‘Did he make love to you?' he asked.
The words seemed to stick funnily in his throat, but he asked them nevertheless. He liked Miss Wilkinson very much now, and was thrilled by her conversation, but he could not imagine anyone making love to her.
‘What a question!' she cried. ‘Poor Guy, he made love to every woman he met. It was a habit that he could not break himself of.'
She sighed a little, and seemed to look back tenderly on the past.
‘He was a charming man,' she murmured.
A greater experience than Philip's would have guessed from these words the probabilities of the encounter: the distinguished writer invited to luncheon en famille, the governess coming in sedately with the two tall girls she was teaching; the introduction:
‘Notre Miss Anglaise.'
‘Mademoiselle.'
And the luncheon during which the Miss Anglaise sat silent while the distinguished writer talked to his host and hostess.
But to Philip her words called up much more romantic fancies.
‘Do tell me all about him,' he said excitedly.
‘There's nothing to tell,' she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts. ‘You mustn't be curious.'
She began to talk of Paris. She loved the boulevards and the Bois. There was grace in every street, and the trees in the Champs-Élysées had a distinction which trees had not elsewhere. They were sitting on a stile now by the high-road, and Miss Wilkinson looked with disdain upon the stately elms in front of them. And the theatres: the plays were brilliant, and the acting was incomparable. She often went with Madame Foyot, the mother of the girls she was educating, when she was trying on clothes.
‘Oh, what a misery to be poor!' she cried. ‘These beautiful things, it's only in Paris they know how to dress, and not to be able to afford them! Poor Madame Foyot, she had no figure. Sometimes the dressmaker used to whisper to me: “Ah, Mademoiselle, if she only had your figure.” '
Philip noticed then that Miss Wilkinson had a robust form, and was proud of it.
‘Men are so stupid in England. They only think of the face. The French, who are a nation of lovers, know how much more important the figure is.'
Philip had never thought of such things before, but he observed now that Miss Wilkinson's ankles were thick and ungainly. He withdrew his eyes quickly.
‘You should go to France. Why don't you go to Paris for a year. You would learn French, and it would—déniaiser you.'
‘What is that?' asked Philip.
She laughed slyly.
‘You must look it out in the dictionary. Englishmen do not know how to treat women. They are so shy. Shyness is ridiculous in a man. They don't know how to make love. They can't even tell a woman she is charming without looking foolish.'
Philip felt himself absurd. Miss Wilkinson evidently expected him to behave very differently; and he would have been delighted to say gallant and witty things, but they never occurred to him; and when they did he was much too afraid of making a fool of himself to say them.
‘Oh, I loved Paris,' sighed Miss Wilkinson. ‘But I had to go to Berlin. I was with the Foyot girls till the girls married, and then I could get nothing to do, and I had the chance of this post in Berlin. They're relations of Madame Foyot, and I accepted. I had a tiny apartment in the Rue Bréda, on the cinquième: it wasn't at all respectable. You know about the Rue Bréda—ces dames, you know.'
Philip nodded, not knowing at all what she meant, but vaguely suspecting, and anxious she should not think him too ignorant.
‘But I didn't care. Je suis libre, n'est-ce pas?' She was very fond of speaking French, which indeed she spoke well. ‘Once I had such a curious adventure there.'
She paused a little and Philip pressed her to tell it.
‘You wouldn't tell me yours in Heidelberg,' she said.
‘They were so unadventurous,' he retorted.
‘I don't know what Mrs Carey would say if she knew the sort of things we talk about together.'
‘You don't imagine I shall tell her.'
‘Will you promise?'
When he had done this, she told him how an art-student who had a room on the floor above her—but she interrupted herself.
‘Why don't you go in for art? You paint so prettily.'
‘Not well enough for that.'
‘That is for others to judge. Je m'y connais, and I believe you have the making of a great artist.'
‘Can't you see Uncle William's face if I suddenly told him I wanted to go to Paris and study art?'
‘You're your own master, aren't you?'
‘You're trying to put me off. Please go on with the story.'
Miss Wilkinson, with a little laugh, went on. The art-student had passed her several times on the stairs, and she had paid no particular attention. She saw that he had fine eyes, and he took off his hat very politely. And one day she found a letter slipped under her door. It was from him. He told her that he had adored her for months, and that he waited about the stairs for her to pass. Oh, it was a charming letter! Of course she did not reply, but what woman could help being flattered? And next day there was another letter! It was wonderful, passionate, and touching. When next she met him on the stairs she did not know which way to look. And every day the letters came, and now he begged her to see him. He said he would come in the evening, vers neuf heures, and she did not know what to do. Of course it was impossible, and he might ring and ring, but she would never open the door; and then while she was waiting for the tinkling of the bell, all nerves, suddenly he stood before her. She had forgotten to shut the door when she came in.
‘C'était une fatalité.'
‘And what happened then?' asked Philip.
‘That is the end of the story,' she replied, with a ripple of laughter.
Philip was silent for a moment. His heart beat quickly, and strange emotions seemed to be hustling one another in his heart. He saw the dark staircase and the chance meetings, and he admired the boldness of the letters—oh, he would never have dared to do that—and then the silent, almost mysterious entrance. It seemed to him the very soul of romance.
‘What was he like?'
‘Oh, he was handsome. Charmant garçon.'
‘Do you know him still?'
Philip felt a slight feeling of irritation as he asked this.
‘He treated me abominably. Men are always the same. You're heartless, all of you.'
‘I don't know about that,' said Philip, not without embarrassment.
‘Let us go home,' said Miss Wilkinson.
XXXIII
PHILIP COULD not get Miss Wilkinson's story out of his head. It was clear enough what she meant, even though she cut it short, and he was a little shocked. That sort of thing was all very well for married women, he had read enough French novels to know that in France it was indeed the rule, but Miss Wilkinson was English and unmarried; her father was a clergyman. Then it struck him that the art-student probably was neither the first nor the last of her lovers, and he gasped: he had never looked upon Miss Wilkinson like that; it seemed incredible that anyone should make love to her. In his ingenuousness he doubted her story as little as he doubted what he read in books, and he was angry that such wonderful things never happened to him. It was humiliating that if Miss Wilkinson insisted upon his telling her of his adventures in Heidelberg he would have nothing to tell. It was true that he had some power of invention, but he was not sure whether he could persuade her that he was steeped in vice; women were full of intuition, he had read that, and she might easily discover that he was fibbing. He blushed scarlet as he thought of her laughing up her sleeve.
Miss Wilkinson played the piano and sang in a rather tired voice; but her songs, Massenet, Benjamin Goddard and Augusta Holmes, were new to Philip; and together they spent many hours at the piano. One day she wondered if he had a voice and insisted on trying it. She told him he had a pleasant baritone and offered to give him les
sons. At first with his usual bashfulness he refused, but she insisted, and then every morning at a convenient time after breakfast she gave him an hour's lesson. She had a natural gift for teaching, and it was clear that she was an excellent governess. She had method and firmness. Though her French accent was so much part of her that it remained, all the mellifluousness of her manner left her when she was engaged in teaching. She put up with no nonsense. Her voice became a little peremptory, and instinctively she suppressed inattention and corrected slovenliness. She knew what she was about and put Philip to scales and exercises.
When the lesson was over she resumed without effort her seductive smiles, her voice became again soft and winning, but Philip could not so easily put away the pupil as she the pedagogue; and this impression conflicted with the feelings her stories had aroused in him. He looked at her more narrowly. He liked her much better in the evening than in the morning. In the morning she was rather lined and the skin of her neck was just a little rough. He wished she would hide it, but the weather was very warm just then and she wore blouses which were cut low. She was very fond of white; in the morning it did not suit her. At night she often looked very attractive, she put on a gown which was almost a dinner dress, and she wore a chain of garnets round her neck; the lace about her bosom and at her elbows gave her a pleasant softness, and the scent she wore (at Blackstable no one used anything but eau-de-Cologne, and that only on Sundays or when suffering from a sick headache) was troubling and exotic. She really looked very young then.
Philip was much exercised over her age. He added twenty and seventeen together, and could not bring them to a satisfactory total. He asked Aunt Louisa more than once why she thought Miss Wilkinson was thirty-seven: she didn't look more than thirty, and everyone knew that foreigners aged more rapidly than English women; Miss Wilkinson had lived so long abroad that she might almost be called a foreigner. He personally wouldn't have thought her more than twenty-six.
‘She's more than that,' said Aunt Louisa.
Philip did not believe in the accuracy of the Careys' statements. All they distinctly remembered was that Miss Wilkinson had not got her hair up the last time they saw her in Lincolnshire. Well, she might have been twelve then: it was so long ago and the Vicar was always so unreliable. They said it was twenty years ago, but people used round figures, and it was just as likely to be eighteen years, or seventeen. Seventeen and twelve were only twenty-nine, and hang it all, that wasn't old, was it? Cleopatra was forty-eight when Antony threw away the world for her sake.
It was a fine summer. Day after day was hot and cloudless; but the heat was tempered by the neighbourhood of the sea, and there was a pleasant exhilaration in the air, so that one was excited and not oppressed by the August sunshine. There was a pond in the garden in which a fountain played; water-lilies grew in it and goldfish sunned themselves on the surface. Philip and Miss Wilkinson used to take rugs and cushions there after dinner and lie on the lawn in the shade of a tall hedge of roses. They talked and read all the afternoon. They smoked cigarettes, which the Vicar would not allow in the house; he thought smoking a disgusting habit, and used frequently to say that it was disgraceful for anyone to grow a slave to a habit. He forgot that he was himself a slave to afternoon tea.
One day Miss Wilkinson gave Philip La Vie de Bohème. She had found it by accident when she was rummaging among the books in the Vicar's study. It had been bought in a lot with something Mr Carey wanted and had remained undiscovered for ten years.
Philip began to read Murger's fascinating, ill-written, absurd masterpiece, and fell at once under its spell. His soul danced with joy at that picture of starvation which is so good-humoured, of squalor which is so picturesque, of sordid love which is so romantic, of bathos which is so moving. Rodolphe and Mimi, Musette and Schaunard! They wander through the grey streets of the Latin Quarter, finding refuge now in one attic, now in another, in their quaint costumes of Louis Philippe, with their tears and their smiles, happy-go-lucky and reckless. Who can resist them? It is only when you return to the book with a sounder judgement that you find how gross their pleasures were, how vulgar their minds; and you feel the utter worthlessness, as artists and as human beings, of that gay procession. Philip was enraptured.
‘Don't you wish you were going to Paris instead of London?' asked Miss Wilkinson, smiling at his enthusiasm.
‘It's too late now even if I did,' he answered.
During the fortnight he had been back from Germany there had been much discussion between himself and his uncle about his future. He had refused definitely to go to Oxford, and now that there was no chance of his getting scholarships even Mr Carey came to the conclusion that he could not afford it. His entire fortune had consisted of only two thousand pounds, and though it had been invested in mortgages at five per cent he had not been able to live on the interest. It was now a little reduced. It would be absurd to spend two hundred a year, the least he could live on at a university, for three years at Oxford which would lead him no nearer to earning his living. He was anxious to go straight to London. Mrs Carey thought there were only four professions for a gentleman, the Army, the Navy, the Law, and the Church. She had added medicine because her brother-in-law practised it, but did not forget that in her young days no one ever considered the doctor a gentleman. The first two were out of the question, and Philip was firm in his refusal to be ordained. Only the law remained. The local doctor had suggested that many gentlemen now went in for engineering, but Mrs Carey opposed the idea at once.
‘I shouldn't like Philip to go into trade,' she said.
‘No, he must have a profession,' answered the Vicar.
‘Why not make him a doctor like his father?'
‘I should hate it,' said Philip.
Mrs Carey was not sorry. The Bar seemed out of the question, since he was not going to Oxford, for the Careys were under the impression that a degree was still necessary for success in that calling; and finally it was suggested that he should become articled to a solicitor. They wrote to the family lawyer, Albert Nixon, who was co-executor with the Vicar of Blackstable for the late Henry Carey's estate, and asked him whether he would take Philip. In a day or two the answer came back that he had not a vacancy, and was very much opposed to the whole scheme; the profession was greatly overcrowded, and without capital or connexions a man had small chance of becoming more than a managing clerk; he suggested, however, that Philip should become a chartered accountant. Neither the Vicar nor his wife knew in the least what this was, and Philip had never heard of anyone being a chartered accountant; but another letter from the solicitor explained that the growth of modern business and the increase of companies had led to the formation of many firms of accountants to examine the books and put into the financial affairs of their clients an order which old-fashioned methods had lacked. Some years before a Royal Charter had been obtained, and the profession was becoming every year more respectable, lucrative, and important. The chartered accountants whom Albert Nixon had employed for thirty years happened to have a vacancy for an articled pupil, and would take Philip for a fee of three hundred pounds. Half of this would be returned during the five years the articles lasted in the form of salary. The prospect was not exciting, but Philip felt that he must decide on something, and the thought of living in London overbalanced the slight shrinking he felt. The Vicar of Blackstable wrote to ask Mr Nixon whether it was a profession suited to a gentleman; and Mr Nixon replied that, since the Charter, men were going into it who had been to public schools and a university; moreover, if Philip disliked the work and after a year wished to leave, Herbert Carter, for that was the accountant's name, would return half the money paid for the articles. This settled it, and it was arranged that Philip should start work on the fifteenth of September.
‘I have a full month before me,' said Philip.
‘And then you go to freedom and I to bondage,' returned Miss Wilkinson.
Her holidays were to last six weeks, and she would be leaving Blackstable only
a day or two before Philip.
‘I wonder if we shall ever meet again,' she said.
‘I don't know why not.'
‘Oh, don't speak in that practical way. I never knew anyone so unsentimental.'
Philip reddened. He was afraid that Miss Wilkinson would think him a milksop: after all she was a young woman, sometimes quite pretty, and he was getting on for twenty; it was absurd that they should talk of nothing but art and literature. He ought to make love to her. They had talked a good deal of love. There was the art-student in the Rue Bréda, and then there was the painter in whose family she had lived so long in Paris: he had asked her to sit for him, and started to make love to her so violently that she was forced to invent excuses not to sit to him again. It was clear enough that Miss Wilkinson was used to attentions of that sort. She looked very nice now in a large straw hat: it was hot that afternoon, the hottest day they had had, and beads of sweat stood in a line on her upper lip. He called to mind Fräulein Cäcilie and Herr Sung. He had never thought of Cäcilie in an amorous way, she was exceedingly plain; but now, looking back, the affair seemed very romantic. He had a chance of romance too. Miss Wilkinson was practically French, and that added zest to a possible adventure. When he thought of it at night in bed, or when he sat by himself in the garden reading a book, he was thrilled by it; but when he saw Miss Wilkinson it seemed less picturesque.
At all events, after what she had told him, she would not be surprised if he made love to her. He had a feeling that she must think it odd of him to make no sign: perhaps it was only his fancy, but once or twice in the last day or two he had imagined that there was a suspicion of contempt in her eyes.
‘A penny for your thoughts,' said Miss Wilkinson, looking at him with a smile.
Of Human Bondage Page 18