The Gentleman in the Parlour

  But of the grand house which he built nothing remains but the high brick wall that surrounded it and three or four roofless buildings, crumbling walls and the shapes of doors and windows. They have still the vague dignity of the architecture of Louis XIV. It is an unhandsome ruin that reminds you of nothing but a group of jerry-built villas destroyed by fire.

  I went back to the river. It was narrow and turbid, deep between high banks, and on the other side were thick clumps of bamboo behind which the red sun was setting. The people were having their evening bath; fathers and mothers were bathing their children, and monks, having washed themselves, were rinsing out their yellow robes. It was a pleasant sight and grateful to the sensibility jarred by those sordid ruins and perplexed.

  I have not the imagination to clothe dead bones with life nor the capacity to feel emotion over and over again about the same thing. I have known people who read The Egoist once a year and others who never go to Paris without having a look at Manet’s Olympe. When once I have received from a work of art its peculiar thrill I have done with it till after the lapse of years, having become a different person, I can in The Egoist read a book I have never read before and in Manet’s Olympe see a picture that has only just been hung in the Louvre. I had a notion that Ayudha would offer me nothing more than Lopburi and so made up my mind to give it a miss. Besides, I like my ease. I had gone from rest-house to rest-house long enough to hanker for the modest comfort of an Eastern hotel. I was getting a trifle tired of tinned sausages and canned pears. I had neither had a letter nor seen a paper since I left Taunggyi and I thought with pleasure of the huge packet that must be awaiting me in Bangkok.

  I determined to go there without lingering on the way. The train passed leisurely through wide and open country with jagged blue hills in the distance. There were rice fields on both sides of the line, as far as the eye could reach, but a good many trees, too, so that the landscape had a certain friendliness. The rice was in all stages of growth, from the young green shoots in little patches to the grain nearly ripe and yellowing in the sun. Here and there they were cutting it and sometimes you saw three or four peasants in line laden with great sheaves. I suppose that there is none of the staple foods of man that needs so much labour first to grow and then to prepare for consumption. In the stream by the side of the track buffaloes in herds, under the charge of a small boy or a bronzed, dwarfish man in a large hat, wallowed luxuriously. Little flocks of rice-birds flew white and shining and sometimes grey cranes with outstretched necks. At the wayside stations there was always a crowd of idlers, and their panaungs, bright yellow, plum or emerald green, made lovely splashes of colour against the dust and the sunshine.

  The train arrived at Ayudha. I was content to satisfy my curiosity about this historic place by a view of the railway-station (after all if a man of science can reconstruct a prehistoric animal from its thigh-bone why cannot a writer get as many emotions as he wants from a railway-station? In the Pennsylvania Depot is all the mystery of New York and in Victoria Station the grim, weary vastness of London), and with nonchalant eyes I put my head out of the carriage window. But a young man sprang to the door and opened it so promptly that I was nearly precipitated on to the platform. He wore a small round topee, a white drill coat, a black silk panaung so arranged as to make breeches, black silk stockings and patent-leather pumps. He spoke voluble English. He had been sent to meet me, he said, and would show me everything there was to be seen at Ayudha; there was a launch waiting at the landing-stage to take me up and down the river; and he had ordered a carriage; and the rest-house had been swept and cleaned that morning; and he ended up:

  ‘Everything in the garden is lovely’

  He smiled at me with large flashing white teeth. A young man with a yellow face as smooth as a new plate, high cheek-bones, and very black gleaming eyes. I had not the heart then to tell him that I would not stay at Ayudha and indeed he gave me no time, for calling porters he told them to take my traps out of the carriage.

  He took his duties seriously. He spared me nothing. From the station we walked along a broad street shaded with tamarind trees, on each side of which were Chinese shops, and the light was lovely and the people made attractive little pictures so that I would willingly have lingered; but my guide told me that there was nothing to see there, you had to go to Bangkok for shops, there they had everything you could buy in Europe; and with gentle determination led me to the landing-stage. We got into the launch. The river was broad and yellow. All along it were houseboats in which were shops, and above the muddy banks were houses on piles among fruit-trees. My guide took me to a walled enclosure on the river bank where had been a royal palace, and in what might have been once a throne-room, for it was but a ruin, there was a royal bed and a royal chair and some fragments of carved wood. He showed me innumerable heads of Buddha in bronze and stone, which had been brought from Lopburi or excavated from the numerous wats of Ayudha. We walked along a road for a little and there waiting for us was a tiny carriage and an obstinate pony. What organisation! We drove for two or three miles, along a pleasantly shady road with peasants’ houses on piles on each side of it and outside each gateway was a little paper pagoda stuck over with little white flags in order to preserve the inmates of the house from cholera. We came to a vast park, with its green glades and grassy clearings, a pleasant place to picnic in, and here were the remains of a palace and great temples, many ruined pagodas and in one of the temples, deserted of all and lonely but indifferent, an enormous bronze figure of a sitting Buddha. Here and there under the trees children were playing. The little Siamese boys, with their wide eyes, curling hair and roguish looks, were very pretty. In passing my guide pointed out to me a shrub with a pale violet flower. He told me that when you found it you might be sure that there were no tigers.

  ‘You have no tigers in England,’ he laughed, not, I thought, without condescension.

  I answered with deprecating modesty.

  ‘No, we lead safe and peaceful lives in that tight little island. We are exposed to no dangers more alarming than the recklessness of a drunken motorist or the fury of a woman scorned.’

  When we got back to the river I thanked the young Siamese warmly for showing me such interesting things and said that I would now go to the rest-house, upon which he opened his large gleaming eyes still larger and with his voice rising shrilly told me that I had not yet seen half of what he had to show me. I looked at him archly and murmured that enough was as good as a feast. He laughed brightly at this, evidently with the flattering belief that I had just invented the epigrammatic phrase, but floored me with the observation that enough was a purely relative term. I let him take me to another ruined temple, a scene untidy with desolation, and I gave an impatient glance at another Buddha of enormous size. And another and another. At last we came to a temple that was still a place of pilgrimage. I drew a breath of relief. It was like coming out of an unfurnished house to let, with its dead emptiness, into the busy street. At the landing-stage were women in sampans selling gold leaf, papers and incense sticks. On each side of the walk that led to the temple were little tables on which were displayed the same wares and sweets and cakes besides, and the vendors were plying a busy trade. The chapel was not very large and it was almost filled with a gigantic image of the Blessed One, and as you walked up the steps and looked through the door (your eyes still dazzled by the sunlight) it was awe-inspiring to discern vaguely that enormous gilded figure looming out of the darkness. In front of him were large figures of two disciples and the altar table was covered with burning incense. In a comer was a large teak bed on which were sitting two monks, smoking the fat Siamese cigarettes, drinking tea and chewing betel; they seemed not to notice the people who were there; some, men, women and children, in order to acquire merit were applying gold leaf to the pediment, a gigantic lotus, on which the Buddha sat. One woman, a spare, middle-aged person with a thin, intelligent face, with genuflections and prayers was consulting fortune by means of large wooden be
ans, which she threw on the ground and which, by falling on their flat or their concave side, answered her questions. There was an old man who came in with half-a-dozen members of his family and as soon as the middle-aged woman had finished with the beans he took them and when after the prescribed rites he threw them on the ground the whole party watched anxiously. Having finished he lit a cigarette and the rest rose from their knees, but whether the fates had promised good fortune or ill you could tell from not one of those impassive faces.

  Now at last my guide took me to the rest-house that had been swept and cleaned for my visit. It was a houseboat with a narrow verandah looking on the river, a long sitting-room of dark wood and a bedroom and bath-room on each side. I very much liked the look of it. The young Siamese asked me to go to his house after dinner, saying he would ask his friends, but I told him I was tired, and with many expressions of goodwill he left me. The day was waning and, alone at last, sitting on the verandah I watched the traffic of the river. There were pedlars going along in their sampans with an easy stroke, pots and pans in their boats, vegetables for sale or food cooking in little stoves. Peasants passed me with a load of rice or an old woman with a shrivelled grey head paddling herself as unconcernedly in a tiny dug-out as though she were walking along the street. The rest-house was at a bend of the river and the bank to which it was moored turned sharply; it was thick with mangoes and palms and arecas. The sun set and they were silhouetted against the redness of the sky: the areca with its bedraggled crown looks like a feather duster very much the worse for wear, but at night against the sapphire of the sky it has the distinction of a Persian miniature. With the last light of day a white flock of egrets, like haphazard thoughts that flit through the mind without reason or sequence, fluttered disorderly down the tranquil stream. Darkness fell and at first the houseboats on the other side of the broad river were bright with lights, but they went out one by one and only here and there was a red gleam reflected on the water. One by one the stars came out and the sky blazed with them. The traffic of the river ceased and only now and then did you hear the soft splash of a paddle as someone silently passed on his way home. When I awoke in the night I felt a faint motion as the houseboat rocked a little and heard a little gurgle of water, like the ghost of an Eastern music travelling not through space but through time. It was worth while for that sensation of exquisite peace, for the richness of that stillness, to have endured all that sight-seeing.

  XXVIII

  A few hours later I was in Bangkok.

  It is impossible to consider these populous modern cities of the East without a certain malaise. They are all alike, with their straight streets, their arcades, their tramways, their dust, their blinding sun, their teeming Chinese, their dense traffic, their ceaseless din. They have no history and no traditions. Painters have not painted them. No poets, transfiguring dead bricks and mortar with their divine nostalgia, have given them a tremendous melancholy not their own. They live their own lives, without associations, like a man without imagination. They are hard and glittering and as unreal as a backcloth in a musical comedy. They give you nothing. But when you leave them it is with a feeling that you have missed something and you cannot help thinking that they have some secret that they have kept from you. And though you have been a trifle bored you look back upon them wistfully; you are certain that they have after all something to give you which, had you stayed longer or under other conditions, you would have been capable of receiving. For it is useless to offer a gift to him who cannot stretch out a hand to take it. But if you go back the secret still evades you and you ask yourself whether after all their only secret is not that the glamour of the East enwraps them. Because they are called Rangoon, Bangkok or Saïgon, because they are situated on the Irrawaddy, the Menam or the Mehkong, those great turbid rivers, they are invested with the magic spell that the ancient and storied East has cast upon the imaginative West. A hundred travellers may seek in them the answer to a question they cannot put and that yet torments them, only to be disappointed, a hundred travellers more will continue to press. And who can so describe a city as to give a significant picture of it? It is a different place to everyone who lives in it. No one can tell what it really is. Nor does it matter. The only thing of importance – to me – is what it means to me; and when the money-lender said, you can ‘ave Rome, he said all there was to be said, by him, about the Eternal City. Bangkok. I put my impressions on the table, as a gardener puts the varied flowers he has cut in a great heap, leaving them for you to arrange, and I ask myself what sort of pattern I can make out of them. For my impressions are like a long frieze, a vague tapestry, and my business is to find in it an elegant and at the same time moving decoration. But the materials that are given me are dust and heat and noise and whiteness and more dust. The New Road is the main artery of the city, five miles long, and it is lined with houses, low and sordid, and shops, and the goods they sell, European and Japanese for the most part, look shop-soiled and dingy. A leisurely tram crowded with passengers passes down the whole length of the street, and the conductor never ceases to blow his horn. Gharries and rickshaws go up and down ringing their bells and motors sounding their claxons. The pavements are crowded and there is a ceaseless clatter of the clogs the people wear. Clopperty-clop they go and it makes a sound as insistent and monotonous as the sawing of the cicadas in the jungle. There are Siamese. The Siamese, with short bristly hair, wearing the panaung, a wide piece of stuff which they tuck in to make baggy and comfortable breeches, are not a comely race, but old age gives them distinction; they grow thin, emaciated even, rather than fat, and grey rather than bald, and then their dark eyes peer brightly out of a ravaged, yellow and wrinkled face; they walk well and uprightly, not from the knees as do most Europeans, but from the hips. There are Chinese, in trousers white, blue or black, that come to just above the ankle and they are innumerable. There are Arabs, tall and heavily bearded, with white hats and a hawklike look; they walk with assurance, leisurely, and in their bold eyes you discern contempt for the race they exploit and pride in their own astuteness. There are turbaned natives of India with dark skins and the clean, sensitive features of their Aryan blood; as in all the East outside India they seem deliberately alien and thread their way through the host as though they walked a lonely jungle path; their faces are the most inscrutable of all those inscrutable faces. The sun beats down and the road is white and the houses are white and the sky is white, there is no colour but the colour of dust and heat.

  But if you turn out of the main road you will find yourself in a network of small streets, dark, shaded and squalid, and tortuous alleys paved with cobble stones. In numberless shops, open to the street, with their gay signs, the industrious Chinese ply the various crafts of an Oriental city. Here are druggists and coffin shops, moneychangers and tea-houses. Along the streets, uttering the raucous cry of China, coolies lollop swiftly bearing loads and the peddling cook carries his little kitchen to sell you the hot dinner you are too busy to eat at home. You might be in Canton. Here the Chinese live their lives apart and indifferent to the Western capital that the rulers of Siam have sought to make out of this strange, flat, confused city. What they have aimed at you see in the broad avenues, straight dusty roads, sometimes running by the side of a canal, with which they have surrounded this conglomeration of sordid streets. They are handsome, spacious and stately, shaded by trees, the deliberate adornment of a great city devised by a king ambitious to have an imposing seat; but they have no reality. There is something stagy about them, so that you feel they are more apt for court pageants than for the use of every day. No one walks in them. They seem to await ceremonies and processions. They are like the deserted avenues in the park of a fallen monarch.

  XXIX

  It appears that there are three hundred and ninety wats in Bangkok. A wat is a collection of buildings used as a Buddhist monastery and it is surrounded by a wall, often crenellated so as to make a charming pattern, like the walled enclosure of a city. Each building has
its own use. The main one is called a bote; it is a great and lofty hall, with a central nave generally and two aisles, and here the Buddha stands on his gilded platform. There is another building, very like the bote, called the vihara and distinguished from it by the fact that it is not surrounded by the sacred stones, which is used for feasts and ceremonies and assemblies of the common folk. The bote, and sometimes the vihara, is surrounded by a cloister. Then there are shelters, libraries, bell towers and the priests’ dwellings. Round the main buildings in due order are pagodas, large and small (they have their names, Phra Prang and Phra Chedi); some contain the ashes of royal or pious persons, (it may be even of royal and pious persons) and some, merely decorative, serve only to acquire merit for those that built them.

  But not by this list of facts (which I found in a book on the Architecture of Siam) can I hope to give an impression of the surprise, the stupefaction almost, which assailed me when I saw these incredible buildings. They are unlike anything in the world, so that you are taken aback, and you cannot fit them into the scheme of the things you know. It makes you laugh with delight to think that anything so fantastic could exist on this sombre earth. They are gorgeous; they glitter with gold and whitewash, yet are not garish; against that vivid sky, in that dazzling sunlight, they hold their own, defying the brilliancy of nature and supplementing it with the ingenuity and the playful boldness of man. The artists who developed them step by step from the buildings of the ancient Khmers had the courage to pursue their fantasy to the limit; I fancy that art meant little to them, they desired to express a symbol; they knew no reticence, they cared nothing for good taste; and if they achieved art it is as men achieve happiness, not by pursuing it, but by doing with all their heart whatever in the day’s work needs doing. I do not know that in fact they achieved art; I do not know that these Siamese wats have beauty, which they say is reserved and aloof and very refined; all I know is that they are strange and gay and odd, their lines are infinitely distinguished, like the lines of a proposition in a schoolboy’s Euclid, their colours are flaunting and crude, like the colours of vegetables in the greengrocer’s stall at an open-air market, and, like a place where seven ways meet, they open roads down which the imagination can make many a careless and unexpected journey.