My Place in the Bazaar Page 7

  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?’

  ’How do you mean?’

  ‘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 u
se 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 t
hat 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.