65 Short Stories (192 page)

Miss Price was waiting on the quay to welcome her. When they had passed the Customs and got rid of Miss Reid’s heavy luggage they went to Miss Price’s house and had an early cup of tea. Miss Reid’s train did not start till five. Miss Price had much to tell Miss Reid.

‘But it’s too bad of me to go on like this when you’ve just come home. I’ve been looking forward to hearing all about your journey.’

‘I’m afraid there’s not very much to tell.’

‘I can’t believe that. Your trip was a success, wasn’t it?’

‘A distinct success. It was very nice.’

‘And you didn’t mind being with all those Germans?’

‘Of course they’re not like English people. One has to get used to their ways. They sometimes do things that-well, that English people wouldn’t do, you know. But I always think that one has to take things as they come.’

‘What sort of things do you mean?’

Miss Reid looked at her friend calmly. Her long, stupid face had a placid look, and Miss Price never noticed that in the eyes was a strangely mischievous twinkle.

‘Things of no importance really. Just funny, unexpected, rather nice things. There’s no doubt that travel is a wonderful education.’

A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE

♦

I left Bangkok on a shabby little ship of four or five hundred tons. The dingy saloon, which served also as dining-room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel chairs on both sides of them. The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty. Cockroaches walked about on the floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash-basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out.

We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water’s edge. We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me. The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.

I had gone on board early in the morning and soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered. There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his. The circus proprietor was what is termed a good mixer, a type which according to your mood you fly from or welcome, but I happened to be feeling much pleased with life and before I had been on board an hour we had shaken for drinks, and he had shown me his animals. He was a very short fat man, and his stengah-shifter, white but none too clean, outlined the noble proportions of his abdomen, but the collar was so tight that you wondered he did not choke. He had a red, clean-shaven face, a merry blue eye, and short, untidy sandy hair. He wore a battered topee well on the back of his head. His name was Wilkins and he was born in Portland, Oregon. It appears that the Oriental has a passion for the circus and Mr Wilkins for twenty years had been travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama (Aden, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta,

Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saigon, Hue, Hanoi, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, their names roll on the tongue savourily, crowding the imagination with sunshine and strange sounds and a multicoloured activity) with his menagerie and his merry-go-rounds. It was a strange life he led, unusual, and one that, one would have thought, must offer the occasion for all sorts of curious experiences, but the odd thing about him was that he was a perfectly common-place little man and you would have been prepared to find him running a garage or keeping a third-rate hotel in a second-rate town in California. The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man’s life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate. I wish I could feel it reasonable to tell here the story of the hermit I went to see on an island in the Tones Straits, a shipwrecked mariner who had lived there alone for thirty years, but when you are writing a book you are imprisoned by the four walls of your subject and though for the entertainment of my own digressing mind I set it down now I should be forced in the end, by my sense of what is fit to go between two covers and what is not, to cut it out. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that notwithstanding his long and intimate communion with nature and his thoughts the man was as dull, insensitive, and vulgar an oaf at the end of this experience as he must have been at the beginning.

The Italian singer passed us, and Mr Wilkins told me that he was a Neapolitan who was on his way to Hong-Kong to rejoin his company, which he had been forced to leave owing to an attack of malaria in Bangkok. He was an enormous fellow, and very fat, and when he flung himself into a chair it creaked with dismay. He took off his topee, displayed a great head of long, curly, greasy hair, and ran podgy and beringed fingers through it.

‘He ain’t very sociable,’ said Mr Wilkins. ‘He took the cigar I gave him, but he wouldn’t have a drink. I shouldn’t wonder if there wasn’t somethin’ rather queer about him. Nasty-lookin’ guy, ain’t he?’

Then a little fat woman in white came on deck holding by the hand a Wa-Wa monkey. It walked solemnly by her side.

‘This is Mrs Wilkins,’ said the circus proprietor, ‘and our youngest son. Draw up a chair, Mrs Wilkins, and meet this gentleman. I don’t know his name, but he’s already paid for two drinks for me and if he can’t shake any better than he has yet he’ll pay for one for you too.’

Mrs Wilkins sat down with an abstracted serious look, and with her eyes on the blue sea suggested that she did not see why she shouldn’t have a lemonade. ‘My, it’s hot,’ she murmured, fanning herself with the topee which she took off

‘Mrs Wilkins feels the heat,’ said her husband. ‘She’s had twenty years of it now’

’Twenty-two and a half,’ said Mrs Wilkins, still looking at the sea. ‘And she’s never got used to it yet.’

‘Nor never shall and you know it,’ said Mrs Wilkins.

She was just the same size as her husband and just as fat, and she had a round red face like his and the same sandy, untidy hair. I wondered if they had married because they were so exactly alike, or if in the course of years they had acquired this astonishing resemblance. She did not turn her head but continued to look absently at the sea.

‘Have you shown him the animals?’ she asked.

‘You bet your life I have.’

What did he think of Percy?’

‘Thought him fine.’

I could not but feel that I was being unduly left out of a conversation of which I was at all events partly the subject, so I asked:

Who’s Percy?’

Percy’s our eldest son. There’s a flyin’-fish, Elmer. He’s the orang-utan. Did he eat his food well this morning?’

‘Fine. He’s the biggest orang-utan in captivity. I wouldn’t take a thousand dollars for him.’

‘And what relation is the elephant?’ I asked.

Mrs Wilkins did not look at me, but with her blue eyes still gazed indifferently at the sea.

‘He’s no relation,’ she answered. ‘Only a friend.’

The boy brought lemonade for Mrs Wilkins, a whisky and soda for her husband, and a gin and tonic for me. We shook dice and I signed the chit. ‘It must come expensive if he always loses when he shakes,’ Mrs Wilkins murmured to the coast-line.

‘I guess Egbert would like a sip of your lemonade, my dear,’ said Mr Wilkins. Mrs Wilkins slightly turned her head and looked at the monkey sitting on her lap.

Would you like a sip of mother’s lemonade, Egbert?’

The monkey gave a little squeak and putting her arm round him she handed him a straw. The monkey sucked up a little lemonade and having drunk enough sank back against Mrs Wilkins’s ample bosom.

‘Mrs Wilkins thinks the world of Egbert,’ said her husband. ‘You can’t wonder at it, he’s her youngest.’

Mrs Wilkins took another straw and thoughtfully drank her lemonade. Egbert’s all right,’ she remarked. ‘There’s nothin’ wrong with Egbert.’

Just then the French official, who had been sitting down, got up and began walking up and down. He had been accompanied on board by the French minister at Bangkok, one or two secretaries, and a prince of the royal family. There had been a great deal of bowing and shaking of hands and as the ship slipped away from the quay much waving of hats and handkerchiefs. He was evidently a person of consequence. I had heard the captain address him as Monsieur le Gouverneur.

‘That’s the big noise on this boat,’ said Mr Wilkins. ‘He was Governor of one of the French colonies and now he’s makin’ a tour of the world. He came to see my circus at Bangkok. I guess I’ll ask him what he’ll have. What shall I call him, my dear?’

Mrs Wilkins slowly turned her head and looked at the Frenchman, with the rosette of the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole, pacing up and down.

‘Don’t call him anythin’,’ she said. ‘Show him a hoop and he’ll jump right through it.’

I could not but laugh. Monsieur le Gouverneur was a little man, well below the average height, and smally made, with a very ugly little face and thick, almost negroid features; and he had a bushy grey head, bushy grey eyebrows, and a bushy grey moustache. He did look a little like a poodle and he had the poodle’s soft, intelligent and shining eyes. Next time he passed us Mr Wilkins called out:

Monsoo. Qu’est-ce que vous prenez?’ 
I cannot reproduce the eccentricities of his accent. Tine petite 
verre de 
porto.’ He turned to me. ‘Foreigners, they all drink porto. You’re always safe with that.’

‘Not the Dutch,’ said Mrs Wilkins, with a look at the sea. ‘They won’t touch nothin’ but Schnapps.’

The distinguished Frenchman stopped and looked at Mr Wilkins with some bewilderment. Whereupon Mr Wilkins tapped his breast and said: 
“Moa, 
proprietarre Cirque. Vous 
avez 
visite.’

Then, for a reason that escaped me, Mr Wilkins made his arms into a hoop and outlined the gestures that represented a poodle jumping through it. Then he pointed at the Wa-Wa that Mrs Wilkins was still holding on her lap.

‘La petit 
fils de nwn femme,’ 
he said.

Light broke upon the Governor and he burst into a peculiarly musical and infectious laugh. Mr Wilkins began laughing too.

‘Oui, oui,’ he cried. 
‘Moa, 
circus proprietor. 
Line 
petite 
verre de 
porto. Oui. Oui. 
Nest-ce-pas?’

‘Mr Wilkins talks French like a Frenchman,’ Mrs Wilkins informed the passing sea.

‘Mais tres volontiers,’ 
said the Governor, still smiling. I drew him up a chair and he sat down with a bow to Mrs Wilkins.

‘Tell poodle-face his name’s Egbert,’ she said, looking at the sea. I called the boy and we ordered a round of drinks.

‘You sign the chit, Elmer,’ she said. ‘It’s not a bit of good Mr What’s-his-name shakin’ if he can’t shake nothin’ better than a pair of treys.’

‘Vous 
comprenez le fiuncais, madame?’ 
asked the Governor politely. ‘He wants to know if you speak French, my dear.’

‘Where does he think I was raised? Naples?’

Then the Governor, with exuberant gesticulation, burst into a torrent of English so fantastic that it required all my knowledge of French to understand what he was talking about.

Presently Mr Wilkins took him down to look at his animals and a little later we assembled in the stuffy saloon for luncheon. The Governor’s wife appeared and was put on the captain’s right. The Governor explained to her who we all were and she gave us a gracious bow. She was a large woman, tall and of a robust build, of fifty-five perhaps, and she was dressed somewhat severely in black silk. On her head she wore a huge round topee. Her features were so large and regular, her form so statuesque, that you were reminded of the massive females who take part in processions. She would have admirably suited the role of Columbia or Britannia in a patriotic demonstration. She towered over her diminutive husband like a skyscraper over a shack. He talked incessantly, with vivacity and wit, and when he said anything amusing her heavy features relaxed into a large fond smile.

‘Clue to 
es bête, mon mil 
she said. She turned to the captain. ‘You must not pay any attention to him. He is always like that.’

We had indeed a very amusing meal and when it was over we separated to our various cabins to sleep away the heat of the afternoon. In such a small ship having once made the acquaintance of my fellow passengers, it would have been impossible, even had I wished it, not to pass with them every moment of the day that I was not in my cabin. The only person who held himself aloof was the Italian tenor. He spoke to no one, but sat by himself as far forward as he could get, twanging a guitar in an undertone so that you had to strain your ears to catch the notes. We remained in sight of land and the sea was like a pail of milk. Talking of one thing and another we watched the day decline, we dined, and then we sat out again on deck under the stars. The two traders played picquet in the hot saloon, but the Belgian colonel joined our little group. He was shy and fat and opened his mouth only to utter a civility. Soon, influenced perhaps by the night and encouraged by the darkness that gave him, up there in the bows, the sensation of being alone with the sea, the Italian tenor, accompanying himself on his guitar, began to sing, first in a low tone, and then a little louder, till presently, his music captivating him, he sang with all his might. He had the real Italian voice, all macaroni, olive oil, and sunshine, and he sang the Neapolitan songs that I had heard in my youth in the Piazza San Ferdinando, and fragments from 
La Boheme, 
and
Traviata, 
and 
Rigoletto. 
He sang with emotion and false emphasis and his tremolo reminded you of every third-rate Italian tenor you had ever heard, but there in the openness of that lovely night his exaggerations only made you smile and you could not but feel in your heart a lazy sensual pleasure. He sang for an hour, perhaps, and we all fell silent; then he was still, but he did not move and we saw his huge bulk dimly outlined against the luminous sky.