satangs you expect, but eighty or eighty-one. You count the change over three times. Then protest. The shopkeeper shakes his head. “We are giving eighty-five satangs for a tical.”
“But the tical,” you say, “is worth a hundred satangs.”
“Oh, no, at the most not more than eighty-seven.”
For a while, perhaps, you will argue. Then you will decide that thirteen-hundredths of one and tenpence are not worth quarrelling over. You will seek enlightenment. “It’s quite simple,” it will be explained to you. “The tical is too big a coin for these people. It’s a nuisance to them, and they can’t get rid of it easily. They say it isn’t worth more than eighty-five satangs to them. It’s rather like a man in a remote English village saying that it’ll be a fearful nuisance to him changing a five-pound note. None of his friends will be able to. He won’t be able to buy anything with it. He’ll have to wait for a chance of changing it. But that if you care to take ninety shillings for it you can have it.
“At one time,” he will go on, “we used to have all the men’s wages sent up here in copper coins by donkeys. But it didn’t pay, we found. It was more trouble than it was worth. In fact, you’re really lucky to get as much as eighty-five satangs for a shilling.”
It is at such moments that you realise how distant from civilisation the Lao still is, but for the most part you feel that you are in as ordered and developed a world as you would in Europe within half an hour’s stroll of telephones and cars. Their villages are tidy, their huts clean and airy, their single store is bright with printed cotton. Each village has its temple and its school. And the presence of the priests, with their cropped heads and their yellow robes, lends a dignity to life. The complicated Buddhist faith, over which metaphysicians will split hairs indefinitely, is a direct and simple thing to the simple Laos. They have retained the capacity to wonder.
§
A few weeks before my arrival a white elephant, the sacred symbol of the faith, the occasion years back of war with Burma, had been born on one of the teak company’s workings. Such a thing had not happened within the memory of man. For miles round the villagers came to pay it homage. Every evening, when the calf was brought down to the river to be bathed, a hundred and fifty to two hundred people were gathered in the compound. They wore their richest and brightest clothes. They had brought flowers to cast before the infant’s feet. And sugar cane to refresh the mother. There was a hush of religious awe. The brown eyes of the Lao maidens grew wide and solemn, luminous and dilated. Their lips parted in a sigh. Their little crinkled hands were joined together, lifted before their faces in simple and silent worship as the calf trotted turbulently towards the water.
It was a curious and moving sight, and I could not help following the curving sequence of analogy as I watched the pink urch
in bound and leap in the brown water. There it sported, like genius in a nursery, unaware that there was any difference between its playmates and itself, unconscious of its own importance, undreaming of its fate and future, the high rewards, the applause, the honour. All along the analogy held. Like genius it had won tardily to recognition.
The rider who presented himself with the news that his charge had given birth to a white elephant was laughed at. There was a sad smile on the district assistant’s face as he started his interrogation. To begin with, he asked, how many toes had it? Eighteen, he was told, and that, in his view, settled it. All real white elephants had twenty. But the rider was persistent. The elephant was no ordinary one. Would not the nai be gracious enough to come and see it? In the end the assistant went. It was the waste of a day, but one had to humour a good rider. When he saw it, however, the pitying smile changed to one of wonder. He had never seen a white elephant in infancy. There are not so very many people in the world who have. But the pink urchin that tottered between its mother’s legs was emphatically unlike any calf that he had seen before.