Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  At this moment Ponsonby announced that dinner was served, and at the same time handed a telegram to his master.

  “Hulloa, what’s this?”

  He opened it and gave a cry. His heart beat so violently that he was obliged to sit down.

  “Papa, what’s the matter?” cried Winnie.

  “It’s so stupid of me, I’m quite upset. Get me a glass of sherry, Ponsonby.”

  “What is it, Theodore?” asked Lady Sophia, anxiously.

  He waved his family aside and would not speak till Ponsonby brought the wine. He drank a glass of sherry. A sigh of relief issued from his lips. He waited till Ponsonby had left the room, and then slowly rose to his feet.

  “Sophia, you will be gratified to learn that the Government has offered me the vacant bishopric of Sheffield.”

  “Oh, papa, I’m so glad,” said Winnie.

  Lionel seized his father’s hand and wrung it warmly.

  “Well, Sophia, what do you say?”

  “Presumably you don’t want me to persuade you to take it.”

  “No, I shall accept as it is offered me, frankly — and by telegram.”

  He looked upon the members of his family and took no pains to hide his intense satisfaction.

  “But I’m keeping you from your duties, Lionel. You mustn’t wait a moment longer.” His son went to the door, but the Canon called him back. “One moment, I was forgetting. I think the time has now arrived to announce Winnie’s betrothal publicly. Just sit down and write out a notice; you can leave it at the News Agency as you pass.”

  Lionel obediently went to the desk and took a pen. The Canon cleared his throat.

  “We are authorized to announce that a marriage has been arranged between Lord Wroxham, of Castle Tanker, and Winifred, only daughter of the Honourable, (write that in full, Lionel,) of the Honourable and Reverend Canon Theodore Spratte, bishop elect of Sheffield; better known as the — —”

  “Better known as the — yes?”

  “You’re very dull, Lionel,” exclaimed the Canon, with a laugh that was somewhat irritable. “Better known as the popular and brilliant Vicar of St. Gregory’s, South Kensington.”

  When Lionel had departed with this, Canon Spratte turned jovially to his brother.

  “Well, Thomas, you see that virtue is sometimes rewarded even in this world. It is a great blessing to me to think that everything I desired has come about. Winnie is to marry a man who will make her an excellent husband, and she will occupy a position which she cannot fail to adorn. While as for myself I am removing to a sphere where such poor abilities as Providence has endowed me with, will have a fuller scope. I confess that I am gratified, not only for myself, but for the honour which has befallen our house. I cannot help regretting that my dear father is not alive to see this day. I need not say, Thomas, that I shall always be pleased to see you at Sheffield. I am convinced that the golf-links are excellent, and the poor hospitality of the Palace will ever be at the command of the head of my family.”

  “Theodore, I shouldn’t like to be a rebellious parson in your diocese,” said Lord Spratte, gravely. “You’ll make it very hot for any one who don’t act accordin’ to your lights.”

  “I shall not forget the watchwords of our house, which have ever been Advance and Progress. To these I shall now add: ‘Discipline.’ But really we should go down to dinner.”

  Lady Sophia thought it high time, for she had a healthy appetite. But at that instant came another interruption. Ponsonby entered the room.

  “A gentleman wishes to see you, sir,” he said, handing a card to the Canon.

  “Oh, I can see no one at this hour. I can’t keep dinner waiting a moment longer.”

  “I told him you could see nobody, sir,” answered Ponsonby, “but the gentleman said he came from the Daily Mail.”

  “That certainly makes a difference,” said the Canon, taking the card.

  “That’s what I thought, sir. He said he would be very much obliged if you could grant him a short interview.”

  “Say I shall be very happy, Ponsonby, and show him into my study.”

  “Theodore, are we to have no dinner?” cried Lady Sophia, when Ponsonby was gone.

  “Dinner, dinner!” exclaimed Canon Spratte, scornfully. “How can I think of dinner now, Sophia? I have a duty to perform. You forgot that my position is radically altered.”

  “I knew you’d remind us of it in less than five minutes,” said Lady Sophia, who felt that firmness now was needed or the future would be unbearable.

  “I and my family have always been in the vanguard of progress,” replied the bishop elect, with a glance at the Lord Chancellor’s portrait.

  “I know, but even your family wants its dinner sometimes.”

  “Sophia, I shall be obliged if you will not interrupt me. I cannot say I think it kind of you to insist in this vulgar way on the satisfaction of a gross and sensual appetite. I should have thought on such an occasion worthier thoughts would occupy your mind. But if your flesh is weak I am willing that you should begin. I am not a selfish man, and Heaven forbid that I should ask as a right what an affectionate and Christian disposition should grant as a pleasure.”

  “Fiddlesticks!”

  Canon Spratte looked his sister up and down. He held himself very erect.

  “Sophia, I have long felt that you do not treat me with the respect I venture to consider my due. I must really beg you not to act towards me any longer with this mixture of indecent frivolity and vulgar cynicism. I do not wish to remind you that there is a change in my position.”

  “You have done so twice in five minutes,” said Lady Sophia, acidly.

  “It appears to be necessary. Once for all, however, let me inform you that henceforth I expect to be treated in a different fashion. If you have not the affection to respect your brother Theodore, if you have not the delicacy of sentiment to respect the son of the late Lord Chancellor — you will at least respect the Bishop of Sheffield.”

  He stood for a moment to allow the effect of his words to be duly felt, and then marched to the door. Here he stopped and turned round.

  “It may also interest you to learn that on the thirty-first of July I am going to be married to Gwendolen Durant.”

  He went out and slammed the door behind him. Lady Sophia stared at her eldest brother with helpless astonishment; but with a little smile, Lord Spratte shrugged his shoulders.

  “He always has had the last word, Sophia.”

  XX

  The Times of the third of May in the following year contained the subjoined announcement:

  SPRATTE. On the 1st instant, at the Palace, the wife of the Right Revd. the Bishop of Sheffield, (the Honourable Theodore Spratte,) of a son.

  THE EXPLORER

  CONTENTS

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  I

  The sea was very calm. There was no ship in sight, and the sea-gulls were motionless upon its even greyness. The sky was dark with lowering clouds, but there was no wind. The line of the horizon was clear and delicate. The shingly beach, no less deserted, was thick with tangled seaweed, and the innumerable shells crumbled under the feet that trod them. The breakwaters, which sought to prevent the unceasing encroachment of the waves, were rotten with age and green with the sea-slime. It was a desolate scene, but there was a restfulness in its melancholy; and the great silence, the suave monotony of colour, might have given peace to a heart that was troubled. They could not assuage the torment of the woman who stood alone upon that spot. She did not stir; and, though her gaze was steadfast, she saw nothing. Nature has neither love nor hate, and wi
th indifference smiles upon the light at heart and to the heavy brings a deeper sorrow. It is a great irony that the old Greek, so wise and prudent, who fancied that the gods lived utterly apart from human passions, divinely unconscious in their high palaces of the grief and joy, the hope and despair, of the turbulent crowd of men, should have gone down to posterity as the apostle of brutish pleasure.

  But the silent woman did not look for solace. She had a vehement pride which caused her to seek comfort only in her own heart; and when, against her will, heavy tears rolled down her cheeks, she shook her head impatiently. She drew a long breath and set herself resolutely to change her thoughts.

  But they were too compelling, and she could not drive from her mind the memories that absorbed it. Her fancy, like a homing bird, hovered with light wings about another coast; and the sea she looked upon reminded her of another sea. The Solent. From her earliest years that sheet of water had seemed an essential part of her life, and the calmness at her feet brought back to her irresistibly the scenes she knew so well. But the rippling waves washed the shores of Hampshire with a persuasive charm that they had not elsewhere, and the broad expanse of it, lacking the illimitable majesty of the open sea, could be loved like a familiar thing. Yet there was in it, too, something of the salt freshness of the ocean, and, as the eye followed its course, the heart could exult with a sense of freedom. Sometimes, in the dusk of a winter afternoon, she remembered the Solent as desolate as the Kentish sea before her; but her imagination presented it to her more often with the ships, outward bound or homeward bound, that passed continually. She loved them all. She loved the great liners that sped across the ocean, unmindful of wind or weather, with their freight of passengers; and at night, when she recognised them only by the long row of lights, they fascinated her by the mystery of their thousand souls going out strangely into the unknown. She loved the little panting ferries that carried the good folk of the neighbourhood across the water to buy their goods in Southampton, or to sell the produce of their farms; she was intimate with their sturdy skippers, and she delighted in their airs of self-importance. She loved the fishing boats that went out in all weathers, and the neat yachts that fled across the bay with such a dainty grace. She loved the great barques and the brigantines that came in with a majestic ease, all their sails set to catch the remainder of the breeze; they were like wonderful, stately birds, and her soul rejoiced at the sight of them. But best of all she loved the tramps that plodded with a faithful, grim tenacity from port to port; often they were squat and ugly, battered by the tempest, dingy and ill-painted; but her heart went out to them. They touched her because their fate seemed so inglorious. No skipper, new to his craft, could ever admire the beauty of their lines, nor look up at the swelling canvas and exult he knew not why; no passengers would boast of their speed or praise their elegance. They were honest merchantmen, laborious, trustworthy, and of good courage, who took foul weather and peril in the day’s journey and made no outcry. And with a sure instinct she saw the romance in the humble course of their existence and the beauty of an unboasting performance of their duty; and often, as she watched them, her fancy glowed with the thought of the varied merchandise they carried, and their long sojourning in foreign parts. There was a subtle charm in them because they went to Southern seas and white cities with tortuous streets, silent under the blue sky.

  Striving still to free herself of a passionate regret, the lonely woman turned away and took a path that led across the marshes. But her heart sank, for she seemed to recognise the flats, the shallow dykes, the coastguard station, which she had known all her life. Sheep were grazing here and there, and two horses, put out to grass, looked at her listlessly as she passed. A cow heavily whisked its tail. To the indifferent, that line of Kentish coast, so level and monotonous, might be merely dull, but to her it was beautiful. It reminded her of the home she would never see again.

  And then her thoughts, which had wandered around the house in which she was born, ever touching the fringe as it were, but never quite settling with the full surrender of attention, gave themselves over to it entirely.

  Hamlyn’s Purlieu had belonged to the Allertons for three hundred years, and the recumbent effigy, in stone, of the founder of the family’s fortunes, with his two wives in ruffs and stiff martingales, was to be seen in the chancel of the parish church. It was the work of an Italian sculptor, lured to England in company of the craftsmen who made the lady-chapel of Westminster Abbey; and the renaissance delicacy of its work was very grateful in the homely English church. And for three hundred years the Allertons had been men of prudence, courage, and worth, so that the walls of the church by now were filled with the lists of their virtues and their achievements. They had intermarried with the great families of the neighbourhood, and with the help of these marble tablets you might have made out a roll of all that was distinguished in Hampshire. The Maddens of Brise, the Fletchers of Horton Park, the Daunceys of Maiden Hall, the Garrods of Penda, had all, in the course of time, given daughters to the Allertons of Hamlyn’s Purlieu; and the Allertons of Hamlyn’s Purlieu had given in exchange richly dowered maidens to the Garrods of Penda, the Daunceys of Maiden Hall, the Fletchers of Horton Park, and the Maddens of Brise.

  And with each generation the Allertons grew prouder. The peculiar situation of their lands distinguished them a little from their neighbours; for, whereas the Garrods, the Daunceys, and the Fletchers lived within walking distance of each other, and Madden of Brise, because of his rank and opulence the most distinguished person in the county, within six or seven miles, Hamlyn’s Purlieu was near the sea and separated by forest land from other places. The seclusion in which its owners were thus forced to dwell differentiated their characters from those of the neighbouring gentlemen. They found much cause for self-esteem in the number of their acres, and, though many of these consisted of salt marshes, and more of wild heath, others were as good as any in Hampshire; and the grand total made a formidable array in works of reference. But they found greater reason still for self-congratulation in their culture. No pride is so great as the pride of intellect, and the Allertons never doubted that their neighbours were boors beside them. Whether it was due to the peculiar lie of the land on which they were born and bred, that led them to introspection, or whether it was due to some accident of inheritance, the Allertons had all an interest in the things of the mind, which had never troubled the Fletchers or the Garrods of Penda, the Daunceys or my lords Madden of Brise. They were as good sportsmen as the others, and hunted or shot with the best of them, but they read books as well, and had a subtlety of intelligence which was no less unexpected than pleasing. The fat squires of the county looked up to them as miracles of learning, and congratulated themselves over their port on possessing in their midst persons who combined, in such excellent proportions, gentle birth and a good seat in the saddle with adequate means and an encyclopedic knowledge. Everything conspired to give the Allertons a good opinion of themselves. They not only looked down from superior heights on the persons with whom they habitually came in contact — that is common enough — but these very persons without question looked up to them.

  The Allertons made the grand tour in a style befitting their dignity; and the letters which each son of the house wrote in turn, describing Paris, Vienna, Dresden, Munich, and Rome, with the persons of consequence who entertained him, were preserved with scrupulous care among the family papers. They testified to an agreeable interest in the arts; and each of them had made a point of bringing back with him, according to the fashion of his day, beautiful things which he had purchased on his journey. Hamlyn’s Purlieu, a fine stone house goodly to look upon, was thus filled with Italian pictures, French cabinets of delicate workmanship, bronzes of all kinds, tapestries, and old Eastern carpets. The gardens had been tended with a loving care, and there grew in them trees and flowers which were unknown to other parts of England. Each Allerton in his time cherished the place with a passionate pride, looking upon it as his greatest privilege
that he could add a little to its beauty and hand on to his successor a more magnificent heritage.

  But at length Hamlyn’s Purlieu came into the hands of Fred Allerton; and the gods, blind for so long to the prosperity of this house, determined now, it seemed, to wreak their malice. Fred Allerton had many of the characteristics of his race, but in him they took a sudden turn which bore him swiftly to destruction. They had been marked always by good looks, a persuasive manner, and a singular liberality of mind; and he was perhaps the handsomest, and certainly the most charming of them all. But the freedom from prejudice which had prevented the others from giving way too much to their pride had in him degenerated into a singular unscrupulousness. His parents died when he was twenty, and a year later he found himself master of a great estate. The times were hard then for those who depended upon their land, and Fred Allerton was not so rich as his forebears. But he flung himself extravagantly into the pursuit of pleasure. He was the only member of his family who had failed to reside habitually at Hamlyn’s Purlieu. He seemed to take no interest in it, and except now and then to shoot, never came near his native county. He lived much in Paris, which in the early years of the third republic had still something of the wanton gaiety of the Empire; and here he soon grew notorious for his prodigality and his adventures. He was an unlucky man, and everything he did led to disaster. But this never impaired his cheerfulness. He boasted that he had lost money in every gambling hell in Europe, and vowed that he would give up racing in disgust if ever a horse of his won a race. His charm of manner was irresistible, and no one had more friends than he. His generosity was great, and he was willing to lend money to everyone who asked. But it is even more expensive to be a man whom everyone likes than to keep a stud, and Fred Allerton found himself in due course much in need of ready money. He did not hesitate to mortgage his lands, and till he came to the end of these resources also, continued gaily to lead a life of splendour.