The Skeptical Romancer (22 page)

“I hope you kept it,” I said.

“You bet I did. I invested all my money in Shanghai, and when I left China I put it all in American railway bonds. Safety first is my motto. I know too much about crooks to take any risks myself.”

I liked that remark, so I asked him if he wouldn’t stay and have luncheon with me.

“No, I don’t think I will. I don’t eat much tiffin, and, anyway, my chow’s waiting for me at home. I think I’ll be getting along.” He got up and he towered over me. “But look here, why don’t you come along this evening and see my place? I’ve married a Haiphong girl. Got a baby too. It’s not often I get a chance of talking to anyone about London. You’d better not come to dinner. We only eat native food, and I don’t suppose you’d care for that. Come along about nine, will you?”

“All right,” I said.

I had already told him that I was leaving Haiphong next day. He asked the boy to bring him a piece of paper so that he might
write down his address. He wrote laboriously in the hand of a boy of fourteen.

“Tell the porter to explain to your rickshaw boy where it is. I’m on the second floor. There’s no bell. Just knock. Well, see you later.”

He walked out, and I went in to luncheon.

After dinner I called a rickshaw and with the porter’s help made the boy understand where I wanted to go. I found presently that he was taking me along the curved canal the houses of which had looked to me so like a faded Victorian water colour. He stopped at one of them and pointed to the door. It looked so shabby and the neighbourhood was so squalid that I hesitated, thinking he had made a mistake. It seemed unlikely that Grosely could live so far in the native quarter and in a house so bedraggled. I told the rickshaw boy to wait and pushing open the door saw a dark staircase in front of me. There was no one about, and the street was empty. It might have been the small hours of the morning. I struck a match and fumbled my way upstairs. On the second floor I struck another match and saw a large brown door in front of me. I knocked, and in a moment it was opened by a little Tonkinese woman holding a candle. She was dressed in the earth brown of the poorer classes, with a tight little black turban on her head; her lips and the skin round them were stained red with betel, and when she opened her mouth to speak I saw that she had the black teeth and black gums that so disfigure these people. She said something in her native language, and then I heard Grosely’s voice.

“Come along in. I was beginning to think you weren’t going to turn up.”

I passed through a little dark antechamber and entered a large room that evidently looked on the canal. Grosely was lying on a long chair, and he raised his length from it as I came in. He was reading the Hong Kong papers by the light of a paraffin lamp that stood on a table by his side.

“Sit down,” he said, “and put your feet up.”

“There’s no reason I should take your chair.”

“Go on. I’ll sit on this.”

He took a kitchen chair and, sitting on it, put his feet on the end of mine.

“That’s my wife,” he said, pointing with his thumb at the
Tonkinese woman who had followed me into the room. “And over there in the corner’s the kid.”

I followed his eyes, and against the wall, lying on bamboo mats and covered with a blanket, I saw a child sleeping.

“Lively little beggar when he’s awake. I wish you could have seen him. She’s going to have another soon.”

I glanced at her, and the truth of what he said was apparent. She was very small, with tiny hands and feet, but her face was flat and the skin muddy. She looked sullen but may only have been shy. She went out of the room and presently came back with a bottle of whisky, two glasses, and a siphon. I looked round. There was a partition at the back of dark unpainted wood which I suppose shut off another room, and pinned against the middle of this was a portrait cut out of an illustrated paper of John Galsworthy. He looked austere, mild, and gentlemanly, and I wondered what he did there. The other walls were whitewashed, but the whitewash was dingy and stained. Pinned on to them were pages of pictures from
The Graphic
or
The Illustrated London News
.

“I put them up,” said Grosely, “I thought they made the place look homelike.”

“What made you put up Galsworthy? Do you read his books?”

“No, I didn’t know he wrote books. I liked his face.”

There were one or two torn and shabby rattan mats on the floor and in a corner a great pile of
The Hong Kong Times
. The only furniture consisted of a washstand, two or three kitchen chairs, a table or two, and a large teak native bed. It was cheerless and sordid.

“Not a bad little place, is it?” said Grosely. “Suits me all right. Sometimes I’ve thought of moving, but I don’t suppose I ever shall now.” He gave a little chuckle. “I came to Haiphong for forty-eight hours and I’ve been here five years. I was on my way to Shanghai really.”

He was silent. Having nothing to say I said nothing. Then the little Tonkinese woman made a remark to him, which I could not of course understand, and he answered her. He was silent again for a minute or two, but I thought he looked at me as though he wanted to ask me something. I did not know why he hesitated.

“Have you ever tried smoking opium on your travels in the East?” he inquired at last casually.

“Yes, I did once, at Singapore. I thought I’d like to see what it was like.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing very thrilling to tell you the truth. I thought I was going to have the most exquisite emotions. I expected visions, like De Quincey’s, you know. The only thing I felt was a kind of physical well-being, the same sort of feeling that you get when you’ve had a Turkish bath and are lying in the cooling room, and then a peculiar activity of mind so that everything I thought of seemed extremely clear.”

“I know.”

“I really felt that two and two are four and there could not be the smallest doubt about it. But next morning – oh, God! My head reeled. I was as sick as a dog, I was sick all day, I vomited my soul out, and as I vomited I said to myself miserably: ‘And there are people who call this fun.’ ”

Grosley leaned back in his chair and gave a low, mirthless laugh.

“I expect it was bad stuff. Or you went at it too hard. They saw you were a mug and gave you dregs that had been smoked already. They’re enough to turn anybody up. Would you like to have another try now? I’ve got some stuff here that I know’s good.”

“No, I think once was enough for me.”

“D’you mind if I have a pipe or two? You want it in a climate like this. It keeps you from getting dysentery. And I generally have a bit of a smoke about this time.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

He spoke again to the woman, and she, raising her voice, called out something in a raucous tone. An answer came from the room behind the wooden partition, and after a minute or two an old woman came out carrying a little round tray. She was shrivelled and old and when she entered gave me an ingratiating smile of her stained mouth. Grosely got up and crossed over to the bed and lay on it. The old woman set the tray down on the bed; on it was a spirit lamp, a pipe, a long needle, and a little round box of opium. She squatted on the bed, and Grosely’s wife got on it too and sat, her feet tucked up under her with her back against the wall. Grosely watched the old woman while she put a little pellet of the drug on the needle, held it over the flame
till it sizzled, and then plugged it into the pipe. She handed it to him, and with a great breath he inhaled it. He held the smoke for a little while and then blew it out in a thick grey cloud. He handed her back the pipe, and she started to make another. Nobody spoke. He smoked three pipes in succession and then sank back.

“By George, I feel better now. I was feeling all in. She makes a wonderful pipe, this old hag. Are you sure you won’t have one?”

“Quite.”

“Please yourself. Have some tea, then.”

He spoke to his wife, who scrambled off the bed and went out of the room. Presently she came back with a little china pot of tea and a couple of Chinese bowls.

“A lot of people smoke here, you know. It does you no harm if you don’t do it to excess. I never smoke more than twenty to twenty-five pipes a day. You can go on for years if you limit yourself to that. Some of the Frenchmen smoke as many as forty or fifty a day. That’s too much. I never do that, except now and then when I feel I want a binge. I’m bound to say it’s never done me any harm.”

We drank our tea, pale and vaguely scented and clean on the palate. Then the old woman made him another pipe and then another. His wife had got back on to the bed and soon, curling herself up at his feet, went to sleep. Grosely smoked two or three pipes at a time and while he was smoking seemed intent upon nothing else, but in the intervals he was loquacious. Several times I suggested going, but he would not let me. The hours wore on. Once or twice while he smoked I dozed. He told me all about himself. He went on and on. I spoke only to give him a cue. I cannot relate what he told me in his own words. He repeated himself. He was very long-winded, and he told me his story confusedly, first a late bit, then an early bit, so that I had to arrange the sequence for myself; sometimes I saw that, afraid he had said too much, he held something back; sometimes he lied and I had to make a guess at the truth from the smile he gave me or the look in his eyes. He had not the words to describe what he had felt, and I had to conjecture his meaning from slangy metaphors and hackneyed, vulgar phrases. I kept on asking myself what his real name was: it was on the tip of my tongue, and it irritated me not to be able to recall it, though why it should in the least matter
to me I did not know. He was somewhat suspicious of me at first, and I saw that this escapade of his in London and his imprisonment had been all these years a tormenting secret. He had always been haunted by the fear that sooner or later someone would find out.

“It’s funny that even now you shouldn’t remember me at the hospital,” he said, looking at me shrewdly. “You must have a rotten memory.”

“Hang it all, it’s nearly thirty years ago. Think of the thousands of people I’ve met since then. There’s no reason why I should remember you any more than you remember me.”

“That’s right. I don’t suppose there is.”

It seemed to reassure him. At last he had smoked enough, and the old woman made herself a pipe and smoked it. Then she went over to the mat on which the child was lying and huddled down beside it. She lay so still that I supposed she had fallen directly asleep. When at last I went I found my boy curled up on the footboard of the rickshaw in so deep slumber that I had to shake him. I knew where I was, and I wanted air and exercise, so I gave him a couple of piastres and told him I would walk.

It was a strange story I carried away with me.

It was with a sort of horror that I had listened to Grosely telling me of those twenty years he had spent in China. He had made money, I do not know how much, but from the way he talked I should think something between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds, and for a tide waiter it was a fortune. He could not have come by it honestly, and little as I knew of the details of his trade, by his sudden reticences, by his leers and hints I guessed that there was no base transaction that, if it was made worth his while, he jibbed at. I suppose that nothing paid him better than smuggling opium, and his position gave him the opportunity to do this with safety and profit. I understood that his superior officers had often had their suspicions of him, but had never been able to get such proof of his malpractices as to justify them in taking any steps. They contented themselves with moving him from one port to another, but that did not disturb him; they watched him, but he was too clever for them. I saw that he was divided between the fear of telling me too much to his discredit and the desire to boast of his own astuteness. He prided himself on the confidence the Chinese had placed in him.

“They knew they could trust me,” he said, “and it gave me a pull. I never double-crossed a Chinaman once.”

The thought filled him with the complacency of the honest man. The Chinese discovered that he was keen on curios, and they got in the habit of giving him bits or bringing him things to buy; he never made inquiries how they had come by them, and he bought them cheap. When he had got a good lot he sent them to Peking and sold them at a handsome profit. I remembered how he had started his commercial career by buying things at auctions and pawning them. For twenty years, by shabby shift and petty dishonesty he added pound to pound, and everything he made he invested in Shanghai. He lived penuriously, saving half his pay; he never went on leave because he did not want to waste his money; he would not have anything to do with the Chinese women, he wanted to keep himself free from any entanglement; he did not drink. He was consumed by one ambition, to save enough to be able to go back to England and live the life from which he had been snatched as a boy. That was the only thing he wanted. He lived in China as though in a dream; he paid no attention to the life around him; its colour and strangeness, its possibilities of pleasure, meant nothing to him. There was always before him the mirage of London, the Criterion Bar, himself standing with his foot on the rail, the promenade at the Empire and the Pavilion, the picked-up harlot, the serio-comic at the music hall, and the musical comedy at the Gaiety. This was life and love and adventure. This was romance. This was what he yearned for with all his heart. There was surely something impressive in the way in which during all those years he had lived like an anchorite with that one end in view of leading again a life that was so vulgar. It showed character.

“You see,” he said to me, “even if I’d been able to get back to England on leave I wouldn’t have gone. I didn’t want to go till I could go for good. And then I wanted to do the thing in style.”

He saw himself putting on evening clothes every night and going out with a gardenia in his buttonhole, and he saw himself going to the Derby in a long coat and a brown hat and a pair of opera glasses slung over his shoulder. He saw himself giving the girls a look-over and picking out the one he fancied. He made up his mind that on the night he arrived in London he would get blind, he hadn’t been drunk for twenty years; he couldn’t afford
to in his job, you had to keep your wits about you. He’d take care not to get drunk on the ship on the way home. He’d wait till he got to London. What a night he’d have! He thought of it for twenty years.