What happens when the most insufferable man on an island turns out to be worse than you imagined - and the rain just won't stop long enough for you to process it?
I was walking the lakefront with Denise on a gray Sunday morning, the kind of Chicago fall day where the sky looks like wet concrete, and this little story landed perfectly. Under two hours. Maugham's "Rain" - a piece I've taught snippets of but never actually sat with start to finish in audio form. And here's the thing about finally listening to it whole: the story is devastating in a way that creeps up on you like that missionary creeps up on Sadie Thompson's autonomy.
The Reverend Davidson Problem (And Why Maugham Still Cuts Deep)
Let me talk about what Maugham is really saying here, because the surface read - pious man destroys free-spirited woman - is only half the machinery. The genius of "Rain" is structural. Maugham gives you Davidson through the Macphails' eyes, and Dr. Macphail is the most dangerously passive narrator type: the reasonable bystander. He sees everything wrong with Davidson's crusade against Sadie Thompson. He's uncomfortable with the forced conversion, the emotional bullying, the leveraging of deportation threats to break a woman's spirit. And he does precisely nothing. The story isn't just about religious hypocrisy. It's about the complicity of decent people who watch it happen. That particular flavor of moral rot dressed up in respectable clothing shows up in surprising places - I kept thinking about it while writing my notes on Neon Gods, which does something similar with power and the performance of righteousness in a very different kind of mythology. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about stories - the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. The ending of "Rain" is that other seven-eighths crashing through the surface.
And that ending. If you know it, you know. If you don't, I won't spoil it, but the final image Maugham leaves you with - Sadie's gramophone playing again, her mechanical laughter, and one devastating line about men - that's the kind of closing that makes you stop walking on a lakefront path and just stand there. Denise asked if I was okay. I was processing.
The Narration Dilemma (Honesty Hour)
Here's where I have to be straight with you: Bellona Times' reading is... functional. This is a LibriVox recording, which means it's free, it's volunteer, and it comes with the understanding that you're getting community effort, not professional studio work. I respect that. But the pacing does make sections feel longer than they need to. There's a flatness to Davidson's dialogue that robs him of his terrifying zeal - he should sound like a man who genuinely believes he's saving a soul, which makes his actions so much more chilling. Instead, he just sounds like someone reading lines about a man who believes things. Sadie Thompson, who should crackle with defiance before she's slowly crushed, doesn't quite get there either.
The narrator made the story seem - and I'm borrowing a listener's word here because it's the right one - arduous. Which is a shame, because at under two hours, this should feel like a gut punch, not a slow trudge through mud. (Though I suppose Maugham might appreciate the irony of a story about relentless rain feeling like you're slogging through it.)
I listened at 1.0x because the author chose those words, but I'll admit: around the forty-minute mark, during Davidson's longer moralizing stretches, I understood why someone might bump it to 1.25x. The prose deserves to be savored, but the delivery doesn't always reward that patience.
What Maugham Knew That We Keep Forgetting
This is why we still read the classics. Written in 1921, "Rain" is about purity culture weaponized against women, about the men who wield moral authority as a form of control, about the rot hiding inside righteousness. My students - the ones who actually do the reading, bless their twelve hearts - would recognize this story's DNA in conversations they're having right now. The setting is a quarantine station in Pago Pago (everyone stuck together, tensions rising, nowhere to escape), and it functions like a pressure cooker. Maugham understood that the most dangerous person in any room is the one who's absolutely certain they're right.
If you loved Conrad's shorter work or the moral claustrophobia of "Heart of Darkness" compressed into a single room, this is its spiritual successor in miniature.
Who Gets Caught in This Rain
Grab this if you want: Maugham's actual prose, a classic short story you can finish in a single sitting, and you're okay with narration that gets the job done without elevating the material. Skip this specific recording if: you need a performance that matches the psychological intensity of the text. There are other versions out there. But this one's free, it's accessible, and the story underneath is still a scalpel.
Worth pausing the faculty meeting for? The story, absolutely. This particular recording - maybe save it for when you're already grading papers and need something in the background that won't let you forget literature can still draw blood.
