At last I turned away. I felt that Strickland had kept his secret to the grave.
“Voyons, Rene, mon ami,” came the loud, cheerful voice of Madame Coutras, “what are you doing all this time? Here are the aperitifs. Ask Monsieur if he will not drink a little glass of Quinquina Dubonnet.”
“Volontiers, Madame,” I said, going out on to the verandah.
The spell was broken.
Chapter LVIII
The time came for my departure from Tahiti. According to the gracious custom of the island, presents were given me by the persons with whom I had been thrown in contact — baskets made of the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, mats of pandanus, fans; and Tiare gave me three little pearls and three jars of guava-jelly made with her own plump hands. When the mail-boat, stopping for twenty-four hours on its way from Wellington to San Francisco, blew the whistle that warned the passengers to get on board, Tiare clasped me to her vast bosom, so that I seemed to sink into a billowy sea, and pressed her red lips to mine. Tears glistened in her eyes. And when we steamed slowly out of the lagoon, making our way gingerly through the opening in the reef, and then steered for the open sea, a certain melancholy fell upon me. The breeze was laden still with the pleasant odours of the land. Tahiti is very far away, and I knew that I should never see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.
Not much more than a month later I was in London; and after I had arranged certain matters which claimed my immediate attention, thinking Mrs. Strickland might like to hear what I knew of her husband’s last years, I wrote to her. I had not seen her since long before the war, and I had to look out her address in the telephone-book. She made an appointment, and I went to the trim little house on Campden Hill which she now inhabited. She was by this time a woman of hard on sixty, but she bore her years well, and no one would have taken her for more than fifty. Her face, thin and not much lined, was of the sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in youth she must have been a much handsomer woman than in fact she was. Her hair, not yet very gray, was becomingly arranged, and her black gown was modish. I remembered having heard that her sister, Mrs. MacAndrew, outliving her husband but a couple of years, had left money to Mrs. Strickland; and by the look of the house and the trim maid who opened the door I judged that it was a sum adequate to keep the widow in modest comfort.
When I was ushered into the drawing-room I found that Mrs. Strickland had a visitor, and when I discovered who he was, I guessed that I had been asked to come at just that time not without intention. The caller was Mr. Van Busche Taylor, an American, and Mrs. Strickland gave me particulars with a charming smile of apology to him.
“You know, we English are so dreadfully ignorant. You must forgive me if it’s necessary to explain.” Then she turned to me. “Mr. Van Busche Taylor is the distinguished American critic. If you haven’t read his book your education has been shamefully neglected, and you must repair the omission at once. He’s writing something about dear Charlie, and he’s come to ask me if I can help him.”
Mr. Van Busche Taylor was a very thin man with a large, bald head, bony and shining; and under the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent of New England, and there was about his demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me ask myself why on earth he was busying himself with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tickled at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put into her mention of her husband’s name, and while the pair conversed I took stock of the room in which we sat. Mrs. Strickland had moved with the times. Gone were the Morris papers and gone the severe cretonnes, gone were the Arundel prints that had adorned the walls of her drawing-room in Ashley Gardens; the room blazed with fantastic colour, and I wondered if she knew that those varied hues, which fashion had imposed upon her, were due to the dreams of a poor painter in a South Sea island. She gave me the answer herself.
“What wonderful cushions you have,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor.
“Do you like them?” she said, smiling. “Bakst, you know.”
And yet on the walls were coloured reproductions of several of Strickland’s best pictures, due to the enterprise of a publisher in Berlin.
“You’re looking at my pictures,” she said, following my eyes. “Of course, the originals are out of my reach, but it’s a comfort to have these. The publisher sent them to me himself. They’re a great consolation to me.”
“They must be very pleasant to live with,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor.
“Yes; they’re so essentially decorative.”
“That is one of my profoundest convictions,” said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Great art is always decorative.”
Their eyes rested on a nude woman suckling a baby, while a girl was kneeling by their side holding out a flower to the indifferent child. Looking over them was a wrinkled, scraggy hag. It was Strickland’s version of the Holy Family. I suspected that for the figures had sat his household above Taravao, and the woman and the baby were Ata and his first son. I asked myself if Mrs. Strickland had any inkling of the facts.
The conversation proceeded, and I marvelled at the tact with which Mr. Van Busche Taylor avoided all subjects that might have been in the least embarrassing, and at the ingenuity with which Mrs. Strickland, without saying a word that was untrue, insinuated that her relations with her husband had always been perfect. At last Mr. Van Busche Taylor rose to go. Holding his hostess’ hand, he made her a graceful, though perhaps too elaborate, speech of thanks, and left us.
“I hope he didn’t bore you,” she said, when the door closed behind him. “Of course it’s a nuisance sometimes, but I feel it’s only right to give people any information I can about Charlie. There’s a certain responsibility about having been the wife of a genius.”
She looked at me with those pleasant eyes of hers, which had remained as candid and as sympathetic as they had been more than twenty years before. I wondered if she was making a fool of me.
“Of course you’ve given up your business,” I said.
“Oh, yes,” she answered airily. “I ran it more by way of a hobby than for any other reason, and my children persuaded me to sell it. They thought I was overtaxing my strength.”
I saw that Mrs. Strickland had forgotten that she had ever done anything so disgraceful as to work for her living. She had the true instinct of the nice woman that it is only really decent for her to live on other people’s money.
“They’re here now,” she said. “I thought they’d, like to hear what you had to say about their father. You remember Robert, don’t you? I’m glad to say he’s been recommended for the Military Cross.”
She went to the door and called them. There entered a tall man in khaki, with the parson’s collar, handsome in a somewhat heavy fashion, but with the frank eyes that I remembered in him as a boy. He was followed by his sister. She must have been the same age as was her mother when first I knew her, and she was very like her. She too gave one the impression that as a girl she must have been prettier than indeed she was.
“I suppose you don’t remember them in the least,” said Mrs. Strickland, proud and smiling. “My daughter is now Mrs. Ronaldson. Her husband’s a Major in the Gunners.”
“He’s by way of being a pukka soldier, you know,” said Mrs. Ronaldson gaily. “That’s why he’s only a Major.”
I remembered my anticipation long ago that she would marry a soldier. It was inevitable. She had all the graces of the soldier’s wife. She was civil and affable, but she could hardly conceal her intimate conviction that she was not quite as others were. Robert was breezy.
“It’s a bit of luck that I should be in London when you turned up,” he said. “I’ve only got three days’ leave.”
“He’s dying to get back,” said his mother.
“Well, I don’t mind confessing it, I have a rattling good time at the front. I’ve made a lot of good pals. It’s a first-rate life. Of cou
rse war’s terrible, and all that sort of thing; but it does bring out the best qualities in a man, there’s no denying that.”
Then I told them what I had learned about Charles Strickland in Tahiti. I thought it unnecessary to say anything of Ata and her boy, but for the rest I was as accurate as I could be. When I had narrated his lamentable death I ceased. For a minute or two we were all silent. Then Robert Strickland struck a match and lit a cigarette.
“The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small,” he said, somewhat impressively.
Mrs. Strickland and Mrs. Ronaldson looked down with a slightly pious expression which indicated, I felt sure, that they thought the quotation was from Holy Writ. Indeed, I was unconvinced that Robert Strickland did not share their illusion. I do not know why I suddenly thought of Strickland’s son by Ata. They had told me he was a merry, light-hearted youth. I saw him, with my mind’s eye, on the schooner on which he worked, wearing nothing but a pair of dungarees; and at night, when the boat sailed along easily before a light breeze, and the sailors were gathered on the upper deck, while the captain and the supercargo lolled in deck-chairs, smoking their pipes, I saw him dance with another lad, dance wildly, to the wheezy music of the concertina. Above was the blue sky, and the stars, and all about the desert of the Pacific Ocean.
A quotation from the Bible came to my lips, but I held my tongue, for I know that clergymen think it a little blasphemous when the laity poach upon their preserves. My Uncle Henry, for twenty-seven years Vicar of Whitstable, was on these occasions in the habit of saying that the devil could always quote scripture to his purpose. He remembered the days when you could get thirteen Royal Natives for a shilling.
The Short Stories
Maugham attended The King’s School, Canterbury, where he was teased for his bad English (French had been his first language) and his short stature, which he inherited from his father. Maugham developed a stammer that stayed with him all his life, although it was sporadic, being subject to his moods and circumstances. At sixteen he refused to continue at The King’s School. His uncle allowed him to travel to Germany, where he studied literature.
INTRODUCTION TO THE SHORT STORIES
Maugham wrote 122 short stories in his long career, and of these, 121 of the stories appeared in magazines before being published in collections. It was a genre he was very comfortable with, as he claimed it enabled him to distil his ideas and experiences into a purer form, for greater effect. The very first piece of writing that Maugham submitted to a publisher was a short story. It was rejected and he was told to try a longer piece; yet the short story was a genre that Maugham returned to repeatedly, and with success. After his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, was published, he frequently submitted short stories to magazines. They were eventually organised into collections:
Orientations, published 1899 by Fisher Unwin
The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands, published 1921 by Doran
The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories, published 1926 by Heinemann
Six Stories Written in the First Person Singular, published 1931 by Doran
The Book Bag, published in 1932 by Long and Smith
Ah King, published in 1933 by Heinemann
Judgement Seat, published in 1934 by Centaur Press
Cosmopolitans, published in 1936 by Doubleday, Doran & Co
The Mixture as Before, published in 1940 by Heinemann
Creatures of Circumstance, published in 1947 by Heinemann
Maugham’s short stories are held in wide regard. As usual, he made blatant use of experiences he encountered and stories he was told on his travels — sometimes in confidence — and the tales and individuals appeared with the thinnest of disguises in his work. He was unrepentant — the fact that some people would not receive him after publication was of no consequence to him.
Maugham’s first collection, Orientations, was published early in his career, and expert reader Edward Garnett was not impressed. The only story he saw merit in was Daisy, in which a carpenter’s daughter from Maugham’s favourite fictional place, Blackstable, is rejected by her family for having an affair with a married man. Daisy has to make her own way in life, and some time later, her family are aghast to find that their errant daughter is starring in the title role of Dick Whittington in a nearby town. Some time later, Daisy is able to turn the tables on her family when everyone’s fortunes are reversed. Despite Garnett’s reservations, the collection was critically well received.
Maugham’s biographer, Selina Hastings, states that the next collection, The Trembling of a Leaf, “marked the triumphant return to the genre of which he was to become a master.” There are six stories in this collection, and they all appeared first in magazines before being collated in this volume. They are set in the South Seas, and based on the experiences Maugham had in the region whilst travelling with his lover, Gerald Haxton. By far the most successful story here is Rain, a story of a clash of moralities that eventually leads to tragedy, played out against the backdrop of incessant tropical rainfall. It was so successful that it earned Maugham over one million dollars in royalties due to repeated reprints, and the key character of Sadie Thompson has been played on screen by Gloria Swanson (1928), Joan Crawford (1932) and Rita Hayworth (1953), whilst Marilyn Monroe would have played the part in an adaptation for television had she not died.
The Casuarina Tree and Ah King are both collections inspired by Maugham’s travels in the Far East, in particular Malaya, accompanied by Gerald Haxton. They are both examples of fine writing, with strong themes such as inter-racial relationships, adultery, snobbery and general frictions between people living in an “alien” environment. One story, The Letter, about a woman’s murder trial in which she is accused of killing a colonial man, was famously made into a film in 1940, starring Bette Davis as the deceptively cool Leslie Crosby. It had also been adapted for the stage by Maugham in 1927, and there had been an earlier film adaptation in 1929. The plot for this story was, as one would expect from Maugham, drawn from life – the trial of Ethel Proudlock in Kuala Lumpur in 1911. Another fine story in this collection, The Outstation, focuses on the tensions between two men thrown together in a remote region.
In Ah King, Maugham uses first person narration in The Book Bag, relating the story of an incestuous affair; whilst Maugham almost dips into comedy in The Vessel of Wrath.
The Mixture as Before took its title from the often used phrase used by doctors at the time for repeat prescriptions. It includes some excellent fiction, but despite his powers as a short story writer, Maugham announced in the preface that he would not write any more. In Three Fat Women of Antibes, three women compete to lose weight, but fail; other stories include gigolos, murderers, adulterers and affluent settings such as Monte Carlo.
In Creatures of Circumstance possibly the most powerful story is The Unconquered, a dark tale of abuse and its consequences, during and in the aftermath of the Second World War in France. This was adapted for television in 1970, starring Michael Pennington and Caroline Mortimer.
In 1948, four of Maugham’s stories were adapted for the cinema and screened in one film, Quartet: The Facts of Life, The Alien Corn, The Kite and The Colonel’s Lady. Maugham himself was included, introducing the stories. It was a great success, and was followed by two more films with the same format, Trio and Encore.
There are hints of Maugham’s sexuality (variously described as bisexual or homosexual) and his interest in sexuality in the stories from time to time – in Three Fat Women of Antibes (1933, interestingly, the same year as The Narrow Corner was published, which had homosexual themes, according to some commentators), the character Frances Hickman is a very masculine woman, who likes to be addressed as Frank, smoking a long cigar and wearing clothes “as like a man as she could”, the implication being that she may be lesbian.
The first edition of the highly successful collection ‘The Trembling of a Leaf’
THE SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
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br /> CONTENTS
THE PUNCTILIOUSNESS OF DON SEBASTIAN
A BAD EXAMPLE
DE AMICITIA
FAITH
THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS
DAISY
CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE
LADY HABART
PRO PATRIA
A POINT OF LAW
AN IRISH GENTLEMAN
FLIRTATION
THE FORTUNATE PAINTER
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)
GOOD MANNERS
COUSIN AMY
THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)
THE PACIFIC
ENVOI
RAIN
THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD
HONOLULU
THE POOL
MACKINTOSH
THE MOTHER
A MAN FROM GLASGOW
BEFORE THE PARTY
THE TAIPAN
THE SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER
CONTENTS
A BAD EXAMPLE
A MAN FROM GLASGOW
A MARRIAGE OF CONVENIENCE (1906 VERSION)
A POINT OF LAW
AN IRISH GENTLEMAN
BEFORE THE PARTY
COUSIN AMY
CUPID AND THE VICAR OF SWALE
DAISY
DE AMICITIA
ENVOI
FAITH
FLIRTATION
GOOD MANNERS
HONOLULU
LADY HABART
MACKINTOSH
PRO PATRIA
RAIN
THE CHOICE OF AMYNTAS
THE FALL OF EDWARD BARNARD
THE FORTUNATE PAINTER
THE HAPPY COUPLE (1908 VERSION)
THE MOTHER
Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated) Page 255
