The Skeptical Romancer (23 page)

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 passage 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. When they got to Suez and he felt the first touch of the East he knew he had done the right thing. Europe was finished. The East was the only place.

He went ashore at Djibouti and again at Colombo and Singapore, but though the ship stopped for two days at Saigon 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 stand-offish as they were in London. Going ashore, he dined at the hotel, and after dinner he 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 away 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.

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 besides 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 coming 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 lookout 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 M. 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. Paderewski brightened. He shook his leonine mane.

“Ah, that will be quite another thing,” he replied. “Their enthusiasm will be so great, there will be an outbreak and they will assassinate the Jews.”

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 Luxembourg. 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, the 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 père
,” 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.”