The Gentleman In the Parlour by W Somerset Maugham

Author:W Somerset Maugham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409088028
Publisher: Random House

XXVI

I travelled leisurely down Siam. The country was pleasant, open and smiling, scattered with neat little villages, each surrounded with a fence, and fruit trees and areca palms growing in the compounds gave them an attractive air of modest prosperity. There was a good deal of traffic on the road, but it was carried on not, as in the little inhabited Shan States by mules, but by bullock-carts. Where the country was flat rice was cultivated, but where it undulated teak forests grew. The teak is a handsome tree, with a large smooth leaf; it does not make a very dense jungle and the sun shines through. To ride in a teak forest, so light, graceful and airy, is to feel yourself a cavalier in an old romance. The rest-houses were clean and trim. During this part of my journey I came across but one white man and this was a Frenchman on his way north who came into the bungalow in which I had settled myself for the night. It belonged to a French teak company, of which he was a servant, and he seemed to look upon it as very natural that I, a stranger, should have made myself at home in it. He was cordial; there are few French in this business and the men, out in the jungle constantly to superintend the native labourer, live lives even more lonely than the English forest men, so that he was glad to have someone to talk to. We shared our dinner. He was a man of robust build, with a large fleshy red face and a warm voice that seemed to wrap his fluent words in a soft rich fabric of sound. He had just come from short leave in Bangkok and with the Frenchman’s ingenuous belief that you are any more impressed by the number of his amours than by the number of his hats, talked much of the sexual experiences he had had there. He was a coarse fellow, ill-bred and stupid. But he caught sight of a torn, paper-bound book that was lying on the table.

‘Tiens, where did you get hold of this?’

I told him that I had found it in the bungalow and had been glancing through it. It was that selection of Verlaine’s poems which has for a frontispiece Carrière’s misty, but not uninteresting portrait of him.

‘I wonder who the devil can have left it here,’ he said.

He took up the volume and idly fingering the pages told me various gross stories about the unhappy poet. They were not new to me. Then his eyes caught a line that he knew and he began to read

‘Voici des fleurs, des fleuis, des feuilles et des branches.

Et puis voici mon coeur qui ne bat que pour vous.’

And as he read his voice broke and tears came into his eyes and ran down his face.

‘Ah, merde,’ he cried, ‘ça me fait pleurer comme un veau.’

He flung the book down and laughed and gave a little sob.

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