"The Painted Veil" (W. Somerset Maugham)
Love, betrayal, and redemption in post-imperial China
A government bacteriologist
"From a social standpoint the man of science does not exist."1
In colonial Hong Kong, some time in the interval between the world wars, Kitty Fane is a beautiful young Englishwoman married to Walter, a government bacteriologist, and carrying on an affair with Charlie Townsend, the charming and handsome Assistant Colonial Secretary.
The infidelity was not unforeseeable. Kitty, ever the belle of the ball, dallied in finding a husband, until her younger sister's engagement drove her in haste to marry Walter, a stiff, shy young man who had been courting her. They wed despite the patent incompatibility of their personalities – Walter out of infatuation and Kitty out of convenience.
He returned with Kitty to his post in Hong Kong, where she found herself, as the wife of a low-ranking scientist, much diminished in social status. But her beauty catches Charlie's eye, and before long their illicit romance has begun. In the midst of her unhappy marriage, she believes that she is in love.
It is an illusion that is soon dispelled. Walter uncovers the affair, and confronts her with a choice: accompany him to the interior of the country to fight an outbreak of cholera, or else he will bring an action against her. Kitty runs back to Charlie in the mad hope that she can leave Walter for him, only to discover that he has no intention of divorcing his wife. She realizes that Walter has read the situation shrewdly. Faced with no better option, she consents to go with him up the river, to Mei-tan-fu.
Mei-tan-fu
The morning drew on and the sun touched the mist so that it shone whitely like the ghost of snow on a dying star. Though on the river it was light so that you could discern palely the lines of the crowded junks and the thick forest of their masts, in front it was a shining wall the eye could not pierce. But suddenly from that white cloud a tall, grim, and massive bastion emerged. It seemed not merely to be made visible by the all-discovering sun but rather to rise out of nothing at the touch of a magic wand. It towered, the stronghold of a cruel and barbaric race, over the river. But the magician who built worked swiftly and now a fragment of colored wall crowned the bastion; in a moment, out of the mist, looming vastly and touched here and there by a yellow ray of sun, there was seen a cluster of green and yellow roofs. Huge they seemed and you could make out no pattern; the order, if order there was, escaped you; wayward and extravagant, but of an unimaginable richness. This was no fortress, nor a temple, but the magic palace of some emperor of the gods where no man might enter. It was too airy, fantastic, and unsubstantial to be the work of human hands; it was the fabric of a dream.2
In the embattled city, the only other Westerners are a Customs official named Waddington and a convent of French nuns.
With Walter preoccupied by his duties, Kitty is left with ample time for self-reflection. Waddington, a friendly but cynical fellow who has taken a Manchu princess as a lover, tells her (unwitting of her own involvement) that Charlie's wife is well aware of his philandering, and – much to the detriment of Kitty's pride – that she considers his lovers to be "uncommonly second-rate."3
Waddington's comments extinguish any lingering esteem that Kitty has for Charlie. But it is her growing association with the convent that marks the real turning point in her life. Kitty sees the strength and compassion of the nuns, especially the stately Mother Superior, and recognizes her own worthlessness in comparison. She sees also the high regard that the nuns have of her husband, and comes to feel a new respect, if not love, for the husband she betrayed.
It becomes her mission to induce Walter to forgive her, not for her own sake but for his, though she knows that his pride will make it nearly impossible. Nonetheless, Kitty allows herself to feel cautious optimism about the future.
It is only a few weeks after their arrival in Mei-tan-fu that Kitty discovers she is pregnant.
'The dog it was that died'
"Am I the father?"
She gave a little gasp. There was just a shadow of a tremor in his voice; it was dreadful that cold self-control of his which made the smallest token of emotion so shattering. She did not know why she thought suddenly of an instrument she had been shown in Hong Kong upon which a needle oscillated a little and she had been told that this represented an earthquake a thousand miles away in which perhaps a thousand persons had lost their lives. She looked at him. He was ghastly pale.4
In a spirit of newfound truthfulness, Kitty admits to Walter that she cannot be certain who the father is. Soon thereafter, Walter falls ill with cholera. By the time that Kitty learns of it, his condition is already dire. On his deathbed, as Kitty begs him to forgive her, he recites the last line of Oliver Goldsmith's "An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog" – "The dog it was that died."
Walter is buried swiftly and Kitty returns to Hong Kong, where she succumbs one last time to Charlie Townsend's charms. Immediately overcome with shame, she makes arrangements to return to England and breaks off the affair decisively with Charlie.
With Kitty's return to England, the trajectories of the characters have reached their endpoints. Charlie began as an idol and finished as contemptible. Walter, a pitiful figure at first, feckless and cuckolded, has deepened considerably – in both the noble aspects (his self-sacrifice fighting the disease) and the dark (his intentional exposure of his wife to the risk of death).
Kitty, at the onset a frivolous and vain woman – though as much a victim of her upbringing as a product of her decisions – has in her journey of self-discovery won our sympathy if not our admiration. Her trials have renewed her rather than broken her, and on the threshold of an uncertain future, she resolves to follow a new path in life: "the path those dear nuns at the convent followed so humbly, the path that led to peace."5
The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham. Originally published 1925. Quotations and page numbers from the 2004 Vintage International edition.
p. 15
pp. 96–97
p. 102
pp. 159–160
p. 246