Hot Countries Page 11

  “That was what I told myself. But you know how it is when panic catches hold of a place. By eleven o’clock our nerves had gone. Three hours and still no news, with the wildest rumours flying round, not one of us could work. We sat in the club, forgetting our rum punches, one thought only in our minds. I shall never forget that morning: the suspense, the terror, the uncertainty. Midday and still no message had come through. The boat that had been sent out to make enquiries had not returned. We sat and waited. It was not till one o’clock that we knew.”

  He paused and shrugged his shoulders.

  “It’s twenty-six years ago,” he said. “That’s a long time. One can forget most things in that time. One thinks one’s heart broken. But it mends. One thinks one’s life is over. But it isn’t. One goes on living. One makes the best out of what’s left. I’ve not had a bad best, either. I’ve had a happy marriage. I’m proud of my children. I’ve made a position. But,” he again shrugged his shoulders, “I don’t know that since that day I’ve felt that anything mattered in particular.”

  I think that in that anecdote is expressed what life has been for the whole of Martinique, for the whole of his generation of Martinique. The carrying on with life in face of the feeling that nothing really matters.

  IV

  “Gone Native”

  In Tahiti, where American and English mailsarrived simultaneously once a month, mail day invariably found one waiting outside the post office. In Martinique, where mails arrived at frequent and irregular intervals, one left the shipping office to forward one’s letters as they came. I had no idea even that a boat was in when Armantine appeared one morning, carrying an envelope, across which trailed at varying angles Inez Holden’s incredible calligraphy.

  As you know [it ran], I never begin or end my letters or answer other people’s, though sometimes I just write. “What is it like in the West Indies and are the natives nice?” This is a true quotation of a remark J heard fall from the lips of a débutante during dinner the other evening, her hostess having put her next to a young man from “foreign parts.” Actually I have no idea what your life can be like. The tropics to the ungeographical are, of course, as much a mystery as the whole of modern life must always be to the unscientific. I might imagine you as having “gone native” to the tune of barbaric tom-toms, fuzzy hair and prancing niggers, degraded to “white cargo,” or whatever it is However, I am quite open-minded and for all I know it may be much worse still, for you may be doing your best to be a “white man” to the last, clinging to conventions and dressing for dinner stuffed in a stiff shirt every evening in your tropical oubliette.

  Of London and your friends what have I to tell you? I am a very bad medium for news and have become more misanthropic than ever. The other morning the fog lifted and I walked in the park, where I encountered Harold Acton. He was altogether witty and enchanting from every aspect, but so like my imitation of him which once amused you, that it seemed as if my own words were echoing back to me.

  It was a longish letter; there was talk of London, of our friends there; of her first novel, Sweet Charlatan, that was in the press.

  I am filled with horror at the idea [she wrote], with all the swooning affectations of an actress at her first night, except that mine is not only affectation. Did you feel like this about your first novel? or were you too young to feel self-conscious? or is it so long ago that you’ve forgotten? And do you really like Sweet Charlatan as much as you said you did? Write and encourage me. Write, even if you can’t encourage me. It would amuse me to read of your vast life in the tropics through the diminutive medium of your neat handwriting,

  It was the first news that I had had from England for many days. London had begun to seem a very great way off. With a direct vividness that letter brought it back to me. Just as clearly as I could see Inez herself, loitering into Boulestin’s in a scarlet coat held round by a black belt, a little carelessly worn, or hurrying back to her flat from a day’s flying at the aerodrome, or laughing across a dinner table under the light of candles; just as clearly as I saw her could I see the world she wrote of: its parties and its personalities, its sights and sounds, its many-coloured stir of contacts. It was clear because it spoke of what was familiar. Language is a form of algebra. There must be a comprehended reality at the back of symbol. But what would that letter have conveyed to one who had never left Waikiki? And wondering that, I wondered whether these pages I was writing would convey any clear impression to the untravelled English and American.

  For the tropics are completely different from anything that one expects. Out of plays and films and novels, out of the conversation of our friends we build a picture of what life is like between Aden and Sourabaya. We go there and it is not like that at all. When I first sailed for them I had a mental picture very much like that of Inez Holden. On the one hand there was the white man with his dinner jacket and his stiff shirt; on the other the “gone native” cabin, the emptying bottle of rum, the tumbling half-castes. I pictured the tropics as one place, in the same way that politically one talks of America and Germany as though one were speaking of a single person. I thought of the natives as white people with brown faces. The reality was completely different.

  Certain aspects of that reality it is impossible to convey. Climate, which is a series of physical sensations, can scarcely be made real to anyone who is virgin to those sensations. You cannot explain what snow is to a Marquesan. Nor can you picture equatorial heat in terms of English heat. A heat which is just as trying, but of a different texture. Nor can the qualities of landscape be conveyed with any exactness. You can do little more than evoke in the reader’s mind a conventional image of tropic scenery. No one, for instance, who has not been both to Malaya and Polynesia could appreciate the skill with which Somerset Maugham has differentiated their separate landscapes. Much there is that cannot be conveyed. But the disparity between what one expected and what one finds largely lies in the fact that the reality would have surprised one less if one had not expected anything at all.

  Novels are a bad guide. Or rather, the novelist who has written of the tropics has been misread. Perhaps because he has dabbled in sociology so much, the novelist would appear to be regarded nowadays as the producer of unofficial blue-books. “This isn’t a true picture,” people will say. “How many people lead that kind of life? To how many people does that kind of experience come?” The novelist is adjured at the same time to tell stories and to portray the ordinary everyday life of ordinary people. If he describes a married woman in Penang arranging an illicit week in Singapore, he will be met with the criticism, “That’s not true of Penang. How many women have done that, d’you think?” Which is sociological but not literary criticism. He is expected to draw studies of society from which principles may be deduced. He is expected not only to entertain, but to fulfil a function. It is by this standard that the majority of novels seem to be reviewed. You might as well say to Edgar Wallace, “What percentage of people do you think are crooks?” It does not matter in the least whether any woman from Penang has or has not gone to Singapore to meet a lover; all that the novelist has to do is to make the reader believe that the particular woman he is describing in the particular story did. You cannot make a story out of the ordinary lives of ordinary people. Stories are made out of exceptional people in ordinary circumstances, or ordinary people in exceptional circumstances. The background of ordinary life must be accurate; that is the only restriction that is laid upon the novelist. Because, however, the idea of the tropics is so strange to the Western mind, the exceptional character and circumstances that the novelist has described are accepted as being general.

  In one of his best stories, The Out station, Somerset Maugham has portrayed a district officer in Borneo leading, a week’s journey from the nearest town, the same life that he would have lived in his club in Pall Mall. Every evening he wore a stiff white shirt, and patent leather shoes. It is true. Everything that can be put across is true. You know that that particular man in th
at situation would behave in that way. He is, however, exceptional. I have not yet met a man who wore evening clothes in the tropics in the bush. In the towns one wears evening clothes as one would in London, a white coat taking the place of the dinner jacket. On the plantations one wears what is most comfortable. Usually one wears the native dress: a sarong, or Chinese trousers. The stiff white shirt character is as rare as the “gone native” character. For him, too, I have never met. I have heard stories of men recognising in native kampongs among troupes of itinerant musicians the features of men they were at school with. But such stories have always reminded me of those anecdotes with whose example at school one’s housemaster used to exhort one to good behaviour. Anecdotes of the shabby, drink-sodden creature coming to beg for half-a-crown “In the whole of his lying story the one thing I could verify was the fact that once he had been captain of this school.” In the tropics, as elsewhere, people have gone to pieces. But the man who would go to pieces in the tropics would go to pieces anywhere. And in the popular imagination the “gone native” myth has become identified with that very different, very real problem of the tropics—the white man and the brown woman.

  §

  How considerable a problem it is only those, I think, who have lived in the tropics can appreciate. The situation amounts to this: that a man during his first ten years in the tropics can scarcely afford to marry, and that for the unmarried man there is no practical alternative between chastity and the brown woman. The white man outnumbers the white woman by fifteen to one. The white women that are there, are, for the most part, the wives of residents. There are no unattached or unchaperoned young women. Occasionally there are scandals. But if only for lack of opportunities they are rare. Privacy is difficult in a community not only where everyone knows everybody, and what everyone is doing at any given moment, but in which there are neither locked doors nor doors to lock, where every verandah is open to casual scrutiny. There is no semi-underworld. Occasionally the town will be visited by a troupe of singers. Occasionally a French saleswoman will arrive with Paris fashions. But that is all; for the most part the white life of a tropical town is consequently extremely moral.

  In French colonies the situation presents no difficulties. The French have little colour feeling. Their empire is a black one. They have, moreover, the mistress system. They expect a young man to have his petite amie, till the time for a prudent marriage comes. The British Empire, however, is white. And its young men are officially expected to remain chaste until they marry. Whatever is done by the Englishman has to be done secretly. And it is idle to pretend that vice in the East is anything but a very squalid business. Orientals, even when they love, are matter-of-fact. Over vice they throw no glamour. It would be impossible to throw any over the whispered message to a head boy on a lonely evening, the impatient pacing of a dark verandah; the silent tread of a half-seen dusky figure; the attempt to create a companionable atmosphere with a gramophone and cakes and stengahs; the hurrying back before dawn to the waiting rickshaw. That ordinarily is what it is. Sometimes the experiment of a second establishment is made, and a man is told, jocularly, that he speaks Malay too well, but it is furtive and unsatisfactory. It is impossible to visit the establishment very often. It is expensive. The white man suspects with good reason that he is being deceived by all his servants. As often as not the experiment is abandoned. There is no sense of liberty, no sense of companionship.

  “The trouble is,” a young business man in Penang said to me, “that there’s no place where you can get friendly with the girls. One would thank heaven here for the kind of night club like the ‘67 that in London one wouldn’t put one’s nose inside.” To the young bachelor that side of life cannot be anything but profoundly unsatisfying. Any averagely attractive white girl arriving in the tropics will be deluged with proposals of marriage.

  In the plantations and in towns that are not British possessions the situation is slightly different. In Bangkok, for example, it would be possible for a white man to have a Siamese girl living in his bungalow, and on the plantations there is fairly often a Malay girl who disappears discreetly when visitors arrive. There the relationship has a certain dignity. There is faithfulness on both sides. Custom creates affection. But in neither case is there any approach to the “gone native” picture. In neither case has the white man done anything that involves loss of caste. He observes the customs of the country. To the average Westerner, of course, the idea of a white person living with a brown is intensely revolting. But the average Westerner thinks of the coloured races in terms of negroes.

  I was discussing Robert Keable’s novel, Numerous Treasure, with a woman who had lived a great deal of her life in the Antilles.

  “It’s good enough,” she said. “But when you think of what it amounts to really: a white man living with the kind of girl you see about the villages …”

  “But that’s not the type of girl at all,” I said, “that Keable’s writing about. He’s not writing about niggers. He’s writing about Polynesians.”

  “I suppose they are a bit different, really,” she admitted.

  The Eskimo and the Hindoo are not more different. The Laos, the Malays, the Polynesians are proud, free-born people with a culture and traditions. They are completely separate from one another. But they have in common a heritage of personal dignity. They cannot be spoken of as the South African negro or the Australian aborigines.

  All the same, I believe it is extremely rare for there to exist a profound relationship between a white man and a brown woman. The Polynesian, sweet-natured and tender though she is, is in too simple a state of development to attach permanently to herself a modern Westerner. While though the Malays and Siamese have an old and complicated culture, it is invariably with Malays and Siamese of the coolie class that the white man allies himself and under conditions which preclude romance. These relationships, into whatever they may develop, begin as a business transaction with the parents of the girl. There is no process of selection. It is arranged through the head boy. You might just as hopefully expect a profound experience to come from the answering of an advertisement in Le Sourire.

  In most novels of the East, written by men who know the East, no attempt is made to disguise this fact. “The exceptional circumstance “that is introduced to make the story interesting is spontaneous feeling on the girl’s part. Usually it is the story, as in Spears of Deliverance and Sepia, of a man who resists the ordinary situation to yield ultimately to a girl’s wooing. These novels do not attempt to pretend that this situation is anything but exceptional. Novels are written out of dreams. It is in this way that the white man in the East dreams of things happening. They rarely do. Ninety-nine times in a hundred there is the discussion with a head boy, the bargaining with a parent. There is no glamour. There is no selection.

  “It’s a bit difficult at first,” I was told. “You’ve nothing to talk to her about except the price of paddy. After a while, you come to have things in common. You get pretty fond of her.”

  It was a teak man in North Siam who said that to me.

  “We can’t take them up into the jungle with us,” he went on. “We’re there for ten months of the year. Perhaps that’s why we’re so faithful to them. They don’t have a chance of getting on our nerves.”

  It is very much in that spirit that the majority of white men in the Far East regard these establishments. In Europe such relationships are exercising at the moment a powerful appeal on the popular imagination. The number of novels dealing with the subject is a proof of that. It: is an expression, that interest, of the desire to get a thing both ways. The European imagines that in such a situation he will know the excitement of illicit love and the comforts of domesticity. But it is not like that. He is free. He has domesticity. But love he has not got. I have yet to meet the man who will say that he has really loved a coloured woman. In the work of no writer except Kipling—and women are a side-show in Kipling’s mental make-up; in many of his greatest stories women do not ap
pear at all—is there any attempt to pretend that love as the moderns know it can exist under such conditions. Only twice does Somerset Maugham make a relationship with a coloured woman binding upon a white. And in each case he chose a Chinese woman. Love, as we understand it, is foreign to these people. “Son désir tout sensuel” wrote Maupassant—he was speaking of the Arabs—“n’est point de ceux qui dans nos pays a à nous montraient aux étoiles par des nuits pareilles. Sur cette terre amollissante et tiède, si captivante que la légende des Lotophages y est né dans l’île de Djerba, l’air est plus savoureux que partout, le soleil plus chaud, le jour plus clair. Mais le cœur ne sait pas aimer, les femmes belles et ardentes sont ignorantes de nos tendresses. Leurs âmes simples restent étrangères aux émotions sentimentales et leurs baisers, dit-on, n’enfantent point le rêve.”

  Tahiti has been called the country of love, but Western love does not exist there. The Tahitians set no store by the things we value highest. “I suppose,” I once heard it asked, “that the Tahitians make love as readily as a modern girl will kiss?” But the answer is, “Much more readily.” The kiss is to the Tahitian a proof of affection. She will kiss no one of whom she is not fairly fond. Love-making she regards as a kind of dance. An adequate partner is all she needs. She regards that partner as the English girl regards a dancing partner. You do not kiss every man you dance with. The Tahitian who is ready to make love with a complete stranger might be offended if that stranger spoke of love to her. To an American, who was leaving for San Francisco for a couple of months, his Tahitian mistress said on their last evening, “Whatever you do, don’t kiss any other girl.”

  Tahiti is love’s land. Love there is freely given. There are no discussions with head boys; no bargaining with parents; there are no responsibilities. No girl will be reluctant to have children in a country where children are well loved, where life is easy and life is happy. For the believer in free love Tahiti will seem the realisation of all his dreams. And I am not sure that Tahiti’s lesson to the white man is not the discovery that there is no such thing as free love; that where love is free there is no love; that he neither loves nor is loved who has no bonds laid on him; that it is not the person who gives to you, but the person to whom you give who matters; that to the person to whom you have given something of yourself you are bound permanently, since you must return to that person if you would be complete; which is a thing that the person who has divided himself between many loves can never be. The Don Juans declare that they are searching for the ideal mate. They are not. They are searching for themselves; they are unsatisfied because they are incomplete. It is not vaingloriousness but the desire that her whole life and being shall be in the hands of a new lover that drives woman to those confessions that cost her in the end that new lover’s faith in her.