THE BAMBOO FLUTE By STELLA BENSON L AST time I was
in England, I was taught to make bamboo flutes ; a very complicated and prettily rustic craft, it seemed, with only one drawback—that the bamboo flute, when made, could rarely, if ever, be induced to play. The completed flute has a most charm- ing wildwood look ; one feels like Pan in the forest until one begins to play—and then one feels like a frustrated glassblower.
But since coming back to China—the home of the bamboo—I have learnt how to make a bamboo flute that not only will play, but cannot be induced to stop playing. -This is the recipe. You take a camp bed and season it with sheets and pillows to taste . . . but perhaps I had better begin at the beginning of my .discovery. The place where I live in China has no modern conveniences ; no golf links, C. of E., running water h. and c., drainage system, railway system, or electric light system exist within many hundreds of miles. Air, by day, is provided by punkahs worked by little-boy-power. By night it is not provided—you have to go and look for it. When night falls upon our primitive day, it falls with a crash— almost literally with a crash. As the hot sun falls into the hot sea, the breeze—apparently—follows it ; the fortis- simo aeroplane whirrings of shrill insects crash into silence so abruptly that, for a moment, you feel as if you had been blown up. A stunned leaden deafness lies upon the air and the heart for a few minutes, and then the night begins to hum, very much as the day did, but on a lower note. At this point, you go to bed, the only alternative being to sit, melting like a lump of tallow, shoulder to shoulder with a sizzling kerosene lamp. Bed, in this climate where every hour is a hunt for air, means a camp bed. Not for me the immobile mausoleum of a real mattressed, metal bed, rooted on one airless site. Mine is a nimble greyhound of a camp bed, lightly harnessed to chase the breeze. Literally, my camp bed hunts with the hounds. Dogs have a nose for a breeze. When bed- time comes, the dog prospectors of my family range with raised noses round the verandahs, and wherever a knot of dogs finally settles, there, you may be sure, the best breeze is to be found. And thither I come, whisking my camp bed into position. " Where the dog sits, there sit I." . . . I cannot say that I am cordially welcomed by the canine discoverers of the site. The dogs are in very much the same position as that unlucky Indian holy man who found a particularly holy cave, and had hardly settled into it, in lofty sanctitude, when a devoted royal disciple, full of good intentions and only too anxious to subsidize holiness, hurried up and built an expensive marble city all over the holy spot—to the horror of the saint. Just so do I—camp bed, cough drops, candlestick, and all— bustle along to share the dogs' sanctuary.
And here the bamboos come into the story. It must be remembered that in a part of the world like ours, life is lived on a Bamboo Standard. If we want ropes, we plait bamboo strands ; if we want sunblinds or floormats or fans, we weave young bamboos together ; if we want rooftrees, masts, stilts, horsewhips, oars, crutches, splints for broken legs, or gallows, we chop bamboos down. If we want vegetables we eat bamboo shoots ; if we want to poison enemies, we send them a bamboo pill. And so, if we want to make a light frame for the necessary mos- quito net upon a camp bed, we chop down eight small bamboos and tie them together at the corners with bamboo peel.
Well . . . there, alas ! you have your recipe for a bamboo flute ; you chop down eight small bamboos and , frame your camp bed with them. . . . Hunt your breeze, and as soon as you find your breeze, your bed begins to play. Bamboos, artfully made into flutes by English amateur craftsmen, are dumb ; bamboos made into the frame of a camp bed are impossible to silence. Cotton wool, stuffed desperately into every mouthpiece, only succeeds in changing the note. The only result of stuffing my first soprano bamboo with solid cotton wool along its whole length was that it .turned into second alto. Corks have no effect. Sealing wax (besides setting the mosquito net on fire) is barren of results: Smashing the bamboos in a rage and putting in a new set is useless. Carpenters are appealed to in vain—indeed, as . all Chinese seem to be born with reinforced concrete nerves, it is impossible to explain to any member of this race how deeply the Nordic sensibility resents a musical bed. Sometimes, when I finally despair of sleep, I try to make a virtue of necessity, and manipulate the cotton wool so as to tune the bed to a purposeful harmony, but I have never yet achieved anything more elaborate than the opening chord of Heilige Nacht.
And so I am held at the mercy of all the noises of the night. My bed's piping opens the door to all the other enemies of sleep. The night watchman every hour walks round the compound playing his Tic-toe to warn thieves of his approach and to remind • his employer of his fidelity ; tie-toe for eleven o'clock, tic-tic-toc for twelve, tic for one, tic-tic for two ; the dogs growl every time he passes. In the background of hearing, a pedlar parades the village street, crying (as it seems) " Ya—ya—took-- oo 00 oo—°' in a. long crescendo and diminuenclay.like a sneeze recorded by a slow-motion talkie. The rain bird cries all night, " Rain—rain—rain--lots-and,lots-of rain," with maddeningly slight variations ; the cry is never quite the same and never quite different;- he seems to be continually conscientiously rehearsing. his repertoire of variations, trying to beat his own record, and I always imagine his wife sitting on the next twig counting—" A hundred and four—a hundred and five—a hundred and —no, darling, you did that one before." " Oh, did I ? Sorry. What about this ? " If it has rained recently, he cries, " I told you so--I told you so . . " The bambooS in the garden shuffle and rattle, for bamboos in a garden can always find a- breeze to bow to, just as bamboos round a bed can always find a breeze to sing to. . . . And so, led by my treacherous bamboos, every thing sings the hot night through.
It makes me tired to think of those anxious amateurs in England trying to make bamboo sing—sawing a square hole here, boring a round hole there, blowing the pith out of that, fitting a cork into this—when the real receipt is so simple. But who, having tried my method, would wish to hear a bamboo's voice again ? Anyone who- has once conquered the reserve of this immoderate vegetable knows that bambobi Should be seen and not heard.
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