Sylvia Townsend Warner – Mr Fortune’s Maggot

The Reverend Timothy Fortune, ex-bank clerk, has spent ten years as a South Seas Island missionary when a "maggot" impels him to embark on an assignment to the even more remote island of Fanua, where a white man is a rarity. Mr. Fortune is a good man, humble and earnest. He wishes to bring the joys of Christianity to the innocent heathen. But in his three years on Fanua, he makes only one convert—the boy Lueli, who loves him. This love, and the sensuous freedom of the islanders, produces in Mr. Fortune a change of heart that is shattering.