Page:Fear by W. Somerset Maugham.djvu/3

714 something odd about the man. At last, as was inevitable, I suppose, he began to talk about the Chinese. Mrs. Wingrove said the same things about them that I had already heard so many missionaries say. They were a lying people, untrustworthy, cruel, and dirty; but a faint light was visible in the east. Though the results of missionary endeavor were not very noteworthy as yet, the future was promising. They no longer believed in their old gods, and the power of the literati was broken. It is an attitude of mistrust and dislike tempered by optimism. But Mr. Wingrove mitigated his wife's strictures. He dwelt on the good nature of the Chinese, on their devotion to their parents and their love for their children.

"Mr. Wingrove won't hear a word against the Chinese," said his wife; "he simply loves them."

"I think they have great qualities," he said. "You can't walk through those crowded streets of theirs without having that impressed on you."

"I don't believe Mr. Wingrove notices the smells." His wife laughed.

At that moment there was a knock at the door, and a young woman came in. She had the long skirts and the unbound feet of the native Christian, and on her face a look that was at once cringing and sullen. She said something to Mrs. Wingrove. I happened to catch sight of Mr. Wingrove's face. When he saw her there passed over it an expression of the most intense physical repulsion. It was distorted as though by an odor that nauseated him, and then immediately the look vanished, and his lips twitched to a pleasant smile; but the effort was too great, and he showed only a tortured grimace. I looked at him with amazement. Mrs. Wingrove, with an "Excuse me," got up and left the room.

"That is one of our teachers," said Mr. Wingrove in that same set voice which had puzzled me before. "She's invaluable. I put infinite reliance on her. She has a very fine character."

Then, I hardly know why, in a flash I saw the truth; I saw the disgust in his soul for all that his will loved. I was filled with the excitement which an explorer may feel when, after an arduous journey, he comes upon a country with features new and unexpected. Those tortured eyes explained themselves, the unnatural voice, the measured restraint with which he praised, that air he had of a hunted man. Notwithstanding all he said, he hated the Chinese with a hatred beside which his wife's distaste was insignificant. When he walked through the teeming streets of the city, it was an agony to him; his missionary life revolted him; his soul was like the raw shoulders of the coolies, and the carrying-pole burned the bleeding wound. He would not go home because he could not bear to see again what he cared for so much; he would not read his books because they reminded him of the life he loved so passionately; and perhaps he had married that vulgar wife in order to cut himself off more resolutely from a world that his every instinct craved. He martyred his tortured soul with a passionate exasperation.

I tried to see how the call had come. I think that for years he had been completely happy in his easy ways at Oxford, and he had loved his work, with its pleasant companionship, his books, his holidays in France and Italy. He was a contented man and asked nothing better than to spend the rest