From On a Chinese Screen, by W. Somerset Maugham.
Copyright, 1922, by George H. Doran Company.
No one knew better than he that he was an important person. He was
number one in not the least important branch of the most important
English firm in China. He had worked his way up through solid ability,
and he looked back with a faint smile at the callow clerk who had come
out to China thirty years before. When he remembered the modest home he
had come from, a little red house in a long row of little red houses, in
Barnes, a suburb which, aiming desperately at the genteel, achieves only
a sordid melancholy, and compared it with the magnificent stone mansion,
with its wide verandahs and spacious rooms, which was at once the office
of the company and his own residence, he chuckled with satisfaction. He
had come a long way since then. He thought of the high tea to which he
sat down when he came home from school (he was at St. Paul’s), with his
father and mother and his two sisters, a slice of cold meat, a great
deal of bread and butter and plenty of milk in his tea, everybody
helping himself, and then he thought of the state in which now he ate
his evening meal. He always dressed, and whether he was alone or not he
expected the three boys to wait at table. His number one boy knew
exactly what he liked, and he never had to bother himself with the
details of housekeeping; but he always had a set dinner with soup and
fish, entree, roast, sweet and savoury, so that if he wanted to ask
anyone in at the last moment he could. He liked his food, and he did not
see why when he was alone he should have less good a dinner than when he
had a guest.
He had indeed gone far. That was why he did not care to go home now; he
had not been to England for ten years, and he took his leave in Japan or
Vancouver where he was sure of meeting old friends from the China coast.
He knew no one at home. His sisters had married in their own station,
their husbands were clerks and their sons were clerks; there was nothing
between him and them; they bored him. He satisfied the claims of
relationship by sending them every Christmas a piece of fine silk, some
elaborate embroidery, or a case of tea. He was not a mean man, and as
long as his mother lived he had made her an allowance. But when the time
came for him to retire he had no intention of going back to England, he
had seen too many men do that and he knew how often it was a failure; he
meant to take a house near the race-course in Shanghai: what with bridge
and his ponies and gold he expected to get through the rest of his life
very comfortably. But he had a good many years before he need think of
retiring. In another five or six Higgins would be going home, and then
he would take charge of the head office in Shanghai. Meanwhile he was
very happy where he was; he could save money, which you couldn’t do in
Shanghai, and have a good time into the bargain. This place had another
advantage over Shanghai: he was the most prominent man in the community
and what he said went. Even the consul took care to keep on the right
side of him. Once a consul and he had been at loggerheads, and it was
not he who had gone to the wall. The taipan thrust out his jaw
pugnaciously as he thought of the incident.
But he smiled, for he felt in an excellent humour. He was walking back
to his office from a capital luncheon at the Hong-Kong and Shanghai
Bank. They did you very well there. The food was first rate and there
was plenty of liquor. He had started with a couple of cocktails, then he
had had some excellent sauterne, and he had finished up with two glasses
of port and some fine old brandy. He felt good. And when he left he did
a thing that was rare with him: he walked. His bearers with his chair
kept a few paces behind him in case he felt inclined to slip into it,
but he enjoyed stretching his legs. He did not get enough exercise these
days. Now that he was too heavy to ride, it was difficult to get
exercise. But if he was too heavy to ride he could still keep ponies,
and as he strolled along in the balmy air he thought of the spring
meeting. He had a couple of griffins that he had hopes of and one of the
lads in his office had turned out a fine jockey (he must see they didn’t
sneak him away, old Higgins in Shanghai would give a pot of money to get
him over there) and he ought to pull off two or three races. He
flattered himself that he had the finest stable in the city. He pouted
his broad chest like a pigeon. It was a beautiful day, and it was good
to be alive.
He paused as he came to the cemetery. It stood there, neat and orderly,
as an evident sign of the community’s opulence. He never passed the
cemetery without a little glow of pride. He was pleased to be an
Englishman. For the cemetery stood in a place, valueless when it was
chosen, which with the increase of the city’s affluence was now worth a
great deal of money. It had been suggested that the graves should be
moved to another spot and the land sold for building, but the feeling of
the community was against it. It gave the taipan a sense of satisfaction
to think that their dead rested on the most valuable site on the island.
It showed that there were things they cared for more than money. Money
be blowed! When it came to “the things that mattered” (this was a
favourite phrase with the taipan), well, one remembered that money
wasn’t everything.
And now he thought he would take a stroll through. He looked at the
graves. They were neatly kept, and the pathways were free from weeds.
There was a look of prosperity. And as he sauntered along he read the
names on the tombstones. Here were three side by side; the captain, the
first mate, and the second mate of the barque _Mary Baxter_, who had all
perished together in the typhoon of 1908. He remembered it well. There
was a little group of two missionaries, their wives and children, who
had been massacred during the Boxer troubles. Shocking thing that had
been! Not that he took much stock in missionaries; but, hang it all, one
couldn’t have these damned Chinese massacring them. Then he came to a
cross with a name on it he knew. Good chap, Edward Mulock, but he
couldn’t stand his liquor, drank himself to death, poor devil, at
twenty-five: the taipan had known a lot of them do that; there were
several more neat crosses with a man’s name on them and the age,
twenty-five, twenty-six, or twenty-seven; it was always the same story;
they had come out to China: they had never seen so much money before,
they were good fellows, and they wanted to drink with the rest: they
couldn’t stand it, and there they were in the cemetery. You had to have
a strong head and a fine constitution to drink drink for drink on the
China coast. Of course it was very sad, but the taipan could hardly help
a smile when he thought how many of those young fellows he had drunk
underground. And there was a death that had been useful, a fellow in his
own firm, senior to him and a clever chap too: if that fellow had lived
he might not have been taipan now. Truly the ways of fate were
inscrutable. Ah, and here was little Mrs. Turner, Violet Turner, she had
been a pretty little thing, he had had quite an affair with her; he had
been devilish cut up when she died. He looked at her age on the
tombstone. She’d be no chicken if she were alive now. And as he thought
of all those dead people, a sense of satisfaction spread through him. He
had beaten them all. They were dead, and he was alive, and by George
he’d scored them off. His eyes collected in one picture all those
crowded graves and he smiled scornfully. He very nearly rubbed his
hands.
“No one ever thought I was a fool,” he muttered.
He had a feeling of good-natured contempt for the gibbering dead. Then,
as he strolled along, he came suddenly upon two coolies digging a grave.
He was astonished, for he had not heard that anyone in the community was
dead.
“Who the devil’s that for?” he said aloud.
The coolies did not even look at him, they went on with their work,
standing in the grave, deep down, and they shovelled up heavy clods of
earth. Though he had been so long in China he knew no Chinese, in his
day it was not thought necessary to learn the damned language, and he
asked the coolies in English whose grave they were digging. They did not
understand. They answered him in Chinese and he cursed them for ignorant
fools. He knew that Mrs. Broome’s child was ailing, and it might have
died, but he would certainly have heard of it, and besides that wasn’t a
child’s grave, it was a man’s and a big man’s too. It was uncanny. He
wished he hadn’t gone into that cemetery; he hurried out and stepped
into his chair. His good humour had all gone and there was an uneasy
frown on his face. The moment he got back to his office he called to his
number two:
“I say, Peters, who’s dead, d’you know?”
But Peters knew nothing. The taipan was puzzled. He called one of the
native clerks and sent him to the cemetery to ask the coolies. He began
to sign his letters. The clerk came back and said the coolies had gone
and there was no one to ask. The taipan began to feel vaguely annoyed:
he did not like things to happen of which he knew nothing. His own boy
would know; his boy always knew everything, and he sent for him; but the
boy had heard of no death in the community.
“I knew no one was dead,” said the taipan irritably. “But what’s the
grave for?”
He told the boy to go to the overseer of the cemetery and find out what
the devil he had dug a grave for when no one was dead.
“Let me have a whisky and soda before you go,” he added, as the boy was
leaving the room.
He did not know why the sight of the grave had made him uncomfortable.
But he tried to put it out of his mind. He felt better when he had drunk
the whisky, and he finished his work. He went upstairs and turned over
the pages of _Punch_. In a few minutes he would go to the club and play
a rubber or two of bridge before dinner. But it would ease his mind to
hear what his boy had to say, and he waited for his return. In a little
while the boy came back, and he brought the overseer with him.
“What are you having a grave dug for?” he asked the overseer point
blank. “Nobody’s dead.”
“I no dig glave,” said the man.
“What the devil do you mean by that? There were two coolies digging a
grave this afternoon.”
The two Chinese looked at one another. Then the boy said they had been
to the cemetery together. There was no new grave there.
The taipan only just stopped himself from speaking.
“But damn it all, I saw it myself,” were the words on the tip of his
tongue.
But he did not say them. He grew very red as he choked them down. The
two Chinese looked at him with their steady eyes. For a moment his
breath failed him.
“All right. Get out,” he gasped.
But as soon as they were gone he shouted for the boy again, and when he
came, maddeningly impassive, he told him to bring some whisky. He rubbed
his sweating face with a handkerchief. His hand trembled when he lifted
the glass to his lips. They could say what they liked, but he had seen
the grave. Why, he could hear still the dull thud as the coolies threw
the spadefuls of earth on the ground above them. What did it mean? He
could feel his heart beating. He felt strangely ill at ease. But he
pulled himself together. It was all nonsense. If there was no grave
there it must have been an hallucination. The best thing he could do was
to go to the club, and if he ran across the doctor, he would ask him to
give him a look over.
Everyone in the club looked just the same as ever. He did not know why
he should have expected them to look different. It was a comfort. These
men, living for many years with one another, lives that were
methodically regulated, had acquired a number of little
idiosyncrasies—one of them hummed incessantly while he played bridge,
another insisted on drinking beer through a straw—and these tricks which
had so often irritated the taipan now gave him a sense of security. He
needed it, for he could not get out of his head that strange sight he
had seen; he played bridge very badly; his partner was censorious, and
the taipan lost his temper. He thought the men were looking at him
oddly. He wondered what they saw in him that was unaccustomed.
Suddenly he felt he could not bear to stay in the club any longer. As he
went out he saw the doctor reading _The Times_ in the reading-room, but
he could not bring himself to speak to him. He wanted to see for himself
whether that grave was really there, and, stepping into his chair he
told his bearers to take him to the cemetery. You couldn’t have an
hallucination twice, could you? And besides, he would take the overseer
in with him, and if the grave was not there, he wouldn’t see it, and if
it was he’d give the overseer the soundest thrashing he’d ever had. But
the overseer was nowhere to be found. He had gone out and taken the keys
with him. When the taipan found he could not get into the cemetery, he
felt suddenly exhausted. He got back into his chair and told his bearers
to take him home. He would lie down for half an hour before dinner. He
was tired out. That was it. He had heard that people had hallucinations
when they were tired. When his boy came in to put out his clothes for
dinner, it was only by an effort of will that he got up. He had a strong
inclination not to dress that evening, but he resisted it: he made it a
rule to dress, he had dressed every evening for twenty years, and it
would never do to break his rule. But he ordered a bottle of champagne
with his dinner, and that made him feel more comfortable. Afterwards he
told the boy to bring him the best brandy. When he had drunk a couple of
glasses of this he felt himself again. Hallucinations be damned! He went
to the billiard room and practised a few difficult shots. There could
not be much the matter with him when his eye was so sure. When he went
to bed he sank immediately into a sound sleep.
But suddenly he awoke. He had dreamed of that open grave and the coolies
digging leisurely. He was sure he had seen them. It was absurd to say it
was an hallucination when he had seen them with his own eyes. Then he
heard the rattle of the night watchman going his rounds. It broke upon
the stillness of the night so harshly that it made him jump out of his
skin. And then terror seized him. He felt a horror of the winding
multitudinous streets of the Chinese city, and there was something
ghastly and terrible in the convoluted roofs of the temples with their
devils grimacing and tortured. He loathed the smells that assaulted his
nostrils. And the people. Those myriads of blue-clad coolies, and the
beggars in their filthy rags, and the merchants and the magistrates,
sleek, smiling, and inscrutable, in their long black gowns. They seemed
to press upon him with menace. He hated the country. China! Why had he
ever come? He was panic-stricken now. He must get out. He would not stay
another year, another month. What did he care about Shanghai?
“Oh, my God!” he cried, “if I were only safely back in England!”
He wanted to go home. If he had to die, he wanted to die in England. He
could not bear to be buried among all these yellow men, with their
slanting eyes and their grinning faces. He wanted to be buried at home,
not in that grave he had seen that day. He could never rest there.
Never. What did it matter what people thought? Let them think what they
liked. The only thing that mattered was to get away while he had the
chance.
He got out of bed and wrote to the head of the firm and said he had
discovered he was dangerously ill. He must be replaced. He could not
stay longer than was absolutely necessary. He must go home at once.
They found the letter in the morning clenched in the taipan’s hand. He
had slipped down between the desk and the chair. He was stone dead.