The Gentleman In the Parlour (22 page)

‘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 chocolates. 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.'

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.

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 clumps 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.

Alas, I have not the smallest talent for this sort of thing, and – doubtless because I cannot do it myself – I do not very much like it in others. A little of it goes a long way with me. I can read a page of Ruskin with enjoyment, but ten only with weariness; and when I have finished an essay by Walter Pater I know how a trout feels when you have taken him off the hook and he lies on the bank flapping his tail in the grass. I admire the ingenuity with which, little piece of glass by little piece of glass, Pater fitted together the mosaic of his style, but it bores me. His
prose is like one of those period houses, all Genoese velvet and carved wood, that they used to have in America twenty years ago, and you looked round desperately for a corner on which to put down your empty glass. I can bear it better when this kind of stately writing is done by our forefathers. The grand style became them. I am awed by the magnificence of Sir Thomas Browne; it is like staying in a great Palladian palace with frescoes by Veronese on the ceilings and tapestries on the walls. It is impressive rather than homely. You cannot see yourself doing your daily dozen in those august surroundings.

When I was young I took much trouble to acquire a style; I used to go to the British Museum and note down the names of rare jewels so that I might give my prose magnificence, and I used to go to the Zoo and observe the way an eagle looked or linger on a cab-rank to see how a horse champed so that I might on occasion use a nice metaphor; I made lists of unusual adjectives so that I might put them in unexpected places. But it was not a bit of good. I found I had no bent for anything of the kind; we do not write as we want to but as we can, and though I have the greatest respect for those authors who are blessed with a happy gift of phrase I have long resigned myself to writing as plainly as I can. I have a very small vocabulary and I manage to make do with it, I am afraid, only because I see things with no great subtlety. I think perhaps I see them with a certain passion and it interests me to translate into words not the look of them, but the emotion they have given me. But I am content if I can put this down as briefly and baldly as if I were writing a telegram.

On my journey up the river and across the lake I read the
Travels in Indo-China
of Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist, who was the first European to give a detailed description of the ruins of Angkor. His book is pleasant to read. It is a painstaking and straightforward account very characteristic of the period when the traveller had still the ingenuous belief that people who did not dress, eat, talk and think as he did were very odd, and not quite human; and M Mouhot narrated many things that would scarcely excite the astonishment of the more sophisticated and also more modest traveller of our day. But apparently he was not always accurate and my copy of his book had been at some time annotated in pencil by a later pilgrim. The corrections were neatly written in a hand that looked determined, but whether this
not so
, this
far from it
, this
quite wrong
, this
a palpable error
were due to a disinterested desire for truth, a wish to guide future readers, or merely to a sense of superiority, I had no means of telling. Perhaps, however, poor Mouhot may justly claim a certain indulgence, for, dying before he completed his journey, he had no opportunity to correct and explain his notes. Here are the last two entries in his diary: