Читать книгу The Lacquer Lady - Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse - Страница 10

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RANGOON seemed very large and busy and important, full of warehouses and shops and bungalows, its streets crowded with lacquered rickshas, in which Fanny delighted to ride, the frightened Agatha clutching her by the arm, while Fanny called to the boy in Burmese to go faster. There are few sensations of superiority so intense as being able to speak a language that one’s companion does not understand.

At the Custom House at Rangoon Mr. Jacobs was claimed by a large, determined-looking wife, and Mrs. Murgatroyd handed Fanny and Agatha over to a teacher from the Church of England Girls’ School, and in that uninspiring spot they passed their night in Rangoon. Fanny was all eagerness to visit the Shway Dagon for she remembered as a tiny child the delightful feast days when she had been taken there by her mother, although Mrs. Moroni was nominally a Christian. However, a glimpse of the lake from a ricksha the next morning, with the golden pagoda reflected in its waters, was as near to heathendom as was allowed. Then the girls were put upon a train in charge of the guard and sent up to Prome, beyond which the railways did not run. At Prome they were transferred to the river steamer of the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, in which they were to journey to Mandalay.

The days of that trip up the river went by very pleasantly for Fanny. No more missionaries and schoolteachers, only the guardianship of the Captain, Silas Bagshaw, a great burly, red-faced individual, huge in frame, with a stentorian voice, husky from much bawling of orders. His vessel, the Nemesis, was a side-wheeler, very broad in the beam, but she carried with her, lashed along her starboard side, a huge two-decked flat, roofed with canvas, which looked rather like Agatha’s notion of the original Ark. The flat was laden with ngapee, dried fish which has been allowed to go bad, a great delicacy beloved of the Burmans. Luckily it was cool weather, but even so the smell of the ngapee was overpowering. Vegetables, live cocks and hens and large families of itinerant vendors filled up what space the ngapee had left both on board the flat and over most of the Nemesis. The vessel acted as a travelling stores to the whole of the riverside population, and every few hours the Nemesis would turn her blunt nose towards the bank and make fast and throw out a gangway, and the inhabitants of the village would swarm on board; laughing, prosperous, good-natured people, apt at a joke and a bargain.

“Very different up in the King’s country,” grunted Captain Bagshaw. “All just as jolly, but they haven’t got the money to spend up there that our people have got in Lower Burma. Up there each official gets a district to look after, and, as the country folk say, he ‘eats’ it. But you two young ladies won’t be interested in politics.”

Fanny tossed her little head.

“Why not, Captain? I suppose you think that all ladies care for nothing but dress, but you see my father is in a high position at the Court, so naturally I’m interested in anything to do with the Government.”

“Your father’s the Italian weaver, isn’t he?” boomed Captain Bagshaw. “An old friend of mine. I brought your father up-river, young lady,” with a nod to Agatha, “when he arrived a month ago. Don’t take much stock of sky-pilots, but he seemed a good one.”

Agatha flushed with pleasure; she had built up, in the years of absence, and by dint of talking of him to the other girls, a romantic notion of the Perfect Father and she was more than half in love with him already. Fanny, who had no intention of letting the conversation be diverted in the direction of the Lumsden family, leaned her elbows on the rail and, cupping her chin in her hand, gazed up at the huge, red-faced skipper.

“Tell me all about Mandalay,” she begged.

Captain Bagshaw scratched the back of his bright red neck reflectively.

“Tell you all about Mandalay? You’re asking something, young lady, it’s the devil of a place, begging your pardon. The King’s all right for an Oriental, but if he’s not so bad as the others, he’s not as good as some people make him out. I don’t have anything to do with Courts, thank the Lord, I’m a simple sailorman, but I tell you I’d sooner navigate this river blindfold in the dry season, sandbanks and all, than I’d try and steer a course in that Palace. Everyone jumps about as though they were on hot bricks waiting to see what’s going to happen. Oh, it’s a lovely place and no mistake. Even the King blows now hot, now cold, and as to the others ...”

“My father was out of favour for some years,” said Fanny.

“I know he was, and for nothing at all; somebody made trouble and told a pack of lies. Your father’s all right if he is a foreigner, Miss Fanny. I used to see a lot of him down at Rangoon when he was in banishment. More fool he to have gone back, if you ask me, but of course there’s pickings to be had in the Palace that you can’t get anywhere else. Ah well, you’ll find it all out for yourself.”

“Shall we enjoy ourselves in Mandalay?” asked Fanny. “Will there be parties?”

The Captain screwed up his face.

“Well, there’s not what you’d call much young society, you know. There’s all kind of dagoes—excuse me, Miss Fanny—Frenchies and Italians and Greeks and Armenians and goodness knows what, and a fair amount of British. But there’s not what you’d call much give and take except among the missionaries. They give a few parties to each other.”

Fanny wrinkled her nose in disdain but Agatha said seriously:

“I don’t want gaiety, I’m to help my father at the mission.”

“Ah well, they all begin like that,” said the Captain philosophically. “Look, young ladies, if you want to see a crocodile, there’s one on that mud-bank.”

That was an excitement indeed, they could not at first believe it was not a log, but as the steamer went churning past, the creature lifted up an ugly lip at them and crawled into the yellow wash of waters with an angry flirting of its scaly tail. Agatha was sickened at the evil that a crocodile seems to exude, but Fanny was fascinated by the very horror that it gave her.

It was certainly great fun, that trip up the Irrawaddy. You soon got used to the dried fish after a few days of it. Fanny loved it all, she loved the faint incense-like smell of the little villages of an evening, the limpid glow of the river and sky, the chattering of the cheerful people, the men with pink and blue and green head-dresses and bright lungyis—skirts of silk or cotton; the slender, pretty little Burmese women with their oily black hair swathed in a high tower round their heads. She loved the wailing cries of the two natives of Chittagong who stood in the bows of the flat, sounding the depth of the water all day long, with two poles painted with bands of scarlet and white. Ceaselessly they chanted the varying depths of the water in wailing voices that sounded to her like the Catholic chants which she had not heard for so long.

It was the spring of the year and already the jungle was festooned with masses of flowers of a faint, dead pink and of brilliant purple. Then jungle would give place to the gleaming squares of water, pierced by thin emerald flames, that meant paddy fields; or here and there along the river bank a pagoda would gleam whitely, looking to both the girls like a gigantic wedding cake, and the sound of its bell would come clear and distinct across the water. Then whenever the Nemesis was heading for a village, six men, so dark as to be a purplish black, almost decent even to Agatha’s eyes, although they were naked except for a tiny loin-cloth, would spring over the side, one of them with the ship’s hawser between his strong teeth, and they would swim with powerful overarm strokes to the bank and haul the Nemesis in till her stern was on shore. Then would come the chattering natives, swarming round the little booths on board and sometimes the girls would stay and watch, sometimes, if Captain Bagshaw could accompany them, they went for a little walk in the village and saw the merry, brown babies playing in the dust, saw the youths playing chin-loon with balls made of basketwork, their laughter going up into the still evening air with the sweet smell of the wood smoke. Back to the Nemesis and to supper by the light of a kerosene lamp, in whose rays big moths and little moths fluttered like scraps of silver. The chain would be grindingly wound in once more, the paddles would begin to revolve, threshing the black water into a gleaming pallor, the leadsmen would take up their melancholy chant and the Nemesis feel her way into midstream, where again the anchor would be let go with a noise like thunder, so that she could lie safely for the night. For those merry, pleasant people could not be trusted, once the northern border of Lower Burma was passed, not to attempt a little dacoity in the night time, and vessels found it more prudent to anchor in midstream.

So at last they came to Mandalay, and the six men swam ashore once more with their dripping burden, the stern was hauled in-shore and the anchor-chain ran through the hawse-pipe, the gang-plank was thrown out and Fanny’s journey had come to an end.

Papa—as Fanny thought it genteel to call him, though he himself preferred the homely Italian Babbo—was waiting at the top of the high mud-bank. Fanny recognised him at once by his dark, pointed beard, and pointed him out to Agatha. There was another European with him, a thin, white-faced man, who wore coloured glasses and had slightly prominent front teeth. Agatha realised with a pang of disappointment that this was her father, she had managed to forget those teeth in the years she had been away.... Both the Reverend Arthur Lumsden and his daughter were a little shy, not so Fanny and Mr. Moroni. Agatha envied them the naturalness of their embrace, perhaps there was something in not being altogether English, after all....

The moment arrived when, the luggage duly separated, the girls had to get into their respective bullock-wagons. Agatha parted from Fanny with a little pang, she would rather have gone with her, she felt, than with this father so unlike the idea she had built up of him. But Fanny, all excitement and readiness for the new life, climbed skilfully in, with a wriggle of her supple little body, over the backs of the bullocks, into the brightly-painted cart. Agatha was helped into her conveyance with much more difficulty.

Mr. Moroni’s bullocks were first away and set off at a brisk trot over the atrocious road, a mass of holes and dried ruts a foot deep, that led from the river bank through the straggling town. Immediately a cloud of dust rose into the air, a cloud that accompanied everyone who moved about the town of Mandalay during the dry season, as though each vehicle belonged to the foreigners (many of them did), and the pillar of cloud was once more performing its useful function. Fanny, her little hand through her father’s arm, looked out eagerly, and now it was her turn to be disappointed. How sordid and shabby it all looked! Little one-storied wooden houses, great patches of waste-land, masses of cheap little booths ... Mr. Moroni noticed her expression.

“You mustn’t mind all this, Francesca, this is the town of the kalās. We’re kalās,” he said with his fine, dry smile. “All foreigners are kalās to the Burmans. English, French, Italians, Indians, everyone except the Chinese and Shans. We all have to live outside the walled city.”

He spoke English almost perfectly, but with slightly more precision and care than an Englishman.

“Your friend seems a nice girl,” he observed. “Though quiet, like all the English.”

“Agatha? Oh yes,” said Fanny. “Look, Papa, there are some poongyis, I remember them. Oh look, they’re holding up their fans so that they shan’t see me.”

“Buddhists are very like Catholics in many ways,” remarked her father dryly.

Fanny gazed back at the group of orange-clad monks and laughed.

“In Agatha’s church the priests are allowed to marry, though Agatha says she doesn’t approve of it. I’m sure that she’ll marry a clergyman all the same. What is her father like, Papa?”

“He’s a good man. He has come to take the place of Dr. Marks. He will never be a great man as Dr. Marks is, but he may be easier to get on with because of that.”

“Papa, tell me, has the King been nice to you? Is Mamma going to take me to see the Queens? Tell me.”

Mr. Moroni shrugged his shoulders.

“He has forgiven me for something I never did, yes. That is to say he found that Monsieur Delange and his daughter could not produce all the velvet and silk that he needs. But I do not complain, he is a good King as monarchs go. Even as a Garibaldino, I admit that.”

Fanny, whose sympathies were instinctively anti-republican, made no reply, but continued to gaze about her. It was the time of the noonday rest, and quietness had begun to settle over the town of the kalās; in the shadow of a rest-house, ochre-robed priests were sitting in meditation, Indian shopkeepers were curled up on their straw mats, or lay pulling at their hookahs.

From a side road, heralded by a faint jingling of bells, appeared a caravan from China, some twenty-five shaggy, rusty, stocky little mules, laden with great bales; they passed the bullock-carts, their hoofs making a pattering sound like heavy rain on the thick, white dust of the road. Arrogant-looking men the Chinese were, beneath their huge pyramidal hats of golden straw, which cast a finer, clearer yellow glow over their bronzed faces. They stared insolently at Fanny with their sidelong eyes, deep-set above high cheek-bones. Their lips, vermilion with betel-nut, looked as though slobbered with blood. Beside them ran their fierce chow dogs, shaggy and panting. The procession turned off on to a piece of waste-land and the men began to unsaddle.

“Oh!” cried Fanny. “At last ...” and pointed.

“Yes,” said Mr. Moroni, his eyes also resting on the great rose-coloured walls beyond the wide lily-laden moat that Fanny had seen. “Yes, there it is. That’s the true city, Francesca, not this town of kalās. That is the Gem City of Mandalay, and in the heart of it is the Golden Palace and around it we all sit, waiting, hoping and struggling.”

Fanny hardly heard what her father was saying, she was gazing with the whole of what soul she possessed in her eyes, and indeed nothing stranger and lovelier than the Gem City of Mandalay could be found upon the earth. The high rose-red walls, crowned at intervals by soaring spires with upcurving pagoda-like roofs, stretched all along above the moat, which shone in limpid patches between out-flung masses of pink lotus. And moored all along the gleaming leafy mile of water were golden barges with high prows, decked with golden dragons that sparkled and glittered in the sunlight till they were mere twinkling points of light in the far distance, points that gleamed like flame against the soft blue of the Shan mountains. Beside the moat the turf was a vivid strip of green, dappled with shade from the dark clumps of mango trees that hung their heavy pointed leaves in the still air. Further down the moat a bridge, washed a dazzling snow-white, spanned the lily-strewn water. As Fanny gazed the deep notes of a gong sounded from beyond the rose-red walls.

“That’s the watchman striking the hour on the clock tower opposite the Palace,” said Mr. Moroni.

“And you go in there every day?” whispered Fanny.

“Every day. Don’t worry, my little Fanny, you’ll get in too. You’ll be in good company. Catholics and Protestants, priests and nuns and clergy all spend hours every morning sitting there in the hopes of getting something out of royalty. But, now Fanny, we must turn away and go to our own home.”

The bullock-wagon lumbered down a side-street and then passed in at the usual shabby compound, though it was gay, as many of them were, with tamarind and mango trees. Mrs. Moroni, large, brown and overflowing, in rather a dingy wrapper, was waiting on the verandah steps.