The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

  The Annamites are a pleasant people to look at, very small, with yellow flat faces and bright dark eyes, and they look very spruce in their clothes. The poor wear brown of the colour of rich earth, a long tunic slit up the sides, and trousers, with a girdle of apple green or orange round their waists; and on their heads a large flat straw hat or a small black turban with very regular folds. The well-to-do wear the same neat turban, with white trousers, a black silk tunic, and over this sometimes a black lace coat. It is a costume of great elegance.

  But though in all these lands the clothes the people wear attract our eyes because they are peculiar, in each everyone is dressed very much alike; it is a uniform they wear, picturesque often and always suitable to the climate, but it allows little opportunity for individual taste; and I could not but think it must amaze the native of an Eastern country visiting Europe to observe the bewildering and vivid variety of costume that surrounds him. An Oriental crowd is like a bed of daffodils at a market gardener’s, brilliant but monotonous; but an English crowd, for instance that which you see through a faint veil of smoke when you look down from above on the floor of a promenade concert, is like a nosegay of every kind of flower. Nowhere in the East will you see costumes so gay and multifarious as on a fine day in Piccadilly. The diversity is prodigious. Soldiers, sailors, policemen, postmen, messenger boys; men in tail coats and top hats, in lounge suits and bowlers, men in plus fours and caps, women in silk and cloth and velvet, in all the colours, and in hats of this shape and that. And besides this there are the clothes worn on different occasions and to pursue different sports, the clothes servants wear, and workmen, jockeys, huntsmen, and courtiers. I fancy the Annamite will return to Huë and think his fellow countrymen dress very dully.

  A NIGHT ON THE RIVER

  IT WAS LATE now, and I was setting out at dawn by car for Hanoi. It seemed hardly worth while to go to bed, and as I drove in my rickshaw to the hotel I asked myself why I should not spend the rest of the night on the river. It would do if I got back in time to change, bathe myself, and have a cup of coffee before starting. I explained to my rickshaw boy what I wanted, and he took me down to the river. There was a landing stage just below the bridge, and here we found half a dozen sampans moored to the side. Their owners were sleeping in them, but at least one of them was sleeping lightly, for he awoke as he heard me walk down the stone steps, and put his head out of the blanket in which he was wrapped. The rickshaw boy spoke to him and he got up. He called to a woman asleep in the boat. I stepped in. The woman untied, and we slipped out into the stream. These boats have a low round awning of bamboo matting, just high enough to sit upright under, and bamboo matting on the boards. You can shut them up with shutters, but I told the man to leave the front open so that I could look at the night. In the heights of heaven the stars shone very bright, as though up there too there were a party. The man brought me a pot of Chinese tea and a cup. I poured some out and lighted my pipe. We went along very slowly, and the sound of the paddle in the water was the only sound that broke the silence. It was delightful to think that I had all those hours before me to enjoy that sense of well-being, and I thought to myself how when I was once in Europe, imprisoned in stony cities, I would remember that perfect night and the enchanting solitude. It would be the most imperishable of my memories. It was a unique occasion, and I said to myself that I must hoard the moments as they passed. I could not afford to waste one of them. I was laying up treasure for myself. And I thought of all the things I would reflect upon, and of the melancholy that I would subtly savour as you savour the first scented strawberries of the year; and I would think of love, and invent stories, and meditate upon beautiful things like art and death. The paddle hit the water very gently, and I could just feel the boat glide on. I made up my mind to watch and cherish every exquisite sensation that came to me.

  Suddenly I felt a bump. What was it? I looked out and it was broad day. The bump was the bump of the boat against the landing stage, and there was the bridge just above me.

  “Good God!” I cried, “I’ve been asleep.”

  I had slept right through the night, and there was my cup of tea cold by my side. My pipe had fallen out of my mouth. I had lost all those priceless moments and had slept solidly through the hours. I was furious. I might never have the opportunity again to spend a night in a sampan on an Eastern river, and now I should never have those wonderful thoughts and matchless emotions that I had promised myself. I paid for the boat and, still in evening clothes, ran up the steps and went to the hotel. My hired car was waiting for me at the door.

  A CLASSMATE IN HAIPHONG

  HERE I HAD the intention of finishing this book, for at Hanoi I found nothing much to interest me. It is the capital of Tonkin, and the French tell you it is the most attractive town in the East, but when you ask them why, answer that it is exactly like a town, Montpellier or Grenoble, in France. And Haiphong to which I went in order to get a boat to Hong Kong is a commercial town and dull. It is true that from it you can visit the Bay of Along, which is one of the Sehenswürdigkeiten of Indo-China, but I was tired of sights. I contented myself with sitting in the café (for here it was none too warm, and I was glad to get out of tropical clothes) and reading back numbers of L’Illustration or, for the sake of exercise, taking a brisk walk along straight, wide streets. Haiphong is traversed by canals, and sometimes I caught a glimpse of a scene which in its varied life, with all the native craft on the water, was multicoloured and charming. There was one canal, with tall Chinese houses on each side of it, that had a pleasant curve. The houses were whitewashed, but the whitewash was discoloured and stained; with their grey roofs they made an agreeable composition against the pale sky. The picture had the faded elegance of an old water colour. There was nowhere an emphatic note. It was soft and a little weary and inspired one with a faint melancholy. I was reminded, I scarcely know why, of an old maid I knew in my youth, a relic of the Victorian age, who wore black silk mittens and made crochet shawls for the poor, black for widows and white for married women. She had suffered in her youth, but whether from ill health or unrequited love, no one exactly knew.

  But there was a local paper at Haiphong, a small dingy sheet with stubby type the ink of which came off on your fingers, and it gave you a political article, the wireless news, advertisements, and local intelligence. The editor, doubtless hard pressed for matter, printed the names of the persons, Europeans, natives of the country, or Chinese, who had arrived each day at Haiphong or left it, and mine was put in with the rest. On the morning of the day before that on which my boat was to sail for Hong Kong I was sitting in the café of the hotel drinking a Dubonnet before luncheon when the boy came in and said that a gentleman wished to see me. I did not know a soul in Haiphong and asked who it was. The boy said he was an Englishman and lived there, but he could not tell me his name. The boy spoke very little French, and it was hard for me to understand what he said. I was mystified, but told him to show the visitor in. A moment later he came back followed by a white man and pointed me out to him. The man gave me a look and walked towards me. He was a very tall fellow, well over six feet high, rather fat and bloated, with a red, clean-shaven face and extremely pale blue eyes. He wore very shabby khaki shorts, and a stengah-shifter unbuttoned at the neck, and a battered helmet. I concluded at once that he was a stranded beach comber who was going to touch me for a loan and wondered how little I could hope to get off for.

  He came up to me and held out a large red hand with broken, dirty nails.

  “I don’t suppose you remember me,” he said. “My name’s Grosely. I was at St. Thomas’s Hospital with you. I recognized your name as soon as I saw it in the papers, and I thought I’d look you up.”

  I had not the smallest recollection of him, but I asked him to sit down and offered him a drink. By his appearance I had first thought he would ask me for ten piastres, and I might have given him five, but now it looked more likely that he would ask for a hundred, and I should have to think myself lucky if
I could content him with fifty. The habitual borrower always asks twice what he expects to get, and it only dissatisfies him to give him what he has asked, since then he is vexed with himself for not having asked more. He feels you have cheated him.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked.

  “No, I was only at the bloody place a year.”

  He took off his sun helmet and showed me a mop of grey hair which needed a brush. His face was curiously mottled, and he did not look healthy. His teeth were badly decayed, and at the corners of his mouth were empty spaces. When the boy came to take the orders he asked for brandy.

  “Bring the bottle,” he said. “La bouteille. Savvy?” He turned to me. “I’ve been living here for the last five years, but I can’t get along with French somehow. I talk Tonkinese.” He leaned his chair back and looked at me. “I remember you, you know. You used to go about with those twins. What was their name? I expect I’ve changed more than you have. I’ve spent the best part of my life in China. Rotten climate, you know. It plays hell with a man.”

  I still had not the smallest recollection of him. I thought it best to say so.

  “Were you the same year as I was?” I asked.

  “Yes, ’92.”

  “It’s a devil of a long time ago.”

  About sixty boys and young men entered the hospital every year; they were most of them shy and confused by the new life they were entering upon; many had never been in London before; and to me at least they were shadows that passed without any particular rhyme or reason across a white sheet. During the first year a certain number for one reason or another dropped out, and in the second year those that remained gained by degrees the beginnings of a personality. They were not only themselves, but the lectures one had attended with them, the scone and coffee one had eaten at the same table for luncheon, the dissection one had done at the same board in the same dissecting room, and The Belle of New York one had seen together from the pit of the Shaftesbury Theatre.

  The boy brought the bottle of brandy, and Grosely, if that was really his name, pouring himself out a generous helping, drank it down at a gulp without water or soda.

  “I couldn’t stand doctoring,” he said. “I chucked it. My people got fed up with me, and I went out to China. They gave me a hundred pounds and told me to shift for myself. I was damned glad to get out, I can tell you. I guess I was just about as much fed up with them as they were with me. I haven’t troubled them much since.”

  Then from somewhere in the depths of my memory a faint hint crept into the rim, as it were, of consciousness, as on a rising tide the water slides up the sand and then withdraws, to advance with the next wave in a fuller volume. I had first an inkling of some shabby little scandal that had got into the papers. Then I saw a boy’s face, and so gradually the facts recurred to me; I remembered him now. I didn’t believe he was called Grosely then, I think he had a one syllabled name, but that I was uncertain of. He was a very tall lad (I began to see him quite well), thin, with a slight stoop, he was only eighteen and had grown too fast for his strength; he had curly, shining brown hair, rather large features (they did not look so large now, perhaps because his face was fat and puffy) and a peculiarly fresh complexion, very pink and white, like a girl’s. I imagine people, women especially, would have thought him a very handsome boy, but to us he was only a clumsy, shuffling lout. Then I remembered that he did not often come to lectures – no, it wasn’t that I remembered; there were too many students in the theatre to recollect who was there and who wasn’t. I remembered the dissecting room. He had a leg at the next table to the one I was working at, and he hardly ever touched it. I forget why the men who had other parts of the body complained of his neglecting the work; I suppose somehow it interfered with them. In those days a good deal of gossip went on over the dissection of a “part,” and out of the distance of thirty years some of it came back to me. Someone started the story that Grosely was a very gay dog. He drank like a fish and was an awful womanizer. Most of those boys were very simple, and they had brought to the hospital the notions they had acquired at home and at school. Some were prudish and they were shocked; others, those who worked hard, sneered at him and asked how he could hope to pass his exams; but a good many were excited and impressed, he was doing what they would have liked to do if they had had the courage. Grosely had his admirers, and you could often see him surrounded by a little band listening open-mouthed to stories of his adventures. Recollections now were crowding upon me. In a very little while he lost his shyness and assumed the airs of a man of the world. They must have looked absurd on this smooth-cheeked boy with his pink and white skin. Men (so they called themselves) used to tell one another of his escapades. He became quite a hero. He would make caustic remarks as he passed the museum and saw a pair of earnest students going over their anatomy together. He was at home in the public houses of the neighbourhood and was on familiar terms with the barmaids. Looking back, I imagine that, newly arrived from the country and the tutelage of parents and schoolmasters, he was captivated by his freedom and the thrill of London. His dissipations were harmless enough. They were due only to the urge of youth. He lost his head.

  But we were all very poor, and we did not know how Grosely managed to pay for his garish amusements. We knew his father was a country doctor, and I think we knew exactly how much he gave his son a month. It was not enough to pay for the harlots he picked up on the promenade at the Pavilion and for the drinks he stood his friends in the Criterion Bar. We told one another in awestruck tones that he must be getting fearfully into debt. Of course, he could pawn things, but we knew by experience that you could not get more than three pounds for a microscope and thirty shillings for a skeleton. We said he must be spending at least ten pounds a week. Our ideas were not very grand, and this seemed to us the wildest pitch of extravagance. At last one of his friends disclosed the mystery: Grosley had discovered a wonderful system for making money. It amused and impressed us. None of us would have thought of anything so ingenious or have had the nerve to attempt it if he had. Grosely went to auctions, not Christie’s, of course, but auctions in the Strand and Oxford Street and in private houses, and bought anything portable that was going cheap. Then he took his purchase to a pawnbrokers and pawned it for ten shillings or a pound more than he had paid. He was making money, four or five pounds a week, and he said he was going to give up medicine and make a regular business of it. Not one of us had ever made a penny in his life, and we regarded Grosley with admiration.

  “By Jove, he’s clever,” we said.

  “He’s just about as sharp as they make them.”

  “That’s the sort that ends up as a millionaire.”

  We were all very worldly wise, and what we didn’t know about life at eighteen we were pretty sure wasn’t worth knowing. It was a pity that when an examiner asked us a question we were so nervous that the answer often flew straight out of our head and when a nurse asked us to post a letter we blushed scarlet. It became known that the dean had sent for Grosely and hauled him over the coals. He had threatened him with sundry penalties if he continued systematically to neglect his work. Grosely was indignant. He’d had enough of that sort of thing at school, he said, he wasn’t going to let a horse-faced eunuch treat him like a boy. Damn it all, he was getting on for nineteen, and there wasn’t much you could teach him. The dean had said he heard he was drinking more than was good for him. Damned cheek. He could carry his liquor as well as any man of his age; he’d been blind last Saturday, and he meant to get blind next Saturday, and if anyone didn’t like it he could do the other thing. Grosely’s friends quite agreed with him that a man couldn’t let himself be insulted like that.

  But the blow fell at last, and now I remembered quite well the shock it gave us all. I suppose we had not seen Grosely for two or three days, but he had been in the habit of coming to the hospital more and more irregularly, so if we thought anything about it, I imagine we merely said that he was off on one of his bats. He would turn up again in a day
or so, rather pale, but with a wonderful story of some girl he had picked up and the time he had had with her. The anatomy lecture was at nine in the morning, and it was a rush to get there in time. On this particular day little attention was paid to the lecturer who, with a visible pleasure in his limpid English and admirable elocution, was describing I know not what part of the human skeleton, for there was much excited whispering along the benches and a newspaper was surreptitiously passed from hand to hand. Suddenly the lecturer stopped. He had a pedagogic sarcasm. He affected not to know the names of his students.