The Moon and Sixpence

Chapter XXXI
N
EXT
DAY
, though I pressed him to remain, Stroeve
left me. I offered to fetch his things from the
studio, but he insisted on going himself; I think
he hoped they had not thought of getting them
together, so that he would have an opportunity
of seeing his wife again and perhaps inducing
her to come back to him. But he found his traps
waiting for him in the porter’s lodge, and the
concierge told him that Blanche had gone out. I
do not think he resisted the temptation of giv-
ing her an account of his troubles. I found that
he was telling them to everyone he knew; he
expected sympathy, but only excited ridicule.
He bore himself most unbecomingly. Knowing
at what time his wife did her shopping, one day,
unable any longer to bear not seeing her, he
waylaid her in the street. She would not speak
to him, but he insisted on speaking to her. He
spluttered out words of apology for any wrong
he had committed towards her; he told her he
loved her devotedly and begged her to return to
him. She would not answer; she walked hurriedly,
with averted face. I imagined him with his fat
little legs trying to keep up with her. Panting a
little in his haste, he told her how miserable he
was; he besought her to have mercy on him; he
promised, if she would forgive him, to do every-
thing she wanted. He offered to take her for a
journey. He told her that Strickland would soon
tire of her. When he repeated to me the whole
sordid little scene I was outraged. He had shown
neither sense nor dignity. He had omitted noth-
ing that could make his wife despise him. There
is no cruelty greater than a woman’s to a man
who loves her and whom she does not love; she
has no kindness then, no tolerance even, she has
only an insane irritation. Blanche Stroeve stopped
suddenly, and as hard as she could slapped her
husband’s face. She took advantage of his con-
fusion to escape, and ran up the stairs to the

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The Moon and Sixpence
studio. No word had passed her lips.
When he told me this he put his hand to his
cheek as though he still felt the smart of the blow,
and in his eyes was a pain that was heartrending
and an amazement that was ludicrous. He looked
like an overblown schoolboy, and though I felt so
sorry for him, I could hardly help laughing.
Then he took to walking along the street which
she must pass through to get to the shops, and
he would stand at the corner, on the other side,
as she went along. He dared not speak to her
again, but sought to put into his round eyes the
appeal that was in his heart. I suppose he had
some idea that the sight of his misery would
touch her. She never made the smallest sign that
she saw him. She never even changed the hour
of her errands or sought an alternative route. I
have an idea that there was some cruelty in her
indifference. Perhaps she got enjoyment out of
the torture she inflicted. I wondered why she
hated him so much.
I begged Stroeve to behave more wisely. His
want of spirit was exasperating.
“ You’re doing no good at all by going on like
this,” I said. “I think you’d have been wiser if
you’d hit her over the head with a stick. She
wouldn’t have despised you as she does now. ”
I suggested that he should go home for a while.
He had often spoken to me of the silent town,
somewhere up in the north of Holland, where
his parents still lived. They were poor people.
His father was a carpenter, and they dwelt in a
little old red-brick house, neat and clean, by the
side of a sluggish canal. The streets were wide
and empty; for two hundred years the place had
been dying, but the houses had the homely state-
liness of their time. Rich merchants, sending
their wares to the distant Indies, had lived in
them calm and prosperous lives, and in their de-
cent decay they kept still an aroma of their splen-
did past. You could wander along the canal till
you came to broad green fields, with windmills

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Somerset Maugham
here and there, in which cattle, black and white,
grazed lazily. I thought that among those sur-
roundings, with their recollections of his boy-
hood, Dirk Stroeve would forget his unhappiness.
But he would not go.
“I must be here when she needs me,” he re-
peated. “It would be dreadful if something ter-
rible happened and I were not at hand.”
“What do you think is going to happen?” I
asked.
“I don’t know. But I’m afraid.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
For all his pain, Dirk Stroeve remained a ridicu-
lous object. He might have excited sympathy if
he had grown worn and thin. He did nothing of
the kind. He remained fat, and his round, red
cheeks shone like ripe apples. He had great neat-
ness of person, and he continued to wear his
spruce black coat and his bowler hat, always a
little too small for him, in a dapper, jaunty man-
ner. He was getting something of a paunch, and
sorrow had no effect on it. He looked more than
ever like a prosperous bagman. It is hard that a
man’s exterior should tally so little sometimes
with his soul. Dirk Stroeve had the passion of
Romeo in the body of Sir Toby Belch. He had a
sweet and generous nature, and yet was always
blundering; a real feeling for what was beautiful
and the capacity to create only what was com-
monplace; a peculiar delicacy of sentiment and
gross manners. He could exercise tact when deal-
ing with the affairs of others, but none when
dealing with his own. What a cruel practical joke
old Nature played when she flung so many con-
tradictory elements together, and left the man
face to face with the perplexing callousness of
the universe.

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The Moon and Sixpence