Free 65 Short Stories by W. Somerset Maugham Page A

seemed to settle down and it made Isabel very happy to observe his growing enthusiasm to introduce American methods into that forgotten corner of the world. But she knew him, and at the end of the year, which was the shortest time he could possibly stay in Tahiti, she expected to have to use all her influence to dissuade him from coming home. It was much better that he should learn the business thoroughly, and if they had been able to wait a year there seemed no reason why they should not wait another. She talked it over with Bateman Hunter, always the most generous of friends (during those first few days after Edward went she did not know what she would have done without him), and they decided that Edward’s future must stand before everything. It was with relief that she found as the time passed that he made no suggestion of returning.
‘He’s splendid, isn’t he?’ she exclaimed to Bateman.
‘He’s white, through and through.’
‘Reading between the lines of his letter I know he hates it over there, but he’s sticking it out because ...’
She blushed a little and Bateman, with the grave smile which was so attractive in him, finished the sentence for her.
‘Because he loves you.’
‘It makes me feel so humble,’ she said.
‘You’re wonderful, Isabel, you’re perfectly wonderful.’
But the second year passed and every month Isabel continued to receive a letter from Edward, and presently it began to seem a little strange that he did not speak of coming back. He wrote as though he were settled definitely in Tahiti, and what was more, comfortably settled. She was surprised. Then she read his letters again, all of them, several times; and now, reading between the lines indeed, she was puzzled to notice a change which had escaped her. The later letters were as tender and as delightful as the first, but the tone was different. She was vaguely suspicious of their humour, she had the instinctive mistrust of her sex for that unaccountable quality, and she discerned in them now a flippancy which perplexed her. She was not quite certain that the Edward who wrote to her now was the same Edward that she had known. One afternoon, the day after a mail had arrived from Tahiti, when she was driving with Bateman he said to her:
Did Edward tell you when he was sailing?’
‘No, he didn’t mention it. I thought he might have said something to you about it.’
Not a word.’
‘You know what Edward is,’ she laughed in reply, ‘he has no sense of time. If it occurs to you next time you write you might ask him when he’s thinking of coming.’
Her manner was so unconcerned that only Bateman’s acute sensitiveness could have discerned in her request a very urgent desire. He laughed lightly. ‘Yes. I’ll ask him. I can’t imagine what he’s thinking about.’
A few days later, meeting him again, she noticed that something troubled him. They had been much together since Edward left Chicago; they were both devoted to him and each in his desire to talk of the absent one found a willing listener; the consequence was that Isabel knew every expression of Bateman’s face, and his denials now were useless against her keen instinct. Something told her that his harassed look had to do with Edward and she did not rest till she had made him confess.
‘The fact is,’ he said at last, ‘I heard in a roundabout way that Edward was no longer working for Braunschmidt and Co., and yesterday I took the opportunity to ask Mr Braunschmidt himself.’
‘Well?’
‘Edward left his employment with them nearly a year ago.’
‘How strange he should have said nothing about it!’
Bateman hesitated, but he had gone so far now that he was obliged to tell the rest. It made him feel dreadfully embarrassed. ‘He was fired.’
‘In heaven’s name what for?’
‘It appears they warned him once or twice, and at last they told him to get out. They say he was lazy and incompetent.’
‘Edward?’
They were silent for a while, and then he saw