Of Human Bondage
agreement, he came to the conclusion that it was only obscure to his
own intelligence. It was the first time that Philip and Mildred had
been thrown entirely together. In London he did not see her all day,
and when he came home the household affairs, the baby, the neighbours,
gave them something to talk about till he settled down to work. Now he
spent the whole day with her. After breakfast they went down to the
beach; the morning went easily enough with a bathe and a stroll along
the front; the evening, which they spent on the pier, having put the
baby to bed, was tolerable, for there was music to listen to and a
constant stream of people to look at; (Philip amused himself by
imagining who they were and weaving little stories about them; he had
got into the habit of answering Mildred’s remarks with his mouth only
so that his thoughts remained undisturbed;) but the afternoons were
long and dreary. They sat on the beach. Mildred said they must get all
the benefit they could out of Doctor Brighton, and he could not read
because Mildred made observations frequently about things in general.
If he paid no attention she complained.
“Oh, leave that silly old book alone. It can’t be good for you always
reading. You’ll addle your brain, that’s what you’ll do, Philip.”
“Oh, rot!” he answered.
“Besides, it’s so unsociable.”
He discovered that it was difficult to talk to her. She had not even
the power of attending to what she was herself saying, so that a dog
running in front of her or the passing of a man in a loud blazer would
call forth a remark and then she would forget what she had been
speaking of. She had a bad memory for names, and it irritated her not
to be able to think of them, so that she would pause in the middle of
some story to rack her brains. Sometimes she had to give it up, but it
often occurred to her afterwards, and when Philip was talking of
something she would interrupt him.
“Collins, that was it. I knew it would come back to me some time.
Collins, that’s the name I couldn’t remember.”
It exasperated him because it showed that she was not listening to
anything he said, and yet, if he was silent, she reproached him for
sulkiness. Her mind was of an order that could not deal for five
minutes with the abstract, and when Philip gave way to his taste for
generalising she very quickly showed that she was bored. Mildred dreamt
a great deal, and she had an accurate memory for her dreams, which she
would relate every day with prolixity.
One morning he received a long letter from Thorpe Athelny. He was
taking his holiday in the theatrical way, in which there was much sound
sense, which characterised him. He had done the same thing for ten
years. He took his whole family to a hop-field in Kent, not far from
Mrs. Athelny’s home, and they spent three weeks hopping. It kept them
in the open air, earned them money, much to Mrs. Athelny’s
satisfaction, and renewed their contact with mother earth. It was upon
this that Athelny laid stress. The sojourn in the fields gave them a
new strength; it was like a magic ceremony, by which they renewed their
youth and the power of their limbs and the sweetness of the spirit:
Philip had heard him say many fantastic, rhetorical, and picturesque
things on the subject. Now Athelny invited him to come over for a day,
he had certain meditations on Shakespeare and the musical glasses which
he desired to impart, and the children were clamouring for a sight of
Uncle Philip. Philip read the letter again in the afternoon when he was
sitting with Mildred on the beach. He thought of Mrs. Athelny, cheerful
mother of many children, with her kindly hospitality and her good
humour; of Sally, grave for her years, with funny little maternal ways
and an air of authority, with her long plait of fair hair and her broad
forehead; and then in a bunch of all the others, merry, boisterous,
healthy, and handsome. His heart went out to them. There was one
quality which they had that he did not remember to have noticed in
people before, and that was goodness. It had not occurred to him till
now, but it was evidently the beauty of their goodness which attracted
him. In theory he did not believe in it: if morality were no more than
a matter of convenience good and evil had no meaning. He did not like
to be illogical, but here was simple goodness, natural and without
effort, and he thought it beautiful. Meditating, he slowly tore the
letter into little pieces; he did not see how he could go without
Mildred, and he did not want to go with her.
It was very hot, the sky was cloudless, and they had been driven to a
shady corner. The baby was gravely playing with stones on the beach,
and now and then she crawled up to Philip and gave him one to hold,
then took it away again and placed it carefully down. She was playing a
mysterious and complicated game known only to herself. Mildred was
asleep. She lay with her head thrown back and her mouth slightly open;
her legs were stretched out, and her boots protruded from her
petticoats in a grotesque fashion. His eyes had been resting on her
vaguely, but now he looked at her with peculiar attention. He
remembered how passionately he had loved her, and he wondered why now
he was entirely indifferent to her. The change in him filled him with
dull pain. It seemed to him that all he had suffered had been sheer
waste. The touch of her hand had filled him with ecstasy; he had
desired to enter into her soul so that he could share every thought
with her and every feeling; he had suffered acutely because, when
silence had fallen between them, a remark of hers showed how far their
thoughts had travelled apart, and he had rebelled against the
unsurmountable wall which seemed to divide every personality from every
other. He found it strangely tragic that he had loved her so madly and
now loved her not at all. Sometimes he hated her. She was incapable of
learning, and the experience of life had taught her nothing. She was as
unmannerly as she had always been. It revolted Philip to hear the
insolence with which she treated the hard-worked servant at the
boarding-house.
Presently he considered his own plans. At the end of his fourth year he
would be able to take his examination in midwifery, and a year more
would see him qualified. Then he might manage a journey to Spain. He
wanted to see the pictures which he knew only from photographs; he felt
deeply that El Greco held a secret of peculiar moment to him; and he
fancied that in Toledo he would surely find it out. He did not wish to
do things grandly, and on a hundred pounds he might live for six months
in Spain: if Macalister put him on to another good thing he could make
that easily. His heart warmed at the thought of those old beautiful
cities, and the tawny plains of Castile. He was convinced that more
might be got out of life than offered itself at present, and he thought
that in Spain he could live with greater intensity: it might be
possible to practise in one of those old cities, there were a good many
foreigners, passing or resident, and he should be able to pick up a
living. But that would be much later; first he must get one or two
hospital appointments; they gave experience and made it easy to get
jobs afterwards. He wished to get a berth as ship’s doctor on one of
the large tramps that took things leisurely enough for a man to see
something of the places at which they stopped. He wanted to go to the
East; and his fancy was rich with pictures of Bangkok and Shanghai, and
the ports of Japan: he pictured to himself palm-trees and skies blue
and hot, dark-skinned people, pagodas; the scents of the Orient
intoxicated his nostrils. His heart beat with passionate desire for the
beauty and the strangeness of the world.
Mildred awoke.
“I do believe I’ve been asleep,” she said. “Now then, you naughty girl,
what have you been doing to yourself? Her dress was clean yesterday and
just look at it now, Philip.”
XCV
When they returned to London Philip began his dressing in the surgical
wards. He was not so much interested in surgery as in medicine, which,
a more empirical science, offered greater scope to the imagination. The
work was a little harder than the corresponding work on the medical
side. There was a lecture from nine till ten, when he went into the
wards; there wounds had to be dressed, stitches taken out, bandages
renewed: Philip prided himself a little on his skill in bandaging, and
it amused him to wring a word of approval from a nurse. On certain
afternoons in the week there were operations; and he stood in the well
of the theatre, in a white jacket, ready to hand the operating surgeon
any instrument he wanted or to sponge the blood away so that he could
see what he was about. When some rare operation was to be performed the
theatre would fill up, but generally there were not more than half a
dozen students present, and then the proceedings had a cosiness which
Philip enjoyed. At that time the world at large seemed to have a
passion for appendicitis, and a good many cases came to the operating
theatre for this complaint: the surgeon for whom Philip dressed was in
friendly rivalry with a colleague as to which could remove an appendix
in the shortest time and with the smallest incision.
In due course Philip was put on accident duty. The dressers took this
in turn; it lasted three days, during which they lived in hospital and
ate their meals in the common-room; they had a room on the ground floor
near the casualty ward, with a bed that shut up during the day into a
cupboard. The dresser on duty had to be at hand day and night to see to
any casualty that came in. You were on the move all the time, and not
more than an hour or two passed during the night without the clanging
of the bell just above your head which made you leap out of bed
instinctively. Saturday night was of course the busiest time and the
closing of the public-houses the busiest hour. Men would be brought in
by the police dead drunk and it would be necessary to administer a
stomach-pump; women, rather the worse for liquor themselves, would come
in with a wound on the head or a bleeding nose which their husbands had
given them: some would vow to have the law on him, and others, ashamed,
would declare that it had been an accident. What the dresser could
manage himself he did, but if there was anything important he sent for
the house-surgeon: he did this with care, since the house-surgeon was
not vastly pleased to be dragged down five flights of stairs for
nothing. The cases ranged from a cut finger to a cut throat. Boys came
in with hands mangled by some machine, men were brought who had been
knocked down by a cab, and children who had broken a limb while
playing: now and then attempted suicides were carried in by the police:
Philip saw a ghastly, wild-eyed man with a great gash from ear to ear,
and he was in the ward for weeks afterwards in charge of a constable,
silent, angry because he was alive, and sullen; he made no secret of
the fact that he would try again to kill himself as soon as he was
released. The wards were crowded, and the house-surgeon was faced with
a dilemma when patients were brought in by the police: if they were
sent on to the station and died there disagreeable things were said in
the papers; and it was very difficult sometimes to tell if a man was
dying or drunk. Philip did not go to bed till he was tired out, so that
he should not have the bother of getting up again in an hour; and he
sat in the casualty ward talking in the intervals of work with the
night-nurse. She was a gray-haired woman of masculine appearance, who
had been night-nurse in the casualty department for twenty years. She
liked the work because she was her own mistress and had no sister to