A Writer's Notebook by W. Somerset Maugham
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, rain-coats 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”.
Red. He has been a sailor in the U.S. Navy and coming down to Pago had bought his discharge. He was by trade a butcher, but during the three years he had been at Pago had done little work. He was as near a beachcomber as I saw. He was a man of twenty-six, perhaps, of middle size, slender, with good features but a sullen look, a small red moustache and three days’ growth of beard, and a fine head of curling red hair. He was dressed in a sleeveless singlet and a pair of dirty drill trousers. The proprietor of the eating-house being ill, Red was running it in return for his keep. He talked of going back to the States to get work, but you felt he could never summon up resolution to leave the island. He asked vaguely if any work was to be got at Apia. The eating-house consisted of a little green bungalow at the back of Pago, almost on the edge of the bush, among breadfruit trees, coconuts and mangoes. It had a modest room in which was a bar, but no drinks were served there, since Pago is dry, and two small tables covered with a red cloth. There were shelves behind the bar, and on these a few dusty tins of canned beef, tomato soup and preserved apricots. Next door was a small slovenly bedroom, and behind the bungalow, in the open, protected only by the veranda roof, were the stove on which Red did the cooking and a rough table to act as pantry, larder and whatnot. When the ship came in and brought eggs these were to be had, but otherwise nothing save hamburger steak, which he made every day, and coffee. For dinner Red made soup out of the remains of the joints from which he had made the hamburger steak. The clients were the very few strangers who dropped in at Pago on their way to Australia, a few sailors from the U.S. station, and a number of natives. Red was a man of few words. It was difficult to get him to speak. He refused the offer of cigarettes or cigars in a surly way. When at last he became more communicative it was to talk of women, of the place, to lament that it ruined one and made one fit for nothing, and to show one a collection of dirty postcards.
The Manua. A schooner of seventy tons, with paraffin auxiliary; she does, when there is no head wind, between four and five knots; she is a bedraggled craft, painted white long ago and now dirty, dingy and mottled. She was built for shallow waters and rolls terribly. “One day,” the skipper told me, “she’ll turn turtle and we shall all go to the bottom of the Pacific.” The cabin, about eight foot by five, serves as a dining-room and sleeping quarters for passengers, and the supercargo makes out his accounts in it. It is lit at night by a paraffin lamp.
The crew consists of a captain, a supercargo, an engineer and his assistant, a Chinese cook and half a dozen kanakas. The boat smells overpoweringly of the paraffin with which she is run. The kanakas wear blue cotton trousers and nothing else; the cook is dressed in dirty, ragged whites. The captain wears a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck, an old grey felt hat, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers. The engineer is dressed like engineers all over the world, a very old tweed cap, old dark pants and an old grey flannel shirt, the whole a mess of grime and dirt.
There are three tiny cabins, with a couple of berths in each, quite dark when the door is shut and with hardly room to stand in. The skipper has a rather larger cabin, with a single berth and a porthole. It is airy and comparatively roomy. The native passengers, in lava-lavas, are crowded aft and forward; they have baskets made of green coconut leaves in which are their provisions and little bundles done up in large coloured handkerchiefs containing their personal belongings.
We left Pago at about half-past four. A number of natives had come to see their friends off, and there was much weeping among those who were going and those who were staying behind. We went along the coast under our power, and the schooner rolled heavily, but presently, the wind favouring, the sail was hoisted and she rolled less. There were no waves, but a long heavy swell.
Supper was served by the cook at half-past five. A soup made of heaven knows what, balls of mince meat strongly flavoured with garlic, and potatoes, and to finish, canned apricots. Tea and canned milk. Our party consisted of a Scotch doctor and his wife, going to Apia to take up an appointment at the hospital, a missionary, an Australian store-keeper going to Burns Philip’s store at Apia, Gerald and myself. After supper we went on deck. The night fell quickly and the rolling grew less. The land was now only a darker mass against the sky. The Southern Cross was very bright. After a while three or four members of the crew came up and sat down smoking. One had a banjo, another a ukulele and a concertina. They began to play and sing, and as they sang they clapped their hands in time. A couple of them stood up and danced. It was a strange, barbaric dance, in which there was something savage and primeval, a rapid dance, with quick movements of hands and feet and strange contortions of the body; it was sensual, sexual even, but sexual without passion; it was animal, naïve, weird without mystery, natural in short, and one might almost say child-like.
It was a curious emotion to sail through this silent sea under the stars and the passionate sky, while the kanakas played and sang and danced. At last they grew tired and stretched themselves out on the deck and slept, and all was silence.
The skipper. He is a little plump man, without angles, with a round face like the full moon, red and clean-shaven, a little fat button of a nose, very white teeth, fair hair close-cropped, with short fat legs and fat arms. His hands are plump too, dimpled on the knuckles. His eyes are round and blue and he wears gold-rimmed spectacles. He is not without charm. He never speaks without an oath, but a good-natured one. He is a jolly soul. He is American, of thirty perhaps, and he has spent all his life on the Pacific. He has been first officer and then captain in passenger ships plying along the coast of California, but he lost his ship and with it his certificate and has now come down to the command of this dirty little tramp. It has not interfered with his good humour. He takes life easily, he is fond of his whisky and fond of the Samoan girls, and he tells vivid, funny stories of his success with them.
The supercargo. He is a clerk in the charterer’s firm, R. & Co., of San Francisco, a little wiry man, quite young, from Portland, Oregon. His head is shaved, and he has large brown eyes and an amusing face. He seems to be on springs, always alert and merry, hard-drinking; and in the mornings he is torpid from the night before. “Gee, I had a hell of a night,” he says, “never again, I’m going on the wagon from now on.” But by noon he has recovered, his head aches less, and with a drink he is as bright and cheery as ever.
Apia. It lies along the beach amid coconut trees, a straggling little town of frame buildings with red roofs of corrugated iron. The Catholic cathedral, all white, stands out not without impressiveness; and beside it the Protestant chapels look like meeting-houses. It is hardly a harbour that you sail into, it is an open roadstead protected by the reef. There is little shipping, a few cutters, a number of whale-boats, a motor-boat or two, and some native canoes.
The Central Hotel. A frame building of three storeys, with verandas all round it, a paddock on one side in which feeds a grey pony, and behind, a couple of yards in one of which is a bu
The owner of the hotel. He is a dentist by profession, and comes from Newcastle. He is a little man, not fat, but not lean either, with black hair, thin on the top and turning grey, and a small untidy moustache, a very red face, partly due to sunshine, partly to alcohol, and a small red nose. He wears white ducks and a black tie. He is an excitable little man, more often than not tipsy, and he loves to tell you the scandal of the island. He is fifty, but talks grandly of going to the front next February, and you are pretty sure that in February he will talk of going in March. He spends his time chatting with the guests and behind his own bar, where he can always be persuaded to take a drink with a customer. He has owned hotels in Sydney and is invariably ready to buy or sell anything from a hotel to a horse, from a motor-car to a camp bedstead. He is bellicose in his conversation and fond of telling you how he hit this person or the other on the nose. He never fails to come out of his contests victorious. He is a figurehead in the hotel, which is run by his wife, a tall gaunt woman of five and forty, with an imposing presence and a determined air, a large-featured woman with a firm mouth. He is terrified of her, and rumours run about the hotel of domestic quarrels in which she has used her fist and her foot as well as her tongue to keep him in subjection. She has been known after a night of drunkenness to keep him for a day in his own little bit of veranda, and on these occasions, afraid to leave his prison, he talks rather pathetically to people on the street below.
Banana leaves. They have a kind of battered beauty like a lovely woman in rags.
The frivolous elegance of palm trees
The coconut trees came down to the water’s edge, not in rows, but spaced out with a certain ordered formality. They had something of the air of a ballet of spinsters, elderly but flippant, who stood with a simpering grace in affected attitudes.
The administrator. He is in Apia because his wife is awaiting her confinement. She is a big untidy woman, in flowing draperies, who suggests Notting Hill Gate or West Kensington. She has languid movements and a drawling voice. She is not handsome, nor even pretty, but she has a pleasant, ingenuous face. He is a tall man, and his small thin face is tanned by years of exposure to the tropical sun. A small moustache barely conceals the weakness of his mouth. He has a foolish laugh, and when he laughs he displays long yellow teeth. He began life as a medical student and prides himself on his medical knowledge. He likes silly jokes, practical chiefly, and is fond of chaffing people. He has the utmost contempt for the whites of Apia. One can guess that he runs his island competently, but with an exaggerated insistence on insignificant details. He measures everything by the standards of the public schoolboy. He regards the natives as wilful children, unreasonable and only just human, who must be treated without any nonsense, but not unkindly. He boasts that he keeps his island like a new pin. There is something old-maidish about him. He looks forward to the time when he can retire and live in the dull London street which you feel he regards as his only real home. He is incredibly conceited.
When you come out of the Central and turn to the left, you pass stores, mostly kept by half-castes; then you come to the large buildings of the German Firm: this is the name by which are known the offices and headquarters of the great German company which had something close to a monopoly of the South Pacific commerce; then you come to pleasant little friendly bungalows inhabited by residents, and farther still, straggling, a native village. When you turn to the right from the hotel, you pass more stores, Government buildings, the English club, and then you come to another native village. In the back part of Apia are stores and small frame houses in which live Chinese and half-castes, and farther back still, clusters of native huts. Coconut trees grow everywhere, mangoes, and here and there trees rich with clustered flowers.
L. He was an estate agent in London and came to Samoa originally for his health. He is a little, thin man, with a long face and a narrow, weak chin, a prominent nose, large and bony, and good, dark brown eyes. He is married to a half-caste and has a small son, but she lives with her parents and he at the hotel. He has rather a cunning, shifty look and does not impress you as honest or scrupulous; but he is anxious to be thought a good sport and is full of a surface jollity. He is quite intelligent. He drinks a great deal and is dead drunk three or four days a week, often by mid-afternoon. Then he is quarrelsome and wants to fight people. He is sullen and vindictive. He lies about stupefied, and when obliged to walk waddles on bent knees.
Gardner is a German American who has changed his name from Kärtner, a fat, bald-headed, big man, always in very clean white ducks; he has a round, clean-shaven face and he looks at you benignly through gold-rimmed spectacles. The faux bon homme. He is here to open a business for a San Francisco firm of jobbers in the goods sold on the island, calicos, machinery, everything that is saleable, which they exchange for copra. He drinks heavily, and though fifty is always willing to stay up all night with the ‘boys’, but he never gets drunk. He is jolly and affable, but very shrewd; nothing interferes with his business, and his good fellowship is part of his stock in trade. He plays cards with the young men and gradually takes all their money from them.
Dr. T. A Scot with an Aberdeen accent, who was in practice in New Zealand until the war took him to France as a surgeon. He had been invalided out and sent here ‘on light duty’. He is a thin man, with a peaked face and thinning short red hair. He talks with a Scottish accent in a very low, quiet voice. He is a precise, rather pedantic little man.
Sharp. An engineer, formerly in the U.S. Navy. He is married to a half-caste in Apia, by whom he has two children. He is a long thin man, with a scraggy neck, a small face with a hooked nose; he has a rather bird-like air, the air of a bird of prey. He is dressed in blue overalls and a sleeveless blue jersey; his arms are heavily tattooed with flags, naked women and initials. On his naked feet he wears sand shoes which were white, but are now quite black, and on his head, indoors and out, a shapeless black cap.
The English Club. It is a simple little frame house facing the sea, with a billiard room on one side, and a small bar at the back of it, a lounge with wicker chairs on the other side, and above, a room in which are old papers and magazines. It is used merely for drinking and playing cards and billiards.
C. He trains horses for the local races. He is an Australian, a very tall athletic fellow so dark that you might take him for a half-caste; his features look a little too big for his face, but in his white riding breeches, spurs and gaiters, he is a trim, handsome and upstanding figure. He is very fond of his half-caste wife, who is plain and sallow, with several gold teeth, and he is proud of a sprawling, white-faced baby with black eyes. His house, in the middle of his plantation, is surrounded by a veranda, and has magnificent views over the fertile country, with Apia and the sea in the distance. It is untidy, poorly furnished, with mats on the door, rockers and cheap wooden tables. There is a litter of papers and illustrated weeklies, guns, riding boots and diapers.
Swan. A tiny little old man, wrinkled, battered and bowed, who looks like a white monkey. He has pale blue eyes peering shrewdly from between red-rimmed lids. He is knotted and gnarled like a very old tree. He is a Swede and came out to the islands forty years ago as mate of a sailing vessel. Since then he has been skipper of a schooner engaged in the slave trade, a ‘black-birder’, a blacksmith, a trader, a planter. Men have sought to kill him, and he has a hernia in the chest which is the result of a wound got in a scrap with Solomon Islanders. At one time he was fairly rich, but he was ruined by the great hurricane which destroyed the stores he owned, an
A trader. He looks as if he had been in the tropics all his life, he is burned dark brown, and he is thin as though all the flesh had been sweated off him; he is bald and clean-shaven; he pays no particular attention to anybody but goes quietly about his business.
Another. A dapper tallish man with his hair worn long, with the love-lock of the London tradesman. He talks with a Cockney accent and has mincing genteel ways; you feel he is just about to wash his hands, his backbone is always trembling to a bow, and you can imagine the words coming from his mouth: “This way, Madam, second on the right, ladies’ hosiery.” He might have come out of Swan & Edgar ten days ago: in point of fact he has been at Apia ten years.
Gus. He is a half-caste, son of a Danish father and a Samoan, and owns an important store dealing in copra, canned and dry goods; he has several white men in his service. He is fat and smooth and quietly smiling; he reminds you of the eunuchs you see in Constantinople; he has an ingratiating way and a suave, oily politeness.