The Whole
Let’s face it: this entire story is simply an exercise in irony. Everything in it leads to the ironic revelation at the end. Along the way, a number of other smaller ironies occur which collective creates a recurring pattern. Without the revelation at the end, none of the smaller ironies would mean much of anything. It is a story that exists for the sole purpose of entertaining with ironic dimension.
A Part of a Whole
It is not just that “Red” is itself an exercise in irony. It is also a story contained in a collection which is itself a compendium of stories heavily dependent to one degree or another on an ironic climax to their narratives. The Trembling of a Leaf is constructed upon two overarching elements which work to unify the disparate stories. The most obvious is that all the stories in this collection take place in setting of the Pacific islands routinely referred to as a paradise. The second element is that this geographical paradise turns out to be a very ironically dark place for the inhabitants, most of whom populate stories in which human imperfection far outweighs the perfection of the natural world.
Beauty Fades and So Does Love
Two characters in the story are initially presented through a flashback as a different sort of model of physical perfection. A young sailor known only as Red is compared to Greek gods for his beauty which verged on the womanly. He falls in love with a native islander he calls Sally whose physical attractiveness is also described in equally hyperbolic terms. The irony of ironies in the story is that having been separated by fate for almost all their lives, both fail to recognize the other as the one-time love of their life due to the ravages of aging.
The Skipper
The story is constructed as a typically Maughamesque narrative of a story within a story. The present-day story concerns a story being related by a man named Neilson to a figure identified only as the skipper of a schooner which has just anchored in port. It is Neilson who is telling the story of Red and Sally to the skipper. The cruelly ironic revelation that the older Red and Sally cannot even recognize each other is preceded by an ironic revelation more comic than tragic: all this time Neilson has been telling the story of Red and Sally to none other than Red himself. Of course, by this point in life, all his once flaming red hair has fall out and he is simply a bald-headed captain of a schooner everyone calls the skipper.
Nothing to Fear But…You Know
The love story of Red and Sally is ripped to shreds by the forces of fate when Red is shanghaied into serving aboard a whaling ship and never heard from again. Well, almost never heard from again. But what of Sally? This is exactly the question which the skipper (not yet revealed to actually be Red) asks. Neilson’s reply is casual and understated:
“Oh, three years afterwards she took up with another white man."
It is also ironic: Neilson was that very man who married the impossibly beautiful young island girl he desired so much it did not matter that she would never really love him. And for the entirety of the marriage he has lived in dread of Red returning from the mysterious beyond only to watch in disbelief at the irony that when it finally does happen, neither Red nor Sally are even aware of its occurrence.
