Authors: W. Somerset Maugham
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind giving me the
address."
The house the stout woman suggested was in the next
street, and they walked towards it. Philip could walk quite well,
though he had to lean on a stick, and he was rather weak. Mildred
carried the baby. They went for a little in silence, and then he
saw she was crying. It annoyed him, and he took no notice, but she
forced his attention.
"Lend me a hanky, will you? I can't get at mine with
baby," she said in a voice strangled with sobs, turning her head
away from him.
He gave her his handkerchief, but said nothing. She
dried her eyes, and as he did not speak, went on.
"I might be poisonous."
"Please don't make a scene in the street," he
said.
"It'll look so funny insisting on separate rooms
like that. What'll they think of us?"
"If they knew the circumstances I imagine they'd
think us surprisingly moral," said Philip.
She gave him a sidelong glance.
"You're not going to give it away that we're not
married?" she asked quickly.
"No."
"Why won't you live with me as if we were married
then?"
"My dear, I can't explain. I don't want to humiliate
you, but I simply can't. I daresay it's very silly and
unreasonable, but it's stronger than I am. I loved you so much that
now..." he broke off. "After all, there's no accounting for that
sort of thing."
"A fat lot you must have loved me!" she
exclaimed.
The boarding-house to which they had been directed
was kept by a bustling maiden lady, with shrewd eyes and voluble
speech. They could have one double room for twenty-five shillings a
week each, and five shillings extra for the baby, or they could
have two single rooms for a pound a week more.
"I have to charge that much more," the woman
explained apologetically, "because if I'm pushed to it I can put
two beds even in the single rooms."
"I daresay that won't ruin us. What do you think,
Mildred?"
"Oh, I don't mind. Anything's good enough for me,"
she answered.
Philip passed off her sulky reply with a laugh, and,
the landlady having arranged to send for their luggage, they sat
down to rest themselves. Philip's foot was hurting him a little,
and he was glad to put it up on a chair.
"I suppose you don't mind my sitting in the same
room with you," said Mildred aggressively.
"Don't let's quarrel, Mildred," he said gently.
"I didn't know you was so well off you could afford
to throw away a pound a week."
"Don't be angry with me. I assure you it's the only
way we can live together at all."
"I suppose you despise me, that's it."
"Of course I don't. Why should I?"
"It's so unnatural."
"Is it? You're not in love with me, are you?"
"Me? Who d'you take me for?"
"It's not as if you were a very passionate woman,
you're not that."
"It's so humiliating," she said sulkily.
"Oh, I wouldn't fuss about that if I were you."
There were about a dozen people in the
boarding-house. They ate in a narrow, dark room at a long table, at
the head of which the landlady sat and carved. The food was bad.
The landlady called it French cooking, by which she meant that the
poor quality of the materials was disguised by ill-made sauces:
plaice masqueraded as sole and New Zealand mutton as lamb. The
kitchen was small and inconvenient, so that everything was served
up lukewarm. The people were dull and pretentious; old ladies with
elderly maiden daughters; funny old bachelors with mincing ways;
pale-faced, middle-aged clerks with wives, who talked of their
married daughters and their sons who were in a very good position
in the Colonies. At table they discussed Miss Corelli's latest
novel; some of them liked Lord Leighton better than Mr.
Alma-Tadema, and some of them liked Mr. Alma-Tadema better than
Lord Leighton. Mildred soon told the ladies of her romantic
marriage with Philip; and he found himself an object of interest
because his family, county people in a very good position, had cut
him off with a shilling because he married while he was only a
stoodent; and Mildred's father, who had a large place down
Devonshire way, wouldn't do anything for them because she had
married Philip. That was why they had come to a boarding-house and
had not a nurse for the baby; but they had to have two rooms
because they were both used to a good deal of accommodation and
they didn't care to be cramped. The other visitors also had
explanations of their presence: one of the single gentlemen
generally went to the Metropole for his holiday, but he liked
cheerful company and you couldn't get that at one of those
expensive hotels; and the old lady with the middle-aged daughter
was having her beautiful house in London done up and she said to
her daughter: "Gwennie, my dear, we must have a cheap holiday this
year," and so they had come there, though of course it wasn't at
all the kind of thing they were used to. Mildred found them all
very superior, and she hated a lot of common, rough people. She
liked gentlemen to be gentlemen in every sense of the word.
"When people are gentlemen and ladies," she said, "I
like them to be gentlemen and ladies."
The remark seemed cryptic to Philip, but when he
heard her say it two or three times to different persons, and found
that it aroused hearty agreement, he came to the conclusion that it
was only obscure to his own intelligence. It was the first time
that Philip and Mildred had been thrown entirely together. In
London he did not see her all day, and when he came home the
household affairs, the baby, the neighbours, gave them something to
talk about till he settled down to work. Now he spent the whole day
with her. After breakfast they went down to the beach; the morning
went easily enough with a bathe and a stroll along the front; the
evening, which they spent on the pier, having put the baby to bed,
was tolerable, for there was music to listen to and a constant
stream of people to look at; (Philip amused himself by imagining
who they were and weaving little stories about them; he had got
into the habit of answering Mildred's remarks with his mouth only
so that his thoughts remained undisturbed;) but the afternoons were
long and dreary. They sat on the beach. Mildred said they must get
all the benefit they could out of Doctor Brighton, and he could not
read because Mildred made observations frequently about things in
general. If he paid no attention she complained.
"Oh, leave that silly old book alone. It can't be
good for you always reading. You'll addle your brain, that's what
you'll do, Philip."
"Oh, rot!" he answered.
"Besides, it's so unsociable."
He discovered that it was difficult to talk to her.
She had not even the power of attending to what she was herself
saying, so that a dog running in front of her or the passing of a
man in a loud blazer would call forth a remark and then she would
forget what she had been speaking of. She had a bad memory for
names, and it irritated her not to be able to think of them, so
that she would pause in the middle of some story to rack her
brains. Sometimes she had to give it up, but it often occurred to
her afterwards, and when Philip was talking of something she would
interrupt him.
"Collins, that was it. I knew it would come back to
me some time. Collins, that's the name I couldn't remember."
It exasperated him because it showed that she was
not listening to anything he said, and yet, if he was silent, she
reproached him for sulkiness. Her mind was of an order that could
not deal for five minutes with the abstract, and when Philip gave
way to his taste for generalising she very quickly showed that she
was bored. Mildred dreamt a great deal, and she had an accurate
memory for her dreams, which she would relate every day with
prolixity.
One morning he received a long letter from Thorpe
Athelny. He was taking his holiday in the theatrical way, in which
there was much sound sense, which characterised him. He had done
the same thing for ten years. He took his whole family to a
hop-field in Kent, not far from Mrs. Athelny's home, and they spent
three weeks hopping. It kept them in the open air, earned them
money, much to Mrs. Athelny's satisfaction, and renewed their
contact with mother earth. It was upon this that Athelny laid
stress. The sojourn in the fields gave them a new strength; it was
like a magic ceremony, by which they renewed their youth and the
power of their limbs and the sweetness of the spirit: Philip had
heard him say many fantastic, rhetorical, and picturesque things on
the subject. Now Athelny invited him to come over for a day, he had
certain meditations on Shakespeare and the musical glasses which he
desired to impart, and the children were clamouring for a sight of
Uncle Philip. Philip read the letter again in the afternoon when he
was sitting with Mildred on the beach. He thought of Mrs. Athelny,
cheerful mother of many children, with her kindly hospitality and
her good humour; of Sally, grave for her years, with funny little
maternal ways and an air of authority, with her long plait of fair
hair and her broad forehead; and then in a bunch of all the others,
merry, boisterous, healthy, and handsome. His heart went out to
them. There was one quality which they had that he did not remember
to have noticed in people before, and that was goodness. It had not
occurred to him till now, but it was evidently the beauty of their
goodness which attracted him. In theory he did not believe in it:
if morality were no more than a matter of convenience good and evil
had no meaning. He did not like to be illogical, but here was
simple goodness, natural and without effort, and he thought it
beautiful. Meditating, he slowly tore the letter into little
pieces; he did not see how he could go without Mildred, and he did
not want to go with her.
It was very hot, the sky was cloudless, and they had
been driven to a shady corner. The baby was gravely playing with
stones on the beach, and now and then she crawled up to Philip and
gave him one to hold, then took it away again and placed it
carefully down. She was playing a mysterious and complicated game
known only to herself. Mildred was asleep. She lay with her head
thrown back and her mouth slightly open; her legs were stretched
out, and her boots protruded from her petticoats in a grotesque
fashion. His eyes had been resting on her vaguely, but now he
looked at her with peculiar attention. He remembered how
passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now he was
entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with dull
pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer
waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had
desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought
with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when
silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far
their thoughts had travelled apart, and he had rebelled against the
unsurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from
every other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so
madly and now loved her not at all. Sometimes he hated her. She was
incapable of learning, and the experience of life had taught her
nothing. She was as unmannerly as she had always been. It revolted
Philip to hear the insolence with which she treated the hard-worked
servant at the boarding-house.
Presently he considered his own plans. At the end of
his fourth year he would be able to take his examination in
midwifery, and a year more would see him qualified. Then he might
manage a journey to Spain. He wanted to see the pictures which he
knew only from photographs; he felt deeply that El Greco held a
secret of peculiar moment to him; and he fancied that in Toledo he
would surely find it out. He did not wish to do things grandly, and
on a hundred pounds he might live for six months in Spain: if
Macalister put him on to another good thing he could make that
easily. His heart warmed at the thought of those old beautiful
cities, and the tawny plains of Castile. He was convinced that more
might be got out of life than offered itself at present, and he
thought that in Spain he could live with greater intensity: it
might be possible to practise in one of those old cities, there
were a good many foreigners, passing or resident, and he should be
able to pick up a living. But that would be much later; first he
must get one or two hospital appointments; they gave experience and
made it easy to get jobs afterwards. He wished to get a berth as
ship's doctor on one of the large tramps that took things leisurely
enough for a man to see something of the places at which they
stopped. He wanted to go to the East; and his fancy was rich with
pictures of Bangkok and Shanghai, and the ports of Japan: he
pictured to himself palm-trees and skies blue and hot, dark-skinned
people, pagodas; the scents of the Orient intoxicated his nostrils.
His heart but with passionate desire for the beauty and the
strangeness of the world.
Mildred awoke.
"I do believe I've been asleep," she said. "Now
then, you naughty girl, what have you been doing to yourself? Her
dress was clean yesterday and just look at it now, Philip."
XCV
When they returned to London Philip began his
dressing in the surgical wards. He was not so much interested in
surgery as in medicine, which, a more empirical science, offered
greater scope to the imagination. The work was a little harder than
the corresponding work on the medical side. There was a lecture
from nine till ten, when he went into the wards; there wounds had
to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages renewed: Philip prided
himself a little on his skill in bandaging, and it amused him to
wring a word of approval from a nurse. On certain afternoons in the
week there were operations; and he stood in the well of the
theatre, in a white jacket, ready to hand the operating surgeon any
instrument he wanted or to sponge the blood away so that he could
see what he was about. When some rare operation was to be performed
the theatre would fill up, but generally there were not more than
half a dozen students present, and then the proceedings had a
cosiness which Philip enjoyed. At that time the world at large
seemed to have a passion for appendicitis, and a good many cases
came to the operating theatre for this complaint: the surgeon for
whom Philip dressed was in friendly rivalry with a colleague as to
which could remove an appendix in the shortest time and with the
smallest incision.