We went into the living-room and sat down. It was bare of every sort of comfort. There was a large table and two or three wooden chairs, straight-backed and severe; there were shelves on which were a number of religious books, paper-bound and musty, and a great many Catholic periodicals. The only secular book I saw was that dreary masterpiece J Promessi Sposi. (When Manzoni met Sir Walter Scott who complimented him on his work he, acknowledging his debt to the Waverley Novels, said that it was not his book, but Sir Walter’s, upon which Sir Walter replied, then it is my best book. But he spoke from his generous heart; it is of an almost intolerable tediousness.) But the father received a daily paper from Italy, the Corriere della Sera, arriving in bundles once a month, and he told me that he read every word of every one.
‘It amuses me,’ he said, ‘of course, but I do it also as well, as a spiritual exercise, for I cannot afford to let my faculties rust. I know everything that is happening in Italy, what operas they are doing at the Scala, what plays are given, and what books are published. I read the political speeches. Everything. In that way I keep abreast of the world. My mind remains active. I do not suppose I shall ever return to Italy, but if I do I shall step back in my environment as though I had never been away. In this kind of life one must never let go of oneself for a minute.’
He talked fluently, in a resonant voice, and he was quick to smile; he had a loud and hearty laugh. When first he came to this place he put up at the PWD bungalow and set about learning the language. The rest of his time he spent building the little house in which I now sat. Then he went out into the jungle.
‘I can do nothing with the Shans,’ he told me. ‘They are Buddhists and they are satisfied with Buddhism. It suits them.’ He gave me a deprecating look of his fine black eyes and with a smile made a statement that I could see was so bold to his mind that he was a trifle startled at it himself. ‘You know, one must admit that Buddhism is a beautiful religion. I have long talks sometimes with the monk at the Pongyi Chaun, he is not an uneducated man, and I cannot but respect him and his faith.’
He soon discovered that he could hope to influence only the people in the little lonely villages in the jungle, for they were spirit-worshippers and their lives were perplexed by the unceasing dread of the malignant powers that lay in wait to ensnare them. But the villages were far away, in the mountains, and often he had to go twenty, thirty or even forty miles to reach them.
‘Do you ride?’ I asked.
‘No, I walk. I don’t say I wouldn’t ride if I could afford a pony, but I am glad to walk. In this country you need plenty of exercise. I suppose that when I get old I shall have to have a pony, and by then I may have the money to buy one, but as long as I am in the prime of life there is no reason I should not travel on the legs God gave me.’
It was his custom on arriving at a village to go to the headman’s house and ask for lodging. When the people came back in the evening from their work he gathered them together on the verandah and talked to them. Now, after all these years, they knew him for forty miles around and they made him welcome. Sometimes a message came to ask him to go to some distant village that he had not yet visited so that they could hear what he had to say.
I remembered the lonely little village, shut off by the pressing growth of that dense verdure, that I had come upon in the jungle. I wanted to form in my mind’s eye some picture of the lives those people led in it. The father shrugged his shoulders when I questioned him.
‘They work. Men and women work together. It is a constant round of unceasing toil. Believe me, life is not easy in the jungle villages up in the mountains. They sow their rice, and you know what time and trouble it takes, and then they reap it; they cultivate opium, and when they have an interval they go into the jungle to gather the jungle produce. They do not starve, but they only save themselves from starvation because they never rest.’
As I wandered through the country, fording rivers or crossing them by rustic bridges, going up and down the tree-clad hills, passing between the rice fields, stopping for a night at one village of bamboo houses after another, talking with that long succession of headmen, their faces wizened or hardy, I seemed to myself like a figure in a tapestry that lined the halls of some old, infinitely deserted palace, an interminable tapestry of a sombre green in which you see dimly dark stiff trees and faded streams, hamlets of strange houses and shadowy people occupied without pause with actions that have a mystical, hieratic and obscure significance. But sometimes when I arrived at a village and the headman and the elders, kneeling on the ground, gave me their presents, I had seemed to read in their large dark eyes a strange hunger. They looked at me humbly, as though they were expecting from me a message for which they had been long eagerly waiting. I wished that I could make them a discourse that would stir them; I wished that I could deliver to them the glad tidings for which they seemed to hanker. I could tell them nothing of a Beyond of which I knew nothing. The priest at least could give them something. I saw him arriving, footsore and weary, at some village, and when the approach of night prevented the people from working any longer, sitting on the floor on the verandah, lit by the moon perhaps, but perhaps only by the stars, and telling them, silent shadows in the darkness, things strange and new.
I do not think he was a very intellectual man; he had character, of course, and shrewdness. He knew quite well that the hill Shans let their children come to him only because he clothed, lodged and fed them, but he shrugged his shoulders tolerantly; they would return to their hills when they were of a proper age, and though some would revert to the savage beliefs of their fathers, others would retain the faith he had taught them and by their influence perhaps lighten the darkness that surrounded them. He led too busy a life to have much time for reflection, and certainly there was in his mind no mystical strain; his faith was strong, as an athlete’s arms are muscular, and he accepted the dogmas of his religion as unquestioningly as you and I accept the fact of single vision or the flushing cheek. He told me that he had had a desire to come to the East as a missionary when he was still a seminarist and had studied in Milan to that end. He showed me a photograph of the group, sitting round the bishop, who had come out with him, twelve of them, and pointed out to me those that were dead. This one had been drowned crossing a river in China, that one had died of cholera in India, and the other had been killed by the wild Was up in the north of the Shan States. I asked him when he had sailed and without a moment’s hesitation he gave me the day of the week, the day of the month and the year; whatever anniversaries they may forget, these nuns, monks and secular priests, the date on which they left Europe remains on the tip of their tongues. Then he showed me a photograph of his family, a typical group of lower middle-class people, such as you may see in the window of any cheap photographer in Italy. They were stiff, formal and self-conscious, the father and mother sitting in the middle in their best clothes, two younger children arranged on the floor at their feet, a daughter on each side of them and behind, standing according to their heights, a row of sons. The priest pointed out to me those that had entered religion.
‘More than half,’ I commented.
‘It has been a great happiness to our mother,’ he said. ‘It is her doing.’
She was a stout woman, in a black dress, with her hair parted in the middle and large, soft eyes. She looked like a good housekeeper and I had little doubt that when it came to buying and selling she could drive a hard bargain. The priest smiled affectionately.
‘She is a wonderful creature, my mother, she has had fifteen children and eleven of them are still alive. She is a saint, and goodness is as natural to her as a fine voice is to a cantatrice; it is no more difficult for her to do a beautiful action than it was for Adelina Patti to take C in alt. Cara.’
He put the photograph back on the table.
When the next day but one I set out again the father said he would walk with me till we came to the hills and so, slinging my pony’s bridle over my arm, we trudged along while he gave me
messages for the nuns at Keng Tung and impressed upon me not to forget to send him prints of the photographs I had taken. He walked with his gun on his shoulder, an old weapon that looked to me much more dangerous to himself than to the beasts of the field; he was an odd figure in his battered helmet and his black cassock trussed up round his waist in order not to impede his gait, his white trousers tucked into his heavy boots. He walked with a long slow stride and I could well imagine that the miles sagged away under it. But presently his sharp eyes caught sight of a kingfisher that sat on the low branch of a tree, green and blue, a little quivering, beautiful thing, poised there for a moment like a living gem; the father put his hand on my arm to stop me and crept forward very softly, noiselessly, till he got to within ten feet; then he fired and when the bird dropped he sprang forward with a cry of triumph and picking it up he threw it in the bag he carried slung to his side.
‘That will help to make my rice tasty,’ he said.
But we reached the jungle and he stopped again.
‘I shall leave you here,’ he said. ‘I must get back to my work.’
I mounted my pony, we shook hands, and I trotted off. I turned back when I came to a bend of the path and waved as I saw him still standing where I had left him. He had his hand on the trunk of a tall tree and the green of the forest surrounded him. I went on and soon, I suppose, with that heavy tread of his that seemed not to spurn the earth but to stamp upon it with a jovial energy, as though it were friendly and would take his affectionate violence in good part (like a great strong dog who wags his tail when you give him a hearty slap on the buttock) soon, I suppose, he trudged back to the life from which for a day or two I had lured him. I knew that I should never see him again. I was going on to I knew not what new experiences and presently I should return to the great world with its excitement and vivid changes, but he would remain there always.
Much time has passed since then and sometimes, at a party when women, their cheeks painted, with pearls round their necks, sit listening to a broad-bosomed prima donna singing the songs of Schumann or at a first night when the curtain falls after an act and the applause is loud, and the audience bursts into amused conversation, my thoughts go back to the Italian priest, a little older now and greyer, a little thinner, for since then he has had two or three bouts of fever, who is jogging up the Shan hills along the forest paths, the same to-day and to-morrow as when I left him; and so it will be till one day, old and broken, he is taken ill in one of those little mountain villages, and too weak to be moved down to the valley is presently overtaken by death. They will bury him in the jungle, with a wooden cross over him, and perhaps (the beliefs of generations stronger than the new faith he had taught) they will put little piles of stone about his grave and flowers so that his spirit may be friendly to the people of the village in which he died. And I have sometimes wondered whether at the end, so far from his kin, the headman of the village and the elders sitting round him silently, frightened to see a white man die, whether in a last moment of lucidity (those strange brown faces bending over him) fear will seize him and doubt, so that he will look beyond death and see that there is nothing but annihilation and whether then he will have a feeling of wild revolt because he has given up for nothing all that the world has to offer of beauty, love and ease, friendship and art and the pleasant gifts of nature, or whether even then he will think his brave life of toil and abnegation and endurance worth while. It must be a terrifying moment for those whom faith has sustained and supported all their lives, the moment when they must finally know whether their belief was true. Of course he had a vocation. His faith was robust and it was as natural to him to believe as to us to breathe. He was no saint to work miracles and no mystic to endure the pain and the ineffable pleasure of union with the Godhead, but as it were the common labourer of God. The souls of men were like the fields of his native Lombardy and without sentimentality, without emotion even, taking the rough with the smooth, he ploughed them and sowed, he protected the growing corn from the birds, he took advantage of the sunshine and grumbled because the rain was too much or too little, he shrugged his shoulders when the yield was scanty and took it as his due when it was abundant. He looked upon himself as a wage-earner like any other (but his wages were the glory of God and a world without end), and it gave him a sort of satisfaction to feel that he earned his keep. He gave the people his heart, and made no more fuss about it than did his father when he sold macaroni over the counter of his little shop in the Milanese.
XVII
I entered upon the last lap of the journey to Keng Tung. For two or three days I went along the valleys by a level path, with a pretty stream flowing by the side of it; on its banks grew huge trees and now and again I saw a nimble monkey leaping from branch to branch; then I began to climb. I had to cross the divide between the basins of the Salween and the Mehkong and soon it grew very cold. Up and up we went. In the morning the mist swathed the surrounding hills, but here and there their tops emerged from it so that they looked like little green islets in a grey sea. The sun shining on the mist made a rainbow, and it was like the bridge that led to the gate of some fairy region of the underworld. A bitter wind blew around those bleak heights, and soon I was chilled to the bone. The mule track was muddy and very slippery, so that my pony kept his feet with difficulty and dismounting I walked. The mist was heavy now, and I could see but a few yards in front of me. The bell on the leader of my caravan was muffled and plaintive and the muleteers shivering trudged along by their beasts’ sides in silence. The path wound through one defile after another, and at each bend I thought I had reached the pass, but the way still went uphill and it seemed interminable. Then suddenly I found myself sloping down. I had crossed the pass, which had needed so prolonged an effort to reach, without noticing it; it gave me a slight shock of disillusion. So when you have spent all your labour to achieve some ambition and have achieved it, it seems nothing to you and you go on somewhither without any sense of a great thing accomplished. And it may be that death is like that also. I should add that this pass being no more than seven thousand feet high, to reach it was perhaps not so extraordinary a feat as to merit these pregnant reflections.
A similar incident occurred to Mr Wordsworth when with his friend, Mr Jones (Jones, as from Calais South ward you and I) he crossed the Alps; but being a poet he wrote:
… whether we be young or old,
Our destiny, our being’s heart and home,
Is with infinitude, and only there;
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something ever more about to be.
So simple is it when you know just how to put the best words in the best order to achieve beauty. The elephant can with his trunk pick up a sixpence and uproot a tree.
Then I came to a point from which they told me I could see Keng Tung, but the whole country was bathed in a silvery vapour and though I strained my eyes I could see nothing. I wound down and down and gradually emerged from the mountain mist and the sun was warm on my back. In the afternoon I came into the plain. The hills I had left were dark and the grey clouds were entangled in the trees that clad them. I trotted along a straight road, wide enough for a bullock wagon, with rice fields, now only a brown and dusty stubble, on each side; I passed peasants with loads on their backs, or suspended on bamboos, going to town for the market next day; and at last I reached a broken brick gateway. It was the gate of Keng Tung. I had been twenty-six days on the journey.
Here I was met by a magistrate, a stoutish man of dignified aspect but of friendly reception, riding a mettlesome white pony, and some other official, who had come to greet me on behalf of the Sawbwa, the chieftain of that state. After we had exchanged the proper civilities we rode on through the main street of the town (but as the houses stood each in its compound with trees growing in it, it had no air of a street but rather of a road in a garden suburb), till we came to the circuit-house, at which I was to lodge. Th
is was a long brick bungalow, placed on a hill without the town, whitewashed, with a verandah in front of it, and from the verandah I saw among trees the brown roofs of Keng Tung. All round were the green hills that surround it.
XVIII
I rode down to the market on my little Shan pony. It was held on a great flat space in which were four rows of open booths and here the people jostled one another in a serried throng. I had wandered so long through country almost uninhabited that I was dazzled by the variety and the colour of the crowd. The sun shone brightly. In the wayside villages the peasants were dressed in sombre hues, in blue or maroon, and often in black, but here the colours were brilliant. The women were neat and small and pretty, with flattened faces, and sallow rather than swarthy, but their hands were beautiful, as delicate as the flowers they wore in their hair, and finely attached to their slender wrists. They were dressed in a sort of skirt, called a lungyi, a long strip of silk wound round and tucked in at the waist, the upper part of which was in stripes of gay colours and the lower part pale green, maroon or black, and they wore a little white bodice, very neat and modest, and over this a padded jacket, pale green or pink or black like a Spanish bolero, with tight sleeves and little wings on the shoulders which suggested that at any moment they might fly smilingly away. The men wore coloured lungyis too or baggy Shan trousers. And a great many wore huge hats of finely plaited straw, like candle extinguishers, with enormous curved brims, and they perched uneasily on the abundant hair and handkerchiefs of men and women. These extravagant hats, hundreds of them, swaying, bobbing up and down, with the restless movements of their wearers, were so fantastic that you could not persuade yourself that these people were busy with the serious affairs of life, but rather, engaged in a frolic, were having an enormous joke with one another.