Of Human Bondage
“Will you come out with me again one evening?”
“I don’t mind.”
He could never get beyond such expressions as that. Her indifference
maddened him.
“That sounds as if you didn’t much care if you came or not.”
“Oh, if you don’t take me out some other fellow will. I need never want
for men who’ll take me to the theatre.”
Philip was silent. They came to the station, and he went to the
booking-office.
“I’ve got my season,” she said.
“I thought I’d take you home as it’s rather late, if you don’t mind.”
“Oh, I don’t mind if it gives you any pleasure.”
He took a single first for her and a return for himself.
“Well, you’re not mean, I will say that for you,” she said, when he
opened the carriage-door.
Philip did not know whether he was pleased or sorry when other people
entered and it was impossible to speak. They got out at Herne Hill, and
he accompanied her to the corner of the road in which she lived.
“I’ll say good-night to you here,” she said, holding out her hand.
“You’d better not come up to the door. I know what people are, and I
don’t want to have anybody talking.”
She said good-night and walked quickly away. He could see the white
shawl in the darkness. He thought she might turn round, but she did
not. Philip saw which house she went into, and in a moment he walked
along to look at it. It was a trim, common little house of yellow
brick, exactly like all the other little houses in the street. He stood
outside for a few minutes, and presently the window on the top floor
was darkened. Philip strolled slowly back to the station. The evening
had been unsatisfactory. He felt irritated, restless, and miserable.
When he lay in bed he seemed still to see her sitting in the corner of
the railway carriage, with the white crochet shawl over her head. He
did not know how he was to get through the hours that must pass before
his eyes rested on her again. He thought drowsily of her thin face,
with its delicate features, and the greenish pallor of her skin. He was
not happy with her, but he was unhappy away from her. He wanted to sit
by her side and look at her, he wanted to touch her, he wanted… the
thought came to him and he did not finish it, suddenly he grew wide
awake… he wanted to kiss the thin, pale mouth with its narrow lips. The
truth came to him at last. He was in love with her. It was incredible.
He had often thought of falling in love, and there was one scene which
he had pictured to himself over and over again. He saw himself coming
into a ball-room; his eyes fell on a little group of men and women
talking; and one of the women turned round. Her eyes fell upon him, and
he knew that the gasp in his throat was in her throat too. He stood
quite still. She was tall and dark and beautiful with eyes like the
night; she was dressed in white, and in her black hair shone diamonds;
they stared at one another, forgetting that people surrounded them. He
went straight up to her, and she moved a little towards him. Both felt
that the formality of introduction was out of place. He spoke to her.
“I’ve been looking for you all my life,” he said.
“You’ve come at last,” she murmured.
“Will you dance with me?”
She surrendered herself to his outstretched hands and they danced.
(Philip always pretended that he was not lame.) She danced divinely.
“I’ve never danced with anyone who danced like you,” she said.
She tore up her programme, and they danced together the whole evening.
“I’m so thankful that I waited for you,” he said to her. “I knew that
in the end I must meet you.”
People in the ball-room stared. They did not care. They did not wish to
hide their passion. At last they went into the garden. He flung a light
cloak over her shoulders and put her in a waiting cab. They caught the
midnight train to Paris; and they sped through the silent, star-lit
night into the unknown.
He thought of this old fancy of his, and it seemed impossible that he
should be in love with Mildred Rogers. Her name was grotesque. He did
not think her pretty; he hated the thinness of her, only that evening
he had noticed how the bones of her chest stood out in evening-dress;
he went over her features one by one; he did not like her mouth, and
the unhealthiness of her colour vaguely repelled him. She was common.
Her phrases, so bald and few, constantly repeated, showed the emptiness
of her mind; he recalled her vulgar little laugh at the jokes of the
musical comedy; and he remembered the little finger carefully extended
when she held her glass to her mouth; her manners like her
conversation, were odiously genteel. He remembered her insolence;
sometimes he had felt inclined to box her ears; and suddenly, he knew
not why, perhaps it was the thought of hitting her or the recollection
of her tiny, beautiful ears, he was seized by an uprush of emotion. He
yearned for her. He thought of taking her in his arms, the thin,
fragile body, and kissing her pale mouth: he wanted to pass his fingers
down the slightly greenish cheeks. He wanted her.
He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the
world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic
happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it
was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known
before. He tried to think when it had first come to him. He did not
know. He only remembered that each time he had gone into the shop,
after the first two or three times, it had been with a little feeling
in the heart that was pain; and he remembered that when she spoke to
him he felt curiously breathless. When she left him it was
wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair.
He stretched himself in his bed as a dog stretches himself. He wondered
how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul.
LVIII
Philip woke early next morning, and his first thought was of Mildred.
It struck him that he might meet her at Victoria Station and walk with
her to the shop. He shaved quickly, scrambled into his clothes, and
took a bus to the station. He was there by twenty to eight and watched
the incoming trains. Crowds poured out of them, clerks and shop-people
at that early hour, and thronged up the platform: they hurried along,
sometimes in pairs, here and there a group of girls, but more often
alone. They were white, most of them, ugly in the early morning, and
they had an abstracted look; the younger ones walked lightly, as though
the cement of the platform were pleasant to tread, but the others went
as though impelled by a machine: their faces were set in an anxious
frown.
At last Philip saw Mildred, and he went up to her eagerly.
“Good-morning,” he said. “I thought I’d come and see how you were after
last night.”
She wore an old brown ulster and a sailor hat. It was very clear that
she was not pleased to see him.
“Oh, I’m all right. I haven’t got much time to waste.”
“D’you mind if I walk down Victoria Street with you?”
“I’m none too early. I shall have to walk fast,” she answered, looking
down at Philip’s club-foot.
He turned scarlet.
“I beg your pardon. I won’t detain you.”
“You can please yourself.”
She went on, and he with a sinking heart made his way home to
breakfast. He hated her. He knew he was a fool to bother about her; she
was not the sort of woman who would ever care two straws for him, and
she must look upon his deformity with distaste. He made up his mind
that he would not go in to tea that afternoon, but, hating himself, he
went. She nodded to him as he came in and smiled.
“I expect I was rather short with you this morning,” she said. “You
see, I didn’t expect you, and it came like a surprise.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter at all.”
He felt that a great weight had suddenly been lifted from him. He was
infinitely grateful for one word of kindness.
“Why don’t you sit down?” he asked. “Nobody’s wanting you just now.”
“I don’t mind if I do.”
He looked at her, but could think of nothing to say; he racked his
brains anxiously, seeking for a remark which should keep her by him; he
wanted to tell her how much she meant to him; but he did not know how
to make love now that he loved in earnest.
“Where’s your friend with the fair moustache? I haven’t seen him
lately.”
“Oh, he’s gone back to Birmingham. He’s in business there. He only
comes up to London every now and again.”
“Is he in love with you?”
“You’d better ask him,” she said, with a laugh. “I don’t know what it’s
got to do with you if he is.”
A bitter answer leaped to his tongue, but he was learning
self-restraint.
“I wonder why you say things like that,” was all he permitted himself
to say.
She looked at him with those indifferent eyes of hers.
“It looks as if you didn’t set much store on me,” he added.
“Why should I?”
“No reason at all.”
He reached over for his paper.
“You are quick-tempered,” she said, when she saw the gesture. “You do
take offence easily.”
He smiled and looked at her appealingly.
“Will you do something for me?” he asked.
“That depends what it is.”
“Let me walk back to the station with you tonight.”
“I don’t mind.”
He went out after tea and went back to his rooms, but at eight o’clock,
when the shop closed, he was waiting outside.
“You are a caution,” she said, when she came out. “I don’t understand
you.”
“I shouldn’t have thought it was very difficult,” he answered bitterly.
“Did any of the girls see you waiting for me?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“They all laugh at you, you know. They say you’re spoony on me.”
“Much you care,” he muttered.
“Now then, quarrelsome.”
At the station he took a ticket and said he was going to accompany her
home.
“You don’t seem to have much to do with your time,” she said.
“I suppose I can waste it in my own way.”
They seemed to be always on the verge of a quarrel. The fact was that
he hated himself for loving her. She seemed to be constantly
humiliating him, and for each snub that he endured he owed her a
grudge. But she was in a friendly mood that evening, and talkative: she
told him that her parents were dead; she gave him to understand that
she did not have to earn her living, but worked for amusement.
“My aunt doesn’t like my going to business. I can have the best of
everything at home. I don’t want you to think I work because I need
to.” Philip knew that she was not speaking the truth. The gentility of
her class made her use this pretence to avoid the stigma attached to
earning her living.
“My family’s very well-connected,” she said.
Philip smiled faintly, and she noticed it.
“What are you laughing at?” she said quickly. “Don’t you believe I’m
telling you the truth?”
“Of course I do,” he answered.
She looked at him suspiciously, but in a moment could not resist the
temptation to impress him with the splendour of her early days.
“My father always kept a dog-cart, and we had three servants. We had a
cook and a housemaid and an odd man. We used to grow beautiful roses.
People used to stop at the gate and ask who the house belonged to, the
roses were so beautiful. Of course it isn’t very nice for me having to
mix with them girls in the shop, it’s not the class of person I’ve been
used to, and sometimes I really think I’ll give up business on that
account. It’s not the work I mind, don’t think that; but it’s the class
of people I have to mix with.”
They were sitting opposite one another in the train, and Philip,
listening sympathetically to what she said, was quite happy. He was
amused at her naivete and slightly touched. There was a very faint
colour in her cheeks. He was thinking that it would be delightful to
kiss the tip of her chin.
“The moment you come into the shop I saw you was a gentleman in every