Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham

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When I come to his connection with Blanche Stroeve I am
exasperated by the fragmentariness of the facts at my disposal.
To give my story coherence I should describe the
progress of their tragic union, but I know nothing of the
three months during which they lived together. I do not know
how they got on or what they talked about. After all, there
are twenty-four hours in the day, and the summits of emotion
can only be reached at rare intervals. I can only imagine how
they passed the rest of the time. While the light lasted and
so long as Blanche's strength endured, I suppose that
Strickland painted, and it must have irritated her when she
saw him absorbed in his work. As a mistress she did not then
exist for him, but only as a model; and then there were long
hours in which they lived side by side in silence. It must
have frightened her. When Strickland suggested that in her
surrender to him there was a sense of triumph over Dirk Stroeve,
because he had come to her help in her extremity, he opened
the door to many a dark conjecture. I hope it was not true.
It seems to me rather horrible. But who can fathom the
subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect
from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.
When Blanche saw that, notwithstanding his moments of passion,
Strickland remained aloof, she must have been filled with
dismay, and even in those moments I surmise that she realised
that to him she was not an individual, but an instrument of
pleasure; he was a stranger still, and she tried to bind him
to herself with pathetic arts. She strove to ensnare him with
comfort and would not see that comfort meant nothing to him.
She was at pains to get him the things to eat that he liked,
and would not see that he was indifferent to food. She was
afraid to leave him alone. She pursued him with attentions,
and when his passion was dormant sought to excite it, for then
at least she had the illusion of holding him. Perhaps she
knew with her intelligence that the chains she forged only
aroused his instinct of destruction, as the plate-glass window
makes your fingers itch for half a brick; but her heart,
incapable of reason, made her continue on a course she knew
was fatal. She must have been very unhappy. But the
blindness of love led her to believe what she wanted to be
true, and her love was so great that it seemed impossible to
her that it should not in return awake an equal love.

But my study of Strickland's character suffers from a greater
defect than my ignorance of many facts. Because they were
obvious and striking, I have written of his relations to
women; and yet they were but an insignificant part of his life.
It is an irony that they should so tragically have
affected others. His real life consisted of dreams and of
tremendously hard work.

Here lies the unreality of fiction. For in men, as a rule,
love is but an episode which takes its place among the other
affairs of the day, and the emphasis laid on it in novels
gives it an importance which is untrue to life. There are few
men to whom it is the most important thing in the world, and
they are not very interesting ones; even women, with whom the
subject is of paramount interest, have a contempt for them.
They are flattered and excited by them, but have an uneasy
feeling that they are poor creatures. But even during the
brief intervals in which they are in love, men do other things
which distract their mind; the trades by which they earn their
living engage their attention; they are absorbed in sport;
they can interest themselves in art. For the most part, they
keep their various activities in various compartments, and
they can pursue one to the temporary exclusion of the other.
They have a faculty of concentration on that which occupies
them at the moment, and it irks them if one encroaches on the
other. As lovers, the difference between men and women is
that women can love all day long, but men only at times.

With Strickland the sexual appetite took a very small place.
It was unimportant. It was irksome. His soul aimed elsewhither.
He had violent passions, and on occasion desire seized
his body so that he was driven to an orgy of lust, but
he hated the instincts that robbed him of his self-possession.
I think, even, he hated the inevitable partner in his debauchery.
When he had regained command over himself, he
shuddered at the sight of the woman he had enjoyed.
His thoughts floated then serenely in the empyrean, and he felt
towards her the horror that perhaps the painted butterfly,
hovering about the flowers, feels to the filthy chrysalis from
which it has triumphantly emerged. I suppose that art is a
manifestation of the sexual instinct. It is the same emotion
which is excited in the human heart by the sight of a lovely
woman, the Bay of Naples under the yellow moon, and the
of Titian. It is possible that Strickland hated
the normal release of sex because it seemed to him brutal by
comparison with the satisfaction of artistic creation.
It seems strange even to myself, when I have described a man who
was cruel, selfish, brutal and sensual, to say that he was a
great idealist. The fact remains.

He lived more poorly than an artisan. He worked harder.
He cared nothing for those things which with most people make
life gracious and beautiful. He was indifferent to money.
He cared nothing about fame. You cannot praise him because he
resisted the temptation to make any of those compromises with
the world which most of us yield to. He had no such temptation.
It never entered his head that compromise was possible.
He lived in Paris more lonely than an anchorite in the
deserts of Thebes. He asked nothing his fellows except
that they should leave him alone. He was single-hearted in
his aim, and to pursue it he was willing to sacrifice not only
himself -- many can do that -- but others. He had a vision.

Strickland was an odious man, but I still think be was a great one.

Chapter XLIV

A certain importance attaches to the views on art of painters,
and this is the natural place for me to set down what I know
of Strickland's opinions of the great artists of the past.
I am afraid I have very little worth noting. Strickland was not
a conversationalist, and he had no gift for putting what he
had to say in the striking phrase that the listener remembers.
He had no wit. His humour, as will be seen if I have in any
way succeeded in reproducing the manner of his conversation,
was sardonic. His repartee was rude. He made one laugh
sometimes by speaking the truth, but this is a form of humour
which gains its force only by its unusualness; it would cease
to amuse if it were commonly practised.

Strickland was not, I should say, a man of great intelligence,
and his views on painting were by no means out of the ordinary.
I never heard him speak of those whose work had a certain
analogy with his own -- of Cezanne, for instance, or of Van Gogh;
and I doubt very much if he had ever seen their pictures.
He was not greatly interested in the Impressionists.
Their technique impressed him, but I fancy that
he thought their attitude commonplace. When Stroeve was
holding forth at length on the excellence of Monet, he said:
"I prefer Winterhalter." But I dare say he said it to annoy,
and if he did he certainly succeeded.

I am disappointed that I cannot report any extravagances in
his opinions on the old masters. There is so much in his
character which is strange that I feel it would complete the
picture if his views were outrageous. I feel the need to
ascribe to him fantastic theories about his predecessors, and
it is with a certain sense of disillusion that I confess he
thought about them pretty much as does everybody else.
I do not believe he knew El Greco. He had a great but somewhat
impatient admiration for Velasquez. Chardin delighted him,
and Rembrandt moved him to ecstasy. He described the
impression that Rembrandt made on him with a coarseness I
cannot repeat. The only painter that interested him who was
at all unexpected was Brueghel the Elder. I knew very little
about him at that time, and Strickland had no power to explain
himself. I remember what he said about him because it was so
unsatisfactory.

"He's all right," said Strickland. "I bet he found it hell to paint."

When later, in Vienna, I saw several of Peter Brueghel's
pictures, I thought I understood why he had attracted
Strickland's attention. Here, too, was a man with a vision of
the world peculiar to himself. I made somewhat copious notes
at the time, intending to write something about him, but I
have lost them, and have now only the recollection of an emotion.
He seemed to see his fellow-creatures grotesquely,
and he was angry with them because they were grotesque;
life was a confusion of ridiculous, sordid happenings, a fit
subject for laughter, and yet it made him sorrowful to laugh.
Brueghel gave me the impression of a man striving to express
in one medium feelings more appropriate to expression in another,
and it may be that it was the obscure consciousness of this
that excited Strickland's sympathy. Perhaps both were trying
to put down in paint ideas which were more suitable to literature.

Strickland at this time must have been nearly forty-seven.

Chapter XLV

I have said already that but for the hazard of a journey to
Tahiti I should doubtless never have written this book. It is
thither that after many wanderings Charles Strickland came,
and it is there that he painted the pictures on which his fame
most securely rests. I suppose no artist achieves completely
the realisation of the dream that obsesses him, and Strickland,
harassed incessantly by his struggle with technique,
managed, perhaps, less than others to express the vision
that he saw with his mind's eye; but in Tahiti the
circumstances were favourable to him; he found in his
surroundings the accidents necessary for his inspiration to
become effective, and his later pictures give at least a
suggestion of what he sought. They offer the imagination
something new and strange. It is as though in this far
country his spirit, that had wandered disembodied, seeking a
tenement, at last was able to clothe itself in flesh. To use
the hackneyed phrase, here he found himself.

It would seem that my visit to this remote island should
immediately revive my interest in Strickland, but the work I
was engaged in occupied my attention to the exclusion of
something that was irrelevant, and it was not till I had been
there some days that I even remembered his connection with it.
After all, I had not seen him for fifteen years, and it was
nine since he died. But I think my arrival at Tahiti would
have driven out of my head matters of much more immediate
importance to me, and even after a week I found it not easy to
order myself soberly. I remember that on my first morning I
awoke early, and when I came on to the terrace of the hotel no
one was stirring. I wandered round to the kitchen, but it was
locked, and on a bench outside it a native boy was sleeping.
There seemed no chance of breakfast for some time, so I
sauntered down to the water-front. The Chinamen were already
busy in their shops. The sky had still the pallor of dawn,
and there was a ghostly silence on the lagoon. Ten miles away
the island of Murea, like some high fastness of the Holy
Grail, guarded its mystery.

I did not altogether believe my eyes. The days that had
passed since I left Wellington seemed extraordinary and
unusual. Wellington is trim and neat and English; it reminds
you of a seaport town on the South Coast. And for three days
afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds chased one another
across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm
and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its
spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it
has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe
is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it
vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly
suggests the approach to the golden realms of fancy than the
approach to Tahiti. Murea, the sister isle, comes into view
in rocky splendour, rising from the desert sea mysteriously,
like the unsubstantial fabric of a magic wand. With its
jagged outline it is like a Monseratt of the Pacific, and you
may imagine that there Polynesian knights guard with strange
rites mysteries unholy for men to know. The beauty of the
island is unveiled as diminishing distance shows you in
distincter shape its lovely peaks, but it keeps its secret as
you sail by, and, darkly inviolable, seems to fold itself
together in a stony, inaccessible grimness. It would not
surprise you if, as you came near seeking for an opening in
the reef, it vanished suddenly from your view, and nothing met
your gaze but the blue loneliness of the Pacific.

Tahiti is a lofty green island, with deep folds of a darker
green, in which you divine silent valleys; there is mystery in
their sombre depths, down which murmur and plash cool streams,
and you feel that in those umbrageous places life from
immemorial times has been led according to immemorial ways.
Even here is something sad and terrible. But the impression
is fleeting, and serves only to give a greater acuteness to
the enjoyment of the moment. It is like the sadness which you
may see in the jester's eyes when a merry company is laughing
at his sallies; his lips smile and his jokes are gayer because in
the communion of laughter he finds himself more intolerably alone.
For Tahiti is smiling and friendly; it is like a
lovely woman graciously prodigal of her charm and beauty;
and nothing can be more conciliatory than the entrance into the
harbour at Papeete. The schooners moored to the quay are trim
and neat, the little town along the bay is white and urbane,
and the flamboyants, scarlet against the blue sky, flaunt
their colour like a cry of passion. They are sensual with an
unashamed violence that leaves you breathless. And the crowd
that throngs the wharf as the steamer draws alongside is gay
and debonair; it is a noisy, cheerful, gesticulating crowd.
It is a sea of brown faces. You have an impression of
coloured movement against the flaming blue of the sky.
Everything is done with a great deal of bustle, the unloading
of the baggage, the examination of the customs; and everyone
seems to smile at you. It is very hot. The colour dazzles you.

Chapter XLVI

HAD not been in Tahiti long before I met Captain Nichols.
He came in one morning when I was having breakfast on the terrace
of the hotel and introduced himself. He had heard that I was
interested in Charles Strickland, and announced that he was
come to have a talk about him. They are as fond of gossip in
Tahiti as in an English village, and one or two enquiries I
had made for pictures by Strickland had been quickly spread.
I asked the stranger if he had breakfasted.

"Yes; I have my coffee early," he answered, "but I don't mind
having a drop of whisky."

I called the Chinese boy.

"You don't think it's too early?" said the Captain.

"You and your liver must decide that between you," I replied.

"I'm practically a teetotaller," he said, as he poured himself
out a good half-tumbler of Canadian Club.

When he smiled he showed broken and discoloured teeth. He was
a very lean man, of no more than average height, with gray
hair cut short and a stubbly gray moustache. He had not
shaved for a couple of days. His face was deeply lined,
burned brown by long exposure to the sun, and he had a pair of
small blue eyes which were astonishingly shifty. They moved
quickly, following my smallest gesture, and they gave him the
look of a very thorough rogue. But at the moment he was all
heartiness and good-fellowship. He was dressed in a
bedraggled suit of khaki, and his hands would have been all
the better for a wash.

"I knew Strickland well," he said, as he leaned back in his
chair and lit the cigar I had offered him. "It's through me
he came out to the islands."

"Where did you meet him?" I asked.

"In Marseilles."

"What were you doing there?"

He gave me an ingratiating smile.

"Well, I guess I was on the beach."

My friend's appearance suggested that he was now in the
same predicament, and I prepared myself to cultivate an
agreeable acquaintance. The society of beach-combers always
repays the small pains you need be at to enjoy it. They are
easy of approach and affable in conversation. They seldom put
on airs, and the offer of a drink is a sure way to their hearts.
You need no laborious steps to enter upon familiarity with
them, and you can earn not only their confidence, but their
gratitude, by turning an attentive ear to their discourse.
They look upon conversation as the great pleasure of life,
thereby proving the excellence of their civilisation, and for
the most part they are entertaining talkers. The extent of
their experience is pleasantly balanced by the fertility of
their imagination. It cannot be said that they are without guile,
but they have a tolerant respect for the law, when the
law is supported by strength. It is hazardous to play poker
with them, but their ingenuity adds a peculiar excitement to
the best game in the world. I came to know Captain Nichols
very well before I left Tahiti, and I am the richer for his
acquaintance. I do not consider that the cigars and whisky he
consumed at my expense (he always refused cocktails, since he
was practically a teetotaller), and the few dollars, borrowed
with a civil air of conferring a favour upon me, that passed
from my pocket to his, were in any way equivalent to the
entertainment he afforded me. I remained his debtor.
I should be sorry if my conscience, insisting on a rigid
attention to the matter in hand, forced me to dismiss him in a
couple of lines.

I do not know why Captain Nichols first left England. It was
a matter upon which he was reticent, and with persons of his
kind a direct question is never very discreet. He hinted at
undeserved misfortune, and there is no doubt that he looked
upon himself as the victim of injustice. My fancy played with
the various forms of fraud and violence, and I agreed with him
sympathetically when he remarked that the authorities in the
old country were so damned technical. But it was nice to see
that any unpleasantness he had endured in his native land had
not impaired his ardent patriotism. He frequently declared
that England was the finest country in the world, sir, and he
felt a lively superiority over Americans, Colonials, Dagos,
Dutchmen, and Kanakas.

But I do not think he was a happy man. He suffered from
dyspepsia, and he might often be seen sucking a tablet of
pepsin; in the morning his appetite was poor; but this
affliction alone would hardly have impaired his spirits.
He had a greater cause of discontent with life than this.
Eight years before he had rashly married a wife. There are men
whom a merciful Providence has undoubtedly ordained to a single
life, but who from wilfulness or through circumstances they
could not cope with have flown in the face of its decrees.
There is no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.
Of such was Captain Nichols. I met his wife. She was
a woman of twenty-eight, I should think, though of a type
whose age is always doubtful; for she cannot have looked
different when she was twenty, and at forty would look no
older. She gave me an impression of extraordinary tightness.
Her plain face with its narrow lips was tight, her skin was
stretched tightly over her bones, her smile was tight, her
hair was tight, her clothes were tight, and the white drill
she wore had all the effect of black bombazine. I could not
imagine why Captain Nichols had married her, and having
married her why he had not deserted her. Perhaps he had,
often, and his melancholy arose from the fact that he could
never succeed. However far he went and in howsoever secret a
place he hid himself, I felt sure that Mrs. Nichols,
inexorable as fate and remorseless as conscience, would
presently rejoin him. He could as little escape her as the
cause can escape the effect.

The rogue, like the artist and perhaps the gentleman, belongs
to no class. He is not embarrassed by the of
the hobo, nor put out of countenance by the etiquette of the
prince. But Mrs. Nichols belonged to the well-defined class,
of late become vocal, which is known as the lower-middle.
Her father, in fact, was a policeman. I am certain that he was
an efficient one. I do not know what her hold was on the
Captain, but I do not think it was love. I never heard her speak,
but it may be that in private she had a copious conversation.
At any rate, Captain Nichols was frightened to death of her.
Sometimes, sitting with me on the terrace of the hotel,
he would become conscious that she was walking in the road outside.
She did not call him; she gave no sign that she was aware
of his existence; she merely walked up and down composedly.
Then a strange uneasiness would seize the Captain;
he would look at his watch and sigh.

"Well, I must be off," he said.

Neither wit nor whisky could detain him then. Yet he was a
man who had faced undaunted hurricane and typhoon, and would
not have hesitated to fight a dozen unarmed niggers with
nothing but a revolver to help him. Sometimes Mrs. Nichols
would send her daughter, a pale-faced, sullen child of seven,
to the hotel.

"Mother wants you," she said, in a whining tone.

"Very well, my dear," said Captain Nichols.

He rose to his feet at once, and accompanied his daughter
along the road. I suppose it was a very pretty example of the
triumph of spirit over matter, and so my digression has at
least the advantage of a moral.

Chapter XLVII

I have tried to put some connection into the various things
Captain Nichols told me about Strickland, and I here set them
down in the best order I can. They made one another's
acquaintance during the latter part of the winter following my
last meeting with Strickland in Paris. How he had passed the
intervening months I do not know, but life must have been very
hard, for Captain Nichols saw him first in the Asile de Nuit.
There was a strike at Marseilles at the time, and Strickland,
having come to the end of his resources, had apparently found
it impossible to earn the small sum he needed to keep body and
soul together.

The Asile de Nuit is a large stone building where pauper and
vagabond may get a bed for a week, provided their papers are
in order and they can persuade the friars in charge that they
are workingmen. Captain Nichols noticed Strickland for his
size and his singular appearance among the crowd that waited
for the doors to open; they waited listlessly, some walking to
and fro, some leaning against the wall, and others seated on
the curb with their feet in the gutter; and when they filed
into the office he heard the monk who read his papers address
him in English. But he did not have a chance to speak to him,
since, as he entered the common-room, a monk came in with a
huge Bible in his arms, mounted a pulpit which was at the end
of the room, and began the service which the wretched outcasts
had to endure as the price of their lodging. He and
Strickland were assigned to different rooms, and when, thrown
out of bed at five in the morning by a stalwart monk, he had made
his bed and washed his face, Strickland had already disappeared.
Captain Nichols wandered about the streets for an hour of
bitter cold, and then made his way to the Place Victor Gelu,
where the sailor-men are wont to congregate. Dozing against
the pedestal of a statue, he saw Strickland again.
He gave him a kick to awaken him.

"Come and have breakfast, mate," he said.

"Go to hell," answered Strickland.

I recognised my friend's limited vocabulary, and I prepared to
regard Captain Nichols as a trustworthy witness.

"Busted?" asked the Captain.

"Blast you," answered Strickland.

"Come along with me. I'll get you some breakfast."

After a moment's hesitation, Strickland scrambled to his feet,
and together they went to the Bouchee de Pain, where the
hungry are given a wedge of bread, which they must eat there
and then, for it is forbidden to take it away; and then to the
Cuillere de Soupe, where for a week, at eleven and four,
you may get a bowl of thin, salt soup. The two buildings are
placed far apart, so that only the starving should be tempted
to make use of them. So they had breakfast, and so began the
queer companionship of Charles Strickland and Captain Nichols.

They must have spent something like four months at Marseilles
in one another's society. Their career was devoid of adventure,
if by adventure you mean unexpected or thrilling incident,
for their days were occupied in the pursuit of enough
money to get a night's lodging and such food as would stay
the pangs of hunger. But I wish I could give here the pictures,
coloured and racy, which Captain Nichols' vivid narrative
offered to the imagination. His account of their discoveries
in the low life of a seaport town would have made a
charming book, and in the various characters that came their
way the student might easily have found matter for a very
complete dictionary of rogues. But I must content myself with
a few paragraphs. I received the impression of a life intense
and brutal, savage, multicoloured, and vivacious. It made the
Marseilles that I knew, gesticulating and sunny, with its
comfortable hotels and its restaurants crowded with the well-to-do,
tame and commonplace. I envied men who had seen with their
own eyes the sights that Captain Nichols described.

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