Dragon Apparent, page 6
It was here too that I noticed that the telephone wires had been colonised by innumerable spiders, which had woven their strands about the wires in such a way as to incorporate them in an enormous, elongated web. At evenly spaced intervals a four-inch spider watched over the territory allotted to it in this vast cooperative enterprise, but as no flies were caught within my sight during the half-hour we waited at Bien-Hoa, I was unable to draw any Bruce-like inspiration in support of collective effort.
* * *
Soon after Bien Hoa we plunged into the forest. For many miles it had been cleared for perhaps a hundred yards on each side of the road. Then suddenly the jungle returned, pressing about us so close that the slender, bowed-over bamboos stroked the bus’s roof as we passed beneath them. When faced with the tropical forest the problem of the writer and painter is alike. The forest is fussy in detail, lacking in any unifying motive and tends to be flatly monochromatic. There is a baroque superabundance of forms, which, unfortunately, do not add up to a Churrigueresque altarpiece. In the depths of our jungle there may have been superb orchids and even certain flowers indigenous to this part of the world whose blooms are several feet across. But all we could see was a dusty confusion of leaves like one of those dense and often grimy thickets cultivated by people in England to safeguard their privacy.
There was a single moment of excitement, when a colossal boa constrictor slithered across the road ahead of us. It was a serpent of the kind one has always seen coiled motionless in the corner of its cage at the zoo. Now it was quite extraordinary to see one in such purposeful motion. Somehow the driver missed it, stopped, reversed and was just too late to run over its tail, which was withdrawn with a mighty flexing of the muscles. Behind us the following Chinese lorry went charging into the fernery to avoid us. There were none of the bellowing recriminations one comes to expect at such times. The Chinese lorry was driven out under its own power and on we went.
The midday stop was at a village rather romantically named, I thought, Kilometre 113. There was a ring of the frontier outpost about this that stirred the imagination. We were still in the forest, which had thinned out a little, and we were perhaps a thousand feet above sea-level. Strewn about all over the place were huge, smooth, mysterious-looking boulders. Some of them had huts built on the top with ladders leading up to them, and others even small forts. It was here that I saw for the first time a sight imagined by many Westerners to be extremely typical of South-Eastern Asia – the uncovered female breast. There was a Moï village somewhere close by and several Moï girls were hanging about the garrison’s sleeping quarters. They were thin and undernourished looking, with, however, the invulnerable torso of the Polynesian, wreathed in this case only by garlands of small violet-coloured flowers. Several groups of Moïs of both sexes padded past down the road while we were there. They looked dirty, degenerate and miserable, the inevitable fate, as I later learned, of these tribes when they come into contact with civilisation. Several of them, with grotesque effect, wore British battle-dress tops but had bare posteriors.
There was an eating place in the village that was serving pork and peas – take it or leave it – and where you could buy weak beer at the equivalent of five shillings a bottle. Here, too, the frontier atmosphere was very marked and obviously enjoyed by the soldiers who waved aside the eating utensils and preferred to manipulate their victuals with a clasp knife and a chunk of bread. However, the French are poor hands at licentious soldiering, being, perhaps, a little too close to the polished sources of our civilisation for this. The restaurant with all its faults and at its toughest would probably have been like the salon of a Hapsburg Pretender compared with any pub in Gibraltar with a Yankee warship in port.
Setting out again we found that we had acquired an escort – a Vietnamese soldier with a tommy gun, who was followed into the bus so closely by a white butterfly that it might have been his familiar spirit. He sat down beside the driver and went to sleep with the butterfly flapping in his face. We were now entering the most dangerous phase of the journey, where a year before most of the vehicles had been burned in an attack and there had been several hundred casualties. A couple of spotting planes circled overhead ready, if necessary, to radio the alarm. After attacks, parachutists are usually dropped but it takes an hour or two for them to get to the scene and by that time it is all over. The Viet-Minh who usually attack in strength have their will with the convoy, and by the time the relieving force arrives they have disappeared.
The road mounted slowly and the vehicles lumbered painfully round the hillsides, so that seen from a bend, the convoy looked like the severed segments of a caterpillar. Gradually we freed ourselves from the dense vegetation, emerging finally into a savannah of coarse grass with occasional clumps of deciduous trees that looked like cork-oaks but were sparingly adorned with pale lemon flowers. The heat was terrific. Having been designed for service in some far northern clime, the bus’s windows could only be forced down a few inches and as the sun’s decline in the sky began, the bus was flooded with an incandescent glare, from which there was no escape. Slowly we ground our way on towards Dalat. Our passage out of the Valley of the Shadow was marked by our escort’s waking up, uncocking his gun and stopping the bus to get out. Now I noticed that the trees had rid themselves of their coverings of parasites, that the swathings of creepers were no more and that lianas ceased to drip from the branches. The road widened and began to look like a corniche in embryo. Pines made their appearance. We were driving into Dalat.
* * *
Dalat is the playground of Indo-China and has a fair share of the dreariness so often associated with places thus advertised. Taking full advantage of an altitude of 3000 feet and the pine forests, a forlorn attempt has been made to encourage a sub-alpine atmosphere, but it remains nothing more than an uninspired imitation; a not very magnificent failure. Even imitations, if carried to sufficiently daring lengths, sometimes generate a fascination of their own. But the spuriousness of Dalat was cautious and hesitant. It looked like a drab little resort in Haute Savoie, developed by someone who had spent a few years as vice-consul in Shanghai. Of Dalat, though, one thing must be admitted; that life there, even in peacetime, is not entirely divorced from adventure, since there is a chance, one in a thousand perhaps, of knocking into a tiger if one strolls in the streets after dark.
We skirted a sad little lake, with edges cropped like a pond on Hampstead Heath and wound up the main street past the Salon de Thé, the Crillon Grill, a dancing, the Chic Shanghai Bar and into the square. We had covered two hundred and fifty miles in thirteen hours. Now a problem arose. I had been told in Saigon to contact a Madame Schneider, who held some important, but undefined, post and was responsible for foreigners. Madame Schneider would be able to find me a room in a town which might be overflowing with visitors and would make all necessary arrangements for the next stage of my journey, to Ban Méthuot. Her address? Well, as far as anybody knew, she didn’t have one. If it came to that, no one in Dalat had addresses, certainly not important people like Madame Schneider. The first person one met in the street would be able to point out where she lived.
As a telegram had been sent from Saigon to warn Madame of my arrival, I half hoped to see either her or her representative awaiting me at the bus terminus. But no; one by one the passengers were claimed by their relations, the crowd thinned and melted away. It was after six, the streets were deserted and the daylight was waning. The local taxicab service consisted of tiny traps drawn by the Indo-Chinese equivalent of the Shetland pony. Only one of these remained and I approached the small Vietnamese boy in charge of it.
N.L. Est ce que vous connaissez Madame Schneider?
SMALL BOY. Moi connaisse.
N.L. Ou est ce qu’elle habite?
SMALL BOY. Là bas. Moi connaisse. (A vague sweep of the arm towards the darkening pine-clad slopes.)
N.L. Mais, elle habite en ville?
SMALL BOY (impatiently). Oui, oui. Moi connaisse. Madame Slé-lé.
It seemed pointless to continue the interrogation in face of the child’s rather surly assurance. I got in, the pony’s head was turned towards the wilds and we set off. We had reached the town’s outskirts when the trap stopped outside a small grocer’s shop. ‘Madame Slé-lé,’ said the boy.
It seemed unlikely that this Vietnamese lady could be the object of my search, and indeed, after I had pronounced the name very slowly and, as I thought, distinctly, half a dozen times, the light dawned. Of course, it was not she, Madame Slé-lé, I wanted at all. It was Madame Sné-dé. The important and celebrated Madame Sné-dé. ‘Oui, bien-sûr. Moi connaisse! Moi connaisse!’
Having received the most graphic description of the route to be taken, we set off again. It seemed that neither the street Madame Schneider lived in, nor her villa itself, possessed a name. But following the instructions it would be impossible to go wrong. Unfortunately the outer suburbs were hilly and our pony, not much larger than a good-sized St Bernard dog, was tired. On slight gradients we got out and walked. Uphill we had to help with the pulling. In the gathering twilight we found an avenue that seemed to fit the description, although all the avenues and villas were practically identical, with unmade dust roads, crazy paths and overhanging eaves, designed to give protection from the snow that could never fall. I worked my way along the avenue going from villa to villa, but no knock was ever answered. Sometimes I caught sight of Vietnamese servants lurking at the house’s rear, but the moment they realised I had seen them, they slipped quietly away and disappeared. Eventually I found a French woman, the first I had seen in this outwardly French town. Leaning out of an upstairs window she pointed in the dim direction of the villa where she thought Madame Schneider lived. So once again, I left the trap, cut across a garden coated with pine needles and managed to steal up on an elderly Vietnamese domestic, who seemed to be a cook, as I caught him in the act of scouring out some pots. Placing myself between him and the back door, so as to cut off any attempt to escape, I began an interrogation.
It is necessary at this point to refer to the existence of pidgin-French and to explain its nature, since this was the occasion when I realised the urgency of mastering its essentials. Pidgin-French, or petit-nègre as it is called, lacks the gay fantasy of its English equivalent, but is, by compensation, far less complex. Its vocabulary is limited to perhaps a hundred words. Verbs are used in the infinitive except where this is difficult to pronounce, when a special pidgin form is devised; thus connaître becomes connaisse. There are adaptations in the way of pronunciation too. The Vietnamese will not bother with difficult foreign consonants. They cannot pronounce r, and f in the Vietnamese language contains a strong element of p in its pronunciation. Thus, for example, bière de France becomes bí’ de Pla’ or bí’ de Pa’; or, to take a sentence ‘je veux du fromage Roquefort’ is translated, ‘Moi content po’-mo’ Lo’-po’.’ It was only as my conversation with the cook progressed that I began to realise the existence of these difficulties.
N.L. Madame Schneider, est ce qu’elle habite ici?
COOK Moi pas connaisse.
N.L. (with exaggerated distinctness and quite useless emphasis on final r) Schnaydair-r-e, Madame Schnaydair-r-e.
COOK (smiling faintly with recognition) Sé-dé?
N.L. (after great imaginative effort) Oui.
COOK Oui.
N.L. Est ce qu’elle est à la maison?
COOK Moi pas connaisse. (I do not understand.)
N.L. (beginning to learn lesson) Madame Sé-dé ici?
COOK Madame partir.
N.L. (refusing to surrender to the finality of the tone) Madame va venir?
COOK Oui.
N.L. Quand?
COOK (employing the indefinite future offered in appeasement to foreigners the world over, meaning, in ten minutes, tomorrow, next week) Maintenant.
N.L. (unappeased) Mais où est-elle allée?
COOK Moi pas connaisse. (This time, either I do not understand, or I do not know.)
N.L. (doubtful now whether this is the right lady) Madame, elle est mariée?
COOK Oui.
N.L. Elle a un mari, donc?
COOK Non.
N.L. Alors, elle est veuve?
COOK (in a desperate effort to make the whole thing crystal clear) Monsieur pas mari, Monsieur médicin. Madame venir, Madame partir. Monsieur venir attend Madame venir. Monsieur, Madame manger.
With a few more hours’ practice I should have readily understood from the lucid account of the Schneider family activities that Madame had already been home and had popped out again, probably for a cocktail with a neighbour, that her husband, who was a doctor, would shortly be arriving and that they would have dinner together at home. As it was the conversation dragged on fatuously. I gathered in quick succession that Madame was in the administration, that she was a doctor, that she was both, that she was on holiday, had returned to France, was shopping in town, and no longer lived there.
My driver, whose attempts to be helpful had only added to the insane confusion, now tired suddenly of the whole business, demanded in pellucid French sixty piastres, the equivalent of one pound, and rattled off, a small Asiatic charioteer, into the gloom. Finally the cook, too, retreated inside, leaving me standing there alone, a prey to mosquitoes and to noisy blundering insects like monstrous May-bugs which struck me repeatedly in the face. It was then that a lorry drove up and deposited Madame Schneider and her husband. They were much surprised to find me awaiting them and told me that they had sent a telegram to Saigon to say that a room had been reserved for me at the Baliverne Hotel and fixing an appointment for me at the Mairie next day. Although quite unprepared for my visit they insisted that I should stay to dinner. Asked how long I expected to stay in Dalat, I replied that I wanted to leave as soon as possible. Madame wanted to know when I wished her to try to arrange an audience with the Emperor Bao Dai, whose villa was just down the road. It seemed that I had passed it without paying it any particular attention. To this are come the Emperors of Annam!
Although there had been some hints at Saigon of the possibilities of an Imperial hunting trip, I had never supposed that an official audience was taken so much as a matter of course and I said something to the effect that I hadn’t given much thought to the matter. The Schneiders seemed surprised. This was my first experience of the fact that writers and journalists travelling in the Far East are supposed to be anxious to interview any crowned heads that happen to be within reach, and that to neglect to show much anxiety is considered a little oafish – even a breach of good manners. It is really extraordinary that these august persons should be wounded in their self-esteem when some insignificant traveller fails to express a desire to be received by them. In any case, my hostess thought, the matter of an audience could quite well wait for a day or two as there was little likelihood of my being able to leave Dalat in under a week. It was further explained to me that I would have to return along the Saigon road to a point about seventy-five miles south where it joined the main road to Ban Méthuot. There was a convoy due to leave Saigon for Ban Méthuot next morning, but I should almost certainly fail to make the connection. The next convoy would leave in about a week’s time. I thought it strange that the people in Saigon should have arranged, in that case, for me to travel to Ban Méthuot via Dalat, and Madame Schneider said that they had probably taken the map too literally. There were two jungle tracks that cut across country from a village called Djiring, about thirty miles away, but one was the Emperor’s private hunting track and his permission would have to be obtained to use it, while as for the other, which had only been completed two years previously, it might be months before – but suddenly Madame had an idea; hadn’t there been some talk of a Gendarmerie officer going to Ban Méthuot in the next few days? Picking up the telephone she got through to the Gendarmerie, and sure enough, by a really remarkable chance, a Lieutenant Suéry was leaving next morning. He had a seat to spare in his car and would be pleased to call for me at the inevitable hour of five o’clock.
The doctor ran me over to the Baliverne Hotel. It was a pretentious building, externally a bad example of timid functionalism tempered with would-be Hispanic swagger. My reception was a good example of Vietnamese passive resistance. It started off with the doctor confidently announcing that he had reserved a room for me by telephone. The Vietnamese male receptionist consulted a list and shook his head. The doctor asked him to make sure and the receptionist went carefully through the rooms, one by one, apparently checking the name of each occupant. No, there was no reservation in that name. Much embarrassed the doctor turned to me. ‘It’s absolutely extraordinary. I telephoned myself.’
‘Would you mind making one final check?’ he asked. The clerk shook his head. ‘No room has been reserved.’
‘Well then let me speak to the manager.’
‘The manager is not here.’
In desperation the doctor asked, ‘and have you no rooms of any kind?’
‘Certainly we have rooms.’
‘Then why didn’t you say so before?’
‘You asked if there was a reservation, and I told you there was none.’
Tired but relieved I signed the register. The reception clerk seemed to remember something.
‘At what time will you be leaving in the morning?’
