Christmas Holiday

by W. Somerset Maugham

  Simon Fenimore was Charley’s oldest friend and indeed it was to spend a few days with him that he had been so eager to come to Paris. They had been at a private school together and together at Rugby; they had been at Cambridge together too, but Simon had left without taking a degree, at the end of his second year in fact, because he had come to the conclusion that he was wasting time; and it was Charley’s father who had got him on to the London newspaper for which for the last year he had been one of the Paris correspondents. Simon was alone in the world. His father was in the Indian Forest Department and while Simon was still a young child had divorced his mother for promiscuous adultery. She had left India and Simon, by order of the court in his father’s custody, was sent to England and put into a clergyman’s family till he was old enough to go to school. His mother vanished into obscurity. He had no notion whether she was alive or dead. His father died of cirrhosis of the liver when Simon was twelve and he had but a vague recollection of a thin, slightly-built man with a sallow, lined face and a tight-lipped mouth. He left only just enough money to educate his son. The Leslie Masons had been touched by the poor boy’s loneliness and had made a point of asking him to spend a good part of his holidays with them. As a boy he was thin and weedy, with a pale face in which his black eyes looked enormous, a great quantity of straight dark hair which was always in need of a brush, and a large, sensual mouth. He was talkative, forward for his age, a great reader, and clever. He had none of the diffidence which was in Charley such an engaging trait. Venetia Mason, though from a sense of duty she tried hard, could not like him. She could not understand why Charley had taken a fancy to someone who was in every way so unlike him. She thought Simon pert and conceited. He was insensible to kindness and took everything that was done for him as a matter of course. She had a suspicion that he had no very high opinion either of her or of Leslie. Sometimes when Leslie was talking with his usual good sense and intelligence about something interesting Simon would look at him with a glimmer of irony in those great black eyes of his and his sensual lips pursed in a sarcastic pucker. You would have thought Leslie was being prosy and a trifle stupid. Now and then when they were spending one of their pleasant quiet evenings together, chatting of one thing and another, he would go into a brown study; he would sit staring into vacancy, as though his thoughts were miles away, and perhaps, after a while, take up a book and start reading as though he were by himself. It gave you the impression that their conversation wasn’t worth listening to. It wasn’t even polite. But Venetia Mason chid herself.

  “Poor lamb, he’s never had a chance to learn manners. I will be nice to him. I will like him.”

  Her eyes rested on Charley, so good-looking, with his slim body, (“it’s awful the way he grows out of his clothes, the sleeves of his dinner-jacket are too short for him already,”) his curling brown hair, his blue eyes, with long lashes, and his clear skin. Though perhaps he hadn’t Simon’s showy brilliance, he was good, and he was artistic to his fingers’ ends. But who could tell what he might have become if she had run away from Leslie and Leslie had taken to drink, and if instead of enjoying a cultured atmosphere and the influence of a nice home he had had, like Simon, to fend for himself? Poor Simon! Next day she went out and bought him half a dozen ties. He seemed pleased.

  “I say, that’s jolly decent of you. I’ve never had more than two ties at one time in my life.”

  Venetia was so moved by the spontaneous generosity of her pretty gesture that she was seized with a sudden wave of sympathy.

  “You poor lonely boy,” she cried, “it’s so dreadful for you to have no parents.”

  “Well, as my mother was a whore, and my father a drunk, I daresay I don’t miss much.”

  He was seventeen when he said this.

  It was no good, Venetia simply couldn’t like him. He was harsh, cynical and unscrupulous. It exasperated her to see how much Charley admired him; Charley thought him brilliant and anticipated a great career for him. Even Leslie was impressed by the extent of his reading and the clearness with which even as a boy he expressed himself. At school he was already an ardent socialist and at Cambridge he became a communist. Leslie listened to his wild theories with good-humoured tolerance. To him it was all talk, and talk, he had an instinctive feeling, was just talk; it didn’t touch the essential business of life.

  “And if he does become a well-known journalist or gets into the House, there’ll be no harm in having a friend in the enemy’s camp.”

  Leslie’s ideas were liberal, so liberal that he didn’t mind admitting the Socialists had several notions that no reasonable man could object to; theoretically he was all in favour of the nationalization of the coal-mines, and he didn’t see why the state shouldn’t run the public services as well as private companies; but he didn’t think they should go too far. Ground rents, for instance, that was a matter that was really no concern of the state; and slum property; in a great city you had to have slums, in point of fact the lower classes preferred them to model dwelling-houses, not that the Mason Estate hadn’t done what it could in this direction, but you couldn’t expect a landlord to let people live in his houses for nothing, and it was only fair that he should get a decent return on his capital.

  Simon Fenimore had decided that he wanted to be a foreign correspondent for some years so that he could gain a knowledge of Continental politics which would enable him when he entered the House of Commons to be an expert on a subject of which most Labour members were necessarily ignorant; but when Leslie took him to see the proprietor of the newspaper who was prepared to give a brilliant young man his chance, he warned him that the proprietor was a very rich man, and that he could not expect to create a favourable impression if he delivered himself of revolutionary sentiments. Simon, however, made a very good impression on the magnate by the modesty of his demeanour, his air of energy and his easy conversation.

  “He was as good as gold,” Leslie told his wife afterwards. “He’s got his head screwed on his shoulders all right, that young fellow. It’s what I always told you, talk doesn’t amount to anything really. When it comes down to getting a job with a living wage attached to it, like every sensible man he’s prepared to put his theories in his pocket.”

  Venetia agreed with him. It was quite possible, their own experience proved it, to have a real love for beauty and at the same time to realize the importance of material things. Look at Lorenzo de’ Medici; he’d been a successful banker and an artist to his finger-tips. She thought it very good of Leslie to have taken so much trouble to do a service for someone who was incapable of gratitude. Anyhow the job he had got him would take Simon to Vienna and thus remove Charley from an influence which she had always regarded with misgiving. It was that wild talk of his that had put it into the boy’s head that he wanted to be an artist. It was all very well for Simon, he hadn’t a penny in the world and no connections; but Charley had a snug berth to go into. There were enough artists in the world. Her consolation had been that Charley had so much candour of soul and a disposition of such sweetness that no evil communications could corrupt his good manners.

  At this moment Charley was dressing himself and wondering, forlorn, how he should spend the evening. When he had got his trousers on he rang up the office of Simon’s newspaper, and it was Simon himself who answered.

  “Simon.”

  “Hulloa, have you turned up? Where are you?” Simon seemed so casual that Charley was taken aback.

  “At the hotel.”

  “Oh, are you? Doing anything to-night?”

  “No.”

  “We’d better dine together, shall we? I’ll stroll around and fetch you.”

  He rang off. Charley was dashed. He had expected Simon to be as eager to see him as he was to see Simon, but from Simon’s words and from his manner you would have thought that they were casual acquaintances and that it was a matter of indifference to him if they met or not. Of course it was two years since they’d seen one another and in that time Simon might have changed
out of all recognition. Charley had a sudden fear that his visit to Paris was going to be a failure and he awaited Simon’s arrival with a nervousness that annoyed him. But when at last he walked into the room there was in his appearance at least little alteration. He was now twenty-three and he was still the lanky fellow, though only of average height, that he had always been. He was shabbily dressed in a brown jacket and gray flannel trousers and wore neither hat nor great coat. His long face was thinner and paler than ever and his black eyes seemed larger. They were never still. Hard, shining, inquisitive, suspicious, they seemed to indicate the quality of the brain behind. His mouth was large and ironical, and he had small irregular teeth that somewhat reminded you of one of the smaller beasts of prey. With his pointed chin and prominent cheek-bones he was not good-looking, but his expression was so high-strung, there was in it so strange a disquiet, that you could hardly have passed him in the street without taking notice of him. At fleeting moments his face had a sort of tortured beauty, not a beauty of feature but the beauty of a restless, striving spirit. A disturbing thing about him was that there was no gaiety in his smile, it was a sardonic grimace, and when he laughed his face was contorted as though he were suffering from an agony of pain. His voice was high-pitched; it did not seem to be quite under his control, and when he grew excited often rose to shrillness.

  Charley, restraining his natural impulse to run to the door and wring his hand with the eager friendliness of his happy nature, received him coolly. When there was a knock he called “Come in,” and went on filing his nails. Simon did not offer to shake hands. He nodded as though they had met already in the course of the day.

  “Hulloa!” he said. “Room all right?”

  “Oh, yes. The hotel’s a bit grander than I expected.”

  “It’s convenient and you can bring anyone in you like. I’m starving. Shall we go along and eat?”

  “O.K.”

  “Let’s go to the Coupole.”

  They sat down opposite one another at a table upstairs and ordered their dinner. Simon gave Charley an appraising look.

  “I see you haven’t lost your looks, Charley,” he said with his wry smile.

  “Luckily they’re not my fortune.”

  Charley was feeling a trifle shy. The separation had for the moment at all events destroyed the old intimacy there had so long been between them. Charley was a good listener, he had indeed been trained to be so from early childhood, and he was never unwilling to sit silent while Simon poured out his ideas with eloquent confusion. Charley had always disinterestedly admired him; he was convinced he was a genius so that it seemed quite natural to play second fiddle to him. He had an affection for Simon because he was alone in the world and nobody much liked him, whereas he himself had a happy home and was in easy circumstances; and it gave him a sense of comfort that Simon, who cared for so few people, cared for him. Simon was often bitter and sarcastic, but with him he could also be strangely gentle. In one of his rare moments of expansion he had told him that he was the only person in the world that he gave a damn for. But now Charley felt with malaise that there was a barrier between them. Simon’s restless eyes darted from his face to his hands, paused for an instant on his new suit and then glanced rapidly at his collar and tie; he felt that Simon was not surrendering himself as he had to him alone in the old days, but was holding back, critical and aloof; he seemed to be taking stock of him as if he were a stranger and he were making up his mind what sort of a person this was. It made Charley uncomfortable and he was sore at heart.

  “How d’you like being a business man?” asked Simon.

  Charley faintly coloured. After all the talks they had had in the past he was prepared for Simon to treat him with derision because he had in the end fallen in with his father’s wishes, but he was too honest to conceal the truth.

  “I like it much better than I expected. I find the work very interesting and it’s not hard. I have plenty of time to myself.”

  “I think you’ve shown a lot of sense,” Simon answered, to his surprise. “What did you want to be a painter or a pianist for? There’s a great deal too much art in the world. Art’s a lot of damned rot anyway.”

  “Oh, Simon!”

  “Are you still taken in by the artistic pretensions of your excellent parents? You must grow up, Charley. Art! It’s an amusing diversion for the idle rich. Our world, the world we live in, has no time for such nonsense.”

  “I should have thought …”

  “I know what you would have thought; you would have thought it gave a beauty, a meaning to existence; you would have thought it was a solace to the weary and heavy-laden and an inspiration to a nobler and fuller life. Balls! We may want art again in the future, but it won’t be your art, it’ll be the art of the people.”

  “Oh, Lord!”

  “The people want dope and it may be that art is the best form in which we can give it them. But they’re not ready for it yet. At present it’s another form they want.”

  “What is that?”

  “Words.”

  It was extraordinary, the sardonic vigour he put into the monosyllable. But he smiled, and though his lips grimaced Charley saw in his eyes for a moment that same look of good-humoured affection that he had been accustomed to see in them.

  “No, my boy,” he continued, “you have a good time, go to your office every day and enjoy yourself. It can’t last very long now and you may just as well get all the fun out of it that you can.”

  “What d’you mean by that?”

  “Never mind. We’ll talk about it some other time. Tell me, what have you come to Paris for?”

  “Well, chiefly to see you.”

  Simon flushed darkly. You would have thought that a word of kindness, and when Charley spoke you could never doubt that it was from the heart, horribly embarrassed him.

  “And besides that?”

  “I want to see some pictures, and if there’s anything good in the theatre I’d like to go. And I want to have a bit of a lark generally.”

  “I suppose you mean by that that you want to have a woman.”

  “I don’t get much opportunity in London, you know.”

  “Later on I’ll take you to the Sérail.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’ll see. It’s not bad fun.”

  They began to talk of Simon’s experiences in Vienna, but he was reticent about them.

  “It took me some time to find my feet. You see, I’d never been out of England before. I learnt German. I read a great deal. I thought. I met a lot of people who interested me.”

  “And since then, in Paris?”

  “I’ve been doing more or less the same thing; I’ve been putting my ideas in order. I’m young. I’ve got plenty of time. When I’m through with Paris I shall go to Rome, Berlin or Moscow. If I can’t get a job with the paper, I shall get some other job; I can always teach English and earn enough to keep body and soul together. I wasn’t born in the purple and I can do without things. In Vienna, as an exercise in self-denial, I lived for a month on bread and milk. It wasn’t even a hardship. I’ve trained myself now to do with one meal a day.”

  “D’you mean to say this is your first meal to-day?”

  “I had a cup of coffee when I got up and a glass of milk at one.”

  “But what’s the object of it? You’re adequately paid in your job, aren’t you?”

  “I get a living wage. Certainly enough to have three meals a day. Who can achieve mastery over others unless he first achieves mastery over himself?”

  Charley grinned. He was beginning to feel more at his ease.

  “That sounds like a tag out of a dictionary of quotations.”

  “It may be,” Simon replied indifferently. “Je prends mon bien où je le trouve. A proverb distils the wisdom of the ages and only a fool is scornful of the commonplace. You don’t suppose I intend to be a foreign correspondent for a London paper or a teacher of English all my life. These are my Wanderjahre. I’m going to s
pend them in acquiring the education I never got at the stupid school we both went to or in that suburban cemetery they call the University of Cambridge. But it’s not only knowledge of men and books that I want to acquire; that’s only an instrument; I want to acquire something much harder to come by and more important: an unconquerable will. I want to mould myself as the Jesuit novice is moulded by the iron discipline of the Order. I think I’ve always known myself; there’s nothing that teaches you what you are, like being alone in the world, a stranger everywhere, and living all your life with people to whom you mean nothing. But my knowledge was instinctive. In these two years I’ve been abroad I’ve learnt to know myself as I know the fifth proposition of Euclid. I know my strength and my weakness and I’m ready to spend the next five or six years cultivating my strength and ridding myself of my weakness. I’m going to take myself as a trainer takes an athlete to make a champion of him. I’ve got a good brain. There’s no one in the world who can see to the end of his nose with such perspicacity as I can, and believe me, in the world we live in that’s a great force. I can talk. You have to persuade men to action not by reasoning, but by rhetoric. The general idiocy of mankind is such that they can be swayed by words, and however mortifying, for the present you have to accept the fact as you accept it in the cinema that a film to be a success must have a happy ending. Already I can do pretty well all I like with words; before I’m through I shall be able to do anything.”