Hot Countries (18 page)

“Very interesting. Here I am afraid you will not find much. The people, you see, do not wear them.”

“I know.”

We looked sadly at each other. There seemed no more to be said. I got up. At that Gimvo Sanjbo looked concerned. He did not know why I had come. But I had brought a letter. I had been written about from England. I had come as a friend. Something needed to be done.

“You go now,” he said. “But I like to do something for you first. I like to give you something. What can I give you?”

He looked round his tin-lined shelves. “Tea?” he said.

“No, you would not want that. Some beef? Some corned beef? No, you would not like corned beef.” His glance shifted from shelf to shelf despondently. I was about to put him out of his embarrassment by accepting some curried prawns when a glow of relief and pleasure lit his face. “I
know,” he said, “and Shepherd & Gray's own product. Some boot polish.”

§

Every table was full at the G.O.H. that night when I went in to dinner. The man I was placed opposite was youthfully middle-aged. He gave the impression of having spent a good deal of his life in the tropics. There was a pint bottle of Bordeaux on the table. He introduced himself by passing it across to me.

“Help yourself,” he said. “You needn't feel shy about it. I'm not paying for it. It'll go down on my expense account. This is my last night in Ceylon. I'm doing myself well.”

He was an auditor, he told me. An auditor of bank accounts, I gathered, though what exactly that meant I do not know. Perhaps I misunderstood him. At any rate, his job, whatever it was, involved a good deal of travel. That night he was sailing for Calcutta.

“I'll be a week there. Then Rangoon. Rangoon will be better. Less civilised. Less officious, if you understand me.” He hesitated, eyeing me cautiously. “Been in the East long?” he asked.

“This is my first night in it.”

He appeared relieved. “Ah, well, then you've everything to learn. Queer place, the East; swank, most of it. Look around you. All those fellows behaving as though they were lords. Haven't a penny, any of them.” He leant across the table confidentially. “You take my advice. Go steady here. It's all very well swanking into the club and shouting ‘Boy!' ordering rounds of drinks, signing for them as though twenty rupees weren't anything to you. At the end of the month the chits come in, and eight hundred rupees a month'll take some earning.”

He spoke caustically. He was not of the public school type. I suspect that between Delhi and Colombo English society itches with class consciousness.

“Look at all these fellows,” he went on. “How many of
them have an anna in the bank? Why do you think they stay out here so long? Not because they love the East. You bet not. Because they can't afford to leave it. Signed too many chits. That's the trouble with them. They may give themselves airs, but how many of them,” he added, producing from his waistcoat pocket a vast half-hunter, “have got a gold watch and chain?”

He dilated on the theme while we worked our way through the many-coursed and uninspired dinner. As we reached the savoury he tapped his finger against the menu.

“This is all very well,” he said. “But who wants to eat seven courses? A piece of steak, or a cut off the joint, with some cheese to follow. That's all I want. And that's what I'm going to have when I'm through with this. Eleven pounds a week, that's all I'll need. A little house out in Northwood, say. And I'll have my mother with me. She'll do me a better dinner than these people. That's what I'm working for. She's had a bad time, poor dear. Not much of a chap, my father. But I'll be able to make her last years good for her. Eleven pounds a week, and a little house and my mother. That's all I care about. Finished dinner? What about some billiards?”

We went.

By the time we had played our game and drunk a beer or two it was after ten. As we walked out into the empty streets a number of rickshaw men ran up to us whispering; “Missie, Missie.” My companion paused.

“Three days to Calcutta, not much chance of anything on the boat. Then a day or two to find my feet. Yes, I suppose I'd better. Coming too?”

I am ready if not to taste any drink once at least to sniff its bouquet. And the night, the velvet tropic night, was propitious to adventure. Along a road starred with fireflie we were hurried toward the open country.

“Where on earth,” I asked, “are we being taken?”

My companion laughed.

“The bishops have cleared up Colombo. One's got to go far afield nowadays.”

We certainly did go far afield. We must have been travelling for a full half-hour before the rickshaws stopped in the middle of what appeared to be a large field, though, as there was no moon, it was too dark to see. There was a lot of whispering, the darkening of the rickshaw lamps, a long pause; then the sound of feet shuffling through the grass. There was more whispering. Then the apologetic voice of the rickshaw men. “One only can we find.” Said my companion, “We'd better toss.” I waived the right. Ten minutes later he returned. “Well, I think home,” I said.

“Really? Ah, well, perhaps you're wise.”

On the way back he talked to me about the house in Northwood and the dinners that his mother would cook for him on eleven pounds a week.

§

Next morning I went to Kandy. And than Kandy there can be in the world few lovelier places. There are its temples and its lake; its streets are broad, its air is cool. The Queen's Hotel is one of the best Eastern hotels that I have stayed in. I imagine that in the right mood and in the right company Kandy might be one of one's happiest travel memories. I was in neither. I had no company, and at the dawn of every day I told myself that had I remained upon the
Amboise
I should be only a few hours from Malaya and the friends who were awaiting me. The four days that I spent at Kandy were profitably industrious, but the harder one works during the day the more does one need congenial companionship during the evening.

I returned in a disgruntled temper to find Colombo intolerably hot and crowded with festivity. It was the week when the Governor's Cup was run for, when Up Country played Colombo at Rugby football, and many of the young men from the plantations were in town. With a jaundiced eye I watched them filling the hotels with exuberant, self-conscious self-assertion. A sorrier exhibition I thought I had not ever seen. Here, it seemed to me, were a number of undistinguished people of no account in their own country,
who possessed no qualities that would entitle them in their own country to recognition and esteem, behaving as if they were feudal chieftains for no better reason than that their parents had happened to be whites. I know now that I was wrong to form that estimate of them, that people must be seen in their own setting, that my judgment of the young planters of Ceylon was as unfocused as would have been during the war an attempt to appraise the qualities of the temporary officer as a man and a soldier on his behaviour in the lounge of the Regent Palace Hotel.

I counted the hours to the sailing of the
Angers.
When she arrived, however, except for the fact that I was being carried by her to Singapore, I would just as soon have been at Kandy. At no time can the
Angers
be a pleasant ship. German originally, she is cumbersome and ill-appointed. Second-class passengers, though their meals are served separately, occupy the same deck as the first-class passengers, with the result that the decks are uncomfortably crowded. There was not, for example, a deck-chair available when I got on board. It would need cheery company to make a trip on the
Angers
enjoyable. And cheeriness is not a characteristic of French ships. The French people carry on to their ships the exclusiveness of their domestic lives. They are not easy or welcoming of approach. When you board an English ship in the middle of her run, before you have eaten your first meal, the secretary of the sports committee has entered your name for innumerable competitions. “Why can't these people let me alone?” you think, as you wait till the saloon is empty to pass your opponents into the second round. But on that trip I would have been grateful for egg and spoon races and deck quoits and rings. During the six days between Colombo and Singapore I spoke to one man only, and not to him except at meals. I counted the minutes to Singapore.

But Singapore can be a frightening city. To the stranger most cities are. It is big and busy. The rickshaw boys speak no English, and you feel forlornly helpless as you try to explain to them where you want to go in English that you imagine will be more comprehensible if you pidgin it. As
they hurry you through the wide, clean streets you have no confidence that they are understanding you. Under any circumstances I should have been glad when the
Kinta
sailed for Penang at four o'clock. As it was, I was to count the seconds. For in a mood of unreflecting folly I bought myself four silk shirts; and it was not till I was sipping a lime-squash in the lounge of the Europe that I discovered that I had in my pocket barely enough money to buy a ticket and get down to the steamer, and that as it was on a Penang bank that I was authorised to cash cheques I had no means of getting any more.

“That's pretty silly of me,” I thought. “It looks as though I shall have to miss my lunch.”

The thought did not particularly worry me. I had eaten a late and ample breakfast; in the tropics the less one eats the better. I sat back in my chair contentedly reading the account of the last Test Match. It was not till the tables round me began to fill that I started to wonder how and where I was to put in the time between now and the sailing of my ship. It was twelve o'clock. The ferry left at three. Three hours had to be filled in somehow. I had nowhere in which to spend them, no room, no club, no flat, no place in the whole town in which I should be justified in sitting without payment. I had never realised before the extent to which we hire everything. It is not only flats we rent. We rent for an hour with a quart of beer the wooden stool of a public-house, with a cocktail the small table of the Trocadero bar, with a lunch the green and gilt of the Berkeley. Dejectedly I wondered for how long I should have been held to have rented my chair in the lounge of the Europe for a ten-cent lime-squash.

The lounge was rapidly becoming full. Newcomers paused in the doorway searching carefully for an empty table. As a marooned sailor watches the tide come in, I saw chair after vacant chair appropriated. Now there were only two free tables. Now there was only one. Now that had gone. There were only scattered here and there a spare chair or two. And I at my table was occupying four with a solitary glass of lime-squash upon the table. And all the time people were coming in. A waiter was eyeing me with distrust. “Who,” he was
saying to himself, “is this wretched stranger who is keeping a whole table to himself, robbing me of tips and custom? “Every moment I grew more uncomfortable.” I must go,” I thought. “It's no good. I've got to go.” One's purse has to be full before one can enslave a waiter. I left the hotel in such confusion that on the way I handed the cloakroom attendant a one-cent tip.

It was only half-past twelve. Out of a cloudless sky an equatorial sun was blazing. Heat and glare quivered from the stone pavements and the yellow buildings. I had not walked ten yards before I had begun to feel my shoulders damp against my shirt. For two hours and a half I had to endure that heat and glare. Singapore is a brave city, a brave and lovely city, with fine streets and stately buildings, a broadly curving, sampan-covered river, and Chinese shops with gold lettering on black. But it is no city for a white man's patrolling between the hours of half-past twelve and three. Those two and a half hours were in all that unsatisfactory month to which they were the climax, the most wretched. I do not know how I spent them. I loitered before shop windows. I escaped out of the heat into the shadowed cool of a bookshop, making enquiries about such books as they were the least likely to possess, dreading that they might possess them; turning the pages of a magazine, suspecting that at any moment a voice would thunder behind my ear, “If you want to buy that magazine, then buy it. If not, go out!” I know nothing that reduces one's morale more effectively than an empty pocket. One feels at the mercy of anyone who chooses to insult one. I counted the seconds to the sailing of the
Kinta.

And it was a moment worth counting seconds to, a moment of utter contrast. It was a neat and dapper boat. Clean and polished after the uncarpeted passages of the
Angers
; small and intimate after the strangeness of unfamiliar places. English was being talked instead of French. There was a pleasant young Irishman with whom I immediately fell into conversation. I felt myself at home again. With all my troubles at the back of me. Thirty-six hours away Penang
was waiting; and at Penang there would be friends and a bank account. I lay back in a long chair utterly at peace. I have rarely known a moment of more complete relief.

Usually it is to such moments of anticipation that one's memory returns with the greatest fondness. However disenchanting the place or meeting that one has counted the seconds to may prove to be, one can always look back and say, “Well, anyhow, there was that moment when the liner sailed, when the bustling little tugs berthed the vast ship against the docks, when the train puffed slowly from the station. At any rate, I had those moments.” In this case, however, fate was charitable, and the sailing of the
Kinta
was not only the curtain upon a series of exacting circumstances—it was the prelude to two of the best months I have ever known. Malaya and Penang were not to belie anything that I had ever dreamt of them.

With the exception of Tahiti, I was never sorrier to leave any place than I was Penang. It is not easy to explain, however, why my stay there was so happy. In the same way that it is more difficult for the novelist to depict a sympathetic than an unsympathetic character, it is easier to show why you dislike than why you like a place. And the charm of Penang is made the harder to convey by the fact that for the Englishman all places out of England governed by Englishmen are superficially the same. As it is in Malaya, so it is in the Caribbean.