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Gilbert White - "Project Gutenberg surfs with a modem donated by Supra."

a Platonic Imitator (see Appendix II) - "Eryxias"

Nathaniel Hawthorne - "The Blithedale Romance"

Christopher Marlowe - "Tamburlaine the Great, Part 2"

Of Human Bondage

W >> W. Somerset Maugham >> Of Human Bondage




"Have you ever lived abroad?" asked Philip.

"I was in Spain for eleven years."

"What were you doing there?"

"I was secretary of the English water company at Toledo."

Philip remembered that Clutton had spent some months in Toledo, and the
journalist's answer made him look at him with more interest; but he felt
it would be improper to show this: it was necessary to preserve the
distance between the hospital patient and the staff. When he had finished
his examination he went on to other beds.

Thorpe Athelny's illness was not grave, and, though remaining very yellow,
he soon felt much better: he stayed in bed only because the physician
thought he should be kept under observation till certain reactions became
normal. One day, on entering the ward, Philip noticed that Athelny, pencil
in hand, was reading a book. He put it down when Philip came to his bed.

"May I see what you're reading?" asked Philip, who could never pass a book
without looking at it.

Philip took it up and saw that it was a volume of Spanish verse, the poems
of San Juan de la Cruz, and as he opened it a sheet of paper fell out.
Philip picked it up and noticed that verse was written upon it.

"You're not going to tell me you've been occupying your leisure in writing
poetry? That's a most improper proceeding in a hospital patient."

"I was trying to do some translations. D'you know Spanish?"

"No."

"Well, you know all about San Juan de la Cruz, don't you?"

"I don't indeed."

"He was one of the Spanish mystics. He's one of the best poets they've
ever had. I thought it would be worth while translating him into English."

"May I look at your translation?"

"It's very rough," said Athelny, but he gave it to Philip with an alacrity
which suggested that he was eager for him to read it.

It was written in pencil, in a fine but very peculiar handwriting, which
was hard to read: it was just like black letter.

"Doesn't it take you an awful time to write like that? It's wonderful."

"I don't know why handwriting shouldn't be beautiful." Philip read the
first verse:

In an obscure night
With anxious love inflamed
O happy lot!
Forth unobserved I went,
My house being now at rest...


Philip looked curiously at Thorpe Athelny. He did not know whether he felt
a little shy with him or was attracted by him. He was conscious that his
manner had been slightly patronising, and he flushed as it struck him that
Athelny might have thought him ridiculous.

"What an unusual name you've got," he remarked, for something to say.

"It's a very old Yorkshire name. Once it took the head of my family a
day's hard riding to make the circuit of his estates, but the mighty are
fallen. Fast women and slow horses."

He was short-sighted and when he spoke looked at you with a peculiar
intensity. He took up his volume of poetry.

"You should read Spanish," he said. "It is a noble tongue. It has not the
mellifluousness of Italian, Italian is the language of tenors and
organ-grinders, but it has grandeur: it does not ripple like a brook in a
garden, but it surges tumultuous like a mighty river in flood."

His grandiloquence amused Philip, but he was sensitive to rhetoric; and he
listened with pleasure while Athelny, with picturesque expressions and the
fire of a real enthusiasm, described to him the rich delight of reading
Don Quixote in the original and the music, romantic, limpid, passionate,
of the enchanting Calderon.

"I must get on with my work," said Philip presently.

"Oh, forgive me, I forgot. I will tell my wife to bring me a photograph of
Toledo, and I will show it you. Come and talk to me when you have the
chance. You don't know what a pleasure it gives me."

During the next few days, in moments snatched whenever there was
opportunity, Philip's acquaintance with the journalist increased. Thorpe
Athelny was a good talker. He did not say brilliant things, but he talked
inspiringly, with an eager vividness which fired the imagination; Philip,
living so much in a world of make-believe, found his fancy teeming with
new pictures. Athelny had very good manners. He knew much more than
Philip, both of the world and of books; he was a much older man; and the
readiness of his conversation gave him a certain superiority; but he was
in the hospital a recipient of charity, subject to strict rules; and he
held himself between the two positions with ease and humour. Once Philip
asked him why he had come to the hospital.

"Oh, my principle is to profit by all the benefits that society provides.
I take advantage of the age I live in. When I'm ill I get myself patched
up in a hospital and I have no false shame, and I send my children to be
educated at the board-school."

"Do you really?" said Philip.

"And a capital education they get too, much better than I got at
Winchester. How else do you think I could educate them at all? I've got
nine. You must come and see them all when I get home again. Will you?"

"I'd like to very much," said Philip.



LXXXVII


Ten days later Thorpe Athelny was well enough to leave the hospital. He
gave Philip his address, and Philip promised to dine with him at one
o'clock on the following Sunday. Athelny had told him that he lived in a
house built by Inigo Jones; he had raved, as he raved over everything,
over the balustrade of old oak; and when he came down to open the door for
Philip he made him at once admire the elegant carving of the lintel. It
was a shabby house, badly needing a coat of paint, but with the dignity of
its period, in a little street between Chancery Lane and Holborn, which
had once been fashionable but was now little better than a slum: there was
a plan to pull it down in order to put up handsome offices; meanwhile the
rents were small, and Athelny was able to get the two upper floors at a
price which suited his income. Philip had not seen him up before and was
surprised at his small size; he was not more than five feet and five
inches high. He was dressed fantastically in blue linen trousers of the
sort worn by working men in France, and a very old brown velvet coat; he
wore a bright red sash round his waist, a low collar, and for tie a
flowing bow of the kind used by the comic Frenchman in the pages of
Punch. He greeted Philip with enthusiasm. He began talking at once of
the house and passed his hand lovingly over the balusters.

"Look at it, feel it, it's like silk. What a miracle of grace! And in five
years the house-breaker will sell it for firewood."

He insisted on taking Philip into a room on the first floor, where a man
in shirt sleeves, a blousy woman, and three children were having their
Sunday dinner.

"I've just brought this gentleman in to show him your ceiling. Did you
ever see anything so wonderful? How are you, Mrs. Hodgson? This is Mr.
Carey, who looked after me when I was in the hospital."

"Come in, sir," said the man. "Any friend of Mr. Athelny's is welcome. Mr.
Athelny shows the ceiling to all his friends. And it don't matter what
we're doing, if we're in bed or if I'm 'aving a wash, in 'e comes."

Philip could see that they looked upon Athelny as a little queer; but they
liked him none the less and they listened open-mouthed while he discoursed
with his impetuous fluency on the beauty of the seventeenth-century
ceiling.

"What a crime to pull this down, eh, Hodgson? You're an influential
citizen, why don't you write to the papers and protest?"

The man in shirt sleeves gave a laugh and said to Philip:

"Mr. Athelny will 'ave his little joke. They do say these 'ouses are that
insanitory, it's not safe to live in them."

"Sanitation be damned, give me art," cried Athelny. "I've got nine
children and they thrive on bad drains. No, no, I'm not going to take any
risk. None of your new-fangled notions for me! When I move from here I'm
going to make sure the drains are bad before I take anything."

There was a knock at the door, and a little fair-haired girl opened it.

"Daddy, mummy says, do stop talking and come and eat your dinner."

"This is my third daughter," said Athelny, pointing to her with a dramatic
forefinger. "She is called Maria del Pilar, but she answers more willingly
to the name of Jane. Jane, your nose wants blowing."

"I haven't got a hanky, daddy."

"Tut, tut, child," he answered, as he produced a vast, brilliant bandanna,
"what do you suppose the Almighty gave you fingers for?"

They went upstairs, and Philip was taken into a room with walls panelled
in dark oak. In the middle was a narrow table of teak on trestle legs,
with two supporting bars of iron, of the kind called in Spain mesa de
hieraje. They were to dine there, for two places were laid, and there
were two large arm-chairs, with broad flat arms of oak and leathern backs,
and leathern seats. They were severe, elegant, and uncomfortable. The only
other piece of furniture was a bargueno, elaborately ornamented with
gilt iron-work, on a stand of ecclesiastical design roughly but very
finely carved. There stood on this two or three lustre plates, much broken
but rich in colour; and on the walls were old masters of the Spanish
school in beautiful though dilapidated frames: though gruesome in subject,
ruined by age and bad treatment, and second-rate in their conception, they
had a glow of passion. There was nothing in the room of any value, but the
effect was lovely. It was magnificent and yet austere. Philip felt that it
offered the very spirit of old Spain. Athelny was in the middle of showing
him the inside of the bargueno, with its beautiful ornamentation and
secret drawers, when a tall girl, with two plaits of bright brown hair
hanging down her back, came in.

"Mother says dinner's ready and waiting and I'm to bring it in as soon as
you sit down."

"Come and shake hands with Mr. Carey, Sally." He turned to Philip. "Isn't
she enormous? She's my eldest. How old are you, Sally?"

"Fifteen, father, come next June."

"I christened her Maria del Sol, because she was my first child and I
dedicated her to the glorious sun of Castile; but her mother calls her
Sally and her brother Pudding-Face."

The girl smiled shyly, she had even, white teeth, and blushed. She was
well set-up, tall for her age, with pleasant gray eyes and a broad
forehead. She had red cheeks.

"Go and tell your mother to come in and shake hands with Mr. Carey before
he sits down."

"Mother says she'll come in after dinner. She hasn't washed herself yet."

"Then we'll go in and see her ourselves. He mustn't eat the Yorkshire
pudding till he's shaken the hand that made it."

Philip followed his host into the kitchen. It was small and much
overcrowded. There had been a lot of noise, but it stopped as soon as the
stranger entered. There was a large table in the middle and round it,
eager for dinner, were seated Athelny's children. A woman was standing at
the oven, taking out baked potatoes one by one.

"Here's Mr. Carey, Betty," said Athelny.

"Fancy bringing him in here. What will he think?"

She wore a dirty apron, and the sleeves of her cotton dress were turned up
above her elbows; she had curling pins in her hair. Mrs. Athelny was a
large woman, a good three inches taller than her husband, fair, with blue
eyes and a kindly expression; she had been a handsome creature, but
advancing years and the bearing of many children had made her fat and
blousy; her blue eyes had become pale, her skin was coarse and red, the
colour had gone out of her hair. She straightened herself, wiped her hand
on her apron, and held it out.

"You're welcome, sir," she said, in a slow voice, with an accent that
seemed oddly familiar to Philip. "Athelny said you was very kind to him in
the 'orspital."

"Now you must be introduced to the live stock," said Athelny. "That is
Thorpe," he pointed to a chubby boy with curly hair, "he is my eldest son,
heir to the title, estates, and responsibilities of the family. There is
Athelstan, Harold, Edward." He pointed with his forefinger to three
smaller boys, all rosy, healthy, and smiling, though when they felt
Philip's smiling eyes upon them they looked shyly down at their plates.
"Now the girls in order: Maria del Sol..."

"Pudding-Face," said one of the small boys.

"Your sense of humour is rudimentary, my son. Maria de los Mercedes, Maria
del Pilar, Maria de la Concepcion, Maria del Rosario."

"I call them Sally, Molly, Connie, Rosie, and Jane," said Mrs. Athelny.
"Now, Athelny, you go into your own room and I'll send you your dinner.
I'll let the children come in afterwards for a bit when I've washed them."

"My dear, if I'd had the naming of you I should have called you Maria of
the Soapsuds. You're always torturing these wretched brats with soap."

"You go first, Mr. Carey, or I shall never get him to sit down and eat his
dinner."

Athelny and Philip installed themselves in the great monkish chairs, and
Sally brought them in two plates of beef, Yorkshire pudding, baked
potatoes, and cabbage. Athelny took sixpence out of his pocket and sent
her for a jug of beer.

"I hope you didn't have the table laid here on my account," said Philip.
"I should have been quite happy to eat with the children."

"Oh no, I always have my meals by myself. I like these antique customs. I
don't think that women ought to sit down at table with men. It ruins
conversation and I'm sure it's very bad for them. It puts ideas in their
heads, and women are never at ease with themselves when they have ideas."

Both host and guest ate with a hearty appetite.

"Did you ever taste such Yorkshire pudding? No one can make it like my
wife. That's the advantage of not marrying a lady. You noticed she wasn't
a lady, didn't you?"

It was an awkward question, and Philip did not know how to answer it.

"I never thought about it," he said lamely.

Athelny laughed. He had a peculiarly joyous laugh.

"No, she's not a lady, nor anything like it. Her father was a farmer, and
she's never bothered about aitches in her life. We've had twelve children
and nine of them are alive. I tell her it's about time she stopped, but
she's an obstinate woman, she's got into the habit of it now, and I don't
believe she'll be satisfied till she's had twenty."

At that moment Sally came in with the beer, and, having poured out a glass
for Philip, went to the other side of the table to pour some out for her
father. He put his hand round her waist.

"Did you ever see such a handsome, strapping girl? Only fifteen and she
might be twenty. Look at her cheeks. She's never had a day's illness in
her life. It'll be a lucky man who marries her, won't it, Sally?"

Sally listened to all this with a slight, slow smile, not much
embarrassed, for she was accustomed to her father's outbursts, but with an
easy modesty which was very attractive.

"Don't let your dinner get cold, father," she said, drawing herself away
from his arm. "You'll call when you're ready for your pudding, won't you?"

They were left alone, and Athelny lifted the pewter tankard to his lips.
He drank long and deep.

"My word, is there anything better than English beer?" he said. "Let us
thank God for simple pleasures, roast beef and rice pudding, a good
appetite and beer. I was married to a lady once. My God! Don't marry a
lady, my boy."

Philip laughed. He was exhilarated by the scene, the funny little man in
his odd clothes, the panelled room and the Spanish furniture, the English
fare: the whole thing had an exquisite incongruity.

"You laugh, my boy, you can't imagine marrying beneath you. You want a
wife who's an intellectual equal. Your head is crammed full of ideas of
comradeship. Stuff and nonsense, my boy! A man doesn't want to talk
politics to his wife, and what do you think I care for Betty's views upon
the Differential Calculus? A man wants a wife who can cook his dinner and
look after his children. I've tried both and I know. Let's have the
pudding in."

He clapped his hands and presently Sally came. When she took away the
plates, Philip wanted to get up and help her, but Athelny stopped him.

"Let her alone, my boy. She doesn't want you to fuss about, do you, Sally?
And she won't think it rude of you to sit still while she waits upon you.
She don't care a damn for chivalry, do you, Sally?"

"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.

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