I Had no intention of visiting Siam when I started my world tour. It was one of those unexpected things that happen easily and quickly in the unhurrying East. I mentioned in the Penang Club that I had sponsored at Chapman & Hall’s a novel about the Siamese teak forests called Brown Wife or White. ‘In that case you ought to see the country,’ my host said. ‘A friend of mine is Forestry Adviser there. He’s starting on a jungle trip next month. Why don’t you join him?’ A telegram was despatched, and two weeks later I was trudging in an elephant train with a cohort of coolies through the heat and mud and rain of the forest areas that lie north of Chiengmai.
In those days the teak trade was highly prosperous; it was organized almost exclusively by the British with the co-operation of the Danes, whose links with the country have been always close—the Siamese have been called ‘The Danes of Asia’—and the atmosphere at Chiengmai, the H.Q. of the teak trade, was like that of a British Colony. I felt, after spending a month in the Federated Malay States, that I was still in the British Raj.
My jungle trip lasted for three weeks; we marched twelve to fourteen miles a day, striking camp at dawn, arriving at our next point early in the afternoon, an hour or so ahead of the elephants; to sleep sometimes under canvas, sometimes in one of the company’s compounds. The path led through rocky mountain paths and flooded rice-fields. I learnt then under what tough conditions the early pioneers had developed the areas where their companies had concessions.
I spent a night in the compound of a young manager who seemed, in his health and cheerfulness, his efficiency, his sense of duty and responsibility, his friendly but firm treatment of his staff, to typify all that was most admirable in the type of Briton who went overseas. On my return a week later, I found him pale, sweating, shivering, stretched out on a long chair under blankets, struck down by malaria.
From the veranda of his bungalow I could see across the brown waters of the Menam down which the logs were drifting on their slow five years’ journey towards Bangkok, the towering splendour of the jungle. There it stood, lovely and cool and green in the October sunlight. It was so beautiful. You could not believe that anything so beautiful could be so full of poison, that those green recesses concealed not peace and quiet but disease and misery and decay; that the very depths of that luxuriant greenery betrayed the malice of its heart, that the measure of its beauty was the measure of its hate, that the very creepers that festooned the trees, heightening their grandeur, making them lovelier than any trees in the West could be, were in fact slowly crushing them to death, eating away their strength, replenished with it, as the fever that fed upon this young man’s strength.
In recent months I have often wished that rather more of the busy bureaucrats whom I have watched in Bangkok and Singapore, bustling about with their brief-cases repairing the ravages of ‘colonial exploitation’, had experienced the realities of ‘the bad old days’ before the age of antibiotics and air-conditioning.
After my trip on my return to Chiengmai I was taken round the leper hospital by the Senior Padre.
We went first to the men’s part; and to that part of it which had been set out as the plan on which ultimately the rest of the hospital was to be rebuilt. It had been arranged like a garden suburb, in a series of small crescents; with neat, brightly painted bungalows each with its carefully ordered plot of ground in front. The gravel paths were trim and closely weeded. In the centre of each crescent blazed gorgeously an immense bed of flowers, and on the steps and on the verandas of the bungalows the patients lounged lazily in the heavy sunlight, gossiping and chewing betel-nut. It was very home-like.
‘To begin with we used to let them marry,’ the Padre told me.
‘Leprosy is not the contagious thing it was once taken for. With proper precautions there is no reason why the children of lepers should be infected. But we found it involved us in too many complications. To carry on at all it was essential to separate the men and women.’
We were crossing, as we talked, the waste part of ground dividing the men’s quarters from the women’s, which a collection of patients, in whose systems the disease had made inconsiderable progress, were converting into a further series of paths and gardens.
Midway between the two sections was the chapel. And as we drew close to it, the Padre’s pace slackened. It had been built only a couple of years back, and he could never pass it without a feeling of profound thankfulness that life should have been granted him long enough to see the completion of it. He was an old man, past sixty, weakened by fever and overwork. To build such a chapel had been one of his life’s ambitions.
For thirty-seven years he had had to wait.
When he had come to Siam as a young man from Washington, there had been nothing at Chiengmai—nothing: no mission, no school, no hospital. There had not even been a railway beyond Bangkok, and with funds scanty and supplies five weeks away, he had realized that till the schools and hospital were established, every consideration but those of the most bare necessities must be denied. He had waited for thirty-seven years, till the time had come when he could build according to his dreams. There it stood now, a high, white building, very bare and open, as was inevitable from the conditions of the place, but possessed of genuine beauty in its austere dignity of naked line.
‘We have two services a week,’ he said, ‘and though there is no compulsion, there are very few of the patients who do not attend. They are all Christians; within a week of their joining us, they come of their own accord to be baptized. It is only natural after all. They were brought up as Buddhists, but Buddhism, for all its beauties, is not a religion that holds its hand out to the pariah. When the Buddha saw a leper, he was filled with disgust and turned away; the Buddhists have allowed their lepers to lie unwanted about their streets. But Jesus, when He saw a leper, was moved, stretched out His hand and told His disciples that they should have care for lepers, so that the leper, who all his life has held himself to be an outcast, discovers that after all there is a God who cares for him. He turns naturally to the God whose heart is so great that it has room in it even for the poor leper.’
Beyond the chapel were the women’s quarters. They had been arranged for the most part in long dormitories divided off into deep but narrow rooms, with seven to ten mattresses in each.
‘It seems to work better this way with women,’ explained the Padre. ‘We once tried putting them in bungalows like the men, but the moment they get in couples they start quarrelling.’
And turning to the bunch of women who were seated in the shady corner of the veranda, he began to joke with one of them about the bamboo basket she was plaiting. He pretended that she was a saleswoman and he a customer.
‘I will give you thirty satangs for your basket.’
And she, in the true Lao spirit, began to bargain with him.
‘Oh no, master. It is worth eighty at the very least.’
‘Perhaps then I might give you forty.’
‘But I would not take less than sixty-five.’
As they haggled the other women joined merrily in, with laughter, relishing this travesty of a scene that had been so familiar in the life they had abandoned. They looked happy, but it was hard to look without revulsion at a woman in whom the disease was reaching its last stages. Her nose, as though the heel of a fist had been pressed ruthlessly upon it, was flattened back upon her face. The hands with which she was preparing her dish of curry were almost fingerless; while her feet, one of which was wrapped round with bandages, were no more than slabs of flesh marked here and there with certain irregular projections.
‘You’ve got to have a strong stomach to stand that,’ I said.
The Padre shrugged his shoulders.
‘One gets used to it, and besides, one knows that they’re not unhappy really. They’re all in the same boat. It makes a big difference, that.’
‘But you must have trouble with them sometimes?’
‘With the young ones, with those who are only affected slightly. That rule about marriage must weigh on them pretty heavily.’
‘They’re at liberty to go.’
‘And do they often?’
‘Occasionally.’
‘Do they come back?’
‘More often than not.’
I could understand their going. There was something pathetic about those little bungalows that had all the appearance but none of the reality of a home.
‘It must be lonely,’ I said.
‘That’s the way Butterman talked,’ he answered.
I caught the reference.
I knew well enough the story he referred to. It was a story that everyone who was in Malaya about that time had heard.
I had heard it from so many sources that I am able to tell it now in straightforward narrative, without needing to explain where and how I learnt each separate detail; indeed I should find it impossible to remember how I came to put the jigsaw puzzle together piece by piece. I see it as a single story—the story of the white man’s battle with the jungle.
Butterman had been a familiar figure in Penang and Ipoh and K.L. For fifteen years he had worked in the Moulmin-Madras Timber Company, and he had often been down to the E. and O. He had once even stayed over there for a week or so of his leave. He was a popular enough fellow; good at games, generous with his money; though too reserved, too inexpansive, as a result, it was said, of his lonely stretches in the jungle, to make close friendships. He was an ambitious and conscientious worker; steady, trust-worthy, unemotional, keeping his temper and his head. Everyone respected him. ‘He’s the sort of man you can feel safe with. He’ll never do anything unexpected,’ it was said of him.
No one was more surprised than the Padre when Butterman arrived in the station unheralded and for no very obvious reason, to request, his first evening at the club, that he should be shown round the leper hospital.
It was the first time during his fifteen years in Chiengmai that he had displayed any interest in the mission’s work. His behaviour was as curious as his request. He asked a number of questions with a startlingly unexpected interest and intensity. He demanded to know the symptoms of leprosy. When he was told where the first signs were to be seen, he repeated slowly over and over again, ‘The hands and feet; yes, yes, the hands and feet.’ He asked about marriage; of the probability of a leper’s child being infected. He maintained with a curious fierceness that it was unfair to deny them marriage. He did not apparently listen to anything that the Padre said. Then suddenly without warning he held out his hand.
‘It’s been very good of you,’ he said. ‘It’s been most interesting. It’s a magnificent work … no idea that it was anything like this. Well, good-bye, Padre, good-bye.’
The sudden change of tone was as curious as it was embarrassing.
‘We needn’t surely say good-bye,’ the Padre said. ‘I shall be seeing you at the club tonight.’
‘Afraid not. Going back to the jungle this afternoon.’
‘What! After only two days here!’ It was a surprising announcement, for Butterman’s camp was a good week’s march distant.
‘Yes, only just came to have a look round. Good-bye, many thanks, and’—he hesitated, then drawing close to the Padre he touched him on the shoulder, lowering his voice to the tone which one employs for the communication of a shady confidence—‘about that other business,’ he said, ‘you’re quite right, you know, quite right. There are some people who aren’t fit to marry.’
It was a leave-taking as astonishing as it was abrupt.
All day long the disturbing impression of that odd interview remained with the Padre, so that when he happened to find himself alone for a moment beside Arnold, Butterman’s manager, at the large round table on which after sundown drinks and glasses were set out, he returned instantly to the subject.
‘I’m a little worried about one of your fellows,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you about him?’
Arnold looked up quickly. Heavily built, with a small imperial and moustache that scarcely concealed the thickening and sagging of his chin-line, he was in point of years little more than youthfully middle-aged, but the tropics had begun to take their toll of him. One thought of him as old.
‘One of my fellows? Who?’
‘Butterman.’
‘Butterman?’ He echoed the name incredulously. ‘But there’s nothing wrong with him. He was fit enough a few hours ago when I saw him off!’
The Padre didn’t reply directly.
‘Wasn’t his coming all the way down from Behang-Kong for a two days’ visit rather curious?’
Arnold shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I give my lads a pretty free hand in the way of breathers. One has to. The jungle’s a curious place. For month after month you’ll be working along quite happily, everything seems all right, then suddenly one morning something snaps, your nerves are gone, and you know that if you stay another hour there, you’ll be off your head. A queer place, the jungle. The size of it, the loneliness, the never seeing a white man for weeks on end; the bouts of fever, and all that hidden life of the jungle crowding so closely round you. Sometimes it’s like a hand throttling you.’
And sitting back in the calm of his last weeks, he mused on the number of men that he had known of whom the jungle in one way or another had got the better. The loneliness, the fever, the privation, the autumn rains, and the summer heat; one by one they had gone down before them, with broken health or broken nerves.
‘I don’t think there’s much wrong with Butterman,’ he said. ‘He merely felt that it was time he had a rest.’
The Padre was unconvinced, however.
‘He behaved very curiously at my place this morning. I was wondering if there might not be something worrying him. I don’t want to interfere, but he hasn’t got himself mixed up with any girl here, has he?’
Arnold laughed: a rather coarse, brutal laugh.
‘I’m afraid, as far as a sleeping dictionary’s concerned, Butterman’s Lao is going to remain as inadequate as it’s always been.
He’s never had any use for that sort of thing.’
‘Exactly. And it was just because of that that I was wondering whether he mightn’t have started now. Wasn’t there some talk about his getting married during his last leave?’
‘There was talk, but when it came to the point he decided that it wasn’t fair to bring out a white woman to a place like this. I dare say he was right: it’s no place to bring up children, what with the heat and the monotony. It’s a dog’s life for a young girl. There’s only one woman in a hundred that could manage it. He didn’t say much to me about it; muttered something as far as I can remember about some fellows being not fit to marry.’
The Padre started. It was the same oddly arresting phrase that Butterman had applied to the celibate lepers at the hospital. Not fit to marry.…
‘I wish,’ he said, ‘that you’d have a rather careful look at him next time you’re in the jungle. I can’t help being worried about him. I’m not at all sure that he doesn’t want more than a three days’ rest.’
‘What’U you have, a gin and bitters?’
‘No, thanks. I’ll stick to stengahs.’
‘Right. Will you mix your own?’
It was the hour when life for the teak-wallah is at its sweetest, the hour just after sundown, when the air is cooling after the long day’s heat, when the body, after the long day’s work, is refreshed by the evening’s bath, and by the afternoon’s ‘lie off’, when pahits and stengahs are set out on the small camp table, and tired limbs lie slackly along the deep canvas chairs. It is the hour that consoles and cancels everything that the day has known of thirst and exposure and fatigue. And Arnold sipped at his whisky, tranquillized by the profound content of physical exhaustion, while Butterman with minute care set himself about the preparation of a pahit.
It had been a long hard day. They had been up at five while it was still dark and, sending their carriers ahead of them, had marched two hours before breakfast. There had been no rain for several weeks and in consequence the paths across the paddy-fields were dry, but even so the going had been extremely hard; they had marched seventeen kilometres; the greater part of it had been over rugged hilly passes, and they had come into camp a full three hours ahead of the elephants. A hard day. But it was worth it now. At no other price could you purchase this exquisite sensation of utter languor.
Out of the corner of his eye Arnold watched Butterman sip critically, then appreciatively, at his gin and bitters. They had been together for three days now, and as far as he could see there was nothing wrong with the chap. His accounts and his reports were in perfect order. His comments on the working of the teak had been extremely lucid, extremely practical. He was right enough. There had been nothing but a momentary touch of nerves that Padre Martin had magnified out of all proportion. A touch of nerves, and who should know better than he how common that was, after twenty-five years of it out here.
Twenty-five years: a long chunk out of a man’s life. Not that he was regretting it. At the beginning he had been resentful. That morning when his father had taken him into his study to explain. Yes, that had been bitter-enough-tasting medicine. ‘I’m very sorry, my boy,’ his father had said to him, ‘but things have not been going too well with me of late. And I cannot afford to send both you and your brother up to Oxford. You are the elder and you have the right to the first consideration. At the same time to a man such as your brother who’s an intellectual pure and simple, whose career will probably be one of scholarship, a university education is a far more important thing than it can ever be for you. It seems to me indeed essential to his future. Whereas I feel that while you would be handicapped you would not be crippled by its absence. If you insist, of course, on what is after all your right, I will never refer to the matter again. I must say I hope though …’
Yes, it had been bitter medicine, but he had swallowed it. And here he was now going back to London in the middle forties, retiring on a capital of forty thousand and a pension, which was more than that brother of his would be able to do if he lived to eighty. He had swallowed the medicine to the last drop. He had played the game through to the last chukka. All down the course he had kept his head. He had not flung his money about on expensive leaves. He had not married his Lao woman like those others had, and when he had come back to Chiengmai as station master he had not allowed himself to become fettered by those bonds of propinquity and habit which others had found hard to break when it came to the last. He had built Cheam a little bungalow beside the river, and when the children had grown up he had sent them to be educated in Malaya. He would play the game by them, he would leave enough when he went away for them to have a start in life. They should have their bread and butter, and if they wanted the jam to spread on it, well, they must find that for themselves. And as for Cheam, she would be happy enough with her bungalow and a paddy-field or two. She would not feel she had been ill-treated. She was unwesternized. She believed, as all Laos did believe, that the mere fact of a man and woman living together constituted marriage, and that marriage meant simply the observances of certain practical obligations. He had observed those obligations. He would leave a clean record here. He was getting the best of both worlds, getting it both ways.
His last jungle trip. In a few weeks now Butterman would be coming down to Chiengmai, to take over. A good fellow, Butterman: sound, steady, practical. It had been ridiculous of Padre Martin to imagine that there was anything wrong with him. He was getting old, the Padre, old and fanciful and fussy. A good fellow, but getting old; had seemed old even in those distant days when himself had been a junior assistant.
And as he lay back in the long comfort of his chair, living over the days of stress and struggle, his eyes began to close, and hi. mouth to sag. A hard life, a good life, and now London at the end of it. The best of both worlds, he had had the thing both ways.
A good life, a hard life. His head began to nod.… In another minute he would have been asleep had not a shriek at his elbow abruptly disturbed his reverie: a wild, uncanny shriek it was; like that of an animal maddened by fear and anger. ‘Heavens!’ was his first thought, ‘a tiger.’ But before he had had time to blink his eyes, he had realized that this was no occasion for alarm.
‘Good heavens, man,’ Butterman was shrieking. ‘What on earth are you doing with those socks?’
He had risen to his feet: his whole body, for all that he was trying to support himself against the table, was shivering as though with ague; nor could he keep steady the arm with which he was pointing at the astonished ‘boy’, who was gaping in the doorway of the tent, a pair of white socks dangling from his hand.
‘What are you doing?’ Butterman shrieked. ‘Who told you that you could touch them?’
The boy was so frightened that he could scarcely speak.
‘The socks master wear today,’ he stammered, ‘they dirty. I go wash.’
‘And who told you that you could wash them?’ Butterman bellowed. ‘How dare you touch my things without permission? I’ll tell you when I want things washed. You put them back.’
The boy hesitated.
‘They dirty, master,’ he explained. ‘Master no can wear.’
For answer Butterman beat madly with his fists upon the flimsy table, making the glasses and the bottles shake on their tin tray.
‘You put them down,’ he shrieked. ‘You put them down.’ And as the boy hurried back into the hut, he sank into his chair with a slow gasp. His eyes were blazing and his cheeks were pale, his lips trembled and there was a circlet of sweat along his forehead. He lay back breathing heavily as though he had completed an immense effort, as though he had been preserved from an immense danger.
‘They spy on one,’ he said. And he pronounced each word separately and distinctly, as a child does when it repeats a lesson. ‘You can’t trust them. All the time you have to be on your guard against them. Spies. Every one of them. Spies!’
Arnold made no reply. He nodded his head and sipped slowly at his emptying glass. But he knew in that instant that it was over no fancy that the Padre was worrying.
‘I was wondering,’ he said some ninety minutes later, as the boy was clearing away the dinner, ‘whether it wouldn’t be a good idea for you to come back to Chiengmai with me tomorrow. You’ll be taking over in a month or so, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we were to work side by side for a little, so that you can see how things fit in.’
Butterman, who since his recovery from the outburst had been exchanging in a perfectly normal manner the mixture of personalities and business that are the basis of conversation, eagerly welcomed the suggestion.
‘I’d be very grateful if I might. There are one or two things that I’m not too sure about.’ And he began to discuss certain points of routine and policy in a fashion so lucid that Arnold began to wonder whether after all he and the Padre were not simply imagining things.
There couldn’t be anything wrong with a man whose brain was as clear and collected as this.
Before the night had passed, however, there had occurred another slight, but following on what had occurred previously, strangely disquieting incident.
For some reason or another, Arnold had found that he could not sleep. To compose his thoughts he had decided to read for a few moments. He had been unable, however, to find the matches and walking to the opening of his tent was just about to call his boy when he saw that Butterman had a light burning still. To avoid disturbing the camp he walked across the few yeards of ground that divided the two tents.
‘Sleepless too?’ he began, ‘I was wondering …’ then stopped abruptly before the unexpected sight that confronted him.
Cross-legged upon his haunches, Butterman was seated on the small rubber ground-sheet beside the bed, with the wide black silk Chinese trousers in which it is the fashion for Europeans in Siam to sleep, rolled back over his knees and with a large heavy-powered electric torch he was examining his naked feet.
‘Good Lord,’ said Arnold, ‘what’s the matter? Have you got mud-sores or something?’
Butterman had given a start at the first sound of his friend’s voice, but the expression of surprise changed quickly to one that Arnold found impossible to diagnose. It was a mixture of knowingness, and suspicion, and furtive cunning; a look that was at the same time a shield against detection and an invitation to share in a conspiracy. There was triumph in it, and fear, hatred and distrust and friendship. And when Butterman spoke his voice had a peculiar intonation that should have been the key to the mystery, but was at the same time an added veil across it.
‘Not yet,’ he said, ‘not yet. Nothing that you can see as yet.’
And Arnold as he heard it shuddered as though he had been brought face to face with something that was uncanny and unhealthy, something that was outside the experience of practical mortality.
There was an odd smell of burning about the house. For a week ever since their return from the jungle, it had clung fugitive and intermittent to the wide-windowed, wide-verandaed bungalow. For half a day or so you would think it had disappeared, and then suddenly as you came into a room or went on to a veranda you would meet it, vague, sinister, repellent. And for hours, although it was so slight that a stranger coming into the house would not have noticed it, the smell would follow you. You would taste it in your food and in your wine. It would be upon the soap with which you washed your face and in the flowers which were upon your table. You waited for it, sought for it, in the same way that during a sleepless night you will listen with a straining ear for the faint rattle of a window pane in a distant corridor.
‘For God’s sake,’ muttered Arnold irritably to his boy, ‘can’t you find where that smell comes from? It must be something that the boys are doing in the kitchen.’
But the boy lifted his clasped hands before his face.
‘No, no, master,’ he pleaded. ‘Boys worried by it as much as master. No can find, master, no can find!’
It was in the liveliest of ill-tempers that Arnold went in to breakfast.
In the doorway of the room he paused.
Butterman as usual was down already. He was seated in a wicker chair on the veranda manicuring his nails. It was a habit to which he was becoming increasingly addicted. The hours of idleness that most men devote to pipes and cigarettes he would spend drawing a long steel file slowly round the oval of his nails, lifting his fingers to the light to examine his handiwork; then once again remitting the supple metal to its task. A testy comment rose to Arnold’s lips, but he bit it back; the fellow was his guest here after all. And walking over to the table he took his seat at it.
The laundry account had been placed on a slip of paper beside his plate, and as the meal had not yet been served, he picked the thing up and glanced at it. It had been arranged in two columns; down one side of it was a list of the various articles: shirts, collars, singlets, handkerchiefs. And against each article was set in the first column the number of pieces that he had sent, in the second those that had been sent by Butterman. He amused himself for a moment by a comparison of the number. Shirts, collars, handkerchiefs; the same number identically. Then suddenly he gave a whistle.
‘Good lord! man,’ he said. ‘You’re pretty economical in socks.’
Butterman looked up quickly.
‘Economical? Socks? What do you mean?’
‘Do you know that you haven’t sent a single pair to be washed this week?’
Butterman did not answer. Instead he rose to his feet and walking to the table, leant forward over it.
‘Don’t you think,’ he said, and he spoke slowly, articulating each word carefully. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if I were to go back to my own house now? It was extremely kind of you to offer me the hospitality of yours. But I must not trespass on it too long. The alterations that were being made to mine are practically completed. Don’t you think it would be better if I were to go?’
Arnold watched him closely. There was nothing unusual or unexpected in Butterman’s suggestion. A man preferred to be among his own things. But behind the intonation of the words, ‘Don’t you think it would be better,’ it was almost as though he had heard a threat. It was absurd, of course. Butterman and he were old and proven friends. It was absurd, utterly absurd. He would have to watch himself. A man was in a bad way when he began to imagine things.
‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘It’s only for another day or two. It’s so jolly having you. Life gets a little lonely sometimes for an old bachelor like myself.’
‘Old bachelor,’ he repeated, and the pitch of Butterman’s voice rose suddenly to a laugh. ‘Why didn’t you marry then? What was to stop you marrying? And now you are finding yourself lonely!’
‘Well, sometimes, naturally.’
Again Butterman laughed, a high-pitched laugh, that was a cackle almost.
‘Lonely! Those homes that are not homes, that have all the appearance, but none of the reality, none of the sweetness of a home! Lonely, yes, I think I’d better be going, Arnold.’
‘It’s as you choose, of course. But if you go I shall be extremely sorry. It’s nice having you.’
‘Nice having me? But why, why should you like having me?’ He did not wait, however, for a reply. ‘Well, if you want me, I suppose I might as well. Here, or another place, it comes to the same thing.’
And pulling back a chair he sat down hurriedly at the table. At that moment the boy arrived with breakfast.
It was the usual two-course meal. Eggs and bacon, preceded by a sardine fish-cake. But though Arnold doused his plate in tomato ketchup, and stirred three lumps of sugar into his tea, through every mouthful that he took he was conscious of that acrid, persistent taste of burning. No wonder they got nervy with this smell about the place.
‘By the way,’ he said, ‘Padre Martin will be dropping in today for tiffin.’
Butterman grunted.
‘Good fellow, Martin,’ Arnold added.
Butterman made no comment. He finished his fish-cake, helped himself to three of the four eggs upon the dish and consumed them resolutely. ‘Whatever else there may be wrong with him, the fellow’s appetite’s all right,’ thought Arnold. It was not till he had finished his fourth piece of toast and marmalade that Butterman spoke again.
‘Do you often,’ he asked, ‘have Martin here to tiffin?’
‘Not too often; now and again.’
‘Once every four months or so, for example?’
‘About that.’
‘And when did you ask him last?’
‘I forget, some while back at least. It seemed about time to be asking him again.’
Butterman grunted.
‘Tiffin isn’t a very usual meal to be asked to. It isn’t like dinner, is it? One doesn’t usually,’ he went on, ‘ask a man to tiffin unless it’s for some special reason. I wonder why you asked Martin here today.’
‘My dear fellow …’
But Butterman, once he had set the question, appeared to have lost all interest in the subject.
‘Here, or another place,’ he said cryptically, ‘it comes to the same thing.’
And rising from the table he walked over to the wicker chair by the veranda, drew from his pocket the long steel file and set himself once again to smooth the curved surface of his nails.
Arnold drew a perplexed hand across his forehead. Where was he? What was happening to him? Was this the friendly, familiar world in which he had lived so long? As he walked out of his bungalow, he felt himself to be escaping from the poisoned atmosphere of some prison house.
He had left the house earlier than usual, but the car was already waiting for him.
‘Straight to the office, master?’ asked the Syce.
Arnold shook his head. He had need before the day’s work started of a few moments of fresh air, and the arrival of the laundry account had reminded him that there were several articles of which he stood in need.
‘Drive to Yem-Sing’s,’ he said.
It was nine o’clock: the heat of the day was still some hours distant, and the main street of Chiengmai was crowded with men and women hurrying by in their brightly-coloured singlets: many of them carrying slung across their shoulders deep tins of water and baskets of fruits and vegetables. They drove slowly, for the motorcar was as new a visitant as the railway to North Siam, and neither had the Laos acquired the habit of avoiding danger, nor had the drivers learnt to resist the thrill of speed; incapacities so regrettable in their consequences that the authorities had marked at either end of the main street a series of artificial bumps in the centre of the roadway to enforce a slackening of pace. At a speed of little more than five miles an hour Arnold’s car drew up before a Chinese store.
‘I want quite a lot of things, Yem-Sing,’ he said.
The merchant passed his hands across each other; and his lips parted gratefully over teeth blackened by many passages of lime-tinged betel-nut, as Arnold hurried through his list.
‘Six shirts,’ he repeated, ‘six singlets, two dozen handkerchiefs, a dozen pair of socks, white socks. Ah, but that is the one thing I cannot manage. I have not in my shop a single pair of white socks left.’
‘What!’
‘I am sorry, master, extremely sorry.’ And in the Lao fashion he lifted his clasped hands before his face. ‘But only a week back the naï Butterman came in here and bought every pair of white socks I had.’
‘The naï Butterman!’
‘Yes, master, truthfully. “How many pairs have you of white socks?” he asks. Forty or fifty pairs, I tell him. “Very well,” he answers, “I will take the lot.” ‘
‘Forty or fifty pairs!’
‘To be exact there were forty-seven.’
For the second time that day Arnold rested a perplexed hand upon his forehead. Forty-seven pairs, and not one pair sent to the laundry; and in the jungle that curious outburst against his servant; and that strangely intonated phrase: ‘Wouldn’t it be better if I went?’ Those questions about Martin; the odd expression of his eyes when he had come that evening into his tent. Where was it, what had happened to it, that friendly, that familiar world?
As he came out into the sun-drenched street he noticed Martin’s car passing on the other side of it.
‘You’re coming to tiffin today, aren’t you?’ he called out.
For answer the Padre drew his car up beside the pavement.
‘Tell me, how is Butterman?’
Arnold shook his head helplessly. ‘It’s something I don’t understand. Something I don’t begin to understand. At times he seems perfectly all right, so perfectly all right that I begin to wonder whether it isn’t just myself imagining things. It’s a hopeless situation.’
‘I know, I know. And we’re so far here from everything. If we could only get him down to Singapore or Bangkok even. If only a specialist in these things could look at him. It’s outside my scope.
I can only guess at things. Ah well, at any rate, we shall have some common ground to compare notes on after tiffin.’
It was a tiffin of which Arnold was able subsequently to remember little. He could not recall what they ate or what they drank, or of what they spoke. There remained only the recollection of vague constraint: of himself talking loudly and incessantly on topics that were of no interest to him: of Martin’s thin, high-pitched voice breaking in with an occasional comment: of Butterman taciturn and glowering, eating prodigiously of every dish: a vague impression. Everything that was said and thought during the early stages of the meal was muffled and obliterated by the one unforgettable moment of dramatic action. The rest was dim. He could not even remember how that moment had come about. Suddenly it had been there upon them. One minute it had not been, the next it was. One minute he had been talking in quick, querulous, excited sentences, the next for some obscure reason unknown to him he had ceased; had realized suddenly that Butterman in a trance almost of detachment was leaning on his elbows across the table, the hands lifted before his face, examining his fingers with the minutest care; had realized that the Padre in a trance also was gazing at them as in moments of hypnotic influence the subject will gaze at some bright object, a shilling, a crystal, a metal disc; found himself as his voice trickled into silence, gazing in his own turn, fascinated, spellbound, at those thin, tapered fingers that slowly one by one Butterman was revolving under his inspection.
Of how long they sat there Arnold had no idea. It was one of those instants that belonging as they do to eternity are timeless. There was the dateless interval of silent gazing, then the sudden shattering of that instant; the lifted head, Butterman’s glance passing from one to the other, and the coming into his face as he realized he was being watched of an incredibly sinister expression.
‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Ah!’ And he laughed, leaning farther forward across the table, so that his hands were held almost beneath their faces. ‘Look at them, look closely—they’re interesting hands. They’re firm, strong hands; feel the bones, how strong they are. Such strong hands, it wouldn’t be difficult for them to kill a man. They’d go round his throat so quietly: they’d just tighten, tighten, tighten, so firm and strong: such firm strong fingers, right to the finger-tips, to the very extremities: the extreme extremities.’
Coldly, regularly, inexorably, like the chill, persistent rain of a northern twilight, the words followed one another. Then suddenly with a laugh, he flung himself back in his chair.
‘By the way, Padre,’ he said jovially, ‘I know what I wanted to ask you: you’re the very man to help me. I wonder if you could find a new boy for me?’
The change of attitude was so startling that the Padre could do no more than stammer feebly:
‘New boy? But what’s wrong with the one you’ve got?’
‘What’s wrong?’ and into the voice had returned the note of menace. ‘He spies, that’s what’s wrong with him, he spies. And I’ve no use for people who spy on me. I should remember that, Padre, if I were you. I get rid of them … one way or another. You’ll get me a new boy, won’t you?
‘By the way, Arnold,’ he went on. ‘I’ve thought of rather a good scheme for stabilizing the value of the tical round Be-koy.’ And for the next twenty minutes he discussed that very real problem of jungle life, the fluctuating value of exchange, with admirable clearness.
‘I can’t make it out,’ said Arnold afterwards. ‘There are times when he seems the sanest man I’ve ever come across. At others … well, you saw what he was like … and one can’t place it, that’s the trouble. One doesn’t know what one’s up against.’
It was at that moment that the boy who had been moving for some seconds at Arnold’s side, came forward. On his face was a peculiar smile of triumph.
‘I have found out, master,’ he announced, ‘whence comes that smell.’
‘Ah!’
‘It is the naï Butterman.’
‘What!’
‘Yes, master, the sweeper discovered it. Every morning the naï Butterman burns in his bathroom the pair of socks that he has worn the day before.’
Although there had been no creak of a lifted latch, no sound of a footfall in the passage, Arnold was conscious as he bent forward among the papers on his desk that someone was standing beside him in the room; someone who stood watching him with intent, malicious eyes. And for a moment he felt so terrified that he did not dare to move, did not dare to disturb that silent watching, did not dare to face the menace that was waiting him. Then with a quick jerk of resolution he looked up.
‘Well, Butterman,’ he said, ‘and what is it I can do for you?’
By an effort of will he kept his voice natural and level-toned. But he felt the palms of his hands go moist as he met that glazed, uncannily bright stare.
‘I’m rather busy at the moment,’ he went on, ‘but if you’d care to sit down and wait a little …’
Butterman laughed. He was not wearing a topee, and the hair that fell dankly along his forehead was dishevelled. There was no collar-stud at his throat and the silk tie that held his shirt was knotted loosely. His sleeves were rolled above his elbow. In his eyes there was that same expression of hunted and desperate cunning with which he had leant forward an hour back across the tiffin table, and his laugh had that false unnatural note which one associates with the villains of melodrama. In his hand he was holding a heavy Colt revolver.
‘Wait,’ he cried. ‘Oh, I don’t mind waiting for a little. I’m in no hurry. Padre Martin will be at the hospital another two hours yet.’
‘So you’re going to see Padre Martin?’
‘Yes, when I’ve done with you,’ and stepping forward he seated himself on the edge of the table, without lowering for an instant the revolver that he had levelled at Arnold’s head. ‘So you thought you could spy on me,’ he said; ‘that you could bring me down from the jungle, and keep me in your house and spy on me; that you could have Padre Martin to tiffin with you, watching and watching till the moment came. You thought you were very clever, didn’t you, that I shouldn’t see through you as easily as I saw through that boy of mine. You weren’t quite clever enough, though, were you?’
‘Now, my dear fellow, do be sensible. What on earth is there that we could be spying on you for?’
‘Spying on me, what for? Ah, but my good fellow, there’s no need for me to pretend things any longer. We know well enough, we three, you and Martin and I. My boy may suspect, but he doesn’t know. There’s just we three, and there’s no need for us to hide things from each other. We can be open now, can’t we? It’s so easy to be open now. Nothing’s any longer at stake. It doesn’t matter what we say or what we reveal; because in such a little while now there’ll be only one of us who’ll know. Only one left by … well … shall we say by three o’clock?’
And as he leant back laughing heartily, with the revolver held unwaveringly before him, the nature of his plan grew plain to Arnold.
‘So you’re going to shoot me first; then you’re going up to the hospital to shoot Martin.’
Butterman nodded.
‘At the same time I don’t quite see how you’ll manage to get both of us.’
‘No?’
‘How could you hope to, my dear fellow? Think! A revolver’s a noisy thing. You’ll have no difficulty in doing me in, we’ll admit that, but how will you ever get out of here when you have? There’s only one way out of this room, the way you’ve come, through the main office, and there are three clerks there, to say nothing of a porter at the gate. What’ll you do when you’ve finished me?’
‘I shall walk straight out through your office to the car that is waiting for me in the porch.’
‘With all those clerks there?’
‘They won’t stop me. They’ll be too astonished. People always are when something unusual happens. They’ll be stunned into inaction. Suppose, for instance, you were to stand up on a table in the Ritz, shout “Silence” and then recite at the top of your voice an indecent limerick. What, do you imagine, would happen? That you’d be flung out? Nothing of the sort. People would just sit and gape at you, the waiters, the band, the diners, and you’d get down from the table, walk straight out of the room, and no one would say a word to you. Which is exactly what I shall do when I’ve shot you. I shall fire twice to make quite certain; then I shall walk out and no one will say a word to me. Long before the hue and cry has started I’ll have settled my account with Martin.’
He spoke calmly, quietly, with the acute, clear sanity, that during the last days had characterized his discussion of every topic. It was as though by some law of compensation, the sickness that had warped one side of his intelligence, had intensified his perceptions in every other. And as Arnold sat back in his chair a sensation of utter helplessness possessed him. Through the window of his office he could hear the hooting of a car. In the office beyond two of his clerks were softly chattering together. Above his head the punkah was flapping lazily; the boy who worked it, the string of it tied round his toe, was rocking, half asleep, with a slow, measured rhythm, only six feet away behind that partition of thin match-board. All round him was the friendly, familiar world, pursuing its friendly, familiar course. And here he was trapped and weaponless.
‘I should doubt,’ continued Butterman, ‘whether it was worth while prolonging the discussion.’
And on the butt of the revolver his finger tightened.
Arnold braced himself. He was not the man to meet death un-protestingly. His desk, which was flanked with two narrow sets of drawers, was cut away in the centre to ease his legs; and he wondered whether he might not be able by slipping downwards suddenly, and pushing upwards to overturn the desk and Butterman simultaneously. Anyhow it was worth trying. Even if he did not save his own life, he might create sufficient disturbance or delay to rescue Martin. Slackening the muscles of his legs and gripping tightly the seat of his chair so as to ensure strong leverage, he steadied himself to dive. ONE—TWO—he began to count, but just as he was about to spring, he noticed a sudden change in his assistant. A perplexed look had come into his face, the muzzle of the revolver had begun to waver; he lifted his left hand towards his head, his lips quivered. He staggered to his feet, to stand swaying stupidly. His fingers loosened their hold on the revolver, letting it fall clattering upon the floor. ‘My head,’ he sobbed, ‘my head.’ And his face pressed tightly into his hands, he began to sway like a drunken man across the room.
‘Sunstroke!’ gasped Arnold. ‘Sunstroke! He had no topee!’
And leaping to his feet, he caught the reeling body into his arms.
An hour later in the small hospital ward that is reserved for American and European patients, Arnold and the Padre were standing at the foot of Butterman’s bed. He was less restless now, packed as he was in ice, but he still tossed occasionally from side to side, and from his lips fell ceaselessly a delirious muttering.
‘Those little painted bungalows up there …’ that was the gist of his tortured rambling. ‘Shut away up there by oneself, all the sweetness of one’s life denied one: the softness of a woman’s arms, the softness of a woman’s smile, not fit for them, not fit … too great a danger … the hands and feet … the bones eaten away, perishing … the scorn, the helplessness … not fit … not fit … they take one and they shut one away up there. They spy on you and watch you, wait till they are quite certain, then they take you … take you … and shut you away in a little bungalow … leave you there to rot and perish … fingerless, toeless, featureless, they wait and watch and wait for you.…’
That was the gist of what he said.
‘So he thought,’ murmured Arnold, ‘that he was a leper, that we were spying on him. But he hasn’t a symptom, has he, of leprosy?’
‘Not a symptom.’
‘Then in heaven’s name …’
But the Padre lifted his hand. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said, ‘I think I see.’
And as they stood there listening, gradually, through the labyrinth of repetitions and inaudibilities, the meaning of his trouble wound its way into the daylight, so that they came to see through what association of ideas the fever of an uneased longing had worked through that distracted brain till its owner had come to believe himself the victim of that dread disease.
‘Not fit to marry,’ the voice went on; ‘the loneliness and the monotony and the fever; for eight months of the year living by herself … no dancing, no theatres, the treachery of the climate … and if she were to go out to the jungle, the squalor of a narrow tent … not fit to marry … the fellow who would dare to ask a woman to share that life … not fit to marry … You’re right, Padre, not to let them marry … to shut them away in those little painted houses … danger’s too great … the softness and sweetness of a woman, the way she smiles, the way she speaks, the way she opens her arms to you … the swooning sweetness of a woman … no, no, Padre, you’re quite right … they’d only degrade it, spoil it, tarnish it, out in the jungle … too squalid, too narrow … lights and music and laughter … must give it them … they must have it … not fit to marry … shut them away in those bungalows … leave them to rot there in their sickness … not fit to marry, Padre … you’re quite right … shut us away, the lot of us … not fit to marry, not fit …’
So the voice babbled on, and across that bed of suffering, Arnold’s eyes met the Padre’s in a look that absolved them of any need of words. They understood. There was nothing further to be said.
Another white man had been beaten by the jungle.
They got him back.
A fellow in the Sarawak Company had his leave hastened by several weeks, and Butterman, his suspicions momentarily stifled by the weakness that followed his recovery, allowed himself to be persuaded by one of the junior assistants to accompany him. He would never come back, of course. Letters had been sent ahead to the London Office. The facts had been set out. Arrangements would be made for the proper medical treatment on the ship. There would be a pension waiting, and efforts would be made to find him a suitable job at home. In eighteen months probably he would be all right. Siam was finished though. Never again would he see the steaming, luxuriant greenery of the jungle, nor the little attap huts beside the river, nor watch the grey logs swing slowly on their long road south to Bangkok.
Another white man beaten.
It was wistfully, with a heavy heart, that Arnold walked down to the Chiengmai Club on the evening of the day on which they said good-bye to Butterman. One less among them, and how few there were left now of his contemporaries. Martin and the Consul and Atkinson who ran the Sarawak Company. New faces otherwise, new faces that came and went: fellows that came out for a year on trial and flung their hands in after seven months; fellows who signed on as permanents, whom every one liked and trusted, for whom every one prophesied quick promotion, and of whom the jungle sooner or later got the better, who were brought in as Farquharson had been on a stretcher, broken by malaria; or were sent back on a liner, their nerves gone, like Butterman. A hard life, too hard possibly for the white man. Not many came through as he had done to the last chukka. And in a few weeks he’d be going.
Only a few weeks now. And for the first time in the course of those twenty-five years, those seven chukkas, he experienced a feeling of regret, almost of nostalgia at the thought of saying good bye to these familiar scenes. Twenty-five years. A large chunk out of a man’s life. His youth and his early manhood, his first grey hairs; and he began to wonder whether he would find life in London so good a thing as he had expected. What would there be after all for him to do? His contemporaries would be strangers to him now, and it was not easy to start making friends at forty-five. His father was dead; his brother settled down in Chichester. There were no open doors waiting for him. And he remembered with misgiving the life that is led in London by the majority of pensioned Englishmen: the aimless empty days, the hanging about the Sports Club, the waiting for some fellow to drop in with whom you may exchange gossip of the far places you will not see again. Long empty days, and the drab, furtive romances with which one endeavoured to enliven them.
He hardly spoke during his game of golf. And afterwards when the sun had set, and the brief tropic twilight had darkened into night, he did not join the others at the large round table where the bottles and glasses were set out. Instead he walked slowly home wards at Martin’s side, and as they turned through the gate of the Club, for the first time in his life he passed his arm beneath the Padre’s. For a little way they walked in silence: in a silence that was, however, peculiarly intimate. The Butterman incident had drawn them very close together.
‘ We shall miss you,’ the Padre said at length. ‘I sometimes wonder what we shall do without you. It isn’t so much that we shall be losing a friend, though that will be bad enough; for we’ve become accustomed to the loss of friends. It’s, if you’ll forgive my saying so, what you’ve stood for here. Life isn’t easy, in a small society like ours. There are many temptations, many difficulties. I don’t think we shall realize till you’ve gone, how much you’ve meant in … well … the keeping of things clean and straight.’
It was the first time that the Padre had ever spoken intimately to Arnold, but there was no sign of embarrassment in his speech.
‘We shall miss you,’ he said, ‘more than I can say.’
‘Yet I’ve not been what you’d call a good man, Padre.’
The Padre hesitated a moment before he answered. Not out of any embarrassment, but because he was searching for the exact words with which to convey his meaning. He knew well enough to what Arnold was referring: the small bungalow beside the river, and the unbaptized children who were growing into manhood in Malaya.
‘A good man,’ he echoed. ‘I suppose by our Western ideas you wouldn’t be. And I don’t mind admitting that when I left America, I came here in the belief that there would be two main evils for me to fight against. Alcohol was one, and the second and greater one, the white man’s attitude to the brown women. But that’s forty years ago. And in the course of forty years one’s view-point alters. I don’t mean that I think right the things I once thought wrong; it isn’t that, but that those things which I once looked on as mortal sins, seem now, well, how shall I put it, just rather a pity. There are other things that are very much more important than a standard of chastity that can never be more than relative. Courage, forbearance, kindliness; above all things kindliness; those seem to me now the most truly Christian qualities. We are so few here and so far. It is so terribly important that we should be patient with one another. We shall miss you more than I can say.’
They had reached the bridge over the river, the point where their road separated, and there were tears in Arnold’s eyes as he said good night to Martin, and it was slowly that he strolled on in the warm darkness, under the tropic stars, watching the muddy waters of the Be-kang swirl past him. Twenty-five years. And it was a strange world that awaited him, a world where he would have no certain habitat, where no one needed him, where no one perhaps would miss him when he went. He had talked of getting things both ways, but might it be that it was to end in his getting them in neither? Something like a sob rose in his throat as he faced the prospect of his uprooting. He was loved after all and needed here. For a long while he lingered, beside the river, and when finally he hastened his pace it was not in the direction of his own house, but in that of the small bungalow where he had spent increasingly little time of late.
To his surprise he found Cheam alone. She was dressed, for he had never made any attempt to Westernize her, in a short blue silk jacket that fell shapelily over a gold and scarlet sinn; her feet were bare; her hair, that was bright with coconut-oil, was drawn back tightly into the clutch of a high tortoiseshell and enamel comb. Her teeth, for from the betel habit he had discouraged her, were unfashionably clean. But from the corner of her mouth she was puffing slowly at a large white cheroot. As he came into the room she lifted her head in the calm, unemotional manner that had from the first characterized their meetings. There had never been at any time between them what Europe would have admitted as passionate relations.
She looked at him steadily and incuriously. But as their eyes met he was conscious on this evening of self-discovery, of a curious sense of kinship with her. They were in the same boat after all, exiles both of them; exiles from their youth and their ambitions. This life of theirs together had not been by any means the thing they had dreamed of for themselves. It was something quite other that they had planned. He had had his dream of Oxford, of English life and English shires and she, no doubt, of such a mating and such a life as had their roots in the dateless annals of her race. But for each of them fate had intervened; on each had been laid the duty of obligation to a family. He had come here that his brother might go to Oxford, and she in her turn had come to him because her parents could not afford to refuse the three hundred rupees that were her purchase. They were both in the same boat. And that same curious sense of belonging to this woman and to this country of his exile, that earlier in the evening had made him forsake the round table and the laughter and the drinks, returned with redoubled force upon him. England had grown a foreign country to him. He had taken root here, by Babel’s waters.
Softly across the night came the tinkle of a temple bell: the symbol of that Eastern doctrine which preaches subservience to one’s fate: the acceptance unprotestingly of one’s dharma.
‘I shall be retiring, you know, Cheam,’ he said, ‘in a few weeks from now.’
She bent her head slowly forward and he knew well enough what was passing behind that inscrutable masked face. How much of paddy-field was he to offer her and how many ticals.
‘Very likely,’ he said, ‘I shall be staying on in Chiengmai. I am thinking of building myself a house across the river. It would be easier probably if you were to leave this bungalow and come and live there with me.’
Again she bent her head. Her face showed neither pleasure nor surprise. Child of Buddha, she was subservient to her dharma; to her fate, as to his ardour, passive and irresponsive.
‘In which case,’ he went on, ‘it would probably be simpler if we were to be married according to English law.’
‘It is as the Naï wishes,’ she replied.
1927