of dark clouds, clearly etched against their grey background, hung a
now golden crescent, into which seemed to be falling a solitary star of
surpassing brilliance.
To stand alone here in the presence of Nature, to witness the marvels
of sunrise or sunset, the strange influence of nights of ravishing
moonlight and days of quickening heat, impresses one with the
conviction that if Oriental language is couched in terms that sound
extravagant to Western ears, the reason is not far to seek. Nature
revels here; one can really see things grow, where the sun shines every
day as it never shines in lands of cold and fog. Natural phenomena are
on a grander scale; the lightning is more vivid, the thunder more
deafening, the rain a deluge against which the feeble artifices of man
offer no protection. The moonlight is brighter, the shadows deeper,
the darkness blacker than in northern climes. So the vegetation covers
the earth, climbs on to the rocks, and disputes possession even with
the waters of the sea. The blossoms are as brilliant in colour as they
are profuse in quantity, and two men will stagger under the weight of
a single fruit. As for thorns, they are long as nails, stiff as steel,
and sharp as needles. The beasts of the forest are mighty, the birds of
the air are of wonderful plumage, the denizens of the deep are many,
and huge, and strange. In the lower forms of life it is just the same;
the lizards, the beetles, the ants, the moths and butterflies, the
frogs and the snakes,--they are great in size and legion in number.
Even the insects, however small, are in myriads.
Only man stagnates, propagates feebly, loses his arts, falls a prey
to pestilence, to new diseases, to imported vices, dies,--while every
creature and every plant around him is struggling in the ceaseless
renewal of life. Man dies, possibly because exultant nature leaves him
so little to do to support his own existence; but it is not strange
that, when he goes beyond the ordinary avocations of daily life, and
takes himself at all seriously, his language should partake somewhat
of the colour of his surroundings. Nor, perhaps, is it altogether
surprising that, living with the tiger and the crocodile, the cobra
and the stinging-ray, the scorpion and the centipede, he should have
acquired some of their bloodthirstiness and venom, rather than have
sought an example in the gentleness of the dove, a bird much fancied by
Eastern peoples for the sweetness of its note and the excellence of its
fighting qualities.
I suppose it is the appalling difficulties of making a passage through
the jungle that have given the elephant and rhinoceros their strength
and courage; but for the people, who are never really cold, and seldom
hungry, there is little inducement to exertion. They can lie under
the fruit trees, and idly watch the grey, gossamer-winged butterflies
floating dreamily across a sunlit glade; they drowse and sleep to the
music of the waters, as the whispering river slips gently towards a
summer sea.
And it is all so comfortable. There is Death, but that is predestined,
the one thing certain in so much that is too hard for the finite mind.
There is also Hell, but of all those who speak so glibly of it, none
ever believes that the same Power which created him, to live for a
moment in trouble on the earth, will condemn him to an eternity of
awful punishment. It is Paradise for which each man, in his own mind,
is destined; a Paradise where he will be rewarded for all his earthly
disappointments by some such pleasant material advantages as he can
picture to himself, while he lies on the river bank and gradually
sinks into a delightful slumber, lulled by the restful rippling of the
passing stream. And he will dream--dream of that Celestial Being of
whom it is related that “his face shone golden, like that of a god, so
that many lizards fell, dazzled, from the walls, and the cockroaches in
the thatch fought to bask in the light of his countenance.”
Oriental imagery,--but a quaintly pretty idea, the creatures struggling
to sit in the light shed by that radiant face.
IX
OF LETTER-WRITING
So you prefer the unaddressed letters, such as you have seen, to those
which you receive from me in a cover, whereon are duly inscribed your
name, style, and titles, and you ask me whether some of the letters are
not really written to you. They are written to “Mary, in heaven,” or
to you, if you please, or to any one to whom they appeal. The reason
why you prefer them to the epistles I address to you is because they
are unconstrained (too much so, you might think, if you saw them all),
while, in writing to you, I am under constraint, and, directly I feel
it, I have to be careful what I say, and beat about for some safe
subject; and, as I abhor gossip and cannot write about my neighbour’s
cat, I become unnatural, stilted, stupid, boring. With Mary it is
different, for she is in heaven, where there are no marriages, and,
therefore, I imagine, no husbands. As for lovers, I do not mind them,
for they have no special privileges; at any rate, they have no right to
interfere with me. The idea that what I write for your eye may be read
by some one for whom it was not intended, hampers the pen and takes
away more than half the pleasure of writing.
If you answer, “You ought not to want to write anything to me that
may not be read by the master over my shoulder, or by the maid in the
kitchen,” I say that I do not wish to interfere with the circulation
of the _Family Herald_; and, for the rest, when you honour me with a
letter, is it to be shown to any one who wishes to know what a really
charming and interesting letter is like? I am blessed with some really
delightful correspondents, of whom I would say you are the chief,
did I not fear to offend some others; but I cannot help noticing,
sometimes with amusement and sometimes with painful regret, that the
character of their letters has a way of changing that, between first
and last, may be compared to looking at the landscape through one end
of a telescope and then through the other. When I see the field of
vision narrowing to something like vanishing-point, until, in fact,
the features of interest are no longer visible, I feel that I too
must put on a minifying-glass, before I attempt to describe to you
my surroundings, my thoughts, my hopes and fears. Worst of all, I can
no longer ask you freely how life is treating you; for if I do, I get
no answer, or you tell me that the winter has been one of unexampled
severity, or the political party in power seems to be losing ground
and missing its opportunities. Individuals and parties have been
losing opportunities since the days when Joseph lost his coat; always
regretting them and always doing it again, because every party and
every individual scorns to profit by the experience of another. That,
you will tell me, is a platitude beneath a child’s notice. I agree
with you, and I only mention it in support of my contention that it is
better to write what you see, or hear, or imagine, or believe, to no
one at all, than to write “delicately,” with the knowledge that there
is a possible Samuel waiting somewhere about, if not to hew you in
pieces, to put inconvenient questions to your friends, and give them
the trouble of making explanations which are none the less aggravating
because they are needless. As a man, I may say that the effort to
avoid writing to women everything that can, by a suspicious mind, be
twisted into something mildly compromising, is more than I am capable
of. The thought that one may innocently get a friend into trouble is
not amusing, so pray dismiss from your mind the idea that any of these
letters are written to you. They are not; and if they ever recall
scenes, or suggest situations that seem familiar, that is merely an
accident. Pure, undiluted fable is, I fancy, very rare indeed; but
travellers are supposed to be responsible for the most of it, and I am
a traveller. On the other hand, almost all fiction is founded on fact,
but you know how small a divergence from the latter is sufficient to
make the former. If my fiction looks like fact, I am gratified; if,
at the same time, it has awakened your interest (and you say it has),
that is more than I ever hoped to achieve. A wanderer’s life in often
beautiful, sometimes strange, surroundings; a near insight into the
fortunes of men and women of widely differing race, colour, and creed;
and the difficulty of writing freely and fearlessly to those who, like
yourself, would give me their sympathy and kindly interest--these
are mainly responsible for the Letters. As to the other contributing
causes, it will amuse you more to exercise your imagination in lively
speculations than to hear the dull truth from me. Besides, if I told
you the truth it would only mislead, for you would not believe it.
X
AT A FUNERAL
Do you remember how Matthew Arnold, in his Essay on “Pagan and Mediæval
Religious Sentiment,” translates a scene from the fifteenth Idyll of
Theocritus, giving the experiences of two Syracusan visitors at the
feast of Adonis at Alexandria, about three hundred years before the
Christian era? The description is wonderfully fresh and realistic,
and it came back to me with strange insistence last night when my
host detailed to me his experiences at a Malay funeral. I fear the
effect will all be lost when I try to repeat what I heard--but you are
indulgent, and you will pardon my clumsy periods for the sake of my
desire to interest you. My only chance of conveying any idea of the
impression made on me is to assume the rôle of narrator at first hand,
and to try, as far as I may, to speak in my host’s words.
“I was travelling,” he said, “and on the point of starting for a
place where lived a Malay raja who was a great friend of mine, when I
heard accidentally that his son had just died. That evening I reached
the station where my friend lived. I saw him, and learned that his
son, a mere lad, would be buried the next day. It is needless to
say why he died, it is not a pretty tale. He had visited, perhaps
eighteen months earlier, a British possession where the screams of
Exeter Hall had drowned the curses of the people of the land, and
this wretched boy returned to his country to suffer eighteen months
of torture,--agonising, loathsome corruption,--in comparison with
which death on the cross would be a joyous festival. That is nothing,
he was dead; and, while his and many another life cry to deaf ears,
the momentary concern of his family and his friends was to bury him
decently. My arrival was regarded as a fortuitous circumstance, and I
was bidden to take part in the function.
“It was early afternoon when I found myself, with the father, standing
at the window of a long room, full of women, watching till the body
should be carried to a great catafalque that stood at the door to
receive it. As we waited there, the man beside me,--a man of unusually
tender feeling,--showed no emotion. He simply said, ‘I am not sorry;
it is better to die than to live like that; he has peace at last.’
“There was a sound of heavy feet staggering over the grass under the
weight of a great load, and the coffin was borne past our window
towards the door. As we walked down the room a multitude of women and
children pressed after us, and while a crowd of men lifted the body
into its place on the catafalque, a girl close by us burst into a
perfect passion of weeping, intermingled with despairing cries, and
expressions of affection for the dead, whom she would never see again.
The raja pulled me by the sleeve, saying, ‘Come outside, I cannot bear
this,’ and I saw the tears were slowly coursing down his face as we
passed the heart-broken child, who, in the abandonment of her grief,
had thrown herself into the arms of another girl, and was weeping
hysterically on her breast. The mourner was the dead boy’s only
sister.
“Meanwhile, the coffin had been placed on the huge wooden bier, and
this was now being raised on the shoulders of a hundred men, with at
least another hundred crowded round to take turns in carrying it to
the place of burial. At this moment the procession moved off, and
anything more unlike a funeral, as you and I know it, would be hard to
imagine. A band of musicians, Spanish _mestizos_, in military uniforms,
headed the _cortège_, playing a wild Spanish lament, that seemed to
sob and wail and proclaim, by every trick of sound, the passing of the
dead. Immediately behind them followed a company of stalwart Indian
soldiers with arms reversed. Then a posse of priests and holy men
chanting prayers. Next we came, and behind us a row of boys carrying
their dead master’s clothes, a very pathetic spectacle. After them
the great bier, vast in size, curious in form, and gay with colour,
but so unwieldy that it seemed to take its own direction and make
straight for the place of burial, regardless of roads and ditches,
shrubs and flowers, or the shouts and cries of its bearers and those
who were attempting to direct their steps. Last of all, a crowd of men
and boys,--friends, retainers, chiefs, sightseers, idlers, gossips and
beggars, a very heterogeneous throng.
“The road to the burial-ground wound down one hill and up another, and
the band, the escort, the priests, and the mourners followed it. But
the catafalque pursued its own devious course in its own blundering
fashion, and, by-and-by, was set down on a high bluff, o’erlooking a
great shining river, with palm-clad banks, backed by a space of level
ground shut in by lofty blue hills. The coffin was then lifted from out
the bier and placed upon the ground.
“I stood by the ready-dug grave and waited; while the father of the
dead boy moved away a few yards, and an aged chief called out, ‘Now,
all you praying people, come and pray.’
“The raja, the priests, and the holy men gathered round the body,
and after several had been invited to take up the word and modestly
declined in favour of some better qualified speaker, a voice began to
intone, while, from time to time, the rest of the company said ‘Amîn.’
“Just then it began to rain a little, and those who had no umbrellas
ran for protection to the catafalque and sheltered themselves under
its overhanging eaves, while a lively interchange of badinage passed
between those who, for the moment, had nothing to do. This was the sort
of conversation that reached my ears.
“‘Now, then, all you people, come and pray.’
“‘Why don’t you pray yourself?’
“‘We did all our praying yesterday; I don’t believe you have done
any. Now is the time, with all these holy men here.’
“‘I dare say; but you don’t suppose I’m going out into the rain to
pray: I’m not a priest.’
“‘No one thought you were; but that is no reason why you should not
pray.’
“‘Never mind about me, tell these other people; but you need not bother
now, for they’ve got it over.’
“And all the time the monotonous voice of the priest muttered the
guttural Arabic words, as though these frivolous talkers were a mile
off, instead of within a few feet of him and those who stood round the
coffin.
“No one could have helped being struck by the curious incongruity of
the scene at that moment. I stood in a place of graves, with an open
sepulchre at my feet. The stage was one of extraordinary beauty, the
players singularly picturesque. That high bluff, above the glistening
river, circled by forest-clad hills of varying height, one needle-like
point rising to at least 6000 feet. Many old graves lay beneath the
shadow of graceful, wide-spreading trees, which carried a perfect
blaze of crimson blossoms, lying in huge masses over dark green
leaves, as though spread there for effect. Groups of brown men, clad
in garments of bright but harmoniously toned colours, stood all about
the hill. On the very edge of the bluff, towards the river, was the
gaily caparisoned, quaintly constructed catafalque, a number of men and
boys sitting in it and round its edge, smoking, laughing, and talking.
Within a dozen feet of them, the closely packed crowd of priests and
holy men praying round the coffin. The band and the guard had been
told to march off, and they were wending their way round a hillside in
middle distance; while the strains of a quick step, the monotone of
rapidly uttered prayer, the conversation and laughter of the idlers,
crossed and re-crossed each other in a manner that to me was distinctly
_bizarre_. Seen against that background and lighted by the fiery rays
of a dying Eastern sun, the scarlet uniforms of the bandsmen, the
dark blue of the escort, the long white coats of the priests, and the
many-coloured garments of the two or three hundred spectators scattered
about the graves, completed a picture not easily forgotten.
“Just then a move was made to the sepulchre, and two ropes were
stretched across it, while some men began to lift the coffin.
“‘What are you doing?’ said the uncle of the dead boy. ‘If you put him
in like that how will his head lie?’
“The bearers immediately let the coffin down, and another man in
authority said, ‘Well, after all, how should his head lie?’
“‘Towards the west,’ said the uncle.
“‘No, it should not,’ replied the other; ‘it should be to the north,
and then he looks towards the west.’
“Several people here joined in the argument, and it was eventually
decided that the head must be towards the north; and then, as the body
was lying on its right side, the face would look towards Mecca.
“‘Well, who knows at which end of the box his head is?’
“Various guesses were hazarded, but the uncle said that would never
do, and he would see for himself. So the wreaths and garlands of ‘blue
chempaka,’ the flower of death, the gorgeous silks and cloths of gold,
were all thrown off, the heavy cover was lifted up, and the uncle began
to feel about in the white grave-clothes for the head of the corpse.
“‘Ha! here it is,’ he said; ‘if we had put him in without looking, it
would have been all wrong, and we should have had a nice job to get him
out again.’
“‘Well, you know all about it now,’ said a bystander, ‘so we may as
well get on.’
“The cover was accordingly replaced, the box turned with the head to
the north, and then, with a deal of talk and superabundance of advice,
from near and from far, the poor body was at last lowered into the
grave. Once there the corpse lies on the earth, for the coffin has no
bottom. The reason is obvious.
“You have probably never been to a funeral, and if so, you do not know
the horrible sound of the first spadesful of earth as they fall, with
dull blows, on that which is past feeling and resistance. The friends
who stand round the grave shudder as each clod strikes the wood under
which lies their beloved dead. Here it was different, for two men got
into the grave and held up a grass mat, against which the earth was
shovelled while the coffin was protected. There was hardly any sound,
and, as the earth accumulated, the men spread it with their hands to
right and left, and finally over the top of the coffin, and then the
rest of the work was done rapidly and quietly. When filled in, two
wooden pegs, each covered with a piece of new white cloth, were placed
at the head and foot of the grave. These are eventually replaced by
stones.
“Then, as the officers of the raja’s household began to distribute
funeral gifts amongst the priests, the holy men, and the poor, my
friend and I slowly retraced our steps, and, with much quiet dignity,
the father thanked me for joining him in performing the last offices to
his dead son.
“‘His sufferings were unbearable,’ he said; ‘they are over now, and
why should I regret?’
“Truly death was best, I could not gainsay it; but that young life, so
horribly and prematurely ended, seemed to have fallen into the snare of
a civilisation that cannot be wholly appreciated by primitive people.
They do not understand why the burning moral principles of a section of
an alien race should be applied to communities that have no sympathy
with the principles, or their application to different conditions of
society.”
XI
OF CHANGE AND DECAY
There is a subject which has an abiding interest for all men and women
who are not too old to love; it is Constancy. I suppose there are few
questions on which any half-dozen intelligent people will express such
different opinions, and it is doubtful whether any of the six (unless
there be amongst them one who is very young and inexperienced) will
divulge his, or her, true thoughts thereanent. Almost all women, and
most men, seem to think they are morally bound to declare themselves to
be very mirrors of constancy, and each is prepared to shower scorn and
indignation on the erring mortal convicted of change of feeling. The
only feeling I here refer to is the declared love of man for woman, of
woman for man.
The other day a friend, writing to me, said, with admirable candour,
“Do not think my heart is so small that it can only contain love
for one man,” and I know that she means one man at a time. The maze
surrounding this suggestion is attractive; let us wander in it for
awhile, and if we become bewildered in its devious turns, if we lose
ourselves in the intricacies of vague phrases, we may yet win our way
back to reason by the road of hard, practical fact.
In the spring of life, when the fancies of the young man and the
girl “lightly turn to thoughts of love,” I suppose the average lover
honestly believes in the doctrine of eternal constancy, for himself
and the object of his affections, and words will almost fail him and
her to describe their contempt for the frail creature who has admitted
a change of mind; worse still, if the change includes a confession of
love for a new object. Coquette, jilt, faithless deceiver, breaker of
hearts, ruthless destroyer of peace of mind,--words of opprobrium are
not sufficient in quantity, or poisonous enough in quality, to satisfy
those from whose lips they flow with the violence and destructive force
of a river in flood.
Now, suppose this heaven-mated couple proceeds to extremities--that is,
to marriage. And suppose that, after quite a short time, so short that
no false note has ever been heard to mar the perfect harmony of their
duet of mutual praise and rapture, one of them dies, or goes mad, or
gets lost, or is put into prison for a long term of years;--will not
the other find a new affinity? It happens so often that I think it must
be admitted as a very likely possibility. When convention permits of
an outward and visible application, and plaster is put over the wound,
most of the very virtuous say, “and an excellent thing, too.”
There, then, we arrive at once at the possibility of change; the
possibility of A, who once swore deathless love and fealty to B,
swearing the same deathless love and fealty to X. It happens, and it
has high approval.
Now go a little step further, and suppose that the excellent couple of
whom I first spoke perpetrate matrimony, and neither of them dies, or
goes mad, or gets into prison. Only, after a longer or shorter time,
they become utterly bored with each other; or one finds the other out;
or, what is most common, one, and that one usually the woman, for
divers reasons, comes to loathe the married state, all it implies and
all it exacts. Just then Satan supplies another and a quite different
man, who falls naturally into his place in the situation, and the play
runs merrily along. B’s deathless love and fealty for A are thrown
out of the window, and what remains is pledged, up to the very hilt,
to that spawn of the Evil One, the wrecker of happy homes, Z. It can
hardly be denied that this also happens.
I come, then, to the case of the affianced but unmarried lovers, where
one, or both, perceives in time that the other is not quite all that
fancy painted; realises that there is a lover, “for showy,” and a
disagreeable companion and master “for blowy”: a helpful daughter, a
charming sweetheart one day, and a very selfish, not to say grasping,
spit-fire on another. Or, across the distant horizon, there sails into
the quiet waters of this love-locked sea a privateer, with attractions
not possessed by the ordinary merchant vessel, and, when the privateer
spreads its sails again, it carries with it a willing prize, leaving
behind a possibly better-found and more seaworthy craft to indulge its
wooden frame with a burst of impotent fury and despair. B’s deathless
love has been transplanted to a more congenial soil, and, after a
space, A will find another and a better helpmate, and both will be
satisfied,--for a time.