The Gentleman in the Parlour

‘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 clay 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 the 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.

  XI

  I spent a few days at Taunggyi completing my preparations and then early one morning started. It was the end of the rainy season and the sky was overcast, but the clouds were high in the heavens and bright. The country was wide and open, sparsely covered with little trees; but now and then, a giant among them, you came upon a huge banyan with wide-spreading roots. It stood upon the earth, a fit object for worship, with a kind of solemnity, as though it were conscious of victory over the blind force of nature and now like a great power aware of its enemy’s strength, rested in armed peace. At its foot were the offerings that the Shans had placed to the spirit that dwelt in it. The road wound tortuously up and down gentle declivities and on each side of it, stretching over the upland plains, swayed the elephant grass. Its white fronds waved softly in the balmy air. It was higher than a man and I rode between it like the leader of an army reviewing countless regiments of tall green soldiers.

  I rode at the head of the caravan, and the mules and ponies that carried the loads followed at my heels. But one of the ponies, unused perhaps to a pack, was very wild. It had savage eyes. Every now and then it bolted wildly among the mules, hitting them with its packs; then the leading mule headed it off, rounding it into the long grass at the side of the road, and stopped it. They both stood still for a moment and then the mule led the pony quietly back to its place in the file. It walked along quite contentedly. It had had its scamper and for a little while at all events was prepared to behave reasonably. The idea in the mulish brain of the pack-leader was as clear and distinct as any idea of Descartes. In the train was peace, order and happiness. To walk with your nose at the tail of the mule in front of you and to know that the nose of the mule behind you was at your tail, was virtue. Like some philosophers the mule knew that the only liberty was the power to do right; any other power was only licence. Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die.

  But presently I came face to face with a buffalo standing stock still in the middle of the road. Now I knew that the Shan buffalo had none of that dislike of my colour that makes white men give the Chinese buffalo a wide berth, but I was not certain whether this particular animal had a very exact notion of nationality, and since his horns were enormous and his eyes far from friendly I thought it prudent to make a slight detour: whereupon the whole file, though neither mules nor muleteers could have had my reason for anxiety, followed me into the elephant grass. I could not but reflect that an undue observance of the law may put you to a good deal of unnecessary trouble.

  With abundant leisure before me and nothing to distract, I had promised myself to think out on this journey various things that had been on my mind for a long time. There were a number of subjects, error and evil, space, time, chance and mutability, which I felt I should really come to some conclusion about. I had a great deal to say to myself about art and life, but my ideas were higgledy-piggledy like the objects in an old junk shop and I did not know where to put my hands on them when I wanted them. They were in corners of my mind, like oddments stowed away at the back of a chest of drawers, and I only just knew they were there. Some of them hadn’t been taken out and brushed for so long that it was a disgrace, the new and the old were all jumbled together, and some were of no use any more and might just as well be thrown on the dust heap, and some (like a pair of Queen Anne spoons long forgotten that with the four a dealer has just found you in an auction room make up the half dozen) would fit very well with new ones. It would be pleasant to have everything cleaned and dusted, neatly put away on shelves, ordered and catalogued so that I knew what my stock consisted of. I resolved that while I rode through the country I would have a regular spring-cleaning of all my ideas. But the pack-leader had round his neck a raucous bell and it clanged so loudly that my reflections were very much disturbed. It was like a muffin bell and it made me think of Sunday afternoon in the London of my youth, with its empty streets and its grey, cold and melancholy sky. I put the spurs to my pony so that I might trot on and escape the dreary sound, but as soon as I began to do so the leader trotted too and the whole cavalcade trotted after him; I galloped and in a moment mules and ponies, their packs jangling and bumping, were galloping helter-skelter after me, and the muffin bell rattled madly at my heels as though it were knelling the death agonies of all the muffin-makers in London. I gave it up as a bad job and settled down again to walk; the train slowed down and just behind me the pack-leader shuffled up and down the empty, respectable street offering muffins for tea, muffins and crumpets. I could not put two thoughts together. I resigned myself at least for that day to make no attempt at serious meditation and instead, to pass the time, invented Blenkinsop.

  There can be nothing so gratifying to an author as to arouse the respect and esteem of the reader. Make him laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured. There was once a man called Blenkinsop. He had no talent, but he wrote a book in which his earnestness and his sincerity, his thoughtfulness and his integrity were so evident that, although it was quite unreadable, no one could fail to be impressed by it. Reviewers were unable to get through it, but could not but recognise the author’s high aim and purity of purpose. They praised it with such an enthusiastic unanimity that all the people who flatter themselves they are in the movement felt bound to have it on their tables. The critic of The London Mercury said that he would have liked to have written it himself. This was the highest praise he knew. Mr Blenkinsop deplored the grammar but accepted the compliment. Mrs Woolf paid it a generous tribute at Bloomsbury, Mr Osbert Sitwell admired it in Chelsea and Mr Arnold Bennett was judicious about it in Cadogan Square. Smart women of easy morals bought it so that people should not think they had n
o mind above the Embassy Club and banting. The poets who go to luncheon parties talked of it exactly as though they had read it from cover to cover. It was bought in the great provincial towns where the virtuous young are gathered together at high tea to improve their minds. Mr Hugh Walpole wrote a preface to the American edition. The booksellers placed it in piles in their shop windows with a photograph of the author on one side and a card with long extracts from the more important reviews on the other. In short the vogue of the book was so great that its pubisher said that if it did not stop selling soon he would have to read it himself. Mr Blenkinsop became a celebrity. He was asked to its annual dinner by the Lyceum Club.

  Now it happened that just about the time when Mr Blenkinsop’s book reached this dizzy height of success, the Prime Minister’s secretary presented the Prime Minister with the list of birthday honours. This high dignitary of the Crown looked at it with misgiving.

  ‘A pretty mangy lot,’ he said. ‘The public will raise a stink about this.’

  The secretary was a democrat.

  ‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘Let the public go and boil itself.’

  ‘Couldn’t we do something for arts and letters?’ suggested the Prime Minister.

  The secretary remarked that almost all the RA’s were knights already and those that were kicked up the devil of a row if any others were knighted.

  ‘The more the merrier, I should have thought,’ said the Prime Minister flippantly.

  ‘Not at all,’ answered the secretary. ‘The more titled RA’s there are the less is their financial value.’

  ‘I see,’ said the Prime Minister. ‘But are there no authors in England?’

  ‘I will inquire,’ replied the secretary, who had been at Balliol.

  He asked at the National Liberal Club and was told that there were Sir Hall Caine and Sir James Barrie. But honours had already been heaped upon them so freely that there seemed nothing more to offer them than the Garter and it was evident that the Lord Mayor of London would be very much put out if they were offered that. The Prime Minister, was, however, insistent and his secretary was in a quandary. But one day when he was being shaved his barber asked him if he had read Blenkinsop’s book.

  ‘I’m not much of a reader meself,’ he said, ‘but our Miss Burroughs, she done your nails last time you was here, she says it’s simply divine.’

  The Prime Minister’s secretary was a man who made it his business to be abreast of the current movements in art and literature, and he was well aware that Blenkinsop’s book was a sound piece of work. In honouring him the State would honour itself and the public might swallow without a wry face the baronetcies and peerages that rewarded services of a less obvious character. But he could afford to take no risks and so sent for the manicurist.

  ‘Have you read it?’ he asked her point blank.

  ‘No, sir, I haven’t exactly what you might call read it, but all the gentlemen who talk about it when I’m doing their nails say it’s absolutely priceless.’

  The result of this conversation was that the secretary placed Blenkinsop’s name before the Prime Minister and told him of his book.

  ‘What do you think about it yourself?’ asked the great man.

  ‘I haven’t read it, I don’t read books,’ replied the secretary frigidly, ‘but there’s nothing about it that I don’t know.’

  Blenkinsop was offered a KCVO.

  ‘We may just as well do the thing well if we’re going to do it at all,’ said the Prime Minister.

  But Blenkinsop, true to his character, begged to be allowed to refuse the distinction. Here was a pretty kettle of fish! The Prime Minister’s secretary was at his wits’ end. But the Prime Minister was a man of determination. When he had once made up his mind to do a thing he would allow no obstacle to stand in his way. He discovered the solution in a flash of his fertile brain and literature after all found a place in the birthday honours. A viscounty was conferred on the Editor of Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables.

  XII

  But even when I had learned by experience that if I wanted a quiet ride I must give the mules an hour’s start of me I found it impossible to concentrate my thoughts on any of the subjects that I had selected for meditation. Though nothing of the least consequence happened my attention was distracted by a hundred trifling incidents of the wayside. The two big butterflies in black and white fluttered along in front of me, and they were like young war widows bearing the loss they had sustained for their country’s sake with cheerful resignation: so long as there were dances at Claridge’s and dressmakers in the Place Vendôme they were ready to swear that all was well with the world. A little cheeky bird hopped down the road turning round every now and then jauntily as though to call my attention to her smart suit of silver grey. She looked like a neat typist tripping along from the station to her office in Cheapside. A swarm of saffron butterflies upon the droppings of an ass reminded me of pretty girls in evening frocks hovering round an obese financier. At the roadside grew a flower that was like the Sweet William that I remember in the cottage gardens of my childhood and another had the look of a more leggy white heather. I wish, as many writers do, I could give distinction to these pages by the enumeration of the birds and flowers that I saw as I ambled along on my little Shan pony. It has a scientific air and though the reader skips the passage it gives him a slight thrill of self-esteem to know that he is reading a book with solid fact in it. It puts you on strangely familiar terms with your reader when you tell him you came across P. Johnsonii. It has a significance that is almost cabalistic; you and he (writer and reader) share a knowledge that is not common to all and sundry and there is the sympathy between you that there is between men who wear masonic aprons or Old Etonian ties. You communicate with one another in a secret language. I should be proud to read in a footnote of a learned work on the botany or ornithology of Upper Burma, Maugham, however, states that he observed F. Jonesia in the Southern Shan States. But I know nothing of botany and ornithology. I could, indeed, fill a page with the names of all the sciences of which I am completely ignorant. A yellow primrose to me, alas! is not primula Vulgaris, but just a small yellow flower, ever so faintly scented with the rain, and grey balmy mornings in February when you have a funny little flutter in your heart, and the smell of the rich wet Kentish earth, and kind dead faces, and the statue of Lord Beaconsfield in his bronze robes in Parliament Square, and the yellow hair of a girl with a sweet smile, hair now grey and shingled.

  I passed a party of Shans cooking their dinner under a tree. Their wagons were placed in a circle round them, making a kind of laager, and the bullocks were grazing a little way off. I went on a mile or two and came upon a respectable Burman sitting at the side of the road and smoking a cheroot. Round him were his servants, with their loads on the ground beside them, for he had no mules and they were carrying his luggage themselves. They had made a little fire of sticks and were cooking the rice of his midday meal. I stopped while my interpreter had a chat with the respectable Burman. He was a clerk from Keng Tung on his way to Taunggyi to look for a situation in a government office. He had been on the road for eighteen days and with only four more to go looked upon his journey as nearly at an end. Then a Shan on horseback threw confusion among the thoughts I tried to marshal. He rode a shaggy pony and his feet were bare in his stirrups. He wore a white jacket and his coloured skirt was tucked up so that it looked like gay riding breeches. He had a yellow handkerchief bound round his head. He was a romantic figure cantering through that wide upland, but not so romantic as Rembrandt’s Polish Rider who rides through space and time with so gallant a bearing. No living horseman has ever achieved that effect of mystery so that when you look at him you feel that you stand on the threshold of an unknown that lures you on and yet closes the way for you. Nor is it strange, for nature and the beauty of nature are dead and senseless things and it is only art that can give them significance.

  But with so much to distract me I could not but suspect that I should reach my
journey’s end without after all having made up my mind upon a single one of the important subjects that I had promised myself to consider.

  XIII

  The day’s march was no more than from twelve to fifteen miles, that being the distance that a mule can comfortably do, and the distance from one another at which the PWD bungalows are placed. But because it is the daily routine it gives you just as much the sensation of covering space as if you had been all day in an express train. When you arrive at your destination you are in reality just as far from your starting place, though you have gone but a few miles, as if you had travelled from Paris to Madrid. When you have ridden along a stream for a couple of days it seems to you of quite imposing length; you ask its name and are surprised to find that it has none, until you stop to reflect that you have followed it for no more than five and twenty miles. And the differences between the upland that you rode through yesterday and the jungle that you are riding through to-day impress themselves upon you as much as the differences between one country and another.

  But because the bungalows are built on the same pattern, though you have been riding for several hours (your caravan does little more than two miles an hour) you seem always to arrive at the same house. It stands on piles in a compound a few yards away from the road. There is a large living-room, and behind, two bedrooms with their bath-rooms. In the middle of the living-room is a handsome teak table. There are two easy-chairs with extensions for the legs and four stout, severe armchairs to set round the table. There is a chiffonier on which are copies of the Strand Magazine for 1918 and two tattered much read novels by Phillips Oppenheim. On the walls there is a longitudinal section of the road, a summary of the Burma Game rules and a list of the furniture and the household utensils of the bungalow. In the compound are the servants’ quarters, stalls for the ponies and a cook-house. It is certainly not very pretty, it is not very comfortable, but it is solid, substantial and serviceable; and though I had never seen any one bungalow before and after that day should never see it again, I seldom caught sight of it at the end of the morning’s journey without a little thrill of content. It was like coming home and when I got my first glimpse of its trim roof I put the spurs to my pony and galloped helter-skelter to the door.