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

drink all through the afternoon, a boy bringing them a bite if they were hungry, and drink all through the night. Fortunes were lost and won in the Glory Hole, for they were gamblers then and a man would risk all the profits of his run in a game of cards. Those were the good old days. But now the trade was gone, the tea clippers no longer thronged the harbour, the port was dead, and the young men, the young men of the A.P.C. or of Jardine’s, turned up their noses at the Glory Hole. And as the old pilot talked that dingy little cubicle with its stained table seemed to be for a moment peopled with those old skippers, hardy, reckless, and adventurous, of a day that has gone forever. XI Fear

I was staying a night with him on the road. The mission stood on a little hill just outside the gates of a populous city. The first thing I noticed about him was the difference of his taste. The missionary’s house as a rule is furnished in a style which is almost an outrage to decency. The parlour, with its air of an unused room, is papered with a gaudy paper, and on the wall hang texts, engravings of sentimental pictures⁠—The Soul’s Awakening and Luke Filde’s The Doctor⁠—or, if the missionary has been long in the country, congratulatory scrolls on stiff red paper. There is a Brussels carpet on the floor, rocking chairs if the household is American and a stiff armchair on each side of the fireplace if it is English. There is a sofa which is so placed that nobody sits on it and by the grim look of it few can want to. There are lace curtains on the windows. Here and there are occasional tables on which are photographs and what-nots with modern porcelain on them. The dining-room has an appearance of more use, but almost the whole of it is taken up by a large table and when you sit at it you are crowded into the fireplace. But in Mr. Wingrove’s study there were books from floor to ceiling, a table littered with papers, curtains of a rich green stuff, and over the fireplace a Tibetan banner. There was a row of Tibetan Buddhas on the chimney piece.

“I don’t know how it is, but you’ve got just the feeling of college rooms about the place,” I said.

“Do you think so?” he answered. “I was a tutor at Oriel for some time.”

He was a man of nearly fifty, I should think, tall and well-covered though not stout, with grey hair cut very short and a reddish face. One imagined that he must be a jovial man fond of laughter, an easy talker and a good fellow; but his eyes disconcerted you: they were grave and unsmiling; they had a look that I could only describe as harassed. I wondered if I had fallen upon him at an inconvenient moment when his mind was taken up with irksome matters, yet somehow I felt that this was not a passing expression, but a settled one rather, and I could not understand it. He had just that look of anxiety which you see in certain forms of heart disease. He chatted about one thing and another, then he said:

“I hear my wife come in. Shall we go into the drawing-room?”

He led me in and introduced me to a little thin woman, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a shy manner. It was plain that she belonged to a different class from her husband. The missionaries for the most part with all manner of virtues have not those which we can find no better way to describe than under the category of good breeding. They may be saints but they are not often gentlemen. Now it struck me that Mr. Wingrove was a gentleman, for it was evident that his wife was not a lady. She had a vulgar intonation. The drawing-room was furnished in a way I had never before seen in a missionary’s house. There was a Chinese carpet on the floor. Chinese pictures, old ones, hung on the yellow walls. Two or three Ming tiles gave a dash of colour. In the middle of the room was a blackwood table, elaborately carved, and on it was a figure in white porcelain. I made a trivial remark.

“I don’t much care for all these Chinese things meself,” answered my hostess briskly, “but Mr. Wingrove’s set on them. I’d clear them all out if I had my way.”

I laughed, not because I was amused, and then I caught in Mr. Wingrove’s eyes a flash of icy hatred. I was astonished. But it passed in a moment.

“We won’t have them if you don’t like them, my dear,” he said gently. “They can be put away.”

“Oh, I don’t mind them if they please you.”

We began to talk about my journey and in the course of conversation I happened to ask Mr. Wingrove how long it was since he had been in England.

“Seventeen years,” he said.

I was surprised.

“But I thought you had one year’s furlough every seven?”

“Yes, but I haven’t cared to go.”

“Mr. Wingrove thinks it’s bad for the work to go away for a year like that,” explained his wife. “Of course I don’t care to go without him.”

I wondered how it was that he had ever come to China. The actual details of the call fascinate me, and often enough you find people who are willing to talk of it, though you have to form your own opinion on the matter less from the words they say than from the implications of them; but I did not feel that Mr. Wingrove was a man who would be induced either directly or indirectly to speak of that intimate experience. He evidently took his work very seriously.

“Are there other foreigners here?” I asked.

“No.”

“It must be very lonely,” I said.

“I think I prefer it so,” he answered, looking at one of