The Complete Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham - II - The World Over (96 page)

Gracie took the necessary steps so that they could get married at once. The eighteen months of Fred’s imprisonment were drawing to an end. Gracie was in a fever of excitement.

It happened then that Ned Preston had one of his periodical bouts of illness and was unable to go to the prison for three weeks. It bothered him, for he didn’t like to abandon his prisoners, so as soon as he could get out of bed he went to the Scrubs. The chief warder told him that Manson had been asking for him.

“I think you’d better go and see him. I don’t know what’s the matter with him. He’s been acting rather funny since you’ve been away.”

It was just a fortnight before Fred was due to be released. Ned Preston went to his cell.

“Well, Fred, how are you?” he asked. “Sorry I haven’t been able to come and see you. I’ve been ill, and I haven’t been able to see Gracie either. She must be all of a dither by now.”

“Well, I want you to go and see her.”

His manner was so surly that Ned was taken aback. It was unlike him to be anything but pleasant and civil.

“Of course I will.”

“I want you to tell her that I’m not going to marry her.”

Ned was so astounded that for a minute he could only stare blankly at Fred Manson.

“What on earth d’you mean?”

“Exactly what I say.”

“You can’t let her down now. Her people have thrown her out. She’s been working all this time to get a home ready for you. She’s got the licence and everything.”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to marry her.”

“But why, why, why?”

Ned was flabbergasted. Fred Manson was silent for a bit. His face was dark and sullen.

“I’ll tell you. I’ve thought about her night and day for eighteen months and now I’m sick to death of her.”

When Ned Preston reached this point of his story our hostess and our fellow guests broke into loud laughter. He was plainly taken aback. There was some little talk after that and the party broke up. Ned and I, having to go in the same direction, walked along Piccadilly together. For a time we walked in silence.

“I noticed you didn’t laugh with the others,” he said abruptly.

“I didn’t think it funny.”

“What d’you make of it?”

“Well, I can see his point, you know. Imagination’s an odd thing, it dries up; I suppose, thinking of her incessantly all that time he’d exhausted every emotion she could give him, and I think it was quite literally true, he’d just got sick to death of her. He’d squeezed the lemon dry and there was nothing to do but throw away the rind.”

“I didn’t think it funny either. That’s why I didn’t tell them the rest of the story. I wouldn’t accept it at first. I thought it was just hysteria or something. I went to see him two or three days running. I argued with him. I really did my damnedest. I thought if he’d only see her it would be all right, but he wouldn’t even do that. He said he hated the sight of her. I couldn’t move him. At last I had to go and tell her.”

We walked on a little longer in silence.

“I saw her in that beastly, stinking corridor. She saw at once there was something the matter and she went awfully white. She wasn’t a girl to show much emotion. There was something gracious and rather noble about her face. Tranquil. Her lips quivered a bit when I told her and she didn’t say anything for a minute. When she spoke it was quite calmly, as though-well, as though she’d just missed a bus and would have to wait for another. As though it was a nuisance, you know, but nothing to make a song and dance about. ‘There’s nothing for me to do now but put my head in the gas-oven,’ she said.

“And she did.”

I
KNOW
this is an odd story. I don’t understand it myself and if I set it down in black and white it is only with a faint hope that when I have written it I may get a clearer view of it, or rather with the hope that some reader, better acquainted with the complications of human nature than I am, may offer me an explanation that will make it comprehensible to me. Of course the first thing that occurs to me is that there is something Freudian about it. Now, I have read a good deal by Freud, and some books by his followers, and intending to write this story I have recently flipped through again the volume published by the Modern Library which contains his basic writings. It was something of a task, for he is a dull and verbose writer, and the acrimony with which he claims to have originated such and such a theory shows a vanity and a jealousy of others working in the same field which somewhat ill become the man of science. I believe, however, that he was a kindly and benign old party. As we know, there is often a great difference between the man and the writer. The writer may be bitter, harsh, and brutal, while the man may be so meek and mild that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose. But that is neither here nor there. I found nothing in my re-reading of Freud’s works that cast any light on the subject I had in mind. I can only relate the facts and leave it at that.

First of all I must make it plain that it is not my story and that I knew none of the persons with whom it is concerned. It was told me one evening by my friend Ned Preston, and he told it me because he didn’t know how to deal with the circumstances and he thought, quite wrongly as it happened, that I might be able to give him some advice that would help him. In a previous story I have related what I thought the reader should know about Ned Preston, and so now I need only remind him that my friend was a prison visitor at Wormwood Scrubs. He took his duties very seriously and made the prisoners’ troubles his own. We had been dining together at the Cafe Royal in that long, low room with its absurd and charming decoration which is all that remains of the old Cafe Royal that painters have loved to paint; and we were sitting over our coffee and liqueurs and, so far as Ned was concerned against his doctor’s orders, smoking very long and very good Havanas.

“I’ve got a funny chap to deal with at the Scrubs just now,” he said, after a pause, “and I’m blowed if I know how to deal with him.”

“What’s he in for?” I asked.

“He left his wife and the court ordered him to pay so much a week in alimony and he’s absolutely refused to pay it. I’ve argued with him till I was blue in the face. I’ve told him he’s only cutting off his nose to spite his face. He says he’ll stay in jail all his life rather than pay her a penny. I tell him he can’t let her starve, and all he says is: ‘Why not?’ He’s perfectly well behaved, he’s no trouble, he works well, he seems quite happy, he’s just getting a lot of fun out of thinking what a devil of a time his wife is having.”

“What’s he got against her?”

“She smashed his kite.”

“She did what?” I cried.

“Exactly that. She smashed his kite. He says he’ll never forgive her for that till his dying day.”

“He must be crazy.”

“No, he isn’t, he’s a perfectly reasonable, quite intelligent, decent fellow.”

Herbert Sunbury was his name, and his mother, who was very refined, never allowed him to be called Herb or Bertie, but always Herbert, just as she never called her husband Sam but only Samuel. Mrs Sunbury’s first name was Beatrice, and when she got engaged to Mr Sunbury and he ventured to call her Bea she put her foot down firmly.

“Beatrice I was christened,” she said, “and Beatrice I always have been and always shall be, to you and to my nearest and dearest.”

She was a little woman, but strong, active, and wiry, with a sallow skin, sharp, regular features, and small beady eyes. Her hair, suspiciously black for her age, was always very neat, and she wore it in the style of Queen Victoria’s daughters, which she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to put it up and had never thought fit to change. The possibility that she did something to keep her hair its original colour was, if such was the case, her only concession to frivolity, for, far from using rouge or lipstick, she had never in her life so much as passed a powder-puff over her nose. She never wore anything but black dresses of good material, but made (by that little woman round the corner) regardless of fashion after a pattern that was both serviceable and decorous. Her only ornament was a thin gold chain from which hung a small gold cross.

Samuel Sunbury was a little man too. He was as thin and spare as his wife, but he had sandy hair, gone very thin now so that he had to wear it very long on one side and brushed it carefully over the large bald patch. He had pale blue eyes and his complexion was pasty. He was a clerk in a lawyer’s office and had worked his way up from office boy to a respectable position. His employer called him Mr Sunbury and sometimes asked him to see an unimportant client. Every morning for twenty-four years Samuel Sunbury had taken the same train to the City, except of course on Sundays and during his fortnight’s holiday at the seaside, and every evening he had taken the same train back to the suburb in which he lived. He was neat in his dress; he went to work in quiet grey trousers, a black coat, and a bowler hat, and when he came home he put on his slippers and a black coat which was too old and shiny to wear at the office; but on Sundays when he went to the chapel he and Mrs Sunbury attended he wore a morning coat with his bowler. Thus he showed his respect for the day of rest and at the same time registered a protest against the ungodly who went bicycling or lounged about the streets until the pubs opened. On principle the Sunburys were total abstainers, but on Sundays, when to make up for the frugal lunch, consisting of a scone and butter with a glass of milk, which Samuel had during the week, Beatrice gave him a good dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, for his health’s sake she liked him to have a glass of beer. Since she wouldn’t for the world have kept liquor in the house, he sneaked out with a jug after morning service and got a quart from the pub round the corner; but nothing would induce him to drink alone, so, just to be sociable-like, she had a glass too.

Herbert was the only child the Lord had vouchsafed to them, and this certainly through no precaution on their part. It just happened that way. They doted on him. He was a pretty baby and then a good-looking child. Mrs Sunbury brought him up carefully. She taught him to sit up at table and not put his elbows on it, and she taught him how to use his knife and fork like a little gentleman. She taught him to stretch out his little finger when he took his teacup to drink out of it and when he asked why, she said:

“Never you mind. That’s how it’s done. It shows you know what’s what.”

In due course Herbert grew old enough to go to school. Mrs Sunbury was anxious because she had never let him play with the children in the street.

“Evil communications corrupt good manners,” she said. “I always have kept myself to myself and I always shall keep myself to myself.”

Although they had lived in the same house ever since they were married she had taken care to keep her neighbours at a distance.

“You never know who people are in London,” she said. “One thing leads to another, and before you know where you are you’re mixed up with a lot of riff-raff and you can’t get rid of them.”

She didn’t like the idea of Herbert being thrown into contact with a lot of rough boys at the County Council school and she said to him:

“Now, Herbert, do what I do; keep yourself to yourself and don’t have anything more to do with them than you can help.”

But Herbert got on very well at school. He was a good worker and far from stupid. His reports were excellent. It turned out that he had a good head for figures.

“If that’s a fact,” said Samuel Sunbury, “he’d better be an accountant. There’s always a good job waiting for a good accountant.”

So it was settled there and then that this was what Herbert was to be. He grew tall.

“Why, Herbert,” said his mother, “soon you’ll be as tall as your dad.”

By the time he left school he was two inches taller, and by the time he stopped growing he was five feet ten.

“Just the right height,” said his mother. “Not too tall and not too short.”

He was a nice-looking boy, with his mother’s regular features and dark hair, but he had inherited his father’s blue eyes, and though he was rather pale his skin was smooth and clear. Samuel Sunbury had got him into the office of the accountants who came twice a year to do the accounts of his own firm and by the time he was twenty-one he was able to bring back to his mother every week quite a nice little sum. She gave him back three half-crowns for his lunches and ten shillings for pocket money, and the rest she put in the Savings Bank for him against a rainy day.

When Mr and Mrs Sunbury went to bed on the night of Herbert’s twenty-first birthday, and in passing I may say that Mrs Sunbury never went to bed, she retired, but Mr Sunbury, who was not quite so refined as his wife, always said: “Me for Bedford,”-when then Mr and Mrs Sunbury went to bed, Mrs Sunbury said:

“Some people don’t know how lucky they are; thank the Lord, I do. No one’s ever had a better son than our Herbert. Hardly a day’s illness in his life and he’s never given me a moment’s worry. It just shows if you bring up somebody right they’ll be a credit to you. Fancy him being twenty-one, I can hardly believe it.”

“Yes, I suppose before we know where we are he’ll be marrying and leaving us.”

“What should he want to do that for?” asked Mrs Sunbury with asperity. “He’s got a good home here, hasn’t he? Don’t you go putting silly ideas into his head, Samuel, or you and me’ll have words and you know that’s the last thing I want. Marry indeed! He’s got more sense than that. He knows when he’s well off. He’s got sense, Herbert has.”