'Of course. I thought it very vulgar, but it left me entirely indifferent.'
'It's funny that their instinct should have been so right.'
'Do you mean to say you've been harbouring this against me all these weeks? I should never have thought you capable of it.'
'I couldn't let you down when everyone was against you. I was too proud for that. Whatever happened I swore to myself that I'd stick to you till we got home. It's been torture.'
'Don't you love me any more?'
'Love you? I loathe the very sight of you.'
'Anne!'
'God knows I loved you. For eight years I worshipped the ground you trod on. You were everything to me. I believed in you as some people believe in God. When I saw the fear in your eyes that day, when you told me that you weren't going to risk your life for a kept woman and her half-caste brats, I was shattered. It was as though someone had wrenched my heart out of my body and trampled on it. You killed my love there and then, Alban. You killed it stone-dead. Since then when you've kissed me I've had to clench my hands so as not to turn my face away. The mere thought of anything else makes me feel physically sick. I loathe your complacence and your frightful insensitiveness. Perhaps I could have forgiven it if it had been just a moment's weakness and if afterwards you'd been ashamed. I should have been miserable, but I think my love was so great that I should only have felt pity for you. But you're incapable of shame. And now I believe in nothing. You're only a silly, pretentious, vulgar poseur. I would rather be the wife of a second-rate planter so long as he had the common human virtues of a man than the wife of a fake like you.'
He did not answer. Gradually his face began to discompose. Those handsome, regular features of his horribly distorted and suddenly he broke out into loud sobs. She gave a little cry.
'Don't Alban, don't.'
'Oh, darling, how can you be so cruel to me? I adore you. I'd give my whole life to please you. I can't live without you.'
She put out her arms as though to ward off a blow.
'No, no, Alban, don't try to move me. I can't. I must go. I can't live with you any more. It would be frightful. I can never forget. I must tell you the truth, I have only contempt for you and repulsion.'
He sank down at her feet and tried to cling to her knees. With a gasp she sprang up and he buried his head in the empty chair. He cried painfully with sobs that tore his chest. The sound was horrible. The tears streamed from Anne's eyes and, putting her hands to her ears to shut out that dreadful, hysterical sobbing, blindly stumbling she rushed to the door and ran out.
Also available in Vintage
W. Somerset Maugham
OF HUMAN
BONDAGE
'It was not true that he would never see her again. It was
not true because it was impossible.'
Of Human Bondage is the first and most autobiographical of Maugham's masterpieces. It tells the story of Philip Carey, an orphan eager for life, love and adventure. After a few months studying in Heidelberg, and a brief spell in Paris as a would-be artist, Philip settles in London to train as a doctor.
And that is where he meets Mildred, the loud but irresistible waitress with whom he plunges into a formative, tortured and masochistic affair which very nearly ruins him.
It is in Of Human Bondage that the essential themes of autonomy and enslavement which dominate so much of Maugham's writing are most profoundly explored.
Also available in Vintage
W. Somerset Maugham
THE MOON AND
SIXPENCE
'Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.'
Inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, The Moon and Sixpence tells the story of Charles Strickland, a conventional stockbroker who abandons his wife and children for Paris and Tahiti, to live his life as a painter. Whilst his betrayal of family, duty and honour gives him the freedom to achieve greatness, his decision leads to an obsession which carries severe implications. The Moon and Sixpence is at once a satiric caricature of Edwardian mores and a vivid portrayal of the mentality of genius.
Also available in Vintage
W. Somerset Maugham
THE RAZOR'S EDGE
'There was in the soul of that boy some confused striving, whether of half-thought-out ideas or of dimly felt emotions, I could not tell ...'
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of this spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters – his fiancée Isabel, whose choice between love and wealth have lifelong repercussions, and Elliot Templeton, her uncle, a classic expatriate American snob.
The most ambitious of Maugham's novels, this is also one in which Maugham himself plays a considerable part as he wanders in and out of the story, to observe his characters struggling with their fates.
Also available in Vintage
W. Somerset Maugham
CAKES AND ALE
'They did not behave like lovers, but like familiar friends ... her eyes rested on him quietly, as though he were not a man, but a chair or a table.'
Cakes and Ale is the book that roused a storm of controversy when it was first published. It is both a wickedly satirical novel about contemporary literary poseurs and a skilfully crafted study of freedom. It is also the book by which Maugham most wanted to be remembered – and probably still is.
'A formidable talent, a formidable sum of talents...precision, tact, irony, and that beautiful negative thing which in so good a writer becomes positive – total, but total absence of pomposity'
Spectator
'One of my favourite writers'
Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Collected Short Stories Volume 2 Page 54