The Gentleman in the Parlour by W. Somerset Maugham
It seemed to reassure him. At last he had smoked enough and the old woman made herself a pipe and smoked it. Then she went over to the mat on which the child was lying and huddled down beside it. She lay so still that I supposed she had fallen directly asleep. When at last I went I found my boy curled up on the foot-board of the rickshaw in so deep a slumber that I had to shake him. I knew where I was and I wanted air and exercise, so I gave him a couple of piastres and told him I would walk.
It was a strange story I carried away with me.
It was with a sort of horror that I had listened to Grosely, telling me of those twenty years he had spent in China. He had made money, I do not know how much, but from the way he talked I should think something between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds, and for a tide-waiter it was a fortune. He could not have come by it honestly, and little as I knew of the details of his trade, by his sudden reticences, by his leers and hints I guessed that there was no base transaction that, if it was made worth his while, he jibbed at. I suppose that nothing paid him better than smuggling opium, and his position gave him the opportunity to do this with safety and profit. I understood that his superior officers had often had their suspicions of him, but had never been able to get such proof of his malpractices as to justify them in taking any steps. They contented themselves with moving him from one port to another, but that did not disturb him; they watched him, but he was too clever for them. I saw that he was divided between the fear of telling me too much to his discredit and the desire to boast of his own astuteness. He prided himself on the confidence the Chinese had placed in him.
‘They knew they could trust me,’ he said, ‘and it gave me a pull. I never double-crossed a Chinaman once.’
The thought filled him with the complacency of the honest man. The Chinese discovered that he was keen on curios and they got in the habit of giving him bits or bringing him things to buy; he never made enquiries how they had come by them and he bought them cheap. When he had got a good lot he sent them to Peking and sold them at a handsome profit. I remembered how he had started his commercial career by buying things at auctions and pawning them. For twenty years by shabby shift and petty dishonesty he added pound to pound, and everything he made he invested in Shanghai. He lived penuriously, saving half his pay; he never went on leave because he did not want to waste his money, he would not have anything to do with the Chinese women, he wanted to keep himself free from entanglement; he did not drink. He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy. That was the only thing he wanted. He lived in China as though in a dream; he paid no attention to the life around him; its colour and strangeness, its possibilities of pleasure, meant nothing to him. There was always before him the mirage of London, the Criterion Bar, himself standing with his foot on the rail, the promenade at the Empire and the Pavilion, the picked-up harlot, the serio-comic at the music hall and the musical comedy at the Gaiety. This was life and love and adventure. This was romance. This was what he yearned for with all his heart. There was surely something impressive in the way in which during all those years he had lived like an anchorite with that one end in view of leading again a life that was so vulgar. It showed character.
‘You see,’ he said to me, ‘even if I’d been able to get back to England on leave I wouldn’t have gone. I didn’t want to go till I could go for good. And then I wanted to do the thing in style.’
He saw himself putting on evening clothes every night and going out with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and he saw himself going to the Derby in a long coat and a brown hat and a pair of opera glasses slung over his shoulder. He saw himself giving the girls a look over and picking out the one he fancied. He made up his mind that on the night he arrived in London he would get blind, he hadn’t been drunk for twenty years; he couldn’t afford to in his job, you had to keep your wits about you. He’d take care not to get drunk on the ship on the way home. He’d wait till he got to London. What a night he’d have! He thought of it for twenty years.
I do not know why Grosely left the Chinese customs, whether the place was getting too hot for him, whether he had reached the end of his service or whether he had amassed the sum he had fixed. But at last he sailed. He went second class; he did not intend to start spending money till he reached London. He took rooms in Jermyn Street, he had always wanted to live there, and he went straight to a tailor’s and ordered himself an outfit. Slap up. Then he had a look round the town. It was different from how he remembered it, there was much more traffic and he felt confused and a little at sea. He went to the Criterion and found there was no longer a bar where he had been used to lounge and drink. There was a restaurant in Leicester Square where he had been in the habit of dining when he was in funds, but he could not find it; he supposed it had been torn down. He went to the Pavilion, but there were no women there; he was rather disgusted and went on to the Empire, he found they had done away with the Promenade. It was rather a blow. He could not quite make it out. Well, anyhow, he must be prepared for changes in twenty years, and if he couldn’t do anything else he could get drunk. He had had fever several times in China and the change of climate had brought it on again, he wasn’t feeling any too well, and after four or five drinks he was glad to go to bed.
That first day was only a sample of many that followed it. Everything went wrong. Grosely’s voice grew peevish and bitter as he told me how one thing and another had failed him. The old places were gone, the people were different, he found it hard to make friends, he was strangely lonely; he had never expected that in a great city like London. That’s what was wrong with it, London had become too big, it wasn’t the jolly, intimate place it had been in the early nineties. It had gone to pieces. He picked up a few girls, but they weren’t as nice as the girls he had known before, they weren’t the fun they used to be, and he grew dimly conscious that they thought him a rum sort of cove. He was only just over forty and they looked upon him as an old man. When he tried to cotton on to a lot of young fellows standing round a bar they gave him the cold shoulder. Anyway, these young fellows didn’t know how to drink. He’d show them. He got soused every night, it was the only thing to do in that damned place, but, by Jove, it made him feel rotten next day. He supposed it was the climate of China. When he was a medical student he could drink a bottle of whisky every night and be as fresh as a daisy in the morning. He began to think more about China. All sorts of things that he never knew he had noticed came back to him. It wasn’t a bad life he’d led there. Perhaps he’d been a fool to keep away from those Chinese girls, they were pretty little things some of them, and they didn’t put on the airs these English girls did. One could have a damned good time in China if one had the money he had. One could keep a Chinese girl and get into the club, and there’d be a lot of nice fellows to drink with and play bridge with and billiards. He remembered the Chinese shops and all the row in the streets and the coolies carrying loads and the ports with the junks in them and the rivers with pagodas on the banks. It was funny, he never thought much of China while he was there and now – well, he couldn’t get it out of his mind. It obsessed him. He began to think that London was no place for a white man. It had just gone to the dogs, that was the long and short of it, and one day the thought came to him that perhaps it would be a good thing if he went back to China. Of course it was silly, he’d worked like a slave for twenty years to be able to have a good time in London, and it was absurd to go and live in China. With his money he ought to be able to have a good time anywhere. But somehow he couldn’t think of anything else but China. One day he went to the pictures and saw a scene at Shanghai. That settled it. He was fed up with London. He hated it. He was going to get out and this time he’d get out for good. He had been home a year and a half, and it seemed longer to him than all his twenty years in the East. He took a passge on a French boat sailing from Marseilles, and when he saw the coast of Europe sink into the sea he heaved a great sigh of relief
He went ashore at Djibouti and again at Colombo and Singapore, but though the ship stopped for two days at Saïgon he remained on board there. He’d been drinking a good deal and he was feeling a bit under the weather. But when they reached Haiphong, where they were staying for forty-eight hours, he thought he might just as well have a look at it. That was the last stopping-place before they got to China. He was bound for Shanghai. When he got there he meant to go to a hotel and look around a bit and then get hold of a girl and a place of his own. He would buy a pony or two and race. He’d soon make friends. In the East they weren’t so stiff and standoffish as they were in London. Going ashore, he dined at the hotel and after dinner got into a rickshaw and told the boy he wanted a woman. The boy took him to the shabby tenement in which I had sat for so many hours and there were the old woman and the girl who was now the mother of his child. After a while the old woman asked him if he wouldn’t like to smoke. He had never tried opium, he had always been frightened of it, but now he didn’t see why he shouldn’t have a go. He was feeling good that night and the girl was a jolly cuddlesome little thing; she was rather like a Chinese girl, small and pretty, like an idol. Well, he had a pipe or two, and he began to feel very happy and comfortable. He stayed all night. He didn’t sleep. He just lay, feeling very restful, and thought about things.
‘I stopped there till my ship went on to Hong-Kong,’ he said. ‘And when she left I just stopped on.’
‘How about your luggage?’ I asked.
For I am perhaps unworthily interested in the manner people combine practical details with the ideal aspects of life. When in a novel penniless lovers drive in a long, swift racing car over the distant hills I have always a desire to know how they managed to pay for it; and I have often asked myself how the characters of Henry James in the intervals of subtly examining their situation coped with the physiological necessities of their bodies.
‘I only had a trunk full of clothes, I was never one to want much more than I stood up in, and I went down with the girl in a rickshaw to fetch it. I only meant to stay on till the next boat came through. You see, I was so near China here I thought I’d wait a bit and get used to things if you understand what I mean, before I went on.’
I did. Those last words of his revealed him to me. I knew that on the threshold of China his courage had failed him. England had been such a terrible disappointment that now he was afraid to put China to the test too.
If that failed him he had nothing. For years England had been like a mirage in the desert, but when he had yielded to the attraction, those shining pools and the palm-trees and the green grass were nothing but the rolling sandy dunes. He had China, and so long as he never saw it again he kept it.
‘Somehow I stayed on. You know, you’d be surprised how quickly the days pass. I don’t seem to have time to do half the things I want to. After all I’m comfortable here. The old woman makes a damned good pipe, and she’s a jolly little girl, my girl, and then there’s the kid. A lively young beggar. If you’re happy somewhere what’s the good of going somewhere else?’
‘And are you happy here?’ I asked him.
I looked round that large bare sordid room. There was no comfort in it and not one of the little personal things that one would have thought might have given him the feeling of home. Grosely had taken on this equivocal little apartment, which served as a house of assignation and as a place for Europeans to smoke opium in, with the old woman who kept it, just as it was, and he camped, rather than lived, there still as though next day he would pack his traps and go. After a little while he answered my question.
‘I’ve never been so happy in my life. I often think I’ll go on to Shanghai some day, but I don’t suppose I ever shall. And God knows, I never want to see England again.’
‘Aren’t you awfully lonely sometimes for people to talk to?’
‘No. Sometimes a Chinese tramp comes in with an English skipper or a Scotch engineer, and then I go on board and we have a talk about old times. There’s an old fellow here, a Frenchman who was in the customs, and he speaks English; I go and see him sometimes. But the fact is I don’t want anybody very much. I think a lot. It gets on my nerves when people come between me and my thoughts. I’m not a big smoker, you know, I just have a pipe or two in the morning to settle my stomach, but I don’t really smoke till night. Then I think.’
‘What d’you think about?’
‘Oh, all sorts of things. Sometimes about London and what it was like when I was a boy. But mostly about China. I think of the good times I had and the way I made my money, and I remember the fellows I used to know, and the Chinese. I had some narrow squeaks now and then, but I always came through all right. And I wonder what the girls would have been like that I might have had. Pretty little things. I’m sorry now I didn’t keep one or two. It’s a great country, China; I love those shops, with an old fellow sitting on his heels smoking a water-pipe, and all the shop-signs. And the temples. By George, that’s the place for a man to live in. There’s life.’
The mirage shone before his eyes. The illusion held him. He was happy. I wondered what would be his end. Well, that was not yet. For the first time in his life perhaps he held the present in his hand.
XLIV
I took a shabby little steamer from Haiphong to Hong Kong, which ran along the coast stopping at various French ports on the way to take on and discharge cargo. It was very old and dirty. There were but three passengers beside myself. Two were French missionaries bound for the island of Hainan. One was an elderly man with a large square grey beard and the other was young, with a round red face on which his beard grew in little black patches. They spent most of the day reading their breviaries and the younger one studied Chinese. Then there was an American Jew called Elfenbein who was travelling in hosiery. He was a tall fellow, powerfully built and strong, clumsy of gesture, with a long sallow face, a big straight nose and dark eyes. His voice was loud and strident. He was aggressive and irascible. He abused the ship, he abused the steward, he abused the boys, he abused the food. Nothing satisfied him. All the time you heard his voice raised in anger because his boxes of show goods were not placed as they should be, because he couldn’t get a hot bath, because the soda water wasn’t cold enough. He was a man with a chip on his shoulder. Everyone seemed in a conspiracy to slight or injure him and he kept threatening to give the captain or the steward a hit on the nose. Because I was the only person on board who spoke English he attached himself to me and I could not settle down on deck for five minutes without his corning to sit by me and telling me his latest grievance. He forced drinks on me which I did not want, and when I refused, cried: Oh, come on, be a sport, and ordered them notwithstanding. To my confusion he addressed me constantly as brother. He was odious, but I must admit that he was often amusing; he would tell damaging stories about his fellow Jews in a racy idiom that made them very entertaining. He talked interminably. He hated to be alone for a minute and it never occurred to him that you might not want his company; but when he was with you he was perpetually on the look out for affronts. He trod heavily on your corns and if you tucked your feet out of the way thought you insulted him. It made his society excessively fatiguing. He was the kind of Jew who made you understand the pogrom. I told him a little story about the peace conference. It appears that on one occasion Monsieur Paderewski was pressing upon Mr Wilson, Mr Lloyd George and Monsieur Clemenceau the Polish claims on Danzig.
‘If the Poles do not get it,’ he said, ‘I warn you that their disappointment will be so great, there will be an outbreak and they will assassinate the Jews.’
Mr Wilson looked grave, Mr Lloyd George shook his head and M. Clemenceau frowned.
‘But what will happen if the Poles get Danzig?’ asked Mr Wilson.
M Paderweski brightened. He shook his leonine mane.
‘Ah, that will be
Elfenbein saw nothing funny in it.
‘Europe’s no good,’ he said. ‘If I had my way I’d sink the whole of Europe under the sea.’
Then I told him about Henri Deplis. He was by birth a native of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. On maturer reflection he became a commercial traveller. This did not amuse him either, so with a sigh for Saki’s sake I desisted. We must accept with resignation the opinion of the hundred per cent American that the English have no sense of humour.
At meal times the captain sat at the head of the table, and two priests on one side of him and Elfenbein and I on the other.
The captain, a jovial little grey-headed man from Bordeaux, was retiring at the end of the year to make his own wine in his own vineyard.
‘Je vous enverrai un fût, mon pète,’ he promised the elderly priest.
Elfenbein spoke fluent and bad French. He seized the conversation and held it. Pep, that’s what he’d got. The Frenchmen were polite to him, but it was not hard to see that they heartily disliked him. Many of his remarks were singularly tactless, and when he used obscene language in addressing the boy who was serving us, the priests looked down their noses and pretended not to hear. But Elfenbein was argumentative, and at one luncheon began to talk of religion. He made a number of observations upon the Catholic faith which were certainly not in good taste. The younger priest flushed and was about to make some observation, when the elder said something to him in an undertone and he held his tongue. But when Elfenbein addressed a direct question to him the old man answered him mildly.
‘There is no compulsion in these matters. Everyone is at liberty to believe what he pleases.’
Elfenbein made a long tirade, but it was received in silence. He was not abashed. He told me afterwards that they couldn’t answer his arguments.