On a Chinese Screen - W. Somerset Maugham (beach read TXT) 📗

and twelve pence in every shilling. I’m sure it’s better to see clearly to the end of your nose than indistinctly through a brick wall. If there’s one thing we can be certain about it is that the whole is greater than the part.”

When, with a hearty shake of the hand, firm and characteristic, she bade me farewell, she said:

“Well, we’ve had a most interesting chat. It does one good in a place like this, so far away from civilisation, to exchange ideas with one’s intellectual equals.”

“Especially other people’s,” I murmured.

“I always think that one should profit by the great thoughts of the past,” she retorted. “It shows that the mighty dead have not lived in vain.”

Her conversation was devastating.

XL A Game of Billiards

I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading a number, several days old, of the South China Times, when the door of the bar was somewhat brusquely thrown open and a very long, thin man appeared.

“Do you care for a game of billiards?” he said.

“By all means.”

I got up and went with him into the bar. It was a small hotel, of stone, somewhat pretentious in appearance, and it was kept by a half-caste Portuguese who smoked opium. There were not half a dozen people staying there, a Portuguese official and his wife waiting for a ship to take them to a distant colony, a Lancashire engineer who was sullenly drunk all day long, a mysterious lady, no longer young but of voluptuous appearance, who came to the dining room for meals and went back to her room immediately afterwards, and I had not seen the stranger before. I supposed he had come in that evening on a Chinese boat. He was a man of over fifty, I should think, shrivelled as though the sap had been dried out of him by tropical suns, with a face that was almost brick red. I could not place him. He might have been a skipper out of a job or the agent of some foreign firm in Hong Kong. He was very silent and he made no answer to the casual remarks that I made in the course of the game. He played billiards well enough, though not excellently, but he was a very pleasant fellow to play with; and when he pocketed my ball, instead of leaving me a double balk, gave me a reasonable shot. But when the game was over I should never have thought of him again, if suddenly, breaking his silence for the first time, he had not put me a very odd question.

“Do you believe in fate?” he asked.

“At billiards?” I retorted not a little astonished at his remark.

“No, in life.”

I did not want to answer him seriously.

“I hardly know,” I said.

He took his shot. He made a little break. At the end of it, chalking his cue, he said:

“I do. I believe if things are coming to you, you can’t escape them.”

That was all. He said nothing more. When we had finished the game he went up to bed, and I never saw him again. I shall never know what strange emotion impelled him to put that sudden question to a stranger.

XLI The Skipper

I knew he was drunk.

He was a skipper of the new school, a neat little man, clean-shaven, who might easily have passed for the commander of a submarine. In his cabin there hung a beautiful new coat with gold braid on it, the uniform which for its good service in the war has been granted to the mercantile marine, but he was shy of using it; it seemed absurd when he was no more than captain of a small boat on the Yangtze; and he stood on his bridge in a neat brown suit and a homburg hat; you could almost see yourself in his admirably polished shoes. His eyes were clear and bright and his skin was fresh. Though he had been at sea for twenty years and could not have been much less than forty he did not look more than twenty-eight. You might be sure that he was a clean-living fellow, as healthy in mind as he was in body, and the depravity of the East of which they talk had left him untouched. He had a pleasant taste in light literature and the works of E. V. Lucas adorned his bookcase. In his cabin you saw a photograph of a football team in which he figured and two of a young woman with neatly waved hair whom it was possible enough he was engaged to.

I knew he was drunk, but I did not think he was very drunk, till he asked me suddenly:

“What is democracy?”

I returned an evasive, perhaps a flippant answer, and for some minutes the conversation turned on less unseasonable topics to the occasion. Then breaking his silence, he said:

“I hope you don’t think I’m a socialist because I said, what is democracy.”

“Not at all,” I answered, “but I don’t see why you shouldn’t be a socialist.”

“I give you my word of honour I’m not,” he protested. “If I had my way I’d stand them up against a wall and shoot them.”

“What is socialism?” I asked.

“Oh, you know what I mean, Henderson and Ramsay Macdonald and all that sort of thing,” he answered. “I’m about fed up with the working man.”

“But you’re a working man yourself, I should have thought.”

He was silent for quite a long time and I thought his mind had wandered to other things. But I was wrong; he was thinking my statement over in all its bearings, for at last he said:

“Look here, I’m not a working man. Hang it all, I was at Harrow.”

XLII The Sights of Town

I am not an industrious sightseer, and when guides, professional or friendly, urge me to visit a famous monument I have a stubborn inclination to send them about their