you turn up; it should wring your withers with apprehension; it should have desperate perils that you must avoid and incredible difficulties that only a reckless courage can surmount; and at the end, if you have made no mistake, if you have seized opportunity by the forelock and wrung unstable fortune by the neck, victory should always crown your efforts.
But since such a patience does not exist, in the long run I generally returned to that which has immortalised the name of Canfield. Though it is of course very difficult to get out, you are at least sure of some result, and when all seems lost the turning of a sudden happy card may grant you a respite. I have heard that this estimable gentleman was a gambler in New York and he sold you the pack for fifty dollars and gave you five dollars for every card you got out. The establishment was palatial, supper was free and champagne flowed freely; negroes shuffled thepacks for you. There were Turkey carpets on the floors and pictures by Meissonier and Lord Leighton on the walls, and there were life-sized statues in marble. I think it must have been very like Lansdowne House.
Looking back on it from this distance it had for me something of the charm of a genre picture and as I set out the seven cards, and then the six, I saw from my quiet room in the jungle bungalow (as it were through the wrong end of a telescope) the rooms brightly lit with glass chandeliers, the crowd of people, the haze of smoke and the tense, strained, tragic feeling of the gambling-hell. I was held for a moment in the great world with its complications, vice and dissipation. It is one of the mistakes that people make to think that the East is depraved; on the contrary the Oriental has a modesty that the ordinary European would find fantastic. His virtue is not the same as the Europeanâs, but I think he is more virtuous. Vice you must look for in Paris, London or New York, rather than in Benares or Peking. But whether this is due to the fact that the Oriental, not being oppressed as we are by the sense of sin, feels no need to transgress the rules that during the long course of his history he has found it convenient to make, or whether, as is shown by his art and literature (which after all are only complicated, but monotonous variations on a single theme) he is unimaginative, who am I to say?
It was time for me to go to bed. I got under my mosquito curtain, lit my pipe and read the novel which I kept for that particular moment. I had looked forward to it all day. It was
Du Côte de Guermantes
and in my fear of coming to the end of it too quickly (I had read it before and could not really start on it again the moment I had finished it) I limited myself rigidly to thirty pages at a time. A great deal of course was exquisitely boring, but what did I care? I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else, and I finished the thirty pages all too soon; I seemed to have to hold back my eyes notto run along the lines too quickly. I put out my lamp and fell into a dreamless sleep.
But I could have sworn I had not been asleep ten minutes when a cock, crowing loudly, woke me; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, broke in upon the silence of the night. The gathering light crept into my room. Another day began.
XVI
I lost count of time. The track now could no longer be called a road and a bullock-cart could not have gone along it; it was no more than a narrow path and we went in single file. We began to climb, and a river, a tributary of the Salween, ran over rocks boisterously below us. The track wound up and down hills through the defiles of the range we were crossing, now at the level of the river, and then high above it. The sky was blue, not with the brilliant, provocative blue of Italy, but with the Eastern blue, which is milky, pale and languorous. The jungle now had all the air of the virgin forest of oneâs fancy: tall trees, rising
But since such a patience does not exist, in the long run I generally returned to that which has immortalised the name of Canfield. Though it is of course very difficult to get out, you are at least sure of some result, and when all seems lost the turning of a sudden happy card may grant you a respite. I have heard that this estimable gentleman was a gambler in New York and he sold you the pack for fifty dollars and gave you five dollars for every card you got out. The establishment was palatial, supper was free and champagne flowed freely; negroes shuffled thepacks for you. There were Turkey carpets on the floors and pictures by Meissonier and Lord Leighton on the walls, and there were life-sized statues in marble. I think it must have been very like Lansdowne House.
Looking back on it from this distance it had for me something of the charm of a genre picture and as I set out the seven cards, and then the six, I saw from my quiet room in the jungle bungalow (as it were through the wrong end of a telescope) the rooms brightly lit with glass chandeliers, the crowd of people, the haze of smoke and the tense, strained, tragic feeling of the gambling-hell. I was held for a moment in the great world with its complications, vice and dissipation. It is one of the mistakes that people make to think that the East is depraved; on the contrary the Oriental has a modesty that the ordinary European would find fantastic. His virtue is not the same as the Europeanâs, but I think he is more virtuous. Vice you must look for in Paris, London or New York, rather than in Benares or Peking. But whether this is due to the fact that the Oriental, not being oppressed as we are by the sense of sin, feels no need to transgress the rules that during the long course of his history he has found it convenient to make, or whether, as is shown by his art and literature (which after all are only complicated, but monotonous variations on a single theme) he is unimaginative, who am I to say?
It was time for me to go to bed. I got under my mosquito curtain, lit my pipe and read the novel which I kept for that particular moment. I had looked forward to it all day. It was
Du Côte de Guermantes
and in my fear of coming to the end of it too quickly (I had read it before and could not really start on it again the moment I had finished it) I limited myself rigidly to thirty pages at a time. A great deal of course was exquisitely boring, but what did I care? I would sooner be bored by Proust than amused by anybody else, and I finished the thirty pages all too soon; I seemed to have to hold back my eyes notto run along the lines too quickly. I put out my lamp and fell into a dreamless sleep.
But I could have sworn I had not been asleep ten minutes when a cock, crowing loudly, woke me; and the various sounds in the compound, first one and then after a pause another, broke in upon the silence of the night. The gathering light crept into my room. Another day began.
XVI
I lost count of time. The track now could no longer be called a road and a bullock-cart could not have gone along it; it was no more than a narrow path and we went in single file. We began to climb, and a river, a tributary of the Salween, ran over rocks boisterously below us. The track wound up and down hills through the defiles of the range we were crossing, now at the level of the river, and then high above it. The sky was blue, not with the brilliant, provocative blue of Italy, but with the Eastern blue, which is milky, pale and languorous. The jungle now had all the air of the virgin forest of oneâs fancy: tall trees, rising
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