The Favorite Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham by W. Somerset Maugham

again, where all those books gave him a feeling of something incomprehensible and hostile.
    “I guess you must find it a bit lonesome here though,” he said.
    “I’ve got used to it. I’ve been here for twenty-five years.” Now the captain could think of nothing more to say, and he smoked in silence. Neilson had apparently no wish to break it. He looked at his guest with a meditative eye. He was a tall man, more than six feet high, and very stout. His face was red and blotchy, with a network of little purple veins on the cheeks, and his features were sunk into its fatness. His eyes were bloodshot. His neck was buried in rolls of fat. But for a fringe of long curly hair, nearly white, at the back of his head, he was quite bald; and that immense, shiny surface of forehead, which might have given him a false look of intelligence, on the contrary gave him one of peculiar imbecility. He wore a blue flannel shirt, open at the neck and showing his fat chest covered with a mat of reddish hair, and a very old pair of blue serge trousers. He sat in his chair in a heavy ungainly attitude, his great belly thrust forward and his fat legs uncrossed. All elasticity had gone from his limbs. Neilson wondered idly what sort of man he had been in his youth. It was almost impossible to imagine that this creature of vast bulk had ever been a boy who ran about. The skipper finished his whisky, and Neilson pushed the bottle towards him.
    “Help yourself.”
    The skipper leaned forward and with his great hand seized it.
    “And how come you in these parts anyways?” he said.
    “Oh, I came out to the islands for my health. My lungs were bad and they said 1 hadn’t a year to live. You see they were wrong.”
    “I meant, how come you to settle down right here?”
    “I am a sentimentalist.”
    “Oh!”
    Neilson knew that the skipper had not an idea what he meant, and he looked at him with an ironical twinkle in his dark eyes. Perhaps just because the skipper was so gross and dull a man the whim seized him to talk further.
    “You were too busy keeping your balance to notice, when you crossed the bridge, but this spot is generally considered rather pretty.”
    “It’s a cute little house you’ve got here.”
    “Ah, that wasn’t here when I first came. There was a native hut, with its beehive roof and its pillars, overshadowed by a great tree with red flowers; and the croton bushes, their leaves yellow and red and golden, made a pied fence around it. And then all about were the coconut trees, as fanciful as women, and as vain. They stood at the water’s edge and spent all day looking at their reflections. I was a young man then—Good Heavens, it’s a quarter of a century ago—and I wanted to enjoy all the loveliness of the world in the short time allotted to me before I passed into the darkness. I thought it was the most beautiful spot I had ever seen. The first time I saw it I had a catch at my heart, and I was afraid I was going to cry. I wasn’t more than twenty-five, and though I put the best face I could on it, I didn’t want to die. And somehow it seemed to me that the very beauty of this place made it easier for me to accept my fate. I felt when I came here that all my past life had fallen away, Stockholm and its University, and then Bonn: it all seemed the life of somebody else, as though now at last I had achieved the reality which our doctors of philosophy—I am one myself, you know—had discussed so much. ‘A year,’ I cried to myself. ‘I have a year. I will spend it here and then I am content to die.’
    “We are foolish and sentimental and melodramatic at twenty-five, but if we weren’t perhaps we should be less wise at fifty.
    “Now drink, my friend. Don’t let the nonsense I talk interfere with you.”
    He waved his thin hand towards the bottle, and the skipper finished what remained in his glass.
    “You ain’t drinking nothin’,” he said, reaching for the whisky.
    “I am of a sober habit,” smiled