She needs to leave, now, right away, she never wants to see Tim again, she is weeping, hysterical. It is Tim HardyвЂ™s new wife, in hysterics. In shock Featherstone staggers back to his house and sits stunned, as darkness falls. Featherstone rushes in to find that the beautful Olivia has shot herself, blowing half her face off. Everyone welcomes them and Featherstone accompanies them all the way to the bungalow Tim had shared with his sister. Featherstone notices Olivia taking this nervously, but continues to woo her right up till the moment when Tim Hardy arrives back at Penang with his new blushing bride. Then another telegram to say heвЂ™s got married. After a few months he telegraphs from there to say heвЂ™s met someone and fallen in love. Then Tim, her brother, is called back to England. Over a period of time MaughamвЂ™s host, Featherstone (the man telling us the story) falls in love with Olivia but she is playfully stand-offish. Then the parents died and the adult siblings hooked up and came to stay in Malaysia, keeping themselves to themselves. His parents had been divorced and Tim and his sister Olive were brought up apart, she in Italy, he in Britain. The Book-BagВ (1932 вЂ“ Malaya вЂ“ 1st person narrator) This is an eerie, powerful and disturbing story, up there with Rain as one of his best.В In Penang Maugham stays with the British Resident who tells him a story about a chap they bumped into at the club earlier in the evening, Tim Hardy. In this preface he goes out of his way to emphasise that his often lurid stories are about rare and exceptional people or incidents, and that in reality almost all the Brits he met administering the empire were honest and good. I know from his biography that Maugham received a lot of criticism for enjoying the hospitality of Brits in faraway places and then betraying their confidences and telling stories about real people which, in these small colonial societies, could be very damaging to the individuals described. In this preface Maugham is also at pains to emphasise how much he respected the people who did these thankless jobs so far from their homeland. Radio, TV, jet airplanes, have all reduced the distance and abolished the sense of psychological isolation, which was so often his subject in the stores from the 20s and 30s.

Now, as he is writing the preface in the early 1950s, the experience of colonial administrators has changed out of all recognition. They served five years with hardly any contact with other white people, rarely saw newspapers, and dreamed of a Britain which slowly changed and left them behind. The British people who staffed remote outposts in Malaysia were very isolated and a long way from home. PrefaceВ Maugham says these stories were set early in the twenties, long before aviation became common. Consisting of a preface and 30 tales, this is the longest of the four volumes of Somerset MaughamвЂ™s collected short stories, made up of 461 densely-printed pages.

Somerset maugham short stories mister