I have written my last story.
CONTENTS
Preface v
A Woman of Fifty 1
The Man with the Scar 18
The Bum 22
The Closed Shop 29
An Official Position 37
A Man with a Conscience 57
French Joe 76
German Harry 81
The Four Dutchmen 85
The End of the Flight 92
Flotsam and Jetsam 98
A Casual Affair 122
Mr. Know-All 142
Straight Flush 149
The Portrait of a Gentleman 155
Raw Material 161
A Friend in Need 165
The Dream 170
The Taipan 175
The Consul 182
Mirage 187
Mabel 206
Masterson 211
A Marriage of Convenience 221
Princess September 234
In a Strange Land 243
The Lotus Eater 248
Salvatore 263
The Wash-Tub 268
Mayhew 276
The Happy Man 280
The Point of Honour 285
The Mother 299
The Romantic Young Lady 313
The Poet 323
A Man from Glasgow 328
The Lion’s Skin 338
The Three Fat Women of Antibes 361
The Happy Couple 376
The Voice of the Turtle 390
The Facts of Life 406
Gigolo and Gigolette 424
Appearance and Reality 441
The Luncheon 456
The Unconquered 461
The Ant and the Grasshopper 487
Home 491
The Escape 496
The Judgment Seat 500
Sanatorium 505
Louise 528
Lord Mountdrago 535
A String of Beads 558
The Promise 565
The Verger 572
The Social Sense 579
The Colonel’s Lady 587
Episode 605
The Kite 625
The Treasure 648
Winter Cruise 664
THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES
OF
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
II
A WOMAN OF FIFTY
My friend Wyman Holt is a professor of English Literature in one of the smaller universities of the Middle West, and hearing that I was speaking in a near-by city-near-by as distances go in the vastness of America-he wrote to ask me if I would come and give a talk to his class. He suggested that I should stay with him for a few days so that he could show me something of the surrounding country. I accepted the invitation, but told him that my engagements would prevent me from spending more than a couple of nights with him. He met me at the station, drove me to his house, and after we had had a drink we walked over to the campus. I was somewhat taken aback to find so many people in the hall in which I was to speak, for I had not expected more than twenty at the outside and I was not prepared to give a solemn lecture, but only an informal chat. I was more than a little intimidated to see a number of middle-aged and elderly persons, some of whom I suspected were members of the faculty, and I was afraid they would find what I had to say very superficial. However, there was nothing to do but to start and, after Wyman had introduced me to the audience in a manner that I very well knew I couldn’t live up to, that is what I did. I said my say, I answered as best I could a number of questions, and then I retired with Wyman into a little room at the back of the stage from which I had spoken.
Several people came in. They said the usual kindly things to me that are said on these occasions, and I made the usual polite replies. I was thirsting for a drink. Then a woman came in and held out her hand to me.
“How very nice it is to see you again,” she said. “It’s years since we last met.”
To the best of my belief I’d never set eyes on her before. I forced a cordial smile to my tired, stiff lips, shook her proffered hand effusively and wondered who the devil she was. My professor must have seen from my face that I was trying to place her, for he said: “Mrs Greene is married to a member of our faculty and she gives a course on the Renaissance and Italian literature.”
“Really,” I said. “Interesting.”
I was no wiser than before.
“Has Wyman told you that you’re dining with us tomorrow night?”
“I’m very glad,” I said.
“It’s not a party. Only my husband, his brother, and my sister-in-law. I suppose Florence has changed a lot since then.”
“Florence?” I said to myself. “Florence?”
That was evidently where I’d known her. She was a woman of about fifty with grey hair simply done and marcelled without exaggeration. She was a trifle too stout and she was dressed neatly enough, but without distinction, in a dress that I guessed had been bought ready-made at the local branch of a big store. She had rather large eyes of a pale blue and a poor complexion; she wore no rouge and had used a lipstick but sparingly. She seemed a nice creature. There was something maternal in her demeanour, something placid and fulfilled, which I found appealing. I supposed that I had run across her on one of my frequent visits to Florence and because it was perhaps the only time she had been there our meeting made more of an impression on her than on me. I must confess that my acquaintance with the wives of members of a faculty is very limited, but she was just the sort of person I should have expected the wife of a professor to be, and picturing her life, useful but uneventful, on scanty means, with its little social gatherings, its bickerings, its gossip, its busy dullness, I could easily imagine that her trip to Florence must linger with her as a thrilling and unforgettable experience.
On the way back to his house Wyman said to me:
“You’ll like Jasper Greene. He’s clever.”
“What’s he a professor of?”
“He’s not a professor; he’s an instructor. A fine scholar. He’s her second husband. She was married to an Italian before.”
“Oh?” That didn’t chime in with my ideas at all. “What was her name?”
“I haven’t a notion. I don’t believe it was a great success.” Wyman chuckled. “That’s only a deduction I draw from the fact that she hasn’t a single thing in the house to suggest that she ever spent any time in Italy. I should have expected her to have at least a refectory table, an old chest or two, and an embroidered cope hanging on the wall.”
I laughed. I knew those rather dreary pieces that people buy when they’re in Italy, the gilt wooden candlesticks, the Venetian glass mirrors, and the high-backed, comfortless chairs. They look well enough when you see them in the crowded shops of the dealers in antiques, but when you bring them to another country they’re too often a sad disappointment. Even if they’re genuine, which they seldom are, they look ill-at-ease and out of place.
“Laura has money,” Wyman went on. “When they married she furnished the house from cellar to attic in Chicago. It’s quite a show place; it’s a little masterpiece of hideousness and vulgarity. I never go into the living-room without marvelling at the unerring taste with which she picked out exactly what you’d expect to find in the bridal suite of a second-class hotel in Atlantic City.”
To explain this irony I should state that Wyman’s living-room was all chromium and glass, rough modern fabrics, with a boldly Cubist rug on the floor, and on the walls Picasso prints and drawings by Tchelicheff. However, he gave me a very good dinner. We spent the evening chatting pleasantly about things that mutually interested us and finished it with a couple of bottles of beer. I went to bed in a room of somewhat aggressive modernity. I read for a while and then putting out the light composed myself to sleep.
“Laura?” I said to myself. “Laura what?”
I tried to think back. I thought of all the people I knew in Florence, hoping that by association I might recall when and where I had come in contact with Mrs Greene. Since I was going
to dine with her I wanted to recall something that would prove that I had not forgotten her. People look upon it as a slight if you don’t remember them. I suppose we all attach a sort of importance to ourselves, and it is humiliating to realize that we have left no impression at all upon the persons we have associated with. I dozed off, but before I fell into the blessedness of deep sleep, my subconscious, released from the effort of striving at recollection, I suppose, grew active and I was suddenly wide awake, for I remembered who Laura Greene was. It was no wonder that I had forgotten her, for it was twenty-five years since I had seen her, and then only haphazardly during a month I spent in Florence.
It was just after the First World War. She had been engaged to a man who was killed in it and she and her mother had managed to get over to France to see his grave. They were San Francisco people. After doing their sad errand they had come down to Italy and were spending the winter in Florence. At that time there was quite a large colony of English and Americans. I had some American friends, a Colonel Harding and his wife, colonel because he had occupied an important position in the Red Cross, who had a handsome villa in the Via Bolognese, and they asked me to stay with them. I spent most of my mornings sightseeing and met my friends at Doney’s in the Via Tornabuoni round about noon to drink a cocktail. Doney’s was the gathering-place of everybody one knew, Americans, English, and such of the Italians as frequented their society. There you heard all the gossip of the town. There was generally a lunch-party either at a restaurant or at one or other of the villas with their fine old gardens a mile or two from the centre of the city. I had been given a card to the Florence Club, and in the afternoon Charley Harding and I used to go there to play bridge or a dangerous game of poker with a pack of thirty-two cards. In the evening there would be a dinner-party with more bridge perhaps and often dancing. One met the same people all the time, but the group was large enough, the people sufficiently various, to prevent it from being tedious. Everyone was more or less interested in the arts, as was only right and proper in Florence, so that, idle as life seemed, it was not entirely frivolous.
Laura and her mother, Mrs Clayton, a widow, lived in one of the better boarding-houses. They appeared to be comfortably off. They had come to Florence with letters of introduction and soon made many friends. Laura’s story appealed to their sympathies, and people were glad on that account to do what they could for the two women, but they were in themselves nice and quickly became liked for themselves. They were hospitable and gave frequent lunches at one or other of the restaurants where one ate macaroni and the inevitable scaloppini, and drank Chianti. Mrs Glayton was perhaps a little lost in this cosmopolitan society, where matters that were strange to her were seriously or gaily talked about, but Laura took to it as though it were her native element. She engaged an Italian woman to teach her the language and soon was reading the Inferno with her; she devoured books on the art of the Renaissance and on Florentine history, and I sometimes came across her, Baedeker in hand, at the Uffizzi or in some church studiously examining works of art.
She was twenty-four or twenty-five then and I was well over forty, so that though we often met we became cordially acquainted rather than intimate. She was by no means beautiful, but she was comely in rather an unusual way; she had an oval face with bright blue eyes and very dark hair which she wore very simply, parted in the middle, drawn over her ears and tied in a chignon low on the nape of her neck. She had a good skin and naturally high colour; her features were good without being remarkable, and her teeth were even, small, and white; but her chief asset was her easy grace of movement, and I was not surprised when they told me that she danced “divinely’. Her figure was very good, somewhat fuller than was the fashion of the moment; and I think what made her attractive was the odd mingling in her appearance of the Madonna in an altar-piece by one of the later Italian painters and a suggestion of sensuality. It certainly made her very alluring to the Italians who gathered at Doney’s in the morning or were occasionally invited to lunch or dinner in the American or English villas. She was evidently accustomed to dealing with amorous young men, for though she was charming, gracious, and friendly with them she kept them at their distance. She quickly discovered that they were all looking for an American heiress who would restore the family fortunes, and with a demure amusement which I found admirable made them delicately understand that she was far from rich. They sighed a little and turned their attentions at Doney’s, which was their happy hunting-ground, to more likely objects. They continued to dance with her, and to keep their hand in flirted with her, but their aspirations ceased to be matrimonial.
But there was one young man who persisted. I knew him slightly because he was one of the regular poker-players at the club. I played occasionally. It was impossible to win and the disgruntled foreigners used sometimes to say that the Italians ganged up on us, but it may be only that they knew the particular game they played better than we did. Laura’s admirer, Tito di San Pietro, was a bold and even reckless player and would often lose sums he could ill afford. (That was not his real name, but I call him that since his own is famous in Florentine history.) He was a good-looking youth, neither short nor tall, with fine black eyes, thick black hair brushed back from his forehead and shining with oil, an olive skin, and features of classical regularity. He was poor and he had some vague occupation, which did not seem to interfere with his amusements, but he was always beautifully dressed. No one quite knew where he lived, in a furnished room perhaps or in the attic of some relation; and all that remained of his ancestors’ great possessions was a Cinquecento villa about thirty miles from the city. I never saw it, but I was told that it was of amazing beauty, with a great neglected garden of cypresses and live oaks, overgrown borders of box, terraces, artificial grottoes, and crumbling statues. His widowed father, the count, lived there alone and subsisted on the wine he made from the vines of the small property he still owned and the oil from his olive trees. He seldom came to Florence, so I never met him, but Charley Harding knew him fairly well.
“He’s a perfect specimen of the Tuscan nobleman of the old school,” he said. “He was in the diplomatic service in his youth and he knows the world. He has beautiful manners and such an air, you almost feel he’s doing you a favour when he says how d’you do to you. He’s a brilliant talker. Of course he hasn’t a penny, he squandered the little he inherited on gambling and women, but he bears his poverty with great dignity. He acts as though money were something beneath his notice.”
“What sort of age is he?” I asked.
“Fifty, I should say, but he’s still the handsomest man I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“Oh?”
“You describe him, Bessie. When he first came here he made a pass at Bessie. I’ve never been quite sure how far it went.”
“Don’t be a fool, Charley,” Mrs Harding laughed.
She gave him the sort of look a woman gives her husband when she has been married to him many years and is quite satisfied with him.
“He’s very attractive to women and he knows it,” she said. “When he talks to you he gives you the impression that you’re the only woman in the world and of course it’s flattering. But it’s only a game and a woman would have to be a perfect fool to take him seriously. He is very handsome. Tall and spare and he holds himself well. He has great dark liquid eyes, like the boy’s; his hair is snow-white, but very thick still, and the contrast with his bronzed, young face is really breath-taking. He has a ravaged, rather battered look, but at the same time a look of such distinction, it’s really quite incredibly romantic’
“He also has his great dark liquid eyes on the main chance,” said Charley Harding dryly. “And he’ll never let Tito marry a girl who has no more money than Laura.”
“She has about five thousand dollars a year of her own,” said Bessie. “And she’ll get that much more when her mother dies.”
“Her mother can live for another thirty years, and five thousand a year won’t go far to keep a husband,
a father, and two or three children, and restore a ruined villa with practically not a stick of furniture in it.”
“I think the boy’s desperately in love with her.”
“How old is he?” I asked.
“Twenty-six.”
A few days after this Charley, on coming back to lunch, since for once we were lunching by ourselves, told me that he had run across Mrs Clayton in the Via Tornabuoni and she had said that she and Laura were driving out that afternoon with Tito to meet his father and see the villa.
The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - II - The World Over Page 2
