The days are hot and damp, and
my legs are stiff with cramp,
And the office punkahs creak!
And I’d give my tired soul, for the life
that makes man whole,
And a whiff of the jungle reek!
Ha’ done with the tents of Shem, dear boys,
With office stool and pew,
For it’s time to turn to the lone Trail,
our own Trail, the
far Trail,
Dig out, dig out on the old trail
The trail that is always new.
A Parody.
It has been said that a white man,
who has lived twelve consecutive months in complete
isolation, among the people of an alien Asiatic race,
is never wholly sane again for the remainder of his
days. This, in a measure, is true; for the life
he then learns to live, and the discoveries he makes
in that unmapped land, the gates of which are closed,
locked, barred, and chained against all but a very
few of his countrymen, teach him to love many things
which all right-minded people very properly detest.
The free, queer, utterly unconventional life has a
fascination which is all its own. Each day brings
a little added knowledge of the hopes and fears, longings
and desires, joys and sorrows, pains and agonies of
the people among whom his lot is cast. Each hour
brings fresh insight into the mysterious workings of
the minds and hearts of that very human section of
our race, which ignorant Europeans calmly class as
‘niggers.’ All these things come to
possess a charm for him, the power of which grows
apace, and eats into the very marrow of the bones
of the man who has once tasted this particular fruit
of the great Tree of Knowledge. Just as the old
smugglers, in the Isle of Man, were wont to hear the
sea calling to them; go where he may, do what he will,
the voice of the jungle, and of the people who dwell
in those untrodden places, sounds in the ears of one
who has lived the life. Ever and anon it cries
to him to come back, come back to the scenes, the
people, the life which he knows and understands, and
which, in spite of all its hardships, he has learned
to love.
The great wheel of progress, like
some vast snowball, rolls steadily along, gathering
to itself all manner of weird and unlikely places and
people, filling up the hollows, laying the high hills
low. Rays of searching garish light reflected
from its surface are pitilessly flashed into the dark
places of the earth, which have been wrapped around
by the old-time dim religious light, since first the
world began. The people in whose eyes these rays
beat so mercilessly, reel and stumble blindly on in
their march through life, taking wrong turnings at
every step, and going woefully astray. Let us
hope that succeeding generations will become used
to the new conditions, and will fight their way back
to a truer path; for there is no blinking the fact
that the first, immediate, and obvious effects of
our spirit of progress upon the weaker races, tend
towards degeneration.
Ten years ago the Peninsula was very
different from what it has since become, and many
places where the steam-engine now shrieks to the church
bells, and the shirt-collar galls the perspiring neck,
were but recently part and parcel of that vast ‘up
country,’ which is so little known but to the
few who dwell in it, curse it, and love
it.
I sent my soul through the
invisible,
Some Letter of the After-Life
to spell,
And Presently my Soul returned
to me
And whispered ’Thou
thyself art Heaven or Hell.
So sings the old Persian poet, lying
in his rose garden, by the wine-cup that robbed him
of his Robe of Honour, and his words are true; though
not quite in the sense in which he wrote them.
For this wisdom the far-away jungles also teach a
man who has to rely solely upon himself, and upon
his own resources, for the manner of his life, and
the form which it is to take. To all dwellers
in the desolate solitude, which every white man experiences,
who is cast alone among natives, there are two ’up
countries’ his Heaven and Hell, and
both are of his own making. The latter is the
one of which he speaks to his fellow race-mates if
he speaks at all about his solitary life. The
former lies at the back of his heart, and is only
known to himself, and then but dimly known till the
time comes for a return to the Tents of Shem.
Englishmen, above all other men, revel in their privilege
of being allowed to grumble and ‘grouse’
over the lives which the Fates have allotted to them.
They speak briefly, roughly, and gruffly of the hardships
they endure, making but little of them perhaps, and
talking as though their lives, as a matter of course,
were made up of these things only. The instinct
of the race is to see life through the national pea-soup
fog, which makes all things dingy, unlovely, and ugly.
Nothing is more difficult than to induce men of our
race to confess that in their lives hard
though they may have been good things have
not held aloof, and that they have often been quite
happy under the most unlikely circumstances, and in
spite of the many horrors and privations which have
long encompassed them about.
Let us take the Hell first. We
often have to do so, making a virtue of necessity,
and a habit is a habit; moreover, our pains are always
more interesting than our pleasures to
our neighbours. Therefore, let us take the dark
view of up-country life to start upon. In the
beginning, when first a man turns from his own people,
and dwells in isolation among an alien race, he suffers
many things. The solitude of soul that
terrible solitude which is only to be experienced in
a crowd the dead monotony, without hope
of change; the severance from all the pleasant things
of life, and the want of any substitutes for them,
eat into the heart and brain of him as a corrosive
acid eats into iron. He longs for the fellowship
of his own people with an exceeding great longing,
till it becomes a burden too grievous to bear; he
yearns to find comradeship among the people of the
land, but he knows not yet the manner by which their
confidence may be won, and they, on their side, know
him for a stranger within their gates, view him with
keen suspicion, and hold him at arm’s length.
His ideas, his prejudices, his modes of thought, his
views on every conceivable subject differ too widely
from their own, for immediate sympathy to be possible
between him and them. His habits are the habits
of a white man, and many little things, to which he
has not yet learned to attach importance, are as revolting
to the natives, as the pleasant custom of spitting
on the carpet, which some old-world Rajas still
affect, is to Europeans. His manners, too, from
the native point of view, are as bad as his habits
are unclean. He is respected for his wisdom,
hated for his airs of superiority, pitied for his ignorance
of many things, feared for what he represents, laughed
at for his eccentric habits and customs, despised
for his infidelity to the Faith, abhorred for his
want of beauty, according to native standards of taste,
and loved not at all. The men disguise their feelings,
skilfully as only Orientals can, but the women
and the little children do not scruple to show what
their sentiments really are. When he goes abroad,
the old women snarl at him as he passes, and spit
ostentatiously, after the native manner when some
unclean thing is at hand. The mothers snatch up
their little ones and carry them hurriedly away, casting
a look of hate and fear over their shoulders as they
run. The children scream and yell, clutch their
mothers’ garments, or trip and fall, howling
dismally the while, in their frantic efforts to fly
his presence. He is Frankenstein’s monster,
yearning for love and fellowship with his kind, longing
to feel the hand of a friend in his, and yet knowing,
by the unmistakable signs which a sight of him causes,
that he is indescribably repulsive to the people among
whom he lives. Add to all this that he is cut
off from all the things which, to educated Europeans,
make life lovely, and you will realise that his is
indeed a sorry case. The privations of the body,
if he has sufficient grit to justify his existence,
count for little. He can live on any kind of food,
sleep on the hardest of hard mats, or on the bare
ground, with his head and feet in a puddle, if needs
must. He can turn night into day, and sleep through
the sunlight, or sleep not at all, as the case may
be, if any useful purpose is to be served thereby.
These are not things to trouble him, though the fleshpots
of Egypt are very good when duty allows him to turn
his back for a space upon the desert. Privations
all these things are called in ordinary parlance,
but they are of little moment, and are good for his
liver. The real privations are of quite another
sort. He never hears music; never sees a lovely
picture; never joins in the talk and listens lovingly
to conversation which strikes the answering sparks
from his sodden brain. Above all, he never encounters
the softening influence of the society of ladies of
his own race. His few books are for a while his
companions, but he reads them through and through,
and cons them o’er and o’er, till the
best sayings of the best authors ring flat on his
sated ears like the echo of a twice-told tale.
He has not yet learned that there is a great and marvellous
book lying beneath his hand, a book in which all may
read if they find but the means of opening the clasp
which locks it, a book in which a man may read for
years and never know satiety, which, though older
than the hills, is ever new, and which, though studied
for a lifetime, is never exhausted, and is never completely
understood. This knowledge comes later; and it
is then that the Chapter of the Great Book of Human
Nature, which deals with natives, engrosses his attention
and, touching the grayness of his life, like the rising
sun, turns it into gold and purple.
Many other things he has to endure.
Educated white men have inherited an infinite capacity
for feeling bored; and a hot climate, which fries us
all over a slow fire, grills boredom into irritability.
The study of oriental human nature requires endless
patience; and this is the hardest virtue for a young,
energetic white man, with the irritable brain of his
race, to acquire. Without it life is a misery for
It is not good for the Christian’s
health
To hurry the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles and
the Aryan smiles,
And he weareth
the Christian down;
And the end of that fight
is a tombstone white,
With the name
of the late deceased,
And the epitaph clear, A fool
lies here
Who tried to hustle
the East.
Then gradually, very gradually, and
by how slow degrees he shudders in after days to recall,
a change comes o’er the spirit of his nightmare.
Almost unconsciously, he begins to perceive that he
is sundered from the people of the land by a gulf
which they can never hope to bridge over.
If he is ever to gain their confidence the work must
be of his own doing. They cannot come up to this
level, he must go down to the plains in which they
dwell. He must put off many of the things of the
white man, must forget his airs of superiority, and
must be content to be merely a native Chief among
natives. His pride rebels, his prejudices cry
out and will not be silenced, he knows that he will
be misunderstood by his race-mates, should they see
him among the people of his adoption, but the aching
solitude beats down one and all of these things; and,
like that eminently sensible man, the Prophet Muhammad,
he gets him to the Mountain, since it is immovable
and will not come to him.
Then begins a new life. He must
start by learning the language of his fellows, as
perfectly as it is given to a stranger to learn it.
That is but the first step in a long and often a weary
march. Next, he must study, with the eagerness
of Browning’s Grammarian, every native custom,
every native conventionality, every one of the ten
thousand ceremonial observances to which natives attach
so vast an importance. He must grow to understand
each one of the hints and doubles ententes,
of which Malays make such frequent use, every little
mannerism, sign and token, and, most difficult of
all, every motion of the hearts, and every turn of
thought, of those whom he is beginning to call his
own people. He must become conscious of native
Public Opinion, which is often diametrically opposed
to the opinion of his race-mates on one and the same
subject. He must be able to unerringly predict
how the slightest of his actions will be regarded
by the natives, and he must shape his course accordingly,
if he is to maintain his influence with them, and to
win their sympathy and their confidence. He must
be able to place himself in imagination in all manner
of unlikely places, and thence to instinctively feel
the native Point of View. That is really the whole
secret of governing natives. A quick perception
of their Point of View, under all conceivable circumstances,
a rapid process by which a European places himself
in the position of the native, with whom he is dealing,
an instinctive and instantaneous apprehension of the
precise manner in which he will be affected, and a
clear vision of the man, his feelings, his surroundings,
his hopes, his desires, and his sorrows, these,
and these alone, mean that complete sympathy, without
which the white man among Malays, is but as a sounding
brass and as a tinkling cymbal.
It does not all come at once.
Months, perhaps years, pass before the exile begins
to feel that he is getting any grip upon the natives,
and even when he thinks that he knows as much about
them as is good for any man, the oriental soul shakes
itself in its brown casing, and comes out in some
totally unexpected and unlooked-for place, to his no
small mortification and discouragement. But,
when he has got thus far, discouragement matters little,
for he has become bitten with the love of his discoveries,
and he can no more quit them than the dipsomaniac can
abandon the drams which are killing him.
Then he gets deep into a groove and
is happy. His fingers are between the leaves
of the Book of Human Nature, and his eager eyes are
scanning the lines of the chapter which in time he
hopes to make his own. The advent of another
white man is a weariness of the flesh. The natives
about him have learned to look upon him as one of their
own people. His speech is their speech, he can
think as they do, can feel as they feel, rejoice in
their joys, and sorrow in their pains. He can
tell them wonderful things, and a philosophy of which
they had not dreamed. He never offends their
susceptibilities, never wounds their self-respect,
never sins against their numerous conventionalities.
He has feasted with them at their weddings, doctored
their pains, healed their sick, protected them from
oppression, stood their friend in time of need, done
them a thousand kindnesses, and has helped their dying
through the strait and awful pass of death. Above
all, he understands, and, in a manner, they
love him. A new white man, speaking to him in
an unknown tongue, seems to lift him for the time
out of their lives. The stranger jars on the
natives, who are the exile’s people, and he,
looking through the native eyes which are no longer
strange to him, sees where his race-mate offends,
and in his turn is jarred, until he begins to hate
his own countrymen. Coming out of the groove hurts
badly, and going back into it is almost worse, but
when a man is once well set in the rut of native life,
these do not disturb him, for he is happy, and has
no need of other and higher things. This is the
exile’s Heaven.
As years go on the up-country life
of which I write will become less and less common
in this Peninsula of ours, and the Malays will be governed
wholly by men, who, never having lived their lives,
cannot expect to have more than a surface knowledge
of the people whose destinies are in their hands.
The Native States will, I fancy, be none the better
governed, and those who rule them will miss much which
has tended to widen the lives of the men who came
before them, and who dwelt among the people while
they were still as God made them.
And those who led these lives?
The years will dim the memories of all they once learned
and knew and experienced; and as they indite the caustic
minute to the suffering subordinate, and strangle with
swaddlings of red-tape the tender babe of prosperity,
they will perchance look back with wonder at the men
they once were, and thinking of their experiences
in the days of long ago will marvel that each one
of them as he left the desert experienced the pang
of Chillon’s prisoner:
Even
I
Regained my freedom with a
sigh.
L’ENVOI
By the green shade of the
palm trees,
Where the river
flows along
To be wedded to the calm seas,
Dwell the people
of my song.
With a languid step they wander
Thro’ the
forest or the grove,
And with listless eyes they
ponder
On the glories
poets love.
They have little joy in beauty,
Little joy in
virtue high,
Honour, mercy, truth, and
duty,
Or the creeds
for which men die.
But their lives are calm and
peaceful,
And they ask for
nothing more
Save some happy, listless,
easeful
Years, and peace
from strife and war.
Tales I tell of women wailing,
Cruel wrong and
bitter strife,
Shrieking souls that pass,
and quailing
Hearts that shrink
beneath the knife.
Tales I tell of evil passions,
Men that suffer,
men that slay,
All the tragedy that fashions
Life and death
for such as they.
Yet these things are but as
fleeting
Shadows, that
more lightly pass
Than the sunlight, which retreating
Leaves no stain
upon the grass.
O my friends! I judge
ye lightly,
Listen to the
tales I tell.
Answer, have I spoken rightly?
Judge me, have
I loved ye well?