The Gentleman In the Parlour (14 page)

But when my house was finished, a green house in a green glade with the torrent splashing noisily between its green banks, and I had eaten, I laughed at myself. At Keng Tung I had bought some rum off a Ghurka when I discovered that my supply of gin was running low and feared that I should have to finish my journey on tea and coffee; it was good rum, home-made, but I did not like it; so to mark the sincere contrition I felt for having behaved with so little sense I sent the Sawbwa's official two bottles.

In reading the books of explorers I have been very much struck by the fact that they never tell you what they eat and drink unless they are driven to extremities and shoot a deer or a buffalo that replenishes their larder when they have drawn in their belts to the last hole; or are so much in want of water that their pack animals are dying and it is only by the merest chance that at the very last moment they come across a well, or by the exercise of the most ingenious ratiocination hit upon a spot where in the evening and the distance they see a shining that tells them that after a few more weary miles they will find ice to quench their thirst. Then a look of relief crosses their set grim faces and perchance a grateful tear courses down their unwashed cheeks. But I am no explorer and my food and drink are sufficiently important matters to me to persuade me in these pages to dwell on them at some length. I keep a pleasant place in my memory for the
durwan
of a bungalow on the way to Keng Tung who brought me with obsequious gestures a lordly dish covered with a napkin, removing which he craved my acceptance of two large cabbages. I had eaten
no green vegetables for a fortnight and they tasted to me more delicious than peas fresh from a Surrey garden or young asparagus from Argenteuil. It is a charming sight and wonderfully exalting to the soul, when you ride wearily into a village, to come upon a duck-pond on which are swimming fat ducks, unconscious of the fact that next day one of them, the fattest, the youngest, the most tender, with baked potatoes and abundant gravy is destined (who can escape his fate?) to make you a succulent dinner. Late in the afternoon, just before the sun is setting, you take an easy stroll and a little way from the compound you catch sight of two green pigeons flying about the trees. They run along the pathway, seeming playfully to chase each other, they are tame and friendly, and unless you have a heart of stone you cannot but be touched by the sight of them. You reflect on the innocence and bliss of their lives. You remember vaguely the fable of La Fontaine which in your childhood you learned by heart and shyly repeated when visitors came to see your mother.

The charming and obscene Lawrence Sterne would have been moved to tears by the sight of the dainty creatures and he would have written a passage that would have wrung your heart. But you are made of sterner stuff. You have a gun in your hands and though you are a bad shot they are an easy mark. In a little while the native who has accompanied you holds them in his hand, but he is unconcerned and sees nothing pathetic in those pretty little birds, but a moment ago full of life, dead before him. How good they are, fat, succulent and juicy, when Rang Lal, the Gurkha, brings them roasted to a turn for your breakfast next morning!

My cooks was a Telegu, a man of mature age; his face, of a dark mahogany, was thin, ravaged and lined, and his thick hair was dully streaked with silver. He was very lean, a tall, saturnine creature of a striking appearance in his white turban and white tunic. He walked with long strides and a swinging step, covering the twelve to fourteen miles of the day's march without fatigue or effort. It startled me at first to see this bearded and dignified person nimbly shin up a tree in the compound and shake down the fruit he needed for some sauce. Like many another artist his personality was more interesting than his work; his cooking was neither good nor varied, one day he gave me trifle for my dinner and the next cabinet pudding; they are the staple sweets of the East, and as one sees them appear on table after table, made by a Japanese at Kyoto, a Chinese at Amoy, a Malay at Alor Star or a Madrassi at Mulmein, one's sympathetic heart feels a pang at the thought of the drab lives of those English ladies in country vicarages or seaside villas (with the retired Colonel their father) who introduced them to the immemorial East. My own knowledge of these matters is small, but I made so bold as to teach my Telegu how to make a corned beef hash. I trusted that after he left me he would pass on the precious recipe to other cooks and that eventually one more dish would be added to the scanty repertory of Anglo-Eastern cuisine. I should be a benefactor of my species.

It had occurred to me that the cook-house was very disorderly and none too clean, but in these matters it is unwise to be squeamish; when you think of all the disagreeable things that go on in your inside it seems absurd to be too particular about the way in which is prepared what you put into it. It must be accepted that from a kitchen that is neat and shining like a new pin you do not often get food that is very good to eat. But I was taken aback when Rang Lal came to me with complaints that the Telegu was so dirty that no one could eat what
he prepared. I went into the cook-house again and saw for myself; it was impossible not to notice also that my cook was very much the worse for liquor. I was told then that he was often so drunk that Rang Lal had to do the cooking himself. We were a fortnight's journey from any place where I might have replaced him, so I contented myself with such vituperation (not very effective since it had to be translated into Burmese which he understood but little) as I was master of. I think the most biting thing I said was that a drunken cook should at least be a good one, but he merely looked at me with large mournful eyes. He did not wince. At Keng Tung he went on a terrific spree and did not appear for three days: I looked about for someone to take his place, for I had four weeks' journey ahead of me before I could reach the rail-head in Siam, but there was no one to be found, so when he reappeared very sorry for himself and woe-begone, I assumed the part of one who is cut to the quick, but magnanimous. I forgave him and he promised that for the rest of the journey he would abstain. One should be tolerant of the vices of others.

Now, passing through the villages, I had often seen little pigs scurrying about the posts on which the houses were built and about a week after I left Keng Tung it occurred to me that a sucking-pig would make a pleasant change to my daily fare; so I gave instructions to buy one at the next opportunity, and one day on arriving at the bungalow I was shown a little black pig lying at the bottom of a basket. It did not look more than a week old. For a few days it was carried in its basket from stage to stage by a young Chinese boy I had engaged at Keng Tung to help my drunken cook, and the boy and Rang Lal played with it. It was a pet. I meant to keep it for a special occasion and often, as I rode along, I indulged in a pleasing reverie on the excellent dinner it would make; I could not hope for apple sauce, but my mouth watered at the thought of the crackling, and I told myself that
the flesh would be sweet and tender. Anxiously I asked the Telegu if he was quite certain he knew how to cook it. He swore by the heads of all his ancestors that there was nothing about roasting a pig that he did not know. Then I halted for a day to give the mules and the men a rest, and I ordered the sucking-pig to be killed. But when it came to the table (how vain are human hopes!) there was no crackling, there was no white tender meat, it was just a brown sloppy stinking mess, it was uneatable. For a moment I was dismayed. I wondered what on earth the great explorers would do in such a pass. Would a frown darken the stern face of Stanley and would Dr Livingstone preserve unruffled his Christian temper? I sighed. Not for this was the little black sucking-pig reft untimely from his mother's breast. It had been better to leave him to lead a happy life in his Shan village. I sent for the cook. Presently he came supported on one side by Rang Lal and on the other by Kyuzaw, my interpreter. When they let go of him he swayed slowly from side to side like a schooner at anchor in a swell.

‘He's drunk,' I said.

‘He's as drunk as a lord,' answered Kyuzaw, who had been to the rajah's school at Taunggyi and knew many a racy English idiom.

(Once upon a time somebody called upon one of the most eminent of the Victorians early one morning and was told by the butler:

‘His lordship isn't up yet, sir.'

‘Oh, at what time does he have breakfast?'

Then the butler imperturbable: ‘He doesn't have breakfast sir. His lordship is generally sick about eleven.')

The Telegu looked at me and I looked at the Telegu. There was no understanding in his lustrous eyes.

‘Take him away,' I said. ‘Give him his wages in the morning and tell him to get out.'

‘Very good, sir,' said Kyuzaw. ‘I think that's best.'

They removed him and there was a great clatter and a
thud outside on the steps, but whether the Telegu had fallen down or whether Kyuzaw and Rang Lal had thrown him I did not think it necessary to ask.

Next morning while I was having breakfast on my verandah Kyuzaw came in to ask for the day's instructions and to gossip. The bungalow was on the edge of a considerable village. And there was more life and movement than you see generally in the Shan villages. The day before when I arrived, perhaps a little before I was expected, the women wore nothing but their
lungyis
, drawn up just to cover their breasts, and the upper part of their bodies were naked, but to-day, I fear in deference to the importance they were good enough to ascribe to me, they wore little bodices and were less pleasing of aspect. Suddenly the cook appeared in front of the bungalow. He had a bundle on his shoulder and this he put down on the ground beside him. He gave me a deep and solemn bow, then quickly took up his bundle, turned round and walked off.

‘I gave him his wages and money for his keep,' said Kyuzaw.

‘Is he going?' I asked.

‘Yes, sir. You said he was to go the first thing this morning. He cooked your breakfast and now he is going.'

I did not say anything. My word was law, and I suppose it bound me more sternly than anyone else. It was twelve days to Keng Tung, and the Telegu would foot it day after day seldom seeing a human face, and then it was twenty-three days more to Taunggyi. He took the path that led into the jungle and my eyes followed him. I had often noticed his long swinging stride. But now, emaciated, in his dingy Eastern clothes, his turban slovenly tied, he looked incredibly forlorn and under the weight of his bundle seemed to walk with lassitude. I did not really care if he was dirty and drunken, and I had dined just as happily off tinned tongue as off a sucking-pig. He seemed now very small and frail as he trudged on and
soon he would be lost to sight in the immensity of Asia. There was something immeasurably pathetic, nay, tragic even, in the sight of that old man stepping out thus into the unknown. In his lagging gait I seemed to read the despair of one who had been beaten by life. I suppose that Kyuzaw saw my uneasiness, for with his frank and tolerant smile he said:

‘You were very patient with him, sir. I would have sent him away long ago.'

‘Was he upset when you told him?'

‘Oh, no, sir. He knew he deserved it. He is not a bad man, a thief, drunken and very dirty, but that is all. He will find another place when he gets back to Taunggyi.'

The uneventful days followed one another like the rhymed couplets of a didactic poem. The country was sparsely inhabited. On the road we met no one but a few Kaws, and now and then we saw their villages perched on the side of a hill. The stages were long and when we arrived at the end of the day's journey we were exhausted. There was no road, but only a narrow pathway, and where it ran under the trees it was thick with mud, and the ponies stumbled through it splashing; sometimes it came up to their knees and it was impossible to go at more than a snail's pace. It was hard work and dreary. We went up and down low hills, winding in and out by the side of the river, and this, which at first was but a narrow stream that one could ford easily, grew day by day into a broad and rushing torrent. The last time we forded it, it was deep enough to come up to the bellies of the ponies. Then it became a great flow of water, tumultuous in places where it dashed over rocks, and then flowing calm and swift. We crossed it on a bamboo raft attached to each bank by a bamboo rope and pulled ourselves
over. Most of the tropical rivers that the traveller sees are very wide, but this one, overhung with an immense luxuriance of vegetation, was as narrow as the Wey. But you could never have mistaken it for an English river, it had none of the sunny calm of our English streams, nor their smiling nonchalance; it was dark and tragic and its flow had the sinister intensity of the unbridled lusts of man.

We camped beside it, among lofty trees, and at night the noise of the crickets and the frogs and the cries of the birds were loud and insistent. There is a notion abroad that the jungle at night is silent and writers have often been eloquent on the subject; but the silence they have described is spiritual; it is a translation of the emotion of solitude and of distance from the world of men and of the sense of awe that comes from the darkness and the solemn trees and the pressing growth of the greenwood; in sober fact the din is tremendous, so that till you become accustomed to it you may find it hard to sleep. But when you lie awake listening to it there is a strange uneasiness in your heart that does feel oddly like a terrible, an unearthly stillness.

But at last we reached the end of the jungle and the track, though uneven and bad, was wide enough for a bullock-cart. From my rest-house there was a broad view of the paddy fields and the hills in the distance were blue. Though they were the same hills that I had been crossing for I do not know how many days they had now a strangely romantic air. In their depths was magic. It was surprising to find what a difference it made to one's spirits to be once more in the open country. It was not till then that one realised how much the long days of travelling through the jungle had depressed them. One felt on a sudden content and well-disposed towards one's fellows.