The Further Side of Silence/Preface
PREFACE
NOBODY, I am assured, ever reads a preface. I consider, therefore, that I may safely regard this foreword as a confidential document, written for the sole purpose of salving my own sensitive conscience. From this point of view I regard it as necessary, for it seems to me that the imposture involved in issuing as a work of fiction a volume which is in the main a record of fact, should be frankly confessed from the outset. A knowledge of the truth that these initial pages will remain to some extent a secret between me, the proofreader, and the printer, will enable me, however, to write of personal things with a larger measure of freedom than I should otherwise be bold enough to use.
The stories composing this book, with a single exception—"The Ghoul," which reached me at second hand—are all relations of incidents in which I have had a part, or in which the principal actors have been familiarly known to me. They faithfully reproduce conditions of life as they existed in the Malayan Peninsula before the white men took a hand in the government of the native states, or immediately after our coming—things as I knew them between 1883 and 1903—the twenty years that I passed in that most beautiful and at one time little frequented corner of Asia. They are written with a full appreciation of the native point of view, and of a people for whom I entertain much affection and sympathy. Incidentally, however, they will perhaps help to explain why British civil servants in the East occasionally lay themselves open to the charge of being animated by "a hungry acquisitiveness" and a passion for annexing the territory of their native neighbours.
Fate and a rather courageous Colonial Governor ordained that I should be sent on a special mission to the Sultan of Pahang—a large Malayan state on the eastern seaboard of the Peninsula—before I was quite one and twenty years of age. This course was not, at the time, as reckless and desperate as it sounds. I had already more than three years' service and had acquired what was reckoned an unusual acquaintance with the vernacular. The mission would entail a long overland journey and an absence of more than three months' duration. Senior men who possessed the necessary qualifications could not be spared for so protracted a period, and thus the choice fell upon me, to my very great content.
My object was to obtain from the Sultan the promise of a treaty surrendering the management of his foreign relations to the British Government and accepting the appointment of a Political Agent at his court. This I obtained and bore in triumph to Singapore, whence I immediately returned to negotiate the details of the treaty, and subsequently to reside at the Sultan's court as the Agent in question.
This meant that I was privileged to live for nearly two years in complete isolation among the Malays in a native state which was annually cut off from the outside world from October to March by the fury of the northeast monsoon; that this befell me at perhaps the most impressionable period of my life; that having already acquired considerable familiarity with the people, their ideas and their language, I was afforded an unusual opportunity of completing and perfecting my knowledge; and that circumstances compelled me to live in a native hut, on native food, and in native fashion, in the company of a couple of dozen Malays—friends of mine, from the western side of the Peninsula, who had elected to follow my fortunes. Rarely seeing a white face or speaking a word of my own tongue, it thus fell to my lot to be admitted to les coulisses of life in a native state, as it was before the influence of Europeans had tampered with its eccentricities.
Pahang, when I entered it in 1887, presented an almost exact counterpart to the feudal kingdoms of medieval Europe. I saw it pass under the "protection" of Great Britain, which in this case was barely distinguishable from "annexation." I subsequently spent a year or so fighting in dense forests to make that protection a permanency, for some of the chiefs resented our encroachment upon their prerogatives; and when I quitted the land a decade and a half later, it was as safe and almost as peaceful and orderly as an English countryside.
Thus at a preposterously early age I was the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles of territory to the British dependencies in the East; and this fact forces me to the conclusion that my share in the business stands in need of some explanation and defence, if readers who are not themselves Britishers are to be persuaded that I am not merely a thief upon a rather large scale. The stories and sketches contained in this book supply me with both. I, who write, have with my own eyes seen the Malayan prison; have lived at a Malayan court; have shared the life of the people of all ranks and classes in their towns and villages, in their rice-fields, on their rivers, and in the magnificent forests which cover the face of their country. I have travelled with them on foot, by boats, and raft. I have fought with and against them. I have camped with the downtrodden aboriginal tribes of jungle-dwelling Sâkai and Sĕmang, and have heard from their own lips the tales of their miseries. I have watched at close quarters, and in intolerable impotency to aid or save, the lives which all these people lived before the white men came to defend their weakness against the oppression and the wrong wrought to them by tyrants of their own race; and I have seen them gradually emerge from the dark shadow in which their days were passed, into the daylight of a personal freedom such as white men prize above most mundane things.
The late Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, recent British Prime Minister, once gave vent to the aphorism that "good government can never be a satisfactory substitute for self-government." That may or may not be true; but the Malays, be it remembered, never possessed "self-government." The rule of their râjas and chiefs was one of the most absolute and cynical autocracies that the mind of man has conceived; and the people living under it were mercilessly exploited, and possessed no rights either of person or of property. To their case, therefore, the phrase quoted above has only the most remote and academical application; but no words or sentiments, no matter how generous or beautiful, would avail to staunch the blood which I saw flow, or to dry the tears which I saw shed in Pahang when I lived in that native state under its own administration.
If, then, my stories move you at all, and if they inspire in you any measure of pity or of desire to see the weak protected and their wrongs avenged, you may judge how passionate was the determination to make the recurrence of such things impossible whereby I and my fellow workers in Malaya were inspired. For we, alas, lived in the midst of the happenings of which you only read.
Hugh Clifford,
Government House,
The Gold Coast,
British West Africa.
SIR HUGH CLIFFORD
By Richard Le Gallienne
THOUGH these powerful and beautiful stories have already reached a wide audience, they deserve a wider, and readers to whom they are still unknown are missing an imaginative pleasure such as can be found in no other writers of my acquaintance except Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. Joseph Conrad, with whom, because of his subject-matter, it is natural to class Sir Hugh Clifford; as I see James Huneker has done before me. So far as treatment is concerned, however, Sir Hugh Clifford owes nothing to those writers. His method is his own and his experience, out of which his stories, as he tells us, have sprung, is perhaps even more his own in theirs. For, with the one exception of "The Ghoul"—as Sir Hugh Clifford tells us in his own preface, itself a thrilling document—these stories are veritable stuff of his own life as a British Government official. He has seen these happenings with his own eyes, and known the actors in them. To have done that. when little more than a boy, is a romance in itself, one of those romantic opportunities which more than once have repaid the servants of the far-flung" British Empire for the hazards and the ennui of a service, the loyalty and efficiency of which have made that empire. Thus, as Sir Hugh Clifford himself laughingly observes, "at a preposterously early age," he was "the principal instrument in adding 15,000 square miles of territory to the British dependencies in the East;" while incidentally, as has so often happened in England's "island story," finding himself, in the interval of his governmental occupations, as a literary artist. A book might well be written of governors, cavalry officers, and civil servants, of his Britannic Majesty, who have thus light-heartedly won distinction, by amusing themselves with their pens in the exile of their lonely out-posts, doing the thing only for fun, regarding themselves merely as amateurs, and discovering their gifts by chance. Far from amateurs indeed they have often proved, but on the contrary lineal descendants of those "complete" men and gentlemen of old time, to whom the sword and the pen came alike naturally, such as was, to name but one, that Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who wrote at sea, while commanding the British fleet, one of the most fascinating sea-songs in the language—
To all you ladies now at land
We men at sea indite.
One would like to be introduced to the "professional writer" who could write a love-story stranger and more beautiful with such a poignant heart-break in it, and with so magical a setting, as that which gives the title to this volume—"The Further Side of Silence." Mr. W. H. Hudson himself in "Green Mansions" has not given us a lovelier "belle sauvage" than Pi-Noi as she first blossoms on the eyes of her future lover, Kria, from the primeval forest, while he paddles up the Tělom River one fateful day:
"A clear, bell-like call thrilled from out the first, so close at hand that the surprise of it made Kria jump and nearly drop his paddle; and then came a ripple of words, like little drops of crystal, which made even the rude Sâkai tongue a thing of music, freshness, and youth. Next the shrubs on the bank were parted by human hands, and Pi-Noi—Breeze of the Forest emerging suddenly, stepped straightway into Kria's life and into the innermost heart of him."
The story is here for the reader to enjoy and study for himself, for it is worth studying as well as enjoying for the subtle, modulated treatment of the wild soul of little Pi-Noi, for whom the creatures of the forest and the forest itself are more her comrades and intimates than any human beings, and whose necessity to play truant with them at intervals even from her lover makes so piteous a tragedy.
One other observation suggests itself—how the "civilizing" work on which Sir Hugh Clifford was engaged inevitably destroys the romance which he thus perpetuates; for alas! that romance can only live so long as the superstition and cruelty which it was the British Commissioner's business to up-root survive in their native dramatic combinations. With the abolition of such tyrants as we read of in "Droit du Seigneur," the Malay Peninsula becomes, to use Sir Hugh Clifford's own words, "as safe and almost as peaceful and orderly as an English countryside." But the trouble with making the world safe for democracy and other things is that it makes it entirely unsafe for Romance. Sir Hugh Clifford did his governmental work so well in Pahang that probably if he returned there to-day he would find no stories to write!