“ ‘What about coming round to my flat and having a look at my photograph album?’ said Harry.
“ ‘I don’t mind if I do,’ I said.
“He had a little bit of a flat in the Charing Cross Road, just two rooms and a bath and a kitchenette, and we drove round there, and I stayed the night.
“When I got back next morning the breakfast was already on the table and Ted had just started. I’d made up my mind that if he said anything I was going to fly out at him. I didn’t care what happened. I’d earned my living before, and I was ready to earn it again. For two pins I’d have packed my box and left him there and then. But he just looked up as I came in.
“ ‘You’ve just come in time,’ he said. ‘I was going to eat your sausage.’
“I sat down and poured him out his tea. And he went on reading the paper. After we’d finished breakfast we went to the hospital. He never asked me where I’d been. I didn’t know what he thought. He was terribly kind to me all that time. I was miserable, you know. Somehow I felt that I just couldn’t get over it, and there was nothing he didn’t do to make it easier for me.”
“What did you think when you read the book?” I asked.
“Well, it did give me a turn to see that he did know pretty well what had happened that night. What beat me was his writing it at all. You’d have thought it was the last thing he’d put in a book. You’re queer fish, you writers.”
At that moment the telephone bell rang. Rosie took up the receiver and listened.
“Why, Mr. Vanuzzi, how very nice of you to call me up! Oh, I’m pretty well, thank you. Well, pretty and well, if you like. When you’re my age you take all the compliments you can get.”
She embarked upon a conversation which, I gathered from her tone, was of a facetious and even flirtatious character. I did not pay much attention, and since it seemed to prolong itself I began to meditate upon the writer’s life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world’s indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit with a good grace to its hazards. He depends upon a fickle public. He is at the mercy of journalists who want to interview him and photographers who want to take his picture, of editors who harry him for copy and tax gatherers who harry him for income tax, of persons of quality who ask him to lunch and secretaries of institutes who ask him to lecture, of women who want to marry him and women who want to divorce him, of youths who want his autograph, actors who want parts and strangers who want a loan, of gushing ladies who want advice on their matrimonial affairs and earnest young men who want advice on their compositions, of agents, publishers, managers, bores, admirers, critics, and his own conscience. But he has one compensation. Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as the theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man.
Rosie put back the receiver and turned to me.
“That was one of my beaux. I’m going to play bridge to-night and he rang up to say he’d call round for me in his car. Of course he’s a Wop, but he’s real nice. He used to run a big grocery store down town, in New York, but he’s retired now.”
“Have you never thought of marrying again, Rosie?”
“No.” She smiled. “Not that I haven’t had offers. I’m quite happy as I am. The way I look on it is this, I don’t want to marry an old man, and it would be silly at my age to marry a young one. I’ve had my time and I’m ready to call it a day.”
“What made you run away with George Kemp?”
“Well, I’d always liked him. I knew him long before I knew Ted, you know. Of course I never thought there was any chance of marrying him. For one thing he was married already and then he had his position to think of. And then when he came to me one day and said that everything had gone wrong and he was bust and there’d be a warrant out for his arrest in a few days and he was going to America and would I go with him, well, what could I do? I couldn’t let him go all that way by himself, with no money perhaps, and him having been always so grand and living in his own house and driving his own trap. It wasn’t as if I was afraid of work.”
“I sometimes think he was the only man you ever cared for,” I suggested.
“I dare say there’s some truth in that.”
“I wonder what it was you saw in him.”
Rosie’s eyes travelled to a picture on the wall that for some reason had escaped my notice. It was an enlarged photograph of Lord George in a carved gilt frame. It looked as if it might have been taken soon after his arrival in America; perhaps at the time of their marriage. It was a three-quarter length. It showed him in a long frock coat, tightly buttoned, and a tall silk hat cocked rakishly on one side of his head; there was a large rose in his buttonhole; under one arm he carried a silver-headed cane and smoke curled from a big cigar that he held in his right hand. He had a heavy moustache, waxed at the ends, a saucy look in his eye, and in his bearing an arrogant swagger. In his tie was a horseshoe in diamonds. He looked like a publican dressed up in his best to go to the Derby.
“I’ll tell you,” said Rosie. “He was always such a perfect gentleman.”
THE END
ALSO BY W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
“[Maugham’s] excessively rare gift of story-telling … is almost the equal of imagination itself.”
—
THE MOON AND SIXPENCE
When Charles Strickland leaves his wife and flees to Paris, gossip suggests that a pretty dancer is to blame. But a more shocking discovery is made: Charles Strickland has become a painter. Based on the life of Paul Gauguin,
