My Maugham Collection Concordance Library: The Gentleman in the Parlour

Non-Fiction > The Gentleman in the Parlour >

In the market was to be found everything to eat, to wear, and to furnish his house that was necessary to the needs of the simple Shan. There were silks from China, and the Chinese hucksters, sedately smoking their water pipes, were dressed in blue trousers, tight-fitting black coats and black silk caps. They were not lacking in elegance. The Chinese are the aristocracy of the East. There were Indians in white trousers, a white tunic that fitted closely to their thin bodies and round caps of black velvet. They sold soap and buttons, and flimsy Indian silks, rolls of Manchester cotton, alarm clocks, looking-glasses and knives from Sheffield. The Shans retailed the goods brought down by the tribesmen from the surrounding hills and the simple products of their own industry. Here and there a little band of musicians occupied a booth and a crowd stood round idly listening. In one three men beat on gongs, one played the cymbals and another thumped a drum as long as himself. My uneducated ear could discern no pattern in that welter of sound, but only a direct and not unexhilarating appeal to crude emotion; but a little further on I came across another band, not of Shans this time but of hillmen, who played on long wind instruments of bamboo and their music was melancholy and tremulous. Every now and then I seemed in this vague monotony to catch a few notes of a wistful melody. It gave you an impression of something immensely old. Every violence of statement had been worn away from it and every challenge to an energetic reaction, and there remained but subdued suggestions on which the imagination might work and references, as it were, to desires and hopes and despairs deep buried in the heart. You had the feeling of a music recollected at night by the camp-fires of nomad tribes on their wanderings from the grass-lands of their ancient homes and begotten of the scattered sounds of the jungle and the silence of flowing rivers; and to my fancy (worked up now, as is the writer's way, by the power of the words, so difficultly controlled, that throng upon his imagination) it suggested the perplexity in the midst of strange and hostile surroundings of men who came they knew not whence and went they knew not whither, a plaintive, questioning cry and a song sung together (as men at sea in a storm tell one another lewd stories to drive away the uneasiness of the battering waves and the howling wind) to reassure themselves by the blessed solace of human companionship against the loneliness of the world.

But there was nothing doleful or forlorn in the throng that crowded the streets of the market. They were gay, voluble and blithe. They had come not only to buy and sell, but to gossip and pass the time of day with their friends. It was the meeting-place not only of Keng Tung, but of the whole countryside for fifty miles around. Here they got the news and heard the latest stories. It was as good as a play and doubtless much better than most. Among the Shans, who were in the majority, wandered in their distinctive costumes members of many tribes. They held together in little groups as though, feeling shy in this foreign environment, they were afraid of being parted from one another. To them it must have seemed a vast and populous city, and they kept themselves to themselves with the countryman's odd mingling of awe and contempt for the inhabitants of a city. There were Tais, Laos, Laws, Palaungs, Was and heaven knows what else. The Was are divided by people wise in these matters into wild and tame, but the wild ones do not leave their mountain fastnesses. They are head-hunters, not from vainglory like the Dyaks, nor for æsthetic reasons like the people of the Mambwe country, but for the purely utilitarian purpose of protecting their crops. A fresh skull will guard and strengthen the growing grain, and so at the approach of spring from each village a small party of men goes out to look for a likely stranger. A stranger is sought since he does not know his way about the country and his spirit will not wander away from his earthly remains. It is said that travel in those parts is far from popular during the hunting season. But the tame Was have the air of amiable and kindly people and certainly their appearance, though wild enough, is picturesque. The Kaws stand out from among the others by reason of their fine physique and swarthy colour. The authorities, however, state that they darkness of their complexion is due for the most part to their dislike of the use of water. The women wear a headdress covered with silver beads so that it looks like a helmet; their hair is parted in the middle and comes down over the ears as one sees it in the portraits of the Empress Eugénie, and in middle age they have funny little wrinkled faces full of humour. They wear a short coat, a kilt and leggings; and there is quite an interval between the kilt and leggings; and there is quite an interval between the coat and the kilt: I could not fail to notice how much character it gives a woman's face to display her navel. The men are dressed in dingy blue, with turbans, and in these the young lads put marigolds as a sign that they are bachelors and want to marry. I wondered indeed if they kept them there or only put them in when the urge was strong upon them. For presumably no one feels inclined to marry on a cold and frosty morning. I saw one with half a dozen flowers in his turban. He was not going to leave his intentions in doubt. He cut a gay and jaunty figure, but the girls seemed to take no more notice of him than he, I am bound to confess, took of them. Perhaps they thought his eagerness was exaggerated and he, I suppose, having put his advertisement in the paper, as it were, was willing to leave it at that. He was a pleasant creature, of a dusky complexion, with large dark eyes, bold and shining, and he stood, with his back a trifle arched, as though all his muscles quivered with strength. There were peasants threading their way among the throng with pigeons on a perch tied by the leg with a string, which you might either buy to release and so acquire merit or add to the next day's curry. One of these men passing him the young Kaw, evidently a careless fellow with his money, on a suddenly impulse (and you saw on his mobile face how unexpectedly it came into his head) bought a pigeon, and when it was given to him he held it for a moment in both his hands, a grey wood pigeon with a pink breast, and then throwing up his arms with the gesture of the bronze boy from Herculaneum flung it high into the air. He watched it fly rapidly away, fly back to its native woods, and there was a boyish smile on his handsome face.

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The Gentleman in the Parlour – XIX