Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated)

by William Somerset Maugham

  “I don’t like telling ‘ands, I don’t really. I’ve told people such terrible things and they’ve all come true, it makes one superstitious like.”

  “Oh, Miss Bennett, just for once.”

  A little crowd collected round her, and, amid screams of embarrassment, giggles, blushings, and cries of dismay or admiration, she talked mysteriously of fair and dark men, of money in a letter, and of journeys, till the sweat stood in heavy beads on her painted face.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m all of a perspiration.”

  Supper was at nine. There were cakes, buns, sandwiches, tea and coffee, all free; but if you wanted mineral water you had to pay for it. Gallantry often led young men to offer the ladies ginger beer, but common decency made them refuse. Miss Bennett was very fond of ginger beer, and she drank two and sometimes three bottles during the evening; but she insisted on paying for them herself. The men liked her for that.

  “She’s a rum old bird,” they said, “but mind you, she’s not a bad sort, she’s not like what some are.”

  After supper progressive whist was played. This was very noisy, and there was a great deal of laughing and shouting, as people moved from table to table. Miss Bennett grew hotter and hotter.

  “Look at me,” she said. “I’m all of a perspiration.”

  In due course one of the more dashing of the young men remarked that if they wanted to dance they’d better begin. The girl who had played the accompaniments sat at the piano and placed a decided foot on the loud pedal. She played a dreamy waltz, marking the time with the bass, while with the right hand she ‘tiddled’ in alternate octaves. By way of a change she crossed her hands and played the air in the bass.

  “She does play well, doesn’t she?” Mrs. Hodges remarked to Philip. “And what’s more she’s never ‘ad a lesson in ‘er life; it’s all ear.”

  Miss Bennett liked dancing and poetry better than anything in the world. She danced well, but very, very slowly, and an expression came into her eyes as though her thoughts were far, far away. She talked breathlessly of the floor and the heat and the supper. She said that the Portman Rooms had the best floor in London and she always liked the dances there; they were very select, and she couldn’t bear dancing with all sorts of men you didn’t know anything about; why, you might be exposing yourself to you didn’t know what all. Nearly all the people danced very well, and they enjoyed themselves. Sweat poured down their faces, and the very high collars of the young men grew limp.

  Philip looked on, and a greater depression seized him than he remembered to have felt for a long time. He felt intolerably alone. He did not go, because he was afraid to seem supercilious, and he talked with the girls and laughed, but in his heart was unhappiness. Miss Bennett asked him if he had a girl.

  “No,” he smiled.

  “Oh, well, there’s plenty to choose from here. And they’re very nice respectable girls, some of them. I expect you’ll have a girl before you’ve been here long.”

  She looked at him very archly.

  “Meet ’em ‘alf-way,” said Mrs. Hodges. “That’s what I tell him.”

  It was nearly eleven o’clock, and the party broke up. Philip could not get to sleep. Like the others he kept his aching feet outside the bed-clothes. He tried with all his might not to think of the life he was leading. The soldier was snoring quietly.

  CV

  The wages were paid once a month by the secretary. On pay-day each batch of assistants, coming down from tea, went into the passage and joined the long line of people waiting orderly like the audience in a queue outside a gallery door. One by one they entered the office. The secretary sat at a desk with wooden bowls of money in front of him, and he asked the employe’s name; he referred to a book, quickly, after a suspicious glance at the assistant, said aloud the sum due, and taking money out of the bowl counted it into his hand.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Next.”

  “Thank you,” was the reply.

  The assistant passed on to the second secretary and before leaving the room paid him four shillings for washing money, two shillings for the club, and any fines that he might have incurred. With what he had left he went back into his department and there waited till it was time to go. Most of the men in Philip’s house were in debt with the woman who sold the sandwiches they generally ate for supper. She was a funny old thing, very fat, with a broad, red face, and black hair plastered neatly on each side of the forehead in the fashion shown in early pictures of Queen Victoria. She always wore a little black bonnet and a white apron; her sleeves were tucked up to the elbow; she cut the sandwiches with large, dirty, greasy hands; and there was grease on her bodice, grease on her apron, grease on her skirt. She was called Mrs. Fletcher, but everyone addressed her as ‘Ma’; she was really fond of the shop assistants, whom she called her boys; she never minded giving credit towards the end of the month, and it was known that now and then she had lent someone or other a few shillings when he was in straits. She was a good woman. When they were leaving or when they came back from the holidays, the boys kissed her fat red cheek; and more than one, dismissed and unable to find another job, had got for nothing food to keep body and soul together. The boys were sensible of her large heart and repaid her with genuine affection. There was a story they liked to tell of a man who had done well for himself at Bradford, and had five shops of his own, and had come back after fifteen years and visited Ma Fletcher and given her a gold watch.

  Philip found himself with eighteen shillings left out of his month’s pay. It was the first money he had ever earned in his life. It gave him none of the pride which might have been expected, but merely a feeling of dismay. The smallness of the sum emphasised the hopelessness of his position. He took fifteen shillings to Mrs. Athelny to pay back part of what he owed her, but she would not take more than half a sovereign.

  “D’you know, at that rate it’ll take me eight months to settle up with you.”

  “As long as Athelny’s in work I can afford to wait, and who knows, p’raps they’ll give you a rise.”

  Athelny kept on saying that he would speak to the manager about Philip, it was absurd that no use should be made of his talents; but he did nothing, and Philip soon came to the conclusion that the press-agent was not a person of so much importance in the manager’s eyes as in his own. Occasionally he saw Athelny in the shop. His flamboyance was extinguished; and in neat, commonplace, shabby clothes he hurried, a subdued, unassuming little man, through the departments as though anxious to escape notice.

  “When I think of how I’m wasted there,” he said at home, “I’m almost tempted to give in my notice. There’s no scope for a man like me. I’m stunted, I’m starved.”

  Mrs. Athelny, quietly sewing, took no notice of his complaints. Her mouth tightened a little.

  “It’s very hard to get jobs in these times. It’s regular and it’s safe; I expect you’ll stay there as long as you give satisfaction.”

  It was evident that Athelny would. It was interesting to see the ascendency which the uneducated woman, bound to him by no legal tie, had acquired over the brilliant, unstable man. Mrs. Athelny treated Philip with motherly kindness now that he was in a different position, and he was touched by her anxiety that he should make a good meal. It was the solace of his life (and when he grew used to it, the monotony of it was what chiefly appalled him) that he could go every Sunday to that friendly house. It was a joy to sit in the stately Spanish chairs and discuss all manner of things with Athelny. Though his condition seemed so desperate he never left him to go back to Harrington Street without a feeling of exultation. At first Philip, in order not to forget what he had learned, tried to go on reading his medical books, but he found it useless; he could not fix his attention on them after the exhausting work of the day; and it seemed hopeless to continue working when he did not know in how long he would be able to go back to the hospital. He dreamed constantly that he was in the wards. The awakening was painful. The sensation of other people sleeping
in the room was inexpressibly irksome to him; he had been used to solitude, and to be with others always, never to be by himself for an instant was at these moments horrible to him. It was then that he found it most difficult to combat his despair. He saw himself going on with that life, first to the right, second on the left, madam, indefinitely; and having to be thankful if he was not sent away: the men who had gone to the war would be coming home soon, the firm had guaranteed to take them back, and this must mean that others would be sacked; he would have to stir himself even to keep the wretched post he had.

  There was only one thing to free him and that was the death of his uncle. He would get a few hundred pounds then, and on this he could finish his course at the hospital. Philip began to wish with all his might for the old man’s death. He reckoned out how long he could possibly live: he was well over seventy, Philip did not know his exact age, but he must be at least seventy-five; he suffered from chronic bronchitis and every winter had a bad cough. Though he knew them by heart Philip read over and over again the details in his text-book of medicine of chronic bronchitis in the old. A severe winter might be too much for the old man. With all his heart Philip longed for cold and rain. He thought of it constantly, so that it became a monomania. Uncle William was affected by the great heat too, and in August they had three weeks of sweltering weather. Philip imagined to himself that one day perhaps a telegram would come saying that the Vicar had died suddenly, and he pictured to himself his unutterable relief. As he stood at the top of the stairs and directed people to the departments they wanted, he occupied his mind with thinking incessantly what he would do with the money. He did not know how much it would be, perhaps no more than five hundred pounds, but even that would be enough. He would leave the shop at once, he would not bother to give notice, he would pack his box and go without saying a word to anybody; and then he would return to the hospital. That was the first thing. Would he have forgotten much? In six months he could get it all back, and then he would take his three examinations as soon as he could, midwifery first, then medicine and surgery. The awful fear seized him that his uncle, notwithstanding his promises, might leave everything he had to the parish or the church. The thought made Philip sick. He could not be so cruel. But if that happened Philip was quite determined what to do, he would not go on in that way indefinitely; his life was only tolerable because he could look forward to something better. If he had no hope he would have no fear. The only brave thing to do then would be to commit suicide, and, thinking this over too, Philip decided minutely what painless drug he would take and how he would get hold of it. It encouraged him to think that, if things became unendurable, he had at all events a way out.

  “Second to the right, madam, and down the stairs. First on the left and straight through. Mr. Philips, forward please.”

  Once a month, for a week, Philip was ‘on duty.’ He had to go to the department at seven in the morning and keep an eye on the sweepers. When they finished he had to take the sheets off the cases and the models. Then, in the evening when the assistants left, he had to put back the sheets on the models and the cases and ‘gang’ the sweepers again. It was a dusty, dirty job. He was not allowed to read or write or smoke, but just had to walk about, and the time hung heavily on his hands. When he went off at half past nine he had supper given him, and this was the only consolation; for tea at five o’clock had left him with a healthy appetite, and the bread and cheese, the abundant cocoa which the firm provided, were welcome.

  One day when Philip had been at Lynn’s for three months, Mr. Sampson, the buyer, came into the department, fuming with anger. The manager, happening to notice the costume window as he came in, had sent for the buyer and made satirical remarks upon the colour scheme. Forced to submit in silence to his superior’s sarcasm, Mr. Sampson took it out of the assistants; and he rated the wretched fellow whose duty it was to dress the window.

  “If you want a thing well done you must do it yourself,” Mr. Sampson stormed. “I’ve always said it and I always shall. One can’t leave anything to you chaps. Intelligent you call yourselves, do you? Intelligent!”

  He threw the word at the assistants as though it were the bitterest term of reproach.

  “Don’t you know that if you put an electric blue in the window it’ll kill all the other blues?”

  He looked round the department ferociously, and his eye fell upon Philip.

  “You’ll dress the window next Friday, Carey. Let’s see what you can make of it.”

  He went into his office, muttering angrily. Philip’s heart sank. When Friday morning came he went into the window with a sickening sense of shame. His cheeks were burning. It was horrible to display himself to the passers-by, and though he told himself it was foolish to give way to such a feeling he turned his back to the street. There was not much chance that any of the students at the hospital would pass along Oxford Street at that hour, and he knew hardly anyone else in London; but as Philip worked, with a huge lump in his throat, he fancied that on turning round he would catch the eye of some man he knew. He made all the haste he could. By the simple observation that all reds went together, and by spacing the costumes more than was usual, Philip got a very good effect; and when the buyer went into the street to look at the result he was obviously pleased.

  “I knew I shouldn’t go far wrong in putting you on the window. The fact is, you and me are gentlemen, mind you I wouldn’t say this in the department, but you and me are gentlemen, and that always tells. It’s no good your telling me it doesn’t tell, because I know it does tell.”

  Philip was put on the job regularly, but he could not accustom himself to the publicity; and he dreaded Friday morning, on which the window was dressed, with a terror that made him awake at five o’clock and lie sleepless with sickness in his heart. The girls in the department noticed his shamefaced way, and they very soon discovered his trick of standing with his back to the street. They laughed at him and called him ‘sidey.’

  “I suppose you’re afraid your aunt’ll come along and cut you out of her will.”

  On the whole he got on well enough with the girls. They thought him a little queer; but his club-foot seemed to excuse his not being like the rest, and they found in due course that he was good-natured. He never minded helping anyone, and he was polite and even tempered.

  “You can see he’s a gentleman,” they said.

  “Very reserved, isn’t he?” said one young woman, to whose passionate enthusiasm for the theatre he had listened unmoved.

  Most of them had ‘fellers,’ and those who hadn’t said they had rather than have it supposed that no one had an inclination for them. One or two showed signs of being willing to start a flirtation with Philip, and he watched their manoeuvres with grave amusement. He had had enough of love-making for some time; and he was nearly always tired and often hungry.

  CVI

  Philip avoided the places he had known in happier times. The little gatherings at the tavern in Beak Street were broken up: Macalister, having let down his friends, no longer went there, and Hayward was at the Cape. Only Lawson remained; and Philip, feeling that now the painter and he had nothing in common, did not wish to see him; but one Saturday afternoon, after dinner, having changed his clothes he walked down Regent Street to go to the free library in St. Martin’s Lane, meaning to spend the afternoon there, and suddenly found himself face to face with him. His first instinct was to pass on without a word, but Lawson did not give him the opportunity.

  “Where on earth have you been all this time?” he cried.

  “I?” said Philip.

  “I wrote you and asked you to come to the studio for a beano and you never even answered.”

  “I didn’t get your letter.”

  “No, I know. I went to the hospital to ask for you, and I saw my letter in the rack. Have you chucked the Medical?”

  Philip hesitated for a moment. He was ashamed to tell the truth, but the shame he felt angered him, and he forced himself to speak. He could not hel
p reddening.

  “Yes, I lost the little money I had. I couldn’t afford to go on with it.”

  “I say, I’m awfully sorry. What are you doing?”

  “I’m a shop-walker.”

  The words choked Philip, but he was determined not to shirk the truth. He kept his eyes on Lawson and saw his embarrassment. Philip smiled savagely.

  “If you went into Lynn and Sedley, and made your way into the ‘made robes’ department, you would see me in a frock coat, walking about with a degage air and directing ladies who want to buy petticoats or stockings. First to the right, madam, and second on the left.”

  Lawson, seeing that Philip was making a jest of it, laughed awkwardly. He did not know what to say. The picture that Philip called up horrified him, but he was afraid to show his sympathy.

  “That’s a bit of a change for you,” he said.

  His words seemed absurd to him, and immediately he wished he had not said them. Philip flushed darkly.

  “A bit,” he said. “By the way, I owe you five bob.”

  He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out some silver.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “Go on, take it.”

  Lawson received the money silently. They stood in the middle of the pavement, and people jostled them as they passed. There was a sardonic twinkle in Philip’s eyes, which made the painter intensely uncomfortable, and he could not tell that Philip’s heart was heavy with despair. Lawson wanted dreadfully to do something, but he did not know what to do.

  “I say, won’t you come to the studio and have a talk?”

  “No,” said Philip.

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  He saw the pain come into Lawson’s eyes, he could not help it, he was sorry, but he had to think of himself; he could not bear the thought of discussing his situation, he could endure it only by determining resolutely not to think about it. He was afraid of his weakness if once he began to open his heart. Moreover, he took irresistible dislikes to the places where he had been miserable: he remembered the humiliation he had endured when he had waited in that studio, ravenous with hunger, for Lawson to offer him a meal, and the last occasion when he had taken the five shillings off him. He hated the sight of Lawson, because he recalled those days of utter abasement.