The Moon and Sixpence

Chapter LVIII
T
HE
TIME
CAME
for my departure from Tahiti. Ac-
cording to the gracious custom of the island, pre-
sents were given me by the persons with whom
I had been thrown in contact — baskets made of
the leaves of the cocoa-nut tree, mats of panda-
nus, fans; and Tiare gave me three little pearls
and three jars of guava-jelly made with her own
plump hands. When the mail-boat, stopping for
twenty-four hours on its way from Wellington to
San Francisco, blew the whistle that warned the
passengers to get on board, Tiare clasped me to
her vast bosom, so that I seemed to sink into a
billowy sea, and pressed her red lips to mine.
Tears glistened in her eyes. And when we
steamed slowly out of the lagoon, making our
way gingerly through the opening in the reef,
and then steered for the open sea, a certain mel-
ancholy fell upon me. The breeze was laden still
with the pleasant odours of the land. Tahiti is

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Somerset Maugham
very far away, and I knew that I should never
see it again. A chapter of my life was closed, and
I felt a little nearer to inevitable death.
N
OT
MUCH
MORE
than a month later I was in Lon-
don; and after I had arranged certain matters
which claimed my immediate attention, think-
ing Mrs. Strickland might like to hear what I
knew of her husband’s last years, I wrote to her.
I had not seen her since long before the war, and
I had to look out her address in the telephone-
book. She made an appointment, and I went to
the trim little house on Campden Hill which she
now inhabited. She was by this time a woman of
hard on sixty, but she bore her years well, and
no one would have taken her for more than fifty.
Her face, thin and not much lined, was of the
sort that ages gracefully, so that you thought in
youth she must have been a much handsomer
woman than in fact she was. Her hair, not yet
very gray, was becomingly arranged, and her
black gown was modish. I remembered having
heard that her sister, Mrs. MacAndrew, outliv-
ing her husband but a couple of years, had left
money to Mrs. Strickland; and by the look of the
house and the trim maid who opened the door I
judged that it was a sum adequate to keep the
widow in modest comfort.
When I was ushered into the drawing-room I
found that Mrs. Strickland had a visitor, and when
I discovered who he was, I guessed that I had
been asked to come at just that time not without
intention. The caller was Mr. Van Busche Taylor,
an American, and Mrs. Strickland gave me par-
ticulars with a charming smile of apology to him.
“ You know, we English are so dreadfully igno-
rant. You must forgive me if it’s necessary to
explain.” Then she turned to me. “Mr. Van
Busche Taylor is the distinguished American
critic. If you haven’t read his book your educa-
tion has been shamefully neglected, and you
must repair the omission at once. He’s writing

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The Moon and Sixpence
something about dear Charlie, and he’s come
to ask me if I can help him.”
Mr. Van Busche Taylor was a very thin man with
a large, bald head, bony and shining; and under
the great dome of his skull his face, yellow, with
deep lines in it, looked very small. He was quiet
and exceedingly polite. He spoke with the accent
of New England, and there was about his
demeanour a bloodless frigidity which made me
ask myself why on earth he was busying himself
with Charles Strickland. I had been slightly tick-
led at the gentleness which Mrs. Strickland put
into her mention of her husband’s name, and
while the pair conversed I took stock of the room
in which we sat. Mrs. Strickland had moved with
the times. Gone were the Morris papers and gone
the severe cretonnes, gone were the Arundel
prints that had adorned the walls of her
drawingroom in Ashley Gardens; the room blazed
with fantastic colour, and I wondered if she knew
that those varied hues, which fashion had im-
posed upon her, were due to the dreams of a poor
painter in a South Sea island. She gave me the
answer herself.
“What wonderful cushions you have,” said Mr.
Van Busche Taylor.
“Do you like them?” she said, smiling. “Bakst,
you know. ”
And yet on the walls were coloured reproduc-
tions of several of Strickland’s best pictures, due
to the enterprise of a publisher in Berlin.
“ You’re looking at my pictures,” she said, fol-
lowing my eyes. “Of course, the originals are out
of my reach, but it’s a comfort to have these.
The publisher sent them to me himself. They’re
a great consolation to me.”
“They must be very pleasant to live with,” said
Mr. Van Busche Taylor.
“ Yes; they’re so essentially decorative.”
“That is one of my profoundest convictions,”
said Mr. Van Busche Taylor. “Great art is always
decorative.”

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235
Somerset Maugham
Their eyes rested on a nude woman suckling a
baby, while a girl was kneeling by their side hold-
ing out a flower to the indifferent child. Looking
over them was a wrinkled, scraggy hag. It was
Strickland’s version of the Holy Family. I sus-
pected that for the figures had sat his household
above Taravao, and the woman and the baby
were Ata and his first son. I asked myself if Mrs.
Strickland had any inkling of the facts.
The conversation proceeded, and I marvelled
at the tact with which Mr. Van Busche Taylor
avoided all subjects that might have been in the
least embarrassing, and at the ingenuity with
which Mrs. Strickland, without saying a word
that was untrue, insinuated that her relations
with her husband had always been perfect. At
last Mr. Van Busche Taylor rose to go. Holding
his hostess’ hand, he made her a graceful,
though perhaps too elaborate, speech of thanks,
and left us.
“I hope he didn’t bore you,” she said, when
the door closed behind him. “Of course it’s a
nuisance sometimes, but I feel it’s only right to
give people any information I can about Charlie.
There’s a certain responsibility about having
been the wife of a genius.”
She looked at me with those pleasant eyes of
hers, which had remained as candid and as sym-
pathetic as they had been more than twenty
years before. I wondered if she was making a
fool of me.
“Of course you’ve given up your business,” I
said.
“Oh, yes,” she answered airily. “I ran it more
by way of a hobby than for any other reason,
and my children persuaded me to sell it. They
thought I was overtaxing my strength.”
I saw that Mrs. Strickland had forgotten that
she had ever done anything so disgraceful as to
work for her living. She had the true instinct of
the nice woman that it is only really decent for
her to live on other people’s money.

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The Moon and Sixpence
“They’re here now,” she said. “I thought
they’d, like to hear what you had to say about
their father. You remember Robert, don’t you?
I’m glad to say he’s been recommended for the
Military Cross.”
She went to the door and called them. There
entered a tall man in khaki, with the parson’s
collar, handsome in a somewhat heavy fashion,
but with the frank eyes that I remembered in
him as a boy. He was followed by his sister. She
must have been the same age as was her mother
when first I knew her, and she was very like her.
She too gave one the impression that as a girl
she must have been prettier than indeed she was.
“I suppose you don’t remember them in the
least,” said Mrs. Strickland, proud and smiling.
“My daughter is now Mrs. Ronaldson. Her
husband’s a Major in the Gunners.”
“He’s by way of being a pukka soldier, you
know,” said Mrs. Ronaldson gaily. “That’s why
he’s only a Major. ”
I remembered my anticipation long ago that
she would marry a soldier. It was inevitable. She
had all the graces of the soldier’s wife. She was
civil and affable, but she could hardly conceal
her intimate conviction that she was not quite
as others were. Robert was breezy.
“It’s a bit of luck that I should be in London
when you turned up,” he said. “I’ve only got
three days’ leave.”
“He’s dying to get back,” said his mother.
“ Well, I don’t mind confessing it, I have a rat-
tling good time at the front. I’ve made a lot of
good pals. It’s a first-rate life. Of course war’s
terrible, and all that sort of thing; but it does
bring out the best qualities in a man, there’s no
denying that.”
Then I told them what I had learned about
Charles Strickland in Tahiti. I thought it unnec-
essary to say anything of Ata and her boy, but
for the rest I was as accurate as I could be. When
I had narrated his lamentable death I ceased.

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Somerset Maugham
For a minute or two we were all silent. Then
Robert Strickland struck a match and lit a ciga-
rette.
“The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind
exceeding small,” he said, somewhat impres-
sively.
Mrs. Strickland and Mrs. Ronaldson looked
down with a slightly pious expression which in-
dicated, I felt sure, that they thought the quota-
tion was from Holy Writ. Indeed, I was
unconvinced that Robert Strickland did not share
their illusion. I do not know why I suddenly
thought of Strickland’s son by Ata. They had
told me he was a merry, light-hearted youth. I
saw him, with my mind’s eye, on the schooner
on which he worked, wearing nothing but a pair
of dungarees; and at night, when the boat sailed
along easily before a light breeze, and the sailors
were gathered on the upper deck, while the cap-
tain and the supercargo lolled in deck-chairs, smok-
ing their pipes, I saw him dance with another lad,
dance wildly, to the wheezy music of the
concertina. Above was the blue sky, and the stars,
and all about the desert of the Pacific Ocean.
A quotation from the Bible came to my lips,
but I held my tongue, for I know that clergymen
think it a little blasphemous when the laity poach
upon their preserves. My Uncle Henry, for twenty-
seven years Vicar of Whitstable, was on these
occasions in the habit of saying that the devil
could always quote scripture to his purpose. He
remembered the days when you could get thir-
teen Royal Natives for a shilling.

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