The Man Who Loved Children (37 page)

Yours sincerely,

GILLIAN ROEBUCK

The letter shocked him in a strange way. He had a kind of awakening and saw how interesting was this youthful freshness turning to him from its dark old home, moldy with prejudice and tobacco smoke and this frank belief in his ideals. He believed he could be of some help to the girl who had started out on life’s journey on her own account.

Sam read them all two or three times, but presently the leaden air pressed him down, and he put out the light, crept under the mosquito nets, and lay on his pillow. In a little while it was sweat-drenched: his blood beat feverishly and his head ached, ached. Meanwhile the birds outside the window, perched on the trees, fences, and the telephone wire outside the gate, twittered and squabbled for places. Every night they took up their footing there to sleep and not an inch of wire would be left. Some even slept perching on the backs of others. Every new wire that was put up was likewise utilized by the metropolitan and therefore homeless myriads. The night was not quiet at any time. Outside in the streets, too, even in this pleasant district, there would sometimes pass one of Singapore’s giant population of waifs and hungry, strayed out from the steaming chowder of the streets, to the small European settlement.

He woke up in an hour or two, eyes burning, head throbbing, ready to weep with the continual pain and fever of the heat. If he could only have got to high ground it would have been better. He did not want to disturb anyone and went himself to get some iced water. He found the kitchen, which had a refrigerator, and opening the door, he leaned his head into the cold air for a while. It refreshed him a little, and then he came back to bed. But the reeking pillow, already drenched with sweat and steaming, and the moist sheets did not invite him. He opened his wardrobe to find a sarong that he usually wore when he was writing, a long strip of red, black, and yellow linen which he tucked in round his waist. The stench of clothes which could never be got dry and of the endemic mildew greeted him. Destroying and breeding nature reached in everywhere here, could not be banished, made man ridiculous.

He sat down, naked except for the linen cloth, sanguine, broad, muscular, and hairless, and after fanning himself for a few minutes and leaning his head on his hand, sighed and pulled the little portable typewriter towards him. His busy small click did not make any appreciable difference in the noises of the night.

“Singapore,” he wrote, “and twelve o’clock of a night decocted in Hades.”

DEAR LOOLOO-DIRL,

Lai Wan Hoe brought my budget of mail home to me tonight and so I have all your un-news.

Well, I don’t mean the Georgetown Record and the story about the shaits [snakes] waking up—that
is
news. Anything to do with old Mother Nature, the mother of us all, is news; and I know you kids know it. So that’s one good thing.

Now here is something for you, Loobeck, fir you always did love blood and thunder and here it is. I went into a Buddhist temple just outside Singapore and though I was an infidel they were glad to see me because I paid the right amount for propitiation at the entrance to the temple, also took some of their holy water. It was a wondrous temple and in it, besides a lot of heathen gods engaged in horrid activities, truly human activities and truly godlike too, if it is true that we humans are so poor as to be copies of the gods
—
for example, cheating, fighting, and making the most awful grimaces when not pleased. There was one appalling wall painting showing the sufferings of the damned and the resources of hell, and it was no slouch, I can tell you. It was certainly done by a male painter (but there aren’t any others here in this land of domesticated woman-animals), and to placate a male god. There were two women who wouldn’t do what their husbands told them. They were tied down on a bench and two demons (men-demons of course) were hacking their heads off. In fact, one is off already and is hanging up on the wall and the other is nearly off. It is just a Buddhist Bluebeard tale. And the expressions on the heads! I saw one poor Chinese woman looking and she had turned very pale—pale ivory, but not natural ivory—so I guess her husband, who was with her and had perhaps brought her just there, for his own reasons, will have no trouble with her for a while.

Then there is a man who wouldn’t contribute to the gods; what a rascal! He is very neatly tied up inside a frame of wood, in an erect position and two demons with the most horrible grins on their faces are sawing him down from the top of his head to his toes. They are sawing him across so that his back is being separated from his front. Judging by the man’s expression, he doesn’t like it, but the demons do, judging from
their
expressions. They have just got down as far as his stomach. A great jagged crosscut saw with teeth about two inches long and wide.

There is a man being thrown into a great fire off a high place, a man who looks very worried, being boiled in a pan. As only a bit of him can be boiled at a time, the attendant demons are getting much pleasure out of turning him round and over so that all parts will get a fair, democratic boiling. Then one is being boiled in a deep pot of boiling oil—I don’t know
what
for—but the Buddhists seem to take an interest in cooking. The one in the deep pot is a woman, perhaps she is in a deep one for more decency. As she squirms about and tries to get out of the pot the demons laugh at her and push her back again. It is a case of the clam who wouldn’t be chowder. Then, in the same chowder department is a woman being held upside down in a very deep pot, almost a bottle—of boiling oil. She is held firmly by two demons, one to a leg. There is also more activity in the same department. A man is being sawn across the middle this time and right next door, in the hook-and-eye division, a man is having his stomach pulled out with great hooks and some (petty offenders, I suppose) are having their tongues yanked out, red-hot irons pushed into their eyes, which are sizzling, and there are others, quite venial, with hands and ears being lopped off with large and apparently specialized lopping knives. But these folks are specialized in knives, as you will see when I get home, with my collection of swords and scimitars and the like. So much art into such wicked weapons! And perhaps, says I, we should suspect all art capable of being applied to such a use. Think of that, Looloo-dirl, when you are reading your
Styles of Ornament
and all those funny, dopey things you read, godfather knows why!

Well, back to the joyful scene, for I know you: I bet you are enjoying it in your solemn, poker-face way. There is a particularly joyful little act—for the demons, I mean. Three men are chained to a tall metal funnel (there must be modernism), and a great fire is raging inside and being kept up by a demon stoker. The victims are being frizzled and grilled against the heated funnel, and turned round at the right time, so that they will be the right shade all round.

There are quite a lot impaled on spears put close together, and there is a man being flattened between two stone slabs; his blood and innards are oozing through in a very natural fashion. There are many other inventions—all in natural colors and blood, blood everywhere. This is all for Chinese Buddhists: I don’t know whether they are tougher than other people and like this, or whether they are weaker than other people and have to have more awful warnings.

The whole thing is quite a nice little business and the priests being successful businessmen look no different from the chetties and the big fat Chinese butchers and bankers, perhaps better-humored because of the pictures they have on their walls. At the entrance to their little place of business, there are big figures of the Chinese Buddha and his pink-white marble wives and all sorts of demon gods, some of them crushing little demons under their feet, just like the advertisement for backache pills. There must be at least fifty little gods of different sorts: you can choose your god, as your pills, in the druggist’s—it is rather a good, comforting idea, for surely the gods go in for competition and try to do a little better than the next god.

There is a sacred snake in a cage that attracted me. You can worship it too, if you are scared enough. Of course I went and hissed at him, but he took no notice; he knew he had no power over the rational, I suppose.

There is much burning of joss sticks and firing-off of crackers; that is the great way of worshiping because you get something for your money. I gave the priest one Straits dollar which he put in a bowl as an offering to the Lord Buddha, though I wondered how the high and mighty, suave and grand Lord Buddha should want one Straits dollar. Then the priest gave me a packet of crackers which I let off in front of the Lord Buddha, and the great god looked down on me and seemed to grin at me through the curls of smoke. It seems that now the demons of the sea and forest will let me pass—all on account of the packet of crackers, and the silver dollar. So tell my little foolish dark-eyed Smudge-Sedgewing that the tigers can’t get me now, for the great Lord Buddha is watching me.

Am tired-tired with the heat and my head. Will write later. Meanwhile keep-up your Georgetown Record, Looloo, and work at your schoolwork. I expect great things of you later on, even if you do seem a little dopey now.

Your loving father,

SAMUEL POLLIT

P.S. I am not sending these notes from the ordinary tourist’s love of the sensational: but because one might say truly that these are the—horrors of superstition, from which, Looloo, may you ever stay free!

DAD

P.P.S. Ask your cousin Leslie to put off getting hitched till I get back so I can join the jubilaum. I’ll bring her some peachblow Chinese silk if they let me.

DAD

Sam went back to bed and slept soundly, and it was not till the next evening that, borrowing Wan Hoe’s typewriter at the office, he wrote to Gillian Roebuck.

The Holy Lion City.

15th April, 1937

DEAR MISS ROEBUCK,

(Because I may only call you My Little Gillian before a host of witnesses, because you are a young lady now):

I am very, very glad you got away at last to such a wonderful place. Yes, it is wonderful to have something to love, something that will last a lifetime, or many lifetimes, and if it’s nature and man in nature, that is the best thing of all.

It isn’t such fun seeing things here. You have an ever-present and all-pervading conscious and subconscious sensation that it—is—HOT. You see a lovely vista of palms and wonderful trees: it is too hot to walk down to them. You see a wonderful mountain clear in air, floating in crystal and it is too hot to even attempt to go even a hundred yards towards it on foot; I’m not thinking of the dense jungle which you would have to cut your way through. You see the glorious foreshores, with their four tiers of trees, the fifty feet, the hundred, the hundred and fifty, and the two hundred, all shades of green, all fronds and foliages laced together; and it is too hot to take a boat to go there. (There is such a lovely stretch behind Singapore in the Strait.) Then you see a lovely sheet of water; but it is too hot to so much as go down to it. You are invited to tea by a lovely lady, and it is too hot to go. You try to keep your temper with a foolish, vain gnat of a human being, and it is too hot to do so. Because it is TOO HOT everywhere. The heat wilts you like a soft leaf, just like the pumpkin leaf goes in our place on a very hot day at Tohoga, You put on nice clean clothes and they wilt when you touch them and they are full of perspiration before you finish dressing. You sweat at breakfast, you sweat at tiffin, and you sweat at eight o’clock dinner.

You don’t want to go anywhere; you don’t want to see anything; you don’t want to know anybody. You just have one paramount thought, again conscious and subconscious, “Let’s strip Jack naked!” You refuse invitations to afternoon tea because politeness prevents you from taking your clothes off in your host’s house; and your tea’s no sooner in than it’s out quicker than in, through your skin. You can’t go out to tiffin or dinner unless you sit under a punkah and then you get a chill in your back. You go for a walk in the evening to study the many interesting types of humans and their funny ways—for they live, boil, stew quite cheerfully in their infernal temperature—and you sweat and sweat and sweat and all you study is THE HEAT.

And your clothes reek and everything goes moldy in one day—hats fuzzy, boots furry, bag leprous, spectacle cases blanched, books diseased, coats blotched. Your bed reeks with the sweat of ages (an age is a week here), and the pillow at about midnight is just a sponge.

And just think, my little Gillian (yes, I will say it and call up a host of invisible witnesses as I have none visible), all that would be unnecessary if we wore shorts or a sarong like sensible people do and didn’t try to be gents: you don’t mind sweat pouring out of you when you’ve no clothes on; and the great Chinese rich men go about happily in their automobiles naked to the waist with great shining free bellies, ready to catch any breeze that kindly blows to our relief.

And now, Miss Roebuck and Miss Gillian, good-by to both of you; and I’ll be seeing my dear naturalists soon in dear old Washington, our new Jerusalem, the one sane, great city, built on a definite plan for a definite purpose and not by the worst cases in a madhouse. (And with the naturalists, my little naturalist!)

Yours sincerely,

SAMUEL C. POLLIT

When they got back at last and the work was about done, Sam set to work to get his notes in order and present his section of the report. He was at first too ill and too overworked to notice that Lai Wan Hoe, his senior clerk, was more harassed than usual; and when he did notice it, he thought that it was because of the pile of work to be got through in a short time. Colonel Willets had decided to close the mission at once, being sick and tired of the Malayan heat, habits, and company. Sam had a pile of notes without end but would have been unable to get up his report without the lifetime knowledge of his Chinese secretary.