The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - II - The World Over (35 page)

“Then my girl asked me to marry her, legally I mean, in the English way. I treated it as a joke. I didn’t know how she’d got such an idea in her head. I thought it was only a whim and I gave her a gold bracelet to keep her quiet. But it wasn’t a whim. She was quite serious about it. I told her there was nothing doing. But you know what women are, when they once set their mind on getting something they never give you a moment’s peace. She wheedled and sulked, she cried, she appealed to my compassion, she tried to extract a promise out of me when I was rather tight, she was on the watch for me when I was feeling amorous, she nearly tripped me when she was ill. She watched me more carefully, I should think, than a stockbroker ever watched the market, and I knew that, however natural she seemed, however occupied with something else, she was always warily alert for the unguarded moment when she could pounce on me and gain her point.”

Masterson gave me once more his slow, ingenuous smile.

“I suppose women are pretty much the same all the world over,” he said.

“I expect so,” I answered.

“A thing I’ve never been able to understand is why a woman thinks it worth while to make you do something you don’t want to. She’d rather you did a thing against the grain than not do it at all. I don’t see what satisfaction it can be to them.”

“The satisfaction of triumph. A man convinced against his will may be of the same opinion still, but a woman doesn’t mind that. She has conquered. She has proved her power.”

Masterson shrugged his shoulders. He drank a cup of tea. “You see, she said that sooner or later I was bound to marry an English girl and turn her out. I said I wasn’t thinking of marrying. She said she knew all about that. And even if I didn’t I should retire some day and go back to England. And where would she be then? It went on for a year. I held out. Then she said that if I wouldn’t marry her she’d go and take the kids with her. I told her not to be a silly little fool. She said that if she left me now she could marry a Burman, but in a few years nobody would want her. She began to pack her things. I thought it was only a bluff and I called it: I said: ‘Well, go if you want to, but if you do you won’t come back.’ I didn’t think she’d give up a house like this, and the presents I made her, and all the pickings, to go back to her own family. They were as poor as church mice. Well, she went on packing her things. She was just as nice as ever to me, she was gay and smiling; when some fellows came to spend the night here she was just as cordial as usual, and she played bridge with us till two in the morning. T couldn’t believe she meant to go and yet I was rather scared. I was very fond of her. She was a damned good sort.”

“But if you were fond of her why on earth didn’t you marry her? It had been a great success.”

“I’ll tell you. If I married her I’d have to stay in Burma for the rest of my life. Sooner or later I shall retire and then I want to go back to my old home and live there. I don’t want to be buried out here, I want to be buried in an English churchyard. I’m happy enough here, but I don’t want to live here always. I couldn’t. I want England. Sometimes I get sick of this hot sunshine and these garish colours. I want grey skies and a soft rain falling and the smell of the country. I shall be a funny fat elderly man when I go back, loo old to hunt even if I could afford it, but I can fish. I don’t want to shoot tigers, I want to shoot rabbits. And I can play golf on a proper course. I know I shall be out of it, we fellows who’ve spent our lives out here always are, but I can potter about the local club and talk to retired Anglo-Indians. I want to feel under my feet the grey pavement of an English country town, I want to be able to go and have a row with the butcher because the steak he sent me in yesterday was tough, and I want to browse about second-hand bookshops. I want to be said how d’you do to in the street by people who knew me when I was a boy. And I want to have a walled garden at the back of my house and grow roses. I dare say it all sounds very humdrum and provincial and dull to you, but that’s the sort of life my people have always lived and that’s the sort of life I want to live myself. It’s a dream if you like, but it’s all I have, it means everything in the world to me, and I can’t give it up.”

He paused for a moment and looked into my eyes.

“Do you think me an awful fool?”

“No.”

“Then one morning she came to me and said that she was off. She had her things put on a cart and even then I didn’t think she meant it. Then she put the two children in a rickshaw and came to say good-bye to me. She began to cry. By George, that pretty well broke me up. I asked her if she really meant to go and she said yes, unless I married her. I shook my head. I very nearly yielded. I’m afraid I was crying too. Then she gave a great sob and ran out of the house. I had to drink about half a tumbler of whisky to steady my nerves.”

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Four months. At first I thought she’d come back and then because I thought she was ashamed to make the first step I sent my boy to tell her that if she wanted to come I’d take her. But she refused. The house seemed awfully empty without her. At first I thought I’d get used to it, but somehow it doesn’t seem to get any less empty. I didn’t know how much she meant to me. She’d twined herself round my heart.”

“I suppose she’ll come back if you agree to marry her.”

“Oh, yes, she told the boy that. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s worth while to sacrifice my happiness for a dream. It is only a dream, isn’t it? It’s funny, one of the things that holds me back is the thought of a muddy lane I know, with great day banks on both sides of it, and above, beech trees bending over. It’s got a sort of cold, earthy smell that I can never quite get out of my nostrils. I don’t blame her, you know. I rather admire her. I had no idea she had so much character. Sometimes I’m awfully inclined to give way.” He hesitated for a little while. “I think, perhaps, if I thought she loved me I would. But of course, she doesn’t; they never do, these girls who go and live with white men, I think she liked me, but that’s all. What would you do in my place?”

“Oh, my dear fellow, how can I tell? Would you ever forget that dream?”

“Never.”

At that moment the boy came in to say that my Madrassi servant with the Ford car had just come up. Masterson looked at his watch.

“You’ll want to be getting off, won’t you? And I must get back to my office. I’m afraid I’ve rather bored you with my domestic affairs.”

“Not at all,” I said.

We shook hands, I put on my topee, and he waved to me as the car drove off.

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 Torres 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.