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

dressing-gown, and her hair was tied in a sluttish knot. She had given her face a dab with a wet towel, but it was all swollen and creased with crying. She looked a drab.
    She raised her eyes dully when the doctor came in. She was cowed and broken.
    “Where’s Mr Davidson?” she asked.
    “He’ll come presently if you want him,” answered Macphail acidly. “I came here to see how you were.”
    “Oh, I guess I’m O.K. You needn’t worry about that.”
    “Have you had anything to eat?”
    “Horn brought me some coffee.”
    She looked anxiously at the door.
    “D’you think he’ll come down soon? I feel as if it wasn’t so terrible when he’s with me.”
    “Are you still going on Tuesday?”
    “Yes, he says I’ve got to go. Please tell him to come right along. You can’t do me any good. He’s the only one as can help me now.”
    “Very well,” said Dr Macphail.
    During the next three days the missionary spent almost all his time with Sadie Thompson. He joined the others only to have his meals. Dr Macphail noticed that he hardly ate.
    “He’s wearing himself out,” said Mrs Davidson pitifully. “He’ll have a breakdown if he doesn’t take care, but he won’t spare himself.”
    She herself was white and pale. She told Mrs Macphail that she had no sleep. When the missionary came upstairs from Miss Thompson he prayed till he was exhausted, but even then he did not sleep for long. After an hour or two he got up and dressed himself, and went for a tramp along the bay. He had strange dreams.
    “This morning he told me that he’d been dreaming about the mountains of Nebraska,” said Mrs Davidson.
    “That’s curious,” said Dr Macphail.
    He remembered seeing them from the windows of the train when he crossed America. They were like huge mole-hills, rounded and smooth, and they rose from the plain abruptly. Dr Macphail remembered how it struck him that they were like a woman’s breasts.
    Davidson’s restlessness was intolerable even to himself. But he was buoyed up by a wonderful exhilaration. He was tearing out by the roots the last vestiges of sin that lurked in the hidden corners of that poor woman’s heart. He read with her and prayed with her.
    “It’s wonderful,” he said to them one day at supper. “It’s a true rebirth. Her soul, which was black as night, is now pure and white like the new-fallen snow.
    I am humble and afraid. Her remorse for all her sins is beautiful. I am not worthy to touch the hem of her garment.”
    “Have you the heart to send her back to San Francisco?” said the doctor. “Three years in an American prison. I should have thought you might have saved her from that.”
    “Ah, but don’t you see? It’s necessary. Do you think my heart doesn’t bleed for her? I love her as I love my wife and my sister. All the time that she is in prison I shall suffer all the pain that she suffers.”
    “Bunkum,” cried the doctor impatiently.
    “You don’t understand because you’re blind. She’s sinned, and she must suffer. I know what she’ll endure. She’ll be starved and tortured and humiliated. I want her to accept the punishment of man as a sacrifice to God. I want her to accept it joyfully. She has an opportunity which is offered to very few of us. God is very good and very merciful.”
    Davidson’s voice trembled with excitement. He could hardly articulate the words that tumbled passionately from his lips.
    “All day I pray with her and when I leave her I pray again, I pray with all my might and main, so that Jesus may grant her this great mercy. I want to put in her heart the passionate desire to be punished so that at the end, even if I offered to let her go, she would refuse. I want her to feel that the bitter punishment of prison is the thank-offering that she places at the feet of our Blessed Lord, who gave his life for her.”
    The days passed slowly. The whole household, intent on the wretched, tortured woman downstairs, lived in a state of unnatural