I left Bangkok on a shabby little ship of four or five hundred tons.
The dingy saloon, which served also as dining-room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel chairs on both sides of them.
The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty.
Cockroaches walked about on the floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash-basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out.
We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water's edge.
We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me.
The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.
I had gone on board early in the morning and soon discovered that I was thrown amid the oddest collection of persons I had ever encountered.
There were two French traders and a Belgian colonel, an Italian tenor, the American proprietor of a circus with his wife, and a retired French official with his.
The circus proprietor was what is termed a good mixer, a type which according to your mood you fly from or welcome, but I happened to be feeling much pleased with life and before I had been on board an hour we had shaken for drinks, and he had shown me his animals.
He was a very short fat man, and his stengah-shifter, white but none too clean, outlined the noble proportions of his abdomen, but the collar was so tight that you wondered he did not choke.
He had a red, clean-shaven face, a merry blue eye, and short, untidy sandy hair.
He wore a battered topee well on the back of his head.
His name was Wilkins and he was born in Portland, Oregon.
It appears that the Oriental has a passion for the circus and Mr Wilkins for twenty years had been travelling up and down the East from Port Said to Yokohama (Aden, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Rangoon, Singapore, Penang, Bangkok, Saigon, Hue, Hanoi, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, their names roll on the tongue savourily, crowding the imagination with sunshine and strange sounds and a multicoloured activity) with his menagerie and his merry-go-rounds.
It was a strange life he led, unusual, and one that, one would have thought, must offer the occasion for all sorts of curious experiences, but the odd thing about him was that he was a perfectly common-place little man and you would have been prepared to find him running a garage or keeping a third-rate hotel in a second-rate town in California.
The fact is, and I have noticed it so often that I do not know why it should always surprise me, that the extraordinariness of a man's life does not make him extraordinary, but contrariwise if a man is extraordinary he will make extraordinariness out of a life as humdrum as that of a country curate.
I wish I could feel it reasonable to tell here the story of the hermit I went to see on an island in the Torres Straits, a shipwrecked mariner who had lived there alone for thirty years, but when you are writing a book you are imprisoned by the four walls of your subject and though for the entertainment of my own digressing mind I set it down now I should be forced in the end, by my sense of what is fit to go between two covers and what is not, to cut it out.
Anyhow, the long and short of it is that notwithstanding his long and intimate communion with nature and his thoughts the man was as dull, insensitive, and vulgar an oaf at the end of this experience as he must have been at the beginning.
The Italian singer passed us, and Mr Wilkins told me that he was a Neapolitan who was on his way to Hong-Kong to rejoin his company, which he had been forced to leave owing to an attack of malaria in Bangkok.
He was an enormous fellow, and very fat, and when he flung himself into a chair it creaked with dismay.
He took off his topee, displayed a great head of long, curly, greasy hair, and ran podgy and beringed fingers through it.
'He ain't very sociable,' said Mr Wilkins. 'He took the cigar I gave him, but he wouldn't have a drink.
I shouldn't wonder if there wasn't somethin' rather queer about him.
Nasty-lookin' guy, ain't he?'
Then a little fat woman in white came on deck holding by the hand a Wa-Wa monkey. It walked solemnly by her side.
'This is Mrs Wilkins,' said the circus proprietor, 'and our youngest son.
Draw up a chair, Mrs Wilkins, and meet this gentleman.
I don't know his name, but he's already paid for two drinks for me and if he can't shake any better than he has yet he'll pay for one for you too.'
Mrs Wilkins sat down with an abstracted serious look, and with her eyes on the blue sea suggested that she did not see why she shouldn't have a lemonade.
'My, it's hot,' she murmured, fanning herself with the topee which she took off.
'Mrs Wilkins feels the heat,' said her husband. 'She's had twenty years of it now.'
'Twenty-two and a half,' said Mrs Wilkins, still looking at the sea.
'And she's never got used to it yet.'
'Nor never shall and you know it,' said Mrs Wilkins.
She was just the same size as her husband and just as fat, and she had a round red face like his and the same sandy, untidy hair.
I wondered if they had married because they were so exactly alike, or if in the course of years they had acquired this astonishing resemblance.
She did not turn her head but continued to look absently at the sea.
'Have you shown him the animals?' she asked.
'You bet your life I have.'
'What did he think of Percy?'
'Thought him fine.'
I could not but feel that I was being unduly left out of a conversation of which I was at all events partly the subject, so I asked:
'Who's Percy?'
'Percy's our eldest son.
There's a flyin'-fish, Elmer. He's the orang-utan.
Did he eat his food well this morning?'
'Fine.
He's the biggest orang-utan in captivity.
I wouldn't take a thousand dollars for him.'