Ch. 12: Georgie Porgie

Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie,
Kissed the girls and made them cry.
When the girls came out to play
Georgie Porgie ran away.

If you will admit that a man has no right to enter his drawing-room
early in the morning, when the housemaid is setting things right and
clearing away the dust, you will concede that civilised people who eat
out of china and own card-cases have no right to apply their standard of
right and wrong to an unsettled land. When the place is made fit for
their reception, by those men who are told off to the work, they can
come up, bringing in their trunks their own society and the Decalogue,
and all the other apparatus. Where the Queen's Law does not carry, it is
irrational to expect an observance of other and weaker rules. The men
who run ahead of the cars of Decency and Propriety, and make the jungle
ways straight, cannot be judged in the same manner as the stay-at-home
folk of the ranks of the regular Tchin.

Not many months ago the Queen's Law stopped a few miles north of
Thayetmyo on the Irrawaddy. There was no very strong Public Opinion up
to that limit, but it existed to keep men in order. When the Government
said that the Queen's Law must carry up to Bhamo and the Chinese border
the order was given, and some men whose desire was to be ever a little
in advance of the rush of Respectability flocked forward with the
troops. These were the men who could never pass examinations, and would
have been too pronounced in their ideas for the administration of
bureau-worked Provinces. The Supreme Government stepped in as soon as
might be, with codes and regulations, and all but reduced New Burma to
the dead Indian level; but there was a short time during which strong
men were necessary and ploughed a field for themselves.

Among the fore-runners of Civilisation was Georgie Porgie, reckoned by
all who knew him a strong man. He held an appointment in Lower Burma
when the order came to break the Frontier, and his friends called him
Georgie Porgie because of the singularly Burmese-like manner in which he
sang a song whose first line is something like the words 'Georgie
Porgie.' Most men who have been in Burma will know the song. It means:
'Puff, puff, puff, puff, great steamboat!' Georgie sang it to his banjo,
and his friends shouted with delight, so that you could hear them far
away in the teak-forest.

When he went to Upper Burma he had no special regard for God or Man, but
he knew how to make himself respected, and to carry out the mixed
Military-Civil duties that fell to most men's share in those months. He
did his office work and entertained, now and again, the detachments of
fever-shaken soldiers who blundered through his part of the world in
search of a flying party