And the invocation was uttered in such a tone as to indicate a rooted antipathy to anything so commonplace, even if she had not added that sequins gave her the sick. Mr. Sampson ‘got out’ one or two ideas, but Mrs. Hodges told him frankly she did not think they would do. It was she who gave Philip the suggestion:
“Can you draw, Phil? Why don’t you try your ‘and and see what you can do?”
Philip bought a cheap box of water colours, and in the evening while Bell, the noisy lad of sixteen, whistling three notes, busied himself with his stamps, he made one or two sketches. He remembered some of the costumes he had seen in Paris, and he adapted one of them, getting his effect from a combination of violent, unusual colours. The result amused him and next morning he showed it to Mrs. Hodges. She was somewhat astonished, but took it at once to the buyer.
“It’s unusual,” he said, “there’s no denying that.”
It puzzled him, and at the same time his trained eye saw that it would make up admirably. To save his face he began making suggestions for altering it, but Mrs. Hodges, with more sense, advised him to show it to Miss Antonia as it was.
“It’s neck or nothing with her, and she may take a fancy to it.”
“It’s a good deal more nothing than neck,” said Mr. Sampson, looking at the decolletage. “He can draw, can’t he? Fancy ‘im keeping it dark all this time.”
When Miss Antonia was announced, the buyer placed the design on the table in such a position that it must catch her eye the moment she was shown into his office. She pounced on it at once.
“What’s that?” she said. “Why can’t I ‘ave that?”
“That’s just an idea we got out for you,” said Mr. Sampson casually.
“D’you like it?”
“Do I like it!” she said. “Give me ‘alf a pint with a little drop of gin in it.”
“Ah, you see, you don’t have to go to Paris. You’ve only got to say what you want and there you are.”
The work was put in hand at once, and Philip felt quite a thrill of satisfaction when he saw the costume completed. The buyer and Mrs. Hodges took all the credit of it; but he did not care, and when he went with them to the Tivoli to see Miss Antonia wear it for the first time he was filled with elation. In answer to her questions he at last told Mrs. Hodges how he had learnt to draw — fearing that the people he lived with would think he wanted to put on airs, he had always taken the greatest care to say nothing about his past occupations — and she repeated the information to Mr. Sampson. The buyer said nothing to him on the subject, but began to treat him a little more deferentially and presently gave him designs to do for two of the country customers. They met with satisfaction. Then he began to speak to his clients of a “clever young feller, Paris art-student, you know,” who worked for him; and soon Philip, ensconced behind a screen, in his shirt sleeves, was drawing from morning till night. Sometimes he was so busy that he had to dine at three with the ‘stragglers.’ He liked it, because there were few of them and they were all too tired to talk; the food also was better, for it consisted of what was left over from the buyers’ table. Philip’s rise from shop-walker to designer of costumes had a great effect on the department. He realised that he was an object of envy. Harris, the assistant with the queer-shaped head, who was the first person he had known at the shop and had attached himself to Philip, could not conceal his bitterness.
“Some people ‘ave all the luck,” he said. “You’ll be a buyer yourself one of these days, and we shall all be calling you sir.”
He told Philip that he should demand higher wages, for notwithstanding the difficult work he was now engaged in, he received no more than the six shillings a week with which he started. But it was a ticklish matter to ask for a rise. The manager had a sardonic way of dealing with such applicants.
“Think you’re worth more, do you? How much d’you think you’re worth, eh?”
The assistant, with his heart in his mouth, would suggest that he thought he ought to have another two shillings a week.
“Oh, very well, if you think you’re worth it. You can ‘ave it.” Then he paused and sometimes, with a steely eye, added: “And you can ‘ave your notice too.”
It was no use then to withdraw your request, you had to go. The manager’s idea was that assistants who were dissatisfied did not work properly, and if they were not worth a rise it was better to sack them at once. The result was that they never asked for one unless they were prepared to leave. Philip hesitated. He was a little suspicious of the men in his room who told him that the buyer could not do without him. They were decent fellows, but their sense of humour was primitive, and it would have seemed funny to them if they had persuaded Philip to ask for more wages and he were sacked. He could not forget the mortification he had suffered in looking for work, he did not wish to expose himself to that again, and he knew there was small chance of his getting elsewhere a post as designer: there were hundreds of people about who could draw as well as he. But he wanted money very badly; his clothes were worn out, and the heavy carpets rotted his socks and boots; he had almost persuaded himself to take the venturesome step when one morning, passing up from breakfast in the basement through the passage that led to the manager’s office, he saw a queue of men waiting in answer to an advertisement. There were about a hundred of them, and whichever was engaged would be offered his keep and the same six shillings a week that Philip had. He saw some of them cast envious glances at him because he had employment. It made him shudder. He dared not risk it.
CVIII
The winter passed. Now and then Philip went to the hospital, slinking in when it was late and there was little chance of meeting anyone he knew, to see whether there were letters for him. At Easter he received one from his uncle. He was surprised to hear from him, for the Vicar of Blackstable had never written him more than half a dozen letters in his whole life, and they were on business matters.
Dear Philip,
If you are thinking of taking a holiday soon and care to come down here I shall be pleased to see you. I was very ill with my bronchitis in the winter and Doctor Wigram never expected me to pull through. I have a wonderful constitution and I made, thank God, a marvellous recovery. Yours affectionately, William Carey.
The letter made Philip angry. How did his uncle think he was living? He did not even trouble to inquire. He might have starved for all the old man cared. But as he walked home something struck him; he stopped under a lamp-post and read the letter again; the handwriting had no longer the business-like firmness which had characterised it; it was larger and wavering: perhaps the illness had shaken him more than he was willing to confess, and he sought in that formal note to express a yearning to see the only relation he had in the world. Philip wrote back that he could come down to Blackstable for a fortnight in July. The invitation was convenient, for he had not known what to do, with his brief holiday. The Athelnys went hopping in September, but he could not then be spared, since during that month the autumn models were prepared. The rule of Lynn’s was that everyone must take a fortnight whether he wanted it or not; and during that time, if he had nowhere to go, the assistant might sleep in his room, but he was not allowed food. A number had no friends within reasonable distance of London, and to these the holiday was an awkward interval when they had to provide food out of their small wages and, with the whole day on their hands, had nothing to spend. Philip had not been out of London since his visit to Brighton with Mildred, now two years before, and he longed for fresh air and the silence of the sea. He thought of it with such a passionate desire, all through May and June, that, when at length the time came for him to go, he was listless.
On his last evening, when he talked with the buyer of one or two jobs he had to leave over, Mr. Sampson suddenly said to him:
“What wages have you been getting?”
“Six shillings.”
“I don’t think it’s enough. I’ll see that you’re put up to twelve when you come back.”
“Thank you
very much,” smiled Philip. “I’m beginning to want some new clothes badly.”
“If you stick to your work and don’t go larking about with the girls like what some of them do, I’ll look after you, Carey. Mind you, you’ve got a lot to learn, but you’re promising, I’ll say that for you, you’re promising, and I’ll see that you get a pound a week as soon as you deserve it.”
Philip wondered how long he would have to wait for that. Two years?
He was startled at the change in his uncle. When last he had seen him he was a stout man, who held himself upright, clean-shaven, with a round, sensual face; but he had fallen in strangely, his skin was yellow; there were great bags under the eyes, and he was bent and old. He had grown a beard during his last illness, and he walked very slowly.
“I’m not at my best today,” he said when Philip, having just arrived, was sitting with him in the dining-room. “The heat upsets me.”
Philip, asking after the affairs of the parish, looked at him and wondered how much longer he could last. A hot summer would finish him; Philip noticed how thin his hands were; they trembled. It meant so much to Philip. If he died that summer he could go back to the hospital at the beginning of the winter session; his heart leaped at the thought of returning no more to Lynn’s. At dinner the Vicar sat humped up on his chair, and the housekeeper who had been with him since his wife’s death said:
“Shall Mr. Philip carve, sir?”
The old man, who had been about to do so from disinclination to confess his weakness, seemed glad at the first suggestion to relinquish the attempt.
“You’ve got a very good appetite,” said Philip.
“Oh yes, I always eat well. But I’m thinner than when you were here last. I’m glad to be thinner, I didn’t like being so fat. Dr. Wigram thinks I’m all the better for being thinner than I was.”
When dinner was over the housekeeper brought him some medicine.
“Show the prescription to Master Philip,” he said. “He’s a doctor too. I’d like him to see that he thinks it’s all right. I told Dr. Wigram that now you’re studying to be a doctor he ought to make a reduction in his charges. It’s dreadful the bills I’ve had to pay. He came every day for two months, and he charges five shillings a visit. It’s a lot of money, isn’t it? He comes twice a week still. I’m going to tell him he needn’t come any more. I’ll send for him if I want him.”
He looked at Philip eagerly while he read the prescriptions. They were narcotics. There were two of them, and one was a medicine which the Vicar explained he was to use only if his neuritis grew unendurable.
“I’m very careful,” he said. “I don’t want to get into the opium habit.”
He did not mention his nephew’s affairs. Philip fancied that it was by way of precaution, in case he asked for money, that his uncle kept dwelling on the financial calls upon him. He had spent so much on the doctor and so much more on the chemist, while he was ill they had had to have a fire every day in his bed-room, and now on Sunday he needed a carriage to go to church in the evening as well as in the morning. Philip felt angrily inclined to say he need not be afraid, he was not going to borrow from him, but he held his tongue. It seemed to him that everything had left the old man now but two things, pleasure in his food and a grasping desire for money. It was a hideous old age.
In the afternoon Dr. Wigram came, and after the visit Philip walked with him to the garden gate.
“How d’you think he is?” said Philip.
Dr. Wigram was more anxious not to do wrong than to do right, and he never hazarded a definite opinion if he could help it. He had practised at Blackstable for five-and-thirty years. He had the reputation of being very safe, and many of his patients thought it much better that a doctor should be safe than clever. There was a new man at Blackstable — he had been settled there for ten years, but they still looked upon him as an interloper — and he was said to be very clever; but he had not much practice among the better people, because no one really knew anything about him.
“Oh, he’s as well as can be expected,” said Dr. Wigram in answer to
Philip’s inquiry.
“Has he got anything seriously the matter with him?”
“Well, Philip, your uncle is no longer a young man,” said the doctor with a cautious little smile, which suggested that after all the Vicar of Blackstable was not an old man either.
“He seems to think his heart’s in a bad way.”
“I’m not satisfied with his heart,” hazarded the doctor, “I think he should be careful, very careful.”
On the tip of Philip’s tongue was the question: how much longer can he live? He was afraid it would shock. In these matters a periphrase was demanded by the decorum of life, but, as he asked another question instead, it flashed through him that the doctor must be accustomed to the impatience of a sick man’s relatives. He must see through their sympathetic expressions. Philip, with a faint smile at his own hypocrisy, cast down his eyes.
“I suppose he’s in no immediate danger?”
This was the kind of question the doctor hated. If you said a patient couldn’t live another month the family prepared itself for a bereavement, and if then the patient lived on they visited the medical attendant with the resentment they felt at having tormented themselves before it was necessary. On the other hand, if you said the patient might live a year and he died in a week the family said you did not know your business. They thought of all the affection they would have lavished on the defunct if they had known the end was so near. Dr. Wigram made the gesture of washing his hands.
“I don’t think there’s any grave risk so long as he — remains as he is,” he ventured at last. “But on the other hand, we mustn’t forget that he’s no longer a young man, and well, the machine is wearing out. If he gets over the hot weather I don’t see why he shouldn’t get on very comfortably till the winter, and then if the winter does not bother him too much, well, I don’t see why anything should happen.”
Philip went back to the dining-room where his uncle was sitting. With his skull-cap and a crochet shawl over his shoulders he looked grotesque. His eyes had been fixed on the door, and they rested on Philip’s face as he entered. Philip saw that his uncle had been waiting anxiously for his return.
“Well, what did he say about me?”
Philip understood suddenly that the old man was frightened of dying. It made Philip a little ashamed, so that he looked away involuntarily. He was always embarrassed by the weakness of human nature.
“He says he thinks you’re much better,” said Philip.
A gleam of delight came into his uncle’s eyes.
“I’ve got a wonderful constitution,” he said. “What else did he say?” he added suspiciously.
Philip smiled.
“He said that if you take care of yourself there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live to be a hundred.”
“I don’t know that I can expect to do that, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t see eighty. My mother lived till she was eighty-four.”
There was a little table by the side of Mr. Carey’s chair, and on it were a Bible and the large volume of the Common Prayer from which for so many years he had been accustomed to read to his household. He stretched out now his shaking hand and took his Bible.
“Those old patriarchs lived to a jolly good old age, didn’t they?” he said, with a queer little laugh in which Philip read a sort of timid appeal.
The old man clung to life. Yet he believed implicitly all that his religion taught him. He had no doubt in the immortality of the soul, and he felt that he had conducted himself well enough, according to his capacities, to make it very likely that he would go to heaven. In his long career to how many dying persons must he have administered the consolations of religion! Perhaps he was like the doctor who could get no benefit from his own prescriptions. Philip was puzzled and shocked by that eager cleaving to the earth. He wondered what nameless horror was at the back of the old man’s mind. He would have liked to prob
e into his soul so that he might see in its nakedness the dreadful dismay of the unknown which he suspected.
The fortnight passed quickly and Philip returned to London. He passed a sweltering August behind his screen in the costumes department, drawing in his shirt sleeves. The assistants in relays went for their holidays. In the evening Philip generally went into Hyde Park and listened to the band. Growing more accustomed to his work it tired him less, and his mind, recovering from its long stagnation, sought for fresh activity. His whole desire now was set on his uncle’s death. He kept on dreaming the same dream: a telegram was handed to him one morning, early, which announced the Vicar’s sudden demise, and freedom was in his grasp. When he awoke and found it was nothing but a dream he was filled with sombre rage. He occupied himself, now that the event seemed likely to happen at any time, with elaborate plans for the future. In these he passed rapidly over the year which he must spend before it was possible for him to be qualified and dwelt on the journey to Spain on which his heart was set. He read books about that country, which he borrowed from the free library, and already he knew from photographs exactly what each city looked like. He saw himself lingering in Cordova on the bridge that spanned the Gaudalquivir; he wandered through tortuous streets in Toledo and sat in churches where he wrung from El Greco the secret which he felt the mysterious painter held for him. Athelny entered into his humour, and on Sunday afternoons they made out elaborate itineraries so that Philip should miss nothing that was noteworthy. To cheat his impatience Philip began to teach himself Spanish, and in the deserted sitting-room in Harrington Street he spent an hour every evening doing Spanish exercises and puzzling out with an English translation by his side the magnificent phrases of Don Quixote. Athelny gave him a lesson once a week, and Philip learned a few sentences to help him on his journey. Mrs. Athelny laughed at them.
“You two and your Spanish!” she said. “Why don’t you do something useful?”
But Sally, who was growing up and was to put up her hair at Christmas, stood by sometimes and listened in her grave way while her father and Philip exchanged remarks in a language she did not understand. She thought her father the most wonderful man who had ever existed, and she expressed her opinion of Philip only through her father’s commendations.
Delphi Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham (Illustrated) Page 223