Difficult, indeed, would it be to choose a more striking introduction to the wonderland of the Far East than that egg-shaped remnant left over from the building of India. How incomplete and lusterless seems the picture drawn by the anticipating imagination when one stands at last in the midst of its prolific, kaleidoscopic life! Sharp and vivid are the impressions that come crowding on the traveler in jumbled, disordered succession, and he experiences a confusion such as comes with the first glance at a great painting. He must look again and again before the underlying conception stands out clearly through the mass of unfamiliar detail.
It would have been strange if the white man of peripatetic mood had not found his way to this Eden of the eastern seas. Within ten minutes of my landing I was greeted by a score of “beachcombers” gathered in the black shade under the portico of a large government building. In garb, they were men of means. It costs nothing worth mentioning to keep spotless the jacket and trousers of thinnest cotton that make up the wardrobe of the Indias. More than their sun-baked faces, their listless movements and ingrown indolence betrayed them as “vags.” Those of the band who were not stretched out at full length on the flagging of the veranda dangled their feet from the encircling railing or leaned against the massive pillars, puffing lazily at pipe or cigarette. On the greensward below, two natives sat on their heels before portable stands, rising now and then to pour out a glass of tea for the “comber” who tossed a Ceylon cent at their feet.
Theoretically, the party had gathered to seek employment. The morning hour, since time immemorial, had called the exiles together in the shade of the shipping office to lay in wait for any stranger, the “cut of whose jib” stamped him as a captain. “Shipping,” however, was dull. Imbued with the habit, “the boys” continued to gather, but into their drowsy yarning rarely intruded the fear of being driven forth from this island paradise.
Now and again some energetic member of the band rose to peer 252through the open door of the shipping office; yet retreated hastily, for a roar as of an angry bull was the invariable greeting from within. When courage came, I ventured to glance inside. A burly Englishman, as nearly naked as a mild sense of propriety permitted, lay on his back in a reclining chair, on the arm of which he threw a mass of typewritten sheets every half-minute, to mop up the perspiration that poured down his rotund face and hairy chest in spite of the heavy velvet punkahs that swung slowly back and forth above him.
“Shippin’ master,” volunteered a recumbent Irishman behind me. “But divil a man dast disturb ’im. If you valy your loife, kape out of ’is soight.”
At noonday the office closed. The beachcombers wandered languidly away to some other shaded spot, and seeking refuge from the equatorial sun in a neighboring park, I dreamed away my first day’s freedom from the holly-stone. A native runner roused me towards nightfall and thrust into my hands a card setting forth the virtues of “The Original and Well-Recognized Sailors’ Boarding House of Colombo, under Proprietorship of C. D. Almeida.” It was a two-story building in the native quarter of Pettah, of stone floor, but otherwise of the lightest wooden material. The dining-room, in the center of the establishment, boasted no roof. Narrow, windowless chambers of the second story, facing this open space, housed the seafaring guests.
Almeida, the proprietor, was a Singhalese of purest caste. His white silk jacket was modestly decorated with red braid and glistening brass buttons. Beneath the folds of a skirt of gayest plaid peeped feet that had never known the restraint of shoes, the toes of which stood out staunchly independent one from another. For all his occupation he clung stoutly to the symbols of his social superiority—tiny pearl earrings and a huge circle comb of celluloid. Fate had been unkind to Almeida. Though his fellow-countrymen, with rarely an exception, boasted thick tresses of long, raven-tinted hair, the boarding master was well nigh bald. His gray and scanty locks did little more than streak his black scalp, and the art of a lifetime of hair dressing could not make the knob at the back of his head larger than a hickory nut. Obviously no circle comb could sit in position so insecure; at intervals as regular as the ticking of his great silver watch, that of Almeida dropped on the ground behind him. Wherever he moved, there slunk at his heels a native urchin who had known no other task in many a month than that of restoring to its place the ornament of caste.
An outrigger canoe and an outdoor laundry in Colombo, Ceylon
Road-repairers of Ceylon. Highway between Colombo and Kandy
253The simple formality of signing a promise-to-pay made me a guest. Four white men and as many black leaned their elbows on the unplaned table, awaiting the evening meal. In an adjoining grotto, two natives were stumbling over each other around a kettle and a fire of fagots. Both were clothed in the scantiest of breechclouts. Now and then they squatted on their smoothly polished heels, scratched savagely at some portion of their scrawny bodies, and sprang up again to plunge both hands into the kettle.
In due time the mess grew too hot for stirring. The pair resumed their squat and burst forth in a dreadful chatter of falsetto voices. Then fell ominous silence. Suddenly the cooks dashed into the smoke that veiled the entrance to the cave, and, flinging themselves upon the caldron, dragged it forth into the dining-room. The senior scooped out handfuls of steaming rice and filled our plates. The younger returned to the smoky cavern and laid hold on a smaller pot that contained a curry of chopped fish. Besides these two delicacies, there were bananas in abundance and a chettie of water, brackish, discolored and lukewarm.
Having distributed heavy pewter spoons among the guests, the cooks filled a battered basin with rice and, dropping on their haunches, thrust the food into their mouths with both hands. The blazing fagots turned to dying embers, the wick that floated in a bottle of oil lighted up a bare corner of the table, and the rising moon, falling upon the naked figures, cast weird shadows across the uneven floor.
Almeida took his leave. The dropping of his comb sounded twice or thrice between the dining-room and the street, and the patter of his bare feet mingled with the whisper of the night outside. I laid my head on a hand as a sign of sleepiness, and a cook led the way to the second story and into one of the narrow rooms. It was furnished with three wooden tables of Dachshund legs. From two pegs in the wall hung several diaphanous tropical garments, the property of my unknown roommates. I inquired for my bed; but the cook spoke no English, and I sat down on the nearest table to await a more communicative mortal.
A long hour afterward two white men stumbled up the stairs, the first carrying a candle high above his head. He was lean and sallow, 254gray-haired and clean shaven, with something in his manner that spoke of better days. His companion was a burly, tow-headed Swede.
“Oho! Ole,” grinned the older man; “here’s a new bunkie. Why don’t you turn in, mate?”
“Haven’t found my bed yet,” I answered.
“Your bed!” cried the newcomer, “Why, damn it, man, you’re sitting on it.”
I followed the example of the pair in reducing my attire to the regulation coolie costume and, turning my bundled clothing into a pillow, sweated out the night.
Over the tea, bananas, and cakes of ground cocoanut that made up the Almeida breakfast, I exchanged yarns with my companions of the night. The Swede was merely a sailor; the older man a less commonplace being. He was an Irishman named John Askins, a master of arts of Dublin University and a civil engineer by profession. Twenty years before, an encroaching asthma had driven him from his native island. In his wanderings through every tropical country under British rule, he had picked up a fluent use of half the dialects of the east, from the clicking Kaffir to the guttural tongue of Kabul. Not by choice was Askins, M. A., a vagabond. Periodically, however, employment failed him and he fell, as now, into the ranks of those who listened open-mouthed—when he chose to abandon the slang of “the road” and the forecastle—to his professorial diction.
Brief as was my acquaintance with Ceylon, I had already discovered two possible openings to the wage-earning class. The first was to join the police force. Half the European officers of Colombo had once been beachcombers. Between them and our band existed a liaison so close that the misdemeanors of “the boys” were rarely punished, and more than one white castaway was housed surreptitiously in the barracks on Slave Island. I had no hesitancy, therefore, in applying for information to the Irishman whose beat embraced the cricket-ground separating Pettah from the European quarter.
He painted the life in uniform in glowing colors. His salary was fifty rupees a month. No princely income, surely, for bear in mind that it takes three rupees to make a dollar. The “graft,” too, he admitted sadly, was next to nothing. Yet he supported a wife—a white one, at that, strange to say—and three children, kept several servants, owned a house of his own, and increased his bank account 255on every pay day. Ludicrous, you know, is the cost of living in Ceylon.
I hurried eagerly away to the office of the superintendent of police. An awkward squad of white recruits was sprinkling with perspiration the green before the government bungalow, from which a servant emerged to inquire my errand. The alacrity with which I was admitted to the inner sanctum aroused within me visions of myself in uniform that were by no means dispelled by the hasty examination to which the superintendent subjected me.
“Yes! Yes!” he broke in, before I had answered his last question; “I think we can take you on all right. By the way, what part of the country are you from? You’ll be from Yorkshire side, I take it?”
“United States.”
“A-oh! You don’t say so? An American! Really, you don’t look it, you know. What a shame! Had a beat all picked out for you. But as an American you’d better go to the Philippines and apply on the force there. We can’t give you anything in Ceylon or India, don’t you know. Awfully sorry. Good day.”
None but a man ignorant of the ways of the Far East could have conceived my second scheme in one sleepless night. It was suggested by the fact that, in earlier years, I had, as the Englishman puts it, “gone in for” cross-country running. Returning to Almeida’s, I soon picked up a partner for the projected enterprise. He was a young and lanky Englishman, who, though he had never indulged in athletic sports, was certain that in eluding for a decade the police of four continents he had developed a record-breaking stride.
In a shady corner of Gordon Gardens we arranged the details of our plan, which was—why not admit it at once?—to become ’rickshaw runners. The hollow-chested natives who plied this equestrian vocation leased their vehicles from the American consul. That official surely would be glad to rent the two fine, new carriages that stood idle in his establishment. The license would cost little. Cloth slippers that sold for a few cents in the bazaars would render us as light-footed as our competitors. We could not, of course, offer indiscriminate service. Half the population of Colombo would have swept down upon us, clamoring for the unheard-of honor of riding behind a sahib. But nothing would be easier than to hang above our licenses the announcement, “for white men only.”
“By thunder,” enthused the Briton, as we turned out into the sunlight 256once more, “it’s a new scheme all right, absolutely unique. It’s sure to attract attention mighty quick.”
It did. So quickly, in fact, that had there been a white policeman within call when we broached the subject to the American consul, we should have found lodging at once in two nicely padded chambers of the city hospital.
“Did you two lunatics,” shrieked my fellow-countryman, from behind the protecting bulwark of his desk, “ever hear of Caste? Would the Europeans patronize you? You bet they would—with a fine coat of tar and feathers! You’d need it, too, for those long, slim knives the runners carry. Of all the idiotic schemes! Why, you—you—don’t you know that’s a crime—or, if it isn’t, the governor would make it one in about ten minutes. Go lie in the shade somewhere until you get your senses—if you’ve got one!”
Years ago, I came to the conclusion that the day of the enterprising young man is past. But it was cruel of the consul to put the matter so baldly. Luckily, the Englishman possessed four cents or we should have been denied the bitter joy of drowning our grief and dissolving our partnership in a glass of arrack.
From the distance of the western world the rate in Almeida’s boarding house—a half rupee a day—does not seem exorbitant. It was, however. In the native restaurants that abounded in Colombo, one could live on half that amount; and as for lodging—what utter foolishness to pay for the privilege of sleeping on a short-legged table when the ground was so much softer? No sooner, therefore, had a pawnbroker of Pettah appraised my useless winter garments at two rupees than I paid my bill at the “Original Boarding House” and became resident at large.
On the edge of the native section stood an eating shop that had won the patronage of half the beachcombers in the city. It was a low, thatched shanty, constructed, like its neighbors, chiefly of bamboo. The front wall—unless the canvas curtain that warded off the blazing sunshine be reckoned such—was all doorway, before which stood a platform heaped high with multicolored tropical fruits.
A dozen white men bawled out a greeting as I pushed aside the curtain and crowded into a place on one of the creaking benches around the table. At the entrance stood the proprietor, guarding a home-made safe, and smiling so vociferously upon whomever added to its contents that his circle comb rose and fell with the exertion. Plainly in sight of the yawning customers, in a smoke-choked back 257room, two chocolate-colored cooks, who had evidently divided between them a garment as large as a lady’s handkerchief, toiled over a long row of kettles.
The dinner was table d’h?te, and cost four cents. A naked boy set before me a heaping plate of rice, four bananas, a glass of tea, and six small dishes of curried vegetables, meat, and shrimps. The time had come when I must learn, like my companions, to dispense with table utensils. I began the first lesson by following the movements of my fellow-guests. Each dug in the center of his mound of rice a hole of the size of a coffee-cup. Into this he dumped the curries one after another and buried them by pushing in the sides of the excavation. The interment finished, he fell upon the mess with both hands, and mixed the ingredients as the “board-bucker” mixes concrete—by shoveling it over and over.
Let no one fancy that the Far East has no etiquette of the table. It was the height of ill-breeding, for example, to grasp a handful of food and eat it from the open palm. Obviously, the Englishman beside me had received careful Singhalese training. Without bending a joint of his hand, he plunged it into the mixture before him, drew his fingers closely together, and, thrusting his hand to the base of the thumb into his mouth, sucked off the food by taking a long, quick breath.
I imitated him, gasped, choked, and clutched at the bench with both hands, while the tears ran in rivulets down my cheeks. ’Twas my introduction to the curries of Ceylon. A mouthful of cayenne pepper would have tasted like ice cream in comparison. The stuff was so calorific—in chillies, not in temperature—that it burned my fingers.
“Hot, Yank?” grinned the Englishman. “That’s what all the lads finds ’em when they first get out here. In a week they’ll be just right. In a month you’ll be longin’ for Madras where they make ’em ’otter.”
The dinner over, the guests threw under their feet the food that remained; washed their fingers, surreptitiously, of course, in a chettie of drinking water; and sauntered out into the starlit night. Across the way lay the cricket ground of Colombo, a twelve-acre field, silent and deserted. While the policeman yawned at the far end of his beat, I scrambled over the bamboo fence, and, choosing a spot where the grass was not entirely worn off, went to bed. The proverbial white elephant was never more of a burden than my kodak had become. Hitherto, I had easily concealed it in a pocket of my corduroy 258coat. Now my entire wardrobe could have been packed inside the apparatus, and wherever I wandered I was forced to lug the thing under one arm, like a pet poodle, wrapped in a ragged cover that deceived the covetous as to its real value. By night it served as pillow, and so fixed a habit had its possession become, that I ran no more risk of leaving it behind than of going away without my cap.
The grassy slope was as soft as a mattress, the tepid night breeze just the right covering. I quickly fell asleep. A feeling, as of someone close at hand, aroused me. Slowly I opened my eyes. Within a foot of me, his naked body glistening in the moonlight, crouched a coolie. I bounded to my feet. But the native was quicker than I. With a leap that would have done credit to a kangaroo, he shot suddenly into the air, landed noiselessly on his bare feet some three yards away, and, before I could take a step in his direction, was gone.
Midnight, certainly, had passed. The flanking streets were utterly deserted. Not a light shone in the long rows of shops. Only the ceaseless chanting of myriads of insects tempered the stillness of the night. I drew a cord from my pocket, tied one end to the kodak and another to a wrist, and lay down again. The precaution was wisely taken. A tug at my arm awakened me a second time and, as I started up, a black rascal, closely resembling my first visitor, scampered away across the playground. Dawn was drawing a thin gray line on the black canvas of night. I left my bed unmade and wandered away into the city.
Before the sun was high I had found employment. A resident in the Cinnamon Gardens had advertised for a carpenter, and for the three days following I superintended the labors of a band of coolies in laying a hardwood floor in his bungalow. During that period, a rumor, spreading among the beachcombers, aroused them to new wakefulness. Colombo was soon to be visited by a circus! It was not that the mixed odor of sawdust and pink lemonade appealed greatly to “the boys.” But tradition whispered that the annual show would bring employment to more than one whose curry and rice advanced with laggard steps.
Dropping in at Almeida’s when my task was ended, I found Askins agog with news of the coming spectacle.
“She’ll be here in a week or ten days,” he cried, gayly. “That means a few dibs a day for some of us. For circuses must have white men. Niggers won’t do. That’s our game, Franck. Just lay low and 259when she blows in, we’ll swoop down on the supe and get our cognoms on the pay roll.
“Or say!” he went on, in more excited tones. “Better still! You won’t need to lie idle meantime, either. An idea strikes me. Remember the arrack shop where the two stokers set us up a bottle of fire-water the other day? Well, just across the street is the Salvation Army. Now you waltz down to the meeting there to-night and get converted. They’ll hand you down a swell white uniform, put you right in a good hash-house, and throw a few odd grafts in your way. All you’ll have to do’ll be to baste a drum or something of the kind twice a day, and you can have quite a few chips tucked away by the time the circus comes.”
“Good scheme,” I answered, “but I’ve got a few chips tucked away now, and if she isn’t due for ten days that will give me time for a jaunt into the interior of the island.”
“Well, it’s a ramble worth making,” admitted the Irishman, “but look out for the sun, and be sure you’re on hand again for the big show.”
The city of Colombo is well spread out. Though I set off early next morning, it was nearly noon when I crossed the Victoria bridge at Grand Pass and struck the open country. Great was the contrast between the Ceylon of my imagination and the reality. A riot of tropical vegetation spread out on every hand; in the dense shadows swarmed naked humans uncountable. But jungle was there none, neither wild men, nor savage beasts. Every acre was producing for the use of man. The highway was wide, well-built as in Europe, close flanked on either side by thick forests of towering palm trees. Here and there, bands of coolies repaired the roadway, or fought back the aggressive vegetation with ax-like knives. Clumsy, broad-wheeled bullock carts, in appearance like our “prairie schooners,” creaked by behind humped oxen ambling seaward at a snail’s pace. Under his protecting roof, made, not of canvas, as the first glimpse suggested, but of thousands of leaves sewn together, the scrawny driver grinned cheerily and mumbled some strange word of greeting. Even the heat was less infernal than I had anticipated. The glare of sunshine was dazzling; a wrist uncovered for a moment was burned red as with a branding-iron; my face shown browner in the mirror of each passing stream; but often are the sun’s rays more debilitating on a summer day at home.
In the forest the slim bamboo and the broad-leafed banana tree 260abounded; but the cocoanut palm predominated. In every grove, prehensile coolies, armed with heavy knives, walked up the slender trunks, and, hiding themselves in the tuft of leaves sixty feet above, chopped off the nuts in clusters of three. One could have recited a poem between the moment of their launching and the time when they struck the soft, spongy earth, to rebound high into the air. ’Tis a national music, the dull, muffled thump of cocoanuts, as reminiscent, ever after, of dense, tropical forests as the tinkle of the donkey bell of Spain, or the squawk of the water wheel of Egypt.
I stepped aside from the highway in the mid-afternoon, and lay down on a grassy slope under shielding palms. A crackling of twigs drew my attention, and, catching sight of a pair of eyes filled with mute wonder, I nodded reassuringly. A native, dressed in a ribbon and a tangle of oily hair, stepped from behind a great drooping banana leaf and advanced with faltering steps. Behind him emerged a score of men and boys, as heavily clothed as the leader; and the band, smiling like a company of ballet dancers en scène, moved forward hesitatingly, halting frequently to exchange signs of mutual encouragement. Their timidity was in strange contrast to the boisterous or menacing attitude of the Arab. One felt that a harsh word or a gesture of annoyance would have sent these deferential country-folk scampering away through the forest. A white man, whatever his station in life, is a tin god in Ceylon.
With a simultaneous gurgle of greeting, the natives squatted in a semicircle at the foot of the knoll on which I lay, as obsequious in manner as loyal subjects come to do homage to their cannibal king. We chatted, intelligibly if not glibly, in the language of signs. My pipe aroused great curiosity. When it had burned out, I turned it over to the leader. He passed it on to his companions, each and all of whom, to my horror, tested the strange thing by thrusting the stem halfway down his throat and sucking fiercely at it. Even when they had examined every other article in my knapsack, my visitors were not content, and implored me with tears in their eyes to give them leave to open my kodak. I distracted their attention by a careful inspection of their tools and betel-nut pouches. With truly Spanish generosity they insisted on presenting me with every article that I asked to see; and then sneaked round behind me to carry off the gift while I was examining another.
I rose to continue my way, but the natives burst out in vigorous protest, and, despatching three youths on some unknown errand, 261dropped again on their haunches and fell to preparing new chews of betel-nut. The emissaries soon returned, one carrying a jack-fruit, another a bunch of bananas, and the third swinging three green cocoanuts by the rope-like stem. The leader laid the gifts, one after another, at my feet. Two men armed with jungle knives sprang forward, and while one hacked at the adamantine jack-fruit, the other caught up a cocoanut, chopped off the top with one stroke, and invited me to drink. The milk—the national beverage of Ceylon—was cool and refreshing, but the meat of the green nut as inedible as a leather strap. The jack-fruit, of the size and appearance of a water melon, was split at last into longitudinal slices. These, in turn, split sidewise into dozens of segments not unlike those of the orange, each one containing a large, kidney-shaped stone. The meat itself was white, coarse-grained, and rather tasteless. The bananas were smaller, but more savory than those of the West Indies. When I had sampled each of the gifts, I distributed them among the donators, and turned down to the highway.
It is easy to account for the vagabond’s fondness for tropical lands. He loves to strut about among reverential black men in all the glory of a white skin; it flatters him astonishingly to have native policemen and soldiers draw up at attention and salute as he passes; he adores, of course, the lazy indolence of the East. But a............