"Tiens, where did you get hold of this?"
I told him that I had found it in the bungalow and had been glancing through it. It was the selection of Verlaine's poems which has for a frontispiece Carrière's misty, but no uninteresting portrait of him.
"I wonder who the devil can have left it here," he said.
He took up the volume and idly fingering the pages told me various gross stories about the unhappy poet. They were not new to me. Then his eyes caught a line that he knew and he began to read.
"Voici des fruits, des fleurs, des feuilles et des branches.
Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous."
"Ah, merde," he cried, "ça me fait pleurer comme un veau."
He flung the book down and laughed and gave a little sob. I poured him out a drink of whisky, for there is nothing better than alcohol to still or at least to enable one to endure that particular heartache from which at the moment he was suffering. Then we played piquet. He went to bed early, since he had a long day before him and was starting at dawn, and by the time I got up he was gone. I did not see him again.
But as I rode along in the sunshine, bustling and quick like women gossiping at their spinning-wheels, I thought of him. I reflected that men are more interesting than books, but have this defect that you cannot skip them; you have at least to skim the whole volume in order to find the good page. And you cannot put them on a shelf and take them down when you feel inclined; you must read them when the chance offers, like a book in a circulating library that is in such demand that you must take your turn and keep it no more than four and twenty hours. You may not be in the mood for them then or it may be that in your hurry you miss the only thing they had to give you.
And now the plain spread out with a noble spaciousness. The rice fields were no longer little patches laboriously wrested from the jungle, but board acres. The days followed one another with a monotony in which there was withal something impressive. In the life of cities we are conscious but of fragments of days; they have no meaning of their own, but are merely parts of time in which we conduct such and such affairs; we begin them when they are already well on their way and continue them without regard to their natural end. But here they had completeness and one watched them unroll themselves with stately majesty from dawn to dusk; each day was like a flower, a rose that buds and blooms and, without regret but accepting the course of nature, dies. And this vast sun-drenched plain was a fit scene for the pageant of that ever-recurring drama. The stars were like the curious who wander upon the scene of some great event, a battle or an earthquake, that has just occurred, first one by one timidly and then in bands, and stand about gaping or look for traces of what has passed.
The road became straight and level. Though here and there deep with ruts and when a stream crossed it muddy, great stretches could have been traversed by car. Now it is all very well to ride a pony at the rate of twelve or fifteen miles a day when you go along mountain paths, but when the road is broad and flat this mode of travel sorely tries your patience. It was six weeks now that I had been on the way. It seemed endless. Then on a sudden I found myself in the tropics. I suppose that little by little, as one uneventful day followed another, the character of the scene had been changing, but it had been so gradual that I had scarcely noticed it, and I drew a deep breath of delight when, riding into a village one noon, I was met, as by an unexpected friend, with the savour of the harsh, the impetuous, the flamboyant South. The depth of the colour, the hot touch of the air on one's cheek, the dazzling, yet strangely veiled light, the different walk of the people, the lazy breath of their gestures, the silence, the solemnity, the dust–this was the real thing and my jaded spirits rose. The village street was bordered by tamarinds and they were like the sentences of Sir Thomas Browne, opulent, stately and self-possessed. In the compounds grew plantains, regal and bedraggled, and the crotons flaunted the riches of their sepulchral hues. The cocoanut trees with their dishevelled heads were like long lean old men suddenly risen from sleep. In the monastery was a grove of areca palms and they stood, immensely tall and slender, with the gaunt precision and the bare, precise, and intellectual nakedness of a collection of apothegms. It was the South.
We had now to get the day's journey over as early as possible and we started just as the first grey light stole into the Eastern sky. The sun rose and it was pleasantly warm on one's back, but in a little while it gre fierce and by ten it was overwhelming. It seemed to me that I had been riding along that board white road since the beginning of time and still it stretched interminably before me. Then we arrived at a handsome village where the township officer, a neat Siamese, smiling and polite, offered to put me up in his own spacious house; and when he took me into his compound I saw waiting for me, shaded by palm trees and diapered by the sun, red, substantial, reliable but unassuming–a Ford car. My journey was over. It ended without any flourish of trumpets, quietly, like the anti-climax of a play; and next morning, in the chilly dawn, leaving my mules and pony with Kyuzaw, I started. The metal road was building and where it was impassable the Ford car took the bullock track; here and there we splashed through shallow streams. I was bumped and shaken and tossed from side to side; still it was a road, a motor road, and sped along vertiginously at the right of eight miles an hour. It was the first car in the history of man that had ever passed that way and the peasants in their fields looked at us in amaze. I wondered whether it occurred to any of them that in it they saw the symbol of a new life. It marked the end of an existence they had led since time immemorial. It heralded a revolution in their habits and their customs. It was change that came down upon them panting and puffing, with a slightly flattened tyre but blowing a defiant horn, Change.
And a little before sunset we arrived at the railhead. There was a new, gaily-painted rest-house at the station, and it might almost have been called a hotel. There was a bath-room, with a bath you could lie down in, and on the verandah long chairs in which you could loll. It was civilisation.
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