CHAPTER I
MY FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE ORIENT
To travel far and wide—out of the beaten paths, and to enjoy it, is to have a great career. I know no other impersonal delight that is so endless as the delight of learning new places. To see new flora, a new type of people having new customs, and then to realise that it is Damascus or Kabul, Calcutta or Canton,—a place which has been to you all your life a meaningless dot on a map, but is now—and for ever will be to you—a vivid, vital reality,—that is an exquisite pleasure, a twofold pleasure, for while it fires your intellect, it feeds your artistic sense, your love of the picturesque.
I take it for granted that you have a love of the picturesque. If I am wrong, you would better close my little book, and try to change it for another. For you will think me a bit mad, and we shan’t get on together at all.
I love the East—genuinely and intensely—I love every inch of it. There are occasional bits of the landscape that are uninteresting, but the people are always charming. They are often lovable. They are invariably quaint and interesting.
I remember saying to my husband, when we had been in the East two days, “I can never be grateful enough for having come to this wonderful Orient.” Days passed into weeks. Weeks stretched into months. Months lengthened into years. With every passing hour my gratitude grew. We are back in London now, and the East is a memory; but I am grateful still, and shall be always.
For people who long to see the Eastern wonderland and can’t, I have a big pity. For people who could go, but don’t care to, I have a huge contempt.
My father—a delightful fellow-traveller, and the dear chum of my girlhood—my father and I had planned to see the East together. But we never did. My husband and I saw all the East together. Every day as we went farther and farther into those wonderful countries we said one to the other, “If he were only with us!”
We had been playing some time in Australia, and when we began to fear lest we had worn out our welcome, our thoughts turned to London, the actor’s Mecca. But I begged that we might go to dear old England by a very roundabout way. It turned out a very roundabout way indeed. We were tempted to go from place to place. We were detained in Japan by business. We were held in India by illness. We went all over the East. And when we “came home” a year ago, my boy knew a little Chinese, a little Japanese, and very much Hindustani.
We reached Colombo at daylight. When I woke I had that strange sensation to which, become as old a traveller as one may, one never gets quite used—the sensation of being in a boat that is at anchor after weeks of incessant motion. The noise was indescribable. The Valetta was going on to London, and they were already coaling. I climbed up to the port-hole and looked out. The coaling was going on farther down. As far as I could see, were native boats that would have made Venice gaudier when Venice was gay with the glory of coloured gondolas. Some of them reminded me of the birch-bark canoes that dart up and down the St. Lawrence, some were shaped like Spanish caravels, some were Egyptian in outline. But all were Oriental in colour; and all were manned by Cingalese—the first Oriental people I had ever seen en masse.