Читать книгу The Lacquer Lady - Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse - Страница 12

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THE following day Fanny went to tea with Agatha in the bungalow attached to the school of the English Mission. Any gaiety was better than none to Fanny just then, and the evening spent at Julie’s had stimulated her social senses. She was quite excited as she walked along, the servant behind her. She was at the age when any chance to exploit her own personality was what mattered; a handful of missionaries, male or even female, might prove as admiring as anyone else. Indeed, it might even be that she could prove dazzling to missionaries. She had often had the delicious tingling that meant she was being a success, among the girls at school, or in the family of some girl who had taken her home to spend a half-holiday, and whenever she felt it she was happy. She walked gaily along, watching carefully where she placed her feet in their shoes of French kid, her parasol of scarlet throwing a rosy glow over her head and shoulders.

Agatha came running out to the verandah to greet her, and Fanny was struck by her prettiness. The warm climate suited Agatha’s thin skin, which at Brighton had been so apt to turn red with the cold wind. Here her face had lost its pinched look and the colour on her high cheek-bones was just enough and not too much.

I didn’t know Agatha was so pretty, thought Fanny, and she felt a little sense of envy for Agatha’s honey and rose colouring. Anyone could be dark out here. She, Fanny, had been distinctive in Brighton, but out here in Mandalay it was the blonde Agatha who might get the greater share of notice. Agatha’s blue print gown softened the rather fierce flax-blue of her pure and candid eyes. Fanny stared at her a little resentfully.

“You don’t look like a lady missionary,” she observed.

“Oh, Fanny,” said Agatha in distress—up till then she had been quite pleased with her appearance. “I do hope I don’t look very unsuitable.”

Fanny laughed, she couldn’t help it, her slight ill-humour gone.

“What a goose you are, Agatha! Surely you don’t want to look like a missionary? I mean that you look much too nice, that’s all. Tell me, is there anyone else here, do you know anybody yet?”

“Dr. Marks is still here, he goes on the steamer to-morrow morning. He’s coming to tea to-day to say good-bye and we’re expecting the Kalawoon, that means the Minister for Foreigners, and his daughter. I expect he’ll help Papa at first if there are any difficulties. And there’s young Mr. Protheroe who’s assistant here, he’ll be under Papa now.”

It certainly sounded gayer than the Moroni household, and the house, too, was more imposing, for the King had allowed it to be built with a triple roof, a thing usually only permitted to Princes and poongyis. That was, explained Agatha, who had already absorbed a mass of information about missionary affairs, to show the honour in which King Mindoon held Dr. Marks, founder of the school, whom he called Poon-dawgyi, which meant High Priest or Great Priest.

“Thank you,” said Fanny rather tartly. “I know Burmese a great deal better than you do, Agatha.”

It was quite a comfort after the glory of the triple roof to find that indoors Agatha’s home was even barer than hers. Mrs. Moroni had at least collected a mass of ornaments that overflowed from every little table and bracket, of which there were many. Tinsel girdles and hair ornaments, paper flowers, china models of old boots, leaden kittens playing the violoncello, pink porcelain pigs with a slit for coins in their broad backs, woollen mats, bunches of dried grasses, strips of satin, hand-painted with sprays of pansies, old Christmas cards, and such like bric-a-brac caught the eye and frequently the careless sleeve or skirt as well. Agatha’s living-room could only boast of three stiff, unnatural-looking pictures of saints that she referred to as “Arundel prints.”

Dr. Marks was talking away in his curiously persuasive voice when Fanny arrived. He was a small, stout man, very Jewish-looking and completely bald, but with a heavy, dark beard, turning grey. His dark eyes beamed from behind gold-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in clerical black, and the front of his coat was rather stained with tobacco ash. A huge cheroot was sending up a cloud of smoke now as he talked. He seemed somehow to fill the quiet room with his personality; the emphasis which his flexible, almost insinuating voice, already gave to his words, was added to by his manner of striking the air with his right hand. An eager, a dominant, and yet a supple man, almost as though there had been a trace of the East in him. Mr. Lumsden looked more neutral-hued than ever in this powerful presence.

Mr. Protheroe was a thin, pale young man, with a clean-shaven, slightly concave face, delicately modelled about the sensitive mouth and slightly protuberant jaw. It was the sort of face that Agatha told herself was “Burne-Jonesy.” Fanny, with one glance at him, decided he was the most interesting man there. He was the only one who, from her point of view, was a man at all. And he would never be interested in her ... her instinct told her that. For her he was another Mr. Danvers. He was the sort of man she would like to captivate and couldn’t, the sort of man who wanted at least the illusion of intelligent companionship, of what Fanny called “booky talks.”

All three men were kind to Agatha’s little friend and pressed cakes and sweets upon her, but it was Agatha whom they treated as grown-up as she sat there behind the teapot, looking, thought Fanny, very much as she had been used to look at school when in charge of some of the younger girls and trying to improve their behaviour. Fanny, not sure of what to say in this company, wisely held her tongue; and gradually, as she listened to Dr. Marks, who held the floor completely, she began to admire him. Fanny always recognised power when she saw it; also it was interesting to hear what he was saying about the difficulties of life in Mandalay. Fanny’s Burmese blood made even the discussion of intrigue intensely interesting to her.

“Don’t let yourself be dragged into anything at the Palace, my dear Lumsden,” urged Dr. Marks. “That’s my advice. H.M. will pretend a great interest in the Christian gospel, will ask you to discuss it with him, he’s done the same time and again with me and with Bishop Bigandet and with the Armenian Bishop. He’s helped us all in turn and hoped that Bigandet would help him with the French and that I would help him with our people. He can’t understand, or he didn’t for several years, that a missionary must set his face against being exploited politically. You see the Buddhist priesthood is enormously powerful, they have their finger in every pie, even the King can’t go against it. He no more understands Christianity than my little dog Jacko does. No, that’s wrong, Jacko’s a good little Christian according to his lights. I’ve known many worse. But I tell you, Lumsden, that I’ve come very regretfully to the conclusion that he had me up here in the first place, not because he wished to know anything about our religion, but because he wished to ingratiate himself with the British. He got me up here and promised to build a school and church and send his sons as pupils, which I must say he did. But I assure you if I hadn’t been bald already, my hair would have gone grey trying to get the money out of him for the upkeep of the school. He’s always trying to get me to accept presents of money for myself, and when I refuse he gets very angry. Yet I couldn’t get the fees out of him for all the pupils he sent from the Palace. I’m not much good at money matters, I’m afraid, and it’s been a hand-to-mouth existence; your daughter will look after you better, Mr. Lumsden, I expect. Some more of that cake, please, Miss Lumsden, it’s delicious; I can see you’re a splendid housewife. The long and the short of it is, Mr. Lumsden, that the King’s got one idea of what we are here for, and we’ve got another. In the early years when he thought he could make use of me, nothing was too good for me. You should have seen the Princes coming to school. It was enough to make a cat laugh.”

“Why was that?” asked Mr. Lumsden in his precise little manner.

“They used to come on an elephant apiece, as many as nine of them at a time, two golden umbrellas held over each one and forty followers in attendance. That might make a procession of as many as three hundred and sixty people, to say nothing of the elephants. They were nice lads, too. The Palace pages used to attend also; they’re called Lapetye Dawtha, which means Sons of Tea, because their office is to hand tea to the King; they each had a little yellow umbrella and about a dozen followers. They were good pupils. You’ll find all Burmese boys are good in school. Burmans have a great respect for learning and for schoolmasters. You’ll find that part of your job easy. It’s the politics that are fatal.”

“I don’t intend to have anything to do with politics.”

“I didn’t intend to either, and what is more I succeeded in keeping to my resolve, though I never can get certain members of the Government at Rangoon to believe it. You’ve no idea how difficult it is, and how everyone misinterprets your actions. A Political Resident here and I got badly at loggerheads. Not Sladen, but the man after him, MacDuff. He wrote and complained to General Fytche that I visited the King too often, though as a matter of fact I’d only been nine times in ten months. He told the Burmese Minister that I wasn’t to be received in the Palace again. I couldn’t let the matter drop there and referred it to the Governor-General and to the Bishop. You see how foolish it was of MacDuff. If I’d had to consult him and obtain his permission every time I went to see the King, it would have made me an agent of the British Government instead of a Christian clergyman. Of course I won. Headquarters impressed on me I had no political status and had nothing to do with MacDuff, but that’s the sort of thing that’s always happening. Then the Bishop came to see me. We’re under the Bishop of Calcutta here, as you know—more’s the pity, we want our own See of Rangoon—and of course the King wanted to see him. I think he had got it into his head that if he could influence the Bishop, the Bishop would influence the Viceroy so that the province of Pegu might be given back. The King was apparently willing to see the Bishop without the Political Agent and to treat him with all honour as Poon-dawgyi, or if he came with the Political Agent to give him political honours, but MacDuff wouldn’t hear of either. The result was H.M. withdrew his sons and they have never been to the school since. As a matter of fact the school is filled with paying pupils and we’ve really been more efficient without the royal patronage than with it, but my position has been getting more and more difficult. Of course, we shall never get free of this taint of politics, it’s bound in H.M.’s mind to be connected with the See of Calcutta, until Burma has a bishop of her own. That’s what I’m going to work for now. The finishing touch as far as I was concerned came about eight months ago when H.M. sent for me and disclosed what he wanted me to do. If you please, I was to go to England in his own private steamer and take two or three of his sons with me, and see the Queen and ask her to give back one of his seaports, Bassein or Rangoon! That’s the sort of thing they think is possible, they have no notion of what the world outside is really like and how countries are run. I explained I couldn’t do anything of the sort, and he got very angry and said, ‘Then you are no further use to me.’ Then he pulled himself together and laughed and joked as usual, but I’ve never seen him from that day to this. I went again and again to the Palace, and my subsidy ceased and I couldn’t get any of the arrears owing, and at last H.M. sent me a message telling me he didn’t want me any more, that I was to leave his capital because my life would be in danger if I stayed. Of course, I didn’t pay any attention to that. My plans didn’t allow of my going for another six months or so, and I wasn’t going to alter them for the King. I wish you joy, Lumsden, you’ll have an interesting time, I can promise you that. You’ve only got to remember never to ask the King for money, and never to take any from him unless you send it to the S.P.G. secretary at Calcutta. H.M. will respect you all right if you keep independent, but don’t you let yourself believe any of his promises. I don’t doubt you could be in high favour for a few months if you chose, but if you let yourself get involved in politics, sooner or later you’ll have to eat dirt and that’s not good for the prestige of our religion or our country.”

“I think I understand,” said Mr. Lumsden quietly. “My talents, such as they are, do not lie in the direction of Courts, and that is not the sort of thing that I aspire to.”

“Good Lord, man!” exploded Dr. Marks. “Do you imagine anyone aspires to it, anyone of our profession, that is to say? He’d be unworthy of the cloth if he did. No, what I’m telling you is that you may get caught in spite of yourself. We foreigners are on a hair-trigger here, my dear fellow, most of us are here for what we can get; and the missionaries, who are here for what they can give, find themselves in a very difficult position.”

Fanny sat watching both men from beneath her thick eyelashes. Fanny was very aware of what people were like, she couldn’t read through a book of Dickens, she couldn’t have picked up a newspaper and understood what anything was about except the police-court cases, she couldn’t have held an impersonal conversation on any subject whatsoever, but she had a sensitiveness, within her limitations, to human beings, that amounted to a talent, whenever her judgment was not obscured by her personal wishes. She was aware that she knew what the three men in the room were like far better than did Agatha, who had been seeing them for several days past. She didn’t think consciously about them, for her interest in human beings began and ended with her own relationships with them, but she held in her mind the knowledge of certain aspects of their selves. She knew that young Protheroe was the sort of idealist who might imagine later on that he was “in love” with Agatha—if only Agatha would be clever and know what to do.... He was nice, and yet he was the sort of man Agatha would like, thinking she understood him. I should like him too if he’d like me, thought Fanny, but he never would. Mr. Danvers ... he’s like him that way. He’s got much more in him than Agatha will ever guess, because he’ll respect her too much to let her know ...

Fanny’s calm eyes turned their gaze on Mr. Lumsden. He, too, wasn’t quite what he looked, not just a timid, dyspeptic parson. He looks silly and he isn’t, thought Fanny; he’s thinking and feeling all sorts of things, things he’s afraid of. He minds things. He minds not being as powerful as Dr. Marks, and he knows he can’t be because of the way his face is made, but he understands about things. I believe he understands lots of things better than Dr. Marks. I wonder why they are all missionaries? What’s the good of believing in something as much as that? I don’t understand it.

That was quite true—Fanny herself always did things with a reason, not because of something she believed in. She did things because of something she hoped for. To her it was extraordinary that all these three men were doing something because of what they believed in.... And Fanny, refusing with her pretty little manner yet another pink sugar cake, gazed limpidly at her hosts. And Agatha, dispensing the hospitality of the teapot, also had her thoughts.

How pretty Fanny looks, but she doesn’t seem able to talk intelligently about anything. After all, gentlemen do like to be talked to about their work. Of course, Dr. Marks is frightfully important and has made the Mission here, but I see what people mean when they tell Papa that he’s been difficult. I’m sure Papa will be much better, because he doesn’t get excited over things. Dear Papa does want looking after, I’m so glad he’s got me, and I suppose Mr. Protheroe needs looking after too, gentlemen always do. He looks as though he were a poet, you really wouldn’t think he was a clergyman if you didn’t see the way he was dressed. I’m sure he’s a splendid missionary. How Dr. Marks does go talking on, I’m sure Papa would know exactly what to do without his advice. Dear me, who is that on the verandah? It must be the Kalawoon. These foreigners seem to have no idea of time. And Agatha rang her little brass bell that stood on the tea-table, for her housewife’s mind was already thinking in terms of fresh hot water.

It was indeed the Kalawoon and his daughter—a girl of about Fanny’s age, round-faced and glowing, with a certain thrust of the chin and direct glance of the brown eyes that told of character. She had flashing white teeth and a fresh rosy colour in her round cheeks. She was dressed in a yellow muslin gown, with black velvet trimmings, and a little hat covered with loops and bows of magenta ribbon. She carried with slightly-conscious pride one of the new sunshades that one held upside down by a tassel attached to its ferrule. Her father, the Armenian minister, whose duty it was to placate the foreigners in King Mindoon’s dominions, was a pleasant-faced man with dark eyes that gleamed from behind large spectacles. As Fanny soon discovered, he spoke little, preferring to encourage conversation in others; a certain carefulness, born of the circumstances of his life seemed to overlay the natural spring of his talk. He gave nothing away in speech, and his part in any discussion consisted chiefly of spreading his hands and smiling deprecatingly. Dr. Marks plunged into a conversation about the mission and the Court, and the Kalawoon, spreading his palms forwards, denying this and not-quite-asserting the other, flattering and placating and yet yielding no ground, gave a pretty exhibition of verbal fencing.

Mr. Lumsden listened gloomily. If this is the sort of thing I’m let in for! Where is the message of Christ in all this? And Edward Protheroe, burning with a zeal that tended to absolute directness, listened in dismay, every now and then trying to break in, but though the Kalawoon always waited politely to hear what he had to say, Dr. Marks brushed him aside like a fly, and himself boomed into the attack again.

The three girls were left looking at each other. Fanny soon took the lead, she talked airily of the evening before at Julie Delange’s. Selah sat nodding and smiling, and not until a quarter of an hour had passed did Fanny realise that Selah knew Julie a very great deal better than she did herself. Fanny saw at once that she had been stupid, but Selah’s ever-pleasant smile and her own happiness in indulging in the small chit-chat that passed for conversation in Mandalay, put Fanny at her ease again.

Presently the whole party went out for a walk in the golden cool of the evening, the ostensible reason being to take Agatha’s little friend Fanny home to the Moroni bungalow. The three girls walked ahead, their shyness beginning to thaw, chattering amiably, as they went past the Gem City, past the rose-red walls which in the still evening air reflected into the moat, without a ripple to jar the illusion of reality. Here and there the pagoda-like pyathats reared up their curving roofs, dark against the glow of the sky, and walls and towers and the snow-white bridges that arched the moat and the heavy blots of darkness made by the mango trees that stood along the far bank, all went down into the clear water as if into infinity. A great golden barge, rich with carven dragons, seemed to float in the heart of a crystal. It was an evening when the clarity of the air made everything at once shining and oddly dream-like.

Edward Protheroe, walking with the older men, found his eyes drawn ahead to the three girlish figures, so gaily coloured, beneath their flower-like parasols, that seemed to float ahead along the turf of the moat. Suddenly he heard himself speaking aloud, and his cheeks grew hot, but having begun in a voice that rang out more loudly than he had meant, he continued firmly:

“What about women, sir?” he asked Dr. Marks, who gazed at him in surprise. “I mean the Burmese women. Coming from India, you must notice the difference, Mr. Lumsden. It is not only that there’s no caste in this country, but the women seem to run the place far more than they do even at home. It seems to me”—here he began to hesitate, to feel around in his mind for just the words he wanted to express the shade of his thought—“that the whole country is in the hands of women. This sort of thing”—and he jerked his head towards the Palace—“is sort of steeped in women, if you know what I mean. It’s—it’s oppressive.”

“Women! I’ve never been able to be interested in women,” said Dr. Marks. “It’s better not, for a missionary.”

“I didn’t mean that,” began Edward, but then felt the impossibility of explaining himself properly. He didn’t like this over-feminised atmosphere, but he was acutely conscious of it, nevertheless.

“I mean I don’t think it’s safe to ignore the question of women here,” he began again.

Dr. Marks fixed him with a belligerent eye.

“Unfortunately, in the way you mean, we cannot ignore them; only too many young Englishmen have their Burmese ‘wives,’ as they call them. Of course the tie is not permanent, and when the white man leaves, the girl goes back to her own people with any children that have been born of the connection. It is shockingly immoral.”

“But that wasn’t the way I meant,” began Edward once more. Then he gave up. How explain that what he was conscious of was a sort of hot, heavy insistence in the very air of the country, an insistence that was somehow female in its pressure? He hated it, he distrusted it, he felt the whole nation had the danger of the female in its essence. A convinced celibate himself, Edward had the nerves that told him of danger, and this danger that he feared was not some entanglement, no gross snare of the senses, but a thing purely mental in its insidious attack. He felt that this Kingdom of Ava stood for feminine domination, for feminine guile and points of view, in a way that was new to him. He fell upon silence, and the others, startled by his outburst, were silent also.

They all paused awhile beside the lotus-laden water, and Dr. Marks, that little, bald-headed, bearded, rather overpowering man, gazed at it, knowing that it might be the last time, and feeling as though it were the first. The self-conscious beauty of the place seemed to him almost monstrous in its perfection, gross in its subtlety, too fantastic to be good; he felt that one ought to be able to fold it all up like a painted fan, to run golden pagodas and red reflections one over the other, clap the white bridges together, merge tamarinds and mangoes into a scented whole, and put the entire affair, smelling of incense and orange blossoms, into a lacquer chest. It had been everything to him for the past six years and he was withdrawing from it, vanquished. It smote him, with an almost unendurable pang, that it could continue to exist without him; and that he left it, for all his passionate faith, almost untouched by the religion for which he would have given his life. He shifted his feet a little in their hot European boots, and for a moment brought his umbrella down sharply between his eyes and the painted vision that was Mandalay.

It should all go out like that ... he thought. But he twitched his umbrella upwards and the cruel beauty before him again brimmed his eyelids and his very soul. A breath of wind blew across the moat, the leaves of the trees rustled faintly, and more faintly still the pyathats with their curling roofs and the proud, angry dragons quivered in the water beneath their canopy of lily leaves. It was as though a giant hand had very slightly, very capriciously moved the sticks of the painted fan. The breeze died away and once more Mandalay was spread out shining and clear, painted on stretched silk. In front of him, at the water’s edge, Dr. Marks saw the three girls, the one fair and the two dark heads together as they gazed and chattered. Pretty little decorations he thought them, but nothing more ... they were of no real importance.

He stared for the last time across to where the golden seven-tiered spire, the Centre of the Universe, stood proud and graceful against the golden sky. It seemed to him that in that moment he gathered up all the memories of the past years. It was as though he were standing alone, steeped in the glow about him, and the persistent tonk, tonk, tonk of a coppersmith bird in a mango tree near by sounded like the blows of a hammer upon a coffin.