Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  “You’ve disarranged my hair, you silly boy!” She went to the glass to put it in order, and when she turned back found that James had gone. “What an odd creature!” she muttered.

  To Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace the affair was but an incident, such as might have been the love of Phædra had she flourished in an age when the art of living consists in not taking things too seriously; but for Hippolitus a tragedy of one sort or another is inevitable. James was not a man of easy affections; he made the acquaintance of people with a feeling of hostility rather than with the more usual sensation of friendly curiosity. He was shy, and even with his best friends could not lessen his reserve. Some persons are able to form close intimacies with admirable facility, but James felt always between himself and his fellows a sort of barrier. He could not realise that deep and sudden sympathy was even possible, and was apt to look with mistrust upon the appearance thereof. He seemed frigid and perhaps supercilious to those with whom he came in contact; he was forced to go his way, hiding from all eyes the emotions he felt. And when at last he fell passionately in love, it meant to him ten times more than to most men; it was a sudden freedom from himself. He was like a prisoner who sees for the first time in his life the trees and the hurrying clouds, and all the various movement of the world. For a little while James had known a wonderful liberty, an ineffable bliss which coloured the whole universe with new, strange colours. But then he learnt that the happiness was only sin, and he returned voluntarily to his cold prison.... Till he tried to crush it, he did not know how strong was this passion; he did not realise that it had made of him a different man; it was the only thing in the world to him, beside which everything else was meaningless. He became ruthless towards himself, undergoing every torture which he fancied might cleanse him of the deadly sin.

  And when Mrs. Wallace, against his will, forced herself upon his imagination, he tried to remember her vulgarity, her underbred manners, her excessive use of scent. She had merely played with him, without thinking or caring what the result to him might be. She was bent on as much enjoyment as possible without exposing herself to awkward consequences; common scandal told him that he was not the first callow youth that she had entangled with her provoking glances and her witty tongue. The epithet by which his brother officers qualified her was expressive, though impolite. James repeated these things a hundred times: he said that Mrs. Wallace was not fit to wipe Mary’s boots; he paraded before himself, like a set of unread school-books, all Mary’s excellent qualities. He recalled her simple piety, her good-nature, and kindly heart; she had every attribute that a man could possibly want in his wife. And yet — and yet, when he slept he dreamed he was talking to the other; all day her voice sang in his ears, her gay smile danced before his eyes. He remembered every word she had ever said; he remembered the passionate kisses he had given her. How could he forget that ecstasy? He writhed, trying to expel the importunate image; but nothing served.

  Time could not weaken the impression. Since then he had never seen Mrs. Wallace, but the thought of her was still enough to send the blood racing through his veins. He had done everything to kill the mad, hopeless passion; and always, like a rank weed, it had thriven with greater strength. James knew it was his duty to marry Mary Clibborn, and yet he felt he would rather die. As the months passed on, and he knew he must shortly see her, he was never free from a sense of terrible anxiety. Doubt came to him, and he could not drive it away. The recollection of her was dim, cold, formless; his only hope was that when he saw her love might rise up again, and kill that other passion which made him so utterly despise himself. But he had welcomed the war as a respite, and the thought came to him that its chances might easily solve the difficulty. Then followed the months of hardship and of fighting; and during these the image of Mrs. Wallace had been less persistent, so that James fancied he was regaining the freedom he longed for. And when he lay wounded and ill, his absolute weariness made him ardently look forward to seeing his people again. A hotter love sprang up for them; and the hope became stronger that reunion with Mary might awaken the dead emotion. He wished for it with all his heart.

  But he had seen Mary, and he felt it hopeless; she left him cold, almost hostile. And with a mocking laugh, James heard Mrs. Wallace’s words:

  “Subalterns always get engaged to the same type of girl. They photograph so badly.”

  And now he did not know what to do. The long recalling of the past had left James more uncertain than ever. Some devil within him cried, “Wait, wait! Something may happen!” It really seemed better to let things slide a little. Perhaps — who could tell? — in a day or two the old habit might render Mary as dear to him as when last he had wandered with her in that green wood, James sighed, and looked about him.... The birds still sang merrily, the squirrel leaped from tree to tree; even the blades of grass stood with a certain conscious pleasure, as the light breeze rustled through them. In the mid-day sun all things took pleasure in their life; and all Nature appeared full of joy, coloured and various and insouciant. He alone was sad.

  IV

  When James went home he found that the Vicar of Little Primpton and his wife had already arrived. They were both of them little, dried-up persons, with an earnest manner and no sense of humour, quite excellent in a rather unpleasant way; they resembled one another like peas, but none knew whether the likeness had grown from the propinquity of twenty years, or had been the original attraction. Deeply impressed with their sacred calling — for Mrs. Jackson would never have acknowledged that the Vicar’s wife held a position inferior to the Vicar’s — they argued that the whole world was God’s, and they God’s particular ministrants; so that it was their plain duty to concern themselves with the business of their fellows — and it must be confessed that they never shrank from this duty. They were neither well-educated, nor experienced, nor tactful; but blissfully ignorant of these defects, they shepherded their flock with little moral barks, and gave them, rather self-consciously, a good example in the difficult way to eternal life. They were eminently worthy people, who thought light-heartedness somewhat indecent. They did endless good in the most disagreeable manner possible; and in their fervour not only bore unnecessary crosses themselves, but saddled them on to everyone else, as the only certain passport to the Golden City.

  The Reverend Archibald Jackson had been appointed to the living of Little Primpton while James was in India, and consequently had never seen him.

  “I was telling your father,” said Mrs. Jackson, on shaking hands, “that I hoped you were properly grateful for all the mercies that have been bestowed upon you.”

  James stared at her a little. “Were you?”

  He hated the fashion these people had of discussing matters which he himself thought most private.

  “Mr. Jackson was asking if you’d like a short prayer offered up next Sunday, James,” said his mother.

  “I shouldn’t at all.”

  “Why not?” asked the Vicar, “I think it’s your duty to thank your Maker for your safe return, and I think your parents should join in the thanksgiving.”

  “We’re probably none of us less grateful,” said James, “because we don’t want to express our feelings before the united congregation.”

  Jamie’s parents looked at him with relief, for the same thought filled their minds; but thinking it their duty to submit themselves to the spiritual direction of the Vicar and his wife, they had not thought it quite right to decline the proposal. Mrs. Jackson glanced at her husband with pained astonishment, but further argument was prevented by the arrival of Colonel and Mrs. Clibborn, and Mary.

  Colonel Clibborn was a tall man, with oily black hair and fierce eyebrows, both dyed; aggressively military and reminiscent He had been in a cavalry regiment, where he had come to the philosophic conclusion that all men are dust — except cavalry-men; and he was able to look upon Jamie’s prowess — the prowess of an infantryman — from superior heights. He was a great authority upon war, and could tell anyone what were the mistak
es in South Africa, and how they might have been avoided; likewise he had known in the service half the peers of the realm, and talked of them by their Christian names. He spent three weeks every season in London, and dined late, at seven o’clock, so he had every qualification for considering himself a man of fashion.

  “I don’t know what they’d do in Little Primpton without us,” he said. “It’s only us who keep it alive.”

  But Mrs. Clibborn missed society.

  “The only people I can speak to are the Parsons,” she told her husband, plaintively. “They’re very good people — but only infantry, Reggie.”

  “Of course, they’re only infantry,” agreed Colonel Clibborn.

  Mrs. Clibborn was a regimental beauty — of fifty, who had grown stout; but not for that ceased to use the weapons which Nature had given her against the natural enemies of the sex. In her dealings with several generations of adorers, she had acquired such a habit of languishing glances that now she used them unconsciously. Whether ordering meat from the butcher or discussing parochial matters with Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Clibborn’s tone and manner were such that she might have been saying the most tender things. She had been very popular in the service, because she was the type of philandering woman who required no beating about the bush; her neighbour at the dinner-table, even if he had not seen her before, need never have hesitated to tell her with the soup that she was the handsomest creature he had ever seen, and with the entrée that he adored her.

  On coming in, Mrs. Clibborn for a moment looked at James, quite speechless, her head on one side and her eyes screwing into the corner of the room.

  “Oh, how wonderful!” she said, at last “I suppose I mustn’t call you Jamie now.” She spoke very slowly, and every word sounded like a caress. Then she looked at James again in silent ecstasy. “Colonel Parsons, how proud you must be! And when I think that soon he will be my son! How thin you look, James!”

  “And how well you look, dear lady!”

  It was understood that everyone must make compliments to Mrs. Clibborn; otherwise she grew cross, and when she was cross she was horrid.

  She smiled to show her really beautiful teeth.

  “I should like to kiss you, James. May I, Mrs. Parsons?”

  “Certainly,” replied Jamie’s mother, who didn’t approve of Mrs. Clibborn at all.

  She turned her cheek to James, and assumed a seraphic expression while he lightly touched it with his lips.

  “I’m only an old woman,” she murmured to the company in general.

  She seldom made more than one remark at a time, and at the end of each assumed an appropriate attitude — coy, Madonna-like, resigned, as the circumstances might require. Mr. Jackson came forward to shake hands, and she turned her languishing glance on him.

  “Oh, Mr. Jackson, how beautiful your sermon was!”

  They sat down to dinner, and ate their ox-tail soup. It is terrible to think of the subtlety with which the Evil One can insinuate himself among the most pious; for soup at middle-day is one of his most dangerous wiles, and it is precisely with the simple-minded inhabitants of the country and of the suburbs that this vice is most prevalent.

  James was sitting next to Mrs. Clibborn, and presently she looked at him with the melancholy smile which had always seemed to her so effective.

  “We want you to tell us how you won your Victoria Cross, Jamie.”

  The others, eager to hear the story from the hero’s lips, had been, notwithstanding, too tactful to ask; but they were willing to take advantage of Mrs. Clibborn’s lack of that quality.

  “We’ve all been looking forward to it,” said the Vicar.

  “I don’t think there’s anything to tell,” replied James.

  His father and mother were looking at him with happy eyes, and the Colonel nodded to Mary.

  “Please, Jamie, tell us,” she said. “We only saw the shortest account in the papers, and you said nothing about it in your letters.”

  “D’you think it’s very good form of me to tell you about it?” asked James, smiling gravely.

  “We’re all friends here,” said the Vicar.

  And Colonel Clibborn added, making sheep’s eyes at his wife:

  “You can’t refuse a lady!”

  “I’m an old woman,” sighed Mrs. Clibborn, with a doleful glance. “I can’t expect him to do it for me.”

  The only clever thing Mrs. Clibborn had done in her life was to acknowledge to old age at thirty, and then she did not mean it. It had been one of her methods in flirtation, covering all excesses under a maternal aspect. She must have told hundreds of young officers that she was old enough to be their mother; and she always said it looking plaintively at the ceiling, when they squeezed her hand.

  “It wasn’t a very wonderful thing I did,” said James, at last, “and it was completely useless.”

  “No fine deed is useless,” said the Vicar, sententiously.

  James looked at him a moment, but proceeded with his story.

  “It was only that I tried to save the life of a sub who’d just joined — and didn’t.”

  “Would you pass me the salt?” said Mrs. Clibborn.

  “Mamma!” cried Mary, with a look as near irritation as her gentle nature permitted.

  “Go on, Jamie, there’s a good boy,” said Mrs. Parsons.

  And James, seeing his father’s charming, pathetic look of pride, told the story to him alone. The others did not care how much they hurt him so long as they could gape in admiration, but in his father he saw the most touching sympathy.

  “It was a chap called Larcher, a boy of eighteen, with fair hair and blue eyes, who looked quite absurdly young. His people live somewhere round here, near Ashford.”

  “Larcher, did you say?” asked Mrs. Clibborn, “I’ve never heard the name. It’s not a county family.”

  “Go on, Jamie,” said Mary, with some impatience.

  “Well, he’d only been with us three or four weeks; but I knew him rather well. Oddly enough, he’d taken a sort of fancy to me. He was such a nice, bright boy, so enthusiastic and simple. I used to tell him that he ought to have been at school, rather than roughing it at the Cape.”

  Mrs. Clibborn sat with an idiotic smile on her lips, and a fixed expression of girlish innocence.

  “Well, we knew we should be fighting in a day or so; and the evening before the battle young Larcher was talking to me. ‘How d’you feel?’ I said. He didn’t answer quite so quickly as usual. ‘D’you know,’ he said, ‘I’m so awfully afraid that I shall funk it.’ ‘You needn’t mind that,’ I said, and I laughed. ‘The first time we most of us do funk it. For five minutes or so you just have to cling on to your eyelashes to prevent yourself from running away, and then you feel all right, and you think it’s rather sport.’ ‘I’ve got a sort of presentiment that I shall be killed,’ he said. ‘Don’t be an ass,’ I answered. ‘We’ve all got a presentiment that we shall be killed the first time we’re under fire. If all the people were killed who had presentiments, half the army would have gone to kingdom come long ago.’”

  “You should have told him to lay his trust in the hands of Him who has power to turn the bullet and to break the sword,” said Mrs. Jackson.

  “He wasn’t that sort,” replied James, drily, “I laughed at him, thinking it the better way.... Well, next day we did really fight. We were sent to take an unoccupied hill. Our maxim was that a hill is always unoccupied unless the enemy are actually firing from it. Of course, the place was chock full of Boers; they waited till we had come within easy range for a toy-pistol, and then fired murderously. We did all we could. We tried to storm the place, but we hadn’t a chance. Men tumbled down like nine-pins. I’ve never seen anything like it. The order was given to fire, and there was nothing to fire at but the naked rocks. We had to retire — we couldn’t do anything else; and presently I found that poor Larcher had been wounded. Well, I thought he couldn’t be left where he was, so I went back for him. I asked him if he could move. ‘No,’ he
said, ‘I think I’m hurt in the leg.’ I knelt down and bandaged him up as well as I could. He was simply bleeding like a pig; and meanwhile brother Boer potted at us for all he was worth. ‘How d’you feel?’ I asked. ‘Bit dicky; but comfortable. I didn’t funk it, did I?’ ‘No, of course not, you juggins!’ I said. ‘Can you walk, d’you think?’ ‘I’ll try.’ I lifted him up and put my arm round him, and we got along for a bit; then he became awfully white and groaned, ‘I do feel so bad, Parsons,’ and then he fainted. So I had to carry him; and we went a bit farther, and then — and then I was hit in the arm. ‘I say, I can’t carry you now,’ I said; ‘for God’s sake, buck up.’ He opened his eyes, and I prevented him from falling. ‘I think I can stand,’ he said, and as he spoke a bullet got him in the neck, and his blood splashed over my face. He gave a gasp and died.”

  James finished, and his mother and Mary wiped the tears from their eyes. Mrs. Clibborn turned to her husband.

  “Reggie, I’m sure the Larchers are not a county family.”

  “There was a sapper of that name whom we met at Simla once, my dear,” replied the Colonel.

  “I thought I’d heard it before,” said Mrs. Clibborn, with an air of triumph, as though she’d found out a very difficult puzzle. “Had he a red moustache?”

  “Have you heard from the young man’s people, Captain Parsons?” asked Mrs. Jackson.

  “I had a letter from Mrs. Larcher, the boy’s mother, asking me to go over and see her.”

  “She must be very grateful to you, Jamie.”

  “Why? She has no reason to be.”

  “You did all you could to save him.”

  “It would have been better if I’d left him alone. Don’t you see that if he had remained where he was he might have been alive now. He would have been taken prisoner and sent to Pretoria, but that is better than rotting on the veldt. He was killed because I tried to save him.”

  “There are worse things than death,” said Colonel Parsons. “I have often thought that those fellows who surrendered did the braver thing. It is easy to stand and be shot down, but to hoist the white flag so as to save the lives of the men under one — that requires courage.”