Of Human Bondage (30 page)

  "All right."

  He was glad to leave her.

  The quarrel was quickly followed by a
reconciliation, but the few days that remained were sometimes
irksome to Philip. He wanted to talk of nothing but the future, and
the future invariably reduced Miss Wilkinson to tears. At first her
weeping affected him, and feeling himself a beast he redoubled his
protestations of undying passion; but now it irritated him: it
would have been all very well if she had been a girl, but it was
silly of a grown-up woman to cry so much. She never ceased
reminding him that he was under a debt of gratitude to her which he
could never repay. He was willing to acknowledge this since she
made a point of it, but he did not really know why he should be any
more grateful to her than she to him. He was expected to show his
sense of obligation in ways which were rather a nuisance: he had
been a good deal used to solitude, and it was a necessity to him
sometimes; but Miss Wilkinson looked upon it as an unkindness if he
was not always at her beck and call. The Miss O'Connors asked them
both to tea, and Philip would have liked to go, but Miss Wilkinson
said she only had five days more and wanted him entirely to
herself. It was flattering, but a bore. Miss Wilkinson told him
stories of the exquisite delicacy of Frenchmen when they stood in
the same relation to fair ladies as he to Miss Wilkinson. She
praised their courtesy, their passion for self-sacrifice, their
perfect tact. Miss Wilkinson seemed to want a great deal.

  Philip listened to her enumeration of the qualities
which must be possessed by the perfect lover, and he could not help
feeling a certain satisfaction that she lived in Berlin.

  "You will write to me, won't you? Write to me every
day. I want to know everything you're doing. You must keep nothing
from me."

  "I shall be awfully, busy" he answered. "I'll write
as often as I can."

  She flung her arms passionately round his neck. He
was embarrassed sometimes by the demonstrations of her affection.
He would have preferred her to be more passive. It shocked him a
little that she should give him so marked a lead: it did not tally
altogether with his prepossessions about the modesty of the
feminine temperament.

  At length the day came on which Miss Wilkinson was
to go, and she came down to breakfast, pale and subdued, in a
serviceable travelling dress of black and white check. She looked a
very competent governess. Philip was silent too, for he did not
quite know what to say that would fit the circumstance; and he was
terribly afraid that, if he said something flippant, Miss Wilkinson
would break down before his uncle and make a scene. They had said
their last good-bye to one another in the garden the night before,
and Philip was relieved that there was now no opportunity for them
to be alone. He remained in the dining-room after breakfast in case
Miss Wilkinson should insist on kissing him on the stairs. He did
not want Mary Ann, now a woman hard upon middle age with a sharp
tongue, to catch them in a compromising position. Mary Ann did not
like Miss Wilkinson and called her an old cat. Aunt Louisa was not
very well and could not come to the station, but the Vicar and
Philip saw her off. Just as the train was leaving she leaned out
and kissed Mr. Carey.

  "I must kiss you too, Philip," she said.

  "All right," he said, blushing.

  He stood up on the step and she kissed him quickly.
The train started, and Miss Wilkinson sank into the corner of her
carriage and wept disconsolately. Philip, as he walked back to the
vicarage, felt a distinct sensation of relief.

  "Well, did you see her safely off?" asked Aunt
Louisa, when they got in.

  "Yes, she seemed rather weepy. She insisted on
kissing me and Philip."

  "Oh, well, at her age it's not dangerous." Mrs.
Carey pointed to the sideboard. "There's a letter for you, Philip.
It came by the second post."

  It was from Hayward and ran as follows:

  My dear boy,

  I answer your letter at once. I ventured to read it
to a great friend of mine, a charming woman whose help and sympathy
have been very precious to me, a woman withal with a real feeling
for art and literature; and we agreed that it was charming. You
wrote from your heart and you do not know the delightful naivete
which is in every line. And because you love you write like a poet.
Ah, dear boy, that is the real thing: I felt the glow of your young
passion, and your prose was musical from the sincerity of your
emotion. You must be happy! I wish I could have been present unseen
in that enchanted garden while you wandered hand in hand, like
Daphnis and Chloe, amid the flowers. I can see you, my Daphnis,
with the light of young love in your eyes, tender, enraptured, and
ardent; while Chloe in your arms, so young and soft and fresh,
vowing she would ne'er consent – consented. Roses and violets and
honeysuckle! Oh, my friend, I envy you. It is so good to think that
your first love should have been pure poetry. Treasure the moments,
for the immortal gods have given you the Greatest Gift of All, and
it will be a sweet, sad memory till your dying day. You will never
again enjoy that careless rapture. First love is best love; and she
is beautiful and you are young, and all the world is yours. I felt
my pulse go faster when with your adorable simplicity you told me
that you buried your face in her long hair. I am sure that it is
that exquisite chestnut which seems just touched with gold. I would
have you sit under a leafy tree side by side, and read together
Romeo and Juliet; and then I would have you fall on your knees and
on my behalf kiss the ground on which her foot has left its
imprint; then tell her it is the homage of a poet to her radiant
youth and to your love for her. Yours always,

G. Etheridge Hayward.

  "What damned rot!" said Philip, when he finished the
letter.

  Miss Wilkinson oddly enough had suggested that they
should read Romeo and Juliet together; but Philip had firmly
declined. Then, as he put the letter in his pocket, he felt a queer
little pang of bitterness because reality seemed so different from
the ideal.

  A few days later Philip went to London. The curate
had recommended rooms in Barnes, and these Philip engaged by letter
at fourteen shillings a week. He reached them in the evening; and
the landlady, a funny little old woman with a shrivelled body and a
deeply wrinkled face, had prepared high tea for him. Most of the
sitting-room was taken up by the sideboard and a square table;
against one wall was a sofa covered with horsehair, and by the
fireplace an arm-chair to match: there was a white antimacassar
over the back of it, and on the seat, because the springs were
broken, a hard cushion.

  After having his tea he unpacked and arranged his
books, then he sat down and tried to read; but he was depressed.
The silence in the street made him slightly uncomfortable, and he
felt very much alone.

  Next day he got up early. He put on his tail-coat
and the tall hat which he had worn at school; but it was very
shabby, and he made up his mind to stop at the Stores on his way to
the office and buy a new one. When he had done this he found
himself in plenty of time and so walked along the Strand. The
office of Messrs. Herbert Carter & Co. was in a little street
off Chancery Lane, and he had to ask his way two or three times. He
felt that people were staring at him a great deal, and once he took
off his hat to see whether by chance the label had been left on.
When he arrived he knocked at the door; but no one answered, and
looking at his watch he found it was barely half past nine; he
supposed he was too early. He went away and ten minutes later
returned to find an office-boy, with a long nose, pimply face, and
a Scotch accent, opening the door. Philip asked for Mr. Herbert
Carter. He had not come yet.

  "When will he be here?"

  "Between ten and half past."

  "I'd better wait," said Philip.

  "What are you wanting?" asked the office-boy.

  Philip was nervous, but tried to hide the fact by a
jocose manner.

  "Well, I'm going to work here if you have no
objection."

  "Oh, you're the new articled clerk? You'd better
come in. Mr. Goodworthy'll be here in a while."

  Philip walked in, and as he did so saw the
office-boy – he was about the same age as Philip and called himself
a junior clerk – look at his foot. He flushed and, sitting down,
hid it behind the other. He looked round the room. It was dark and
very dingy. It was lit by a skylight. There were three rows of
desks in it and against them high stools. Over the chimney-piece
was a dirty engraving of a prize-fight. Presently a clerk came in
and then another; they glanced at Philip and in an undertone asked
the office-boy (Philip found his name was Macdougal) who he was. A
whistle blew, and Macdougal got up.

  "Mr. Goodworthy's come. He's the managing clerk.
Shall I tell him you're here?"

  "Yes, please," said Philip.

  The office-boy went out and in a moment
returned.

  "Will you come this way?"

  Philip followed him across the passage and was shown
into a room, small and barely furnished, in which a little, thin
man was standing with his back to the fireplace. He was much below
the middle height, but his large head, which seemed to hang loosely
on his body, gave him an odd ungainliness. His features were wide
and flattened, and he had prominent, pale eyes; his thin hair was
sandy; he wore whiskers that grew unevenly on his face, and in
places where you would have expected the hair to grow thickly there
was no hair at all. His skin was pasty and yellow. He held out his
hand to Philip, and when he smiled showed badly decayed teeth. He
spoke with a patronising and at the same time a timid air, as
though he sought to assume an importance which he did not feel. He
said he hoped Philip would like the work; there was a good deal of
drudgery about it, but when you got used to it, it was interesting;
and one made money, that was the chief thing, wasn't it? He laughed
with his odd mixture of superiority and shyness.

  "Mr. Carter will be here presently," he said. "He's
a little late on Monday mornings sometimes. I'll call you when he
comes. In the meantime I must give you something to do. Do you know
anything about book-keeping or accounts?"

  "I'm afraid not," answered Philip.

  "I didn't suppose you would. They don't teach you
things at school that are much use in business, I'm afraid." He
considered for a moment. "I think I can find you something to
do."

  He went into the next room and after a little while
came out with a large cardboard box. It contained a vast number of
letters in great disorder, and he told Philip to sort them out and
arrange them alphabetically according to the names of the
writers.

  "I'll take you to the room in which the articled
clerk generally sits. There's a very nice fellow in it. His name is
Watson. He's a son of Watson, Crag, and Thompson – you know – the
brewers. He's spending a year with us to learn business."

  Mr. Goodworthy led Philip through the dingy office,
where now six or eight clerks were working, into a narrow room
behind. It had been made into a separate apartment by a glass
partition, and here they found Watson sitting back in a chair,
reading The Sportsman. He was a large, stout young man, elegantly
dressed, and he looked up as Mr. Goodworthy entered. He asserted
his position by calling the managing clerk Goodworthy. The managing
clerk objected to the familiarity, and pointedly called him Mr.
Watson, but Watson, instead of seeing that it was a rebuke,
accepted the title as a tribute to his gentlemanliness.

  "I see they've scratched Rigoletto," he said to
Philip, as soon as they were left alone.

  "Have they?" said Philip, who knew nothing about
horse-racing.