The Favorite Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham Page 5

  “It was the most crying scandal of the Pacific,” exclaimed Davidson vehemently. “The missionaries had been agitating against it for years, and at last the local press took it up. The police refused to stir. You know their argument.

  They say that vice is inevitable and consequently the best thing is to localize and control it. The truth is, they were paid. Paid. They were paid by the saloon-keepers, paid by the bullies, paid by the women themselves. At last they were forced to move.”

  “I read about it in the papers that came on board in Honolulu,” said Dr Macphail.

  Iwelei, with its sin and shame, ceased to exist on the very day we arrived. The whole population was brought before the justices. I don’t know why I didn’t understand at once what that woman was.”

  “Now you come to speak of it,” said Mrs Macphail, “I remember seeing her come on board only a few minutes before the boat sailed. I remember thinking at the time she was cutting it rather fine.”

  “How dare she come here!” cried Davidson indignantly. “I’m not going to allow it.”

  He strode towards the door.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Macphail.

  “What do you expect me to? I’m going to stop it. I’m not going to have this house turned into-into …”

  He sought for a word that should not offend the ladies’ ears. His eyes were flashing and his pale face was paler still in his emotion.

  “It sounds as though there were three or four men down there,” said the doctor. “Don’t you think it’s rather rash to go in just now?”

  The missionary gave him a contemptuous look and without a word flung out of the room.

  “You know Mr Davidson very little if you think the fear of personal danger can stop him in the performance of his duty,” said his wife.

  She sat with her hands nervously clasped, a spot of colour on her high cheek-bones, listening to what was about to happen below. They all listened. They heard him clatter down the wooden stairs and throw open the door. The singing stopped suddenly, but the gramophone continued to bray out its vulgar tune. They heard Davidson’s voice and then the noise of something heavy falling. The music stopped. He had hurled the gramophone on the floor. Then again they heard Davidson’s voice, they could not make out the words, then Miss Thompson’s, loud and shrill, then a confused clamour as though several people were shouting together at the top of their lungs. Mrs Davidson gave a little gasp, and she clenched her hands more tightly. Dr Macphail looked uncertainly from her to his wife. He did not want to go down, but he wondered if they expected him to. Then there was something that sounded like a scuffle. The noise now was more distinct. It might be that Davidson was being thrown out of the room. The door was slammed. There was a moment’s silence and they heard Davidson come up the stairs again. He went to his room.

  “I think I’ll go to him,” said Mrs Davidson.

  She got up and went out.

  “If you want me, just call,” said Mrs Macphail, and then when the other was gone: “I hope he isn’t hurt.”

  “Why couldn’t he mind his own business?” said Dr Macphail.

  They sat in silence for a minute or two and then they both started, for the gramophone began to play once more, defiantly, and mocking voices shouted hoarsely the words of an obscene song.

  Next day Mrs Davidson was pale and tired. She complained of headache, and she looked old and wizened. She told Mrs Macphail that the missionary had not slept at all; he had passed the night in a state of frightful agitation and at five had got up and gone out. A glass of beer had been thrown over him and his clothes were stained and stinking. But a sombre fire glowed in Mrs Davidson’s eyes when she spoke of Miss Thompson.

  “She’ll bitterly rue the day when she flouted Mr Davidson,” she said. “Mr Davidson has a wonderful heart and no one who is in trouble has ever gone to him without being comforted, but he has no mercy for sin, and when his righteous wrath is excited he’s terrible.”

  “Why, what will he do?” asked Mrs Macphail.

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t stand in that creature’s shoes for anything in the world.”

  Mrs Macphail shuddered. There was something positively alarming in the triumphant assurance of the little woman’s manner. They were going out together that morning, and they went down the stairs side by side. Miss Thompson’s door was open, and they saw her in a bedraggled dressing-gown, cooking something in a chafing-dish.

  “Good morning,” she called. “Is Mr Davidson better this morning?”

  They passed her in silence, with their noses in the air, as if she did not exist. They flushed, however, when she burst into a shout of derisive laughter. Mrs Davidson turned on her suddenly.

  “Don’t you dare to speak to me,” she screamed. “If you insult me I shall have you turned out of here.”

  “Say, did I ask Mr Davidson to visit with me?”

  “Don’t answer her,” whispered Mrs Macphail hurriedly.

  They walked on till they were out of earshot.

  “She’s brazen, brazen,” burst from Mrs Davidson.

  Her anger almost suffocated her.

  And on their way home they met her strolling towards the quay. She had all her finery on. Her great white hat with its vulgar, showy flowers was an affront. She called out cheerily to them as she went by, and a couple of American sailors who were standing there grinned as the ladies set their faces to an icy stare. They got in just before the rain began to fall again.

  “I guess she’ll get her fine clothes spoilt,” said Mrs Davidson with a bitter sneer.

  Davidson did not come in till they were half-way through dinner. He was wet through, but he would not change. He sat, morose and silent, refusing to eat more than a mouthful, and he stared at the slanting rain. When Mrs Davidson told him of their two encounters with Miss Thompson he did not answer. His deepening frown alone showed that he had heard.

  “Don’t you think we ought to make Mr Horn turn her out of here?” asked Mrs Davidson. “We can’t allow her to insult us.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any other place for her to go,” said Macphail.

  “She can live with one of the natives.”

  “In weather like this a native hut must be a rather uncomfortable place to live in.”

  “I lived in one for years,” said the missionary.

  When the little native girl brought in the fried bananas which formed the sweet they had every day, Davidson turned to her.

  “Ask Miss Thompson when it would be convenient for me to see her,” he said.

  The girl nodded shyly and went out.

  “What do you want to see her for, Alfred?” asked his wife.

  “It’s my duty to see her. I won’t act till I’ve given her every chance.”

  “You don’t know what she is. She’ll insult you.”

  “Let her insult me. Let her spit on me. She has an immortal soul, and I must do all that is in my power to save it.”

  Mrs Davidson’s ears rang still with the harlot’s mocking laughter.

  “She’s gone too far.”

  “Too far for the mercy of God?” His eyes lit up suddenly and his voice grew mellow and soft. “Never. The sinner may be deeper in sin than the depth of hell itself, but the love of the Lord Jesus can reach him still.”

  The girl came back with the message.

  “Miss Thompson’s compliments and as long as Rev Davidson don’t come in business hours she’ll be glad to see him any time.”

  The party received it in stony silence, and Dr Macphail quickly effaced from his lips the smile which had come upon them. He knew his wife would be vexed with him if he found Miss Thompson’s effrontery amusing.

  They finished the meal in silence. When it was over the two ladies got up and took their work. Mrs Macphail was making another of the innumerable comforters which she had turned out since the beginning of the war, and the doctor lit his pipe. But Davidson remained in his chair and with abstracted eyes stared at the table. At last
he got up and without a word went out of the room. They heard him go down and they heard Miss Thompson’s defiant “Come in’ when he knocked at the door. He remained with her for an hour. And Dr Macphail watched the rain. It was beginning to get on his nerves. It was not like soft English rain that drops gently on the earth; it was unmerciful and somehow terrible; you felt in it the malignancy of the primitive powers of nature. It did not pour, it flowed. It was like a deluge from heaven, and it rattled on the roof of corrugated iron with a steady persistence that was maddening. It seemed to have a fury of its own. And sometimes you felt that you must scream if it did not stop, and then suddenly you felt powerless, as though your bones had suddenly become soft; and you were miserable and hopeless.

  Macphail turned his head when the missionary came back. The two women looked up.

  “I’ve given her every chance. I have exhorted her to repent. She is an evil woman.”

  He paused, and Dr Macphail saw his eyes darken and his pale face grow hard and stern.

  “Now I shall take the whips with which the Lord Jesus drove the usurers and the money changers out of the Temple of the Most High.”

  He walked up and down the room. His mouth was close set, and his black brows were frowning.

  “If she fled to the uttermost parts of the earth I should pursue her.”

  With a sudden movement he turned round and strode out of the room. They heard him go downstairs again.

  “What is he going to do?” asked Mrs Macphail.

  “I don’t know.” Mrs Davidson took off her pince-nez and wiped them. “When he is on the Lord’s work I never ask him questions.”

  She sighed a little.

  “What is the matter?”

  “He’ll wear himself out. He doesn’t know what it is to spare himself.”

  Dr Macphail learnt the first results of the missionary’s activity from the halfcaste trader in whose house they lodged. He stopped the doctor when he passed the store and came out to speak to him on the stoop. His fat face was worried.

  “The Rev Davidson has been at me for letting Miss Thompson have a room here,” he said, “but I didn’t know what she was when I rented it to her. When people come and ask if I can rent them a room all I want to know is if they’ve the money to pay for it. And she paid me for hers a week in advance.”

  Dr Macphail did not want to commit himself.

  “When all’s said and done it’s your house. We’re very much obliged to you for taking us in at all.”

  Horn looked at him doubtfully. He was not certain yet how definitely Macphail stood on the missionary’s side.

  “The missionaries are in with one another,” he said, hesitatingly. “If they get it in for a trader he may just as well shut up his store and quit.”

  “Did he want you to turn her out?”

  “No, he said so long as she behaved herself he couldn’t ask me to do that. He said he wanted to be just to me. I promised she shouldn’t have no more visitors. I’ve just been and told her.”

  “How did she take it?”

  “She gave me Hell.”

  The trader squirmed in his old ducks. He had found Miss Thompson a rough customer.

  “Oh, well, I daresay she’ll get out. I don’t suppose she wants to stay here if she can’t have anyone in.”

  “There’s nowhere she can go, only a native house, and no native’ll take her now, not now that the missionaries have got their knife in her.”

  Dr Macphail looked at the falling rain.

  “Well, I don’t suppose it’s any good waiting for it to clear up.”

  In the evening when they sat in the parlour Davidson talked to them of his early days at college. He had had no means and had worked his way through by doing odd jobs during the vacations. There was silence downstairs. Miss Thompson was sitting in her little room alone. But suddenly the gramophone began to play. She had set it on in defiance, to cheat her loneliness, but there was no one to sing, and it had a melancholy note. It was like a cry for help. Davidson took no notice. He was in the middle of a long anecdote and without change of expression went on. The gramophone continued. Miss Thompson put on one reel after another. It looked as though the silence of the night were getting on her nerves. It was breathless and sultry. When the Macphails went to bed they could not sleep. They lay side by side with their eyes wide open, listening to the cruel singing of the mosquitoes outside their curtain.

  “What’s that?” whispered Mrs Macphail at last.

  They heard a voice, Davidson’s voice, through the wooden partition. It went on with a monotonous, earnest insistence. He was praying aloud. He was praying for the soul of Miss Thompson.

  Two or three days went by. Now when they passed Miss Thompson on the road she did not greet them with ironic cordiality or smile; she passed with her nose in the air, a sulky look on her painted face, frowning, as though she did not see them. The trader told Macphail that she had tried to get lodging elsewhere, but had failed. In the evening she played through the various reels of her gramophone, but the pretence of mirth was obvious now. The ragtime had a cracked, heart-broken rhythm as though it were a one-step of despair.

  When she began to play on Sunday Davidson sent Horn to beg her to stop at once since it was the Lord’s day. The reel was taken off and the house was silent except for the steady pattering of the rain on the iron roof.

  “I think she’s getting a bit worked up,” said the trader next day to Macphail. “She don’t know what Mr Davidson’s up to and it makes her scared.”

  Macphail had caught a glimpse of her that morning and it struck him that her arrogant expression had changed. There was in her face a hunted look. The half-caste gave him a sidelong glance.

  “I suppose you don’t know what Mr Davidson is doing about it?” he hazarded.

  “No, I don’t.”

  It was singular that Horn should ask him that question, for he also had the idea that the missionary was mysteriously at work.

  He had an impression that he was weaving a net around the woman, carefully, systematically, and suddenly, when everything was ready, would pull the strings tight.

  “He told me to tell her,” said the trader, “that if at any time she wanted him she only had to send and he’d come.”

  “What did she say when you told her that?”

  “She didn’t say nothing. I didn’t stop. I just said what he said I was to and then I beat it. I thought she might be going to start weepin’.”

  “I have no doubt the loneliness is getting on her nerves,” said the doctor. “And the rain-that’s enough to make anyone jumpy,” he continued irritably. “Doesn’t it ever stop in this confounded place?”

  “It goes on pretty steady in the rainy season. We have three hundred inches in the year. You see, it’s the shape of the bay. It seems to attract the rain from all over the Pacific.”

  “Damn the shape of the bay,” said the doctor.

  He scratched his mosquito bites. He felt very short-tempered. When the rain stopped and the sun shone, it was like a hot-house, seething, humid, sultry, breathless, and you had a strange feeling that everything was growing with a savage violence. The natives, blithe and childlike by reputation, seemed then, with their tattooing and their dyed hair, to have something sinister in their appearance; and when they pattered along at your heels with their naked feet you looked back instinctively. You felt they might at any moment come behind you swiftly and thrust a long knife between your shoulder-blades. You could not tell what dark thought lurked behind their wide-set eyes. They had a little the look of ancient Egyptians painted on a temple wall, and there was about them the terror of what is immeasurably old.

  The missionary came and went. He was busy, but the Macphails did not know what he was doing. Horn told the doctor that he saw the governor every day, and once Davidson mentioned him.

  “He looks as if he had plenty of determination,” he said, “but when you come down to brass tacks he has no backbone.”

  “I suppose that mean
s he won’t do exactly what you want,” suggested the doctor facetiously.

  The missionary did not smile.

  “I want him to do what’s right. It shouldn’t be necessary to persuade a man to do that.”

  “But there may be differences of opinion about what is right.”

  “If a man had a gangrenous foot would you have patience with anyone who hesitated to amputate it?”

  “Gangrene is a matter of fact.”

  “And Evil?”

  What Davidson had done soon appeared. The four of them had just finished their midday meal, and they had not yet separated for the siesta which the heat imposed on the ladies and on the doctor. Davidson had little patience with the slothful habit. The door was suddenly flung open and Miss Thompson came in. She looked round the room and then went up to Davidson.

  “You low-down skunk, what have you been saying about me to the governor?”

  She was spluttering with rage. There was a moment’s pause. Then the missionary drew forward a chair.

  “Won’t you be seated, Miss Thompson? I’ve been hoping to have another talk with you.”

  “You poor low-life bastard.”

  She burst into a torrent of insult, foul and insolent. Davidson kept his grave eyes on her.

  “I’m indifferent to the abuse you think fit to heap on me, Miss Thompson,” he said, “but I must beg you to remember that ladies are present.”

  Tears by now were struggling with her anger. Her face was red and swollen as though she were choking.

  “What has happened?” asked Dr Macphail.

  “A feller’s just been in here and he says I gotter beat it on the next boat.”

  Was there a gleam in the missionary’s eyes? His face remained impassive.