On a Chinese Screen W. Somerset Maugham (books for 10th graders TXT) 📖
- Author: W. Somerset Maugham
Book online «On a Chinese Screen W. Somerset Maugham (books for 10th graders TXT) 📖». Author W. Somerset Maugham
“My girl was a child when I saw her last,” he said to me when he showed me the photograph. “Now she’s a married woman.”
“When are you going on leave?” I asked him.
“Oh, my wife’s coming out now.”
“But don’t you want to see your daughter?” I asked.
He looked at the photograph again and then looked away. There was a curious look in his face, a somewhat peevish look, I thought, and he answered:
“I’ve been away from home too long now. I shall never go back.”
I leaned back in my chair, smoking my pipe. The photograph showed me a girl of nineteen with wide blue eyes and bobbed hair; it was a pretty face, open and friendly, but the most noticeable thing about it was a peculiar charm of expression. Bob Webb’s daughter was a very alluring young person. I liked that engaging audacity.
“It was rather a surprise to me when she sent along that photograph,” he said presently. “I’d always thought of her as a child. If I’d met her in the street I shouldn’t have known her.”
He gave a little laugh that was not quite natural.
“It isn’t fair. … When she was a child she used to love being petted.”
His eyes were fixed on the photograph. I seemed to see in them a very unexpected emotion.
“I can hardly realise she’s my daughter. I thought she’d come back with her mother, and then she wrote and said she was engaged.”
He looked away now and I thought there was a singular embarrassment in the down-turned corners of his mouth.
“I suppose one gets selfish out here, I felt awfully sore, but I gave a big dinner party to all the fellows here the day she was married, and we all got blind.”
He gave an apologetic laugh.
“I had to, you know,” he said awkwardly. “I had such an awful hump.”
“What’s the young man like?” I asked.
“She’s awfully in love with him. When she writes to me her letters are about nothing else.” There was an odd quaver in his voice. “It’s a bit thick to bring a child into the world and to educate her and be fond of her and all that sort of thing just for some man whom you’ve never even seen. I’ve got his photograph somewhere, I don’t know where it is. I don’t think I’d care about him very much.”
He helped himself to another whisky. He was tired. He looked old and bloated. He said nothing for a long time, and then suddenly he seemed to pull himself together.
“Well, thank God, her mother’s coming out soon.”
I don’t think he was quite a normal man after all.
XLV The Old TimerHe was seventy-six years old. He had come to China when he was little more than a boy as second mate of a sailing vessel and had never gone home again. Since then he had been many things. For long years he had commanded a Chinese boat that ran from Shanghai to Ichang and he knew by heart every inch of the great and terrible Yangtze. He had been master of a tug at Hong-Kong and had fought in
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