‘“But what can I do?” I cried with dismay.
‘“You can marry,” said the minister.
‘“Mais voyons, monsieur le ministre, I do not know any women. I am not a lady’s man and I am forty-nine. How do you expect me to find a wife?”
‘“Nothing is more simple. Put an advertisement in the paper.”
‘I was confounded. I did not know what to say.
‘“Well, think it over,” said the minister. “If you can find a wife in a month you can go, but no wife no job. That is my last word.” He smiled a little, to him the situation was not without humour. “And if you think of advertising I recommend the Figaro.”
‘I walked away from the ministry with death in my heart. I knew the place to which they desired to appoint me and I knew it would suit me very well to live there; the climate was tolerable and the Residency was spacious and comfortable. The notion of being a governor was far from displeasing me and, having nothing but my pension as a naval officer, the salary was not to be despised. Suddenly I made up my mind. I walked to the offices of the Figaro, composed an advertisement and handed it in for insertion. But I can tell you, when I walked up the Champs Elysées afterwards my heart was beating much more furiously than it had ever done when my ship was stripped for action.’
The governor leaned forward and put his hand impressively on my knee.
‘Mon cher monsieur, you will never believe it, but I had four thousand three hundred and seventy-two replies. It was an avalanche. I had expected half-a-dozen; I had to take a cab to take the letters to my hotel. My room was swamped with them. There were four thousand three hundred and seventy-two women who were willing to share my solitude and be a governor’s lady. It was staggering. They were of all ages from seventeen to seventy. There were maidens of irreproachable ancestry and the highest culture, there were unmarried ladies who had made a little slip at one period of their career and now desired to regularise their situation; there were widows whose husbands had died in the most harrowing circumstances; and there were widows whose children would be a solace to my old age. They were blonde and dark, tall and short, fat and thin; some could speak five languages and others could play the piano. Some offered me love and some craved for it; some could only give me a solid friendship but mingled with esteem; some had a fortune and others golden prospects. I was overwhelmed. I was bewildered. At last I lost my temper, for I am a passionate man, and I got up and I stamped on all those letters and all those photographs and I cried: I will marry none of them. It was hopeless, I had less than a month now and I could not see over four thousand aspirants to my hand in that time. I felt that if I did not see them all, I should be tortured for the rest of my life by the thought that I had missed the one woman the fates had destined to make me happy. I gave it up as a bad job.
‘I went out of my room hideous with all those photographs and littered papers and to drive care away went on the boulevard and sat down at the Café de la Paix. After a time I saw a friend passing and he nodded to me and smiled. I tried to smile but my heart was sore. I realised that I must spend the years that remained to me in a cheap pension at Toulon or Brest as an officier de marine en retraite. Zut! My friend stopped and coming up to me sat down.
‘“What is making you look so glum, mon cher?” he asked me. “You who are the gayest of mortals.”
‘I was glad to have someone in whom I could confide my troubles and told him the whole story. He laughed consumedly. I have thought since that perhaps the incident had its comic side, but at the time, I assure you, I could see in it nothing to laugh at. I mentioned the fact to my friend not without asperity and then, controlling his mirth as best he could, he said to me: “But, my dear fellow, do you really want to marry?” At this I entirely lost my temper.
‘“You are completely idiotic,” I said. “If I did not want to marry, and what is more marry at once, within the next fortnight, do you imagine that I should have spent three days reading love letters from women I have never set eyes on?”
‘“Calm yourself and listen to me,” he replied. “I have a cousin who lives in Geneva. She is Swiss, du reste, and she belongs to a family of the greatest respectability in the republic. Her morals are without reproach, she is of a suitable age, a spinster for she has spent the last fifteen years nursing an invalid mother who has lately died, she is well educated and pardessus le marché she is not ugly.”
‘“It sounds as though she were a paragon,” I said.
‘“I do not say that, but she has been well brought-up and would become the position you have to offer her.”
‘“There is one thing you forget. What inducement would there be for her to give up her friends and her accustomed life to accompany in exile a man of forty-nine who is by no means a beauty?’”
Monsieur le Gouverneur broke off his narrative and shrugging his shoulders so emphatically that his head almost sank between them, turned to us.
‘I am ugly. I admit it. I am of an ugliness that does not inspire terror or respect, but only ridicule, and that is the worst ugliness of all. When people see me for the first time they do not shrink with horror, there would evidently be something flattering in that, they burst out laughing. Listen, when the admirable Mr Wilkins showed me his animals this morning Percy, the oranutan, held out his arms and but for the bars of the cage would have clasped me to his bosom as a long lost brother. Once indeed when I was at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris and was told that one of the anthropoid apes had escaped I made my way to the exit as quickly as I could in fear that, mistaking me for the refugee, they would seize me and, notwithstanding my expostulations, shut me up in the monkey house.’
‘Voyons, mon ami,’ said Madame his wife, in her deep slow voice, ‘you are talking even greater nonsense than usual. I do not say that you are an Apollo, in your position it is unnecessary that you should be, but you have dignity, you have poise, you are what any woman would call a fine man.’
‘I will resume my story. When I made this remark to my friend he replied: “One can never tell with women. There is something about marriage that wonderfully attracts them. There would be no harm in asking her. After all it is regarded as a compliment by a woman to be asked in marriage. She can but refuse.”
‘“But I do not know your cousin and I do not see how I am to make her acquaintance. I cannot go to her house, ask to see her and when I am shown into the drawing-room say: Voila, I have come to ask you to marry me. She would think I was a lunatic and scream for help. Besides, I am a man of an extreme timidity, and I could never take such a step.”
‘“I will tell you what to do,” said my friend. “Go to Geneva and take her a box of chocolates from me. She will be glad to have news of me and will receive you with pleasure. You can have a little talk and then if you do not like the look of her you take your leave and no harm is done. If on the other hand you do, we can go into the matter and you can make a formal demand for her hand.”
‘I was desperate. It seemed the only thing to do. We went to a shop at once and bought an enormous box of chocolates and that night I took the train to Geneva. No sooner had I arrived than I sent her a letter to say that I was the bearer of a gift from her cousin and much wished to give myself the pleasure of delivering it in person. Within an hour I received her reply to the effect that she would be pleased to receive me at four o’clock in the afternoon. I spent the interval before my mirror and seventeen times I tied and retied my tie. As the clock struck four I presented myself at the door of her house and was immediately ushered into the drawing-room. She was waiting for me. Her cousin said she was not ugly. Imagine my surprise to see a young woman, enfin a woman still young, of a noble presence, with the dignity of Juno, the features of Venus, and in her expression the intelligence of Minerva.’
‘You are too absurd,’ said Madame. ‘But by now these gentlemen know that one cannot believe all you say.’
‘I swear to you that I do not exaggerate. I was so taken aback that I nearly dropped the box of chocolat
es. But I said to myself: la garde meurt mais ne se rend pas. I presented the box of chocolates. I gave her news of her cousin. I found her amiable. We talked for quarter of an hour. And then I said to myself: Allons-y. I said to her:
‘“Mademoiselle, I must tell you that I did not come here merely to give you a box of chocolates.”
‘She smiled and remarked that evidently I must have had reasons to come to Geneva of more importance than that.
‘“I came to ask you to do me the honour of marrying me.” She gave a start.
‘“But, monsieur, you are mad,” she said.
‘“I beseech you not to answer till you have heard the facts,” I interrupted, and before she could say another word I told her the whole story. I told her about my advertisement in the Figaro and she laughed till the tears ran down her face. Then I repeated my offer.
‘“You are serious?” she asked.
‘“I have never been more serious in my life.”
‘“I will not deny that your offer has come as a surprise. I had not thought of marrying, I have passed the age; but evidently your offer is not one that a woman should refuse without consideration. I am flattered. Will you give me a few days to reflect?”
‘“Mademoiselle, I am absolutely desolated,” I replied. “But I have not time. If you will not marry me I must go back to Paris and resume my perusal of the fifteen to eighteen hundred letters that still await my attention.”
‘“It is quite evident that I cannot possibly give you an answer at once. I had not set eyes on you a quarter of an hour ago. I must consult my friends and my family.”
‘“What have they got to do with it? You are of full age. The matter is pressing. I cannot wait. I have told you everything. You are an intelligent woman. What can prolonged reflection add to the impulse of the moment?”
‘“You are not asking me to say yes or no this very minute? This is outrageous.”
‘“That is exactly what I am asking. My train goes back to Paris in a couple of hours.”
‘She looked at me reflectively.
‘“You are quite evidently a lunatic. You ought to be shut up both for your own safety and that of the public.”
‘“Well, which is it to be?” I said. “Yes or no?” ‘She shrugged her shoulders.
‘“Mon dieu.” She waited a minute and I was on tenterhooks. “Yes.”
The Governor waved his hand towards his wife.
‘And there she is. We were married in a fortnight and I became governor of a colony. I married a jewel, my dear Sirs, a woman of the most charming character, one in a thousand, a woman of a masculine intelligence and a feminine sensibility, an admirable woman.’
‘But hold your tongue, mon ami,’ his wife said. ‘You are making me as ridiculous as yourself.’
He turned to the Belgian colonel.
‘Are you a bachelor, mon colonel? If so I strongly recommend you to go to Geneva. It is a nest (une pépinière was the word he used) of the most adorable young women. You will find a wife there as nowhere else. Geneva is besides a charming city. Do not waste a minute, but go there and I will give you a letter to my wife’s nieces.’
It was she who summed up the story.
‘The fact is that in a marriage of convenience you expect less and so you are less likely to be disappointed. As you do not make senseless claims on one another there is no reason for exasperation. You do not look for perfection and so you are tolerant to one another’s faults. Passion is all very well, but it is not a proper foundation for marriage. Voyez-vous, for two people to be happy in marriage they must be able to respect one another, they must be of the same condition and their interests must be alike; then if they are decent people and are willing to give and take, to live and let live, there is no reason why their union should not be as happy as ours.’ She paused. ‘But, of course, my husband is a very, very remarkable man.’
XXXV
It was but a run of thirty-six hours from Bangkok to Kep, on the Cambodian coast, to which I was bound so that I could get to Phnom-Penh and so to Angkor. Kep, a strip of land in front of the sea backed by green hills, is a health station established by the French for the officials of their government, and there is a large bungalow filled with them and their wives. It is in charge of a retired sea-captain and through him I was able to get a car to take me to Phnom-Penh. This is the ancient capital of Cambodia, but nothing remains of its antiquity; it is a hybrid town built by the French and inhabited by the Chinese; it has broad streets with arcades in which are Chinese shops, formal gardens and, facing the river, a quay neatly planted with trees like the quay in a French riverside town. The hotel is large, dirty and pretentious, and there is a terrace outside it where the merchants and the innumerable functionaries may take an apéritif and for a moment forget that they are not in France.
Here the enthusiastic traveller may visit a palace, built within thirty years or so, where the descendant of so long a line of kings keeps up a semblance of royalty; and he will be shown his jewels, gold head-dresses pyramidal and tinselly, a sacred sword, a sacred lance, and odd, old-fashioned ornaments presented to him by European potentates in the sixties; he may see a throne-room with a gorgeous gaudy throne surmounted by a huge white nine-tiered umbrella; he may see a wat, very spick and span and new, with a great deal of gilt about it and a silver floor; and should he have a well-furnished memory and an alert imagination he may amuse himself with sundry reflections upon the trappings of royalty, the passing of empire, and the deplorable taste in art of crowned heads.
But if rather than a serious traveller he is a silly flippant person he may amuse himself with a little story.
Once upon a time at the palace of Phnom-Penh there was a great function for the reception of the new French governor and his wife, and the king and all his court were dressed in their grandest clothes. The governor’s wife was shy and new to the country and for something to say admired a beautiful and jewelled belt that the monarch wore. Etiquette and oriental politeness forced him immediately to take it off and offer it to her; but the belt was the only thing that kept up his royal trousers, so he turned to the prime minister and asked him to give him the belt, a trifle less grand, that he himself was wearing. The prime minister undid it and gave it to his master, but turned to the minister of war who stood next to him and asked him to give him his. The minister of war turned to the grand chamberlain and made the same request, and so it went on down the line from minister to minister, from one official to another, till at last a small page-boy was seen hurrying from the palace holding up his trousers with both hands. For he, the most insignificant of all that gathering, had found no one to give him a belt.
But the traveller before he leaves Phnom-Penh will be well advised to visit the museum, since here, probably for the first time in his life, he will see, among much that is dull and commonplace, examples of a school of sculpture that will give him a good deal to think about. He will see at least one statue that is as beautiful as anything that the Mayans or the archaic Greeks ever wrought from stone. But if, like me, he is a person of slow perceptions, it will not for some time occur to him that here, unexpectedly, he has come upon something that will for the rest of his life enrich his soul. So might a man buy a plot of land to build himself a little house and then discover that there was a gold mine underneath it.
XXXVI
One thing that makes a visit to Angkor an event of unusual significance – preparing you to enter into the state of mind proper to such an experience – is the immense difficulty of getting there. For once you have reached Phnom-Penh – itself a place sufficiently off the beaten track – you must take a steamer and go a long way up a dull and sluggish river, a tributary of the Mehkong, till you reach a wide lake; you change into another steamer, flat-bottomed, for there is no great depth, and in this you travel all night; then you pass through a narrow defile and come to another great stretch of placid water. It is night again when you reach the end of it. Then you get into a sampan and are rowed among clum
ps of mangroves up a tortuous channel. The moon is full and the trees on the banks are sharply outlined against the night and you seem to traverse not a real country but the fantastic land of the silhouettist. At last you come to a bedraggled little village of watermen, whose dwellings are houseboats, and landing you drive down by the river side through plantations of coconut, betel and plantain, and the river is now a shallow little stream (like the country stream in which on Sundays in your childhood you used to catch minnows and put them in a jam-pot) till at length, looming gigantic and black in the moonshine, you see the great towers of Angkor Wat.
But now that I come to this part of my book I am seized with dismay. I have never seen anything in the world more wonderful than the temples of Angkor, but I do not know how on earth I am going to set down in black and white such an account of them as will give even the most sensitive reader more than a confused and shadowy impression of their grandeur. Of course to the artist in words, who takes pleasure in the sound of them and their look on the page, it would be an opportunity in a thousand. What a chance for prose pompous and sensual, varied, solemn and harmonious; and what a delight to such a one it would be to reproduce in his long phrases the long lines of the buildings, in the balance of his paragraphs to express their symmetry, and in the opulence of his vocabulary their rich decoration! It would be enchanting to find the apt word and by putting it in its right place give the same rhythm to the sentence as he had seen in the massed grey stones; and it would be a triumph to hit upon the unusual, the revealing epithet that translated into another beauty the colour, the form and the strangeness of what he alone had had the gift to see.