Free The Gentleman In the Parlour by W. Somerset Maugham Page B

gay ridingbreeches. He had a yellow handkerchief bound round his head. He was a romantic figure cantering through that wide upland, but not so romantic as Rembrandt’s
Polish Rider
who rides through space and time with so gallant a bearing. No living horseman has ever achieved that effect of mystery so that when you look at him you feel that you stand on the threshold of an unknown that lures you on and yet closes the way for you. Nor is it strange, for nature and the beauty of nature are dead and senseless things and it is only art that can give them significance.
    But with so much to distract me I could not but suspect that I should reach my journey’s end without after all having made up my mind upon a single one of the important subjects that I had promised myself to consider.

XIII
    The day’s march was no more than from twelve to fifteen miles, that being the distance that a mule can comfortably do, and the distance from one another at which the PWD bungalows are placed. But because it is the daily routine it gives you just as much the sensation of covering space as if you had been all day in an express train. When you arrive at your destination you are in reality just as far from your starting place, though you have gone but a few miles, as if you had travelled from Paris to Madrid. When you have ridden along a stream for a couple of days it seems to you of quite imposing length; you ask its name and are surprised to find that it has none, until you stop to reflect that you have followed it for no more than five and twenty miles. And the differences between the upland that you rode through yesterday and the jungle that you are riding through to-day impress themselves upon you as muchas the differences between one country and another.
    But because the bungalows are built on the same pattern, though you have been riding for several hours (your caravan does little more than two miles an hour) you seem always to arrive at the same house. It stands on piles in a compound a few yards away from the road. There is a large living-room, and behind, two bedrooms with their bath-rooms. In the middle of the living-room is a handsome teak table. There are two easy-chairs with extensions for the legs and four stout, severe armchairs to set round the table. There is a chiffonier on which are copies of the Strand Magazine for 1918 and two tattered much read novels by Phillips Oppenheim. On the walls there is a longitudinal section of the road, a summary of the Burma Game rules and a list of the furniture and the household utensils of the bungalow. In the compound are the servants’ quarters, stalls for the ponies and a cook-house. It is certainly not very pretty, it is not very comfortable, but it is solid, substantial and serviceable; and though I had never seen any one bungalow before and after that day should never see it again, I seldom caught sight of it at the end of the morning’s journey without a little thrill of content. It was like coming home and when I got my first glimpse of its trim roof I put the spurs to my pony and galloped helter-skelter to the door.
    The bungalow stands generally on the outskirts of a village, and when I arrived at the confines of the commune I found waiting to greet me the headman with his clerk and an attendant, a son or nephew, and the elders. When I approached they went down on their haunches, shikoed and offered me a cup of water, a few marigolds and a little rice. I drank the water with misgiving. But once I was handed on a tray eight thin tapers and was told that this was the highest mark of respect that could be shown me, for they were the tapers that were set before the image of Buddha. I could not but be conscious that I little deserved such a compliment. I settled down inthe bungalow and then my interpreter informed me that the headman and the elders stood without, desiring to tender the customary presents. They brought them in on lacquer trays, eggs, rice and bananas.