Part 18

Then he gets deep into a groove and is happy. His fingers are between the leaves of the Book of Human Nature, and his eager eyes are scanning the lines of the chapter which in time he hopes to make his own. The advent of another white man is a weariness of the flesh. The natives about him have learned to look upon him as one of their own people. His speech is their speech, he can think as they do, can feel as they feel, rejoice in their joys, and sorrow in their pains. He can tell them wonderful things, and a philosophy of which they had not dreamed. He never offends their susceptibilities, never wounds their self-respect, never sins against their numerous conventionalities. He has feasted with them at their weddings, doctored their pains, healed their sick, protected them from oppression, stood their friend in time of need, done them a thousand kindnesses, and has helped their dying through the strait and awful pass of death. Above all, he _understands_, and, in a manner, they love him. A new white man, speaking to him in an unknown tongue, seems to lift him for the time out of their lives. The stranger jars on the natives, who are the exile's people, and he, looking through the native eyes which are no longer strange to him, sees where his race-mate offends, and in his turn is jarred, until he begins to hate his own countrymen. Coming out of the groove hurts badly, and going back into it is almost worse, but when a man is once well set in the rut of native life, these do not disturb him, for he is happy, and has no need of other and higher things. This is the exile's Heaven.

As years go on the up-country life of which I write will become less and less common in this Peninsula of ours, and the Malays will be governed wholly by men, who, never having lived their lives, cannot expect to have more than a surface knowledge of the people whose destinies are in their hands. The Native States will, I fancy, be none the better governed, and those who rule them will miss much which has tended to widen the lives of the men who came before them, and who dwelt among the people while they were still as God made them.

And those who led these lives? The years will dim the memories of all they once learned and knew and experienced; and as they indite the caustic minute to the suffering subordinate, and strangle with swaddlings of red-tape the tender babe of prosperity, they will perchance look back with wonder at the men they once were, and thinking of their experiences in the days of long ago will marvel that each one of them as he left the desert experienced the pang of Chillon's prisoner:--

Even I Regained my freedom with a sigh.

L'ENVOI

By the green shade of the palm trees, Where the river flows along To be wedded to the calm seas, Dwell the people of my song. With a languid step they wander Thro' the forest or the grove, And with listless eyes they ponder On the glories poets love. They have little joy in beauty, Little joy in virtue high, Honour, mercy, truth, and duty, Or the creeds for which men die. But their lives are calm and peaceful, And they ask for nothing more Save some happy, listless, easeful Years, and peace from strife and war.

Tales I tell of women wailing, Cruel wrong and bitter strife, Shrieking souls that pass, and quailing Hearts that shrink beneath the knife. Tales I tell of evil passions, Men that suffer, men that slay, All the tragedy that fashions Life and death for such as they. Yet these things are but as fleeting Shadows, that more lightly pass Than the sunlight, which retreating Leaves no stain upon the grass. O my friends! I judge ye lightly, Listen to the tales I tell. Answer, have I spoken rightly? Judge me, have I loved ye well?

THE END

_Printed by_ R. R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_.

* * * * *

_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

"=SINCE THE BEGINNING.=" A Tale of an Eastern Land. Crown 8vo, Cloth. 6s.

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_Pall Mall Gazette._--"Altogether a book of quite unusual ability, displaying exceptional powers of observation and description."

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_Daily News._--"These vivid and powerful pictures of the wild life of the Malayan Peninsula are of the deepest interest."

_Morning Post._--"Mr. Clifford approaches his subject with the sympathy inspired by a country which he 'knows intimately' that is 'very dear to him,' and the scene of the best years of his life. His descriptive powers are considerable, his pictures accurate and full of colour."

_The World._--"He draws further upon his memory for sketches of Eastern life, of which the vigour and colour may be compared with those of Mr. Kipling himself ... His pages 'palpitate with actuality,' if we may use a slang phrase of the day; not one of them is dull."'

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* * * * *

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=FLORENCE.= By GRANT ALLEN. Second Edition.

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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:

This etext has been prepared as an archival version using only the characters found in the 7-bit ASCII character set. In the original text Malay words were spelled with diacritics or accents which cannot be rendered in this etext. To view these diacritics, please use the versions of this etext encoded for utf-8 (which renders diacritics fully) or ISO-8859-1 (which renders some but not all diacritics).

The following diacritics are found in the Malay words in the original text:

breves, indicating short vowels; these typically occur as the first vowel in a Malay word (mostly e, but sometimes a, i, u). Letters with breve accents have been replaced with just the letter themselves.

circumflexes (e.g. a) indicating long vowels; these have been replaced with just the letter themselves.

vowels with diaeresis (e.g. a) indicating vowels which should be sounded separately; these have also been replaced with just the letters themselves.

glottal stops; in the original text, these were indicated by a character similar to a curved right single quotation mark. These have been rendered using the ASCII apostrophe character such as in "Dato'". Note also that apostrophes are used for other purposes such as to demarcate quoted speech, indicate possessives and contractions in English words. The purpose would be discernable from the context.

While it was possible to mark-up such as "D[^a]to" (circumflex a) "P[)e]kan" (breve e) to indicate the accents, the large number of Malay words in the text means that usage of such markup would have made the text extremely cluttered and unreadable. Malay from the middle of the 20th century onwards no longer used diacritics, hence the Malay words in this etext are still intelligible with the diacritics removed and indeed look very similar to their modern day equivalents.

Inconsistencies in the hyphenation of words have been preserved. (body-guard, bodyguard; eye-ball, eyeball; eye-lid, eyelid; fire-light, firelight; foot-hills, foothills; sun-down, sundown; sweet-stuff, sweetstuff)

Pg. 3, original text was "become morally week and seedy", "weak" was probably intended instead of "week" and changed accordingly. (become morally weak and seedy)

Pg. 30, "whi l" changed to "while". (while the Malays gambled)

Pg. 54, added closing single quote mark to demarcate end of quoted speech. ('_Diam! Diam!_')

Pg. 105, duplicated word "a" removed (cultivation of a _padi_ swamp)

Pg. 116, "Raja Sibidi" is also spelled "Raja Sebidi" in two other instances on the same page. Original text preserved in all cases as it is unclear which the author intended.

Pg. 193, unusual word "sweatmeats". Author probably meant "sweetmeats". Original text preserved. (while the Prince ate some sweatmeats)

Pg. 210, poem at the beginning of the chapter. In the original text, there was the unusual word "scrak", spelled with a c with acute accent. Author might have intended "sorak" spelled with a circumflex over the "o". "Sorak" occurs elsewhere in the text meaning a "war-cry", which is plausible in the context here. However, "scrak" is preserved, with a simple unaccented "c".

Pg. 247, a piece of poetry quoted by the author. The last line appears to be missing some punctuation--a closing single-quote mark at the end and possibly a comma after "whispered". The author's original text has been preserved--the missing punctuation could have been intentional if he had, for example, been quoting verbatim from his source. (And whispered 'Thou thyself art Heaven or Hell.)

Pg. 255-256, poem "L'envoi". In the original text a page break occurred after the first 16 lines of the poem. This break has been presumed to also be a stanza break as it divides the poem into two equal groups of 16 lines and there is a change in tone at this point.