The Skeptical Romancer: Selected Travel Writing

by W. Somerset Maugham

  The landlord of the hotel at Steenvoorde. He is quite a character, a Fleming, cautious, slow, heavy and stout, with round eyes, a round nose, and a round face, a man of forty-five perhaps; he does not welcome the arriving guest, but puts obstacles in the way of his taking a room or having dinner and has to be persuaded to provide him with what he wants; when he has overcome his instinctive mistrust of the stranger, he is friendly. He has a childlike sense of humour, heavy and slow as himself, with a feeling for the practical joke; and he has a fat, tardy laugh. Now that he has come to know me, though still a little suspicious, he is pleasant and affable. When I said to him: “Votre café est bien bon, patron,” he answered elliptically: “C’est lui qui le boit qui l’est.” He speaks in a broad accent, mixing up chaotically the second person singular and the second person plural. He reminds one of those donors of altar pieces that you see in old Flemish pictures; and his wife might be the donor’s wife; she is a large woman, with a stern, unsmiling, lined face, a rather alarming creature; but now and then you feel that there is the Flemish humour behind her severity, and sometimes I have heard her laugh heartily at the discomfiture of some offending person. The first day I arrived here, when. I was persuading the patron to give me dinner, he went to ask his wife if it was possible. “Il faut bien que je la demande,” he said, “puisque je couche avec.”

  I enjoyed myself at Steenvoorde. It was cold and uncomfortable. It was impossible to get a bath. The food was poor. The work was hard and tedious. But what a delight it was to have no responsibility! I had no decisions to make. I did what I was told, and having done it my time was my own. I could waste it with a clear conscience. Till then I had always thought it so precious that I could not afford uselessly to waste a minute. I was obsessed by the ideas that seethed in my head and the desire to express them. There was so much I wanted to learn, so many places I wanted to see, so many experiences I felt I couldn’t afford to miss; but the years were passing and time was short. I was never without a sense of responsibility. To what? Well, I suppose to myself and to such gifts as I had, desiring to make the most both of them and of myself. And now I was free. I enjoyed my liberty. There was a sensual, almost voluptuous, quality in the pleasure of it. I could well understand it when I was told of certain men that they were having the time of their lives in the war. I don’t know if there’s such a word as hebetude in English, but if there is that’s the state I so thoroughly enjoyed.

  HAWAII

  HONOLULU. THE UNION Saloon. You get to it by a narrow passage from King Street, and in the passage are offices so that thirsty souls may be supposed bound for one of these just as well as for the bar. It is a large square room with three entrances, and opposite the bar two corners have been partitioned off into little cubicles. Legend states that they were built so that King Kalakaua might go and drink without being seen by his subjects. In one of these he may have sat over his bottle, a bronze potentate, with R.L.S., discussing the misdeeds of missionaries and the inhibitions of Americans. The saloon is wainscoted with dark brown wood to about five feet from the floor, and above, the wall is papered with a varied assortment of pictures. They are an odd collection. Prints of Queen Victoria, a portrait in oils, in a rich gold frame, of King Kalakaua, old line engravings of the eighteenth century (there is one after a theatrical picture by Dewilde, heaven knows how it got there), oleographs from the Christmas supplements of the Graphic and Illustrated London News of twenty years ago, advertisements of whisky, gin, champagne and beer, photographs of baseball teams and of native orchestras. Behind the bar serve two large half-castes, in white, fat, clean-shaven, dark-skinned, with thick curly hair and large, bright eyes.

  Here gather American men of business, sailors, not able seamen, but captains, engineers and first mates, storekeepers and Kanakas. Business of all sorts is done here. The place has a vaguely mysterious air and you can imagine that it would be a fit scene for shady transactions. In the daytime the light is dim and at night the electric light is cold and sinister.

  The Chinese quarter. Streets of frame houses, one, two, three storeys high, painted in various colours, but time and weather have made the colours dingy. They have a dilapidated look as though the leases were running out and it was worth no tenant’s while to make repairs. In the stores is every imaginable article of Western and Eastern commerce. The Chinese clerks sit impassive within the shops and stare idly at the passers-by. Sometimes, at night, you see a pair, yellow, lined, with slanting eyes, intent on a mysterious game which might be the Chinese equivalent of chess. They are surrounded by onlookers as intense as they, and they take an immense time between each move, calculating deeply.

  The Red Light District. You go down side-streets by the harbour, in the darkness, across a rickety bridge, and you come to a road, all ruts and holes; a little farther, and there is parking room for motors on either side; there are saloons gaily lit and a barber’s shop; there is a certain stir, an air of expectant agitation; you turn down a narrow alley, either to the right or to the left, and find yourself in the district. The street divides Iwelei into two parts, but each part is exactly like the other. Rows of little bungalows, painted green and very neat and tidy in appearance, even a trifle prim; and the road between them is broad and straight.

  Iwelei is laid out like a garden city, and in its respectable regularity, its order and trimness, gives an impression of sardonic horror; for never can the search for love have been so planned and systematized. The pretty bungalows are divided into two lodgings; each is inhabited by a woman, and each consists of two rooms and a kitchenette. One is a bedroom in which there is a chest-of-drawers, a large bed with a canopy and curtains, and a chair or two. It has an overcrowded look. The parlour contains a large table, a gramophone, sometimes a piano, and half a dozen chairs. On the walls are pennants from the San Francisco exhibition and sometimes cheap prints, the favourite of which is September Morn, and photographs of San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the kitchenette is disorder. Here beer and gin are kept for visitors.

  The women sit at their windows so that they may be clearly seen. Some are reading, some are sewing, and take no notice of the passer-by; others watch him approach and call out to him as he passes. They are of all ages and all nations. There are Japanese, Negro women, Germans, Americans, Spaniards. (It is strange and nostalgic as you pass to hear on a gramophone coplas or a seguidilla. Most of them have no trace of youth or beauty, and you wonder how, looking as they do, they can earn a living. Their cheeks are heavily rouged and they are dressed in cheap finery. When you go in the blinds are drawn down and if someone knocks the answer is: Busy. You are at once invited to drink beer and the woman tells you how many glasses she has had that day. She asks you where you come from. The gramophone is turned on. The price is a dollar.

  The streets between are lit by a rare street lamp, but chiefly by the light that comes from the open windows of the bungalows. Men wander about, for the most part silently, looking at the women; now and then one makes up his mind and slinks up the three steps that lead into the parlour, is let in, and then the door and window are shut and the blind is pulled down. Most of the men are only there to look. They are of all nationalities. Sailors from the ships in port, sailors from the American gunboats, mostly drunk, Hawaiians, soldiers from the regiments, white and black, quartered on the island, Chinese, Japanese. They wander about in the night, and desire seems to throb in the air.

  For some time the local papers had been writing articles about the scandal of Iwelei, the missionaries had been clamorous, but the police refused to stir. Their argument was that with the great preponderance of men in Oahu prostitution was inevitable, and to localize it made it easy to control and rendered medical examination more reliable. The papers attacked the police and at last they were forced to act. A raid was made, and fourteen ponces were arrested; oddly enough on the charge sheet most of them claimed French nationality. It suggests that the profession is peculiarly attractive to the citizens of France. A few days later all the women were
summoned and sentenced to be on their good behaviour for a year on pain of being sent to prison. Most of them went straight back to San Francisco. I went to Iwelei the night of the raid. Most of the houses were closed, and there was hardly anyone in the streets. Here and there little groups of three or four women discussed the news in undertones. The place was dark and silent. Iwelei had ceased to exist.

  Haula. A little hotel on the windward side of Oahu kept by a German Swiss and his Belgian wife. It is a wooden bungalow with a wide veranda and the doors are protected from mosquitoes by wire netting. In the garden bananas, papaias and coconut trees. The Swiss is a little man with a square German head, a head too large for his body, bald, with a long, untidy moustache. His wife is matronly, stout and red-faced, with brown hair severely brushed back. She gives you the impression of being competent and business-like. They like to talk of their homes which they haven’t seen for seventeen years, he of Berne, she of the village near Namur where she was born. After dinner the hostess comes into the living-rooms and chats while she plays patience and presently the landlord, who is also the cook, comes in and sits down to gossip.

  From here you visit the sacred waterfall, passing through fields of sugar-cane, and then along a narrow brook upwards towards the mountains. A track runs along it, now on one side, now on the other, so that every now and then you have to ford the stream. Wherever there is a large stone with a flattish top, you see numbers of leaves that have been placed on it and are held down by a pebble. They are offerings to propitiate the deity of the place. The water falls through a narrow gorge into a deep round pool, and you are surrounded by tangled scrub, green and immensely luxuriant. Beyond, above, is a valley which, it is said, no one has ever explored.

  THE MISSIONARY AND MISS THOMPSON

  THE MISSIONARY. He was a tall thin man, with long limbs loosely jointed, hollow cheeks and high cheek-bones; his fine, large dark eyes were deep in their sockets, and he had full sensual lips; he wore his hair rather long. He had a cadaverous look, and a look of suppressed fire. His hands were large, rather finely shaped, with long fingers, and his naturally pale skin was deeply burned by the Pacific sun.

  Mrs. W., his wife, was a little woman with her hair very elaborately done, with prominent blue eyes behind gold-rimmed pince-nez; her face was long, like a sheep’s, but she gave no impression of foolishness, rather of extreme alertness. She had the quick movements of a bird. The most noticeable thing about her was her voice, high, metallic and without inflection; it fell on the ear with a hard monotony, irritating the nerves like the clamour of a pneumatic drill. She was dressed in black, and wore round her neck a thin gold chain from which hung a small cross. She was a New Englander.

  Mrs. W. told me that her husband was a medical missionary, and as his district (the Gilberts) consisted of widely separated islands, he frequently had to go long distances by canoe. The sea was often rough and his journeys were not without danger. During his absence she remained at their headquarters and managed the mission. She spoke of the depravity of the natives in a voice nothing could hush, but with a vehement, unctuous horror; she described their marriage customs as obscene beyond description. She said that when first they went to the Gilberts it was impossible to find a single “good” girl in any of the villages. She was very bitter about the dancing.

  Miss Thompson. Plump, pretty in a coarse fashion, perhaps not more than twenty-seven: she wore a white dress and a large white hat, and long white boots from which her calves, in white cotton stockings, bulged. She had left Iwelei after the raid and was on her way to Apia, where she hoped to get a job in the bar of a hotel. She was brought to the house by the quartermaster, a little, very wrinkled man, indescribably dirty.

  The lodging house. It is a two-storey frame house with verandas on both floors, and it is about five minutes’ walk from the dock, on the Broad Road, and faces the sea. Below is a store in which are sold canned goods, pork and beans, beef, hamburger steak, canned asparagus, peaches and apricots; and cotton goods, lava-lavas, hats, raincoats and such like. The owner is a half-caste with a native wife surrounded by little brown children. The rooms are almost bare of furniture, a poor iron bed with a ragged mosquito-curtain, a rickety chair and a washstand. The rain rattles down on the corrugated iron roof. No meals are provided.

  On these three notes I constructed a story called “Rain”.

  A CASTAWAY

  WMS. AN IRISHMAN. When he was a boy of fifteen he took on the paternity of a child got from some girl by the son of the local clergyman. This young man, after promising to pay for the child’s keep, did not do so, and Wms had to pay half a crown a week till the child was fourteen. Twenty years later, on going back to Ireland, he sought the man out, then married and the father of children, and fought him till he made him ask his pardon.

  For some time he was in New Zealand. One day he was shooting with a friend, a bank clerk, who had no gun licence: suddenly they saw a policeman, the clerk was in dismay, thinking he would be arrested, so Wms told him to keep on calmly and himself started running. The policeman pursued and they ran back to Auckland. Once there Wms stopped, the policeman came up, asked for his licence, which Wms immediately produced. The policeman asked him why he had run away, whereupon he answered: “Well, you’re an Irishman same as I am, if you promise to hold your tongue about it I’ll tell you; the other fellow hadn’t a licence.” The policeman burst out laughing and said: “You’re a sport, come and have a drink.”

  He is a gross, sensual man, and he loves to tell you about the women he’s lived with. He’s had ten children by Samoan women; one, a girl of fifteen, he keeps at school in New Zealand, but the rest he’s handed over to the Mormon mission with a sum of money. He came out to the islands when he was twenty-six as a planter. He was one of the few white men settled in Savaii at the time of the German occupation and had already a certain influence with the natives. He loves them as much as it is in his selfish nature to love anybody. The Germans made him Amtmann, a position he occupied for sixteen years. On one occasion, having to call on Solf, the German minister for foreign affairs, Solf said to him: “Being governor of a German colony I suppose you speak German fluently.” “No,” he answered, “I only know one word, prosit, and I haven’t heard that since my arrival in Berlin.” The minister laughed heartily and sent for a bottle of beer.

  TAHITI

  PAPEETE. SHARKS SURROUNDED the ship as she entered the passage in the reef and followed her into the lagoon. The lagoon was very quiet and still and the water clear. A number of white schooners lay along the wharf. A crowd had assembled to see the ship come in, the women in bright colours, the men in white or khaki or blue. On the bright sunny quay the crowd, so brilliantly coloured, was a sight charmingly gay.

  There are stores and office buildings along the beach and a long line of old trees, with heavy green foliage, and here and there, making the green more vivid, the rich scarlet of the flamboyant. The buildings, the post office, the offices of the Compagnie Navale de l’Océanie, haven’t the severe, businesslike dullness of most such buildings in the Pacific; they have a florid tawdriness which is not altogether unpleasing. The beach with its fine trees has something French about it and reminds you of the ramparts of a provincial town in Touraine. And Papeete as a whole, notwithstanding its English and American stores, its Chinese shops, has a subtly French character. It has an engaging trimness, and it is leisurely. You feel that people live there, and the desire for gain is not quite so much in evidence as in the English islands. The roads are good, as good and as carefully kept as many roads in France, and trees, giving a grateful shade, have been planted along them. By the beach, shaded by a huge mango tree, with a vast bamboo by the side of it, is a brick washing-place of exactly the same pattern as those I saw near Arras in which soldiers, resting, were washing their shirts. The market place might be in any village of some size in France. And yet the whole has an exotic note which gives it character peculiar to itself.

  Besides Tahitian, English and French a
re spoken indifferently. The natives speak French trailingly, with an accent that reminds you of that of the Russian students in Paris. Round each little house there is a garden, wild and uncared for; a tangled mass of trees and gaudy flowers.

  The Tahitians wear trousers for the most part, shirts and huge straw hats. They seem lighter than most Polynesians. The women wear the Mother Hubbard, but great numbers wear black.

  The Hotel Tiare. It is about five minutes walk from the Custom House at the end of the town, and when you step out of the gate you walk straight into the country. In front is a little garden full of flowers and surrounded by a hedge of coffee shrubs. At the back is a compound in which grow a breadfruit tree, an avocado pear, oleander and taro. When you want a pear for lunch you pick one off the tree. The hotel is a bungalow surrounded by a terrace, part of which serves as a dining-room. There is a small sitting-room with a waxed parquet floor, a piano and bentwood furniture covered with velvet. The bedrooms are small and dark. The kitchen is a little house by itself and here, all day long, sits Madame Lovaina superintending the Chinese cook. She is a very good cook herself and very hospitable. Everyone in the neighbourhood in want of a meal comes to the hotel and gets one. Lovaina is a half-caste, very white, a woman of fifty, perhaps, and of enormous proportions. She is not merely fat, she is huge and shapeless; and she wears a pink Mother Hubbard and a small straw hat. Her face has kept its small features, but she has a vast expanse of chin. Her brown eyes are large and liquid; her expression pleasant and candid. She has a ready smile and a hearty, fat laugh. She takes a motherly interest in all young people, and when the boyish purser of the Moana got very drunk I saw her stir her immense bulk and take the glass out of his hand to prevent him from drinking more, and she sent her son to see him safely back to his ship.