The Gentleman In the Parlour (21 page)

‘Mr Wilkins talks French like a Frenchman,' Mrs Wilkins informed the passing sea.

‘Mais très volontiers,'
said the governor, still smiling. I drew him up a chair and he sat down with a bow to Mrs Wilkins.

‘Tell poodle-face his name's Egbert,' she said, looking at the sea.

I called the boy and we ordered a round of drinks.

‘You sign the chit, Elmer,' she said. ‘It's not a bit of good Mr What's-his-name shakin' if he can't shake nothin' better than a pair of treys.'

‘Vous comprenez le français, madame?'
asked the governor politely.

‘He wants to know if you speak French, my dear.'

‘Where does he think I was raised? Naples?'

Then the governor, with exuberant gesticulations, burst into a torrent of English so fantastic that it required all my knowledge of French to understand what he was talking about.

Presently Mr Wilkins took him down to look at his animals and a little later we assembled in the stuffy saloon for luncheon. The governor's wife appeared and was put on the captain's right. The governor explained to her who we all were and she gave us a gracious bow. She was a large woman, tall and of a robust build, of fifty-five perhaps, and she was dressed somewhat severely in black silk. On her head she wore a huge round topee. Her features were so large and regular, her form so statuesque, that you were reminded of the massive females who take
part in processions. She would have admirably suited the role of Columbia or Britannia in a patriotic demonstration. She towered over her diminutive husband like a skyscraper over a shack. He talked incessantly, with vivacity and wit, and when he said anything amusing her heavy features relaxed into a large, fond smile.

‘Que tu es bête, mon ami,'
she said. She turned to the captain. ‘You must not pay any attention to him. He is always like that.'

We had indeed a very amusing meal and when it was over we separated to our various cabins to sleep away the heat of the afternoon. On such a small boat having once made the acquaintance of my fellow passengers, it would have been impossible, even had I wished it, not to pass with them every moment of the day that I was not in my cabin. The only person who held himself aloof was the Italian tenor. He spoke to no one, but sat by himself as far forward as he could get, twanging a guitar in an undertone so that you had to strain your ears to catch the notes. We remained in sight of land and the sea was like a pail of milk. Talking of one thing and another we watched the day decline, we dined, and then we sat out again on deck under the stars. The two traders played piquet in the hot saloon, but the Belgian colonel joined our little group. He was shy and fat and opened his mouth only to utter a civility. Soon, influenced perhaps by the night and encouraged by the darkness that gave him, up there in the bows, the sensation of being alone with the sea, the Italian tenor, accompanying himself on his guitar, began to sing, first in a low tone, and then a little louder, till presently, his music captivating him, he sang with all his might. He had the real Italian voice, all macaroni, olive oil and sunshine, and he sang the Neapolitan songs that I had heard in my youth in the Piazza San Ferdinando, and fragments from
La Bohême
, and
Traviata
and
Rigoletto.
He sang with emotion and false emphasis and his tremolo reminded you of every
third-rate Italian tenor you had ever heard, but there in the openness of that lovely night his exaggerations only made you smile and you could not but feel in your heart a lazy sensual pleasure. He sang for an hour, perhaps, and we all fell silent; then he was still, but he did not move and we saw his huge bulk dimly outlined against the luminous sky.

I saw that the little French governor had been holding the hand of his large wife and the sight was absurd and touching.

‘Do you know that this is the anniversary of the day on which I first saw my wife,' he said, suddenly breaking the silence which had certainly weighed on him, for I had never met a more loquacious creature. ‘It is also the anniversary of the day on which she promised to be my wife. And, which will surprise you, they were one and the same.'

‘Voyons, mon ami,'
said the lady, ‘you are not going to bore our friends with that old story. You are really quite insupportable.'

But she spoke with a smile on her large, firm face, and in a tone that suggested that she was quite willing to hear it again.

‘But it will interest them,
mon petit chou.'
It was in this way that he always addressed his wife and it was funny to hear this imposing and even majestic lady thus addressed by her small husband. ‘Will it not, monsieur?' he asked me. ‘It is a romance and who does not like romance, especially on such a night as this?'

I assured the governor that we were all anxious to hear and the Belgian colonel took the opportunity once more to be polite.

‘You see, ours was a marriage of convenience pure and simple.'

‘C'est vrai,'
said the lady. ‘It would be stupid to deny it. But sometimes love comes after marriage and not before, and then it is better. It lasts longer.'

I could not but notice that the governor gave her hand
an affectionate little squeeze.

‘You see, I had been in the navy, and when I retired I was forty-nine. I was strong and active and I was very anxious to find an occupation. I looked about: I pulled all the strings I could. Fortunately I had a cousin who had some political importance. It is one of the advantages of democratic government that if you have sufficient influence merit, which otherwise might pass unnoticed, generally receives its due reward.'

‘You are modesty itself,
mon pauvre ami,'
said she.

‘And presently I was sent for by the Minister to the Colonies and offered the post of governor in a certain colony. It was a very distant spot that they wished to send me to and a lonely one, but I had spent my life wandering from port to port, and that was not a matter that troubled me. I accepted with joy. The minister told me that I must be ready to start in a month. I told him that would be easy for an old bachelor who had nothing much in the world but a few clothes and a few books.'

‘“Comment, mon lieutenant,”
he cried, “You are a bachelor?”

‘“Certainly,” I answered. “And I have every intention of remaining one.”

‘“In that case I am afraid I must withdraw my offer. For this position it is essential that you should be married.”

‘It is too long a story to tell you, but the gist of it was that owing to the scandal my predecessor, a bachelor, had caused by having native girls to live in the Residency and the consequent complaints of the white people, planters and the wives of functionaries, it had been decided that the next governor must be a model of respectability. I expostulated. I argued. I recapitulated my services to the country and the services my cousin could render at the next elections.

‘“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.”