The Moon and Sixpence

Chapter LIV
A
S
WE
WALKED
ALONG
I reflected on a circumstance
which all that I had lately heard about Strickland
forced on my attention. Here, on this remote is-
land, he seemed to have aroused none of the
detestation with which he was regarded at home,
but compassion rather; and his vagaries were
accepted with tolerance. To these people, native
and European, he was a queer fish, but they were
used to queer fish, and they took him for granted;
the world was full of odd persons, who did odd
things; and perhaps they knew that a man is not
what he wants to be, but what he must be. In
England and France he was the square peg in

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the round hole, but here the holes were any sort
of shape, and no sort of peg was quite amiss. I
do not think he was any gentler here, less self-
ish or less brutal, but the circumstances were
more favourable. If he had spent his life amid
these surroundings he might have passed for no
worse a man than another. He received here what
he neither expected nor wanted among his own
people — sympathy.
I tried to tell Captain Brunot something of the
astonishment with which this filled me, and for
a little while he did not answer.
“It is not strange that I, at all events, should
have had sympathy for him,” he said at last, “for,
though perhaps neither of us knew it, we were
both aiming at the same thing.”
“What on earth can it be that two people so
dissimilar as you and Strickland could aim at?” I
asked, smiling.
“Beauty. ”
“A large order,” I murmured.
“Do you know how men can be so obsessed by
love that they are deaf and blind to everything
else in the world? They are as little their own
masters as the slaves chained to the benches of
a galley. The passion that held Strickland in bond-
age was no less tyrannical than love.”
“How strange that you should say that!” I an-
swered. “For long ago I had the idea that he was
possessed of a devil.”
“And the passion that held Strickland was a
passion to create beauty. It gave him no peace. It
urged him hither and thither. He was eternally a
pilgrim, haunted by a divine nostalgia, and the
demon within him was ruthless. There are men
whose desire for truth is so great that to attain
it they will shatter the very foundation of their
world. Of such was Strickland, only beauty with
him took the place of truth. I could only feel for
him a profound compassion.”
“That is strange also. A man whom he had
deeply wronged told me that he felt a great pity

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The Moon and Sixpence
for him.” I was silent for a moment. “I wonder if
there you have found the explanation of a char-
acter which has always seemed to me inexpli-
cable. How did you hit on it?”
He turned to me with a smile.
“Did I not tell you that I, too, in my way was
an artist? I realised in myself the same desire as
animated him. But whereas his medium was
paint, mine has been life.”
Then Captain Brunot told me a story which I
must repeat, since, if only by way of contrast, it
adds something to my impression of Strickland.
It has also to my mind a beauty of its own.
Captain Brunot was a Breton, and had been in
the French Navy. He left it on his marriage, and
settled down on a small property he had near
Quimper to live for the rest of his days in peace;
but the failure of an attorney left him suddenly
penniless, and neither he nor his wife was will-
ing to live in penury where they had enjoyed con-
sideration. During his sea faring days he had
cruised the South Seas, and he determined now
to seek his fortune there. He spent some months
in Papeete to make his plans and gain experi-
ence; then, on money borrowed from a friend in
France, he bought an island in the Paumotus. It
was a ring of land round a deep lagoon, uninhab-
ited, and covered only with scrub and wild guava.
With the intrepid woman who was his wife, and
a few natives, he landed there, and set about
building a house, and clearing the scrub so that
he could plant cocoa-nuts. That was twenty years
before, and now what had been a barren island
was a garden.
“It was hard and anxious work at first, and we
worked strenuously, both of us. Every day I was
up at dawn, clearing, planting, working on my
house, and at night when I threw myself on my
bed it was to sleep like a log till morning. My
wife worked as hard as I did. Then children were
born to us, first a son and then a daughter. My
wife and I have taught them all they know. We

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Somerset Maugham
had a piano sent out from France, and she has
taught them to play and to speak English, and I
have taught them Latin and mathematics, and
we read history together. They can sail a boat.
They can swim as well as the natives. There is
nothing about the land of which they are igno-
rant. Our trees have prospered, and there is shell
on my reef. I have come to Tahiti now to buy a
schooner. I can get enough shell to make it worth
while to fish for it, and, who knows? I may find
pearls. I have made something where there was
nothing. I too have made beauty. Ah, you do not
know what it is to look at those tall, healthy trees
and think that every one I planted myself.”
“Let me ask you the question that you asked
Strickland. Do you never regret France and your
old home in Brittany?”
“Some day, when my daughter is married and
my son has a wife and is able to take my place
on the island, we shall go back and finish our
days in the old house in which I was born.”
“ You will look back on a happy life,” I said.
“
Evidemment, it is not exciting on my island,
and we are very far from the world — imagine, it
takes me four days to come to Tahiti — but we
are happy there. It is given to few men to at-
tempt a work and to achieve it. Our life is simple
and innocent. We are untouched by ambition, and
what pride we have is due only to our contem-
plation of the work of our hands. Malice cannot
touch us, nor envy attack. Ah, 
mon cher mon-
sieur, they talk of the blessedness of labour, and
it is a meaningless phrase, but to me it has the
most intense significance. I am a happy man.”
“I am sure you deserve to be,” I smiled.
“I wish I could think so. I do not know how I
have deserved to have a wife who was the per-
fect friend and helpmate, the perfect mistress
and the perfect mother. ”
I reflected for a while on the life that the Cap-
tain suggested to my imagination.
“It is obvious that to lead such an existence

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The Moon and Sixpence
and make so great a success of it, you must both
have needed a strong will and a determined char-
acter. ”
“Perhaps; but without one other factor we
could have achieved nothing.”
“And what was that?”
He stopped, somewhat dramatically, and
stretched out his arm.
“Belief in God. Without that we should have
been lost.”
Then we arrived at the house of Dr. Coutras.