Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham

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The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was
very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green
paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames.
The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight
lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale
rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence
of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece.
At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in
London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste,
artistic, and dull.

When we left I walked away with Miss Waterford, and the fine
day and her new hat persuaded us to saunter through the Park.

"That was a very nice party," I said.

"Did you think the food was good? I told her that if she
wanted writers she must feed them well."

"Admirable advice," I answered. "But why does she want them?"

Miss Waterford shrugged her shoulders.

"She finds them amusing. She wants to be in the movement.
I fancy she's rather simple, poor dear, and she thinks we're
all wonderful. After all, it pleases her to ask us to luncheon,
and it doesn't hurt us. I like her for it."

Looking back, I think that Mrs. Strickland was the most
harmless of all the lion-hunters that pursue their quarry from
the rarefied heights of Hampstead to the nethermost studios of
Cheyne Walk. She had led a very quiet youth in the country,
and the books that came down from Mudie's Library brought with
them not only their own romance, but the romance of London.
She had a real passion for reading (rare in her kind, who for
the most part are more interested in the author than in his book,
in the painter than in his pictures), and she invented a
world of the imagination in which she lived with a freedom she
never acquired in the world of every day. When she came to
know writers it was like adventuring upon a stage which till
then she had known only from the other side of the footlights.
She saw them dramatically, and really seemed herself to live a
larger life because she entertained them and visited them in
their fastnesses. She accepted the rules with which they
played the game of life as valid for them, but never for a
moment thought of regulating her own conduct in accordance
with them. Their moral eccentricities, like their oddities of dress,
their wild theories and paradoxes, were an entertainment which
amused her, but had not the slightest influence on her convictions.

"Is there a Mr. Strickland?" I asked

"Oh yes; he's something in the city. I believe he's a
stockbroker. He's very dull."

"Are they good friends?"

"They adore one another. You'll meet him if you dine there.
But she doesn't often have people to dinner. He's very quiet.
He's not in the least interested in literature or the arts."

"Why do nice women marry dull men?"

"Because intelligent men won't marry nice women."

I could not think of any retort to this, so I asked if Mrs.
Strickland had children.

"Yes; she has a boy and a girl. They're both at school."

The subject was exhausted, and we began to talk of other things.

Chapter V

During the summer I met Mrs. Strickland not infrequently.
I went now and then to pleasant little luncheons at her flat,
and to rather more formidable tea-parties. We took a fancy to
one another. I was very young, and perhaps she liked the idea
of guiding my virgin steps on the hard road of letters; while
for me it was pleasant to have someone I could go to with my
small troubles, certain of an attentive ear and reasonable
counsel. Mrs. Strickland had the gift of sympathy. It is a
charming faculty, but one often abused by those who are
conscious of its possession: for there is something ghoulish
in the avidity with which they will pounce upon the misfortune
of their friends so that they may exercise their dexterity.
It gushes forth like an oil-well, and the sympathetic pour out
their sympathy with an abandon that is sometimes embarrassing
to their victims. There are bosoms on which so many tears
have been shed that I cannot bedew them with mine.
Mrs. Strickland used her advantage with tact. You felt that you
obliged her by accepting her sympathy. When, in the
enthusiasm of my youth, I remarked on this to Rose Waterford,
she said:

"Milk is very nice, especially with a drop of brandy in it,
but the domestic cow is only too glad to be rid of it.
A swollen udder is very uncomfortable."

Rose Waterford had a blistering tongue. No one could say such
bitter things; on the other hand, no one could do more
charming ones.

There was another thing I liked in Mrs. Strickland.
She managed her surroundings with elegance. Her flat was always
neat and cheerful, gay with flowers, and the chintzes in the
drawing-room, notwithstanding their severe design, were bright
and pretty. The meals in the artistic little dining-room were
pleasant; the table looked nice, the two maids were trim and
comely; the food was well cooked. It was impossible not to
see that Mrs. Strickland was an excellent housekeeper.
And you felt sure that she was an admirable mother. There were
photographs in the drawing-room of her son and daughter.
The son -- his name was Robert -- was a boy of sixteen at Rugby;
and you saw him in flannels and a cricket cap, and again in a
tail-coat and a stand-up collar. He had his mother's candid
brow and fine, reflective eyes. He looked clean, healthy, and normal.

"I don't know that he's very clever," she said one day, when I
was looking at the photograph, "but I know he's good. He has
a charming character."

The daughter was fourteen. Her hair, thick and dark like her
mother's, fell over her shoulders in fine profusion, and she
had the same kindly expression and sedate, untroubled eyes.

"They're both of them the image of you," I said.

"Yes; I think they are more like me than their father."

"Why have you never let me meet him?" I asked.

"Would you like to?"

She smiled, her smile was really very sweet, and she blushed a
little; it was singular that a woman of that age should flush
so readily. Perhaps her naivete was her greatest charm.

"You know, he's not at all literary," she said. "He's a
perfect philistine."

She said this not disparagingly, but affectionately rather, as
though, by acknowledging the worst about him, she wished to
protect him from the aspersions of her friends.

"He's on the Stock Exchange, and he's a typical broker.
I think he'd bore you to death."

"Does he bore you?" I asked.

"You see, I happen to be his wife. I'm very fond of him."

She smiled to cover her shyness, and I fancied she had a fear
that I would make the sort of gibe that such a confession
could hardly have failed to elicit from Rose Waterford.
She hesitated a little. Her eyes grew tender.

"He doesn't pretend to be a genius. He doesn't even make much
money on the Stock Exchange. But he's awfully good and kind."

"I think I should like him very much."

"I'll ask you to dine with us quietly some time, but mind, you come
at your own risk; don't blame me if you have a very dull evening."

Chapter VI

But when at last I met Charles Strickland, it was under
circumstances which allowed me to do no more than just make
his acquaintance. One morning Mrs. Strickland sent me round a
note to say that she was giving a dinner-party that evening,
and one of her guests had failed her. She asked me to stop
the gap. She wrote:

"It's only decent to warn you that you will be bored to
extinction. It was a thoroughly dull party from the
beginning, but if you will come I shall be uncommonly grateful.
And you and I can have a little chat by ourselves."

It was only neighbourly to accept.

When Mrs. Strickland introduced me to her husband, he gave me
a rather indifferent hand to shake. Turning to him gaily,
she attempted a small jest.

"I asked him to show him that I really had a husband. I think
he was beginning to doubt it."

Strickland gave the polite little laugh with which people
acknowledge a facetiousness in which they see nothing funny,
but did not speak. New arrivals claimed my host's attention,
and I was left to myself. When at last we were all assembled,
waiting for dinner to be announced, I reflected, while I
chatted with the woman I had been asked to "take in," that
civilised man practises a strange ingenuity in wasting on
tedious exercises the brief span of his life. It was the kind
of party which makes you wonder why the hostess has troubled
to bid her guests, and why the guests have troubled to come.
There were ten people. They met with indifference, and would
part with relief. It was, of course, a purely social function.
The Stricklands "owed" dinners to a number of persons,
whom they took no interest in, and so had asked them;
these persons had accepted. Why? To avoid the tedium of
dining , to give their servants a rest, because
there was no reason to refuse, because they were "owed" a dinner.

The dining-room was inconveniently crowded. There was a K.C.
and his wife, a Government official and his wife,
Mrs. Strickland's sister and her husband, Colonel MacAndrew,
and the wife of a Member of Parliament. It was because the Member
of Parliament found that he could not leave the House that I had
been invited. The respectability of the party was portentous.
The women were too nice to be well dressed, and
too sure of their position to be amusing. The men were solid.
There was about all of them an air of well-satisfied prosperity.

Everyone talked a little louder than natural in an instinctive
desire to make the party go, and there was a great deal of
noise in the room. But there was no general conversation.
Each one talked to his neighbour; to his neighbour on the
right during the soup, fish, and entree; to his neighbour on
the left during the roast, sweet, and savoury. They talked of
the political situation and of golf, of their children and the
latest play, of the pictures at the Royal Academy, of the
weather and their plans for the holidays. There was never a
pause, and the noise grew louder. Mrs. Strickland might
congratulate herself that her party was a success.
Her husband played his part with decorum. Perhaps he did not talk
very much, and I fancied there was towards the end a look of
fatigue in the faces of the women on either side of him.
They were finding him heavy. Once or twice Mrs. Strickland's eyes
rested on him somewhat anxiously.

At last she rose and shepherded the ladies out of one room.
Strickland shut the door behind her, and, moving to the other
end of the table, took his place between the K.C. and the
Government official. He passed round the port again and
handed us cigars. The K.C. remarked on the excellence of the
wine, and Strickland told us where he got it. We began to
chat about vintages and tobacco. The K.C. told us of a case
he was engaged in, and the Colonel talked about polo. I had
nothing to say and so sat silent, trying politely to show
interest in the conversation; and because I thought no one was
in the least concerned with me, examined Strickland at my
ease. He was bigger than I expected: I do not know why I had
imagined him slender and of insignificant appearance; in point
of fact he was broad and heavy, with large hands and feet, and
he wore his evening clothes clumsily. He gave you somewhat
the idea of a coachman dressed up for the occasion. He was a
man of forty, not good-looking, and yet not ugly, for his
features were rather good; but they were all a little larger
than life-size, and the effect was ungainly. He was clean
shaven, and his large face looked uncomfortably naked.
His hair was reddish, cut very short, and his eyes were small,
blue or grey. He looked commonplace. I no longer wondered
that Mrs. Strickland felt a certain embarrassment about him;
he was scarcely a credit to a woman who wanted to make herself
a position in the world of art and letters. It was obvious
that he had no social gifts, but these a man can do without;
he had no eccentricity even, to take him out of the common run;
he was just a good, dull, honest, plain man. One would
admire his excellent qualities, but avoid his company.
He was null. He was probably a worthy member of society, a good
husband and father, an honest broker; but there was no reason
to waste one's time over him.

Chapter VII

The season was drawing to its dusty end, and everyone I knew
was arranging to go away. Mrs. Strickland was taking her
family to the coast of Norfolk, so that the children might
have the sea and her husband golf. We said good-bye to one
another, and arranged to meet in the autumn. But on my last
day in town, coming out of the Stores, I met her with her son
and daughter; like myself, she had been making her final
purchases before leaving London, and we were both hot and tired.
I proposed that we should all go and eat ices in the park.

I think Mrs. Strickland was glad to show me her children,
and she accepted my invitation with alacrity. They were even
more attractive than their photographs had suggested, and she was
right to be proud of them. I was young enough for them not to
feel shy, and they chattered merrily about one thing and another.
They were extraordinarily nice, healthy young children.
It was very agreeable under the trees.

When in an hour they crowded into a cab to go home, I strolled
idly to my club. I was perhaps a little lonely, and it was
with a touch of envy that I thought of the pleasant family
life of which I had had a glimpse. They seemed devoted to one
another. They had little private jokes of their own which,
unintelligible to the outsider, amused them enormously.
Perhaps Charles Strickland was dull judged by a standard that
demanded above all things verbal scintillation; but his
intelligence was adequate to his surroundings, and that is a
passport, not only to reasonable success, but still more to
happiness. Mrs. Strickland was a charming woman, and she
loved him. I pictured their lives, troubled by no untoward
adventure, honest, decent, and, by reason of those two
upstanding, pleasant children, so obviously destined to carry
on the normal traditions of their race and station,
not without significance. They would grow old insensibly;
they would see their son and daughter come to years of reason,
marry in due course -- the one a pretty girl, future mother of
healthy children; the other a handsome, manly fellow,
obviously a soldier; and at last, prosperous in their
dignified retirement, beloved by their descendants, after a happy,
not unuseful life, in the fullness of their age they would
sink into the grave.

That must be the story of innumerable couples, and the pattern
of life it offers has a homely grace. It reminds you of a
placid rivulet, meandering smoothly through green pastures and
shaded by pleasant trees, till at last it falls into the vasty
sea; but the sea is so calm, so silent, so indifferent, that
you are troubled suddenly by a vague uneasiness. Perhaps it
is only by a kink in my nature, strong in me even in those days,
that I felt in such an existence, the share of the great
majority, something amiss. I recognised its social values,
I saw its ordered happiness, but a fever in my blood asked for a
wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such
easy delights. In my heart was a desire to live more dangerously.
I was not unprepared for jagged rocks and treacherous shoals if
I could only have change -- change and the excitement of
the unforeseen.

Chapter VIII

On reading over what I have written of the Stricklands, I am
conscious that they must seem shadowy. I have been able to
invest them with none of those characteristics which make the
persons of a book exist with a real life of their own; and,
wondering if the fault is mine, I rack my brains to remember
idiosyncrasies which might lend them vividness. I feel that
by dwelling on some trick of speech or some queer habit I
should be able to give them a significance peculiar to themselves.
As they stand they are like the figures in an old tapestry;
they do not separate themselves from the background,
and at a distance seem to lose their pattern, so that you have
little but a pleasing piece of colour. My only excuse is that
the impression they made on me was no other. There was just
that shadowiness about them which you find in people whose
lives are part of the social organism, so that they exist in
it and by it only. They are like cells in the body, essential,
but, so long as they remain healthy, engulfed in
the momentous whole. The Stricklands were an average family
in the middle class. A pleasant, hospitable woman, with a
harmless craze for the small lions of literary society; a
rather dull man, doing his duty in that state of life in which
a merciful Providence had placed him; two nice-looking,
healthy children. Nothing could be more ordinary. I do not
know that there was anything about them to excite the
attention of the curious.

When I reflect on all that happened later, I ask myself if I
was thick-witted not to see that there was in Charles
Strickland at least something out of the common. Perhaps.
I think that I have gathered in the years that intervene between
then and now a fair knowledge of mankind, but even if when I first
met the Stricklands I had the experience which I have now,
I do not believe that I should have judged them
differently. But because I have learnt that man is incalculable,
I should not at this time of day be so surprised by the news
that reached me when in the early autumn I returned to London.

I had not been back twenty-four hours before I ran across Rose
Waterford in Jermyn Street.

"You look very gay and sprightly," I said. "What's the matter
with you?"

She smiled, and her eyes shone with a malice I knew already.
It meant that she had heard some scandal about one of her
friends, and the instinct of the literary woman was all alert.

"You did meet Charles Strickland, didn't you?"

Not only her face, but her whole body, gave a sense of alacrity.
I nodded. I wondered if the poor devil had been
hammered on the Stock Exchange or run over by an omnibus.

"Isn't it dreadful? He's run away from his wife."

Miss Waterford certainly felt that she could not do her
subject justice on the curb of Jermyn Street, and so,
like an artist, flung the bare fact at me and declared that
she knew no details. I could not do her the injustice of supposing
that so trifling a circumstance would have prevented her from
giving them, but she was obstinate.

"I tell you I know nothing," she said, in reply to my agitated
questions, and then, with an airy shrug of the shoulders:
"I believe that a young person in a city tea-shop has left
her situation."

She flashed a smile at me, and, protesting an engagement with
her dentist, jauntily walked on. I was more interested than
distressed. In those days my experience of life at first hand
was small, and it excited me to come upon an incident among
people I knew of the same sort as I had read in books.
I confess that time has now accustomed me to incidents of this
character among my acquaintance. But I was a little shocked.
Strickland was certainly forty, and I thought it disgusting
that a man of his age should concern himself with affairs of
the heart. With the superciliousness of extreme youth, I put
thirty-five as the utmost limit at which a man might fall in
love without making a fool of himself. And this news was
slightly disconcerting to me personally, because I had written
from the country to Mrs. Strickland, announcing my return, and
had added that unless I heard from her to the contrary,
I would come on a certain day to drink a dish of tea with her.
This was the very day, and I had received no word from Mrs.
Strickland. Did she want to see me or did she not? It was
likely enough that in the agitation of the moment my note had
escaped her memory. Perhaps I should be wiser not to go.
On the other hand, she might wish to keep the affair quiet,
and it might be highly indiscreet on my part to give any sign that
this strange news had reached me. I was torn between the fear
of hurting a nice woman's feelings and the fear of being in
the way. I felt she must be suffering, and I did not want to
see a pain which I could not help; but in my heart was a
desire, that I felt a little ashamed of, to see how she was
taking it. I did not know what to do.

Finally it occurred to me that I would call as though nothing
had happened, and send a message in by the maid asking Mrs.
Strickland if it was convenient for her to see me. This would
give her the opportunity to send me away. But I was
overwhelmed with embarrassment when I said to the maid the
phrase I had prepared, and while I waited for the answer in a
dark passage I had to call up all my strength of mind not to bolt.
The maid came back. Her manner suggested to my excited
fancy a complete knowledge of the domestic calamity.

"Will you come this way, sir?" she said.

I followed her into the drawing-room. The blinds were partly
drawn to darken the room, and Mrs. Strickland was sitting with
her back to the light. Her brother-in-law, Colonel MacAndrew,
stood in front of the fireplace, warming his back at an unlit fire.
To myself my entrance seemed excessively awkward. I imagined
that my arrival had taken them by surprise, and Mrs. Strickland
had let me come in only because she had forgotten to put me off.
I fancied that the Colonel resented the interruption.

"I wasn't quite sure if you expected me," I said, trying to
seem unconcerned.

"Of course I did. Anne will bring the tea in a minute."

Even in the darkened room, I could not help seeing that Mrs.
Strickland's face was all swollen with tears. Her skin,
never very good, was earthy.

"You remember my brother-in-law, don't you? You met at dinner,
just before the holidays."

We shook hands. I felt so shy that I could think of nothing
to say, but Mrs. Strickland came to my rescue. She asked me
what I had been doing with myself during the summer, and with
this help I managed to make some conversation till tea was
brought in. The Colonel asked for a whisky-and-soda.

"You'd better have one too, Amy," he said.

"No; I prefer tea."

This was the first suggestion that anything untoward
had happened. I took no notice, and did my best to engage
Mrs. Strickland in talk. The Colonel, still standing in front
of the fireplace, uttered no word. I wondered how soon I could
decently take my leave, and I asked myself why on earth Mrs.
Strickland had allowed me to come. There were no flowers,
and various knick-knacks, put away during the summer, had not been
replaced; there was something cheerless and stiff about the
room which had always seemed so friendly; it gave you an odd
feeling, as though someone were lying dead on the other side
of the wall. I finished tea.

"Will you have a cigarette?" asked Mrs. Strickland.

She looked about for the box, but it was not to be seen.

"I'm afraid there are none."

Suddenly she burst into tears, and hurried from the room.

I was startled. I suppose now that the lack of cigarettes,
brought as a rule by her husband, forced him back upon her
recollection, and the new feeling that the small comforts she
was used to were missing gave her a sudden pang. She realised
that the old life was gone and done with. It was impossible
to keep up our social pretences any longer.

"I dare say you'd like me to go," I said to the Colonel,
getting up.

"I suppose you've heard that blackguard has deserted her,"
he cried explosively.

I hesitated.

"You know how people gossip," I answered. "I was vaguely told
that something was wrong."

"He's bolted. He's gone off to Paris with a woman. He's left
Amy without a penny."

"I'm awfully sorry," I said, not knowing what else to say.

The Colonel gulped down his whisky. He was a tall, lean man
of fifty, with a drooping moustache and grey hair. He had
pale blue eyes and a weak mouth. I remembered from my
previous meeting with him that he had a foolish face, and was
proud of the fact that for the ten years before he left the
army he had played polo three days a week.

"I don't suppose Mrs. Strickland wants to be bothered with me
just now," I said. "Will you tell her how sorry I am?
If there's anything I can do. I shall be delighted to do it."

He took no notice of me.

"I don't know what's to become of her. And then there are the
children. Are they going to live on air? Seventeen years."

"What about seventeen years?"

"They've been married," he snapped. "I never liked him.
Of course he was my brother-in-law, and I made the best of it.
Did you think him a gentleman? She ought never to have
married him."

"Is it absolutely final?"

"There's only one thing for her to do, and that's to divorce
him. That's what I was telling her when you came in.
'Fire in with your petition, my dear Amy,' I said. `You owe it
to yourself and you owe it to the children.' He'd better not let
me catch sight of him. I'd thrash him within an inch of his life."

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