The Moon and Sixpence

Chapter XXXVIII
I 
DID
NOT
SEE
HIM
again for nearly a week. Then he
fetched me soon after seven one evening and took
me out to dinner. He was dressed in the deepest
mourning, and on his bowler was a broad black
band. He had even a black border to his handker-
chief. His garb of woe suggested that he had lost
in one catastrophe every relation he had in the
world, even to cousins by marriage twice re-
moved. His plumpness and his red, fat cheeks
made his mourning not a little incongruous. It
was cruel that his extreme unhappiness should
have in it something of buffoonery.
He told me he had made up his mind to go away,
though not to Italy, as I had suggested, but to
Holland.
“I’m starting to-morrow. This is perhaps the
last time we shall ever meet.”
I made an appropriate rejoinder, and he smiled
wanly.
“I haven’t been home for five years. I think
I’d forgotten it all; I seemed to have come so far
away from my father’s house that I was shy at
the idea of revisiting it; but now I feel it’s my
only refuge.”
He was sore and bruised, and his thoughts went
back to the tenderness of his mother’s love. The
ridicule he had endured for years seemed now
to weigh him down, and the final blow of
Blanche’s treachery had robbed him of the re-
siliency which had made him take it so gaily. He
could no longer laugh with those who laughed
at him. He was an outcast. He told me of his child-
hood in the tidy brick house, and of his mother’s
passionate orderliness. Her kitchen was a miracle
of clean brightness. Everything was always in
its place, and no where could you see a speck of
dust. Cleanliness, indeed, was a mania with her.
I saw a neat little old woman, with cheeks like
apples, toiling away from morning to night,
through the long years, to keep her house trim

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and spruce. His father was a spare old man, his
hands gnarled after the work of a lifetime, silent
and upright; in the evening he read the paper
aloud, while his wife and daughter (now mar-
ried to the captain of a fishing smack), unwill-
ing to lose a moment, bent over their sewing.
Nothing ever happened in that little town, left
behind by the advance of civilisation, and one
year followed the next till death came, like a
friend, to give rest to those who had laboured so
diligently.
“My father wished me to become a carpenter
like himself. For five generations we’ve carried
on the same trade, from father to son. Perhaps
that is the wisdom of life, to tread in your
father’s steps, and look neither to the right nor
to the left. When I was a little boy I said I would
marry the daughter of the harness-maker who
lived next door. She was a little girl with blue
eyes and a flaxen pigtail. She would have kept
my house like a new pin, and I should have had
a son to carry on the business after me.”
Stroeve sighed a little and was silent. His
thoughts dwelt among pictures of what might
have been, and the safety of the life he had re-
fused filled him with longing.
“The world is hard and cruel. We are here none
knows why, and we go none knows whither. We
must be very humble. We must see the beauty
of quietness. We must go through life so incon-
spicuously that Fate does not notice us. And let
us seek the love of simple, ignorant people. Their
ignorance is better than all our knowledge. Let
us be silent, content in our little corner, meek
and gentle like them. That is the wisdom of life.”
To me it was his broken spirit that expressed
itself, and I rebelled against his renunciation. But
I kept my own counsel.
“What made you think of being a painter?” I
asked.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“It happened that I had a knack for drawing. I

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got prizes for it at school. My poor mother was
very proud of my gift, and she gave me a box of
water-colours as a present. She showed my
sketches to the pastor and the doctor and the
judge. And they sent me to Amsterdam to try
for a scholarship, and I won it. Poor soul, she
was so proud; and though it nearly broke her
heart to part from me, she smiled, and would
not show me her grief. She was pleased that her
son should be an artist. They pinched and saved
so that I should have enough to live on, and when
my first picture was exhibited they came to
Amsterdam to see it, my father and mother and
my sister, and my mother cried when she looked
at it.” His kind eyes glistened. “And now on ev-
ery wall of the old house there is one of my pic-
tures in a beautiful gold frame.”
He glowed with happy pride. I thought of those
cold scenes of his, with their picturesque peas-
ants and cypresses and olive-trees. They must
look queer in their garish frames on the walls of
the peasant house.
“The dear soul thought she was doing a won-
derful thing for me when she made me an artist,
but perhaps, after all, it would have been better
for me if my father’s will had prevailed and I
were now but an honest carpenter. ”
“Now that you know what art can offer, would
you change your life? Would you have missed all
the delight it has given you?”
“Art is the greatest thing in the world,” he
answered, after a pause.
He looked at me for a minute reflectively; he
seemed to hesitate; then he said:
“Did you know that I had been to see
Strickland?”
“ You?”
I was astonished. I should have thought he
could not bear to set eyes on him. Stroeve smiled
faintly.
“ You know already that I have no proper pride.”
“What do you mean by that?”
He told me a singular story.

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