First then you come upon a long audience chamber, then a throne room, robing chambers, other throne rooms and private apartments. On each side of these are the dwelling-places of the king, the queen and the princesses. The throne room is a barn, a roof supported by tall posts, but the posts are great teak trees on which you can still see the marks of the tools with which they were rudely shaped, and they are lacquered and gilt; the walls are mere planks roughly planed and they are lacquered and gilt too. The gold is worn and discoloured. The contrast of this crudeness of workmanship with all this gilt and lacquer gives, I know not how, an effect of peculiar magnificence. Each building, too much like a Swiss chalet, by itself is unimpressive, but in the mass they have a dark splendour that takes the fancy. The carving that adorns the roofs, the balustrades and the partitions between chamber and chamber, is coarse, but the designs have often grace and a luxurious elegance. The builders of the palace in the most unexpected way, but the use of the most incongruous elements, have achieved a palatial effect so that you feel that here Oriental monarchs might fitly dwell. Much of the decoration is obtained by the use in various patterns of a mosaic of innumerable little pieces of mirror and of white and brightly coloured glass: you would have said that nothing could be more hideous (it reminds you of the kind of thing you saw on Margate pier in your childhood and took back with pride after a day's outing as a present to a dismayed relation), yet oddly enough the impression is not only sumptuous but pleasing. So rudely carved are the screens and partitions on which these artful fragments of glass are thus inlaid that they have none of the effect of tinsel, but on their gold ground glitter dimly with the secret radiance of tarnished gems. This is not a barbarous art, which has a greater strength and vitality, a more rugged force, but a savage or if you like a childlike art; it is in a way trifling and effeminate and it is its roughness (as though with uncertain touch the artists were creating each familiar pattern afresh from their own heads) that gives it character. You have a notion of a people fumbling confusedly with the very beginning of the beautiful and they are charmed with shining objects as a bushman might be or a child.
The palace now is despoiled of the rich hangings and the gilded furniture with which it was adorned. You walk through chamber after chamber and it is like a house that has been long to let. No one seems to visit it. Towards evening these gilded, jewelled, deserted chamber are sombre and ghostly. You wander softly so that you may not disturb the faintly scented silence. You stand and look at all that emptiness in amaze and it is incredible that so short a while ago this was the scene of unimaginable intrigue and of turbulent passion. For here romance is within the memory of men still alive. It is not fifty years since this palace saw incidents as dramatic and to us as remote as those of the Renaissance in Italy or of Byzantium. I was taken to see an old lady who in her day had made history. She was a rather stout, short person, dressed soberly in black and white, and she looked at me through gold-rimmed spectacles with quiet, slightly ironic eyes. Her father, a Greek, had been in the service of King Mindon and she was appointed maid of honour to Queen Supalayat. Presently she married the English captain of one of the king's river boats, but he died, and after a decent interval she became engaged to a Frenchman. (She spoke in a low voice, with the very faintest trace of a foreign accent; the files buzzing about her did not seem to incommode her, she held her hands clasped demurely on her lap.) The Frenchman went home and at Marseilles married one of his own countrywomen. After so long a time she did not remember very much about him; she remembered his name, of course, and she remembered that he had a very handsome moustache, and that was all. But then she loved him madly. (When she laughed it was a little ghostly chuckle as though her mirth were a shadow and what she laughed at an illusion of the comic.) She made up her mind to be revenged on him. She still had her entrée to the palace. She got hold of the draft of a treaty that King Thebaw had made with the French by the terms of which every sphere of influence in Upper Burma passed into their hands. She gave it to the Italian Consul to take to the Chief Commissioner of Lower Burma, and so caused the English advance on Mandalay and the dethronement and exile of King Thebaw. Was it not Alexandre Dumas who said that in the theatre there is nothing so dramatic as something that is happening behind a closed door? The quiet, ironic eyes of that old lady, behind their gold-rimmed spectacles, were a closed door, and who could tell what bizarre thoughts, what a welter of fantastic passions, still dwelt behind them? She spoke of Queen Supalayat: she was a very nice woman, and people had been so unkind about her; all those stories of the massacres she had instigated, stuff and nonsense!
"I know for a fact that she did not murder more than two or three people at the outside." The old lady faintly shrugged her fat little shoulders. "Two or three people! What is that to make a fuss about? Life is cheap."
I sipped a cup of tea and someone turned on the gramophone.
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