But because the bungalows are built on the same pattern, though you have been riding for several hours (your caravan does little more than two miles an hour) you seem always to arrive at the same house. It stands on piles in a compound a few yards away from the road. There is a large living-room, and behind, two bedrooms with their bath-rooms. In the middle of the living-room is a handsome teak table. There are two easy-chairs with extensions for the legs and four stout, severe armchairs to set round the table. There is a chiffonier on which are copies of the Strand Magazine for 1918 and two tattered much read novels by Phillips Oppenheim. On the walls there is a longitudinal section of the road, a summary of the Burma Game rules and a list of the furniture and the household utensils of the bungalow. In the compound are the servants' quarters stalls for the ponies and a cook-house. It is certainly not very pretty, it is not very comfortable, but it is solid, substantial and serviceable; and though I had never seen any one bungalow before and after that day should never see it again, I seldom caught sight of it at the end of the morning's journey without a little thrill of content. It was like coming home and when I got my first glimpse of its trim roof I put the spurs to my pony and galloped helter-skelter to the door.
The bungalow stands generally on the outskirts of a village, and when I arrived at the confines of the commune I found waiting to greet me the headman with his clerk and an attendant, a son or nephew, and the elders. When I approached they went down on their haunches, shikoed and offered me a cup of water, a few marigolds and a little rice. I drank the water with misgiving. But once I was handed on a tray eight thin tapers and was told that this was the highest mark of respect that could be shown me, for they were the tapers that were set before the image of Buddha. I could not but be conscious that I little deserved such a compliment. I settled down in the bungalow and then my interpreter informed me that the headman and the elders stood without desiring to tender the customary presents. They brought them in on lacquer trays, eggs, rice and bananas. I sat down in a chair and they knelt on the floor in a half-circle in front of me. The headman, with abundant gestures but with composure, made me a log harangue. Through the translation that my interpreter gave me I thought I perceived certain phrases that were not unfamiliar to me, and I seemed to discern something about one flag, hands across the sea and the desire that I should take back to my own country not only a greeting from this distant land, but the urgent request of the inhabitants that the government would build a metal road. I felt it became me to make a reply if not as eloquent at least as long. I was only a wandering stranger, and if by the instructions they had received to make easy my way they had been misled into thinking me a person of any consequence I could at least do myself the justice of not behaving like one. I am no politician and I was too shamefaced to utter the imperial platitudes that fall so trippingly from the mouth of those who make it their business to govern empires. Perhaps I might have told my listeners that they were fortunate in being under the control of a power that was content to leave them alone. Once a year the Resident of the district came round and composed the differences that they could not compose themselves, listened to their complaints, appointed a new headman when one was needed, and then left them to their own devices. They governed themselves according to their own customs and they were free to grow their rice, to marry, bring forth children, and die, to worship the gods they chose, without let or hindrance. They saw no soldiers and had no jail. But I felt that these matters were not of my competence and so contented myself with the smaller office of amusing them. Though no speaker (I can count on one hand the speeches that on public occasions I have been induced to make), it was not hard to devise a few graceful and humorous remarks in return for the eggs, bananas and rice which were presented to me.
It is not easy, however, to make forty different speeches about eggs, bananas and rice, and the eggs I soon learnt by experience were far from fresh. But thinking my interpreter would despise me if I said the same thing every day, in the morning when I rode along I racked my brain for new ways of expressing my gratification at my welcome and my present. I invented as one day followed another more than thirty different speeches and when I sat there while my interpreter translated what I had said, it was a satisfaction for me to see the little nods the headman and the elders gave me when a point had gone home and the way they shook themselves when they saw a joke. Now one morning I suddenly thought of an entirely new jest. It was a very good one and I saw in the twinkling of an eye how I could bring it into my speech. The lot of the English and the American humorist is hard, for pornography rather than brevity is the soul of wit, but the prudishness of his audience (and perhaps their sentimentality) has forced him to look for a laugh everywhere but where it is most easily to be found. But just as the poet may beat out more exquisite verse when he is constrained by the complicated measures of a Pindaric ode than when he has the elbow room of blank verse, so the difficulties placed in the way of our humorists have often resulted in their making unexpected discoveries in the ludicrous. They have found a rich load of laugher where but for the taboos they would never have sought it. The two pitfalls that threaten the humorist are the inane on one side and the disgusting on the other; and it is a regrettable fact, which the English or American humorist has to put up with, that the inane enrages more than the disgusting revolts.
But by this time I knew my public and this joke, though I hope not coarse, just touched the obscene as a mosquito touches your face and then flies away buzzing when you slap. It amused me very much, and as I rode along I thought of the headman and the elders of the village I was approaching, on their knees on the floor in front of me, shaking with laughter and rolling from side to side.
We arrived. The village chief was a man of fifty-seven and he had been headman for thirty years. He brought his nephew, a shy youth with the beginnings of a beard, four or five elders and the clerk, who sat a little by himself, a man of immeasurable age, wrinkled, with a sparse grey beard, a man so old that he seemed hardly human. He looked like a pagoda which is tumbling into ruin and soon the encroaching jungle will fall upon it and it will be no more.
In due time I made my speech and when I came to my good joke the interpreter giggled and his eyes glistened. I was pleased. I finished and sat back in my chair while he translated my winged words. The little half-circle of listeners turned from me to him and watched him with dark, attentive eyes. He was a good speaker, my interpreter, fluent, with a gift of easy and descriptive gesture. I always felt that he did me justice. I had never made a wittier speech. I was surprised that it did not seem to go down. Not a smile rewarded any of my sallies; they listened politely, but no change in their expression suggested that they were either interested or amused. I had kept my best joke for the last and as I reckoned that it was approaching, a smile on my lips, I leaned forward. The interpreter finished. Not a laugh, not a chuckle. I will admit that I was put out. I signified to the headman that the ceremony was at an end, they shikoed, struggled to their feet, and one after the other left the bungalow.
For a moment I hesitated.
"They didn't seem to me very intelligent," I hazarded.
"They were the stupidest lot of people we've come across," said my interpreter, and there was indignation in his tone. "I've made the same jokes every day and this is the first time they've never laughed."
I was a trifled startled. I was not sure that I understood.
"I beg your pardon?" I said.
"What for you say all sorts of different things, sir? You take too much trouble for ignorant men like that. I make the same speech every day and they like it very much."
I was silent for a moment.
"For all you care I might just as well say the multiplication table," I said them, with what I thought a certain irony.
My interpreter smiled brightly, flashing a great many white teeth at me.
"Yes, sir, that will save you a lot of trouble," he said. "You say the multiplication table and then I make my speech."
The worst of it was that I could not be quite certain that I remembered it.
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