Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  But when next day, about tea-time, an hour at which he was pretty certain to find Norah at home, he knocked at her door his courage suddenly failed him. Was it possible for her to forgive him? It would be abominable of him to force himself on her presence. The door was opened by a maid new since he had been in the habit of calling every day, and he inquired if Mrs. Nesbit was in.

  “Will you ask her if she could see Mr. Carey?” he said. “I’ll wait here.”

  The maid ran upstairs and in a moment clattered down again.

  “Will you step up, please, sir. Second floor front.”

  “I know,” said Philip, with a slight smile.

  He went with a fluttering heart. He knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” said the well-known, cheerful voice.

  It seemed to say come in to a new life of peace and happiness. When he entered Norah stepped forward to greet him. She shook hands with him as if they had parted the day before. A man stood up.

  “Mr. Carey — Mr. Kingsford.”

  Philip, bitterly disappointed at not finding her alone, sat down and took stock of the stranger. He had never heard her mention his name, but he seemed to Philip to occupy his chair as though he were very much at home. He was a man of forty, clean-shaven, with long fair hair very neatly plastered down, and the reddish skin and pale, tired eyes which fair men get when their youth is passed. He had a large nose, a large mouth; the bones of his face were prominent, and he was heavily made; he was a man of more than average height, and broad-shouldered.

  “I was wondering what had become of you,” said Norah, in her sprightly manner. “I met Mr. Lawson the other day — did he tell you? — and I informed him that it was really high time you came to see me again.”

  Philip could see no shadow of embarrassment in her countenance, and he admired the use with which she carried off an encounter of which himself felt the intense awkwardness. She gave him tea. She was about to put sugar in it when he stopped her.

  “How stupid of me!” she cried. “I forgot.”

  He did not believe that. She must remember quite well that he never took sugar in his tea. He accepted the incident as a sign that her nonchalance was affected.

  The conversation which Philip had interrupted went on, and presently he began to feel a little in the way. Kingsford took no particular notice of him. He talked fluently and well, not without humour, but with a slightly dogmatic manner: he was a journalist, it appeared, and had something amusing to say on every topic that was touched upon; but it exasperated Philip to find himself edged out of the conversation. He was determined to stay the visitor out. He wondered if he admired Norah. In the old days they had often talked of the men who wanted to flirt with her and had laughed at them together. Philip tried to bring back the conversation to matters which only he and Norah knew about, but each time the journalist broke in and succeeded in drawing it away to a subject upon which Philip was forced to be silent. He grew faintly angry with Norah, for she must see he was being made ridiculous; but perhaps she was inflicting this upon him as a punishment, and with this thought he regained his good humour. At last, however, the clock struck six, and Kingsford got up.

  “I must go,” he said.

  Norah shook hands with him, and accompanied him to the landing. She shut the door behind her and stood outside for a couple of minutes. Philip wondered what they were talking about.

  “Who is Mr. Kingsford?” he asked cheerfully, when she returned.

  “Oh, he’s the editor of one of Harmsworth’s Magazines. He’s been taking a good deal of my work lately.”

  “I thought he was never going.”

  “I’m glad you stayed. I wanted to have a talk with you.” She curled herself into the large arm-chair, feet and all, in a way her small size made possible, and lit a cigarette. He smiled when he saw her assume the attitude which had always amused him.

  “You look just like a cat.”

  She gave him a flash of her dark, fine eyes.

  “I really ought to break myself of the habit. It’s absurd to behave like a child when you’re my age, but I’m comfortable with my legs under me.”

  “It’s awfully jolly to be sitting in this room again,” said Philip happily. “You don’t know how I’ve missed it.”

  “Why on earth didn’t you come before?” she asked gaily.

  “I was afraid to,” he said, reddening.

  She gave him a look full of kindness. Her lips outlined a charming smile.

  “You needn’t have been.”

  He hesitated for a moment. His heart beat quickly.

  “D’you remember the last time we met? I treated you awfully badly — I’m dreadfully ashamed of myself.”

  She looked at him steadily. She did not answer. He was losing his head; he seemed to have come on an errand of which he was only now realising the outrageousness. She did not help him, and he could only blurt out bluntly.

  “Can you ever forgive me?”

  Then impetuously he told her that Mildred had left him and that his unhappiness had been so great that he almost killed himself. He told her of all that had happened between them, of the birth of the child, and of the meeting with Griffiths, of his folly and his trust and his immense deception. He told her how often he had thought of her kindness and of her love, and how bitterly he had regretted throwing it away: he had only been happy when he was with her, and he knew now how great was her worth. His voice was hoarse with emotion. Sometimes he was so ashamed of what he was saying that he spoke with his eyes fixed on the ground. His face was distorted with pain, and yet he felt it a strange relief to speak. At last he finished. He flung himself back in his chair, exhausted, and waited. He had concealed nothing, and even, in his self-abasement, he had striven to make himself more despicable than he had really been. He was surprised that she did not speak, and at last he raised his eyes. She was not looking at him. Her face was quite white, and she seemed to be lost in thought.

  “Haven’t you got anything to say to me?”

  She started and reddened.

  “I’m afraid you’ve had a rotten time,” she said. “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  She seemed about to go on, but she stopped, and again he waited. At length she seemed to force herself to speak.

  “I’m engaged to be married to Mr. Kingsford.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me at once?” he cried. “You needn’t have allowed me to humiliate myself before you.”

  “I’m sorry, I couldn’t stop you…. I met him soon after you” — she seemed to search for an expression that should not wound him— “told me your friend had come back. I was very wretched for a bit, he was extremely kind to me. He knew someone had made me suffer, of course he doesn’t know it was you, and I don’t know what I should have done without him. And suddenly I felt I couldn’t go on working, working, working; I was so tired, I felt so ill. I told him about my husband. He offered to give me the money to get my divorce if I would marry him as soon as I could. He had a very good job, and it wouldn’t be necessary for me to do anything unless I wanted to. He was so fond of me and so anxious to take care of me. I was awfully touched. And now I’m very, very fond of him.”

  “Have you got your divorce then?” asked Philip.

  “I’ve got the decree nisi. It’ll be made absolute in July, and then we are going to be married at once.”

  For some time Philip did not say anything.

  “I wish I hadn’t made such a fool of myself,” he muttered at length.

  He was thinking of his long, humiliating confession. She looked at him curiously.

  “You were never really in love with me,” she said.

  “It’s not very pleasant being in love.”

  But he was always able to recover himself quickly, and, getting up now and holding out his hand, he said:

  “I hope you’ll be very happy. After all, it’s the best thing that could have happened to you.”

  She looked a little wistfully at him as she took his hand and h
eld it.

  “You’ll come and see me again, won’t you?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “It would make me too envious to see you happy.”

  He walked slowly away from her house. After all she was right when she said he had never loved her. He was disappointed, irritated even, but his vanity was more affected than his heart. He knew that himself. And presently he grew conscious that the gods had played a very good practical joke on him, and he laughed at himself mirthlessly. It is not very comfortable to have the gift of being amused at one’s own absurdity.

  LXXX

  For the next three months Philip worked on subjects which were new to him. The unwieldy crowd which had entered the Medical School nearly two years before had thinned out: some had left the hospital, finding the examinations more difficult to pass than they expected, some had been taken away by parents who had not foreseen the expense of life in London, and some had drifted away to other callings. One youth whom Philip knew had devised an ingenious plan to make money; he had bought things at sales and pawned them, but presently found it more profitable to pawn goods bought on credit; and it had caused a little excitement at the hospital when someone pointed out his name in police-court proceedings. There had been a remand, then assurances on the part of a harassed father, and the young man had gone out to bear the White Man’s Burden overseas. The imagination of another, a lad who had never before been in a town at all, fell to the glamour of music-halls and bar parlours; he spent his time among racing-men, tipsters, and trainers, and now was become a book-maker’s clerk. Philip had seen him once in a bar near Piccadilly Circus in a tight-waisted coat and a brown hat with a broad, flat brim. A third, with a gift for singing and mimicry, who had achieved success at the smoking concerts of the Medical School by his imitation of notorious comedians, had abandoned the hospital for the chorus of a musical comedy. Still another, and he interested Philip because his uncouth manner and interjectional speech did not suggest that he was capable of any deep emotion, had felt himself stifle among the houses of London. He grew haggard in shut-in spaces, and the soul he knew not he possessed struggled like a sparrow held in the hand, with little frightened gasps and a quick palpitation of the heart: he yearned for the broad skies and the open, desolate places among which his childhood had been spent; and he walked off one day, without a word to anybody, between one lecture and another; and the next thing his friends heard was that he had thrown up medicine and was working on a farm.

  Philip attended now lectures on medicine and on surgery. On certain mornings in the week he practised bandaging on out-patients glad to earn a little money, and he was taught auscultation and how to use the stethoscope. He learned dispensing. He was taking the examination in Materia Medica in July, and it amused him to play with various drugs, concocting mixtures, rolling pills, and making ointments. He seized avidly upon anything from which he could extract a suggestion of human interest.

  He saw Griffiths once in the distance, but, not to have the pain of cutting him dead, avoided him. Philip had felt a certain self-consciousness with Griffiths’ friends, some of whom were now friends of his, when he realised they knew of his quarrel with Griffiths and surmised they were aware of the reason. One of them, a very tall fellow, with a small head and a languid air, a youth called Ramsden, who was one of Griffiths’ most faithful admirers, copied his ties, his boots, his manner of talking and his gestures, told Philip that Griffiths was very much hurt because Philip had not answered his letter. He wanted to be reconciled with him.

  “Has he asked you to give me the message?” asked Philip.

  “Oh, no. I’m saying this entirely on my own,” said Ramsden. “He’s awfully sorry for what he did, and he says you always behaved like a perfect brick to him. I know he’d be glad to make it up. He doesn’t come to the hospital because he’s afraid of meeting you, and he thinks you’d cut him.”

  “I should.”

  “It makes him feel rather wretched, you know.”

  “I can bear the trifling inconvenience that he feels with a good deal of fortitude,” said Philip.

  “He’ll do anything he can to make it up.”

  “How childish and hysterical! Why should he care? I’m a very insignificant person, and he can do very well without my company. I’m not interested in him any more.”

  Ramsden thought Philip hard and cold. He paused for a moment or two, looking about him in a perplexed way.

  “Harry wishes to God he’d never had anything to do with the woman.”

  “Does he?” asked Philip.

  He spoke with an indifference which he was satisfied with. No one could have guessed how violently his heart was beating. He waited impatiently for Ramsden to go on.

  “I suppose you’ve quite got over it now, haven’t you?”

  “I?” said Philip. “Quite.”

  Little by little he discovered the history of Mildred’s relations with Griffiths. He listened with a smile on his lips, feigning an equanimity which quite deceived the dull-witted boy who talked to him. The week-end she spent with Griffiths at Oxford inflamed rather than extinguished her sudden passion; and when Griffiths went home, with a feeling that was unexpected in her she determined to stay in Oxford by herself for a couple of days, because she had been so happy in it. She felt that nothing could induce her to go back to Philip. He revolted her. Griffiths was taken aback at the fire he had aroused, for he had found his two days with her in the country somewhat tedious; and he had no desire to turn an amusing episode into a tiresome affair. She made him promise to write to her, and, being an honest, decent fellow, with natural politeness and a desire to make himself pleasant to everybody, when he got home he wrote her a long and charming letter. She answered it with reams of passion, clumsy, for she had no gift of expression, ill-written, and vulgar; the letter bored him, and when it was followed next day by another, and the day after by a third, he began to think her love no longer flattering but alarming. He did not answer; and she bombarded him with telegrams, asking him if he were ill and had received her letters; she said his silence made her dreadfully anxious. He was forced to write, but he sought to make his reply as casual as was possible without being offensive: he begged her not to wire, since it was difficult to explain telegrams to his mother, an old-fashioned person for whom a telegram was still an event to excite tremor. She answered by return of post that she must see him and announced her intention to pawn things (she had the dressing-case which Philip had given her as a wedding-present and could raise eight pounds on that) in order to come up and stay at the market town four miles from which was the village in which his father practised. This frightened Griffiths; and he, this time, made use of the telegraph wires to tell her that she must do nothing of the kind. He promised to let her know the moment he came up to London, and, when he did, found that she had already been asking for him at the hospital at which he had an appointment. He did not like this, and, on seeing her, told Mildred that she was not to come there on any pretext; and now, after an absence of three weeks, he found that she bored him quite decidedly; he wondered why he had ever troubled about her, and made up his mind to break with her as soon as he could. He was a person who dreaded quarrels, nor did he want to give pain; but at the same time he had other things to do, and he was quite determined not to let Mildred bother him. When he met her he was pleasant, cheerful, amusing, affectionate; he invented convincing excuses for the interval since last he had seen her; but he did everything he could to avoid her. When she forced him to make appointments he sent telegrams to her at the last moment to put himself off; and his landlady (the first three months of his appointment he was spending in rooms) had orders to say he was out when Mildred called. She would waylay him in the street and, knowing she had been waiting about for him to come out of the hospital for a couple of hours, he would give her a few charming, friendly words and bolt off with the excuse that he had a business engagement. He grew very skilful in slipping out of the hospital unseen. Once, when he we
nt back to his lodgings at midnight, he saw a woman standing at the area railings and suspecting who it was went to beg a shake-down in Ramsden’s rooms; next day the landlady told him that Mildred had sat crying on the doorsteps for hours, and she had been obliged to tell her at last that if she did not go away she would send for a policeman.

  “I tell you, my boy,” said Ramsden, “you’re jolly well out of it. Harry says that if he’d suspected for half a second she was going to make such a blooming nuisance of herself he’d have seen himself damned before he had anything to do with her.”

  Philip thought of her sitting on that doorstep through the long hours of the night. He saw her face as she looked up dully at the landlady who sent her away.

  “I wonder what she’s doing now.”

  “Oh, she’s got a job somewhere, thank God. That keeps her busy all day.”

  The last thing he heard, just before the end of the summer session, was that Griffiths, urbanity had given way at length under the exasperation of the constant persecution. He had told Mildred that he was sick of being pestered, and she had better take herself off and not bother him again.

  “It was the only thing he could do,” said Ramsden. “It was getting a bit too thick.”

  “Is it all over then?” asked Philip.

  “Oh, he hasn’t seen her for ten days. You know, Harry’s wonderful at dropping people. This is about the toughest nut he’s ever had to crack, but he’s cracked it all right.”