Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  “You’d better lie down for a bit. I expect you’re about done up.”

  “There’s nowhere for me to lie down, sir,” he answered, and there was in his voice a humbleness which was very distressing.

  “Don’t you know anyone in the house who’ll give you a shakedown?”

  “No, sir.”

  “They only moved in last week,” said the midwife. “They don’t know nobody yet.”

  Chandler hesitated a moment awkwardly, then he went up to the man and said:

  “I’m very sorry this has happened.”

  He held out his hand and the man, with an instinctive glance at his own to see if it was clean, shook it.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Philip shook hands with him too. Chandler told the midwife to come and fetch the certificate in the morning. They left the house and walked along together in silence.

  “It upsets one a bit at first, doesn’t it?” said Chandler at last.

  “A bit,” answered Philip.

  “If you like I’ll tell the porter not to bring you any more calls tonight.”

  “I’m off duty at eight in the morning in any case.”

  “How many cases have you had?”

  “Sixty-three.”

  “Good. You’ll get your certificate then.”

  They arrived at the hospital, and the S. O. C. went in to see if anyone wanted him. Philip walked on. It had been very hot all the day before, and even now in the early morning there was a balminess in the air. The street was very still. Philip did not feel inclined to go to bed. It was the end of his work and he need not hurry. He strolled along, glad of the fresh air and the silence; he thought that he would go on to the bridge and look at day break on the river. A policeman at the corner bade him good-morning. He knew who Philip was from his bag.

  “Out late tonight, sir,” he said.

  Philip nodded and passed. He leaned against the parapet and looked towards the morning. At that hour the great city was like a city of the dead. The sky was cloudless, but the stars were dim at the approach of day; there was a light mist on the river, and the great buildings on the north side were like palaces in an enchanted island. A group of barges was moored in midstream. It was all of an unearthly violet, troubling somehow and awe-inspiring; but quickly everything grew pale, and cold, and gray. Then the sun rose, a ray of yellow gold stole across the sky, and the sky was iridescent. Philip could not get out of his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and deprivation into a slatternly middle age — he saw the pretty face grow thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal — then, when the man was past his prime, the difficulty of getting jobs, the small wages he had to take; and the inevitable, abject penury of the end: she might be energetic, thrifty, industrious, it would not have saved her; in the end was the workhouse or subsistence on the charity of her children. Who could pity her because she had died when life offered so little?

  But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was the natural order of things. Otherwise, good heavens! otherwise they would swarm over the river in their multitude to the side where those great buildings were, secure and stately, and they would pillage, burn, and sack. But the day, tender and pale, had broken now, and the mist was tenuous; it bathed everything in a soft radiance; and the Thames was gray, rosy, and green; gray like mother-of-pearl and green like the heart of a yellow rose. The wharfs and store-houses of the Surrey Side were massed in disorderly loveliness. The scene was so exquisite that Philip’s heart beat passionately. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. Beside that nothing seemed to matter.

  CXV

  Philip spent the few weeks that remained before the beginning of the winter session in the out-patients’ department, and in October settled down to regular work. He had been away from the hospital for so long that he found himself very largely among new people; the men of different years had little to do with one another, and his contemporaries were now mostly qualified: some had left to take up assistantships or posts in country hospitals and infirmaries, and some held appointments at St. Luke’s. The two years during which his mind had lain fallow had refreshed him, he fancied, and he was able now to work with energy.

  The Athelnys were delighted with his change of fortune. He had kept aside a few things from the sale of his uncle’s effects and gave them all presents. He gave Sally a gold chain that had belonged to his aunt. She was now grown up. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and set out every morning at eight to work all day in a shop in Regent Street. Sally had frank blue eyes, a broad brow, and plentiful shining hair; she was buxom, with broad hips and full breasts; and her father, who was fond of discussing her appearance, warned her constantly that she must not grow fat. She attracted because she was healthy, animal, and feminine. She had many admirers, but they left her unmoved; she gave one the impression that she looked upon love-making as nonsense; and it was easy to imagine that young men found her unapproachable. Sally was old for her years: she had been used to help her mother in the household work and in the care of the children, so that she had acquired a managing air, which made her mother say that Sally was a bit too fond of having things her own way. She did not speak very much, but as she grew older she seemed to be acquiring a quiet sense of humour, and sometimes uttered a remark which suggested that beneath her impassive exterior she was quietly bubbling with amusement at her fellow-creatures. Philip found that with her he never got on the terms of affectionate intimacy upon which he was with the rest of Athelny’s huge family. Now and then her indifference slightly irritated him. There was something enigmatic in her.

  When Philip gave her the necklace Athelny in his boisterous way insisted that she must kiss him; but Sally reddened and drew back.

  “No, I’m not going to,” she said.

  “Ungrateful hussy!” cried Athelny. “Why not?”

  “I don’t like being kissed by men,” she said.

  Philip saw her embarrassment, and, amused, turned Athelny’s attention to something else. That was never a very difficult thing to do. But evidently her mother spoke of the matter later, for next time Philip came she took the opportunity when they were alone for a couple of minutes to refer to it.

  “You didn’t think it disagreeable of me last week when I wouldn’t kiss you?”

  “Not a bit,” he laughed.

  “It’s not because I wasn’t grateful.” She blushed a little as she uttered the formal phrase which she had prepared. “I shall always value the necklace, and it was very kind of you to give it me.”

  Philip found it always a little difficult to talk to her. She did all that she had to do very competently, but seemed to feel no need of conversation; yet there was nothing unsociable in her. One Sunday afternoon when Athelny and his wife had gone out together, and Philip, treated as one of the family, sat reading in the parlour, Sally came in and sat by the window to sew. The girls’ clothes were made at home and Sally could not afford to spend Sundays in idleness. Philip thought she wished to talk and put down his book.

  “Go on reading,” she said. “I only thought as you were alone I’d come and sit with you.”

  “You’re the most silent person I’ve ever struck,” said Philip.

  “We don’t want another one who’s talkative in this house,” she said.

  There was no irony in her tone: she was merely stating a fact. But it suggested to Philip that she measured her father, alas, no longer the hero he was to her childhood, and in her mind joined togethe
r his entertaining conversation and the thriftlessness which often brought difficulties into their life; she compared his rhetoric with her mother’s practical common sense; and though the liveliness of her father amused her she was perhaps sometimes a little impatient with it. Philip looked at her as she bent over her work; she was healthy, strong, and normal; it must be odd to see her among the other girls in the shop with their flat chests and anaemic faces. Mildred suffered from anaemia.

  After a time it appeared that Sally had a suitor. She went out occasionally with friends she had made in the work-room, and had met a young man, an electrical engineer in a very good way of business, who was a most eligible person. One day she told her mother that he had asked her to marry him.

  “What did you say?” said her mother.

  “Oh, I told him I wasn’t over-anxious to marry anyone just yet awhile.” She paused a little as was her habit between observations. “He took on so that I said he might come to tea on Sunday.”

  It was an occasion that thoroughly appealed to Athelny. He rehearsed all the afternoon how he should play the heavy father for the young man’s edification till he reduced his children to helpless giggling. Just before he was due Athelny routed out an Egyptian tarboosh and insisted on putting it on.

  “Go on with you, Athelny,” said his wife, who was in her best, which was of black velvet, and, since she was growing stouter every year, very tight for her. “You’ll spoil the girl’s chances.”

  She tried to pull it off, but the little man skipped nimbly out of her way.

  “Unhand me, woman. Nothing will induce me to take it off. This young man must be shown at once that it is no ordinary family he is preparing to enter.”

  “Let him keep it on, mother,” said Sally, in her even, indifferent fashion. “If Mr. Donaldson doesn’t take it the way it’s meant he can take himself off, and good riddance.”

  Philip thought it was a severe ordeal that the young man was being exposed to, since Athelny, in his brown velvet jacket, flowing black tie, and red tarboosh, was a startling spectacle for an innocent electrical engineer. When he came he was greeted by his host with the proud courtesy of a Spanish grandee and by Mrs. Athelny in an altogether homely and natural fashion. They sat down at the old ironing-table in the high-backed monkish chairs, and Mrs. Athelny poured tea out of a lustre teapot which gave a note of England and the country-side to the festivity. She had made little cakes with her own hand, and on the table was home-made jam. It was a farm-house tea, and to Philip very quaint and charming in that Jacobean house. Athelny for some fantastic reason took it into his head to discourse upon Byzantine history; he had been reading the later volumes of the Decline and Fall; and, his forefinger dramatically extended, he poured into the astonished ears of the suitor scandalous stories about Theodora and Irene. He addressed himself directly to his guest with a torrent of rhodomontade; and the young man, reduced to helpless silence and shy, nodded his head at intervals to show that he took an intelligent interest. Mrs. Athelny paid no attention to Thorpe’s conversation, but interrupted now and then to offer the young man more tea or to press upon him cake and jam. Philip watched Sally; she sat with downcast eyes, calm, silent, and observant; and her long eye-lashes cast a pretty shadow on her cheek. You could not tell whether she was amused at the scene or if she cared for the young man. She was inscrutable. But one thing was certain: the electrical engineer was good-looking, fair and clean-shaven, with pleasant, regular features, and an honest face; he was tall and well-made. Philip could not help thinking he would make an excellent mate for her, and he felt a pang of envy for the happiness which he fancied was in store for them.

  Presently the suitor said he thought it was about time he was getting along. Sally rose to her feet without a word and accompanied him to the door. When she came back her father burst out:

  “Well, Sally, we think your young man very nice. We are prepared to welcome him into our family. Let the banns be called and I will compose a nuptial song.”

  Sally set about clearing away the tea-things. She did not answer. Suddenly she shot a swift glance at Philip.

  “What did you think of him, Mr. Philip?”

  She had always refused to call him Uncle Phil as the other children did, and would not call him Philip.

  “I think you’d make an awfully handsome pair.”

  She looked at him quickly once more, and then with a slight blush went on with her business.

  “I thought him a very nice civil-spoken young fellow,” said Mrs. Athelny, “and I think he’s just the sort to make any girl happy.”

  Sally did not reply for a minute or two, and Philip looked at her curiously: it might be thought that she was meditating upon what her mother had said, and on the other hand she might be thinking of the man in the moon.

  “Why don’t you answer when you’re spoken to, Sally?” remarked her mother, a little irritably.

  “I thought he was a silly.”

  “Aren’t you going to have him then?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I don’t know how much more you want,” said Mrs. Athelny, and it was quite clear now that she was put out. “He’s a very decent young fellow and he can afford to give you a thorough good home. We’ve got quite enough to feed here without you. If you get a chance like that it’s wicked not to take it. And I daresay you’d be able to have a girl to do the rough work.”

  Philip had never before heard Mrs. Athelny refer so directly to the difficulties of her life. He saw how important it was that each child should be provided for.

  “It’s no good your carrying on, mother,” said Sally in her quiet way. “I’m not going to marry him.”

  “I think you’re a very hard-hearted, cruel, selfish girl.”

  “If you want me to earn my own living, mother, I can always go into service.”

  “Don’t be so silly, you know your father would never let you do that.”

  Philip caught Sally’s eye, and he thought there was in it a glimmer of amusement. He wondered what there had been in the conversation to touch her sense of humour. She was an odd girl.

  CXVI

  During his last year at St. Luke’s Philip had to work hard. He was contented with life. He found it very comfortable to be heart-free and to have enough money for his needs. He had heard people speak contemptuously of money: he wondered if they had ever tried to do without it. He knew that the lack made a man petty, mean, grasping; it distorted his character and caused him to view the world from a vulgar angle; when you had to consider every penny, money became of grotesque importance: you needed a competency to rate it at its proper value. He lived a solitary life, seeing no one except the Athelnys, but he was not lonely; he busied himself with plans for the future, and sometimes he thought of the past. His recollection dwelt now and then on old friends, but he made no effort to see them. He would have liked to know what was become of Norah Nesbit; she was Norah something else now, but he could not remember the name of the man she was going to marry; he was glad to have known her: she was a good and a brave soul. One evening about half past eleven he saw Lawson, walking along Piccadilly; he was in evening clothes and might be supposed to be coming back from a theatre. Philip gave way to a sudden impulse and quickly turned down a side street. He had not seen him for two years and felt that he could not now take up again the interrupted friendship. He and Lawson had nothing more to say to one another. Philip was no longer interested in art; it seemed to him that he was able to enjoy beauty with greater force than when he was a boy; but art appeared to him unimportant. He was occupied with the forming of a pattern out of the manifold chaos of life, and the materials with which he worked seemed to make preoccupation with pigments and words very trivial. Lawson had served his turn. Philip’s friendship with him had been a motive in the design he was elaborating: it was merely sentimental to ignore the fact that the painter was of no further interest to him.

  Sometimes Philip thought of Mildred. He avoided deliberately the streets in which there
was a chance of seeing her; but occasionally some feeling, perhaps curiosity, perhaps something deeper which he would not acknowledge, made him wander about Piccadilly and Regent Street during the hours when she might be expected to be there. He did not know then whether he wished to see her or dreaded it. Once he saw a back which reminded him of hers, and for a moment he thought it was she; it gave him a curious sensation: it was a strange sharp pain in his heart, there was fear in it and a sickening dismay; and when he hurried on and found that he was mistaken he did not know whether it was relief that he experienced or disappointment.

  At the beginning of August Philip passed his surgery, his last examination, and received his diploma. It was seven years since he had entered St. Luke’s Hospital. He was nearly thirty. He walked down the stairs of the Royal College of Surgeons with the roll in his hand which qualified him to practice, and his heart beat with satisfaction.

  “Now I’m really going to begin life,” he thought.

  Next day he went to the secretary’s office to put his name down for one of the hospital appointments. The secretary was a pleasant little man with a black beard, whom Philip had always found very affable. He congratulated him on his success, and then said:

  “I suppose you wouldn’t like to do a locum for a month on the South coast?

  Three guineas a week with board and lodging.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” said Philip.

  “It’s at Farnley, in Dorsetshire. Doctor South. You’d have to go down at once; his assistant has developed mumps. I believe it’s a very pleasant place.”