The Gentleman in the Parlour Read online

  It was as much the manner of this chance acquaintance as what he told me that persuaded me to make the journey across the Shan States on which I now set out. From the rail-head in Upper Burma to the rail-head in Siam, whence I could get down to Bangkok, it was between six and seven hundred miles. Kind people had done everything possible to render the excursion easy for me and the Resident at Taunggyi had wired to me that he had made arrangements for mules and ponies to be ready for me on my arrival. I had bought in Rangoon such stores as seemed necessary, folding chairs and a table, a filter, lamps and I know not what. I took the train from Mandalay to Thazi, intending there to hire a car for Taunggyi, and a man I had met at the club at Mandalay and who lived at Thazi asked me to have brunch (the pleasant meal of Burma that combines breakfast and lunch) with him before I started. His name was Masterson. He was a man in the early thirties, with a pleasant friendly face, curling dark hair speckled with grey, and handsome dark eyes. He spoke with a singularly musical voice, very slowly, and this, I hardly know why, inspired you with confidence. You felt that a man who took such a long time to say what he had to say and had found the world with sufficient leisure to listen to him must have qualities that made him sympathetic to his fellows. He took the amiability of mankind for granted and I suppose he could only have done this because he was himself amiable. He had a nice sense of humour, without of course a quick thrust and parry, but agreeably sarcastic; it was of that agreeable type that applies commonsense to the accidents of life and so sees them in a faintly ridiculous aspect. He was engaged in a business that kept him travelling up and down Burma most of the year and in his journeyings he had acquired the collector’s habit. He told me that he spent all his spare money on buying Burmese curiosities and it was especially to see them that he asked me to have a meal with him.

  The train got in early in the morning. He had warned me that, having to be at his office, he could not meet me; but brunch was at ten and he told me to go to his house as soon as I was finished with the one or two things I had to do in the town.

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ he said, ‘and if you want a drink ask the boy for it. I’ll get back as soon as I’ve got through with my business.’

  I found out where there was a garage and made a bargain with the owner of a very dilapidated Ford to take me and my baggage to Taunggyi. I left my Madrassi servant to see that everything was stowed in it that was possible and the rest tied on to the footboards, and strolled along to Masterson’s house. It was a neat little bungalow in a road shaded by tall trees, and in the early light of a sunny day looked pretty and homelike. I walked up the steps and was hailed by Masterson.

  ‘I got done more quickly than I expected. I shall have time to show you my things before brunch is ready. What will you have? I’m afraid I can only offer you a whisky and soda.’

  ‘Isn’t it rather early for that?’

  ‘Rather. But it’s one of the rules of the house that nobody crosses the threshold without having a drink.’

  ‘What can I do but submit to the rule?’

  He called the boy and in a moment a trim Burmese brought in a decanter, a syphon and glasses. I sat down and looked about the room. Though it was still so early the sun was hot outside and the jalousies were drawn. The light was pleasant and cool after the glare of the road. The room was comfortably furnished with rattan chairs and on the walls were water-colour paintings of English scenes. They were a little prim and old-fashioned and I guessed that they had been painted in her youth by the maiden and elderly aunt of my host. There were two of a cathedral I did not know, two or three of a rose garden and one of a Georgian house. When he saw my eyes for an instant rest upon this, he said:

  ‘That was our house at Cheltenham.’

  ‘Oh, is that where you come from?’

  Then there was his collection. The room was crowded with Buddhas and with figures, in bronze or wood, of the Buddha’s disciples; there were boxes of all shapes, utensils of one kind and another, curiosities of every sort, and although there were far too many they were arranged with a certain taste so that the effect was pleasing. He had some lovely things. He showed them to me with pride, telling me how he had got this object and that, and how he had heard of another and hunted it down and the incredible astuteness he had employed to induce an unwilling owner to part with it. His kindly eyes shone when he described a great bargain and they flashed darkly when he inveighed against the unreasonableness of a vendor who rather than accept a fair price for a bronze dish had taken it away. There were flowers in the room, and it had not the forlorn look that so many bachelors’ houses have in the East.

  ‘You’ve made the place very comfortable,’ I said.

  He gave the room a sweeping glance.

  ‘It was all right. It’s not much now.’

  I did not quite know what he meant. Then he showed me a long wooden gilt box, decorated with the glass mosaic that I had admired in the palace at Mandalay, but the workmanship was more delicate than anything I had seen there, and this with its gem-like richness had really something of the ornate exquisiteness of the Italian Renaissance.

  ‘They tell me it’s about a couple of hundred years old,’ he said. ‘They’ve not been able to turn out anything like this for a long time.’

  It was a piece made obviously for a king’s palace and you wondered to what uses it had been put and what hands it had passed through. It was a jewel.

  ‘What is the inside like?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, nothing much, it’s just lacquered.’

  He opened it and I saw that it contained three or four framed photographs.

  ‘Oh, I’d forgotten those were there,’ he said.

  His soft, musical voice had a queer sound in it, and I gave him a sidelong look. He was bronzed by the sun, but his face notwithstanding flushed a deeper red. He was about to close the box, and then he changed his mind. He took out one of the photographs and showed it to me.

  ‘Some of these Burmese girls are rather sweet when they’re young, aren’t they?’ he said.

  The photograph showed a young girl standing somewhat self-consciously against the conventional background of a photographer’s studio, a pagoda and a group of palm-trees. She was wearing her best clothes and she had a flower in her hair. But the embarrassment you saw she felt at having her picture taken did not prevent a shy smile from trembling on her lips and her large solemn eyes had nevertheless a roguish twinkle. She was very small and very slender.

  ‘What a ravishing little thing,’ I said.

  Then Masterson took out another photograph in which she sat with a child standing by her side, his hand timidly on her knee, and a baby in her arms. The child stared straight in front of him with a look of terror on his face; he could not understand what that machine and the man behind it, his head under a black cloth, were up to.

  ‘Are those her children?’ I asked.

  ‘And mine,’ said Masterson.

  At that moment the boy came in to say that brunch was ready. We went into the dining-room and sat down.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ll get to eat. Since my girl went away everything in the house has gone to blazes.’

  A sulky look came into his red honest face and I did not know what to reply.

  ‘I’m so hungry that whatever I get will seem good,’ I hazarded.

  He did not say anything and a plate of thin porridge was put before me. I helped myself to milk and sugar. Masterson ate a spoonful or two and pushed his plate aside.

  ‘I wish I hadn’t looked at those damned photographs,’ he said. ‘I put them away on purpose.’

  I did not want to be inquisitive or to force a confidence my host had no wish to give, but neither did I desire to seem so unconcerned as to prevent him from telling me something he had in his heart. Often in some lonely post in the jungle or in a stiff grand house, solitary in the midst of a teeming Chinese city, a man has told me stories about himself that I was sure he had never told to a living soul. I was a stray acquaintance whom
he had never seen before and would never see again, a wanderer for a moment through his monotonous life, and some starved impulse led him to lay bare his soul. I have in this way learned more about men in a night (sitting over a syphon or two and a bottle of whisky, the hostile, inexplicable world outside the radius of an acetylene lamp) than I could have if I had known them for ten years. If you are interested in human nature it is one of the great pleasures of travel. And when you separate (for you have to be up betimes) sometimes they will say to you:

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve bored you to death with all this nonsense. I haven’t talked so much for six months. But it’s done me good to get it off my chest.’

  The boy removed the porridge plates and gave each of us a piece of pale fried fish. It was rather cold.

  ‘The fish is beastly, isn’t it?’ said Masterson. ‘I hate river fish, except trout; the only thing is to smother it with Worcester sauce.’

  He helped himself freely and passed me the bottle.

  ‘She was a damned good housekeeper, my girl; I used to feed like a fighting-cock when she was here. She’d have had the cook out of the house in a quarter of an hour if he’d sent in muck like this.’

  He gave me a smile, and I noticed that his smile was very sweet. It gave him a peculiarly gentle look.

  ‘It was rather a wrench parting with her, you know.’

  It was quite evident now that he wished to talk and I had no hesitation in giving him a lead.

  ‘Did you have a row?’

  ‘No. You could hardly call it a row. She lived with me five years and we never had a tiff even. She was the best-tempered little thing that ever was. Nothing seemed to put her out. She was always as merry as a cricket. You couldn’t look at her without her lips breaking into a smile. She was always happy. And there was no reason why she shouldn’t be. I was very good to her.’

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ I answered.

  ‘She was mistress here. I gave her everything she wanted. Perhaps if I’d been more of a brute she wouldn’t have gone away’

  ‘Don’t make me say anything so obvious as that women are incalculable.’

  He gave me a deprecating glance and there was a trace of shyness in the smile that just flickered in his eyes.

  ‘Would it bore you awfully if I told you about it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Well, I saw her one day in the street and she rather took my fancy. I showed you her photograph, but the photograph doesn’t begin to do her justice. It sounds silly to say about a Burmese girl, but she was like a rose-bud, not an English rose, you know, she was as little like that as the glass flowers on that box I showed you are like real flowers, but a rose grown in an Eastern garden that had something strange and exotic about it. I don’t know how to make myself plain?’

  ‘I think I understand what you mean all the same,’ I smiled.

  ‘I saw her two or three times and found out where she lived. I sent my boy to make enquiries about her, and he told me that her parents were quite willing that I should have her if we could come to an arrangement. I wasn’t inclined to haggle and everything was settled in no time. Her family gave a party to celebrate the occasion and she came to live here. Of course I treated her in every way as my wife and put her in charge of the house. I told the boys that they’d got to take their orders from her and if she complained of any of them out they went. You know, some fellows keep their girls in the servants’ quarters and when they go away on tour the girls have a rotten time. Well, I think that’s a filthy thing to do. If you are going to have a girl to live with you the least you can do is to see that she has a good time.

  ‘She was a great success and I was as pleased as Punch. She kept the house spotless. She saved me money. She wouldn’t let the boys rob me. I taught her to play bridge and believe me, she learned to play a damned good game.’

  ‘Did she like it?’

  ‘Loved it. When people came here she couldn’t have received them better if she’d been a duchess. You know, these Burmese have beautiful manners. Sometimes it would make me laugh to see the assurance with which she would receive my guests, government officials, you know, and soldiers who were passing through. If some young subaltern was rather shy she’d put him at his ease at once. She was never pushing or obtrusive, but just there when she was wanted and doing her best to see that everything went well and everyone had a good time. And I’ll tell you what, she could mix the best cocktail you’d get anywhere between Rangoon and Bhamo. People used to say I was lucky.’

  ‘I’m bound to say I think you were,’ I said.

  The curry was served and I piled my plate with rice and helped myself to chicken and then chose from a dozen little dishes the condiments I fancied. It was a good curry.

  ‘Then she had her babies, three in three years, but one died when it was six weeks old. I showed you a photograph of the two that are living. Funny looking little things, aren’t they? Are you fond of children?’

  ‘Yes. I have a strange and almost unnatural passion for new-born babies.’

  ‘I don’t think I am, you know. I couldn’t even feel very much about my own. I’ve often wondered if it showed that I was rather a rotter.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think the passion many people affect for children is merely a fashionable pose. I have a notion that children are all the better for not being burdened with too much parental love.’

  ‘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. I 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 would have 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, too 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 daresay 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?’