Of Human Bondage
“No, father,” answered Sally demurely.
“Do you know what I’m talking about, Sally?”
“No, father. But you know mother doesn’t like you to swear.”
Athelny laughed boisterously. Sally brought them plates of rice
pudding, rich, creamy, and luscious. Athelny attacked his with gusto.
“One of the rules of this house is that Sunday dinner should never
alter. It is a ritual. Roast beef and rice pudding for fifty Sundays in
the year. On Easter Sunday lamb and green peas, and at Michaelmas roast
goose and apple sauce. Thus we preserve the traditions of our people.
When Sally marries she will forget many of the wise things I have
taught her, but she will never forget that if you want to be good and
happy you must eat on Sundays roast beef and rice pudding.”
“You’ll call when you’re ready for cheese,” said Sally impassively.
“D’you know the legend of the halcyon?” said Athelny: Philip was
growing used to his rapid leaping from one subject to another. “When
the kingfisher, flying over the sea, is exhausted, his mate places
herself beneath him and bears him along upon her stronger wings. That
is what a man wants in a wife, the halcyon. I lived with my first wife
for three years. She was a lady, she had fifteen hundred a year, and we
used to give nice little dinner parties in our little red brick house
in Kensington. She was a charming woman; they all said so, the
barristers and their wives who dined with us, and the literary
stockbrokers, and the budding politicians; oh, she was a charming
woman. She made me go to church in a silk hat and a frock coat, she
took me to classical concerts, and she was very fond of lectures on
Sunday afternoon; and she sat down to breakfast every morning at
eight-thirty, and if I was late breakfast was cold; and she read the
right books, admired the right pictures, and adored the right music. My
God, how that woman bored me! She is charming still, and she lives in
the little red brick house in Kensington, with Morris papers and
Whistler’s etchings on the walls, and gives the same nice little dinner
parties, with veal creams and ices from Gunter’s, as she did twenty
years ago.”
Philip did not ask by what means the ill-matched couple had separated,
but Athelny told him.
“Betty’s not my wife, you know; my wife wouldn’t divorce me. The
children are bastards, every jack one of them, and are they any the
worse for that? Betty was one of the maids in the little red brick
house in Kensington. Four or five years ago I was on my uppers, and I
had seven children, and I went to my wife and asked her to help me. She
said she’d make me an allowance if I’d give Betty up and go abroad. Can
you see me giving Betty up? We starved for a while instead. My wife
said I loved the gutter. I’ve degenerated; I’ve come down in the world;
I earn three pounds a week as press agent to a linendraper, and every
day I thank God that I’m not in the little red brick house in
Kensington.”
Sally brought in Cheddar cheese, and Athelny went on with his fluent
conversation.
“It’s the greatest mistake in the world to think that one needs money
to bring up a family. You need money to make them gentlemen and ladies,
but I don’t want my children to be ladies and gentlemen. Sally’s going
to earn her living in another year. She’s to be apprenticed to a
dressmaker, aren’t you, Sally? And the boys are going to serve their
country. I want them all to go into the Navy; it’s a jolly life and a
healthy life, good food, good pay, and a pension to end their days on.”
Philip lit his pipe. Athelny smoked cigarettes of Havana tobacco, which
he rolled himself. Sally cleared away. Philip was reserved, and it
embarrassed him to be the recipient of so many confidences. Athelny,
with his powerful voice in the diminutive body, with his bombast, with
his foreign look, with his emphasis, was an astonishing creature. He
reminded Philip a good deal of Cronshaw. He appeared to have the same
independence of thought, the same bohemianism, but he had an infinitely
more vivacious temperament; his mind was coarser, and he had not that
interest in the abstract which made Cronshaw’s conversation so
captivating. Athelny was very proud of the county family to which he
belonged; he showed Philip photographs of an Elizabethan mansion, and
told him:
“The Athelnys have lived there for seven centuries, my boy. Ah, if you
saw the chimney-pieces and the ceilings!”
There was a cupboard in the wainscoting and from this he took a family
tree. He showed it to Philip with child-like satisfaction. It was
indeed imposing.
“You see how the family names recur, Thorpe, Athelstan, Harold, Edward;
I’ve used the family names for my sons. And the girls, you see, I’ve
given Spanish names to.”
An uneasy feeling came to Philip that possibly the whole story was an
elaborate imposture, not told with any base motive, but merely from a
wish to impress, startle, and amaze. Athelny had told him that he was
at Winchester; but Philip, sensitive to differences of manner, did not
feel that his host had the characteristics of a man educated at a great
public school. While he pointed out the great alliances which his
ancestors had formed, Philip amused himself by wondering whether
Athelny was not the son of some tradesman in Winchester, auctioneer or
coal-merchant, and whether a similarity of surname was not his only
connection with the ancient family whose tree he was displaying.
LXXXVIII
There was a knock at the door and a troop of children came in. They
were clean and tidy, now. Their faces shone with soap, and their hair
was plastered down; they were going to Sunday school under Sally’s
charge. Athelny joked with them in his dramatic, exuberant fashion, and
you could see that he was devoted to them all. His pride in their good
health and their good looks was touching. Philip felt that they were a
little shy in his presence, and when their father sent them off they
fled from the room in evident relief. In a few minutes Mrs. Athelny
appeared. She had taken her hair out of the curling pins and now wore
an elaborate fringe. She had on a plain black dress, a hat with cheap
flowers, and was forcing her hands, red and coarse from much work, into
black kid gloves.
“I’m going to church, Athelny,” she said. “There’s nothing you’ll be
wanting, is there?”
“Only your prayers, my Betty.”
“They won’t do you much good, you’re too far gone for that,” she
smiled. Then, turning to Philip, she drawled: “I can’t get him to go to
church. He’s no better than an atheist.”
“Doesn’t she look like Rubens’ second wife?” cried Athelny. “Wouldn’t
she look splendid in a seventeenth-century costume? That’s the sort of
wife to marry, my boy. Look at her.”
“I believe you’d talk the hind leg off a donkey, Athelny,” she answered
calmly.
She succeeded in buttoning her gloves, but before she went she turned
to Philip with a kindly, slightly embarrassed smile.
“You’ll stay to tea, won’t you? Athelny likes someone to talk to, and
it’s not often he gets anybody who’s clever enough.”
“Of course he’ll stay to tea,” said Athelny. Then when his wife had
gone: “I make a point of the children going to Sunday school, and I
like Betty to go to church. I think women ought to be religious. I
don’t believe myself, but I like women and children to.”
Philip, strait-laced in matters of truth, was a little shocked by this
airy attitude.
“But how can you look on while your children are being taught things
which you don’t think are true?”
“If they’re beautiful I don’t much mind if they’re not true. It’s
asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as
to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman
Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper
flowers, but she’s hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter
of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious
turn of mind, and if you haven’t it doesn’t matter what beliefs were
instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the
best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen
use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy
in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality
because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the
morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has
learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of
Herbert Spencer.”
This was contrary to all Philip’s ideas. He still looked upon
Christianity as a degrading bondage that must be cast away at any cost;
it was connected subconsciously in his mind with the dreary services in
the cathedral at Tercanbury, and the long hours of boredom in the cold
church at Blackstable; and the morality of which Athelny spoke was to
him no more than a part of the religion which a halting intelligence
preserved, when it had laid aside the beliefs which alone made it
reasonable. But while he was meditating a reply Athelny, more
interested in hearing himself speak than in discussion, broke into a
tirade upon Roman Catholicism. For him it was an essential part of
Spain; and Spain meant much to him, because he had escaped to it from
the conventionality which during his married life he had found so
irksome. With large gestures and in the emphatic tone which made what
he said so striking, Athelny described to Philip the Spanish cathedrals
with their vast dark spaces, the massive gold of the altar-pieces, and
the sumptuous iron-work, gilt and faded, the air laden with incense,
the silence: Philip almost saw the Canons in their short surplices of
lawn, the acolytes in red, passing from the sacristy to the choir; he
almost heard the monotonous chanting of vespers. The names which
Athelny mentioned, Avila, Tarragona, Saragossa, Segovia, Cordova, were
like trumpets in his heart. He seemed to see the great gray piles of
granite set in old Spanish towns amid a landscape tawny, wild, and
windswept.
“I’ve always thought I should love to go to Seville,” he said casually,
when Athelny, with one hand dramatically uplifted, paused for a moment.
“Seville!” cried Athelny. “No, no, don’t go there. Seville: it brings
to the mind girls dancing with castanets, singing in gardens by the
Guadalquivir, bull-fights, orange-blossom, mantillas, mantones de
Manila. It is the Spain of comic opera and Montmartre. Its facile charm
can offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which is
superficial. Theophile Gautier got out of Seville all that it has to
offer. We who come after him can only repeat his sensations. He put
large fat hands on the obvious and there is nothing but the obvious
there; and it is all finger-marked and frayed. Murillo is its painter.”
Athelny got up from his chair, walked over to the Spanish cabinet, let
down the front with its great gilt hinges and gorgeous lock, and
displayed a series of little drawers. He took out a bundle of
photographs.
“Do you know El Greco?” he asked.
“Oh, I remember one of the men in Paris was awfully impressed by him.”
“El Greco was the painter of Toledo. Betty couldn’t find the photograph
I wanted to show you. It’s a picture that El Greco painted of the city
he loved, and it’s truer than any photograph. Come and sit at the
table.”
Philip dragged his chair forward, and Athelny set the photograph before
him. He looked at it curiously, for a long time, in silence. He
stretched out his hand for other photographs, and Athelny passed them
to him. He had never before seen the work of that enigmatic master; and
at the first glance he was bothered by the arbitrary drawing: the
figures were extraordinarily elongated; the heads were very small; the
attitudes were extravagant. This was not realism, and yet, and yet even