A Writer's Notebook (65 page)

E. He describes himself as country-born, and because he has probably been exposed to a good deal of mortification on that account insists that he is proud of it. His father was first mate on a tea clipper running to China, who eventually settled in Moulmein and married a Burmese. E. came to Mandalay as interpreter in 1885 and has remained there ever since, first in the Government service and then in a business of his own, selling jade, amber and silk. When I went to see him I was taken into a room which served both as a parlour and as a shop. It was crowded with cheap European furniture, upholstered chairs and sofas, occasional tables and what-nots, and here and there were cabinets in which was displayed a certain amount of second-rate jade and amber. There was no fan, and the place was hot and stuffy and mosquito-ridden. He kept me waiting a long time, while he was dressing himself up. Then he came in, a tall thin man with white hair, a sallow dark skin and a flat nose. He talked a great deal in a loud rasping voice; he seemed to like the sound of it. He spoke in a formal elaborate way, using in conversation words which we are accustomed to see only in print. He always chose the long word rather than the short one. He had a passion for the hackneyed phrase. Whenever he referred to anybody and however often, it was always by his full title. Thus he spoke of General Sir George White, the Hero of Ladysmith, and of General Sir Harry Prendergast, V.C.

G. He is a tall man of over six feet, slender, not exactly handsome, but of prepossessing appearance. He has a thin sun-burnt
face with sunken cheeks; his eyes are blue and smiling. He is clean-shaven, but for a small toothbrush moustache. His hair, cut short, is hardly grey. He is loose-jointed and his gestures are easy and graceful. He is dressed without affectation, but well; his clothes hang on him loosely, but are well cut. He is a cavalryman and you can imagine that in uniform he must be a striking figure. He speaks with a singular drawl, in a rather humorous fashion. He is dryly ironic. He is an amateur of horseflesh, a great sportsman, and talks easily of all the unusual games that he has played.

T. He is a tall thin man with a sallow, clean-shaven face and spectacles. This gives him an odd air of a student, and you would think that he was a literary journalist rather than a jungle-wallah. He has a shy and apologetic manner. He has lived so much alone that he speaks very little. He is dressed in khaki shorts, stockings and a khaki shirt. He is by profession a miner and has discovered a jade mine in the north of Burma, where he expects to make his fortune. He comes down to Mandalay for the wet season, but the rest of the year he spends up at his mine with no other white man within seven miles of him.

Borneo. H. is dressed in a khaki shirt and khaki shorts. He wears brown shoes and stockings that come to just below the knee. He is a man of about the middle size, fat, with a red face shining with sweat and a hooked red nose. He has blue eyes and fairish hair receding on the forehead. He talks almost entirely in catch-words, especially when he is with people who are drinking. It is his way of showing that he is a good fellow. But when he is alone with you he speaks more naturally, and like a
gentleman. He keeps a couple of cats and a dog. He comes from a family of clergymen.

A. He is a Welshman with quite a marked Welsh accent, a thin, slovenly, clean-shaven man, with outsticking ears and irregular features. He is neither good-looking nor healthy of appearance. He has a sardonic humour and a way of insincerely flattering people, and it gives him a certain amusement when he sees that they are taken in by his soft sawder. He is badly and untidily dressed. He plays the piano well and is fond of classical music. Whenever he is out of temper he soothes himself by playing. He gives you the impression of being a country boy of rather humble origin who by his cleverness at school and in examinations entered the Civil Service. He has in his room a lot of school prizes bound in the usual way. He is fond of reading French and has a small collection of modern French novels, but speaks it badly.

The Sultan. It was arranged that we should be received by the Sultan in his audience chamber at ten, and as we walked along we saw him and his suite coming out of the place where he lives, which is above and at the side of the audience chamber, and we waited for a moment to allow him to get in. He was accompanied by two middle-aged men and a suite, all higgledy-piggledy, with a man holding an umbrella over his head. The audience chamber was a long low room with a gaudily-painted throne at one end. In front of this was a table with half a dozen dining-room chairs round it, and from this, on each side of the table, two rows of chairs ran down the hall. We were introduced to the Sultan and then to the two regents. The Sultan is a little boy of thirteen with a long face like a horse, a pale ivory skin, a large mouth which shows his long teeth and gums when he smiles, and very quick beady eyes. He was
dressed in yellow silk, a coat, trousers and sarong, and on his head he wore a black fez decorated with an appliqué pattern of gold cloth enriched with imitation diamonds. Round his neck were a number of gold strings and chains and a large gold medal. The regents, who are his close relations, wore blueish-grey patterned silk handkerchiefs made into a kind of turban on their heads, and dark trousers, bajus and sarongs. One of them had a very pronounced squint and wore spectacles of blue glass. The younger brother of the Sultan, a little pale-faced boy of eight, was carried in by an attendant on whose lap he sat throughout the audience. The Sultan looked every now and then at the cross-eyed regent to see what he was to do, but seemed to have self-assurance and to be not at all shy. He sat in an arm-chair at the head of the table, with the regents on one side of him and the British Resident and ourselves on the other. Behind him stood a group of officials in very shabby clothes. One of them bore a state sword of execution and there was another who bore a spear, a third with a cushion and a fourth with the apparatus for chewing betel-nut. Large native cigarettes were handed round, about the size of an ordinary candle, coarse Borneo tobacco wrapped in nipah palm leaves; but they smoked easily and coolly. The rest of the councillors sat on chairs on each side of the hall and appeared to be listening intently to the conversation that went on at the round table. At the side of the throne behind the Sultan stood two enormous burning candles in large brass candlesticks, and these were supposed to indicate the purity of the Sultan's sentiments toward us. The little boy, the Sultan's brother, stared with all his eyes. The regent on behalf of the Sultan paid us elaborate compliments, and then the Resident on my behalf made a long speech telling them all about me and who I was. After this there was a little desultory conversation, each side trying to think of something to say. Then after a final compliment from the regent and a graceful return from the Resident we took our leave.

The hill behind the Residency is covered with all manner of trees, but the haphazard arrangement, due to the chance of nature, has the effect of an artful devising. It looks like a jungle-covered hill in an old Chinese picture.

We went over the cutch factory. It is built by the side of the river at the bottom of a hill. A variety of sheds, on piles, of roughly-hewn logs covered with a corrugated iron roof. Behind it grow bananas, papayas and various trees. It has a rough and ready air and gives you the impression of having been erected higgledy-piggledy as occasion arose. It is sloppy and untidy and has none of the trimness of a factory in England or America. Cutch is a material used for tanning made from the bark of the mangrove tree, and as you walk about the factory there is a slight odour of tan. There are huge vats in which the bark, which has been previously broken to pieces by a complicated machine, is washed in water and boiled till the tannin has been extracted, and when the cutch is finally ready it comes out in a thick, reddish brown viscid liquid which looks like molasses. This then dries out and is made into large, very hard cakes. The manager and his two assistants live each in his own bungalow on a hill and they have a little club which they all go to as evening draws in. The club consists of one long room in part of which is a billiard-table and in the rest a small bar, a bridge-table, and a table on which are piled up papers like the
Daily Graphic
and the
Mirror
, and magazines like the
Royal
and the
Strand
. The club is looked after by one boy who serves out drinks and in the interval acts as billiard-marker. It is very grubby. The manager is a fattish man with horn-rimmed spectacles and false teeth, clean-shaven, with a bronzed, squarish face. He has been here for five and twenty years and is said to have great influence on the natives. He has a way of interspersing his conversation with fragments of bad French. He is said to be kindly and reliable. The three men who compose the staff
get on very badly together. They have fearful quarrels. The engineer is a man getting on for thirty, who speaks with a broad Scotch accent so that it is not easy for the Englishman to understand what he says. He is of about middle height, dressed in shabby grey drill and a ragged tennis shirt. He has a good-looking attractive face with blunt, but not unpleasant, features, and blue eyes which you may think are just bleary with drink, but if you look at them with imagination have an imaginative and tragic look. They give you the impression of being oddly puzzled as though they had seen things out in the East which the man could not understand, and you might think to yourself that this raw, simple uneducated Scot had become aware of something strange which had knocked him off his balance and left him adrift on the sea of life. He is said to be a very heavy drinker and when drunk is objectionable and violent. The third man is small but big-boned, sandy-haired, with a large nose, and extremely taciturn.