Anna and the King of Siam Read online

  Nor could the English do that through the centuries that followed, not even in the thirteenth century when they drove Llewelyn-ap-Gruffyd foot by foot back to the mountain-holds where, deserted by his friends and betrayed by his confederates, he perished alone, last of his race to hold the scepter of Cymri. The city walls which Edward I had built to secure his conquest were little changed in the nineteenth century, although the Castle of Carnarvon, his seal of triumph on defeated Wales, was crumbling into dust.

  A hundred years ago in Carnarvon people still talked of these things, and of others. They talked of Din Sylwy where a double circle of stones was believed to be King Arthur’s Round Table. They talked also of Pont Aberglaslyn on the Beddgelert Road, which—it was whispered—the Devil had built in return for the soul of the first one to pass over it, and of how the wily villagers had driven a dog across the bridge when it was finished and so kept their bargain and cheated the Dark One.

  Reared in this land of elf and Merlin, it was not strange that Anna Harriette Crawford remembered vividly all her life how as a child she had posted letters in trees to fairies and wood spirits and had received the most flattering replies. Nor was it strange that she carried away from it through the years a profound love of freedom, a deep religious faith, a courage and a pride that never deserted her.

  She was only six years old when her parents sailed for India. Captain Crawford and his regiment had been ordered to reinforce the troops there in the face of impending war. His little daughter was left with a relative who conducted a school for girls. She was not quite seven when this relative, Mrs. Walpole, called her to the parlor and, taking her gently into plump arms, told her that her father had died a soldier’s death in that far-away country where he had gone to serve the Queen.

  In the most delightful of all Indian months, the cool month of November, in the year 1849, a steamer came to anchor in the harbor of Bombay, bringing Anna Harriette Crawford among its passengers. She was fifteen, fresh from school, and eager to rejoin her mother, who had married again.

  The sun shone through the mists of early dawn as the young girl looked from her cabin window with mingled curiosity and wonder. She was a pretty girl, small-boned and delicate in appearance, with brown eyes and wavy brown hair parted in the middle. In the foreground she saw the stone quays and the great flight of stone steps along the waterfront. Beyond were strange shapes of temples, Hindu, Parsee, Jain, and Mohammedan; the remains of old Maratha forts; and a line of European and native mansions. In the distance was the dim outline of the mighty ghats towering into the clouds.

  As the boat docked everything was confusion. Shrieking porters quarreled over luggage. A number of officers, civil and military—some in light-brown coats of China silk and wide-brimmed straw hats, others in frogged blue tunics and military caps—pressed through the crowd and boarded the ship. A young cadet who had been standing near the gangplank rushed into the arms of a handsome officer, very like himself but older by twenty or thirty years. Anna looked anxiously about for her mother, half afraid that she would not recognize her after the long years. But when she found her mother the years did not seem to have mattered. Her mother looked a little older, a little frailer, but that was all. They drove away from the quay happily, Anna almost hanging out of the carriage in her eagerness not to miss any of the new and strange sights. Her mother told her that they would stay with friends at Colaba for a few weeks, and would then go to Poona. Her stepfather held a prominent position in the Public Works Department and was needed in Poona to supervise certain government projects there.

  In the meantime they would see as much of Bombay as time permitted. One of their early drives was to the fort, another to the dockyard. It was Anna’s first glimpse of the commerce of the world. Her life had been so sheltered that she had hardly bought so much as a ribbon for herself in the shops of Carnarvon. The great square at the dockyard in Bombay was full of merchants, both dark-faced and white, jostling and contending with each other in a dozen languages. There were pompous Englishmen, suave Parsees, Arabs and Hindus, and mixed with them a motley collection of fakirs and beggars hoping for a few pice.

  For six hours this mass of humanity bartered, bought and sold, haggled, and fought in a strangely exciting warfare. At four o’clock a long line of carriages drove up to the stone warehouses and dashed away with the white merchants. Almost instantly not a human being was to be seen except a few Indian watchmen and some armed white sentinels. Anna had refused to be dragged away until it was all over. She was intoxicated with the drama of it. So this was commerce! She felt an insatiable curiosity to see and know more.

  A day or two later her mother and she drove through the markets and bazaars of the Parsee section. They visited the Bhendi Bazaar, and the Arabian horse-market. They saw the landing of pilgrims from Mecca, a dirty ill-looking set of men. And they watched the arrival of some beautiful slave-women who had been bought for private sale among the rich Indians.

  But the experience that made the most profound impression on the young girl newly arrived from the simple life of Carnarvon was a dinner party. It was given by a rich widow whose house was near Parel, a beautiful part of the island. Her husband had been an “uncovenanted officer.” In the East of those days so great was the prestige attached to the word “officer” that every white man was an officer of some sort, from brigadier to private. A civilian was an “uncovenanted officer.”

  The carriage bringing Anna Harriette and her parents to the dinner drove through a long avenue of trees to a pillared building of stone with a spacious flight of steps leading to it. On the steps half a dozen servants were waiting, in flowing white robes, crimson and gold turbans, and blue and gold cummerbunds. Anna Harriette looked at this princely assembly in awe. They salaamed the guests, and then with stately dignity advanced to help them alight from their carriages. Another group of flunkeys, equally magnificent, moved forward to conduct them to a sumptuously furnished apartment where they were to lay off their wraps. A third company then led them to the drawing room in the middle of which sat the widow, like a queen, on a yellow satin ottoman, surrounded by her guests.

  Anna Harriette found herself little interested in the guests, although the men were for the most part in handsome uniforms, and the women in low-necked dresses of exquisite Chinese crepe and silk, or Indian gauze and mulmul. It was the regal Indian servants who drew her attention. At dinner they glided about, so quietly that their feet seemed hardly to touch the floor, offering the guests costly foods and wines, setting down plates and removing them without making the faintest sound. The punkahs overhead moved softly to and fro. Light fell from coconut-oil chandeliers on the flowers, the glass, the silver. Everything went forward with ease and perfection. The servants who were not at the moment waiting on the table stood with arms folded across their breasts under the shadow of door or pillars, until their turn came. They were so still that, except for the glitter in their eyes, they might have been statues cast in bronze.

  The talk at the table was full of expanding British power. It flowed around the young girl in a sea of words. She listened and said nothing. No one considered it strange that she was quiet, because it was the proper thing. But the thoughts in her head were anything but quiet. She heard the officers, whose faces were red with wine, exulting over the accomplished fact of British supremacy in India, and she wondered a little. They discussed campaigns and victories, and spoke contemptuously of the “natives,” whom everyone agreed had to be put in their place periodically. “Their place?” Anna Harriette pondered, strangely troubled. “And what is their place in their own country?” The laughter, the pomp, the arrogant assertion of racial superiority grated on the young Welsh girl unpleasantly. She watched the Indians moving silently about. She had a feeling of leashed power emanating from the mute and motionless figures under the arches and pillars. It came to her for the first time that it was a very solemn affair for Britons to be in India, luxuriating on her land and on her spoils.

  Abruptly the d
elicious dinner, the music of fountains playing through the windows, the movement and color about the table seemed incongruous, almost revolting! What were they thinking, the dark and sinister men waiting in the shadows, watching every turn and expression on the white faces around the table? Did they hate the conquerors of their ancient land? Did they say to themselves with scorn, “A little while, you fools, and our knives will slit your throats!” The ominous illusion became so strong that suddenly Anna Harriette wanted only to escape this impassive scrutiny. If she laughed at a joke made by the young soldier next to her, if she merely leaned closer to hear better, those obsidian eyes seemed to observe her, even when they remained fixed on vacancy. She could hardly restrain the impulse to stand up and run away from the overpowering sense of animosity and resentment that came to her over the chatter of the table. But this would have been a shocking breach of etiquette. She sat still, trying to hush her secret heart.

  The lively conversation turned to the home government, and every man at the table had his own theory of how it should be administered. All of this Anna Harriette knew herself to be too young to comprehend. But she was not too young to perceive that no one around the long table except herself was aware that those dusky, silent figures were flesh and blood. To the other guests they apparently had no more significance than automatons carved out of wood or stone.

  When she came out of the house at last she drew a deep breath of relief. She felt as if she had escaped imminent danger.

  From that day on she began to think much about India, and the white man in India. She was less volatile than before as she drove about the city with her mother. She did not speak of the groping doubts that troubled her, for what she was thinking seemed utterly different from the thoughts of the people around her. They accepted without question the right of the British to rule, to control commerce for their own benefit, to grow rich on the base of terrible poverty that supported the framework of empire. Gradually the delight that had stirred in her during the first drives through Bombay lessened as she saw how complacently her countrymen were establishing themselves in a land where they were out of harmony in form and color.

  During these weeks her intellectual independence was born. It came with a stirring of the conviction that was never to leave her: that a human being, whatever his color or creed or sex, had certain inalienable rights which other human beings had no right to violate. Years later she called the Indian Mutiny “the just retribution that seems to have overtaken our nation.”

  After a few months in Bombay Anna set out with her parents for Poona, the former capital of the great Indian kings. The country was full of extravagant contrasts—gorgeous temples of gods and squalid dwellings of men; fertile plains and arid wastes; towering hills crowned with ancient forts, now lonely and deserted; deep caves in the hearts of isolated mountains where lay written in stone the romantic culture of long-past ages.

  As the dak, drawn by horses, trotted briskly along, her mind was busy with many thoughts. And as days later they jounced up the ghats in palkis, or palanquins, the thoughts were still with her.

  Two things had emerged from the brief time in Bombay as important. First and foremost, she was in love, with a young British officer she had met there and who seemed already essential to her life. He was Major Thomas Louis Leonowens, who held a staff appointment in the Commissariat Office. They had agreed to correspond and it was understood between them that when Anna was a little older they would marry.

  The other fact was that she did not like her new stepfather. With every day of the journey her dislike for him grew stronger. He was a domestic tyrant. Unfortunately, too, by the terms of her father’s will he—with Colonel Rutherford Sutherland—was her guardian and the executor of the estate her father had left her.

  He had begun to hint that he had plans for her future, and they had not been long in Poona before the tension grew serious. His plans included a husband whom he had already picked out, a rich merchant more than twice her age, and objectionable to her in every way. He would not countenance her friendship with young Major Leonowens, who after all had very little beyond his commission. But Anna had her own store of independence, and the friendship continued clandestinely by correspondence.

  At last Anna’s mother brought about a compromise between her domineering husband and her high-spirited daughter. The chaplain of the East India Company in Bombay was the Rev. George Percy Badger. He and his wife were close friends of Anna’s mother. Mr. Badger, a well-known Arabic scholar, had been commissioned to visit the primitive churches of the Nestorians of Kurdistan and other Eastern Christians. He and Mrs. Badger invited Anna Harriette to go with them on their tour of Egypt and the Near East. She was delighted, her stepfather did not disapprove, she had an independent income which made travel possible, so the matter was arranged.

  In 1850 she sailed from Bombay with the Badgers. In Egypt she wrote, “We sailed down the Nile, which flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands like a grave and mighty thought threading an unravelled dream; ascended the First and Second Cataracts; in fact, went to visit everything that was worth seeing, the Pyramids, Luxor, Thebes, Karnak, everything!” For a girl imbued with the love of travel it was a wonderful experience. In addition, Mr. Badger undertook her education and she began to study Arabic with him. For her study of Persian she hired a teacher, Moonshee. He and his wife, Miriam Beebe, were to be with her for many years.

  Working with Mr. Badger, taking notes as he directed, listening to his explanations of what they saw, opened up a world that Anna Harriette had not known existed. He taught her how to observe, how to perceive more than was indicated on the surface, how to analyze, how to enjoy serious study. It was a rich education for an impressionable girl, better than any the schools of her day had to offer. And during all her travels she wrote to “her own Leon” in Bombay.

  When she returned to Poona after nearly a year’s absence her mind was made up. She would be married as soon as matters could be arranged, in spite of her stepfather’s opposition. Leon wrote that everything was ready for her:

  I have taken a large airy house in an excellent healthy situation near Government. It is a long way from the fort, but that is of no consequence compared to the advantage of a splendid house on reasonable terms and a good situation with pure air. I have also purchased a Shijram and horse and completed the furniture as far as I shall be able to go with the exception of a few articles. Our house will be neatly furnished, but not very amply, as it would take an awful lot of money to furnish a house in complete style. As it is I have expended up to date about eleven hundred Rupees, from which you can judge that setting up house is no joke. There are very extensive grounds and gardens attached to the house which you will be pleased with.…

  The charge for license is very heavy, and we can be “called” (I believe that is the term) at the Poona Church. We had better perhaps avoid incurring an unnecessary expense. You must, however, consult your own tastes and wishes in the matter, and let me know how you decide. As for myself, I am too happy and too delighted to make you, my darling Annie, my wife, to care much whether it is by banns or license, although I attach every importance and weight to that ceremony which will make us one for life. Do not fail to write early on the subject.

  They were married in 1851, very quietly. As she wrote later to one of her grandchildren, “This marriage my stepfather opposed with so much rancor that all correspondence ceased from that date.” The resentment on her side was as deep. She never mentioned the name of her hated stepfather to her children and grandchildren. None of them knows it to this day.

  3

  THE ASTROLOGER’S PROPHECY

  The new home was on Malabar Hill completely isolated from the rest of the world. The hill was a rocky promontory on the south side of the island of Bombay. It was covered with beautiful houses, many of which were almost palaces. At its highest point, detached and alone, stood a lofty tower. It was a Tower of Silence where the followers of Zoroaster deposited their dead.


  On the other side of this much-dreaded spot and not far from a forest of palms which descended in undulations to the base of the hill stood a solitary house, called by everyone “Morgan’s Folly.” Its builder had returned to England ten years before, broken in fortune and health, and it had stood unoccupied ever since. It was this house to which Major Leonowens took his bride.

  The original owner had loved birds and had built his residence to accommodate them. The young couple immediately named it “The Aviary.” There were only two stories. The lower was built of stone pillars united by screens of fine open wire wrought in patterns of the Persian rose and the Buddhist lily. Most of the rare birds that had originally been kept there were gone, but there were still the sooruk, or scarlet breast, an exquisite singer; the maina, or Java sparrow; the bulbul, or Indian nightingale; and the zeenah, a little quarrelsome brown and red-spotted bird. The upper story was of fine-grained teak. An elaborately carved balcony ran all around it. The eastern end of the house was a tower which commanded the widest and most beautiful view to be found anywhere on the island.

  The house had been built to accommodate not only birds but trees. One gigantic baobab, which had stood there perhaps for centuries, had been carefully preserved when the house was planned by allowing an opening through both stories and the roof. As a result the house had the singular appearance of having been built around a great tree. The ground floor was covered with weeds and a perfect jungle of brushwood. The gardener told Anna that it abounded in all kinds of reptiles, but she never saw any signs of them until several large cobras were called out one morning by a party of snake-charmers.