The Skeptical Romancer (13 page)

“I beg your pardon,” I said.

“Have you read
Les Avariés
?” he asked. “I think that is the finest play that has been produced in Europe since Scribe.”

“Do you?” I said politely.

“Yes, you see our students are greatly interested in sociological questions.”

It is my misfortune that I am not, and so as deftly as I could I led the conversation to Chinese philosophy, which I was desultorily reading. I mentioned Chuang-Tzu. The professor’s jaw fell.

“He lived a very long time ago,” he said, perplexed.

“So did Aristotle,” I murmured pleasantly.

“I have never studied the philosophers,” he said, “but of course we have at our university a professor of Chinese philosophy, and if you are interested in that I will ask him to come and call on you.”

It is useless to argue with a pedagogue, as the Spirit of the Ocean (somewhat portentously to my mind) remarked to the Spirit of the River, and I resigned myself to discuss the drama. My professor was interested in its technique and, indeed, was preparing a course of lectures on the subject, which he seemed to think both complicated and abstruse. He flattered me by asking me what were the secrets of the craft.

“I know only two,” I answered. “One is to have commonsense, and the other is to stick to the point.”

“Does it require no more than that to write a play?” he inquired, with a shade of dismay in his tone.

“You want a certain knack,” I allowed, “but no more than to play billiards.”

“They lecture on the technique of the drama in all the important universities of America,” said he.

“The Americans are an extremely practical people,” I answered. “I believe that Harvard is instituting a chair to instruct grandmothers how to suck eggs.”

“I do not think I quite understand you.”

“If you can’t write a play no one can teach you, and if you can it’s as easy as falling off a log.”

Here his face expressed a lively perplexity, but I think only because he could not make up his mind whether this operation came within the province of the professor of physics or within that of the professor of applied mechanics.

“But if it is so easy to write a play why do dramatists take so long about it?”

“They didn’t, you know. Lope de Vega and Shakespeare and a hundred others wrote copiously and with ease. Some modern playwrights have been perfectly illiterate men and have found it an almost insuperable difficulty to put two sentences together. A celebrated English dramatist once showed me a manuscript and I saw that he had written the question: will you have sugar in your tea, five times before he could put it in this form. A novelist would starve if he could not on the whole say what he wanted to without any beating about the bush.”

“You would not call Ibsen an illiterate man and yet it is well known that he took two years to write a play.”

“It is obvious that Ibsen found a prodigious difficulty in thinking of a plot. He racked his brain furiously, month after month, and at last in despair used the very same that he had used before.”

“What do you mean?” the professor cried, his voice rising to a shrill scream. “I do not understand you at all.”

“Have you not noticed that Ibsen uses the same plot over and over again? A number of people are living in a closed and stuffy room, then someone comes (from the mountains or from over the sea) and flings the window open; everyone gets a cold in the head and the curtain falls.”

I thought it just possible that the shadow of a smile might lighten for a moment the professor’s grave face, but he knit his brows and gazed for two minutes into space. Then he rose.

“I will peruse the works of Henrik Ibsen once more with that point of view in mind,” he said.

I did not omit before he left to put him the question which one earnest student of the drama always puts another when peradventure they meet. I asked him, namely, what he thought was the future of the theatre. I had an idea that he said, oh hell, but on reflection I believe his exclamation must have been,
ô ciel!
He sighed, he shook his head, he threw up his elegant hands; he looked the picture of dejection. It was certainly a comfort to find that all thoughtful people considered the drama’s state in China no less desperate than all thoughtful people consider it in England.

THEY SAY OF
it that the dogs bark when peradventure the sun shines there. It is a grey and gloomy city, shrouded in mist, for it stands upon its rock where two great rivers meet so that it is washed on all sides but one by turbid, rushing waters. The rock is like the prow of an ancient galley and seems, as though possessed of a strange, unnatural life, all tremulous with effort; it is as if it were ever on the point of forging into the tumultuous stream. Rugged mountains hem the city round about.

Outside the walls bedraggled houses are built on piles, and here, when the river is low, a hazardous population lives on the needs of the watermen; for at the foot of the rock a thousand junks are moored, wedged in with one another tightly, and men’s lives there have all the turbulence of the river. A steep and tortuous stairway leads to the great gate guarded by a temple, and up and down this all day long go the water coolies, with their dripping buckets; and from their splashing the stair and the street that leads from the gate are wet as though after heavy rain. It is difficult to walk on the level for more than a few minutes, and there are as many steps as in the hill towns of the Italian Riviera. Because there is so little space the streets are pressed together, narrow and dark, and they wind continuously so that to find your way is like finding it in a labyrinth. The throng is as thick as the throng on a pavement in London when a theatre is emptying itself of its audience. You have to push your way through it, stepping aside every moment as chairs come by and coolies bearing their everlasting loads: itinerant sellers, selling almost anything that anyone can want to buy, jostle you as you pass.

The shops are wide open to the street, without windows or doors, and they are crowded too. They are like an exhibition of arts and crafts, and you may see what a street looked like in mediæval England when each town made all that was necessary to its needs. The various industries are huddled together so that you will pass through a street of butchers where carcasses and entrails hang bloody on each side of you, with flies buzzing about them and mangy dogs prowling hungrily below; you will pass through a street where in each house there is a hand-loom and they are busily weaving cloth or silk. There are innumerable eating houses from which come heavy odours, and here at all
hours people are eating. Then, generally at a corner, you will see tea-houses, and here all day long again the tables are packed with men of all sorts drinking tea and smoking. The barbers ply their trade in the public view and you will see men leaning patiently on their crossed arms while their heads arc being shaved; others are having their ears cleaned, and some, a revolting spectacle, the inside of their eyelids scraped.

It is a city of a thousand noises. There are the peddlers who announce their presence by a wooden gong; the clappers of the blind musician or of the masseuse; the shrill falsetto of a man singing in a tavern; the loud beating of a gong from a house where a wedding or a funeral is being celebrated. There are the raucous shouts of the coolies and chair-bearers; the menacing whines of the beggars, caricatures of humanity, their emaciated limbs barely covered by filthy tatters and revolting with disease; the cracked melancholy of the bugler who incessantly practises a call he can never get; and then, like a bass to which all these are a barbaric melody, the insistent sound of conversation, of people laughing, quarrelling, joking, shouting, arguing, gossiping. It is a ceaseless din. It is extraordinary at first, then confusing, exasperating, and at last maddening. You long for a moment’s utter silence. It seems to you that it would be a voluptuous delight.

And then combining with the irksome throng and the din that exhausts your ears is a stench which time and experience enable you to distinguish into a thousand separate stenches. Your nostrils grow cunning. Foul odours beat upon your harassed nerves like the sound of uncouth instruments playing a horrible symphony.

You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about you. Upon your own people sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really possess them. By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a fashion part of yourself. But these are as strange to you as you are strange to them. You have no clue to their mystery. For their likeness to yourself in so much does not help you; it serves rather to emphasize their difference. Someone attracts your attention, a pale youth with great horn spectacles and a book under his arm, whose studious look is pleasant, or an old man, wearing a hood, with a grey sparse beard and tired eyes: he looks like one of those sages that the Chinese artists painted in a rocky landscape or under Kang-hsi modelled
in porcelain; but you might as well look at a brick wall. You have nothing to go upon, you do not know the first thing about them, and your imagination is baffled.

But when, reaching the top of the hill, you come once more to the crenellated walls that surround the city and go out through the frowning gate, you come to the graves. They stretch over the country, one mile, two miles, three, four, five, interminable green mounds, up and down the hills, with grey stones to which the people once a year come to offer libation and to tell the dead how fare the living whom they left behind; and they are as thickly crowded, the dead, as are the living in the city; and they seem to press upon the living as though they would force them into the turbid, swirling river. There is something menacing about those serried ranks. It is as though they were laying siege to the city, with a sullen ruthlessness, biding their time; and as though in the end, encroaching irresistibly as fate, they would drive those seething throngs before them till the houses and the streets were covered by them, and the green mounds came down to the water gate. Then at last silence, silence would dwell there undisturbed.

They are uncanny, those green graves, they are terrifying. They seem to wait.

THE CIRCUIT HOUSE
stood on the river bank, quite close to the water, and all round it were great trees, tamarinds, banyans, and wild gooseberries. A flight of wooden steps led to a broad veranda, which served as a living room, and behind this were a couple of bedrooms, each with a bathroom. I found that one of these was occupied by another traveller, and I had but just examined the accommodation and talked to the Madrassi in charge about meals and taken stock of what pickles and canned goods and liquor he had on the premises when a little man appeared in a mackintosh and a topee dripping with rain. He took off his soaking things, and presently we sat down to the meal known in this country as brunch. It appeared that he was a Czecho-Slovak, employed by a firm of exporters in Calcutta, and was spending his holiday seeing the sights of Burma. He was a short man with wild black hair, a large face, a bold hooked nose, and gold-rimmed spectacles. His
stengah-shifter
fitted tightly over a corpulent figure. He was evidently an active and an energetic sightseer, for the rain had not prevented him from going out in the morning, and he told me that he had visited no less than seven pagodas. But the rain stopped while we were eating, and soon the sun shone brightly. We had no sooner finished than he set out again. I do not know how many pagodas there are at Pagan; when you stand on an eminence they surround you as far as the eye can reach. They are almost as thickly strewn as the tombstones in a cemetery. They are of all sizes and in all states of preservation. Their solidity and size and magnificence are the more striking by reason of their surroundings, for they alone remain to show that here a vast and populous city once flourished. Today there is only a straggling village with broad untidy roads lined with great trees, a pleasant enough little place with matting houses, neat and trim, in which live the workers in lacquer; for this is the industry on which Pagan, forgetful of its ancient greatness, now modestly thrives.

But of all these pagodas only one, the Ananda, is still a place of pilgrimage. Here are four huge gilded Buddhas standing against a gilded wall in a lofty gilded chamber. You look at them one by one through a gilded archway. In that glowing dimness they are inscrutable. In front of one a mendicant in his yellow robe chants in a high-pitched voice some litany that you do not understand. But the other pagodas are deserted. Grass grows in the chinks of the pavement, and young trees have taken root in the crannies. They are the refuge of birds. Hawks wheel about their summits, and little green parrots chatter in the eaves. They are like bizarre and monstrous flowers turned to stone. There is one in which the architect has taken as his model the lotus, as the architect of St. John’s, Smith Square, took Queen Anne’s footstool, and it has a baroque extravagance that makes the Jesuit churches in Spain seem severe and classical. It is preposterous, so that it makes you smile to look at it, but its exuberance is captivating. It is quite unreal, shoddy but strange, and you are staggered at the fantasy that could ever have devised it. It looks like the fabric of a single night made by the swarming hands of one of those wayward gods of the Indian mythology. Within the pagodas images of the Buddha sit in meditation. The gold leaf has long since worn away from the colossal figures, and the figures are crumbling to dust. The fantastic lions that guard the entrance ways are rotting on their pedestals.

A strange and melancholy spot. But my curiosity was satisfied with a visit to half a dozen of the pagodas, and I would not let the vigour of my Czecho-Slovak be a reproach to my indolence. He divided them into various types and marked them down in his notebook according to their peculiarities. He had theories about them, and in his mind they were neatly ticketed to support a theory or clinch an argument. None was so ruined that he did not think it worth while to give it his close and enthusiastic attention, and to examine the make and shape of tiles he climbed up broken places like a mountain goat. I preferred to sit idly on the veranda of the circuit house and watch the scene before me. In the full tide of noon the sun burned all the colour from the landscape, so that the trees and the dwarf scrub that grew wildly where in time past were the busy haunts of men were pale and grey; but with the declining day the colour crept back, like an emotion that tempers the character and has been submerged for
a while by the affairs of the world, and trees and scrub were again a sumptuous and living green. The sun set on the other side of the river, and a red cloud in the west was reflected on the tranquil bosom of the Irrawaddy. There was not a ripple on the water. The river seemed no longer to flow. In the distance a solitary fisherman in a dugout plied his craft. A little to one side but in full view was one of the loveliest of the pagodas. In the setting sun its colours, cream and fawn-grey, were soft like the silk of old dresses in a museum. It had a symmetry that was grateful to the eye; the turrets at one corner were repeated by the turrets at every other; and the flamboyant windows repeated the flamboyant doors below. The decoration had a sort of bold violence, as though it sought to scale fantastic pinnacles of the spirit and in the desperate struggle, with life and soul engaged, could not concern itself with reticence or good taste. But withal it had at that moment a kind of majesty, and there was majesty in the solitude in which it stood. It seemed to weigh upon the earth with too great a burden. It was impressive to reflect that it had stood for so many centuries and looked down impassively upon the smiling bend of the Irrawaddy. The birds were singing noisily in the trees; the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked, croaked, croaked. Somewhere a boy was whistling a melancholy tune on a rude pipe, and in the compound the natives were chattering loudly. There is no silence in the East.