The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - II - The World Over (21 page)

“I hear that Jack is back,” she told her husband at dinner. “I shall go over tomorrow morning and get the things he promised to bring me.”

“I wouldn’t do that. He’s pretty sure to drop in towards sundown and he’ll bring them himself.”

“I can’t wait. I’m crazy to have them.”

“All right. Have it your own way.”

She couldn’t help talking about him. For some time now they had seemed to have little to say to one another, Norman and she, but that night, in high spirits, she chattered away as she had done during the first months of their marriage. She always rose early, at six, and next morning she went down to the river and had a bathe. There was a little dent in the bank just there, with a tiny sandy beach, and it was delicious to splash about in the cool, transparent water. A kingfisher stood on the branch of a tree overhanging the pool and its reflection was brilliantly blue in the water. Lovely. She had a cup of tea and then stepped into a dug-out. A boy paddled her across the river. It took a good half-hour. As they got near she scanned the bank; Jack knew she would come at the earliest opportunity; he must be on the lookout. Ah, there he was. The delicious pain in her heart was almost unbearable. He came down to the landing-stage and helped her to get out of the boat. They walked hand in hand up the pathway and when they were out of sight of the boy who had paddled her over and of prying eyes from the house, they stopped. He put his arms round her and she yielded with ecstasy to his embrace. She clung to him.

His mouth sought hers. In that kiss was all the agony of their separation and all the bliss of their reunion. The miracle of love transfused them so that they were unconscious of time and place. They were not human any more, but two spirits united by a divine fire. No thought passed through their minds. No words issued from their lips. Suddenly there was a brutal shock, like a blow, and immediately, almost simultaneously, a deafening noise. Horrified, not understanding, she clung to Jack more tightly and his grip on her was spasmodic, so that she gasped; then she felt that he was bearing her over.

“Jack.”

She tried to hold him up. His weight was too great for her and as he fell to the ground she fell with him. Then she gave a great cry, for she felt a gush of heat, and his blood sputtered over her. She began to scream. A rough hand seized her and dragged her to her feet. It was Norman. She was distraught. She could not understand.

“Norman, what have you done?”

“I’ve killed him.”

She stared at him stupidly. She pushed him aside.

“Jack. Jack.”

“Shut up. I’ll go and get help. It was an accident.”

He walked quickly up the pathway. She fell to her knees and took Jack’s head in her arms.

“Darling,” she moaned. “Oh, my darling.”

Norman came back with some coolies and they carried him up to the house. That night she had a miscarriage and was so ill that for days it looked as if she would die. When she recovered she had the nervous tic that she’d had ever since. She expected that Norman would send her away; but he didn’t, he had to keep her to allay suspicion. There was some talk among the natives, and after a while the District Officer came up and asked a lot of questions; but the natives were frightened of Norman, and the D.O. could get nothing out of them. The Dyak boy who paddled her over had vanished. Norman said something had gone wrong with his gun and Jack was looking at it to see what was the matter and it went off. They bury people quickly in that country and by the time they might have dug him up there wouldn’t have been much left to show that Norman’s story wasn’t true. The D.O. hadn’t been satisfied.

“It all looks damned fishy to me,” he said, “but in the absence of any evidence, I suppose I must accept your version.”

She would have given anything to get away, but with that nervous affliction she had no ghost of a chance any longer of earning a living. She had to stay-or starve; and Norman had to keep her-or hang. Nothing had happened since then and now nothing ever would happen. The endless years one after another dragged out their weary length.

Mrs Grange on a sudden stopped talking. Her sharp ears had caught the sound of a footstep on the path and she knew that Norman was back from his round. Her head twitching furiously, her hand agitated by that sinister, uncontrollable gesture, she looked in the untidy mess of her dressing-table for her precious lipstick. She smeared it on her lips, and then, she didn’t know why, on a freakish impulse daubed it all over her nose till she looked like a red-nose comedian in a music-hall. She looked at herself in the glass and burst out laughing.

“To hell with life!” she shouted.

I
AM
telling this story in the first person, though I am in no way connected with it, because I do not want to pretend to the reader that I know more about it than I really do. The facts are as I state them, but the reasons for them I can only guess, and it may be that when the reader has read them he will think me wrong. No one can know for certain. But if you are interested in human nature there are few things more diverting than to consider the motives that have resulted in certain actions. It was only by chance that I heard anything of the unhappy circumstances at all. I was spending two or three days on an island on the north coast of Borneo, and the District Officer had very kindly offered to put me up. I had been roughing it for some time and I was glad enough to have a rest. The island had been at one time a place of some consequence, with a Governor of its own, but was so no longer; and now there was nothing much to be seen of its former importance except the imposing stone house in which the Governor had once lived and which now the District Officer, grumblingly because of its unnecessary size, inhabited. But it was a comfortable house to stay in, with an immense drawing-room, a dining-room large enough to seat forty people, and lofty, spacious bedrooms. It was shabby, because the government at Singapore very wisely spent as little money on it as possible; but I rather liked this, and the heavy official furniture gave it a sort of dull stateliness that was amusing. The garden was too large for the District Officer to keep up and it was a wild tangle of tropical vegetation. His name was Arthur Low; he was a quiet, smallish man in the later thirties, married, with two young children. The Lows had not tried to make themselves at home in this great place, but camped there, like refugees from a stricken area, and looked forward to the time when they would be moved to some other post where they could settle down in surroundings more familiar to them.

I took a fancy to them at once. The D.O. had an easy manner and a humorous way with him. I am sure he performed his various duties admirably, but he did everything he could to avoid the official demeanour. He was slangy of speech and pleasantly caustic. It was charming to see him play with the two children. It was quite obvious that he had found marriage a very satisfactory state. Mrs Low was an extremely nice little woman, plump, with dark eyes under fine eyebrows, not very pretty, but certainly attractive. She looked healthy and she had high spirits. They chaffed one another continually and each one seemed to look upon the other as immensely comic. Their jokes were neither very good nor very new, but they thought them so killing that you were obliged to laugh with them.

I think they were glad to see me, especially Mrs Low, for with nothing much to do but keep an eye on the house and the children, she was thrown very much on her own resources. There were so few white people on the island that the social life was soon exhausted; and before I had been there twenty-four hours she pressed me to stay a week, a month, or a year. On the evening of my arrival they gave a dinner-party to which the official population, the government surveyor, the doctor, the schoolmaster, the chief of constabulary, were invited, but on the following evening the three of us dined by ourselves. At the dinnerparty the guests had brought their house-boys to help, but that night we were waited on by the Lows’ one boy and my travelling servant. They brought in the coffee and left us to ourselves. Low and I lit cheroots.

“You know that I’ve seen you before,” said Mrs Low.

“Where?” I asked.

“In London. At a party. I heard someone point you out to somebody else. In Carlton House Terrace at Lady Kastellan’s.”

“Oh? When was that?”

“Last time we were home on leave. There were Russian dancers.”

“I remember. About two or three years ago. Fancy you being there!”

“That’s exactly what we said to one another at the time,” said Low, with a slow, engaging smile. “We’d never been at such a party in our lives.”

“It made a great splash, you know,” I said. “It was
the
party of the season. Did you enjoy it?”

“I hated every minute of it,” said Mrs Low.

“Don’t let’s overlook the fact that you insisted on going, Bee.” said Low. “I knew we’d be out of it among all those swells. My dress clothes were the same I’d had at Cambridge and they’d never been much of a fit.”

“I bought a frock specially at Peter Robinson’s. It looked lovely in the shop. I wished I hadn’t wasted so much money when I got there; I never felt so dowdy in my life.”

“Well it didn’t much matter. We weren’t introduced to anybody.”

I remembered the party quite well. The magnificent rooms in Carlton House Terrace had been decorated with great festoons of yellow roses and at one end of the vast drawing-room a stage had been erected. Special costumes of the Regency period had been designed for the dancers and a modern composer had written the music for the two charming ballets they danced. It was hard to look at it all and not allow the vulgar thought to cross one’s mind that the affair must have cost an enormous amount of money. Lady Kastellan was a beautiful woman and a great hostess, but I do not think anyone would have ascribed to her any vast amount of kindliness, she knew too many people to care much for any one in particular, and I couldn’t help wondering why she had asked to such a grand party two obscure and quite unimportant little persons from a distant colony.

“Had you known Lady Kastellan long?” I asked.

“We didn’t know her at all. She sent us a card and we went because I wanted to see what she was like,” said Mrs Low.

“She’s a very able woman,” I said.

“I dare say she is. She hadn’t an idea who we were when the butler man announced us, but she remembered at once. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘you’re poor Jack’s friends. Do go and find yourselves seats where you can see. You’ll adore Lifar, he’s too marvellous.’ And then she turned to say how d’you do to the next people. But she gave me a look. She wondered how much I knew and she saw at once that I knew everything.”

“Don’t talk such nonsense, darling,” said Low. “How could she know all you think she did by just looking at you, and how could you tell what she was thinking?”

“It’s true, I tell you. We said everything in that one look, and unless I’m very much mistaken I spoilt her party for her.”

Low laughed and I smiled, for Mrs Low spoke in a tone of triumphant vindictiveness.

“You are terribly indiscreet, Bee.”

“Is she a great friend of yours?” Mrs Low asked me.

“Hardly. I’ve met her here and there for fifteen years. I’ve been to a good many parties at her house. She gives very good parties and she always asks you to meet the people you want to see.”

“What d’you think of her?”

“She’s by way of being a considerable figure in London. She’s amusing to talk to and she’s nice to look at. She does a lot for art and music. What do
you
think of her?”

“I think she’s a bitch,” said Mrs Low, with cheerful but decided frankness.

“That settles her,” I said.

“Tell him, Arthur.”

Low hesitated for a moment.

“I don’t know that I ought to.”

“If you don’t, I shall.”

“Bee’s got her knife into her all right,” he smiled. “It was rather a bad business really.”

He made a perfect smoke-ring and watched it with absorption.

“Go on, Arthur,” said Mrs Low.

“Oh, well. It was before we went home last time. I was D.O. in Selangor and one day they came and told me that a white man was dead in a small town a couple of hours up the river. I didn’t know there was a white man living there. I thought I’d better go and see about it, so, I got in the launch and went up. I made inquiries when I got there. The police didn’t know anything about him except that he’d been living there for a couple of years with a Chinese woman in the bazaar. It was rather a picturesque bazaar, tall houses on each side, with a board walk in between, built on piles on the river-bank, and there were awnings above to keep out the sun. I took a couple of policemen with me and they led me to the house. They sold brass-ware in the shop below and the rooms above were let out. The master of the shop took me up two flights of dark, rickety stairs, foul with every kind of Chinese stench, and called out when we got to the top. The door was opened by a middle-aged Chinese woman and I saw that her face was all bloated with weeping. She didn’t say anything, but made way for us to pass. It wasn’t much more than a cubby-hole under the roof; there was a small window that looked on the street, but the awning that stretched across it dimmed the light. There wasn’t any furniture except a deal table and a kitchen chair with a broken back. On a mat against the wall a dead man was lying. The first thing I did was to have the window opened. The room was so frowsty that I retched, and the strongest smell was the smell of opium. There was a small oil-lamp on the table and a long needle, and of course I knew what they were there for. The pipe had been hidden. The dead man lay on his back with nothing on but a sarong and a dirty singlet. He had long brown hair, going grey, and a short beard. He was a white man all right. I examined him as best I could. I had to judge whether death was due to natural causes. There were no signs of violence. He was nothing but skin and bone. It looked to me as though he might very likely have died of starvation. I asked the man of the shop and the woman a number of questions. The policeman corroborated their statements. It appeared that the man coughed a great deal and brought up blood now and then, and his appearance suggested that he might very well have had T.B. The Chinaman said he’d been a confirmed opium smoker. It all seemed pretty obvious. Fortunately cases of that sort are rare, but they’re not unheard of-the white man who goes under and gradually sinks to the last stage of degradation. It appeared that the Chinese woman had been fond of him. She’d kept him on her own miserable earnings for the last two years. I gave the necessary instructions. Of course I wanted to know who he was. I supposed he’d been a clerk in some English firm or an assistant in an English store at Singapore or Kuala Lumpur. I asked the Chinese woman if he’d left any effects. Considering the destitution in which they’d lived it seemed a rather absurd question, but she went to a shabby suit-case that lay in a corner, opened it, and showed me a square parcel about the size of two novels put together wrapped in an old newspaper. I had a look at the suit-case. It contained nothing of any value. I took the parcel.”