The Gentleman In the Parlour (20 page)

‘Come and go as you will, little bird,' she said. ‘I will never put you in a cage any more.'

‘I will come because I love you, little Princess,' said the bird. ‘And I will sing you the loveliest songs I know. I shall go far away, but I shall always come back, and I shall never forget you.' He gave himself another shake. ‘Good gracious me, how stiff I am,' he said.

Then he opened his wings and flew right away into the blue. But the little Princess burst into tears, for it is very difficult to put the happiness of someone you love before your own, and with her little bird far out of sight she felt on a sudden very lonely. When her sisters knew what had happened they mocked her and said that the little bird would never return. But he did at last. And he sat on September's shoulder and ate out of her hand and sang her the beautiful songs he had learned while he was flying up and down the fair places of the world. September kept her window open day and night so that the little bird might come into her room whenever he felt inclined, and this was very good for her; so she grew extremely beautiful. And when she was old enough she married the King of Cambodia and was carried all the way to the city in which he lived on a white elephant. But her sisters never slept with their windows open, so they grew extremely ugly as well as disagreeable, and when the time came to marry them off they were given away to the King's Councillors with a pound of tea and a Siamese cat.

When I was strong enough a kind friend, manager of the BAT, took me in his company's launch to see the klongs, or canals, which give Bangkok its individuality. It appears that until a few years ago no one was allowed without the royal permission to build on land and the houses stood on piles driven into the mud-banks at the water's edge or were constructed on floating pontoons moored to the side. The Menam, broad and handsome, is the city's main highway. Going up it, you pass wats placed advantageously here and there along the banks; and the high wall of the palace with the crowded splendour of the buildings behind it; public buildings, very grand and new; the trim, green, old-fashioned and dignified British legation and then untidy wharves. You turn down into one of the main klongs, the Oxford Street of Bangkok, and on each side are houseboats on which are shops open to the river front, and people go about making their purchases in sampans. Some of the canals are so broad that pontoons are moored in midstream and thus make a double or a treble row of shops. Little steamers, the omnibuses of the thrifty, puff up and down quickly, crowded with passengers; and as the rich in their great cars splash the passers-by on a rainy day in London, so opulent Chinamen in motor-launches speed along with a wash that makes the tiny dug-outs rock dangerously. Great barges are rowed slowly up and down, laden with wares, and these are the horse-drawn wagons that carry goods to market or from the wholesale merchant to the shopkeeper. Then there are the pedlars, like street-hawkers with a push-cart, who go about in little boats with their fish, their meat, or their vegetables.
A woman, sitting under a yellow umbrella of oiled paper, paddles them along with a firm and easy stroke. Finally there are the pedestrians, single persons in a sampan who paddle to and fro bent on some errand or idly as one might take a stroll down Picadilly. To unaccustomed eyes it is surprising to see a decent old woman with a mop of grey hair deftly manoeuvring her canoe amid the traffic as she goes methodically about her day's shopping. And like children scampering across the road tiny boys and girls, sometimes stark naked and seldom with more than a rag round their loins, dart in and out among the steamers and motor-boats in tiny little dug-outs so that you wonder that they are not run down. On the houseboats people lounge about idly; men mostly half naked wash themselves or their children, and here and there half-a-dozen urchins scramble about in the water.

And as you pass down a klong you get a sight of little creeks running out of it, only large enough for a sampan to enter, and you have a glimpse of green trees and houses sheltering amongst them. They are like the secluded courts and alleys that you find in London leading out of a busy thoroughfare. And just as the main street of a large town winds into a suburban road the klong narrows, the traffic dwindles, and now there is but one houseboat here and there, as it might be a general store to provide for the varied wants of the neighbours; and then the trees on the banks grow thick, coconuts and fruit trees, and you come but now and then upon a little brown house, the home of some Siamese who does not fear solitude. The plantations grow more extensive and your klong, which first was a busy street, then a respectable road through the suburbs, now becomes a leafy country lane.

I left Bangkok on a shabby little boat of four or five hundred tons. The dingy saloon, which served also as dining-room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel chairs on both sides of them. The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty. Cockroaches walked about on tne floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash-basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out.

We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water's edge. We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me. The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.

I had gone on board early in the morning and soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered. There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his. The circus proprietor was what is termed a good mixer, a type which according to your mood you fly from or welcome, but I happened to be feeling much pleased with life and before I had been on board an hour we had shaken for drinks, and he had shown me his animals. He was a very short fat man and his stingah-shifter, white but none too clean, outlined the noble proportions of his abdomen, but the collar was so tight that you wondered he did not choke. He had a red, cleanshaven face, a merry blue eye and short, untidy sandy hair. He wore a battered topee well on the back of his head. His name was Wilkins and
he was born in Portland, Oregon. It appears that the Oriental has a passion for the circus and Mr Wilkins for twenty years had been travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama (Aden, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saïgon, Huë, Hanoi, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, their names roll on the tongue savourily, crowding the imagination with sunshine and strange sounds and a multicoloured activity) with his menagerie and his merry-go-rounds. It was a strange life he led, unusual and one that, one would have thought, must offer the occasion for all sorts of curious experiences, but the odd thing about him was that he was a perfectly commonplace little man and you would have been prepared to find him running a garage or keeping a third-rate hotel in a second-rate town in California. The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man's life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate. I wish I could feel it reasonable to tell here the story of the hermit I went to see on an island in the Torres Straits, a shipwrecked mariner who had lived there alone for thirty years, but when you are writing a book you are imprisoned by the four walls of your subject and though for the entertainment of my own digressing mind I set it down now I should be forced in the end by my sense of what is fit to go between two covers and what is not, to cut it out. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that notwithstanding this long and intimate communion with nature and his thoughts the man was as dull, insensitive and vulgar an oaf at the end of this experience as he must have been at the beginning.

The Italian singer passed us and Mr Wilkins told me that he was a Neapolitan who was on his way to Hong-Kong to rejoin his company which he had been forced to leave owing to an attack of malaria in Bangkok.
He was an enormous fellow, and very fat, and when he flung himself into a chair it creaked with dismay. He took off his topee, displaying a great head of long, curly, greasy hair, and ran podgy and beringed fingers through it.

‘He ain't very sociable,' said Mr Wilkins. ‘He took the cigar I gave him, but he wouldn't have a drink. I shouldn't wonder if there wasn't somethin' rather queer about him. Nasty lookin' guy, ain't he?'

Then a little fat woman in white came on deck holding by the hand a Wa-Wa monkey. It walked solemnly by her side.

‘This is Mrs Wilkins,' said the circus proprietor, ‘and our youngest son. Draw up a chair, Mrs Wilkins, and meet this gentleman. I don't know his name, but he's already paid for two drinks for me and if he can't shake any better than he has yet he'll pay for one for you too.'

Mrs Wilkins sat down with an abstracted, serious look, and with her eyes on the blue sea suggested that she did not see why she shouldn't have a lemonade.

‘My, it's hot,' she murmured, fanning herself with the topee which she took off.

‘Mrs Wilkins feels the heat,' said her husband. ‘She's had twenty years of it now.'

‘Twenty-two and a half,' said Mrs Wilkins, still looking at the sea.

‘And she's never got used to it yet.'

‘Nor never shall and you know it,' said Mrs Wilkins.

She was just the same size as her husband and just as fat, and she had a round red face like his and the same sandy, untidy hair. I wondered if they had married because they were so exactly alike, or if in the course of years they had acquired this astonishing resemblance. She did not turn her head but continued to look absently at the sea.

‘Have you shown him the animals?' she asked.

‘You bet your life I have.'

‘What did he think of Percy?'

‘Thought him fine.'

I could not but feel that I was being unduly left out of a conversation of which I was at all events partly the subject, so I asked:

‘Who's Percy?'

‘Percy's our eldest son. There's a flyin'-fish, Elmer. He's the oran-utan. Did he eat his food well this morning?'

‘Fine. He's the biggest oran-utan in captivity. I wouldn't take a thousand dollars for him.'

‘And what relation is the elephant?' I asked.

Mrs Wilkins did not look at me, but with her blue eyes still gazed indifferently at the sea.

‘He's no relation,' she answered. ‘Only a friend.'

The boy brought lemonade for Mrs Wilkins, a whisky and soda for her husband and a gin and tonic for me. We shook dice and I signed the chit.

‘It must come expensive if he always loses when he shakes,' Mrs Wilkins murmured to the coastline.

‘I guess Egbert would like a sip of your lemonade, my dear,' said Mr Wilkins.

Mrs Wilkins slightly turned her head and looked at the monkey sitting on her lap.

‘Would you like a sip of mother's lemonade, Egbert?'

The monkey gave a little squeak and putting her arm round him she handed him a straw. The monkey sucked up a little lemonade and having drunk enough sank back against Mrs Wilkins' ample bosom.

‘Mrs Wilkins thinks the world of Egbert,' said her husband. ‘You can't wonder at it, he's her youngest.'

Mrs Wilkins took another straw and thoughtfully drank her lemonade.

‘Egbert's all right,' she remarked. ‘There's nothin' wrong with Egbert.'

Just then the French official who had been sitting down got up and began walking up and down. He had been accompanied on board by the French minister at
Bangkok, one or two secretaries and a prince of the Royal Family. There had been a great deal of bowing and shaking of hands and as the boat slipped away from the quay much waving of hats and handkerchiefs. He was evidently a person of consequence. I had heard the captain address him as Monsieur le Gouverneur.

‘That's the big noise on this boat,' said Mr Wilkins. ‘He was governor of one of the French colonies and now he's makin' a tour of the world. He came to see my circus at Bangkok. I guess I'll ask him what he'll have. What shall I call him, my dear?'

Mrs Wilkins slowly turned her head and looked at the Frenchman, with the rosette of the legion of honour in his button hole, pacing up and down.

‘Don't call him anything,' she said. ‘Show him a hoop and he'll jump right through it.'

I could not but laugh. Monsieur le Gouverneur was a little man, well below the average height, and smally made, with a very ugly little face and thick, almost negroid features; and he had a bushy grey head, bushy grey eyebrows and a bushy grey moustache. He did look a little like a poodle and he had the poodle's soft, intelligent and shining eyes. Next time he passed us Mr Wilkins called out:

‘
Monsoo. Qu'est ce que vous prenez
?' I cannot reproduce the eccentricities of his accent.
‘Une petite vene de poito.'
He turned to me. ‘Foreigners, they all drink porto. You're always safe with that.'

‘Not the Dutch,' said Mrs Wilkins, with a look at the sea. ‘They won't touch nothin' but Schnaps.'

The distinguished Frenchman stopped and looked at Mr Wilkins with some bewilderment. Whereupon Mr Wilkins tapped his breast and said:

‘Moa, proprietarre Cirque. Vous avez visite.'

Then, for a reason that escaped me, Mr Wilkins made his arms into a hoop and outlined the gestures that represented a poodle jumping through it. Then he pointed
at the Wa-Wa that Mrs Wilkins was still holding on her lap.

‘La petit fils de mon femme,'
he said.

Light broke upon the governor and he burst into a peculiarly musical and infectious laugh. Mr Wilkins began laughing too.

‘Oui, oui,'
he cried.
‘Moa
, circus proprietor.
Une petite verre de porto. Oui. Oui. N'est ce pas?'