Of Human Bondage
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 held 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