Of Human Bondage
faint: his lips were gray. The midwife sobbed noisily, but he took no
notice of her. His eyes were fixed upon his wife, and in them was an
utter bewilderment. He reminded you of a dog whipped for something he
did not know was wrong. When Chandler and Philip had gathered together
their things Chandler turned to the husband.
“You’d better lie down for a bit. I expect you’re about done up.”
“There’s nowhere for me to lie down, sir,” he answered, and there was
in his voice a humbleness which was very distressing.
“Don’t you know anyone in the house who’ll give you a shakedown?”
“No, sir.”
“They only moved in last week,” said the midwife. “They don’t know
nobody yet.”
Chandler hesitated a moment awkwardly, then he went up to the man and
said:
“I’m very sorry this has happened.”
He held out his hand and the man, with an instinctive glance at his own
to see if it was clean, shook it.
“Thank you, sir.”
Philip shook hands with him too. Chandler told the midwife to come and
fetch the certificate in the morning. They left the house and walked
along together in silence.
“It upsets one a bit at first, doesn’t it?” said Chandler at last.
“A bit,” answered Philip.
“If you like I’ll tell the porter not to bring you any more calls
tonight.”
“I’m off duty at eight in the morning in any case.”
“How many cases have you had?”
“Sixty-three.”
“Good. You’ll get your certificate then.”
They arrived at the hospital, and the S. O. C. went in to see if anyone
wanted him. Philip walked on. It had been very hot all the day before,
and even now in the early morning there was a balminess in the air. The
street was very still. Philip did not feel inclined to go to bed. It
was the end of his work and he need not hurry. He strolled along, glad
of the fresh air and the silence; he thought that he would go on to the
bridge and look at day break on the river. A policeman at the corner
bade him good-morning. He knew who Philip was from his bag.
“Out late tonight, sir,” he said.
Philip nodded and passed. He leaned against the parapet and looked
towards the morning. At that hour the great city was like a city of the
dead. The sky was cloudless, but the stars were dim at the approach of
day; there was a light mist on the river, and the great buildings on
the north side were like palaces in an enchanted island. A group of
barges was moored in midstream. It was all of an unearthly violet,
troubling somehow and awe-inspiring; but quickly everything grew pale,
and cold, and gray. Then the sun rose, a ray of yellow gold stole
across the sky, and the sky was iridescent. Philip could not get out of
his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who
stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the
squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a
stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering
upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip
thought of the life which had been in store for her, the bearing of
children, the dreary fight with poverty, the youth broken by toil and
deprivation into a slatternly middle age—he saw the pretty face grow
thin and white, the hair grow scanty, the pretty hands, worn down
brutally by work, become like the claws of an old animal—then, when the
man was past his prime, the difficulty of getting jobs, the small wages
he had to take; and the inevitable, abject penury of the end: she might
be energetic, thrifty, industrious, it would not have saved her; in the
end was the workhouse or subsistence on the charity of her children.
Who could pity her because she had died when life offered so little?
But pity was inane. Philip felt it was not that which these people
needed. They did not pity themselves. They accepted their fate. It was
the natural order of things. Otherwise, good heavens! otherwise they
would swarm over the river in their multitude to the side where those
great buildings were, secure and stately, and they would pillage, burn,
and sack. But the day, tender and pale, had broken now, and the mist
was tenuous; it bathed everything in a soft radiance; and the Thames
was gray, rosy, and green; gray like mother-of-pearl and green like the
heart of a yellow rose. The wharfs and store-houses of the Surrey Side
were massed in disorderly loveliness. The scene was so exquisite that
Philip’s heart beat passionately. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of
the world. Beside that nothing seemed to matter.
CXV
Philip spent the few weeks that remained before the beginning of the
winter session in the out-patients’ department, and in October settled
down to regular work. He had been away from the hospital for so long
that he found himself very largely among new people; the men of
different years had little to do with one another, and his
contemporaries were now mostly qualified: some had left to take up
assistantships or posts in country hospitals and infirmaries, and some
held appointments at St. Luke’s. The two years during which his mind
had lain fallow had refreshed him, he fancied, and he was able now to
work with energy.
The Athelnys were delighted with his change of fortune. He had kept
aside a few things from the sale of his uncle’s effects and gave them
all presents. He gave Sally a gold chain that had belonged to his aunt.
She was now grown up. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker and set out
every morning at eight to work all day in a shop in Regent Street.
Sally had frank blue eyes, a broad brow, and plentiful shining hair;
she was buxom, with broad hips and full breasts; and her father, who
was fond of discussing her appearance, warned her constantly that she
must not grow fat. She attracted because she was healthy, animal, and
feminine. She had many admirers, but they left her unmoved; she gave
one the impression that she looked upon love-making as nonsense; and it
was easy to imagine that young men found her unapproachable. Sally was
old for her years: she had been used to help her mother in the
household work and in the care of the children, so that she had
acquired a managing air, which made her mother say that Sally was a bit
too fond of having things her own way. She did not speak very much, but
as she grew older she seemed to be acquiring a quiet sense of humour,
and sometimes uttered a remark which suggested that beneath her
impassive exterior she was quietly bubbling with amusement at her
fellow-creatures. Philip found that with her he never got on the terms
of affectionate intimacy upon which he was with the rest of Athelny’s
huge family. Now and then her indifference slightly irritated him.
There was something enigmatic in her.
When Philip gave her the necklace Athelny in his boisterous way
insisted that she must kiss him; but Sally reddened and drew back.
“No, I’m not going to,” she said.
“Ungrateful hussy!” cried Athelny. “Why not?”
“I don’t like being kissed by men,” she said.
Philip saw her embarrassment, and, amused, turned Athelny’s attention
to something else. That was never a very difficult thing to do. But
evidently her mother spoke of the matter later, for next time Philip
came she took the opportunity when they were alone for a couple of
minutes to refer to it.
“You didn’t think it disagreeable of me last week when I wouldn’t kiss
you?”
“Not a bit,” he laughed.
“It’s not because I wasn’t grateful.” She blushed a little as she
uttered the formal phrase which she had prepared. “I shall always value
the necklace, and it was very kind of you to give it me.”
Philip found it always a little difficult to talk to her. She did all
that she had to do very competently, but seemed to feel no need of
conversation; yet there was nothing unsociable in her. One Sunday
afternoon when Athelny and his wife had gone out together, and Philip,
treated as one of the family, sat reading in the parlour, Sally came in
and sat by the window to sew. The girls’ clothes were made at home and
Sally could not afford to spend Sundays in idleness. Philip thought she
wished to talk and put down his book.
“Go on reading,” she said. “I only thought as you were alone I’d come
and sit with you.”
“You’re the most silent person I’ve ever struck,” said Philip.
“We don’t want another one who’s talkative in this house,” she said.
There was no irony in her tone: she was merely stating a fact. But it
suggested to Philip that she measured her father, alas, no longer the
hero he was to her childhood, and in her mind joined together his
entertaining conversation and the thriftlessness which often brought
difficulties into their life; she compared his rhetoric with her
mother’s practical common sense; and though the liveliness of her
father amused her she was perhaps sometimes a little impatient with it.
Philip looked at her as she bent over her work; she was healthy,
strong, and normal; it must be odd to see her among the other girls in
the shop with their flat chests and anaemic faces. Mildred suffered
from anaemia.
After a time it appeared that Sally had a suitor. She went out
occasionally with friends she had made in the work-room, and had met a
young man, an electrical engineer in a very good way of business, who
was a most eligible person. One day she told her mother that he had
asked her to marry him.
“What did you say?” said her mother.
“Oh, I told him I wasn’t over-anxious to marry anyone just yet awhile.”
She paused a little as was her habit between observations. “He took on
so that I said he might come to tea on Sunday.”
It was an occasion that thoroughly appealed to Athelny. He rehearsed
all the afternoon how he should play the heavy father for the young
man’s edification till he reduced his children to helpless giggling.
Just before he was due Athelny routed out an Egyptian tarboosh and
insisted on putting it on.
“Go on with you, Athelny,” said his wife, who was in her best, which
was of black velvet, and, since she was growing stouter every year,
very tight for her. “You’ll spoil the girl’s chances.”
She tried to pull it off, but the little man skipped nimbly out of her
way.
“Unhand me, woman. Nothing will induce me to take it off. This young
man must be shown at once that it is no ordinary family he is preparing
to enter.”
“Let him keep it on, mother,” said Sally, in her even, indifferent
fashion. “If Mr. Donaldson doesn’t take it the way it’s meant he can
take himself off, and good riddance.”
Philip thought it was a severe ordeal that the young man was being
exposed to, since Athelny, in his brown velvet jacket, flowing black
tie, and red tarboosh, was a startling spectacle for an innocent
electrical engineer. When he came he was greeted by his host with the
proud courtesy of a Spanish grandee and by Mrs. Athelny in an
altogether homely and natural fashion. They sat down at the old
ironing-table in the high-backed monkish chairs, and Mrs. Athelny
poured tea out of a lustre teapot which gave a note of England and the
country-side to the festivity. She had made little cakes with her own
hand, and on the table was home-made jam. It was a farm-house tea, and
to Philip very quaint and charming in that Jacobean house. Athelny for
some fantastic reason took it into his head to discourse upon Byzantine
history; he had been reading the later volumes of the Decline and Fall;
and, his forefinger dramatically extended, he poured into the
astonished ears of the suitor scandalous stories about Theodora and
Irene. He addressed himself directly to his guest with a torrent of
rhodomontade; and the young man, reduced to helpless silence and shy,
nodded his head at intervals to show that he took an intelligent
interest. Mrs. Athelny paid no attention to Thorpe’s conversation, but