Somerset Maugham Short Stories The Romantic Young Lady And 18 Others

"The Romantic Young Lady" In Seville, the Duchess de Dos Palos reluctantly sees the Countess de Marbella, the cleverest woman in Seville, to try and prevent her daughter marrying the Countess's coachman. The Countess subsequently sees her coachman, telling him he must choose between his job or marriage. The coachman decides to remain as the Countess's coachman, saying, "a place like this is found only once in a lifetime."

"The Point of Honour" In Seville, the narrator meets an aristocrat who, finding that he has been reading the play El médico de su honra by Calderón, tells him a similar story: Don Pedro Aguria, an aristocrat, marries Soledad, whom he loves, although she does not love him. Pepe Alvarez, who was once engaged to Soledad, arrives from overseas; their relationship has ended, but Don Pedro is obliged to kill Alvarez if Soledad ever meets him again. Circumstances suggest, wrongly, that they do meet, and Don Pedro kills Alvarez in a duel. The narrator wonders if the unhappy-looking wife of the storyteller is Soledad.

"A Man from Glasgow" In Algeciras, a port in Spain, the narrator meets a man from Glasgow, in the olive trade, who is anxious to leave the country. He relates his experience at an olive estate in Écija, where he repeatedly heard ghostly laughter from a nearby house. A madman died there years before and no one had lived there since then. He continued to hear the laughter when he moved to Seville, sixty miles away.

"The Unconquered" In occupied France during the Second World War, two German soldiers stationed at Soissons ask the way at a nearby farm; they get drunk on the farmer's wine and one of them, Hans, rapes Annette, his daughter. Hans afterwards visits the farm whenever he can and, bringing much-needed food, gets on friendly terms with the farmer and his wife. Annette, who becomes pregnant, is defiantly opposed to Hans.

"The Mother" In Macarena, Seville, a woman known as La Cachirra, having served a prison sentence for murder, comes to the neighbourhood; her fierce, unsociable temperament intrigues the neighbours. She loves her son Currito, who regularly visits, and is jealous of his interest in Rosalia, a local girl. When Rosalia tells her she and Currito intend to get married, La Cachirra stabs her.

"Flotsam and Jetsam" Norman Grange, an impoverished rubber planter in a remote setting in Borneo, reluctantly looks after anthropologist Skelton who is recovering from malaria. Grange's wife is a former actress from Britain whose theatre company went bankrupt in Malaya. She hates her husband and the location, but it is impossible to leave. While Skelton is there she tells him her background and about her unhappiness, but not about her love affair with a visiting rubber company manager, whom Grange murdered.

"Before the Party" The upper-class Skinner family is preparing to attend a party. Among them is silent older daughter Millicent, mother of a young child and widowed when her husband, a colonial administrator, died of fever eight months earlier while they were living in Borneo; she and her child have returned home to England to live with her parents and sister. During this era, the early twentieth century, when propriety dictated a strict period of mourning, it is one of Millicent's first social appearances since her husband's death.
While the Skinners are gathering to leave, after one question too many from her younger sister, who's heard a rumour that her brother-in-law was a drinker and didn't die of fever after all, Millicent tells the true story of her husband's death. Explaining her discovery that he was an incorrigible drunk with a well-known reputation within the colony, and that he had married Millicent while on home leave largely because he'd been warned he'd be sacked if he didn't find himself a wife who could keep him in line, she describes her dogged attempts to reform him—and to preserve her marriage. (Both Skinner sisters had grown old enough to be considered spinsters, and Millicent in particular had been anxious to marry; she had not imagined herself in love with her husband, but it is a blow to discover just how far from in love with her he had been.)
After having been impressively sober for some months and an attentive husband and father—just when he'd given Millicent reason to believe she had triumphed—he relapses badly, and the discovery is so stark and so bitter that she stabs him to death with the ornamental native sword hanging above the bed where she found him drunk. It was easy to conceal the true cause of death from the local council, and by now the jungle has reclaimed the body in its entirety, so there's no danger whatsoever that her crime will be discovered, Millicent tells her family in conclusion.
Her proper parents and sibling are aghast; her father, a lawyer, considers his duty; but the overall impression is that her family is stunned by the impropriety of Millicent's deed. It simply was shockingly bad form.
The short story was dramatized in 1949 by Rodney Ackland.

"The Force of Circumstance" Guy meets and marries Doris in England while on leave from Malaya; she returns there with him much in love and ready to make a home for him in the same house where he's been the resident officer for ten years.
When a native woman lurks about the compound with her small children and makes an ever-growing nuisance of herself, Guy at last reveals the woman's connection to him, one he had believed Doris need never discover, since residents usually were not sent back to their old posts after returning from home leave. Such domestic arrangements as he had with the native woman are common and expected among unmarried white men in the colony, he assures Doris, and the native women expect the arrangements to end as casually as they begin; there was no love between them, nor any expectation of any; and the woman was paid well to go away and is unusual in her refusal to be gone.
Despite loving Guy and knowing he loves her, despite her appreciation of his loneliness so far from home without white companions, Doris is repelled by the discovery that he lived with a native woman and fathered her children.

"The Yellow Streak" is an internal story of class snobbery, racism and frail human nature in the face of death. Izzart is an insecure snob with a secret who is put in charge of the safety of Campion, a mining engineer hired by the Sultan of fictional Sembulu to discover mineral possibilities in Borneo. Drink, vanity, carelessness and self-doubt bring Izzart to cracking point when an incident with a tidal wave on the river means it's every (white) man for himself. Not only his weakness, but his inner torment is clear to the more experienced Campion.
In 2020 the Chief Minister of Sarawak suggested that this story be made the basis of tourism promotion in Sri Aman which is well known for the tidal bore featured in the story.